About a Girl: Part 3, by J. D. Allen

I was on the road a day later. I had packed up an SUV with supplies for the trip: food, extra gas cans, guns, and a few other implements of destruction. The SUV had belonged to some big-shot lawyer whose kids I'd gone to school with. I suppose you could say I stole it, but I figured that, since he was rotting in a shallow grave behind his house, he didn't need it anymore. I named the SUV 'Juggernaut'. It seemed like a good name. The thing was huge and I hoped that nothing could stop it on the pilgrimage to California. 

I was excited when I got on the freeway and watched my town disappear behind me. Finally, I was doing something. I was moving forward. I had my music on and it felt like a road-trip: much like driving to college for a new semester. I had my music playing and had pleasant thoughts about the future. But soon I came to a city, and the pleasant thoughts and the excitement were swept away. I wasn't prepared for what I saw. Fires had swept through the city. Evidence of their passing was marked by the charred skeletons of buildings that had once been the city's downtown. Cars were everywhere. Some sat abandoned in the middle of the street; grave markers of the innocent and testaments to the panic that had gripped the city. Others had crashed into buildings, light posts, other cars, or whatever else was in their way as the drivers were taken by the plague. The cars and burned-out buildings told a story of the city's slow demise, as if it had been the one stricken by disease. The city seemed a corpse, but the zombies and the crows gave it a sense of animation, like a macabre puppet dancing on unseen strings. Then it hit me with a wave of nausea that momentarily blocked out my vision: the city itself was undead.

I hesitate to do so, but it seems necessary to give an account of the bodies that littered the haunted city. Here the dead had been left to rot where they fell. Bodies of different ages, sizes, and states of decay could be found everywhere. I tried to look away, but each time I shifted my gaze, they fell upon some new horror. Some of the corpses were simply dead: bloated carcasses with their throats torn open and black pools of dried blood wreathing their contorted faces like dark halos. These were the more pleasant to look at. The rest had been torn apart and left in varying states of dissection. 

My eyes turned away from these to the armies of crows that filled the sky and swarmed the streets. It seemed that, every moment that they weren't squabbling amongst themselves or flying away from some threat, they were tearing away at the rotting flesh of human carcasses. The birds themselves looked sick, as though the plague that had afflicted the corpses was slowly affecting the birds as well. There was a madness in their black eyes that made this seem entirely plausible. Taking in the crows as they swarmed around, tearing at the bodies, I remembered what they were. They were a murder: a murder of crows. I shuddered. I felt an emotion I'd never felt before, and though it was new to me, I knew it's name in an instant. It was terror.

 

I drove through the city as quickly as I could and didn't look back. When I got enough distance from it, I pulled over at the side of the road. I had my music blasting in hopes that I could somehow drown out my thoughts. Still, I found myself shaking and jumping at the sight of every passing bird. I don't know how long I sat there trying to fight off the terror. I tried to slow my breathing and calm my racing heart, but nothing I did seemed to help. Finally, I felt a shift, and the terror was eaten by rage.

It was the zombies' fault. Everything was their fault; all of it. I turned the Juggernaut around. I rolled down my windows and cranked the music even louder. Death Metal seemed an appropriate choice. Once I reached the city, I tore through the streets.  I gave no attention to the thumping of birds against the windshield or to the sound of bones beneath the wheels. None of this mattered. I was completely focused on something else and rage coursed through my veins like fire. The zombies had to be destroyed. They all had to die one final and irreversible death. 

I spotted one coming out of an alley and screeched to a halt, nearly capsizing Juggernaut in my haste. I flew out of the vehicle, drawing my swords and raced towards the zombie. To that mindless piece of filth, it probably seemed that I was food, delivering itself. It came forward, arms outstretched, eyes vacant, and a greenish drool hanging from its bottom lip. It led with its mouth, and I could have decapitated it with no effort at all. But that was too easy. It was too simple to strike at its neck and just let it fall. That wouldn't be enough. 

I swung and its arm severed at the elbow. Sidestepping, I slashed at its ribs, cutting cleanly through its side.  That single stroke left a gaping wound that oozed black sludge. It turned quickly, extending its other arm, which I severed at the shoulder. The cut wasn't clean and the arm dangled, connected to the shoulder by sinew until I hacked again and it fell harmlessly to the ground. My rage burned hotter as I hacked again and again at the abomination before me, the blackish ooze that had once been its blood seeping from each cut. Finally, when its movements were slowed and it could barely stand, I swung with all my might and precision and its head toppled to the ground. I hoped that it still felt the pain. I hoped that it suffered. 

I looked away from the wrecked corpse and saw several more of the monsters closing in, first drawn by the still-blasting music and then by the flurry of movement. I surged forward to meet them and danced the same dance as I had with the first. Limbs flew, ooze sprayed, and the music throbbed on. The ground became slick and littered with the limbs, torsos, and heads of the undead as zombies continued to appear from doorways and alleys. 

I don't know how long it lasted, but finally I was the only thing left moving on the entire street. The crows had even abandoned that place, as if they knew I was death walking amongst them. I was exhausted. I walked over to the Juggernaut and turned it off, cutting off the roar of the music. Silence rang in my ears and I noticed my rage was gone. The fire I felt now was the burning ache of overexerted muscles. 

I surveyed the carnage and the sight of the mangled zombies sent a shiver up my spine. They'd been human once. I wondered if any of their humanity remained when the infection took over. Was there some sort of consciousness left in the back of their mind? If that was true, then maybe my enraged slaughter had been murder. Maybe it had been mercy. How could I know? Thinking about it only made my head hurt and humanizing them only made me sick to my stomach. 

I couldn't get back in the car; not while I was still covered in sweat and zombie sludge. I think there was even some of my own blood, but I couldn't really tell. So I broke into an apartment to take a shower. The electricity didn't work, but the water did. The shower was cold as ice, but it did the trick. When I got out, I saw that my arms, shoulders, and back were laced with scratches, some of which had broken the skin. There were also teeth marks on my right shoulder. I didn't remember getting bitten. I didn't remember much of anything that had happened in the fighting, but I really didn't want to think about that until the city was behind me once more. 

I changed into some clean clothes, leaving the bloody and torn ones behind, and drove off into the sunset. I was exhausted, but managed to get a few more hours of driving in before I was too tired to continue. I pulled over under a highway overpass and had barely killed the engine before I nodded off.

About a Girl: Part 2, by J. D. Allen

Nothing was the same after that. Nothing was the same before it, but, before my parents died, I had hope and I felt that there was still something I could do about this tragedy. After they were dead, there was only pain and despair. I started walking around without the mask, daring the infection to take me. I sought out zombies in numbers and even drew them to me. I was reckless to the point of madness, but I just would not die. I lay awake most nights and just wished that I could. The infection wouldn't take me either, though I'd been drooled upon, bled upon, clawed, and bitten. For a long while, I cursed my immunity. Yet, for all my self-loathing and despair, I couldn't kill myself. I wouldn't let the zombies kill me either. If they somehow managed to win—somehow managed to catch me off guard—I could accept that, but I would not give up. For reasons I still don't understand, I couldn't.

The days became weeks and the weeks began to blend together. As the days stretched out after the outbreak, my feeling of isolation grew. There was no one left in my town but me. I hadn't left my town since the outbreak, so I didn't know much of what had happened in the neighboring towns or even much of what had happened in the rest of the world. Within the first week, television channels had stopped broadcasting. People's individual efforts to share news using the internet became my only source of information on the outside world. By some miracle, a good portion of the internet continued to work. Many forums and even a few video sharing sites remained up and running. As long as someone could continue to get power to their home, they could communicate with other survivors. Some people must have made a great deal of effort to keep strategic banks of servers up and running. They'd found some sense of purpose in the face of this tragedy. I envied them that.

I tried to find my own sense of purpose to deal with the sense of solitude. I ended up developing a somewhat academic interest in the zombies. I studied their behavior and their movement. I looked for patterns so I could predict their reactions and the routes they would take to get from one place to another. If zombie behavior was predictable, then I might be able to forecast their movements and such. It would make survival easier for everyone. It was pointless. I found it much better to study the most effective ways to kill the bastards. I started by dissecting a few of the zombies I killed. I wanted to find out what the infection did to their organs and if it made some places more or less vulnerable. I found out a few things I didn't really want to know.

I shared my findings on the forums and continued to experiment with different ways of killing them. Some things were effective and others weren't. For example, stabbing a zombie through the heart is not very effective. They're invulnerable to pain and their circulatory system is a mess to begin with. Even with a hole in their heart, they are able to continue chasing you until their brain is almost completely shut down due to oxygen deprivation.  Their brain basically has to die before they stop chasing you. At least, I think that's what causes it. This can take anywhere from five to ten minutes. It's much more effective to sever their spinal chord or destroy the parts of their brain that continue to function.

These academic ventures weren't enough to really make me feel like I had purpose. What good did it really do to kill all the zombies in my town? I was the only one who really benefited from it. Even sharing what I'd done with others didn't do much good. Most of them just tried to avoid the zombies at all cost. I was discouraged, but hope came in the form of the first television broadcast since the TV stations' initial shutdown. 

Someone had somehow figured out an override and was broadcasting in a loop over quite a few different channels. The transmission could best be described as a documentary. A guy in California had begun gathering people at an old prison with stone walls that he claimed was safe from the zombies.  He showed the work they were doing to make the place self-sustainable: he'd gathered farm equipment and was planting the fields, they had their own power plant generating electricity for them, and a nearby building that housed huge banks of servers. They had a well, defenses,a hospital, and a bit more. Things were organized. Together, people had a better chance of survival. Together, people had a better chance of rebuilding. Together, people had a better reason to. 

The video served as a beacon, calling anyone, willing and able, to come and join in the efforts. Dozens had come already, but there was room enough for many more. I had to go. There was nothing left for me in my town but empty streets and hastily dug graves. I began preparing for my trip the day after the transmission began airing.

About a Girl: Part 1, by J. D. Allen

This whole thing became real for me the day my nephew died. Before that it seemed so distant, like it couldn't be happening. The world couldn't possibly be falling apart like this. But when we got a call from my sister and she told us that her little boy was dead, we couldn't console her, we couldn't comfort her...there was nothing we could do. We could only listen to her hopeless sobs and add some of our own. I remember my mom asking when the funeral would be, not realizing there wouldn't be one. Such courtesies were gone in the face of this apocalypse. The world as we knew it was destroyed: destroyed by a plague of sorts that was transforming human beings into thoughtless undead, fixed on consuming the flesh of the living. The newscasters called it a 'zombie apocalypse'. The name stuck.

My nephew had been in school. He was a first grader. He was always excited about show and tell and his shiny folders and No. 2 pencils. I've played it through my head a million times. He was probably just sitting there in class when mass panic spread: fire alarms blaring, teachers trying not to panic, and all the children being evacuated to a church near the school building. A kid in the school had turned into a zombie and they decided to follow their bomb threat protocol to try to keep the children safe. Hindsight suggests it was a bad call. The most terrifying thing about the infection is that someone carries it for somewhere around two to three days before they turn, and then they change in almost an instant: like a switch is flipped in their brain. Some of the kids turned while they were in the church. I have a few theories about why one person turning seems to set off a chain reaction in others who are infected, but I'm no scientist. They're just suppositions, I don't really know anything. What I do know is that too few people made it out of that building. My cousin wasn't one of them. I'm unable to convince myself that it ended in any way other than him getting eaten. I wish I could lie to myself and believe he'd met some other end, but I can't believe. He would have been dead or undead soon after because so many people were exposed, but that's of very little consolation. 

Well, either he got eaten or he got burned alive. They torched the church after they blockaded the doors to keep the zombies in. I was told they could hear students begging for help even after the building was ablaze. Necessity justified the inhumanity of their actions, but that does nothing to quiet my anger. What happened will never sit well with me, even in the face of the greatest crisis humanity has ever witnessed. 

The plague, this 'zombie apocalypse', began in the late spring, right as college was letting out and summer was beginning. I had actually just finished up my finals when news reports came in of strange behavior in some town in Kansas. They claimed people were going nuts and eating one another. I didn't believe it at first. I couldn't believe it. A lot of people on the television didn't believe it either. Then the Center for Disease Control declared it an epidemic a few days after the report. Samuel, my nephew, was already dead by that point. The town where my sister lived had its first outbreak on Day 3. By the time the outbreak was declared an epidemic, it was a ghost town. My sister was dead, her husband was dead...everyone was dead. Within the first week, they called it a pandemic.  By that point, everyone had lost someone dear to them, but within the first month, everyone who survived had lost everything. 

The disease itself is flawless: it shows no symptoms for at least thirty six hours, can be transmitted through a sneeze, a handshake, or saliva left on a chewed-up pencil. It's the perfect storm of bacteria or viruses or whatever it is. It might be a parasite for all I know. People tried to run away from it, but so many of them had already caught it and they just spread it faster. These selfish bastards killed us all. Maybe if people had stayed in their towns, there would be billions of people left instead of hundreds. Someone said that about one in a thousand people were immune to the infection. I live in a town of three thousand, but I'm the only one left. Statistically, there are two others who could have survived, but realistically, they got eaten. I survived because I'm immune. And because I'm a nerd.

When it all became real, I didn't freak out, and I didn't run. I acted on my 'zombie apocalypse plan'. Yeah, I had one of those. I've always assumed that every nerdy guy does. We watch zombie flicks, look past the outlandishness of it all and cast judgment on the characters. We would do better. When the movie is over, we ask ourselves, “What would I do in the situation?” We might meditate on it for hours if left to our own devices. We then develop some sort of plan for if a zombie apocalypse were to occur. It's pure fiction. Our creativity is wasted in the planning for such an event. But then it happened.

So I acted on my zombie apocalypse plan. I found a blacksmith who could make me some swords. They were simple, but their design was with purpose. One was light and quick, the other heavier and more brutal. One would parry and slice while the other cracked bone and severed limbs. I had him make me several backups of each weapon. If one were to break for some reason, I would be in deep shit without spares.

As order dissolved into chaos, I started wearing a gas mask and carrying my swords strapped across my back. People looked at me strange—those who hadn't barricaded themselves in their homes—but I was prepared when the epidemic swept through our town. 

A lot of people were terrified to the point of stupidity when the town started turning into the walking dead. I just got angry. I was angry with the bastard that had brought the infection in. I was angry with the people that acted so helpless and weak. I was angry that I couldn't save them. I tried. I tried so hard to save them. I took it upon myself to patrol the streets, striking down whatever zombies I found, but everyone had isolated themselves in their homes. I couldn't save them. Even when I did manage to rescue someone, when I managed to stop the zombies that were trying to eat them, they were already dead: they just didn't know it yet. They'd gotten infected somehow and I couldn't do a thing about it. I couldn't protect any of them. I was useless. 

I came home one day from patrolling the streets for zombies and found my mom lying on the floor. That moment is permanently etched in my mind. I will always remember the grotesque expression that was frozen on her face and the way her body lay twisted and ruined. I will spare you the rest because I would not wish my memories of that day upon anyone. I just want it to be known that much of my sanity was stripped away that day: the day when I found my mother torn apart on the floor of my living room. The day I hunted down the senseless undead creature that had done it to here. The day I slaughtered my own father.