Days With The Undead (Book 1)
Days With The Undead
Book One
By Julianne Snow
Copyright 2012 Sirens Call Publications
Edited by Kate Monroe
Also available in paperback;
ISBN: 1468007998
ISBN-13: 978-1468007992
License Notes
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for the recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Contents
Day 3:
It was a close call today. We’ve been travelling west, trying to get in front of and then outrun the Undead for almost two days now. Trying to stay off the roads but keeping close enough to use them if the need arose was getting more and more difficult. And then the inevitable happened.
We came across a horde of the Undead just mulling – well, not even mulling - just standing in a clearing early this morning. As far from them as we were and as silent as we were being, something or someone in our group caught their global attention and the collective of milky white eyes that turned in our direction was positively bone-chilling.
As we stared dumbstruck in horror, drawn to the sight as one becomes to a horrific accident, we soon realized that we would need to move. Our frozen tableau continued though, even as the ballerina-like synchronicity of decomposing limbs turned and started to move in our direction. Our ridged limbs not comprehending the commands to take flight from our terrified minds.
I don’t remember quite when we started to run or what broke the reverie we were all experiencing. I just know that we ran and were thankful that we had a path to travel. The Undead are unconcerned with such things, and the thick foliage and uneven ground would help to slow them down.
Our escape was narrow but our lesson important – never stop to stare.
The truly scary thing about the Undead - besides of course the fact that they are what they are - is their unwavering ability to pursue you. They don’t get tired, they don’t stop to rest and the only thing that stops them is a swift second death.
The trouble with trying to put them all down is that fairly soon you can end up being overrun by their masses, or too tired to fight the ones in front of you. All you can do is keep moving and hope that something catches their attention to divert their ravenous intentions.
To be perfectly honest we had assumed that we had left most of the Undead behind us in Toronto and the surrounding Greater Toronto Area. In the past few days however it’s become increasingly apparent that anyone fleeing the city and suburbs has spread things farther afield than we had dared to anticipate.
Stupid, I know; in any situation one should always prepare for the worst possible outcome, it has the tendency to keep you alive. Planning for the worst or in fact planning for any contingency has a way of keeping you on your toes.
Unfortunately we were all still a little shell-shocked; shocked that the world appeared to be disintegrating behind us. While we had tried our best to prepare for this possible yet improbable eventuality, it was still something that none of us had actually thought would happen. The events of the past one and a half days have left us all a little frazzled, lost, and feeling alone even though we are in the physical sense together.
Putting some distance between us and the horde from the field felt good. In an instant that feeling was robbed from us as we came to the crest of a steep ridge. We were now face to decomposing face with a group of our Undead pursuers. The surprise elicited a shocked, scared little cry from Barbara, one of our group, but it was quickly squashed as we reacted. And there wasn’t much time to do anything but react; our primal, instinctual selves took over.
The sound of the first shot ricocheted off the surrounding foliage in the relative silence of the early morning. Before my eyes the pimpled face of what was once an adolescent boy exploded, shards of bone along with infected brain tissue flying out like they were searching for their next victim even in death. I quickly turned my face, hoping to shield it from the spray of grey matter and connective tissues. Thank heavens I was just out of splatter range as the Undead kept coming at us in what felt like increasing numbers.
In all truthfulness there were only twenty-five to thirty of them and they were spaced out and slow-moving. Unwittingly, they had made themselves easy targets; having to come up the opposite side of the ridge made our task of their death relatively uncomplicated.
We each had our own firearms along with other back-up weapons in the event that a gun jammed on us. It was moments like those that I appreciated the fact that my husband had been so meticulous when teaching me to shoot. I could hit both stationary and moving targets at a number of distances. That knowledge made me feel somewhat safe and comfortable in what I had to do. I don’t know how each the others felt in that moment but I could read the resilience in their faces.
Given our knowledge and perseverance, we made it through that encounter and plan to make it though many more to come. Survival is what we have chosen and we are all geared to success.
You have to be.
This is a fight to the death and none of us want to think of the consequences of what death will mean for us. I know that each and every one of us would rather die than become one of them. Of that I’m one hundred percent certain.
It only took us a few minutes to quickly dispatch all of the Undead coming up the hill at us. They came at us in all shapes and sizes. Most of them were still fully intact and had barely started to decompose. It’s only been three days since this all started and what I would have expected to see as a pathologist was normal; some bloating and a little skin slippage, even some discoloration of the skin. Their faces were all slack and carried the expression of vacancy.
It made it easier to kill them if you happened to look at their faces. You knew that there was nothing left of the human soul that once thrived inside the shell.
I tried not to make eye contact with any of them. It was unnerving to catch a glimpse of the dead eyes. Eyes that had likely once held such promise. Now they were just limpid milky pools of emptiness. Stare too long and you can get lost.
It happened to Ben the other day as we were just leaving Toronto. He happened to stare a moment too long and ended up mesmerized by the sheer austerity of those eyes. That moment we had to rescue him as the Undead toddler got closer than any of us would have liked. It was another lesson that we needed to learn. Staring is bad in any form when it comes to the Undead. Unless of course you happen to be behind a barrier that’s impossible for the breach. After all, observation is key; you need to observe in order to understand.
But nothing in the movies we watched could ever have prepared us for what we were now facing. Sure it was always entertaining to watch the way that Hollywood varied the classic archetype of the “Zombie” but to witness something so fundamentally against nature actually moving toward you; that’s another story altogether.
Your fear and panic can take root in your disbelief. You can either choose to believe and move or you will succumb to it.
It’s a sad thing, coming face to face with the Undead. While we realize that they are just monsters now, they were once people. People like you and me. People that have loved and lost. No one is immune to what is happening. Your money couldn’t save you. The only thing that kept you alive these days was a plan and the will to put it into action. Once you started moving, you can’t just stop. If you do, the Undead catch up.
From our vantage point, we could see that the Undead from the field had gained a little ground on us. The way that we had previously come also had a few stragglers shuffling in our general direction. We decided our only option was to divert our journey along the ridge and hope that we didn’t meet any other unwanted travelers along the way. Ben, our map expert let us know that in a few kilometers another trail heading in the right direction would present itself.
The trouble with staying out of any major urban area - or even minor ones for that matter - is that you end up travelling in less than optimal conditions. We would have loved to get into a car and travel farther and faster but the roads were already treacherous.
With the sheer number of people fleeing from Toronto and the surrounding cities and towns, the roads in some areas were clogged with accidents, cars with empty gas tanks and the Undead that follow the exodus.
It frightens me to think of the number of people who left the town harboring family members or friends that had been infected in recent attacks. One would think that they would have gained some knowledge from the Hollywood blockbusters. But no… It’s like the panic that they felt in needing to put distance between themselves and the situation had prevented their brains from assessing sound logic.
Now as a result, the Undead have more of a chance to gain a foothold on our civilization, our humanity. Anyone watching the news can see that Toronto is quickly becoming the antithesis of a tourism hot spot. And the closer you happen to be to Toronto, the more risk you can expect to encounter.
If one could look at a map of Southern Ontario and see the vectors of transmission illustrated, it would look like a bomb had gone off. The damage, in this case the infection, was spreading outward at an alarming rate. The northern shore of Lake Ontario, with all of its urban sprawl, would have become a sea of red. All we want to do is stay as far in front of that sea as possible.
We have been fairly lucky so far by staying off the roads but inevitably we seem to manage to pick up followers when we can’t avoid them altogether. While we are careful as anyone can possibly be, you cannot avoid the Undead completely.
We were fortunate enough to spot an isolated and abandoned cabin in the woods to spend tonight in. It’s small, but that made it all the more attractive to us. I assume it’s a hunting lodge of some sort, being that it’s so far from any major access road. Its construction is simple; made of solid brick with two heavy doors and four double paned windows. A lot of egress points if needed and not too many points of weakness to safeguard.