Resurrection (3 page)
Chapter 5
The day dawned grim and damp. The building was quiet except for the endless staccato tapping of raindrops on the metal roof. Needles of shattered glass lay strewn across the floor.
Mark’s eyes popped open and he sat up and screamed, attempting to once again push himself further into the corner. Slowly he came to reality and realized the night was ended and the creatures had not broken through. Cautiously he crawled to the edge of the gun counter and peered at the front door.
They had gone, but he knew they would return tonight and the night after and the night after that. They would keep coming and each time there would be more of them. They would poke and probe and pry at every inch of the building until they uncovered its weakness.
They would push and pull one night and then with increased numbers the next they would try again, they would not stop until they killed him and satisfied their hunger.
He now knew what the deputy had meant when he told him that these were not men. He had not been able to fathom at the time the officer’s words and he now held the belief that even the deputy himself was not quit convinced that what he was speaking of was in fact reality.
The reanimated dead human was a make believe creation of Hollywood, or of writers of horror fiction. It was a creature that walked the streets seeking candy on Halloween night and not a true threat that stalked the byways seeking the flesh and blood of the living.
But these were real and they wished to kill him and consume his body to feed a voracious appetite or to transform him into one of them. They would that he be transfigured and join the collective, an addition to the swarm, nocturnally scavenging for the soft meat and sanguine fluid of the vulnerable humans who remained on the earth.
He did not intend to end his existence on earth this way however, no, he intended instead to go out with a fight.
He filled the bed and cab of the pickup truck with as many supplies and weapons as possible. He retrieved some cans of gun powder from the gun room and four five gallon cans of gasoline from the lawnmower shed, two of which he placed in the camper shell of the pickup.
He carved two notches into a pencil in order to expose the graphite and then connected a set of jumper cables to the pencil and placed this just in front of the gun counter. He connected another set of cables to the opposite end of the set that he had just attached to the pencil and then joined several others pairs of cables in succession to form one continuous line which he then fed through an open window.
He placed a twelve volt marine battery outside the window next to the jumper cables and wrapped the ends where the cables came together with electrical tape and then secured them to the floor with duct tape.
He placed the two gas cans at each end of the gun counter and then ran a line of gunpowder from each of the cans to where the pencil lay. He poured a liberal amount of gunpowder over and around the pencil making certain to allow it a supply of oxygen.
He spent the rest of the day piling anything that would burn in various places in the room and covering those with gunpowder. He stacked empty pallets and boxes and placed cans of lantern fuel inside the pile. He founds some spray cans of ether and tossed them in for good measure.
A heavy rain set in later in the afternoon and the sky became dark. “They’ll come early tonight,” he whispered.
He soaked rags in gasoline and stuffed them into the gas cans allowing the ends of the rags to lie on the floor and then poured more gunpowder around each one.
He backed the truck out of the garage and then closed and locked the overhead door with a padlock on the outside and then drove around to the front of the store and concealed the truck in one of the bays of the carwash the Landry’s had once operated.
He opened the front security screen and left it ajar and then rechecked his work inside the store to make certain all of the other windows and doors were open to allow an ample supply of oxygen.
He lit a small kerosene lantern and hung it from the display above the hardware counter and then returned to the truck to wait for the reappearance of his tormentors.
They came shambling out of the fields and woods; at first just one or two at a time but later in groups of five or ten. All of them eventually found the open door and entered the store.
He counted fifty two individuals in all; he waited to make certain that there were no stragglers. Cautiously and silently he opened the truck door and stepped outside. He paused for a few moments; he could hear the monsters inside the building over the sound of raindrops on the tin roof above his head. A sudden apprehension infringed upon his thoughts, what if they sensed what he had planned and rushed him when he got to the door? What if he were to slip and fall or was not able to get the screen closed quickly enough?
But he had to do this now, he had to act. He ran into the rain, mud and water splashed at his ankles as his feet hit the sodden ground. Through the window he saw some of the creatures turn, they had seen him! He focused all of his attention on the door but it seemed as if it were receding from him as quickly as he was advancing.
He saw a shadow appear in the doorway, and then another and another. He reached out his arms and felt the metal screen in his hand. He pushed into it with all of his weight and the door slammed shut.
The fiends rushed the door as he clicked the padlock closed and he backed quickly away. They hurled themselves at the barrier but it held fast. Suddenly they became silent and slowly moved away from the entrance.
They formed a line on either side of the doorway. At the back of the column stood his mother, her figure in silhouette against the light cast by the lantern. She slowly moved toward him, as she approached the door her arms spread out, she beckoned to him and she called out his name.
She pressed herself against the door and he took a faltering step toward her. Her mouth formed the words he had yearned to hear from her all of his life, “I love you.”
His eyes fixed on those of his dead mother and the two locked their gaze on one another. He took another a step towards the door, “I love you too mom,” he said, his lips trembling as he spoke.
He glanced down at the battery sitting on the sidewalk and then connected the jumper cables to the terminals. He stood and looked again at her, his tears mixed with the raindrops on his face, “goodbye again mother,” he said.
He sloshed back to the truck and then turned and looked behind once more. A flash of light erupted within the building growing in intensity until it detonated in a volcanic fireball.
Flame and smoke burst through the screen where his mother stood and she was enveloped in fire. An anguished cry erupted from the demons inside the store while a second explosion blew the glass out of the windows.
The heat from the conflagration quickly became intense and he jumped into the pickup, started it and spun out onto the pavement. He stopped and glanced back at the building which had once been his sanctuary as flames belched through the roof. He knew he was stepping out into an uncertain future, but hadn’t the future always been so? It was only the past that was a certainty.
He pulled an atlas from the bag beside him and opened it to New Mexico. He turned his flashlight on and closed his eyes. Putting his finger high in the air he brought it down on the map and then once again opened his eyes.
It seemed appropriate, almost as if it were preordained, maybe at times the future is not completely ambiguous. His digit rested on a place on the map in the high deserts of North America, Resurrection, New Mexico.
He shifted the truck into drive and headed off into the night.
Chapter 6
In the first years of the epidemic scientists knew nothing about the virus, about how it spread or how it killed its victims. Scientists did not even know from where it had originated.
All that was really known about it is that once contracted, it acted as a sort of gateway thorough which an as yet unknown secondary infectious agent was allowed to enter the human body.
The two “viruses” worked in tandem. The initial infection had no symptoms, and its only function it seemed was to disable a specialized defense in the body’s immune system which would allow the secondary agent to invade the victim’s body.
Much was discovered about the initial virus in the intervening years of the pandemic, but the defense system which it disabled and the secondary agent which caused the actual illness had as yet to be discovered; scientists simply had no clue as to what was happening in the secondary phase.
Some of the infected had antibodies of the primary virus, but had yet to acquire the secondary illness and most of these had been infected for several years with no ill effects. Others fell ill very soon after the antibodies were discovered in their blood.
Once the victim began to show signs of illness, death was imminent and their demise was relatively swift. The person would begin losing weight and would soon refuse to eat, their body would begin wasting and they would quickly succumb to respiratory or cardiac failure.
But, after this secondary infection and the victim’s death, the third and most shocking phase of the illness began. Those who had passed on were reawakening, this occurred exactly twenty-two hours after their demise, death became a temporary condition.
Scientist attempted embalming the dead immediately following the cessation of brain activity but this did not stop their reanimation. The virus or whatever it was now was unofficially known as the Resurrection Virus.
Governments around the world began programs to dispose of the bodies of those newly dead. Large trucks were dispatched and the deceased were gathered up in huge numbers and taken to incineration sites designated by the local governing bodies. This worked for a while as once the body was burned it no longer posed a threat, later though it became impossible to keep up with the enormous amount of corpses and the effort was universally abandoned.
These resurrected corpses craved the blood and flesh of the living. They were carriers of the secondary infection, but they carried a variant of this agent which did not require the primary virus to initiate the illness.
Now, not only were individuals falling ill from the two viruses but the bodies of the recent dead were roaming about infecting others through their bite, this in turn rapidly increased the population of the reanimated while decreasing the population of the living.
Governments worldwide had gone underground, the U.S. and Canadian Governments had retreated to the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, as had U.S. and top foreign researchers from around the world who were studying the plague.
Above ground Planet Earth was now a hostile environment and the human race was threatened with extinction.
July 2031: The seventh year of the plague
Charles Lynch, Charlie to his friends, had been a father and husband, now he was alone and he preferred it that way. His wife and all five of his children had passed away when the disease first made its appearance.
He had in the early days, joined one of the militias that had formed. The government had called up all able bodied men and women to assist the armed forces in an attempt to keep some semblance of civil obedience, the effort failed miserably and chaos now reigned.
Charlie is a secondary, one of those infected with the second stage of the illness he is also one of the rare examples where the infection that he harbors has not as yet had any ill effects. He does not know how long he has to live so he tends to live by his wits and figures that if he is going to die it may as well be a quick death. Passing on to the next world was preferable to remaining on this one as an undead and disfigured monster hiding in the darkness and feasting on the flesh of the living.
He made it a point to be heavily armed, not because he feared Wasters, as the resurrected deceased had come to be called, the infection he harbored kept them from seeking his blood, no he was far more apprehensive of those who were out to take advantage of the lawlessness the plague had wrought. Those who preyed on the helpless, now they were the truly dangerous ones, the Wasters, Charlie reasoned were simply doing what the disease made them do.
Charles Lynch, formerly of 2711 Thunderbird Lane, Anytown, USA, traveled alone. Through a burned landscape he walked, one of the few examples of the human species left on planet earth, but even he questioned whether he was still truly mortal.
He lived with the knowledge that at any moment he could transform into a mindless blood craving monster, a creature created by unseen organisms, a marionette, whose strings were pulled by a microscopic life form, a life form which thrived on human blood. There was no escape from this nightmare become reality, so he survived any way he could.
Chapter 7
Charlie rested but he never actually slept, it was more like a state of semi consciousness, he remained acutely aware of his surroundings with his eyes partially open. Sometime around two a.m. he was alerted by the sound of boots on the wooden floor of the abandoned house where he had taken refuge for the night, his eyes popped fully open and he was instantly sentient.
He carefully pulled the .45 from its holster then lay still in the darkness. Soon he could see movement, two people. The second of the duo paused for a moment in a small shaft of moonlight and Charlie could see a weapon in his hand.
He waited as the two intruders came closer and when they were within a few feet of him, Charlie’s pistol exploded. He fired three rounds before the intruders returned fire. A barrage of gunfire erupted and bullets struck the wall above his position on the floor, he had the advantage as the intruders mistakenly believed he was standing up.
Muzzle flashes betrayed the interloper’s positions and Charlie let loose on the one he had seen in the moonlight, he heard a loud thud as the assailant fell to the floor. He turned his weapon on the other person, who had by this time ascertained that Charlie was shooting from a prone position and had begun placing shots which came dangerously close to hitting him.
Charlie rolled over and took up a new position. He saw the shadowy form of his would be assassin in the opposite corner of the room. He fired three well placed shots and the person let out a piercing shriek and fled from the room, holding onto the wall for support as they went.
Charlie lay motionless for a moment and then slowly he stood with his back against the wall. He made a quick magazine change and then walked the few paces to where the attacker he had killed lay in a pool of blood.
He pulled out a cigarette and lit it and threw the burning match down, it hissed as its flame was extinguished in the flowing blood of his attacker.
He bent down and searched the body.
“Well hello there Mr. Grant” He said to himself. “Fifty bucks ought to be worth something.”
He found some Camel cigarettes and a picture of a small boy who appeared to be about eight or nine years old, he also found a butane lighter in the shirt pocket, this was something he had not laid eyes on in some time and he flicked it a couple of times to make certain that it worked.
He pocketed the money, the cigarettes and the lighter and then tossed the picture to the floor beside the body but then had second thoughts and retrieved it from the floor and as he was bending over the body he noticed a necklace around the neck of the corpse and yanked it free and stuck it and the photograph shirt pocket.
The corpse’s hand was frozen around a weapon, he pried it out of the hardened fist; he also found two extra magazines on the gun belt. Almost as an afterthought he reached down and pulled the ski mask off of the body and was surprised to find that it was a woman.
“Damn shame,” he exclaimed.
He gathered his equipment and blankets and decided it was much too risky for him to stay here now and it was still dark out. He would either have to find some other place to rest or go without for the remainder of the night.
The Wasters were active at night and the Resurrection virus had given them excellent low light vision but they were blinded by sunlight, in fact any type of light source created a pain response in them. They were quick to attack and could run at least thirty miles per hour and keep up that pace for three quarters of a mile.
He found a hiding place under a large cedar tree which had thick, low hanging branches and remained there until daylight.
Chapter 8
“It is always darkest just before the day dawneth.”
He always seemed to remember that quote at times like these, he was not sure why and he was not certain the adage was appropriate any longer.
When he was reasonably convinced that the Wasters had gone underground he built a small fire and made some coffee. Coffee was a luxury but he had managed to be able to trade or buy or steal enough for at least one cup a day. Whiskey on the other hand was a necessity that one could be killed for, good whiskey at any rate; he poured a taste in his coffee.
He pulled a book from his pack, leaned back against the tree trunk and enjoyed his coffee while he read. He had read this particular book so many times he could almost recite it word for word, “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck.
He looked longingly at the now crumpled cover and wiped a gloved hand across the faded picture of the ancient gasoline powered vehicle on the front. He sighed and opened the book.
After a while he pulled the picture of the boy from his pocket. The child was smiling and his front teeth were missing, it must be a school picture Charlie thought. He looked at the back of the photo,” Zeke” was written there in fading pencil.