The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (3 page)

“But she was ‘Afflicted’, right?”

“Yeah,” Zane scraped his hand across his mouth. “She was covered in blood. It was her blood. Something had bitten her face off. I mean actually ripped the nose and lips right off her face. Her whole head was just a bloody mask of gore. One of her ears was hanging by a piece of chewed gristle. She was hideous.”

“Where did she come from?”

“Around the corner,” Zane pointed to the end of the storage sheds. I didn’t see her until she was almost on me. She was standing in a puddle of her own blood, swaying like she was exhausted. There was blood and gore in her hair and her arms were scratched. A couple of her fingers were missing. I think she bit them off.”

“You saw her do that?”

“No,” Zane admitted. “But she spat a finger out when I turned around and saw her there. She was gnawing on it. She spat it on the ground and then shrieked.”

“What did you do?”

“I backed away,” Zane’s face was transforming, the color draining from his cheeks and his brow furrowing. He suddenly looked older. His mouth twisted. “I was loading a bag into the back of the Jeep. The bag was packed with tools and stuff – things I thought I might need.”

“Did she attack you?”

“She tried,” Zane said softly. “But she stumbled. She clawed at me, her fingernails hooked into the sleeve of my shirt. I reached into the bag and felt the handle of the hammer. That’s what I hit her with.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Jesus…” I breathed.

Zane let out a breath he had been holding. It sounded like a tremulous sigh – the sound someone makes after they have cried themselves out. He nodded his head slowly. “She wouldn’t go down,” he said – and at last his eyes slammed into mine. I could see the haunted pain there. “I hit her again… and again,” he whispered. “Blood splattered over my shirt. I was screaming. The ghoul was shrieking. The fourth time I hit her I turned the hammer around and buried the clawed end of the tool into the broad of her forehead. The weight of the blow knocked her off her feet, but this time she didn’t get up.”

“She was dead? I mean really dead?”

“I don’t know,” Zane confessed. “She wasn’t moving. I don’t know if that ended her or not. I threw myself behind the wheel of my car and reversed over her. Then I just drove, man. I drove as fast as I could and I didn’t ever look back.”

I stood back and shook my head slowly. Zane’s harrowing encounter with one of the ‘Afflicted’ was the kind of moment that could haunt a man for the rest of his life – especially a young man without a lifetime of experience to bulwark his emotions. I felt sorry for him. On the surface he was calm, composed. But the layers underneath were scared with the horrors that happened during the Apocalypse.

We walked back towards where our vehicles were parked. Somehow, away from the storage shed, the air seemed fresher, the space around us less claustrophobic. Zane leaned against the side of his Jeep like he needed to. I wrote three pages of frantic notes and then looked up circumspectly.

“Can we go to the University now?”

Zane looked up like it was the first time he had seen me. “Why?” his voice became guarded.

“So I can get a sense of the events that happened that day, Zane,” I said honestly. “I don’t want to just tell the world your story, I want to know where you were, what you lived through. To do that we need to go back to the campus.”

He thought about it for a long moment, his eyes narrowed. The friendly affable face was hidden behind a mask. “Sure,” he said slowly. “That makes sense.”

I followed Zane in my own car. It was a short drive. The lawns were overgrown and filled with weeds, the concrete paths that snaked their way through the maze of University buildings were cracked and crumbling.

“This was the Janzow Campus Center,” Zane looked over his shoulder at me as we went in through the doors. The interior was a wrecked abandoned shambles. The chairs and tables were overturned, painted in a coat of grey dust and there were the droppings of vermin and birds on the floor. A couple of pigeons were roosting in the rafters where the ceiling had collapsed, looking down at us. There were framed dusty photos still hanging askew on the walls, an overturned pool table and a couple of sofas, each with the stuffing gnawed out of them by rats… or something larger.

Zane looked around, reminiscing. “They were refurbishing and renovating this part of the university just before the Apocalypse broke out,” he said absently.

I looked around. The windows were smashed and there was glass everywhere. It crunched loudly under my feet. One of the walls was spattered in dried blood. It looked like an abstract artist’s mural.

I heard Zane sigh. His hands had bunched into fists, the flesh across his knuckles white with tension or tight restraint. He stared at me, maybe resentful now that I had brought him back here.

“This is the place,” he said tonelessly and pointed. “I was sitting right over there. By a window.”

“What were you doing?”

“Preparing for a test. Suddenly all the televisions around the walls started to sound the emergency broadcast alarm. Then the Governor of Nebraska came on the screen.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that Martial Law was immediately in effect and that the National Guard had been deployed to Omaha to deal with a situation involving a virus that had been spreading across from the east and west coasts.”

I nodded. “Did you know anything about the ‘Affliction’ before the announcement, Zane?”

His face remained impassive. “Yes,” he said. “I was a photojournalist for the University’s newspaper. I kept my eyes open because news and reporting fascinated me. I knew what the virus was. It had been all over the national news for a week before it hit here. I think everyone knew right away what the Governor was talking about. That’s why everything broke down into panic and chaos. We thought it was just a matter of time.”

I stood a dusty chair upright and set it at a table then sat down wearily. I reached for my notebook.

“What did you do?”

“I ran out of the building, back to my dorm and started packing.”

I looked up out of curiosity more than interest. “What did you pack?”

“Memories,” Zane said abstractly. “I had most of the practical gear I needed back at the storage shed, so I packed the kind of things that meant something to me. The things that had value.”

“Like?”

“A small folded American flag that was given to me by a friend who went into the service, a photo of my parents, my grandma’s Bible…”

I wrote a note about that because I felt it was an insight into the young man Zane had been before the spread of the ‘Affliction’.

“Anything else?”

He inclined his head. “A water purifier, a silver coin stash in case I needed money, and a couple of survival books by James Wesley Rawles.”

“What about everyone else?” I continued along the same line of questioning. “What were the other students doing at the time?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Some did what I did,” he said. “There were people everywhere talking on their cell phones, screaming, panicking. Others didn’t take the warning seriously – or were too tough to admit they were scared. They stayed, I guess… until the helicopters started to arrive. Then the real panic set in.”

I looked up from my notebook. “Helicopters?”

Zane nodded. “Three helicopters circled the university and then dropped to the ground. They landed on the football field, and a convoy of military vehicles pulled into the campus parking lot with a police escort.”

“To fight the ‘Afflicted’?” I was confused.

Zane shook his head. “Apparently the National Guard was going to set up a safe zone on the Campus…”

I looked around me at all the wreckage, the dried blood. “I guess that didn’t work out too well. It was lucky you didn’t stay.”

Zane said nothing. I tried another question.

“Did you have a plan at that stage? I mean you had survival gear packed and ready in the storage shed. I assume you had thought about this kind of thing happening one day… so I’m guessing you also had a plan of action, right?”

“Yes,” Zane said. “I called my parents and explained the situation to them. I told them I was heading home. My parents told me Colorado was also under Martial Law, and that Denver had been overrun.”

“Where was ‘home’ for you?”

“Alamosa, Colorado,” he answered. “It’s a twelve hour drive from here… but my regular route takes me through four major population centers – Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Castle Rock and Denver…”

“Was Alamosa safe? What was the situation where your parents were?”

“It was ‘Affliction’ free,” Zane explained. “The entire San Luis Valley in Southern Colorado was shut down from the outside world. I knew that if I could get there, I would be safe.”

“The San Luis Valley?” I wrote that down in my notebook.

“Yes. There are only five ways to enter that valley and my parents told me that every route was guarded by a combination of local Colorado National Guard units and a local militia.”

I sat back, admittedly impressed. “It sounds like the folks around your hometown take preparation seriously,” I said in lighthearted banter. Zane didn’t laugh. “Yes,” his face was stony. “And it’s just as well, don’t you think? The ‘Affliction’ never reached that part of America thanks to those volunteer local militia units and the National Guard. Their preparedness saved thousands of lives.”

We lapsed into a kind of prickly silence. I was thinking about Zane Francescato and how the Apocalypse had impacted on a young man who had begun the horror as a university student and returned here now – two years later – as a man. The toll was not immediately obvious because on the surface he had retained a kind of affable geniality that was probably part of his nature. It was only when you scratched below the surface that the profound extent of the traumas he had endured began to show in little flashes of temper, and a gaze that could turn from friendly to ice in an instant. I supposed the Apocalypse had affected all those who had endured in different ways. On the young – like Zane – perhaps the impact had been the greatest.

I wondered what that meant for America as we moved forward into a future with fuel shortages, starvation and a population wary and mistrustful of its government and even strangers within its own communities.

I don’t know what Zane was thinking right then; perhaps he was remembering those dark moments at the University, or maybe he was reflecting on what he had been forced to do in order to endure. Nothing showed on his face. His expression was fixed, revealing nothing.

“So you drove to Alamosa,” I said, breaking the uneasy spell of silence.

The corner of Zane’s mouth twitched. “I drove to my uncle’s farm,” Zane qualified. “It’s about five hours drive from here. It’s like a half-way point between here and Alamosa.”

“And you made that part of the journey without incident?”

Zane started to reply and then stopped himself. He dug his hands deep into his pockets and leaned his hip against a wall. He raised an eyebrow and glared at me cynically.

“Do you mean, did I kill any more of the ‘Afflicted’?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was exactly what I meant, but I sensed Zane’s hostility, and my instincts told me the interview teetered on the precipice. Regardless, I stared at him frankly. “That is what I mean.”

Zane narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I killed two more of the ‘Afflicted’ on the way to my uncle’s farm.”

I sat up a little straighter. “Tell me what happened.”

Zane pushed himself away from the wall and went to stare out through the broken glass of a nearby window. When he began to speak, it was like he was talking to the clouds… or maybe the heavens.

“By the time I got on the road, the freeways were choked,” he said. “There were lines of cars for miles, people walking along the side of the road carrying their possessions on their backs. Some pushing bicycles. Parents dragging their crying children by the hand, hurrying in panic. Everyone was looking over their shoulder, expecting the ‘Afflicted’ to appear on the skyline at any moment. People turned ugly. There were car accidents and fistfights. I saw one guy get out of his station wagon and shoot a woman in the head… for her car. His had broken down. He stole her car and then drove a few hundred yards before he lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a crowd of people pulling a hand cart behind them. The car went into the crowd and bodies were thrown into the air like rag dolls. The cart must have been filled with everything the family owned. People got out of their cars. No one helped the driver. No one even helped the family. They just stole whatever they could pick up and drove away. It was scary. It was ugly. It was brutal and heartless.”

“Did you stop, Zane?”

“No,” he whispered, and lowered his head with his own shame and regret. “I was too scared to.”

There are different kinds of silences. As a journalist you learn them all. There are the kind of silences when someone you’re interviewing doesn’t want to answer a question – the squirming silence. And there are those heavy silences when you make a profound point that just has no creditable answer.

This wasn’t one of those silences. This was the kind of quiet that comes when you peel back the flesh covering a tender open wound that is so painful it chokes the words in your throat and swells agonizingly in your chest so you can’t breath.