Books of the Dead (Book 1): Sanctuary From The Dead (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

In the Beginning

I was in my apartment when my world went to shit.  I heard some screams and pulled myself away from the TV just in time to see my downstairs neighbors, the Raburns, sprint down the street, running from a small group of zombies and headlong into another larger group of undead. 

My mind actually clutched at what was happening, trying to work its way around the word -
zombie
. 
Like they were real
.  They were outside my apartment, but my mind didn’t want to accept it.  These were things of late night horror movies now shambling down the street in front of me.  I actually closed my blinds, blinked a couple times, and then reopened them, and dammit, they were still there.

Things were not going well for the Raburns.  Lyle tried to take them on with nothing but his bare hands.  He didn’t stand a chance as the zombies quickly took him down.  His wife went down a mome
nt later.  It only took a minute, but their screams echoed in my mind for months.  I never knew her name and now I never would.

About eight months ago our world turned completely upside-down.  When I say our world, you never expect something like this to mean the
whole world
, including
where you live
.  While it wasn’t okay for some nation half a world away to suffer some major disaster or calamity, you never expected it to hit in your backyard.  The people of Portsmouth never expected it.  I sure as shit never expected it.

Portsmouth was a dying city before
‘The Outbreak.’  In its heyday, the city churned out steel like there was no tomorrow, its mills supplying enough metal to build everything from skyscrapers to battleships back in the day. That time had passed more than fifty years ago.  When those mills closed, the whole area spiraled down.  By the turn of the century, the county held the dubious distinction of having some of the highest unemployment in the state along with the biggest welfare rolls. 

Before the Outbreak I used to joke with my friends that the city was the land of the zombies, but now my sad attempt at humor was just that -- sad. 

The population at the time the dead came back to life was just under 20,000 and getting smaller with each year as more and more businesses closed their doors.  With no jobs, the young people left the city in droves.  Why I was still in town was beyond me.  Maybe I was just unmotivated.  Or maybe it was something about the place that kept me here -- a sense of community.  Whatever it was, despite it being an armpit, it was still my armpit.

For reasons that we never learned, the dead came back to life and started killing and eating th
e living.  It wasn’t that knowing would make any of our lives easier, but the mind searches for answers.  We humans are funny that way.

The first days were truly Hell on earth.  No one wanted to believe it.  Reality skewed with the world tilting into some sort of George Romero zombie flick.  A lot of people died because they refused to accept the
truth. Their rational minds denied this new and ghastly reality until a zombie was in their face.  By then it was way too late.

At first, there were only a few zombies and a lot of living, but those numbers seemed to invert almost overnight.  When “The Outbreak” hit, I followed “late-breaking” news compulsively and was glued to my TV when I wasn’t working.  Some reports had the origin in Russia, while others said that it came from North Korea; that report was easy to buy given the batshit crazy leaders th
ey had there.  No one was ever really able to pinpoint the origin.  At least, not in the limited time the world as we knew it had left. 

The Outbreak spread like an out of control wildfire even as government officials assured us that they had the situation “
under control
.”  Television reports showed soldiers wearing masks and some wearing bio-suits, manning checkpoints, and keeping things neat and orderly, while internet videos showed a completely different picture.  In vivid and living color, soldiers fired on masses of fleeing people, many of which were still alive and not undead.  The government ripped these videos off-line as fast as they could and even shut down YouTube entirely.  “Charlie Bit My Finger” was knocked off the charts as the most watched video when “Charlie Chewed My Face Off” videos got an exponential amount of views.

For the first few weeks, I believed the “
We’ve got things under control
” lie, as did ninety percent of the population.  It’s easy and safer to capitulate to the idea that the government would step in and save the day -- only this time they didn’t and we were on our own.

After watching the Raburns eat it -- or better put, watch them get eaten, my mind raced for what to do next.  Was my apartment safe?  What weapons did I have?  Besides a stale loaf of bread, the half-gallon of expired milk, and a jar of peanut butter, what did I have in the place to allow me to wait out a long term siege of the walking dead? 
Not much
was the answer.

Escape to a better location was the best option. 
But where
?

I paced for several minutes and finally picked up the phone and called the only people I knew I wanted to talk to -- my parents.

“Mom, are you alright?” I asked as soon she answered the phone.

“Joel, oh thank God,” she said.  “We’re okay.  How are you?”

“Okay, except for the fact that a mob of zombies just killed my neighbor.”

“Don’t get over excited,” she said
.

“Did you hear me?  They ate them.  While they were still alive.”

“Okay, you made your point,” she said, and I could envision her running her hands through her hair the way she did when she wanted to calm down.

My dad picked up the second line and said, “Stay inside, Joel.  It’s not safe.”

“I don’t think it’s a good long term solution.  The front of my place is all windows.”  My apartment had this great floor-to-ceiling window design across the front that was great for allowing in a lot of light, but not so good in keeping out a mob of zombies.

“Stay away from the windows,” he said, but I could hear the panic in his voice and it shook me some.  He was usually a rock.

“What do you guys think I should do?”

When the chips fell, it was always my mom that really kept her shit together.

“Okay, Joel,” she said.  “Here’s what we’ll do.  We’re going to the nursing home to collect your grandmother and then we’ll meet at the church.

I didn’t mean to audibly groan, but there was no holding it back.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “We all know it’s not your favorite place, but it is solidly built and it has the civil defense shelter in the basement.  Plus, they’ll have plenty of food because of the day care.”

“Is
n’t there somewhere else?” I asked and I think I may have whined a little.

“You have a better idea?” she asked.

“Okay, I’ll meet you guys there,” I said and started to hang up.

“Joel,” she said and I stayed on the line.  “We love you.  Be
--,”

But that was it.  The
connection broke.  I hit the button on the phone about ten times but nothing happened.  I took a moment to collect myself and tried to call them back, but all I got was a pre-recorded message telling me that all circuits were busy and that I should try my call later.  There wasn’t going to be a later.

The church was one of the last places I wanted to spend my time.  Had I known that hours would become days
, and days would become weeks, I might not have ever gone.  Then again, had I struck out on my own, there was little doubt I’d be dead or worse.

Getting to the church turned out to be a real
challenge.  In the chaos, most drivers had decided that the old rules of the road didn’t apply anymore and were driving balls-to-walls as if there was only one speed -- fast.  I saw a horrific collision of two cars at an intersection that had most likely killed everyone in both cars.  I didn’t stop to check because zombies swarmed the cars, descending on the fresh kills.

I drove most of the way to the church like I was at the Indianapolis 500.  
My progress came to an abrupt halt when I nearly slammed into a jack-knifed semi-trailer that had been carrying office supplies.  Paper was blowing down the street like exaggeratedly large snowflakes.  Several cars must have been following the thing too closely because one small Chevy sat embedded underneath the trailer and a small pick-up lay capsized, with the driver’s door open.  The driver of the Chevy screamed for help, but the cries were weak.

The wreck completely blocked the intersection and the smell of diesel fuel permeated the air; it made me worried that the whole mess would become a giant fireball at any second.  I considered helping the person in the Chevy, but when I looked in my rearview mirror, I discovered I had my own troubles coming down fast.  I was boxed in by a family in a monster pick-up.  Another car pulled in behind the truck and the gridlock was set. 

I honked my horn insistently, but had no place to go.  I looked back at the people in the cars behind me and saw the panic on their faces.  Further down the street, a swarm of zombies was coming at a slow but steady pace like an inexorable flow of lava from a volcano.  The swarm grew in size as more undead streamed out of the yards along the street joining the herd. 

Up to this point, I had seen a few pockets of zombies and some individual undead shambling along on my way to the church, but this throng stopped me in my tracks.  There were at least forty to fifty walking toward us, some making faster progress than the others.  All of them looked hungry.

The driver of the pick-up directly behind me put his truck in reverse and floored it, but only got as far as the car behind him as his back bumper smashed in the front of that car with a loud metal against metal crunching sound.  I watched in horror as an elderly man got out of the car and started shouting at the pick-up truck driver, seemingly oblivious to the encroaching danger behind him.  The man got out of the pick-up with a tire iron in hand and headed back towards the old man, shouting.  In their confusion and stupidity, neither of these men were getting it.  Not at all.

The man’s wife did get it, loud and clear.  She opened her door, dragged out two small kids, and yelled at her husband to leave the old man alone, but the man had his hate on and was determined to deal with this old bastard who had blocked them in.  She picked-up a little boy, who was probably around three or four, and told the other kid to follow her.  When I saw their eyes
, as they passed by me, they were open wide in terror.  They took off running around a dry cleaning business on the corner of the block and disappeared. 

The father stood
shouting, face-to-face with the old man.  I saw I was getting nowhere, grabbed my baseball bat, and ran around the front of my car then started around the semi-trailer.  My heart went out to the driver of the Chevy, but when I looked back, I saw the zombies coming in over us like a wave. 

The tire-iron toting father ran off in the direction of where his wife and kids ha
d gone.  The old man held his head and leaned against the side of his car, blood dripping off a gaping wound in his forehead.  The zombies swept in on him like dark flood waters, enveloping him, and he started screaming.  I sprinted away without looking back, but heard the echoes of the old man’s screams for at least a block until they ceased completely.  It only took me five minutes at a full out sprint to make it to the church where I sat in wait for my parents.

By the third day I was out of my mind with worry.  There had been no word from my parents.  The nation’s extensive communication network teetered on the verge of collapse in the first twelve hours of the Outbreak -- every panicked call stressing the network like a house of cards; and it was brought to its knees and flattened.  The cell phone I carried as a constant companion became nothing more than a paper weight, yet I held onto it for several weeks hoping that I would still get the call that never came.

I wasn’t the only person separated from family and
friends, but it offered little solace.  My parents ones were one-of-a-kind people and the kindness and company of strangers could never replace them.  Never.

Contrary to all the zombie films, the world didn’t turn into a place overrun with zombie hordes overnight.  The reality was even worse.  It was like death by a thousand cuts being carried out on all the survivors. 
During those first few days people streamed into the church.  Some had stories that made war crimes seem like the tamest TV movies.  Others were so shell shocked that they were incapable of recounting anything. 

Within a week, the worst of what was going to happen reached its apex.  The streets were swamped with the undead.  Going outside was out of the question -- that is if you wanted to live.  There were more than a few people at the church in my situation, with family members out there, maybe on their own, locked in their houses, or on the run just staying out of reach of the undead.  Or maybe they were already dead or worse, undead.  A part of me wanted to leave this world, but som
ething stronger made me want to survive. Maybe I was just too much of a coward to take that sort of definitive action.