I was sitting on my computer that evening, watching videos on the internet again. Laughing as the main character kept calling his partner ‘Police girl’, completely ignoring her attempts to correct him. My entertainment was interrupted by the sound of an erratically driven car coming up my driveway.
I paused my video and sighed, not sure what would warrant two visits in the same day. Though it did have the same sound as John’s car when he came, there was a strange clunking noise like the engine was damaged. I appeared at the door as the car came to a stop much like I had the first time, a little trick I enjoyed doing to scare people. Always be there before they knock, and they’ll think you are psychic.
The car was John’s, the old beat up sedan, I didn’t bother to learn the make and model, but I recognized it. Though it sported a new paint job, bloody red, a couple of bullet holes, and a shattered window.
“What the hell?” I hurried, relatively, down the stairs to the car. Miss O’Connor was driving, and John was in the passenger side, holding a bloody rag to his shoulder. “What the hell John?!” I assumed he had been shot at and wounded in the line of duty.
“He said to come here, that you could probably help him.”
“Alright, alright… Well, I can… get him inside, I’ll grab what I need to pull it out.”
“What?”
“He’s been shot right?”
“No, some psychopath bit him and then some people started to shoot at us. Saying that it was the only way. Then they got attacked by some other people… Oh my God, they were eating them.” O’Connor seemed to be losing her mind.
“John, what happened?”
“What she said.” He groaned.
‘Shit. What the hell was going on? This shit doesn’t happen in real life, this isn’t some fucking Romero movie.’ I thought to myself, a lot of people always seem to be in denial in the movies and it always gets more people killed than necessary. “Let’s get you patched up buddy.” I dragged him inside and laid him out on the kitchen table before running to get my medical kit. I did not go full speed, I had to maintain my cover in front of O’Connor.
I returned and grabbed a couple syringes, local anesthetics, and injected them into the flesh around the bite. He barely flinched, might be going into shock already. Next, I disinfected the wound, alcohol and iodine, no need to be stingy with it. I finally stitched it closed with a curved needle and some medical thread. The whole time Miss O’Connor was panicking, pacing back and forth while verbally denying that this was happening.
“Alright there, as long as there is no infection you’ll live.” I patted John on his good shoulder and gave a small smile, though his eyes were closed. On an impulse I took his handcuffs from him and locked one cuff around his wrist and the other on the leg of the table. It had a real stone surface, so I figured it would hold him if he woke up and decided he was hungry for some Tullius meat.
“Hey! What are you doing?!” O’Connor objected to me handcuffing her partner. Of course, she would.
“Look bitch, I don’t like you, but if what you said is actually happening, what if they infected him with whatever they had? He might be fine, he might wake up and decide you look like a nice snack.”
“Who are you calling a bitch?!”
“You. I am calling you a bitch. Now I am going to go lay down and watch some news, come find me when he wakes up.” I did not want to argue with her, so I simply walked away. I heard her swearing up a storm behind me, but I did not change my pace. I returned to my entertainment room, putting the TV on a news station and sitting down to see what they were saying. The first channel was simply the colorful bars with a ringing, with the text claiming they were experiencing technical difficulties.
“Okay, that is not unnerving in the slightest.” I changed the channel, and again the network was ‘experiencing technical difficulties’. “Damnation.” I flipped through several of the most common ones I watched, most of them were down. How quickly could this possibly have spread? Finally, one was still on air.
“-could only be described as something from a nightmare or something out of a horror movie. Men and women being swarmed by others and attacked, then rising up and joining their attackers. Behind me you can see the National Guard attempting to set up a roadblock.” The reporter pointed to a small army of men and women in uniform setting up barricades, rolling out barbed wire, and setting up firing positions. I doubted it would help them very much. I wondered how long it would take normal people to accept what was happening, this had to have been some sort of cosmic joke, or a terrible nightmare that I would wake up from soon. Revenants. They weren’t living, but they weren’t dead, driven only by their hunger and base instincts. If that was what this was, everyone and everything on the planet was in danger.
There had been small outbreaks of ghouls, revenants, and the like throughout the ages, but they were always put down before they spread from the originating village or town. This, this was insanity, all over the world it seemed that the dead were rising up to eat their friends and neighbors.
“Damn… damn…” I whispered to myself, I had no fear of the disease itself, but at the rate things seemed to be going. Well, I worried that I would end up starving to death in the long run.
I continued to watch the news until the dead attacked the barricade that the mortal soldiers had set up. They reacted like they were fighting normal people; body shots won’t stop something that doesn’t need its organs. The last scene before the camera cut out was the reporter running away from the dead, the camera abandoned, laying sideways as the dead marched onward. I looked at my phone, it had been a couple of hours since John arrived.
I stood up and moved over to my computer and began to search the Internet for more information. Mostly it seemed people were posting where they were and that they needed help. They had been attacked, or someone they were close to was hurt. Most of these people would be dead in the next day or so. Their wounded loved ones would change and take a bite out of them, conscripting them to the army of the unliving. I sighed and kept digging for more information. One person claimed that they had cut the head off one of the revenants, or as he put it, zombies, and the head was still alive. Good to know, don’t think just because the head was removed that the threat was gone.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
There was a video attached, it showed a young man with black hair holding the head of another man, older, with gray hair. The head’s jaw kept working, and the tongue would lash out towards the young man, who was explaining what had happened.
“Interesting, however this is pointless to continue watching.”
I looked for another half hour before I was interrupted. A scream, a woman’s scream, O’Connor to be exact. I blurred out of my chair and down into the kitchen to see what she was screaming about.
It was John, he had turned into one of them, and she had removed his handcuff, probably with her own keys. Now he was struggling to bite her face, or arm, whatever he could pull in close as the scrappy little woman fought him. I walked slowly into the kitchen and picked up a butcher’s cleaver. It seemed as good a weapon as any to use on short notice. Miss O’Connor noticed me at this point and began screaming for me to help her. I felt the sudden urge to wait a few more minutes to see how this would play out.
I crushed that urge just as quickly as it appeared, a plan crystalizing as I got closer. I could use her. A proxy. Maybe not a perfect plan, or even a good one, but as things went I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to live. “I’ll help you. But you have to do whatever I say from here on out.” I said with a calm voice as I continued to close the distance.
“What?”
“I want your word that you will do everything I tell you to from this point forward, until you die.”
“What?”
“Do you accept my terms?”
“Yes, whatever you want, just hel-.” I buried the cleaver into John’s skull, a normal person probably wouldn’t have been able to do it, but I struck much, much harder than a human. I yanked it side to side before pulling the blade free. John’s body fell to the ground with a thud.
“Excellent.” I dropped the cleaver and bent over to pick up John’s body, no reason to leave it in my kitchen. I began to carry him outside. “Now, go get some rags from the closet near the foyer and clean up this blood.” I said without looking at her, I had other things to take care of.
I approached the woodchipper just as footsteps came running up behind me. It was O’Connor, and she had drawn her gun. “You murdered him!”
“He was already dead.” I said, turning towards her, even holding the body over my shoulder I wasn’t encumbered in the slightest.
“No, he wasn’t! He was sick.”
“Right… sick. Never heard of an illness that makes its victim try and eat other people.”
“What are you doing with his body?”
“Well first I was going to strip it of anything useful. Like his car keys, and the gun under his arm… Then I was going to feed him into my woodchipper here. Much easier clean up, don’t you think so? Plus, it will help the grass grow.”
“You… you psychopath!”
“I believe that I would be called a sociopa-.”
BANG! BANG! BANG!
She shot me, three times, in the chest. I suspect she expected me to fall over, dead or dying but I stood there and looked down at my ruined shirt. “I kind of liked this shirt.” My voice coming out wheezy and strained as my collapsed lung rebuilt itself. “On top of that, it is rude to interrupt someone.” I dropped John’s body in the dirt and began to walk towards her.
Clearly not learning the lesson the first time Miss O’Connor fired at me until the slide of her pistol locked back, no more bullets. About half of them grazed or struck me solidly, one even clipped my jaw, tearing a horrible looking furrow across my face. It wasn't comfortable, but I made a show of it, making sure not to flinch when the bullets struck. Fire, ripping out my heart, and yes it had to come out, or cutting my head off, those were the only way that I could have died at this point. My skin was no stronger than a human’s, but it healed at an amazing rate. Not as fast as that animal from those superhero movies, but one could sit down and watch the wounds close in less than a minute. I could feel the blood within my body burning away as it was used as fuel to heal my wounds.
“Are you quite finished?!” I roared at her, letting some of my glamour seep into my voice, releasing a terrifying aura. A vampire’s glamour could be used for many things; making it so we went unnoticed, cloud the mind of mortals, make them easier to prey upon, or making us appear extremely attractive, terrifying, just about anything one could think of.
“Oh my god… oh my god, this can’t be happening. This is impossible.”
“Listen to me bitch, if I was not worried about my own future I would rip your throat out now to replenish the blood you just cost me. However, I need you, but I warn you now, if you try any of that shit again, I’ll do worse to you than what I gave to John.” I turned away from her and walked over to his corpse. My anger drove me to rip his limbs from the body and toss them into the woodchipper individually. I pulled the pistol from his shoulder holster before tossing in his torso and head. I heard sobbing despite the loud grinding sound coming from the chipper.
I turned around to find O’Connor on the ground in the fetal position crying. I had not meant to put that much force into terrifying her. I had only wanted to scare her just enough that she would do what I wanted, what I needed her to do. “Get up Miss O’Connor.” My voice back to the same tone and cadence I had used when I was putting on the act when they were cops.
Slowly she looked up at me and I had to stop my sigh. Perhaps a little positive encouragement was necessary. Almost choking as I forced out the words I spoke once more. “I apologize… it seems that the world has gone to hell and I need your help.” I held out a hand to her, the gesture negated by the blood that stained my hand. I was surprised when she took it despite the blood and slowly helped her to her feet.
“The issue we will have is food. I do not need it, so I do not have a lot. I suggest we take what we can and leave this place, find a group of people, and put you in charge of them. Nominally at least, you will answer to me in secret… But before all that, let’s get cleaned up and armed.”
Luckily the power was still on, and water was still running. We showered in different bathrooms, and since Miss O’Connor didn’t have clothes I gave her some of mine. They would be a little big, but she would have to deal with it for now.
While I dressed I thought about my home and the chances are that I would be able to keep it. I had solar panels on the roof as backup, but I did not want to stay in my home during this emergency. The building had hardly any defenses besides its remoteness, fifteen-minute walk to my next neighbor and longer to arrive at the edge of the city proper. In case any were wondering, I never did learn the name of the city I was living near. I doubted it would remain long enough to matter to me.
I met Miss O’Connor as she was coming out of the bathroom wearing a loose pair of my jeans and a gray t-shirt too large for her. She salvaged her own shoes, mine would be too large for her feet to be safe. “So, what now?” She asked, seeming to have gotten a hold of her emotions now that we had our talk.
“Now, we wait out the next couple of days and see what our luck brings us.” She would have a chance to come to terms with the end of the world and use up the supplies of food in my home so they would not go to waste.
“Alright… it seems so cowardly to hide out here while people are dying.”
“Do you want to be the one dying? Or would you rather be a coward until the world settles down some?”
She made a disgusted sound before turning away and disappearing into one of the bedrooms. I decided she could borrow it for the time being. It was going to be a long week, and it had started off so well too.