WEEK THREE – DAY 16 OF 31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN KICKS OFF WITH: THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER WHEN YOUR DEAD By D P Sloan It was raining the night I officially died, I know, it sounds awfully cliché like some garbage Hollywood movie that has no real plot but oodles of special effects. Unfortunately for me that’s the long and the short of it, maybe it was just my time. I was never a religious man, too busy with the task at hand to worry about heaven or hell but I, like everyone else, always wondered what happened. Was there a heaven? Did the big bearded guy upstairs stop in for a chat? Did anything happen at all? Maybe you just lay where you happen to fall, unable to move, staring out your eye holes until someone comes along, pushes your eyelids shut and seals you in darkness forever. I was praying not to go the way I did, I think all of us survivors were praying not to go the way I did, but how often does the man upstairs answer our prayers anyway? The events leading up to my death polarised people, the bible bashers prayed for mercy and clung to their bibles even tighter in the night, everyone else abandoned hope and god believing it was too late for his help because we were already in hell and just waiting for the devil to show up. I realise the futility of my actions, this autobiography that no one will hear, but I have to do something to keep myself sane, well, as sane as anyone can be these dark times. I would like to think I made a difference in my time on the planet, that I helped make someone else’s life just a little better. Besides I have to do something to keep the horror of what’s happened at the back of my mind. If only people could hear me now, babbling to myself like some crazed homeless person you see on the street, begging for change and having an argument with the invisible man. I suppose for you to understand what’s happened and where I’m at now you would have to understand how I got here in the first place. No-one really knows for sure how it all started, by the time you were sick it was far too late. Some say modern medicine went too far, breakthroughs outpacing research. We were so busy trying to give old geezers a hard-on and keeping ourselves from catching colds we never stopped to think about the consequences. Others believe that it was a terrorist attack or some new weapon that escaped from a government lab. Someone somewhere through their own arrogance or ignorance managed to create zombies. Shambling, brain eating, chaos causing, shoot’em in the head zombies. I never in my lifetime thought I would have seen it or even believed it had I not witnessed the horrific events unfolding with my very own eyes. They looked like they had shambled straight off the pages of some horror novel, skin falling off, wide eyes, the whole nine yards. Almost everything ever written about them was correct, who would’ve ever guessed that some schmuck behind a typewriter could’ve actually gotten something right. One major problem with the newly risen dead, is that they can do a lot of things a living person can except that they are dead silent. They don’t moan, groan or even wheeze. They lacked the motor skills to use a gun or drive a car but they could climb, they could run and swim or they could stab you if one of them happened to have something in their hand. I heard stories of a former Olympic high jumper trying it inside a house and caving his own head in trying to jump after someone. You could always tell the old zombies, the ones made in the beginning because they were different. They seemed to move just that little bit faster and last that little bit longer, like the virus somehow got weaker or did more internal damage for every generation of infected. The newer generations did less and shambled more, they could barely run and this latest batch can’t even seem to do that. Of course it wasn’t zombies in the beginning it was the flu or a cold or some other benign winter aliment. Once the virus started to spread and I call it a virus because no one actually knows for sure what it is any more, what we do know for sure is that there was no way of stopping it. The outbreaks spread like wildfire from most major urban centres outwards. It was airborne and spread very quickly, one cough on the train or a sneeze on the aeroplane and everyone on board was now a carrier. It appeared as the common cold, same symptoms and same time frame. No one was the wiser until people started dying quietly in their beds instead of getting better and by then it was far too late. The actual period spent dead was short 10 to 15 minutes at most before the return trip to the land of the living. People were told it’s just a cold go home and sleep it off. They forgot to mention give it to your friends and family. No one knew the true horror or the situation until it was far too late. Not only was it airborne, it was blood borne too and could survive for days outside the body, like hepatitis C and the Flu mated and had some bastard offspring. Everyone was warned of massive outbreaks of colds and flu like ailments, then they were warned of mass hallucinations, after the hallucinations a warning came of mass hysteria then the final warning was run for your lives. There was mass panic as the news broke, people in the urban centres fleeing for their lives as the infection spread. Roads became congested, trains stopped, aeroplanes grounded. All measures were taken to try and stop the spread but nothing worked, the stupidity and ignorance of the general populace prevented them from working. People turned to religion for comfort and protection and paid a high price for their beliefs. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for religion because everyone needs something to believe in, whether you worship God, Allah or Buddha, but when something is spreading from person to person with horrible consequences and your religion incites you to go sit in a small building huddled shoulder to shoulder with the person next to you is when it becomes a very bad idea. By the time we were officially told to run for it the military had tried to stop the spread and failed. Travel restrictions were enforced and cordons erected but I don’t think that they fully understood the nature of the beast, hell they didn’t even believe in actual zombies until they came face to face with them, then again neither did I. You could set them on fire, try to drown them, nothing but destroying the brain worked. Once word got out that you had to shoot them in the head things got a little easier but not by much. Our first major loss to the undead horde came about because my superiors in the military refused to believe in zombies, that the events unfolding was just mass hysteria but we didn’t have enough men or ammunition for the sheer numbers involved. The grand plan was to retake the village of Clydebank which had the River Clyde running through from the rabid masses for use as a fortress so to speak, a large safe haven that was easily defended. It only had a few entrances and exits, it actually made perfect sense it couldn’t easily be assaulted and the depths and currents of the river kept a water assault out of the question. We were on the based at the Beardmore Hotel and our orders were to barricade both sides and send in fire teams to do a street to street sweep. The teams had lost before they even began quickly becoming overwhelmed and consumed. Thirty minutes after the last radio went silent we knew there was trouble brewing. Forty five minutes after the fire teams had vanished without a trace the zombies shambled up the roads towards us and headed for the barricades, our own fire teams part of the shambling horde. The sniper teams opened up at long range and dropped as many as they could but there were too many, we opened fire with everything we had. High command figured this would be a cakewalk and didn’t bother to provide any vehicle or naval support, so we ended up fighting for hours to try and stem the tide, the road running red and the bodies piled four or five high but eventually we started running low on ammo. Imagine 20 million zombies all massing at 5 or 6 points, no one in the world has enough ammunition to stop that sort of nonsense. As a last ditch effort we retreated back to Drumchapel and blew the village of Clydebank up, finishing off any zombies that managed to survive the blast. Thank god for C4, we heard over the radio nobody else was having much luck either, blowing their assets not long after us. Once word finally got to high command about what had happened they knew we were all in deep shit without a spoon to dog with and still they didn’t learn. I don’t know if it was arrogance or ignorance on the part of everyone in charge but it seemed that nobody wanted to believe what was happening or maybe they had Can’t-be-arsed Syndrome – they sat around with their fingers in their ears refusing to listen to what anyone was telling them and making snap decisions with only half the facts. Either way it led to our second biggest loss, the massacre of Drumchapel Park. Most of the survivors you meet will try to tell you it was the Battle of Drumchapel Park, however this is technically incorrect as there was no actual fighting, just lots of dying. This was the military’s second attempt at retaking Drumchapel and surrounding areas. Luckily I had kept all my equipment and heard the orders filter out from the commanding officers. I imagine no one could quite believe what they were hearing, I couldn’t but orders are orders. Their brilliant idea was to erect barriers walling off a large section of the park then set up camp using the soldiers on the inside of the barrier as bait and simply wait for the zombies to arrive. Once plenty of zombies turned up for the show or meal depending on how you look at it, then simply use aerial assault to shell them from the air. I don’t know how the hell they thought this idea would work any better than the last one. I witnessed the whole thing from Faifley, having deserted not long after the first disaster. I was making my way south towards Balloch, no one could survive a winter without proper shelter and proper shelter meant zombies clawing at the walls. I watched from a hill hidden by a copse of trees as the helicopters lifted the gigantic concrete blocks into place one by one. I didn’t have too much to worry about as the army was more interested in the zombies than deserters and I doubt they could keep track of everyone lost during the battles anyway. Once everything was sealed off the navy landed a small team of marines in to the secure zone that appeared to be well supplied. It worked spectacularly, everything going off without a hitch, no casualties and eventually no survivors. By the time the aerial assault planes were in position in the skies there were millions of zombies at the walls trying to claw their way through the five inches of concrete the army had placed across the park. At nine a.m. precisely the planes opened fire, the thunderous hundred and twenty millimetre guns pulverising everything outside the walls into a fine red mist. It rained down for almost an hour, infecting everything it touched. The newly infected inside the wall finishing off anyone smart enough to get into their hazmat gear before the barrage occurred. I shook my head in disbelief at the stupidity of it all glad to be leaving all that behind me. Do you blame me for believing I would be better on my own after that? Once a large portion of the populace was infected airborne infection rates dropped dramatically, zombies not breathing or coughing couldn’t spread the virus by that means. Strangely enough animals weren’t affected by the virus. Once I was walking through a park on the outskirts of a large city, it was dusky evening after a beautiful sunny day and about time for me to find some shelter for the night and I came across a tree full of birds chirping and nesting all for a small audience of zombies silently watching the commotion from the base of the tree. It was beautiful in its sadness, to see all that was the human race reduced to staring at a bunch of birds hoping for a snack. All of the secondary infection zones were soldiers, survivalists or weekend warriors who thought they could take on the entire mindless horde. Once I deserted from the army, I became one of those people I speak so disdainfully about. I foolishly believed I could survive better alone after the disaster the army turned out to be. I gathered a small pack, plenty of ammo and set off in search of a place to call home, preferably a place without zombies. In my travels through the wasteland that used to be the West of Glasgow I came across several home made fortresses, a lone zombie or a small collection of zombies clawing away at the inside of the fortifications. Too many video games and movies the action hero hacks his way through the infected throng, blowing them to bits with grenades as he passes. Too bad nobody was able to warn these poor souls before the televisions and radios went dark that blood contact was enough, they may have taken greater care, adopted different strategies and they may have still been alive today. I saw far too many of these lonely bastions as I passed from place to place that I finally realised it was going to take a group effort, not a large group mind you but a group none the less. After the massacre in Drumchapel Park it was generally accepted that the best option was to form pockets of resistance and try to retake the Scotland piece by piece rather than mass a large force and try to sweep the country clean but that effort didn’t get very far either. Once everyone had broken up into small groups a lot of them lost communication with each other and simply vanished into the night. Things started to degrade very quickly after that news could only be spread by radio or signals and once the batteries went flat and the power finally went out everyone lost communication. The only way to talk to the nearest group was to send a runner, half the time they disappeared never to be seen again, sometimes we were lucky and could put them out of their misery as they shambled towards the walls. I stumbled upon a small group of these survivors as I was travelling through Loch Lomond and decided I might settle down for a little while. They had inhabited one of the many old forts left behind by people long past. It had high walls, deep trenches, could be repaired with the local sand and had plenty of room for everyone. There were 30 people there, all rough survival types from all walks of life and that’s also where I met Catherine. After the disaster at Drumchapel park the army started to disintegrate, soldiers realising that survival might be easier as a single unit rather than as a large group. I was eventually a member of one of these pockets and I was also a former soldier. As things broke down and central command was lost things got real bad. No supplies were coming in so we had to head out during the day and forage what we could find, we did manage to grow some food but it wasn’t nearly enough. We heard stories from nearby groups that some people farther north had turned to cannibalism and were raiding the surrounding countryside for food. Scotland was longer the greatest nation on earth it was a collection of fiefdoms under siege. None of us knows what happened to the rest of the world, before all communication was lost we had heard stories of England shutting its borders and shooting down any planes that flew too close but nobody knows for sure what’s really going on, whether someone has found a cure or even a way to drive them out. It was eventually decided that we should fight back as best we could so hunting parties were organised and sent out to the nearest city. The problem you run into is that most of the power is out now and the only way to find the bastards is to enter a zone, stay quiet and listen for the shambling. God forbid one of them sits down, falls over or walks into a wall and decides to stop moving. You could enter a house full of zombies and get no warning whatsoever. You turn a corner and suddenly you’re face to face with three of them. It was my job in my former life to hunt them down, to crawl through the rubble of society and try to clean out the infectious scourge. Having no lights made things hard we could only hunt during the day in small fast moving bands. We planned our routes carefully, did a week’s recon of the area and went well armed. Mostly we tried to lure them out of the houses, loud noise and lots of movement seemed to catch their attention. Then we gunned them down at long range using hunting rifles and the like. Once an area was cleared, or rather deemed clear, we had to go door knocking. Trying to clean up the mess was even worse. Clean up. Two words that made grown men shudder. Your first outing on clean up duty was always the worst. By the time you made it to the zone you were cleaning the corpses had already been out in the sun for an entire week waiting for the virus to die, you had to wear hazmat suits, undergo decontamination for fear of becoming infected, but the very worst part was the smell. There was no way to get rid of it, it permeated your hazmat suit and made your eyes water. The state of the bodies gave you nightmares for a month, worse than the waking nightmare we were currently living through. At least the zombies not moaning was a small blessing, if zombies had been moaning at the walls twenty four seven we would all have been driven insane. The Protective clothing was a must and we gathered anything we could, anything we could use. We even brought a spare truck just to carry all the extras. Guns, ammo, fuel, fresh water, potted vegetables, anything we could get our hands on. My death was no different than millions of others, and neither is my experience I presume. I was grabbed from behind while raiding an empty house. The previous owner must have been hidden or not heard the search team, I died screaming like countless others. The crux of my problem was not when I died but when I re-awoke, no longer in control of my own body, but still being able to stare out of my eye holes like some trapped passenger on a horrible carnival ride. I get to watch myself, shambling around, eating some unwary traveller or small animal not paying attention. Not able to warn them to scream for them to run, just silently shamble up behind them. Some days I see the hordes of remaining zombies and wonder what the other people trapped inside those heads are thinking, have they gone completely insane with the horrifying acts theyve committed or have they managed to remain somewhat sane and are staring out in morbid fascination of the events unfolding. A phrase always stuck in my mind, funnily enough from a Stephen King novel called, ‘Pet Semetary,’ that phrase still haunts me – ‘Sometimes dead is better!’
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 14:37:41 +0000
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