Nowadays, I was a survivalist just like everyone else on this miserable planet. I think my job had to be ranked one of the worst to be involved with on that fateful night. June 8th 2002, you didn't want to be anyplace that held a deceased human being. For whatever reason, (radiation, biological, extraterrestrial, I've heard 'em all) every freshly dead human on the face of the Earth "awoke", and they were very, very hungry.
I had just finished a little project, a guy named Val Merducci, and was sitting on top of a small brownstone he had owned. Poison was one of my favorite methods, and I was documenting how long it had taken to eliminate someone of Val's size. He had lived well, to have become the size he was, but had neglected to share some of the gain with a business "partner". Several phone calls later, Val was dead and my wealth had been expanded by a five figure sum.
My train of thought was interrupted when Val began to quiver and grunt. I looked over at him in near disbelief, mostly because the poison should've been instantaneous. Hell, it would've been instant for an elephant even, much less some fatso in a cheap designer suit. I began to screw on the silencer, kinda disappointed that I would have to resort to the old cliche of a bullet to the head. Enough time had been spent reflecting on this job and I needed to finish it now. That was when Val rolled over and looked at me with those terrible fogged over eyes, and I felt like a hamburger at the end of a weight watchers meeting. He staggered to his feet, (the new dead are like children, learning to move all over again. It doesn't mean they're not dangerous, just easy to evade. The dead who have been awake for a while are the dangerous ones, they regain alot of mobility after several weeks.) and began to shuffle towards me. I watched him with a grim fascination, almost mesmerized until he grabbed my arm and tried to take a chunk out of it. I found a simple bullet to the head returned him to his prior state, and after that I began to realize the screams I had heard earlier had risen in their level. In fact it began to drown out everything else. At that point I began to realize something was dreadfully wrong. (no kidding, your latest victim resurects himself, tries to eat you and now the New York night life sounds like a bad Halloween sound effects tape. I'd say something was dreadfully wrong wouldn't you?)
I also figured that sitting on top of that building sorta limited my options for a quick escape from the police or whatever else happened to creep up the stairs. I heard muffled screams from several doors as I went by, but I had no desire to discover the source. Unfortunately, soon as I walked outside, a great urge to reenter the building asserted itself. The fact that several people ( I hesitate to call them that, since it was pretty obvious they should've been in a coffin instead wandering on the street) immediately began to shuffle over to me had a great deal to do with that. A quick scan showed me several groups of these things hunched over some poor schmuck, and the ferocity of his screams convinced me that getting caught would not be in my best interest. Moving over to my car became the number one thing on my to do list, and I eased my Colt 45 out of its holster. Two well placed shots ensured my trip to the drivers side door, and I figured my escape was all but complete. To say I was mistaken would be a great understatement.
I heard more screaming behind me, causing me to give a quick glance over my shoulder. The words CITY MORGUE flashed out at me, and I began to wonder just how bad my luck could turn. That was when Linda came racing out of there like a bat out of hell. Behind her came several corpsicles, each smeared with whoever they had gotten ahold of inside. Shots rang from my 45 again, stopping them cold (excuse the pun). This was when I discovered loud noises attract these things like crazy.
Thankfully I still had my ten with silencer attached(good old cliche), and dispatched several more of the zombies while fumbling with my keys. I got her unlocked and shoved Linda (I didn't know her name quite yet, but she was alive and that was good enough for me) inside the coupe. We raced off into what had once been New York, and now looked more like a charnel house.
Linda began to get a little hysterical, and my feeble attempts at comfort
weren't very helpful. I figured a little music would be, so I popped in The
Downward Spiral, by Nine Inch Nails. It seemed to be appropriate at the
time, considering, and it allowed me time to think. We managed to get by
scores of abandoned cars and jammed streets before we found the largest
wreck I had ever seen. Twenty or more cars must've been piled up, with
quite a few of the newly awakened dead crawling all over it. From the looks
and sounds of it, any survivors were being cured of the condition rapidly.
The odds were too much for me to feel comfortable, so we high-tailed it out
of that scene. What we found next shocked the hell out of me...
--MHal9000
Turning onto Main street, we ran straight into the largest mob I had ever seen. All of them were moaning and clutching their stomachs. Zombies.
I had to think quickly. Try to turn away or floor it and ram my way through? Neither seemed very appealing, but I was out of time. I yanked the wheel hard to the right, trying to pull away before the mob overcame us. Linda clung to the door handle as the g-forces of the turn smacked my head into the window. The car began to skid . . . Darkness.
When my eyes opened again, I was sitting slumped over in the driver's seat of my car, amid a mass of crumpled metal and shattered glass. I felt a trickle of blood run down my face . . . cold. I groaned, feeling suddenly and extremely hungry. Then it hit me. I was dead.
I tried to turn my head and look around, having to force my muscles to remember how to move. I sluggishly looked over at Linda. She was still breathing. Barely.
A meal! I forced my armed to reach out and grab her. I couldn't control myself, the hunger was so powerful it was overwhelming. I suppose I got too carried away, because the force of my attack took it's toll on her already battered body.
Linda stopped breathing. I let go of her in disgust, as repulsed by the thought of dead flesh as I was hungry for live flesh. I fumbled with the car door, trying to get it open. I couldn't think straight, I was in a trance. Like being half asleep. I couldn't remember anything in detail, just vague sensations. All I knew was that I was very hungry, and suddenly very afraid, like a young child alone in an unfamiliar place.
I heard a sound from where I had left Linda's body, and I turned to look. She was awakening now. I felt strangely comforted to see a familiar face, though I couldn't remember where I had seen her before. I finally forced the door open with a hunger motivated burst of strength, climbing out and onto my feet for the first time as a dead man. I turned to see Linda stumble out after me. She grabbed my arm, as eager to stay with the comfort of something even slightly familiar in this strange, terrible new world.
Helping each other relearn the skill of walking, we searched for
something to satisfy our ravenous hunger.
--BaldLocust ( kunra@usa.net )
Till we stumbled into an open access to the sewer, which happened to
contain water and a single live wire. At that point in time, my newly
discovered world as a zombie came to a screeching and jolting halt.
I awoke several hours later, with a strange warm feeling all over me which
I realized later to be the sensation of being in the land of the living
once more. I turned my very sore head to the side and saw Linda along side
my bed in a makeshift hospital. She had more bandages on her than I thought
humanly possible. We had been delivered from the veritable jaws of death,
and now we sat in small enclave of the living, surrounded by its minions.
--MHal9000
I still felt the nightmare moving like fog in my brain, it had been all
to real for comfort.
Then it slowly dawned on me that the medical staff looked more like the
mad doctors from some B horror flick.
Actually the contraptions they had hooked to me and Linda looked like
something out of a lab.
I got the funny feeling this was one big experiment and Linda and I had
just become their newest lab rats.
--Whisper Mckee
"The male is conscious!" I heard one of the doctors exclaim. "Check his restraints!"
A brawny orderly marched toward where I was resting. He stood beside the bed, shaking and tightening several sets of cuffs over my arms and legs. The cold metal restraints pressed uncomfortably into my aching limbs, and I was about to comment on the orderly's bedside manner when two doctors approached and began shining lights into my eyes and poking thermometers and needles at me.
"Temperature normal," said one of the doctors.
The other doctor handed a large, painful needle full of my blood to a nurse. "Test this." he said, and she took the sample toward an elaborate array of test tubes and beakers. The doctor turned to his colleague. "He seems human." he said.
"What are you talking about?" I interrupted. "Of course I'm human, doesn't take an egghead to figure that one out!"
The doctors looked at each other, then back at me. "What is your name?" asked one of them.
I started to answer, but nothing came out. I thought hard, scanning my memory for a bit of information that should have been the easiest thing in the world to remember, but I could not remember what my name was. "I . . . don't know. Where am I? What is this place?"
"Should we tell him?" asked one of the doctors.
"I don't see why not." said the other. He turned to me. "You were killed in a car accident a few hours ago. Fortunately, your body was not excessively damaged. You awoke as one of the, for lack of a better term, zombies, along with your friend over there." He pointed to Linda, whom I didn't recognize at the time but decided not to argue the point. "Fortunately, you stumbled upon one of our little traps. We've been working on a procedure to change the zombies back into humans, and you two are our first test subjects. You seem to be doing very well."
"And her?" I asked, taking on faith the fact the Linda was a friend of mine.
"Her condition is not quite stable yet." said a doctor, frowning. "The crash and our trap took a slightly higher toll on her than they did you."
"What is causing the dead to awake?" I asked.
The doctors both looked away, grunting nervously. "All in good time."
said one of them, and they walked away.
--Bald Locust (http://dte.simplenet.com/fiction)
For the next few weeks we began to recover from our wounds, both mental
and physical. In the meantime, I watched our savior/captors with a cautious
eye, and began to surmise several things about them. I would've bet money(
which says something for my being sure about this) that they had something
to do with the reawakening of the dead. Just the silent determination they
wore on their faces spelled that out, along with the fact that the lab was
too perfect a setup to have been thrown together just as humanity was
crumbling all around. Every time we tried to pry any information out of
them, we got the cryptic "all in good time" phrase. To be quite honest, if
I hadn't been restrained there would have been some serious ass kicking
dealt out the third or fourth time they said it to me.
--MHal9000
Linda was much stronger now , stronger than she had led them to believe. In fact she was completely well but had feigned slow recovery. Everytime they touched her to perform whatever test they were doing that day, she bitched and moaned like a banchee. I'd never been prouder of the girl. She ate very little, if at all and appeared lethargic. They checked my restraints every night before leaving. They hadn't checked her's since the day we arrived , unconsious.
I woke up one night to find good ol Linda standing over me. In the weeks
we had been used, basically, as lab rats, that no food ploy had finally
paid off. She had lost enough weight to slip her hands out of the wrist
restraints. Blood can act as a great lubricant, just as fear can be a great
motivator. She had skinned her wrists up pretty good but you should seen
the look on the face. The woman was estatic. A hairpin in the ankle
restraints and she was free. Hey! What exactly did she do before the world
went to hell in a handbasket.
--Janice Newton
She reached to unlatch one of my wrist restraints, but stopped and ducked behind my bed when loud footsteps approached the room. A doctor entered and turned on the light while saying, "I thought I heard a noise. Did it come from in here?" He then noticed Linda's empty bed and yelled at me, "Where did she go? What happened?"
"I don't know. You woke me up when you came in."
He looked all around the room, behind a medical table, in the closet, and eventually behind my bed, but he didn't find her. She had slipped through the door without his notice. She was good. Eventually, the doctor left.
The next day, the doctors pressed me again for information about her escape, but I continued to feign ignorance. At least I knew she had not been caught. I wondered whether she would return for me.
--Argus Skyhawk
Several days later, during one of the many tests we were subjected to, I finally got one I had nicknamed Boris to get a little talkative. It took several hours to finally get a subject he was interested in, but I had managed to break through the wall they were putting up. For 45 minutes Boris and I discussed the pros and cons of neurological toxins, both natural and synthetic. I really would've liked to continue the talk too, Boris had some interesting theories. Unfortunately, information on another subject was needed, so I began to steer the conversation in that direction. After several exasperating attempts, he finally began to relent, and actually admitted that his team knew something about the awakening. That was when we began to hear blood-curdling screams, from inside the compound.
Boris immediately bolted into the next room, and for several minutes all I heard was random screams from different sections of the compound. I really began to sweat when the screams began coming closer to my room, what with my being strapped into the test chair and all. A figure burst into the room, and I finally realized that the old story about your life flashing before your eyes wasn't a story after all. Until I realized it was Linda who had entered the room, with a brutal looking assault shotgun in hand. "GET ME OUTA THIS THING!" Seems to be the thing I remember shouting, and just after Linda had done that, Boris ran back into the room.
"Run!......They're right behind me!.......Gakhhhhhhh!( or something like that? Kinda hard to put something like that into words)
Anyways, true to his word, "They" came in right on his tail. Several of the undead, smeared with gore and grabbing for Boris like he was the last bit of food on a deserted island. Linda leveled out the shotgun and dispatched the three in short order, which created quite a bit of noise I'm sorry to say. About a dozen more poured into the room and descended on Boris before he could even get a scream out. Linda and I backed into a corner, and I tried to come to terms with being eaten alive before it actually began.
This is when it gets pretty weird.
One of them which had been squeezed out of the Borisborg, came over towards us. It did so at a slow shuffle, as if it was trying to figure out what we were exactly. Still a reasonable distance from us (or else Linda would've blasted it) it stopped and seemed to sniff the air. After that, it turned around and loped back into the hallway. We sat there in shock, watching the rest of them finish with Boris and also head back into the hallway.
We hadn't been touched.
You can also read Janice Newton's Alternate Addition, which was submitted around the same time.
--MHal9000
Not being ungrateful types, we decided to make the most of this very major miracle by escaping rapidly. To accomplish this we simply moved in the opposite direction of any scream we heard. Eventually, this granted us access to what had been New York. Now it looked more like the John Carpenter version, and I kept expecting to see Snake Pliskin step around a corner.
We had to get some kind of transportation quickly, weapons too. I figured
Linda must've had some kind of plan, since that shotgun she had didn't
drop out of the sky. Course with every other weird thing going on maybe I
shouldn't rule out that scenario either...
--MHal9000
"By now the precinct station has to be empty." said Linda as she scanned the area. I'm thinking, can she read my mind? "No screaming, no deaders. We can find weapons and transport there." There was no b---s--- in her tone, she was used to being in charge and right now It was all about saving her butt, I could come along if I wanted too. The hysterics earlier musta been caused by the trauma of the immediate reality check. But she had the bull by the balls now.
"Ok, lets do it!" I said. "If they want some of this, they can come and get it!!." Fear had passed, I was pissed now, I was ready to wear a dinner bell around my neck! Just who the hell did they think they were f---ing with, I'd blow them all a new a--hole. Ok, I felt better now. As we entered the station, the smell of fresh blood clogged the air. It clung to us and fit like new skin.
'A new skin to go dancing in.' I heard the voice as clearly as if it (Furie??) was said right in my ear.
"A new skin to go dancing in!!??. What the hell are you talking about??" asked the woman. "Don't we have enough problems without you going off the deep end on us?"
Huh!?? "You heard it too?" Man. this was this was gettin curiouser and curiouser.
"Sure I heard, you're right in front of me!!" Whew, that meant I hadn't lost it. I was so busy watching my butt., I barely took a breath let alone spoke. But we heard it and we heard at the same time. Damn, this is gettin curiouser and curiouser. God, what fresh hell is this? (JOHN FURIE!!)
Now talk about your stranger turn of events. The only thing we could figure out is we were not alone. (How's that for cliche.) There were more like us and apparently psychicly linked. This Furie guy had cast a mental net and made us hear him. I knew right away this was going be a p-----g contest. I didn't like the violation, ( this must be what rape feels like.) My first reaction was untold fear, quickly replace by an anger so intense I was in pain. ( GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HEAD, YOU S.O.B.). There was a soft laughter. Was it in my ear or in my head? "Is that jerkboy laughing at us?", asked Linda, "Just who the hell does he think he is?" Mocking laughter again, you know, that superior kind. We started toward the precinct station. We had to get a car and ammo and we had to find them. Somehow we knew he was not the only one, just the strongest, and there is survival in numbers. We'd determine that stronger thing at a more opportune time (was that another chuckle?). Right now we just had to find them.
She came out of the darkness to our right, she was covered in the blood and gore of her fellow man with pieces of guy hanging all over her. Did she take a bath in him or what? I say guy because it was pretty apparent. She must have been back quite awhile because she was fast, cat fast, but not fast enough. I nailed her with the first shot but the noise was deafening. They came from every nook and cranny, big ones, little ones, fat ones, tall ones. Man, talk about your worst nightmare. We took off, sprinting for the station's garage door. There was a two foot gap between the partially closed door and the pavement. "Slide, slide!!" I shouted, and down we went, under the door to what we hoped was, at least, temporary safety. We scrambled into the nearest paddy wagon. I figured we needed something heavy. "Crap, no keys". Linda leaned down and pulled wires from under the dash. A couple of clicks and the engine came to life. We hit that garage door like a bat outta hell and mowed down some approaching deader in the process. There was more than a little satisfaction in that. "You got that right".
"Did you see them fly?"
"Just like bowling pins." laughed Linda.
But I had only thought it. "You can hear me can't you?"
She turned in time to see I was speaking and
thought back to me "Yes I can."
--Janice Newton
