He stepped into the room with his harsh and hoary boots, panting and out of breath. He quickly locks the door behind him and rests his forehead on the frame of the door. As he is catching his breath and calming down, a loud bang from behind the door is heard. He jumps back, startled, and reaches for his shot gun strapped behind him. He cocks the gun and waits for the thing behind the door, still banging and snarling, to come in the room. He hears a few more outside the barricaded windows and realizes that there is more than one. He only has only five shells left in his gun. He knows he will die, and he lets out a desperate sob as he clutches the cross he is wearing as a necklace.
"God…" He starts to whisper, his eyes filling up with burning tears. He trembles and shudders as he starts to reach into his jacket. "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want…" He begins to pray as he takes out a small compressed computer. "He maketh me to lie down the green pastures: He leadeth me besides the still," he chokes on a sob, "w-waters." He turns the computer on as the snarling quickens and he can hear a horde of them outside ripping the walls and wood apart. "He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name' sake." He sets a timer on his device. "Yea, though I w-walk through the valley of the shadow of d-death," he whimpers as he says, "I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;" He finishes programing his device as a hand of the things' behind the door crashes through the door. He stands up straight and wipes his tears from his cheek; then he says with his voice loud and resonant, "Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me." He pulls a cord from the device and it beeps, starting the timer for twenty-five seconds. "Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over." The door is ripped in shreds and he drops his gun and holds the device in his hand to his bosom next to his heart. He screams in a brash and booming voice without any fear etched in it, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life," The things huddle on the door and crawls in a sickly fashion with its limbs contorted and decayed. They all turn to see him and their eyes brighten in a grotesque fashion with a lust for hunger. Their sharp bite snarls in the air and one screams like a banshee to the man. As they come dashing towards him, the device in his hand beeps twice. The man begins to talks in a serene and secure voice as the thing jumps to his face. "And I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever."
A white light is bathed in the scenery coming from the device, and as all is quiet and as time has seemed to have slowed down; a snarl breaks the beauty of this suspense and the white fire from the device bellows and surrounds all. Outside the community building there were three people up on the roof of a store, eagerly hoping for the man to come out so they can let out their held breath. They grip the edge of the metal as they burn a hole through the building with their eyes, until…
The community service building has its walls and windows implode for a slight second and then blown outwards, letting the shards of window shields and flesh of the beasts fly within a mile radius of them. A scream of a prolonged "no" from the woman on the roof top of the store is heard as the man besides her has his mouth gaped open in a sick, vile horror. A large and hot puff of smoke emerges from the explosion and as it dies down, a slight fire lingers in the area, lasting with the smell of smoke. The woman starts to weep for the man who had just set off the device. She tries to get up and jump off the roof to reach him in a moment of insanity, but the same friend who gaped lunges his hands around her and pulls her back in time.
"STAN!" She screams in a chilling way one might detect in a horror movie.
"You can't save him now!" Her friend yells back at her, holding her to him to keep her from jumping.
"Let me go! Kyle! Let me go!" She starts to sob as she screams, letting her impulse to jump fall as her tears do.
"Wendy stop it!" He pleads letting out a sob himself for his fallen friend.
"God dammit!" The other friend punches the rail of metal, ignoring the throbbing pain on his knuckles and focusing on his lost friend. "God, not Stan…" He mutters as he ducks his head under his arms.
The woman, Wendy, starts to cry on her friend's, Kyle, shoulders. He holds her as he cries along, mourning for his super best friend.
"They will never go away, will they?" The other friend begins. "No matter how much we kill, how much we try. They will never go away…"
The other two stay on the floor, hugging each other for comfort and sobbing for their lost one.
Later, about an hour or so afterwards, the three begin to return to their base. They crept softly and slowly, covering and patching their mourning for another time to survive to reach the base. They swiftly run in silence as they are consumed with a numb feeling, their eyes red and pudgy from the tears. Finally, they safely made it to their base. The other friend scratched on the door three times, Kyle holding Wendy up as support for her stabbed leg with his arm. A knock in the tune of the chorus of the song "We Will Rock You" by Queen came from the other side of the large steel door. The other friend said, "Viva La Resistance: order". The door had a slot, and it opened cautiously. A person's eye crept from behind and examined the three outside. The steel door opened and the three limped inside.
A man that was known well between the three closed the door and locked it tightly and securely once more. They were in a sort of white quarantine looking room. Another door, iron this time, was at the other end across from the first one. It was thicker and taller. The man took out a weirdly shaped flashlight, the kind a doctor would use to check your nose, eyes, and mouth. He first approached the other friend and forcefully opened his eye wide with his two fingers. The other friend was used to this procedure and allowed it. He shined the tool to his eyes and checked the dilation. He took a washed Popsicle stick and pushed his tongue down and viewed his throat with the tool. He shook his head in approval and did the same to the other two. He then took out a glass of kept blood and swayed it in front of the three. The three didn't react in the least and he covered the glass once more and put it away. He looked around for another person.
"Where's Stan?" He said sadly.
"Dead." Wendy said without hesitation, as if she were assuring herself it was real.
The man looked sad, almost mournful. "How are you three holding up?" He asked.
"Casualties happen." The other friend said. "This is no different." His voice was bitter and hoarse.
"What happened to your leg?" The man asked to the direction of Wendy.
"Those fuckers didn't touch it. It was jabbed with a shard of glass when I fell trying to get out." She explained looking at the wall next to her in a sideways glance.
"I see. I think we still have some bandages and disinfectants. You'd need to go to Butters for that." He glances at the blood dripping from the other friend's hand. "Ken, what happened to your hand?"
"It collided with a metal rail, no biggy." Kenny said.
"Okay. Go to the infirmary and wash up." He said.
"Thanks, Kevin." Kyle muttered in a hoarse voice.
"You're welcome."
As the three entered through the larger iron door, they entered the semi-dark building. There was no electricity, so everyone had candles. The three limped to the infirmary where Butters (a nickname the man has had since he could remember), the medically trained professional, would be there waiting for the wounded. As they entered the room Butters just finished treating a man by the name of Clyde Donovan. He injected him with a syringe and patched him up. As Clyde left he clutched his arm in pain. Butters turned to the three and saw their faces.
"I'm going to assume the raid was a bust, huh, fellas." He said.
"We couldn't even pick up supplies. A horde of them came after us." Kenny said leisurely.
Wendy clutched the hem of her shirt as she held back tears.
"That looks like a gusher, Wends. Sit up here and I'll treat ya." He said. He turned to the shelves behind him and took out elastic bandages and other medical tools. She sat on the patient's bed and held her leg to him as he treated it.
"Where's Stan?" He said as he finished.
Wendy clutched the edges of the patient's bed and said in a harsh and loud hiss, "He's dead!"
Butters looked taken aback and he gasped as he covered his mouth with his hand. "Oh hamburgers."
"I need the elastic bandage too." Kenny interrupted, taking the bandages from Butters without asking. He wrapped it around his knuckles and cut the end with his teeth. Kyle helped Wendy off of the bed and she put her arms around his shoulders for support so she could walk. They went out of the room.
When Kenny left to his room, shared with Cartman and Craig, Kyle accompanied Wendy to hers, shared by Red and Bebe. Each room occupied three residents in this building. Red and Bebe weren't at the room at that moment. Kyle laid Wendy down on her futon on the floor and laid her head on her pillow. He took her leg and pushed it back gently to her stomach.
"Does that hurt?" Kyle asked.
"Not as much to worry about." She said softly.
He nodded and sat back to the wall next to her futon. He crooked his head up slightly, facing the ceiling as he relaxed his muscles.
"What if this is hell?" He asked.
"It is, Kyle." She said.
"No… I mean in biblical terms. What if this is hell?" Kyle said.
"You don't even believe in hell, you're Jewish." She muttered, falling asleep.
"Well, let's just say this is hell. Let's just say we don't start living yet until after we die. When we die we start living for real. What if, when we die, that's when the adventure starts? A real adventure that would be one full of knowledge and growth instead of the pain and sorrow that we have grown accustomed to." He contemplated as he rested his palms on the cold marbled floor.
"Are you suggesting we all kill ourselves?" She said, her voice strained and tired.
"I don't know… it was just a thought." He said.
"Stan is dead." She said after a long silence. Her face stayed void of emotion, despite a single tear slipping from her violet eyes.
"I really thought he'd be the one to outlive us all." Kyle said.
"I did too. I guess we immortalized him." She said.
"We always did. He was the strongest, the fastest, and the most reasonable. It just seemed logical to think he'd survive longer than us." He pondered.
"What am I supposed to do without him? How do I go on?" She said as she let out a sob, giving in to her temptation to cry.
"I don't know. Same here. He always had my back. He always pushed me out of danger. We worked as a team because we were the closest of friends. Now what do I do without my best friend?" Kyle smiled sadly.
Wendy hugged her pillow and buried her crying face in it. "This is all wrong. It's not supposed to go this way."
Kyle ran his fingers through his red hair. "Fuck…"
"How could he blow himself up? Doesn't he know we need him!" Wendy cried angrily.
"He didn't have a choice, Wends. You saw the horde of those bloodthirsty beasts surrounding the community building. Would you rather him die human or become those things!"
She clenched her pillow tighter and whimpered, "I really thought he would have come out in time…"
"Well he didn't, okay!" Kyle waved his hand angrily, shouting in frustration.
After a short pause, he grew impatiently perturbed and sighed violently before getting up to leave.
"Kyle…" she whimpered behind her mourning sobs.
He turned back slightly, wanting to keep walking and ignore her call, but he simply couldn't.
"Don't leave…" she whispered.
"What do you want me to do, Wends? Bring him back! Because I would if I could, ya know!" He yelled to her.
She didn't say a word and continued to cry into the pillow. He sighed softly and went back to her side to sit down. "You're not making this easy." He admitted.
Not a single word from her was spoken. He sadly smiled as he glanced to her, her face pressed against the pillow and her hands gripping it tight and stern. He raised his hand to play with her hair, to run his fingers through it, to calm her down.
The morning after that night was the same as always. The residents in the building, in the safe house, all woke up at a scheduled time of 6:00 AM. They dressed and showered in the public female and male bathrooms and then went to the eating room to consume their daily morning portions. They had two meals: breakfast and dinner. Dinner was around four or five. Breakfast is always at seven. This is how things worked in the Safe House, as the residents referred to it. The building was a large military base, a fine one at that, full of barbed wires and steel walls. None of those beasts could penetrate it. The base had plenty of ammo and explosives to last almost twenty years, but as food supplies died down, the Safe House began to assign teams of Scavengers. The Scavengers went off to collect supplies; food, batteries, clothing, first aid kits, medical tools, books and paper (for knowledge and recording events), even scraps of random items they sympathized through memory of the time before the outbreak. Things like toys, collectables, scraps of jewels, bags, blankets, board games, text books, piano key boards, even broken TV sets, all just to remember a better time. Each item was separated in two piles: Needs and Wants. The Needs were distributed fairly or secluded from the public for later emergencies. The Wants were separated by category (education, pass time, accessories, keep safes, scraps, etc.) and put on display for the residents of the Safe House to choose from.
Inside the base was a simple order and stability among the residents from years of hiding from what lays outside of the base. Outside dwells the beast, as the residents of the Safe House refer to them. The beasts were subhuman and of the undead. They came about fifteen years ago, first as a series epidemic. Three epidemics unfolded, the next worse than the previous. The first came as a subtle wave, one that no one would pay mind to, and it was known as The Swine Flu. Later, about four years later, developed a catastrophic disease in which was recognized as Super Influenza. The influenza came about around World War One in the nineteen-teens (1918), as a random disease. It killed off more than 20 million of healthy people worldwide. It would disappear just as random as it came. What came after the swine flu was known as the Super Influenza, meaning that it had a higher death toll and was unable to be cured or prevented. The symptoms would develop light and without notice, unlike the influenza which appeared with vivid headaches, prominent fevers, and nauseating stomachache from the early start. The super influenza would continue to affect you without your notice until you suddenly felt all the symptoms thrice fold all at once. "It would attack you with a vengeance of six flus at once", said a famous scientist at the time of the outbreak, "leaving you unable to defend yourself in the least!" The noticeable symptoms would last for twelve to forty-eight hours before you died. The moment the symptoms surfaced you would be stricken by a high fever that would begin vigorously and without mercy. You would have sudden seizures of tremors erupting as chills that would shake you to the point of severe convulsions. Your throat would lock up, leaving you gasping and wheezing as your lungs would begin to bleed and die from lack of oxygen. Your stomach would have the sensation of a harsh churning motion and your eyes would be bloodshot and a deep scarlet. You would have symptoms of dehydration and your organs would fail, leaving you unconscious. This would eventually lead to dysentery and heart failure.
The last epidemic wasn't airborne like the last two; in fact, it was a gradual growth that was too quiet to notice at first glance. The disease started to affect pigs, for their insides were the most similar to ours, and we were concerned on the massive killings of swine that we hadn't bothered to think it would affect us next. Stories about demons and chupacabras arose about farmers claiming a Mexican folklore monster came to make their pigs sick; of course, it wasn't taken seriously. Later it would occur that a farmer killed a pig he didn't know was infected with the disease. The story goes that as he ate the pig with his family then they contracted the disease. They had rash fevers, on and off, and their eyes were bloodshot and bleeding. They couldn't stand loud noises and their skin started to decay. A deadly symptom was revealed that the ones that contracted the disease had a craving for iron and minerals specifically found in blood; thankfully, the patients were found eating rich soil (which possessed the minerals and iron). Their eyes and noses would have ruptured vessels, causing them to bleed, and their mouths would inflame. Within weeks the patients would die. Once dead, they were taken to the morgue for autopsies. Hours later it was heard in the news that the patients rose from the dead and had murdered the mortician. The mortician's assistant had escaped in a fright and had told the press everything. When the media came to look at the crime scene, the bodies were missing and the mortician was found with his insides gushed open and residue of bite marks that flooded his skin. The assistant had claimed that the farmers had pale skin and their pulse wasn't beating. For months there were cases that the media tried to cover up the streak of murders and witnesses of the rising dead. Then two years passes and the world went to shit. It went so bad that hordes of them appeared randomly to attack civilians. Many tried to make Safe Houses, but the only ones that worked were the military bases and county penitentiaries.
"How was the raid yesterday? Did you get any good supplies?" A rather robust man commented to Kyle as he sat next to him with their daily breakfast portions in their regular trays.
"Not a thing. We actually lost…" He wasn't able to finish the sentence without his voice breaking. He decided to stuff his mouth with a scoop of his oatmeal.
"You lost supplies? Don't tell me you retards lost a rifle?" The rather robust man laughed gallingly and stuffed his face with his own scoop of oatmeal. After swallowing his massive bite, he looked around the crowded room. "Where's Stan?"
At this Kyle lost it and felt his mouth twitch to a contortion one would feel when beginning to cry. He buried his face in his arms as he gripped his curly hair tight letting out a silent spasm of sobs.
The rather robust man side glanced to him and smirked softly as he chuckled, covering his face with his hands as his fingers pinched the bridge of his nose, a habit that was picked up by their dead comrade. "I see…" He finally said.
He arose from his seat and walked on to eat in his room. "Cartman…" The rather robust man turned upon hearing his name being called out. "It was an explosion. He… they surrounded him so he…"
Cartman, whose first name was Eric, simply stood silent and turned to walk away once again, in turn leaving Kyle alone.
In a world as this, deaths were familiar. They all, here who slept in the halls of the Safe House, were accustomed to the stench of drenched blood, to the cries of agony and terror, to the news of a dead colleague, to the famine that ripped at their tummies, to the unfairness of death, and most of all, to the constant fear and torture of being the next to die, of having woken up one morning to find that the beasts have found a way to enter to their Safe House. They were used to having friends die and to being drained of hope and virtue. None of the residents at the Safe House, old to young, had their innocence and nativity intact when it came to the way of the new world. A well way to put it was the phrase spoken by a certain resident by the name of Craig Tucker, "We all have the mental state of forty bipolar war veterans."
In a moment of dying hope, the residents of the Safe House falter, as do people. Yet with this tale, the ones who falter are the strongest when revived. They, the impaired, can bounce back to their feet. They, the weakened, can push to revive their strength. They, the scarred, can mend their wounds. They are the faltered, the impaired, the weakened, the scarred, and the residents with dying hope. They are the strongest, the most determined, the fiercest, and the cure! They are the humanity and they will strive to remain human for as long as they shall breathe. This is the essence of people, of all the persons who dare keep their will. It is a will that brings responsibility and virtue, deceit and malice. It is the will that makes them human, along with reason, and fault. They are the dying hope; dying surely, but incapable to vanquish entirely.
They are humanity.