Chapter 1: Ancient Pharaohs
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!
—The Epic of Gilgamesh
Once, when she was just a girl in the flush of her youth, a young boy gave her a red flower as a token of his love. He was a rare and precious boy, though she had to confess that she had fully forgotten his face and name. Little lingered but the vague memory of the red flower.
Quinn Fabray slept in a parked car beneath a bridge with a blanket piled over her. She woke with the cold morning rain. It gusted over the car, dancing with the death. She watched it fall on the road, on the car, on the ruins.
When morn came and the grey sunlight congealed over the land, Quinn rose, fed and gathered her belongings before leaving the car where she had spent the night behind her, like the bones of an eaten meal. The world felt dead, she only a vestigial entity left of it. The last of Gods crowned masterpiece. Everyone else expelled to tombs, only to leave them to haunt the non-expelled. Nothing moved save the leaves and branches on the wind. Quinn liked it that way—days where humanoids stalked the streets was not days to relish.
In the grey light of the dawn, she was cold, hungry and solitary. Once, a young boy had given her a red rose as a token of his love, but now there was no boy or love left. Only gloom and only death was. Only a feeble hope of whatever possessed the divine power of life. Every day, the future looked a little bit darker. But the past—even the grimy parts of it—kept on getting brighter.
When the sun stood high, hidden by a vast blanket of grey clouds, Quinn Fabray walked in a wide street of a little town. The rain had caught up again. Surrounding her was dark buildings with shattered windows and tired walls. Some had survived, some had not. The town was a ghost; dusty and dead, draped by dead automobiles on the roads and the pavements. Lifeless shops standing by the street, emptied and without any costumers or employees. Void swallowing all. All of them abandoned by their former owners and conquered by nature.
When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural. Too bad few foreshadowed, too few saw and could act, that it spread faster than a common flu, that civility and civilians became an ignored hurdle when mankind fought the increasing fire. Women and children and babes at the breast unheeded while the strong tried to save themselves.
Quinn held her rifle tight while walking down the road, occasionally squatting and studying the land before her. She watched the buildings, she smelled, she listened; however it was not the living she feared. Much fouler creatures roamed these lands; feasters, remorseless and unfeeling killers. In the plague-infected land of cold and famine, many lost all faith and turned to the bestial acts of eating their dead. Unfortunately, many witnessed that their meal resurrected and fed of them instead. It is not the dead that should fear the living; it is the living that should fear the dead.
All the way along the muddy streets she walked in the shadows of lonesome buildings, slowly disintegrated by nature itself. The buildings were scavenged-trough, emptied, ruined and acting as tombs for dead memories… and humans.
The cadavers of the fuel-spitting automobiles joined the buildings, standing on the roads in their shame. They once tried to strangle the earth, but were to slow—overthrown by worse fears. It had spread like a common flue—Quinn could barely recall—only in a more "macabre" way. Standing in the muddy streets and glancing at the lost world, one could only imagine what story the megalomaniac ghost told. What it once was.
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it
And its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit
And it goes by the name of…
At the top of the hole sit a privileged few
Making mock of the vermin in the lower zoo
Turning beauty into filth and greed—I too
Have sailed the world
And seen its wonders
For the cruelty of men
Is as wondrous as Peru
But there's no place like…
…the scabland, she thought.
Genesis chapter 1 verse 26: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." It really made her think. The walking dead was the definition of evil and terror, but man—God's greatest creation—was indeed the foulest and vilest. God is too fond of a joke. Or was it Satan that created the world when God was sleeping?
What am I? Quinn wondered, standing there with long blond hair gathered in a braid and eyes shimmering like emeralds. Of Satan or of God?
She wondered what the world had once been like. She couldn't remember any more so it was just that, wondering. Like camping, she thought. Friends gathered around a glazing fire, conversing, telling stories and singing sweet hymns. Laughing, hoping. The fire was dead though, the fire in her heart would soon follow. Laughter? The laughter froze in man's throats and strangled him to death. There was naught of the camp left. No friends, no memories. All was casted away into oblivion save feeble memories and hopes flying on the wind.
There is no civility, only politics, only the survival of the fittest. It felt like it was only she and those words, that dogma, that ideology. Everything else lost or dead in the power of time. It was so little promise in the country. She should find something to eat soon. The whole world was shrinking down to a core of vital entities. Things to eat, warmth, medication… was God even there?
Dreaming about the campfire and the faces long forgotten, she hummed, hoping that her greatest wish would soon be fulfilled. Humming, she walked:
"Gotta make a move to a
Town that's right for me
Town to keep me movin'
Keep me groovin' with some energy
Well, I talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about, Talk about
Talk about movin
Gotta move on
Gotta move on
Gotta move on
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?"
Quinn could recall what a man had once said to her. The man was forgotten, the time was forgotten, all that was left was she, the idea and this vestigial world of carnage and bad dreams. He had thought that she was naïve and foolish, believing the false tales of lying tongues. He had grinned at her, snorted of her simple and warm-hearted vision of the world before he had told her "Life is not a song, sweetling. Someday you may learn that, to your sorrow."
She had.
"Gotta make a move to a
Town that's right for me
Town to keep me movin'
Keep me groovin' with some energy
Well, I talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about, Talk about
Talk about movin
Gotta move on
Gotta move on
Gotta move on
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?
Why won't you take me to
Funkytown?"
Her humming was done and Quinn stood by the ade of an infirmary. Or what once had been an infirmary. The land was conquered by nature and by the dead, likewise the time crumbled all things; everything grew old and was forgotten under the power of time. The infirmary was closer to a tomb than an infirmary.
She moved inside, into a huge reception lit by the cracked windows and doors. Furniture lay shattered around, everything out of place as if it had been a war where the only arms were tossing of furniture. The air was damp and thick.
Sitting at the reception desk was a body.
The woman—Quinn could barely see it was a woman—had shot herself. The shotgun, empty, was still clutched in her hand. The corpse was black as leather, the desiccated flesh stretched taut over the bones, and little of her head was left. Most draped the wall behind her, forming the capital words THE END IS NIGH.
She moved in silence up the stairs were she found the second body. It reeked of a repulsive and robust stank, draping the floor in a pool of putrid blood and gore. It was mere bones left in the pool. Passing it she glanced the splashing of blood and vermin and a mass of decomposed brain tissue and frontal lobe and all other things few could ever name. She saw the biting marks on the bones, the leftover flesh not devoured and the marks of tongues that had tried to lick up the blood and gore surrounding the cadaver. What a way to go.
Carefully, not infecting her shoes, she passed the cadaver and entered the hallway of the first floor. It opened to divulge many rooms, all shimmering from their tired, ravaged and shattered windows.
All eyes.
In each room there were many cots. Many cots bore a body—the remains of it—or the signs that it once had. All the bodies were disembowelled and disfigured like a half-eaten buffet. Some were old, some young. Some were women, some men. All helpless when the year of zero came.
She could easily see that they had been here. Everything was out of order, everything cluttered and chaotic. Then not even thinking about the half-eaten buffet.
Then, somewhere off in the distance she could hear the soft voices of mastication and munching. She moved deeper down the hall, sliding between the cots and the rest the mass grave contained.
Two of them sat above a body—just a little girl—and chewed loudly as they ripped the dead and cold flesh of her bones. One of them most have heard her footsteps since he looked up, still chewing, and saw Quinn. The being had once been a man. Still humanoid in shape, its skin was as pale as milk and a tiny stream of blood was running down from its eyes. Like weeping, she thought. On the left side of its neck it had a black and festering wound—like the bite of a wolfhound—and blackish and swollen lymph nodes had spread from the wound and covered half the beings face and shoulder. The other half was covered in darkish blood and the tendons of the little girl was hanging down its chin.
It stood up, slow and gurgling and hissing, still chewing the slice of the little girl. Before it could do its move, Quinn stepped forward and drew her knife—long and sharp and shiny—and impaled it between its eyes. The dead die fast that way.
Dropping the dead cadaver (now at least) to the floor, Quinn moved towards the second. Before Quinn's knife did its blow the dead man turned half around, still sucking on the girls arm. Its teeth never left her flesh.
Quinn moved deeper into the different rooms, sliding between the cots, turning the shelves and desks. She scavenged several cans of beans, and just dropped all the pills and pharmaceuticals she found into her knapsack, never caring to read their names. In one room, next to the corpse of an old man, she found a bottle of Jack Daniels Scotch, good year too. Quinn had few pleasures left, but thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treaded out the corn.
Pulling books from the shelves she found the Good Book. The front decorated in black leather with a golden cross cutting the cover, pages crumbling by moisture and pus. She turned the pages and read, "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered."
She stopped and dropped the book when she stumbled upon the maternity ward.
The feelings hit her like a fist. Feelings, almost like a vestigial in this world. Her voice and mood fell dead, the tears streaming. Oh my God, she thought. Oh my God. She couldn't handle it, couldn't let the wounds open again.
She headed quickly down the stairs, running. She didn't stop until she was outside, breathing gulps of fresh air, barely managing to ingest the oxygen. She couldn't stay here no more. Not in this city. This city belonged to the past, not to the present. The dead, not her, not the living.
She walked down the road and saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world; the cold relentless circling of an intestate earth. Borrowed time and a borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
In the evening she tramped out across a field trying to find a place where her fire wouldn't be seen and where she could rest in peace. The walk was slow on the ground. Night overtook her on a muddy road. She crossed into a field and plodded towards a distant house skylighted stark and cold against the last of the human world. By the time she got there it was dark of night and her bones were aching and shrieking.
The house was empty, bathed in solitude. She found a blanket in a bedroom and slept in the first floor of the house, in a chair facing the door. Monsters move at night, someone had once told her. You got one shot. Yet who are the monsters, and who was she? She felt like she had always felt, simply bewildered, like a woman lost in a dream, in a landscape of meaningless signs; if the world had some meaning for her she didn't understand.
Long in the night she heard a sound. The rain was hard and falling. She had fallen asleep in the chair. She realised as she slept that she heard footsteps on the drive towards the house. In her dream—a nightmare—this sound had become the roar of the fires, burning before her; she had been running through the land, the fires and smoke hissing all around her, and she had lost everything.
Heavy, stumbling, the footsteps landed on the porch. Quinn woke and rose quickly with the Springfield rifle in hand, all senses alert. She racked the slide and realised the safety.
A male stepped through the doorway. He was brown of hair, coated in a green parka and with shinning but tired glasz eyes. A freeze went through the male as he saw the dark figure of Quinn targeting him.
"Keep back," Quinn warned. "Let me see your hands."
The male lifted his arms, slow and weakly. "I'm not armed," he said. A bright ribbon of blood poured down his parka. The wound was on his shoulder.
"Please, help," the male pleaded.
Quinn stepped forward and raised her rifle. "Turn around."
"Jesus," he moaned.
"Turn around," she said, harshly.
But the male took two steps forward and sank to his knees and tipped his face forward. "Please—" He stopped. "Wait a second. Don't I know you, mademoiselle?"
"I'm sorry," Quinn said.
"Please, wait!" He opened his eyes wide; held out his hands. "No. No, don't!"
"I'm sorry," she repeated, and then she squeezed the trigger.
Quinn stood in the dark of the night, sweltering. Bloodstain on her chest like a map of violent new continents. She felt cleansed. She felt a dark planet turn under her feet as she knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night. She looked at the sky through smoke heavy with human sins and God was not there. The faith dwindling away. The cold, suffocating dark went on forever and she was alone.
Live our lives, lacking anything better to do, Quinn thought. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what souls imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what they choose to impose. The rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. "It's us," she whispered, "only us."
Long ago, growing up in a place long forgotten—long dead and gone—Quinn had decided that there was no good or evil, only different ways of thinking. Now however—after the plague and the rise of the dead and the failures of mankind—she believed in evil once again. And among the herd of evil was she.
She began to sing:
"What have I done?
Sweet Jesus, what have I done?
Become a butcher in the night
Become a dog on the run
And have I fallen so far
And is the hour so late
That nothing remains but the cry of my hate,
The cries in the dark that nobody hears
Here where I stand at the turning of the years?
If there's another way to go
I missed it many long months ago
My life was a war that could never be won
It gave me a number and murdered Fabray
When it chained me and left me for dead…"
What have I become? she thought, glancing towards the blood draping the walls, sheading water for what she had done. Crying, sobbing, sniffling. Old wounds reopened. Guilt, hopelessness, void, and she was alone with the walking dead in a world of carnage, filth and squalor. What have I done?
She lay listening to the water drip in the woods. The dark and the silence. The remnants of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. All those small fragments of the past revealing themselves only to disappear again, like a puzzle lost in the wind. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. If only her heart were stone.
In the first weeks the land was peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing, clinging to their God, to their faith, to their hope. The fittest tottering down the road, while the weak—the women and the children and the babes at the breast—were unheeded. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. No matter the strength, mankind could not adapt to this. Thus many finally lost faith and turned to creedless shells preforming bestial acts. Starvation solved by eating the dead. Cannibalism, necrophilia, and Darwin's evolutionary theory reversed and the human race mutated back to the animals they once were.
When understanding that, many had stopped clinging to their lives, many had stopped trying to run away from the necessity. They had seen their final act done, lived by their own terms. If they dared, why didn't she?
"Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I am tired and I
I want to go to bed
Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
And then leave me alone
Don't try to wake me in the morning
'Cause I will be gone
Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go…"
Quinn went silent and glanced over at the red pool from the chair in which she was sitting. Soon now, she thought. Soon.
Holding the rifle tight in her hands she cursed her own lack of valour. What was she waiting for? What more could this world bring her if not more scare and agony? Society had finally moved away from its creators, they staggering after it, but never managing to reach it once again.
Acceptance.
The dead man moved—just a mere hint of a movement, but still the beginning of the end of the beginning.
Quinn lifted for her rifle, checked the chamber. One bullet left.
The dead man moved yet again. Quinn saw in the dark that it opened its eyes, now transformed into blackish and dead holes with nothing left of its former I. She had once known that man… but not anymore. Gone, he was.
The rifle felt heavy in her arms. One more body amongst the foundations makes little difference, she thought. She wondered what she was waiting for. Do it, she thought. DO IT.
"Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore…"
The dead man found his feet and raised himself from the pool of blood, staggering, seeing her… gurgling and hissing. The blackish wound of her shot in his chest. Slow and limping—like dragging his entire dead body after his one yearning—the dead man moved towards her.
Once, when she was but a girl in the flush of her youth, a young boy had given her a red flower as a token of his love. He was a rare and precious boy, and she loved him of all her heart. But he did not linger in her arms forever. He was gone now, and only the vague memory of the red flower remained. Bad things, horrible things, gloomy thing, heart-breaking things. Mankind's not to be trusted and she had learned that all too well.
As the dead man was just a yard away from her, she placed the rifle in her mouth and welcomed death. The bite of steel was red and cold.
Ancient pharaohs looked forward to the end of the world. Hoping the cadavers would rise, and reclaim hearts from golden jars. Must currently be holding breath in anticipation.