It was a beautiful day, the day I died. Not a cloud in the sky, birds chirping, flowers blooming, a hayfield so overgrown it seemed to touch the sky.
Adam and I had been holed up in an old storm shelter for about a month. My Grandfather had built it back in the seventies as a bomb shelter when he was up in arms about the Communist conspires. My father had transformed it into a storm shelter in the nineties when I was a kid. It was equipped with a functioning well and plumbing, was fully solar powered and had enough food to last a month, my father always made sure of that. When I was a teenager, Adam and I used to sneak out there to fool around, and later after we were married, we snuck out there during holidays and family reunions just to get some peace and quiet. The day the outbreak happened in our area, this is exactly what we had been doing.
Aunt Addie had been in the kitchen gossiping to my cousin Emma about Uncle David's prostate surgery. The kids were squealing and running circles around the living room. And Mom was trying to cook while my Grandmother was taking the spoon away trying to tell her how to do it. There was such a ruckus in the house that day so no one noticed when Adam and I took a box of wine, disappearing into the shelter.
We had lost track of time, and when the box was empty, Adam looked at me and asked, "What time is it?"
"Six," I told him as I checked my phone. I laughed realizing how long we had been there "We've been out here for five hours! I wonder if they even noticed."
Adam laughed as well, standing up. "We'll just have to find out." He extended his hand, helping me to my feet.
. We exited the shelter still; carrying on about the lost time. At the same time my Uncle David came out of the house in a panic, walking with a strange limp. Afraid he had torn some of the stitches from his surgery, I ran toward him. "Uncle David? What's wrong?"
"She bit me" He stammered out, breathless. "Everyone. It's a… " He stopped abruptly, and his eyes rolled up in his head.
As he slumped over limp, I tried to catch him, shaking him as I laid him down. "Who bit you? What about everyone else? Dave, what's happening? Shit!" I turned to Adam, who was watching the whole thing in shock. "Shit Adam, you just going to stand there?" I grabbed a hold of his arm and ran inside to check on the others.
Walking into the house was like a scene out of a horror movie. It was a massacre, blood everywhere, broken furniture, bodies lying all over the floor. I started counting as my eyes filled with tears at the sight of my family. "Adam" I whispered. "There's two missing. Maybe they're still alive."
We started searching the house. I found my eight year old niece sitting over my mother's dead body, in the back corner of the master bedroom. Her little blonde pigtails splattered with blood, she was sitting straight up, and it looked as if she were trying to wake my mother up. "Gracie" I called out to her. Her head snapped to attention at the sound of my voice. Slowly but jerky, she turned her head to look towards the noise. I gasped seeing her face. It was covered in blood. Pieces of flesh were hanging from her mouth and there was a large gaping hole in the front of her neck.
"I-Is she -eating- your mom?" Adam asked in all seriousness.
Grace or what used to be Grace came charging us, mouth agape, eyes vacant, and appeared to be looking to us for another meal. I grabbed a hold of Adam's shirt and started running out of the room, peeling him away from the tragedy, shutting and locking the door behind us. As we approached the living room again, I heard sounds, like moaning. "Shh, you hear that?" I asked Adam.
"Yeah," he answered, "Sounds like someone may still be alive. Come on."
We followed the noise to find the bodies still where we left them. Most of them. There was a trail of blood leading into the kitchen, we followed it slowly. I could almost swear I saw some of those bodies twitching as we walked passed them, but I chalked it up to my imagination and kept walking. We entered the kitchen to see my cousin Emma, badly injured, her body jarring unnaturally with each step. "Emma!" I walked towards her to help. She turned hard towards me. With a vicious snarl she lunged at me. I screamed. She kept attacking us. Adam grabbed a knife out of the butcher block. He stabbed her in the chest. She kept coming. It was like she felt no pain, the knife sticking in her chest where her heart should be had no effect whatsoever.
"The fuck?" he said seeing how much good stabbing her did. Turning around to reach for another knife, he saw them. "Baby, we gotta go, now!" He pointed at the living room where all the bodies of my family had suddenly reanimated, and were heading our way. We made a run for the storm shelter. Maybe if we could make it there we could survive and wait this thing out.