Fall of Argos
This is the second fanfic I've made for World War Z. Like Caiman Pantano, Argos, New York is fictitious.
Honolulu, Hawaii
(During the Great Panic Argos, New York was devastated by the zombies. I am sitting next to Samantha Roberts, one of the few survivors of what is called the Battle for Argos, on her cabin cruiser in Honolulu. She would be pretty, but is covered in many wounds, even including an amputated arm)
They call it the "Battle of Argos", but there was no battle. It was just a huge slaughter. 50,000 people under attack by nine million zombies from the Big Apple.
I normally don't say where to begin, but could you tell the events?
(she looks down at the water)
Yeah, okay. Back when it was still African rabies, I didn't pay much attention. I had other worries: keeping my job at Wal-Mart, avoiding gangs (1), and attempting to get my GED.
1 – Argos was, before the War, filled with gangs, drugs, and other criminal activity.
You
didn't finish high school?
This is Argos we're talking about, man. 95% of all students, I've read, don't... didn't... graduate from high school. At least I wasn't pregnant.
I know, I'm just unused to meeting somebody like...
Hey, I may not be smart but when I made it to the Safe Zone I wasn't some useless F6! Anyways, I ignored the African rabies. After all, Phalanx was out and they said "African", not American.
When did the zombies come?
July 21st, 2015: the day is imprinted in my mind. I had been sleeping but woke up to gunshots. I thought, "there's just a gang out there", took out my taser gun, and got dressed. Suddenly Zack came bursting into my apartment building, seven G's from New York City. There were screams and shrieks, and lots of gunfire from my neighbors. I was on the first floor, so I ran up to the second floor, closed the door, and I, with the help of the tenants, barricaded it with furniture. All of our weapons were just tasers and kitchen knives, but we waited behind, ready, and called the police. By then they had already been defeated: half the police were back in the stations, and the other half had been, I hear, fighting a gang in some huge street battle and Zack ambushed them.
But electricity doesn't work on zombies.
(she snorts)
Like we knew that. Remember, I had no warning about the army of zombies. I did realize that if it was called "rabies", I realized the connection, though, that the disease must spread by bites. When the ghouls came swarming through, I shot one in the chest. Nothing! He didn't fall, and I ran for it. I ran to a window overlooking the street, and there was a window washer's dumbwaiter thingy (2) hanging outside.
2 - It is just a window-washing platform.
There was a dead washer on it: he reanimated and grabbed me. He got hold of my T-shirt and pulled me in, but I punched him in the head long enough to delay him biting me. I kicked him in the balls, but of course it had no effect. One of my neighbors, a cop, ran up to him and stabbed him through the eye into his brain. He fell, but I didn't know what was happening. I thanked him and just jumped on the dumbwaiter thingy. I lowered myself down, and made sure to not get grabbed by some G lurking behind me. I ran along the road, which was crawling with both innocents and gangsters fighting it out with the zombies. I hopped in some cop's abandoned car, and tried to get to a pawn shop as soon as possible, but I saw that the zombies weren't being killed even by gunshot wounds. I decided to head for the police station. Lucky for me, the road was blocked by a horrible crash and I was forced to get out of the car and continue on foot in till I could find shelter. I ended up at a casino owned by the Slot Gang (3). Zack wasn't there yet, and the gang did know about the plague, so I went with them.
3 - The Slot Gang was one of Argos's largest gangs, so-named because they owned 60% of the casinos in the city.
You joined a gang?
(she rolls her eyes)
Safest place in the entire city. The police were incompetent, probably already dead, and the Slot Gang knew what they were doing when they fortified the casino. I just had to help, and not even with the combat. I stayed there for four days, in till another gang, the Sag Gang, (4) attacked us. There were about seventy Slots against 100 Sags.
4 – Sag stands for South Argos Gangstas
The Sags just threw one grenade, and actual frag grenade, and it blew open the main doors. They came charging in, firing their rifles and handguns. Nearly all of us were killed in the shootout. The Sags were known for killing people without even having a reason and.... I just got out of there as fast as possible. One slashed me on the arm with a machete, but I found a first aid kit in a house and patched myself up.
(she pushes up her shirt sleeve, showing a large scar)
I wandered the streets, scrounging for food like some homeless guy, in till I ran into a group of my friends. They had rifles, machetes, and Molotovs, but they still hadn't learned how to kill G's. I joined them, and we planned to go attack a warehouse that we could use as a fortress. We... so many deaths...
(she sobs for a few seconds)
What happened?
There were eight of us. David, Paul, Mark, Mary, Barbara, Emma, Chelsea, and myself. We just walked in and started firing as possible. I had a brother, he joined the army, who was a veteran of the Road to New York. He told me about "Out G'ing the G". We did not do that. There were seventy zombies, seventy of them! We got a few of them with headshots, but we were a bunch of idiots and didn't realize it! Of course, we were already panicked. They pulled Emma and David away from us. Emma was torn apart, completely eaten, and David was bitten and trampled by the hoard. Chelsea and Barbara started to get too close to the zombies, but Paul, the idiot, threw a Molotov and killed them, just setting the zombies that were hit on fire! They could have made it!
(by now Samantha is roaring, and she is crying at the same time)
Paul realized that he had killed them, and shot himself with his own rifle! Mark and Mary ran for it, and I tried to follow them. As I dashed out, some G grabbed my loose shirt and pulled me in the second time that day. I escaped with a couple of permanent scratches.
(she points to two scratches on the same arm that she has shown me, and a third on her neck)
I tucked it in, but even then a G could grab it so I took it off. We all went to an old pizzeria. The food there had always sucked, so we figured that there wouldn't be many people and therefore not many zombies. For once we were correct, and stayed there for a while. Then Mary began crying, and showed us a bite mark we hadn't noticed on her hand. We waited in till she went into the coma that comes right before you die, and then decapitated her. We didn't know about the brain, still, but did know that her head would be the only threat then. We piled it under rubble. Mark and I tried to stay out of the zombie's way, but we ran out of supplies and were driven back to downtown.
Was it overrun?
It was total chaos. You know those stories of how Kobura looked when it was being attacked by Zack? That's what Argos looked like. People jumping out of windows, fires everywhere, and fighting all over. Mark told me to stand guard while he raided an apartment for food. I noticed that, at one moment, seventeen zombies were shot. Only one was a headshot, and that one died. It was like a sign from heaven: the way to kill the already dead. I told Mark about my discovery and we started, trying, anyways, to use headshots. We joined up with another group that found this out. They were civilians from northern Argos trying to fight their way through the city. We knew how to kill zombies now, but we just couldn't defend ourselves. We were bad shots when trying to get a head, and there were so many G's all over the place. Our group had 36. By the time we made it seven blocks south, the direction that let out of the city, we had eight left. I got these.
(she points to all of the scars on her face, pulls up the other sleeve, showing a completely scarred up arm, and lifts her shirt to where I can see bullet marks and scratches)
Four of them walked ahead, careful, and got blown up by explosives some idiot had seeded the road with. The two people from the group decided to go their own way.
(she smiles, with a fond look on her face)
At least Mark made it.
Were you and Mark....
If you're asking if we interested in each over romantically, I never paid much attention to him but the zombies were driving me closer to him. Maybe one of this apocalypse disease-things, like ADS. Mark made it through our entire exodus to the west with me.
What happened when you reached the city limits?
Argos was in a forested area, near the Canadian border. Imagine Argos, but without the fires and instead of buildings you have trees. Mark and I found a cabin cruiser sailing on Lake Erie. The crew let us onboard, and we were ferried across to Canuck-land. The next winter we spent shivering up in tents in some refugee camp. The boat's crew told us, "Everybody is going North." They should have just stayed quiet. When next winter came around we trudged through the snow back to the Great Lakes, then walked across them into the States.
Where did you go afterwards?
Our choices were to the Safe Zone, Canada again, which was out of the option, find a town that didn't have any zombies and build a fortress there, or join one of the Isolated Groups, since the Redeker Plan had finally been adopted. We marched all the way through the snowline down to Kansas. I was pregnant, so we stopped there.
Pregnant?
With Mark's son, Andy. He returned my affections while we were in Canada.
How long did you stay in Kansas?
Five years, in till we snuck by the zombies and shot straight to the Safe Zone.I wish we had stayed in Kansas: it was an easier life just sitting in a fortress compared to working fields and plumbing and all the other grunt work. In case you're wondering, Mark and I married while in Kansas.
(a zombie climbs up onto the boat. Samantha sticks a rifle to its head and pulls the trigger, killing it)
Anything else?
You can stop when you feel like it.
I think I'll rest for a while. Maybe you can hear about my experience in the Safe Zone later.
(Argos was a terrible loss. While many cities share similar fates, Argos has become famous for how unprepared the population was caught and how much destruction was brought upon it: although Mrs. Roberts did not mention this most of Argos was leveled by the fires and weakened structures, and only 341 people made it out alive. Most of them died in the forests or the refugee camps in Canada.)
