Chapter II

Glenn stood there transfixed by what he had seen, still shuddering in disbelief. Did he just see that man eat that woman? And after taking no less than three shots to the chest at that! Even more incredulous was seeing the woman who had throat and large portions of her chest devoured stand back up. She should have been dead; she should have stayed dead! The impossible had just come into being. Unlike the man who could have still been alive after those gunshots, however improbable, Glenn watched this woman die. She was dead, dead as a doornail yet defying all logical explanation she was up, walking towards him with a clear sense of direction behind it. She was a bit slow and clumsy, often stumbling behind the one that had eaten a good sixth of her flesh. The man was still going strong as he sluggishly advanced upon Glenn; the blood loss seemed to not impede him in the least. The man, or monster that he had become had come half the distance between the woman he fed upon and Glenn by the time Glenn finally came to his senses and reacted in order to save himself from the same fate. He got into the car and fired up the engine. As he turned the key he kept a watch on the slothful cannibalistic man and its former victim, now accomplice came lumbering towards his vehicle out of the corner of his eye. He sped away leaving him or it in his wake. Glancing briefly in his rear view mirror he saw the pair turn and attack a carefree jogger coming through the neighborhood. The quick glance turned into a stare. Glenn watched the horror unfold before his eyes. This wasn't the most well to do part of Atlanta, it had its problems with gangbangers and thugs but no one here expected their neighbors whom they knew and trusted to turn around and start eating them. Glenn couldn't look away as the pair of living dead people gnawed the meat off the bones of the jogger while she was still alive, screaming in agony the whole time until the blood loss reached a point where her consciousness escaped her. Was this really happening? What was he seeing here? Did someone lace his lunch with shrooms or something? This all was just too crazy to be real.

He looked back ahead for a split second and before he looked back to the carnage in his rear view he saw an old man staggering about in front of him, without a clear sense of purpose or direction. "Oh my god." Glenn shouted as he swerved to avoid the man and sped on around him. The man moved just like the other two deceased did and didn't seem to care that he had almost been struck by a car. Instead he started chasing the car with no hope of ever catching up to Glenn. Glenn then turned a corner to get away from the slow moving man munchers behind him and drove a few more blocks down until he was forced to slam on his brakes when a bright red SUV ran a stop sign and crashed into the back of a parked car. Glenn covered his mouth in shock of what he had just seen. Were they watching the dead walk in their rear view mirrors too? Glenn crept up into the intersection but didn't see anything, human or vehicle coming down the street. They weren't being chased but maybe they had seen what he had seen, that's enough to freak anyone out bad enough to take their mind off the road Glenn presumed. Feeling confident enough that there were no cannibals close enough to get him Glenn crossed the intersection and parked along the side of the road. He couldn't just leave those people here. He might have seen some freaky shit today but it wasn't going to stop him from being a good person and coming to the aid of people who needed help. Glenn pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911 while keeping his eyes on the car that had wrecked behind him. The SUV had hit the parked car pretty hard, going at least 50 mph which left the front end of the vehicle completely crumpled up and mangled together with the back end of the car it had smashed. Thin wafting strips of smoke rose from under the cracked and folded hood. The front windshield was cracked through and through and was about ready to shatter with the touch of a feather. The driver's side window had a radial fracture expanding outward with a few droplets of red at its center, presumably where the driver had smacked her head against it during the crash. Through the cracked glass Glenn could not see the occupant so he was unsure if he or she was ok.

Meanwhile Glenn's phone continued to ring and ring and ring. Presuming it might have been a bad connection Glenn hung up and tried his call again. This time he got a busy signal. "A busy signal? This is 9 1 fucking 1!" Glenn griped in his thoughts. He hung up and tried again, this time opening the door and stepping out to go check on the wrecked vehicle's occupant or occupants. Another busy signal, so Glenn kept trying as he slowly approached the SUV. By this time several of the neighbors had come outside to see what had happened. A woman with her two children, a young man in dreadlocks and a striped shirt and an old man with a cane in one hand and a piece of chicken in the other. As Glenn got closer to the car he could make out movement inside. The driver in the front seat and the passenger, both visible only as a shadowy shape through the tinted, badly cracked glass were mobile. The driver seemed to be thrashing about in some kind of a stupor while the passenger was crawling over the front seat and reaching towards a third figure in the back seat, a child. The child, who couldn't have been more that 8 or 9 years old was screaming and kicking at the passenger whom Glenn now clearly recognized as a man. The man fell over into the back seat where the child continued to kick and writhe about. Glenn could see the back door shaking but unable to open, the side effect of child locks being set to on by default. He could also see the driver's side door wiggle a little as the driver attempted to jimmy open the door which was slightly stuck due to one of the front corner panels being pushed back over it. Glenn froze as he looked into the back seat and saw a spray of bright red paint the inside of the rear windows just after the passenger had climbed up upon the child. Glenn started to back away and hung up his phone for the last time; he wasn't going to help these people, no one was. When the front door cracked open he saw the driver lean her head out, missing a chunk of her skin from where she had struck her head against the glass. Seeing blood and a tiny exposed bit of skull from beneath the wound freaked Glenn out so he bolted and ran back to his car.

This time he didn't stop for anyone or anything and quickly made his way out of that neighborhood and onto a major thoroughfare leading towards the 285 loop. He had already encountered three distinct incidents of the reanimated recently deceased or ill, he couldn't say for sure, cannibalizing the healthy and living. Something serious was going on here. To what extent this problem had gotten he could not say but certainly that whole neighborhood was affected. Glenn prayed that this was just an isolated incident and could be contained. Maybe that was what was tying up the lines when he tried to call 911. Hopefully the authorities were aware of this and were working on doing something about it. Had Glenn been one to pay attention to the news he would have known that similar small scale incidents such as this one had occurred in remote places for years now and stories on the crank pages of the internet would have claimed they were going on much longer than that. He might have heard one or two of these reports while in the car delivering pizzas in between swapping out CDs or hooking up his iPod to his piece of crap stereo system. The reporting had always been toned down stating the occurrence as "an outbreak of an unidentified and deadly disease." rather than saying the obvious "the dead came back to life and feasted on the living." A bit of journalistic responsibility perhaps; one could only imagine the panic that would have been incited had the latter phrase been the one chosen. Nonetheless these occurrences were nothing new, England 1981, Rwanda 1989, Cameroon 1996, Thailand 1998, Cambodia 1999, Bolivia 2002, Both of the Congos, Liberia and Botswana 2006, Mexico, Belarus, Uganda, the Sudan, India, Greece, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Poland, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe and South Africa all had incidents last year in 2009. In the early months of the current year there were claimed to be such occurrences in inland California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Each time it had been a few select individuals or at worst a small isolated community that had been affected and each time the area was successfully quarantined and decontaminated. By decontaminated of course meant the victims were quartered off and left to die, or aided in their demise by the health officials or in some cases military members who enforced the quarantine. Up until now such an outbreak had never occurred in a heavily populated area and whatever contingency plan existed for such an occurrence had never been tested. For a plague with close to 30 years of documented cases it had claimed no more than 200 lives, now in the span of a single day in Atlanta alone it was poised to double that number if not more.

Now Glenn wasn't really aware of those things though he might have overheard them at times. For him this was the first time anything like this had ever happened. He couldn't really be blamed for his ignorance; it wasn't really until these incidents began on American soil that the news media really even bothered to report on them so even for the well informed this problem was perhaps a year or two old at most. Honestly Glenn didn't care where it came from or what it had done in the past, all he cared about was that it would be taken care of now and everything would get back to normal as soon as possible. He did not want to see any more of a freak show today.

There was some assurance when Glenn got back onto the 285 and back into traffic. It was normal traffic, not zombie traffic. People were just driving, albeit slowly, but no one was getting out and eating the other drivers. That part felt good; perhaps the night of the living dead stuff was just confined to that little borough he had been in. If so it would be best that Glenn put as much distance between that neighborhood and himself as he could as quickly as possible. As for where to go his first instinct was to head back to work. If he got any more orders from this part of town he simply was not going to take them. His boss could bitch and complain all he wanted to but Glenn was not going back. Why the fuck would these people send out for pizza when they clearly were eating in on themselves.

Glenn tried to get his mind off what he had seen by playing some tunes. The radio was still playing the same music as always. "Could you people be bothered to update your playlist once every ten years?" Glenn complained.

The same music as always, no emergency alert message, not even a news bulletin. That could be a good sign Glenn supposed. That put further credence into Glenn's earlier optimistic outlook on the situation. Perhaps this was just a couple of isolated incidents, if it was something more certainly there would be more made of it over the air, or anything made of it at all. Glenn assured himself that whatever it was he saw was the end of it and it would be taken care of soon enough and be little more than a blip on the evening news and a persistent meme on the crank pages. I spite of his self-assurances he remained freaked out, something inside told him this was far from over.

His fears were realized when he walked back into work and found one of his coworkers eating the contents of his boss' chest and guts on top of a perfectly good pizza. There were plenty of times Glenn had fantasized about killing his boss but when it had actually happened it was horrifying. There was also something else afoul in the pizzeria that Glenn wasn't so keen to notice, a customer lying dead at his feet just inside the door with a fork shoved through his left eye all the way in where the handle was barely noticeable. The man was dead dead, like he wasn't getting back up. "Guess it's a good thing the owner sprung for real silverware for the dine in customers." Glenn thought to himself. He then ran back to his car before his coworker decided he was sick of Italian food and wanted to try a Korean dish. Glenn sped away running over a zombified teenager in the process. With two broken legs and a crushed rib cage the teen was still alive, lying on the ground reaching up for the next foolish passer-by to chew on.

"Work was a no go, how about home?" Glenn asked himself. After a short drive up I-85 Glenn took his exit and made his way towards home. Home was a modest red brick apartment complex surrounded by trees and crawling with ivy. It wasn't fancy but it wasn't ghetto either. This was mainly a community of retired persons and college kids all crammed together with the occasional lost in life person in their mid to late 20s like Glenn thrown in there for good measure. Glenn pulled up to his apartment complex, things seemed normal for the most part. People weren't trying to eat each other. There were even people having a BBQ, eating meat that well, humans were intended to eat. All a good sign. While parking he heard the warning he heard earlier from the CDC come over the radio again, only this time he paid attention to it. ". . .Repeat all Atlanta residents are urged to remain in their homes until further notice." the message reiterated.

"I know, I know. I'm getting into my home." Glenn told the radio as he set the parking brake.

He then grabbed the pizza and took it inside with him. He locked, dead bolted and chained his front door behind him and set the pizza down on his kitchen table which was covered with empty containers of takeout food, beer bottles and magazines. Glenn then turned on the TV. Normal shows were still broadcasting; they were showing a rerun of Rick and Morty at the present time. Glenn flipped over to one of the 24 hour news networks to see if anything was being said about the outbreak. Of course not! Why report on people eating each other when someone he never heard of might have said a slightly insensitive phrase during an acceptance speech for some film award he had never heard of either. "The petty bullshit people obsess over!" Glenn complained. This is why he never paid attention to current events, nothing important was ever said. Glenn went into the kitchen and dug around in the fridge. Being the typical 20-something college dropout slacker the fridge was rather bare. Glenn's diet consisted mainly of things that could be ordered "to go." A couple of microwave chimichangas, a snickers, a half-eaten carton of shrimp lo mein, an orange and some diet Pepsi; yeah, he was really stocked up for a zombie apocalypse.

"Hey dumbass! Wait a second! I just brought in a pizza!" Glenn exclaimed as stopped himself from taking out one of the chimichangas to heat up.

If the people that ordered it weren't around to eat it there was no sense letting it go to waste; this could be Glenn's lunch, and dinner and probably his breakfast too. When Glenn opened the pizza box and removed the first slice a cacophony of car horns followed by the siren of a fire engine were heard outside.

"What now?" Glenn thought.

He had a sinking feeling today was just going to keep getting worse and worse. He didn't know the half of it.

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Author's Note:The mention of England as the earliest known incidence of a modern zombie outbreak was a reference to my crossover series "Walker Zero" although that is set in an entirely different continuity than this is. So if it seems out of place that is just me doing a meta-joke on myself. This one will probably have a few clues dropped here and there concerning it's own speculative origin story for the outbreak via ancillary characters and events since it takes place closest to the start of the global outbreak. Also I haven't forgotten about Michonne's backstory for these prequels. I will be doing that next and I also have another partially written chapter for Daryl's leg of the journey. Bear with me I tend to have difficulty getting something off the ground so updates are likely to be sluggish until I am past the opening act but I am making progress towards them.