Chapter 1. Brave New World
Rachel gasped as she was greeted with the sight of a sterile white ceiling above her. Her head was pounding, like a swinging mallet hitting a gong. Her mouth felt dry, like sand in the desert. She had that crusty feeling around her eyes like she had taken a long nap. Rachel tore out the oxygen tub and looked over, her IV was dry with no saline in the bag or any type of fluid had been there. It looked like it had been dry for a long time. She tried pressing the emergency button for desk help but it did nothing. The rest of the monitors she hooked up to are off.
Disoriented and confused she stumbled out of bed, "Nur-" she tried. Clearing her throat and tossing off the blankets she called out "Nurse!" With no answer. The flowers on her bedside looked as if they'd been dead for a long time, the bed sheets seemed stale and old. Rachel sat up and grabbed the IV pole next to her for balance before trying to stand. Once she puts her weight on her legs, legs that feel shaky and weird-they give out.
Immediately, an eerie feeling took her. A cross between a hunted instinct and a deja vu feeling. The whole building smells wrong, the very air is a crackling stale feeling. Nothing like the sterile cleaner one would associate with a medical facility.
Rachel stumbled over to the bathroom and gulped some water down from the bathroom sink. She leans against the mirror in shock- she looks different. Haggard even. She's thinner than she's ever remember being. To an unhealthy point, she can see how her collar bone pops out like a sickening skeleton, as she peeks down her hospital robes she can count her ribs. Her face looks unwashed, her hair full of split and fraying ends. Splashing more water on her face and hair she felt a little better, the last of the lingering sleep fog lifting from her life. She takes a closer look at the bandages wrapped around her torso, they are old faded, and smell faintly of dried blood and sweat. These need to be changed, they smell infected, she thought before venturing out in the hallway.
Pushing an old hospital bed aside she took in the flickering lights, the wrecked equipment, the papers that littered the hallway. It was a complete war zone. There were even some bullet holes and questionable stains that lined the walls. Rachel starts to make her way down the hallway in a dazed sort of confusion, the sinking feeling in her gut grew larger.
"Hello?" She called out, "Is anyone there?"
A cold chill creeped down her spine. "Anybody?" she called.
She peered into a neighboring hallway and saw nothing but more flickering lights and an abandoned scene that greeted her. A shadowed corpse lay prone on the ground, "What happened here?" she whispered completely horrified. The woman, or what was left of a woman's brain decorated the walls, as if it had been shot clean through. From the stench that wafted into her nose, Rachel figured she must've been here for a long time.
This scene seems familiar. Was a stray thought. Like a scene out of a horror movie.
Being a cop, she was not that excited over a dead body. She had seen them before, while it was rare, she had dealt with two murders over the time she was in law enforcement. Plus she had also seen other bodies of people in various stages of decomposition. So what unnerved her on this scene wasn't the smell of death but rather the scene of abandonment. That a body was dumped here, in the middle of what seemed like an abandoned hospital seemed unreal.
Down at the end of the hallway, two doors were barricaded, "DON'T OPEN, DEAD INSIDE" it read. The deja vu feeling she had green greater. She remembered faintly, from a different life, of something similar she had seen on a show she had watched. The picture was almost clandestine in how it modeled the memory.
Walking with the dead. No, that's not it, it was the "-Walking Dead" she murmured aloud.
A prop style? Was her next thought. But that was also dismissed. If it was a prop then it wouldn't smell THAT awful. No, that was actually decomposing tissue. It would be a pretty awful prank too.
"Uungh" a groan came from behind it, "Hello?" Rachel called hopefully, "Is anybody there?
"Ungghhhhh!" The groaning became more urgent, clawing decayed hands escaped from the cracks of the door like a doomsday warning.
Rachel turns to her left and pushed the exit door open, stumbling down the stairwell to the ground floor using the walls as support. Sheet wrapped bodies was the sight that greeted her. Dozens of decaying bodies wrapped in bloody sheets.
Influenza. She thought a little hysterically. Not zombies. Zombies don't exist. She thought again, because the Walking Dead doesn't exist in real life. Because that would be crazy. Her only thought is of Carl, of her sister Lori. The last two members of her family she can count.
She finds an abandoned bike and pedals home with her hospital gown flapping in the wind. Rachel makes it home with little memory of the journey, besides the worrying thought of her son and sister. She might have seen a half crawling animal - noit'snotaperson- notazombie - zombie's aren't real! Rachel makes it home and pulls the bike right up to the porch. She practically jumps of the stairs in her haste and enters the house- notright-it'snotlocked. Immediately she notices that pictures are all missing from their frames. "Lori!" She calls out, "Carl?"
Walking into her son's room, she notices clothes are thrown everywhere, a suitcase is half open on the bed with pant legs poking out of it. Hasty packing left uncompleted. It's obvious now the house is abandoned.
Calm down. Rachel felt her situational training kick in. They're alive, because who else would take the photos from their frames? Where else would all the photo albums go?
But where would they go? She opened the cupboards, most of the food was cleaned out. All the cans, the flour, even the dried garbanzo beans she had bought years ago but never used were gone.
With some digging she found a can of green peas and suddenly Rachel felt her hunger come back with a roaring vengeance. She cracked open the can and practically inhaled the contents of mushy peas. Rachel gets to her feet and makes her way outside, sitting on the front steps to her house. Looking out into her abandoned neighborhood she spots a man walking down the middle of the seat with a black suit on, the man spots her and starts limping towards her. She lifted her hand in a wave, not sure what she is doing, but it's the first sign of life she's seen. The a gun shot cracks out and the man's head explodes in viceral misma of blood and gore. She blinks in shot as she half crouches and looks for the source of the sound.
A snap cracks behind her -and as she twists around she sees -Carl?- before the swing of the shovel catches the back of her head and it all fades to black.
-.-.-
Rachel woke up to a bed, her hands above her head and a man leaning over her. Panic grips her heart because why else would her hands be tied behind her head? But a small boy stands in the shadow of the man, a baseball bat in hand as he shifts nervously from foot to foot. The man gives her a sharp look while he washes his hands in a bowl on the table.
"Got that bandage changed," He said off hand, with a tone one would use to approach a wounded tiger, cautious but wary. "It was pretty rank, what was the wound?"
"Gunshot," Rachel replied.
"Gunshot?" He questioned, "Anything else?" He wipes his hands on a towel before he turns to her.
"Gunshots not enough?" Rachel asked sarcastically.
"Look, I ask, and you answer" The man tells her with a steely glint in his eyes, "That's just common courtesy. Did you get bit?"
"Bit?" She questioned.
"Bit," He repeats, "chewed on, maybe scratched-anything like that?"
"No-I got shot" Rachel said, a little less scared now and more confused. Something in her face must have convinced him because the man softens- just a little.
He places a hand on her forehead, "Feels cool enough, the fever would've killed you by now."
"Um, I don't think I have one." Rack says, shaking her head, feeling a little awkward.
"It'd be hard to miss," He agreed, a corner of his lips turning up. The man reaches up and cuts the binding on her wrists with a pocket knife before doing the same with her ankles and closing the knife with a small click. "Come on out when you're able." As he makes his way over to the door and guiding his son out. Rachel grabs the thin blanket, her head still feeling a little fuzzy, and shuffles after them. They're the first life she's seen since waking up in this strange apocalyptic situation and she'd be damned before she lets the answers to her questions just leave.
She heads in the direction of quiet murmurs. The man and his little boy are dishing up food onto plates. With a second look at the boy, Rachel feels a little silly she mistook his for Carl. The boy looks nothing like him.
Then with another glance around the room she notices that it is her neighbors house, her neighbors house with canned goods, toilet paper rolls in corners, two twin mattresses lay side by side, recently slept in. The windows and doors were all boarded up with heavy blankets covering them shielding them completely from the outside world. Oil lamps were scattered around the place creating short lights and long shadows flickering on the walls. She wandered over to one of the blankets and reaches out to one of them- "Don't do that," The man calls softly, "They'll see the light."
She looks back and he's staying right behind her. It was odd, she thought, she had watched him shoot a man point blank earlier today but she didn't read the danger in him.
"There's more out there than usual. I never should've fired that gun today." The man makes his way to the table and pulls a metal can off a campfire burner. "Sounds draw them; now they're all over the street. Stupid of me-using a gun." He blows the burner out and sets it out to cool. "But it all happened so fast, I didn't think." He sits at the table with his son, there are three places out she notices.
"You shot that man today," Rachel says, a small note of accusation in her voice.
"Man?" He looks at her with honest confusion.
"It ain't no man," The boy pipes up.
"What the hell was that out of your mouth just now?" The man admonished him.
"It was not a man." The boy corrects.
"You shot him in the street- a man." Rachel says a little more bewildered.
The other man scoffs, "Lady, you need glasses. That was a Walker. Come on, sit before you fall down." Rachel does as asked as the man puts some beans on his sons plate and then slides another plate full of food over to Rachel. The pair of them say their blessings and dig in.
"Hey mister," Rachel asks as she swallows her food, "Do you even know what's going on?"
She hastens to explain, "I mean, I just woke up today in the hospital. I came home and that's all I know. Where is everybody?"
Both the man and son share an alarmed look with each other before the man clears his throats.
"But you know about the dead people, right?"
"I saw a lot of that," Rachel says carefully, "I saw it in the hospital, piled in trucks, out on driveways…"
No, not the ones they put down. The ones they didn't- the Walkers- like the one I shot today. He'd have tried to rip into you, tried to eat you."
What? Rachel thought.
At her horrified expression, "Well, I guess if this is the first you're hearing it, I know how it must sound."
"They're out there now? On the streets?" Rachel asked. Real life zombies? Rachel wanted to laugh, but it wouldn't be a happy one. She felt a little incredulous. So far, it seemed like everything was like some kind of big walking dead parody.
"Yeah, but we'll be fine as long as we stay quiet." Rachel switches her gaze between both of them, they both seem very sincere.
The man has an earnest expression, "Listen- one thing I do know is that you can't get bit. I saw your bandage and that's what we were afraid of. The bites kill you. The fevers burns you out. But then after a while you come back.."
"Seen it happen." The boy says. His father squeezes him arm in comfort.
Rachel can't eat another bite, it feels like ashes in her mouth. She abandons her place half eaten and walks to the window in a daze.
"Quick-" The man whispers to his son, "Turn out the lamps" Just as a car siren went off.
The boy whimpers, and Rachel feels the hair on the back of her neck stand up "It's all right, it's happened once before. It went on for a few minutes. Get the lights Duane," The man repeated.
The man helps her draw the curtain open a crack to look outside. "I think we're okay" the man looks outside over her shoulder to the stumbling figures in the dark.
"The noise, won't it bring more of them?" Rachel whispers.
"Nothing we can do now, we just have to wait them out." The man whispers back.
The moonlight catches a stumbling figure and reveals a snarling half rotted face of what used to be a human being. It was something that no movie producer could have reproduced- she could see where the torso had been half torn off and exposed white bone. Rachel couldn't ignore it any longer.
"Zombies" She muttered half hysterically. "Zombies exist."
-.-.-
In which Rachel finds out that the world she lives in isn't quite like her old one.
Up next: Zombies exist, and some things are explained.
I plan for her to be getting to Atlanta in about two chapters. After that, things are going to start to deviate from canon.
Question for all of you:
If you woke up tomorrow in a world full of zombies, what would you do?
