A Story of Survival
By Domina Caligo
Chapter 1: History
Victus mortuus.
The Living Dead. I had made it up one day when this started to happen. The name is very agreeable though. They are the living dead. I have held someone who was in the process of being turned. Her heart physically stopped for a few seconds. It scared me senseless when her heart started and she blinked at me. Then she tried to eat my face. We, my group and I are not sure what this thing is. I call it a virus but Seth calls it Ragen. Some corny joke that Jamie told him and it stuck. I guess it works. These people are mad. Insane and with only one thing in mind, to eat. There is nothing left of the people that they were. And the worst part is that it only takes minutes to completely infest its host. The longest I saw was 5 minutes. The man was out P.E. teacher, physically fit and healthy. It takes longer for those with strong immune systems. Not a saving grace form what I have seen. It looks excruciatingly painful. There are ways to identify someone in the process of being turned. Loss of color, sweating, weakness of the body, loss of body control and then the vomiting of blood. I think it is because the virus regenerates so fast that to keep the blood levels down it ejects blood. Vomiting, bleeding pores, all there. It happens even in the eyes. They turn red and black. The whites, they turn the color of blood while the irises turn pupil black. There is no sane thought in those eyes. Just madness. The hollows beneath the eyes are there, like shadows. It makes someone who has not slept for a week look healthy. I still wake up screaming from those eyes. They even reflect light, like cats. I can no longer wear red. Now it seams as a childish indulgent, but… I don't see Jamie or Seth wearing red. It has been a month since our town collapsed. There is only three of us, me, Jamie and Seth. We have gotten to know each other very well. It was the only was to survive. Safety in numbers doesn't work. We saw a group of 15 die because one man panicked and ran for it with the keys to their vehicle. We could not help them, not with the amount of ammo that we had. But it was there own fault. Shouting at that time of day? It roused the Ragen from their normal sleeping habits. They are nocturnal, which makes them fucking hard to locate and kill safely. That is what we do, Jamie, Seth and I. We hunt the Ragen and try to find the best place to hide out during winter. It was only weeks away.
It seams like only yesterday when it happened. There were rumors about people disappearing and dieing all week. The News said nothing about it so we thought nothing about it. It was a grand joke to us, the rumors of the "zombies" eating people. Oh how I wish we did. We were in the middle of class when it all happened. The shouting and screaming brought our teacher to open the door to shout at the racket. That is when he was attacked. I did not know who it was, but he made Mr. Kenton scream. It was so loud. Everyone was shocked. The noise, the fear, it was chaotic. For some unknown reason I grabbed the nearest person to me and ran with her. It was Jamie. In the hallway there was blood everywhere, so much of it. Jamie and I were separated, I was so confused. I doubted she could hear my shouts over the noise, it was deafening. I ended on the floor with some one on top of me; it was one of the infected. And he was trying to, well, bite me. I was saved by someone. They used a bat to beat the thing to death while still on me. Where and why he had a bat at school I don't know. But I was grateful for that little bit of rule braking. It took me a while to realize the man on top of me was our school cop. On his belt he had a gun. I did not know much about it but I grabbed it and the spare clippings. I soon found Jamie getting in to Seth's truck starting to drive away. When Jamie saw me she started to shout at me to run. Man did I run. The truck was still moving so I jumped into the bed. That was not an easy thing for someone like me to do. I was out of breath and wheezing like a dead whistle. On the way out of the parking lot we managed to run over not one, but 2 of the Ragen. I could hear Jamie scream while Seth did it. I still don't know why we picked my Grandparents house, but it probably saved us. When we arrive there we literally ran into the house only to be meeting with my Grandfathers shot gun. He managed to graze my arm. I never saw him look as apologetic as he did right then. While we were there we called every one we knew. It seamed that no one was answering. I then found out that my family was dead. My sisters, my brothers, my Mom. When I called my father he was on his death bed and his wife was already so. I cried so hard after that when no one was looking.
We were there for 5 day till we left. My grandparents stayed there, said that they were too old to be of any help. Before we left, Grandpa gave me his 10 guns and the keys to his truck. He told me that I was to be the only one to drive it. They killed themselves by an over dose of pills (they had plenty). On our way out of town we raided the nearest store and station. We took plenty of stuff: candy bars, caned foods (mostly non heated ones), soap (don't ask me why, but I was glad later), garbage bags, bleach cleaning supplies, toilet paper (Thank God someone thought of that), drinks (lots of water and energy drinks) and alcohol. Jamie loaded up on it, almost 3 of every bottle. I thought that we would not have enough room, but we did. At the station Seth took all the jerky while I looked for gas cans and Jamie filled them up. We had to cut it short because the Ragen appeared. We felt as if we were going to survive. That is when we saw them. There were bodies every where. That and blood to. We saw that they were Ragen and thought that they were dieing. Days later we booted that theory out.
We have been traveling for a while, but our work has paid off. We found the perfect place. It looked to be a very large house, manor maybe, with walls. Walls wide enough to walk on (5 feet) and tall enough to have no doubt that none could clime over (12 feet). Seth picked the gate and we looked around. There were none in it. It was two stories tall with the top floor nothing but rooms. There where twelve good sized ones. In entering the building there is a grand staircase that splits in to two for the upper wings. To the left there is an open room with a fire place and a double door that we found out that it led to a library. On the right there was the dining room and a sitting room. Behind the stairs there were two doors. One on the back of the stairs going down to a very large area of a basement. The other one was right in front of it and it led to the kitchen (a much stocked kitchen). Exiting the kitchen through tits back door showed a vegetable garden that was in much disarray. But there has not been a frost so I could salvage most of it. The best thing was yet to be found. Whoever's house this was had it equipped with solar energy, rather that electricity. So we had power. That and a city hours drive away that had a few major shops. (Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Bi-Mart) We may yet survive.
This is an introduction. I could not start my story in the beginning so I did it as a prolog. The next chapter will have dialog and such.
In and Out,
Domina Caligo