Chapter 6

The Story Continues

Smith walked into the room he had interviewed Cal in the day before suppressing a yawn. With barely two hours of sleep he wasn't at the top of his game, but then again not many people were these days. The young veteran was sitting in the chair as he had the day before, staring off into space with his mind somewhere else. "Cal? You in there?" Smith snapped his fingers in front of the young man's face a few times before he snapped out of his trance much like someone being startled from behind. "Shall we begin?" The orderlies took up positions on either side of Cal, arms crossed and ready to intervene should the need arise, as it almost certainly would.

"Cal?" He seemed more distant than the day before and began muttering under his breath, talking to himself. Whatever help he needed here he obviously wasn't getting, aside from that drug.

The young man spoke up without looking up. "What's your name?"

"Smith."

"That's weird. I thought your name started with an S, but ended in head, you stupid-" One of the orderlies put a hand on his shoulder to remind him where they were and he finally looked up. The tone in his voice was much more somber now, almost all the fire he had seen yesterday had vanished overnight. He resumed his story from the day before, and his eyes looked into that distant place he was trying to remember…

2 YEARS AGO

OUTSKIRTS OF RIVERSIDE, PENNSYLVANIA

I can't remember much about the crash itself, only the ground rushing up to meet us through the pilot's window. The first thing I do remember is standing in a small clearing in the woods, dazed and bleeding with shell casing littering the ground around me. I squinted my eyes and could barely make out my footprints coming from the east side of the clearing. A few bodies of infected lay around me one of which was still twitching. Judging by how many casings were at my feet I used much more ammo than I should have, a mistake that was probably going to kill me. I glanced around but I couldn't see any of the others, or any trace that they had been here. Realizing how dangerous it was being alone with no cover I stumbled back into the woods looking for a landmark that might tell me where I was.

It wasn't long before I found the river and the campsites. Trailers, RVs, tents, you name it. Who would be camping at this time of year I had no idea, but people are just plain unpredictable at times. I scrounged through some of them looking for supplies I could use. In the darkness the old campsites were still as recognizable as they were when I was a child. My few friends from school and I used to come into these woods all the time to play, and that included sneaking into the campgrounds to see if anyone had left anything we wanted. We never stole much, just a few dollars there and here, maybe something else we wanted, but we never took anything important, and that's what counts, right?

I took the time to analyze my situation and how I had come to be in it. I assume that in my stupor from the crash I had somehow wandered from wherever we landed into the woods, Maybe I had a concussion and that was why I couldn't remember, I don't know. After looking at my supplied I learned that I was down to 5 magazines for my M4 and 3 for my pistol. I found a crowbar in the back of a rundown pickup with the red paint having been weathered by the elements, among other things. I took it with me and followed the river to my old hometown, anxious to see what had become of it. I reached the wall within an hour, a hastily constructed and poorly built wall, but a wall nonetheless. It was just good enough to keep me from climbing over it with sharp stakes protruding from it, to stop attackers I assumed. The top was strung with razor wire and broken glass from what I could make out but the darkness hindered my vision. I would have given anything for a pair of NVGs at that moment, or even a flashlight.

I strolled around the wall until I found an opening. A bus, armored with razor wire and steel plating, had crashed through the wall from the inside in what I guessed was an attempt to escape whatever was going on inside the town. The windows were streaked with blood and something was pounding on the inside as I approached. There was an opening between the escape vehicle and the wall large enough for me to squeeze through, and when I emerged a feeling of dread washed over me. The town was completely black, not even the streetlights were running. The only illumination was the moon, but it had retreated behind the clouds 10 minutes before. I made my way through the darkened streets littered with buses and cars until I came upon a sandbagged position.

A .50cal had been positioned here, but it was now broken and twisted. 4 bodies were strung along the makeshift barricade with all of them wearing army uniforms. I checked each corpse for ammo, finding enough to get me by. I picked up one of their weapons, an M4 like mine but with a flashlight attached to it. I looked the weapon over and examined it extensively before I was convinced it was in a well enough condition to fire. Swapping it out for my old one I went up the street searching anything I thought would be worthwhile along the way.

The odd thing about my surroundings was the lack of zombies, a strange thing to say two weeks ago. Bodies and wrecked cars littered the street and trash blew freely through the nighttime breeze as I approached a familiar home. A car was parked on the lawn with all the doors open and the rear windshield smashed inward. The door was barricaded and as I drew closer I noticed more bodies on the lawn, leading up to the front door as everything grew quiet. I began sweating as I worked my way to the back yard and up to the sliding glass door that was to serve as my second entryway. It was locked so I slid a set of keys out of my pocket, and upon finding the right one, I opened the door and slid it slowly and carefully to the side.

The house was a mess with books and paper lying all over the floor in addition to other things. A soft glow emanated from the living room and I readied my weapon as I crept nearer. The closer I drew I began noticing a soft noise from the room, a man's voice informing people of measures to take to insure safety from the infected and a muffled whimpering sound. I poked my head around the corner and saw that the TV was on and tuned into one of the emergency broadcast channels. Evacuation points rolled across the bottom of the screen as the man's voice droned on, softly with the TV being on a very low volume. On the couch I saw a still figure illuminated only by the glow of the TV in an otherwise dark home. The figure was alive, their chest rising slowly up and down and a pillow covering their face. I silently paced over with my weapon raised, just in case, and rapidly tore the pillow from the figure's grasp.

The woman screamed before my hand covered her mouth, the yell shattering the stillness of the town's blanket of silence. Her eyes narrowed at me and she began to struggle free as I put a finger up to my mouth, the universal symbol for silence. As her eyes adjusted she relaxed and I took my hand away she stood up with her back to me and began wiping away the tears she didn't want me to see. Without warning she swung herself back to me and embraced me, her whimpering beginning again. In that same instant someone began pounding on the door and without a word I ushered her into the basement and rushed, silently of course, to the window. A glance outside showed me an infected man in a police uniform pounding his fists against the door as more from the surrounding shadows came to join him. I threw furniture and anything else I could find against the door in a haste, with the noise of my labor enticing them even more. When I had done all I could I went to the basement and locked the door behind me and slowly crept down the stairs in utter darkness. As I reached the floor I switched on my attached flashlight and shone it around the room, finally coming to rest on my new companion her eyes wide with relief as I set my rifle on the table next to me.

I walked over and sat down next to her. My body felt completely drained of energy and I could barely speak let alone move of my own free will. I closed my eyes and nearly nodded off before she nudged my shoulder, a look in her eyes that urged me to stay awake. I did the only thing I could think of at that point and I struck up an interrogation. "Why didn't you leave like everyone else?"

"They didn't leave!" She was shouting in that whispering way that lets you know that they're mad while they are trying to be quiet. "Who do you think is trying to get in right now?"

"Well why did you stay here? That's what I wanted to know!" Now I was whisper shouting, it was a giant whisper argument.

"We tried! We were loading up the car in the middle of a giant massacre! The army was shooting anyone that came at them funny and those monsters, the infected people, were tearing everyone to shreds literally! A girl was walking through it all with her head in her hands and crying so dad went over to see what he could do. As soon as he touched her shoulder her hand came up and tore him in half while mom took the shotgun out of the car. We both screamed and infected that were ignoring us and fighting other people took notice and rushed at us. We ran to the house but one of the special ones caught mom's foot with its tongue and dragged her back into a swarm of those things! I locked the house up and waited for the shooting to stop. It took hours, but when it finally died down I looked outside and…and…" She looked at the ground and held herself before she continued. "They were everywhere. Bodies were all over the street and now they were attacking the houses! A bus with armor all over it drove past with about 20 people on board and disappeared around the corner with a horde of those things tailing it. I turned off all the lights and stayed quiet since then. That was three days ago."

"So is there anyone else you know of that might have survived?"

"Maybe… I don't know!"

"I'm sorry Samantha, I really am, but we have to focus, okay? Take this." I gave my sidearm to her along with some ammo. "I'm going to check upstairs and see what's going on. Don't use that unless you have to, okay?" She nodded to me, and then I took my rifle and ascended the staircase leaving the flashlight with her. Fear was a lot more dangerous than a horde of infected and she needed the light more than I did. When I reached the main floor I noticed that the door had been practically shattered and the TV was now destroyed with wisps of smoke coming from the broken screen. Since we weren't the only ones here anymore I went back downstairs and got her. "We need to move. Is there anywhere we can go?"

"You remember how to get to the river, right? Maybe we can get a boat and head over to Newburg. The TV said they were evacuating people to a safe zone to the north and the infection hadn't reached the city yet."

"Sounds like a plan." I didn't hold any hope of Newburg being safe when we reached, if we reached it. Philly had been overrun in less than a week and since New burg was almost as big there were potentially a million zombies waiting for us if we were wrong. Riverside was a bust though and staying here was certain death, compared to heading to Newburg which was only probable death. We exited the house, careful not to make any noise that would alert the uninvited house guests who were lurking somewhere in the shadows. We made it to the street when she stopped. She bent to the ground and came back up with a shotgun, an auto loader by the looks of it like the one Francis had used. I jogged to the car in the front yard and after looking through the trunk's contents I came back with a couple boxes of shotgun shells for the same weapon. Handing them to her we continued down the street heading in the direction of the church.

I knew Riverside like the back of my hand and it almost felt like I was a kid again, going out after dark with Samantha and my other friends and raising hell when we thought we could get away with it, which, of course, we never managed. Neither of us spoke after leaving her house, more out of fear of breaking the silence than revealing our position. Along the way we passed humvees, buses, cars, even semi trucks, all broken down and destroyed. At our slow peace it took us nearly two hours to get to our shortcut to the river, the one that only we knew about. If we were lucky, then it would be devoid of infected and we could quietly slip out of town. To get to it we had to go through the warehouse behind the convenience store across from the church, but after that it should have been smooth sailing.

As we approached we say that the church's lights were still on, seemingly the only place in the town with working power. In darkness light stands out, so we avoided it altogether and made straight for our shortcut. Inside the warehouse we found the entrance, a small hole in the wall leading to the abandoned and boarded up warehouses behind this one. "Remember when we used to come through here with Dusty and the others?"

She began to relax and we let our guard down in the presence of familiarity and pleasant memories. "Yeah, I remember the time you cried because you thought you were going to lose your leg." She giggled as I began to clear the crates away from the hole, our own camouflage so no one would find it.

"Did you see how much blood there was?"

She laughed again. "You scraped your knee!" I puched away the last of the crates and peered inside, but something was off. I turned on the flashlight and looked a second time.

They were all over, at least 50 of them wandering around. Bodies were piled up all around, and on the far side of the room I could make out more sandbags and another .50cal blocking one of the open doors which had been used as an entrance. Many of the infected were in military uniforms, and many of the bodies rested against bloodstained, bullet scarred walls in rows. I quickly pulled back and shoved the crates against the hole again as Sam readied her shotgun. "Not this way." I tried to put on a smile, but failed miserably as we left the warehouse. Now we had to go through the streets and alleys to reach the river and for all we knew a thousand zombies were waiting for us on our route.

We never got the chance to find out. As soon as that thought entered my head the church bells began ringing and gunfire erupted from the same direction. Then above it all came the scream of the horde, surging from all directions to the church. I heard the cry of a hunter and the wheezing of a smoker as what seemed to me a thousand pairs of eyes diverted their attention from the church, and looked straight at us.