...Of The Dead Read online



  …Of The Dead

  By

  Kristopher Lioudis

  Copyright © 2015 by Kristopher Lioudis

  All Rights Reserved.

  This work is not transferable. No part of this work can be sold, shared, copied, scanned, or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the creation of the author or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  FEMA recommends keeping a three-day emergency supply of food and water on hand as well as various and sundry other items, flashlights, batteries, a hand-crank radio so you can pick up the frantic ramblings of broadcasters as the civilization we’ve worked so hard to build over the last few millennia comes crashing down in a matter of weeks. What they don’t tell you is, after that three-day supply is gone, and all your neighbors are hungry, and the streets are full of the undead, and worst of all, Walmart is on fire, and there is no hope of anyone coming to rescue you, what do you do then?

  It really only took a few months, maybe as many as five or six, for everything, and by that I mean Everything with a capital “E”, to go to hell. By the time people were posting on Twitter about their family and friends attacking and eating their family and friends, the tide had already turned. It may have been possible, in that brief window when it all began, to mount some kind of offensive that could have saved us, but we were too busy arguing. Liberals blamed right-wing Christians. Republicans blamed the Democratic-dominated legislature. Vegans blamed factory farms. Small business owners blamed Costco. It seemed that everyone took the opportunity to point a finger at whoever had been pissing them off for the fact that people were dropping dead by the hundreds of thousands, then getting back up again and killing millions more.

  Within a few days of the first reports, mass panic set in as millions of residents all over the country realized that the system they had supported and believed in whole-heartedly their entire lives was not, in fact, going to come to their rescue. In the United States, as in most every other country around the world, as soon as the chaos began to set in, heads of state and the very wealthy behind them were ushered into secure underground bunkers. The very same tax paying citizens who had funded the building of those protective shelters were left outside the gates to fend for themselves, or worse, were shot dead when they attempted to gain entry.

  The U.S. government, what little of it remained after D.C. was overrun, was airlifted to notorious Area 51 in Nevada only to discover that a combination of reanimated corpses and civilian refugees had torn down the gates, massacred the guards, and filled the underground caverns meant to house officials with moaning, drooling zombies. Air Force One, which lost radio contact en route to the Nevada airfield, is believed to have either diverted to an even more secret and secure location, or to have crashed somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, depending on which conspiracy theory you subscribe to. Either way, social media sites across the nation came alive with sightings of the Zombie President from Massachusetts to Arizona; second in number only to sightings of Zombie Elvis.

  Major US cities fell within a few short weeks. Not just because of the dead, but because as soon as civil order even thought about tipping over, residents took advantage of the situation to go out and set fires, loot electronics, and stab each other in the face for setting fires and looting electronics. LA and New York both vied for the honor of being the first city to be completely destroyed. Jacksonville residents, in an attempt to contain their outbreak, destroyed five of their seven bridges in one coordinated effort. The casualties numbered in the tens of thousands, and every one of those reanimated and infected the rest of the city anyway.

  Similar efforts were carried out all over the country. In Forked River, New Jersey, a local militia group decided it might be a good idea to blow up the Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant. Their motives for doing so were not well understood. Media reporting on the matter stated that the group may have believed that a nuclear blast would have eliminated a large cluster of undead feeding in the area. Had the men survived the blast that brought down the cooling tower, they might have realized that it didn’t trigger the nuclear explosion they were hoping for, but merely released a massive amount of radiation, contaminating the ground and water and, in effect, sentencing the surrounding area to a slow death by radiation poisoning, if the dead didn’t get them first.

  Attempts to quarantine the island of Manhattan met with mixed results. With the destruction of bridges, tunnels, and highway offramps, the city did manage to keep out the hundreds of thousands of zombies coming from New Jersey, however, the effective isolation left residents completely cut-off from supplies and with no means of exit when their own outbreak began to very literally consume the area.

  Even rural areas of the Mid-Western United States, with their sparse populations and well-armed denizens, were not immune to the mass stupidity of the Human Race. Milwaukee, Wisconsin natives turned Miller Field from a baseball stadium to a refugee center to a fortified stronghold over the first weeks of the outbreak. This stronghold managed to hold off several legions of the undead for almost four weeks, one of the longest recorded defenses against a foe as relentless as the zombie masses. Based on social media reports from those within Miller, with no effective long-term plan, infighting among members of the ad hoc leadership, and pressure from the ever growing army outside the ball field, the collapse of the fortress came from within when several people inside the park destroyed fortifications meant to contain the rationed food and water. In the resultant chaos, over one hundred and fifty people were killed. These then reanimated and quickly attacked the others. In very short order, all of the two-hundred-thousand refugees were either completely consumed or killed and reanimated. Had anyone been left alive to see it, they would have noticed that as soon as the last living human was brought down, the mass of nearly half a million zombies congregated outside immediately lost interest and shambled off to find other prey.

  While social media still ran, to its credit YouTube lasted much longer than broadcast news, people posted videos of their own and others’ attempts to fight off hordes of zombies. You might be surprised to know how many people thought it was a good idea to face an army of reanimated corpses with a machete or even more comical, a katana. Even if a blow was lucky enough to make it through the skull, the resultant effort necessary to then pry the weapon free either left the would-be ninja open for attack or too worn out physically to strike another successful blow. Ditto, the water tower snipers, safely perched high above the throngs, leisurely picking off targets, left stranded and starving to death as hundreds of zombies congregated below them attracted by all the noise. Heavily armed Rambos overrun in the streets as they realized, too late, that even a thirty round magazine runs dry pretty quickly in real life. And the handguns, oh the handguns. So many well-meaning but ill-equipped almost-heroes charging the streets with Glocks and Berettas and even big, old Smith and Wesson revolvers only to discover that scoring a headshot on a moving target with a weapon whose effective range is measured in 10s of feet is nowhere near as easy as Hollywood had led us to believe. Such a shame.

  Not to say that everybody turned out to be an ill-prepared idiot, just most people. And they waaay outnumbered the preppers. For all we know, there may be one or two families still out there, holed up in a well-secured bunker with a ten-year supply of food and clean drinking water, waiting for things to quiet down a little before they pop out and try to reestablish society. We do know that there was a Twitter feed devoted to revealing the locations of these preppers so that their “wealth” could be “
redistributed”. Don’t act like you didn’t check it once or twice while your stomach rumbled and maybe you watched the two-by-fours nailed to your front door start to splinter and buckle inward. If you’re lucky, its only corpses on the other side and the worst that will happen is that you’ll be eaten alive.

 

  One hastily developed religion in Montana began to worship the reanimated dead as resurrected saviors. They claimed, as thousands upon thousands of followers ran headlong into massive herds of the undead, that each corpse was a messiah and that to be devoured and reborn as a flesh-eating horror was the highest honor a human could hope to attain. The movement was understandably short-lived as leaders of the cult were killed by newly risen deliverers. While many mocked the overt insanity of cult leaders and followers alike, many questioned later if members hadn’t been better off embracing a fate that seemed all but inevitable, rather than the constant battle for survival that life had quickly become.

 

  In the end, it was Man’s own stupidity that brought down civilization. The Dead were just the catalyst. Perhaps that was their purpose. Through all the arguing that took place while there were still pundits to argue, many theories were posited as to the origins of the risen dead. Beyond bio-terrorism and germ warfare and solar radiation and pertussis vaccines, no one seemed to wonder if it wasn’t something as simple as God or Mother Nature or the Planet or whatever you want to call it just growing tired of us and knowing that it would really only take a little nudge to completely destroy us. Or, more to the point, to get us to destroy ourselves.