Days With The Undead (Book 1) (10 page)

No one really knows for sure what happened, but it appears that after losing contact with the cabin, the pilots landed the plane without incident and then proceeded to park it right up against the folded accordion of the passenger walkway. The pilots then called the control tower to let them know there was an issue. It may have been self-preservation on the part of the pilots, thinking that maybe they would have been asked to remain on the tarmac, or worse, shot out of the sky.

The situation worldwide is getting to the point of panic and who really knows what the pilots had been briefed on prior to leaving for their destination? Losing contact with the passenger section of the plane would have indicated to me that there was an issue that needed to be dealt with. Did they have an inkling of what was on the opposing side of the cockpit door?

I just don’t understand how they could have held such low regard for the people of London. Had they given an accurate account of what was actually going on that day, how many lives could have been saved? It’s not like the news wasn’t showing that the Undead has proliferated across parts of Canada and the United States. Surely, the British government would have mounted some kind of defense had they known what they might have been up against.

Once the hatch was opened, it was utter pandemonium. The Emergency Personnel had no idea what to expect and as a result they were ill-prepared for what burst forth and attacked them. It was a bloody massacre that spread further and further outward throughout the entire airport and then beyond.

The Undead spread through Heathrow like the wave of a tsunami; touching everything in their path. No one was safe especially when the newly Undead also began to rise.

Video footage from the interior of that airport, leaked onto the Internet, showed the panic. Once the Undead burst forth from that passenger skyway, you could tell that no one in the direct vicinity really knew what was going on. It took them only a few short minutes to moving.

At that point, it became a stampede in the crowded terminal. The wave of people closest to the boarding gate started moving outward, pushing against the throngs of other people milling about. If the feed had contained sound, I’m sure it would have just been a cacophony of screams and demands to move. You could see security personnel trying to fight the current in order to get to the people causing the disturbance. Instead they were carried backward until the moment that the Undead transformation caught up with them.

Chaos and pandemonium are good words to describe what I saw on that video feed but it’s not completely accurate either. There was something
more
present, something written deeply in the faces of the trapped that day. Perhaps it was fear; perhaps it was the purest terror. What I do know is that the Undead didn’t take any prisoners, only converts. And they all burst out of the airport and into the streets of London.

Something similar was reported in Australia where a cruise ship had been noticed just drifting off the coast. With the way of the affairs at the moment, no one was of the mind to rescue a listless ship; especially not one with no visible signs of life on deck. It didn’t matter anyway since the ocean current had a different plan altogether.

It took the ship a few hours to fully make its way into the harbor. By that time, people had started to notice that it was a collision course with the myriad of connected docks. A listless ship is a dangerous one. It’s unpredictable in that it will go anywhere that the currents take it.

A bystander video taken from the deck of another cruise ship docked in the harbor showed its slow advance on the network of docks. There were no signs of life on the decks, but lots of evidence that something horrific had befallen the passengers. Deck chairs were overturned and a few of the life boats had been partially lowered to the water line. Something terrible had happened on that ship but no one staring at it from the safety of the moored vessels in the harbor or the wharf dared to guess what it could have been.

Slowly but surely it was headed for the elaborate system of docks. From the video, you could the voices of people stating the obvious: It’s going to hit something. As the currents drove it closer and closer to the infrastructure, the panicked disbelief at the fact that nothing was being done to stop its advance started to take over. Many distinct voices could be heard shouting that it was high time someone did something.

Once the ship was directly in the harbor, someone approached in a tugboat, hoping that it would be able to push the ship back out to sea. The forward momentum was too much however, and the tugboat was only pushed back by the larger, more substantial ship.

The momentum of the cruise ship tore through docks and destroyed other vessels when it finally connected. When it came to rest, it hung in the water lopsidedly. Many of the voices on the tape expressed relief that the order was finally over and hope that the vessel wouldn’t sink into the water of the harbor.

The relief ended quickly as the throngs of the Undead started to appear on deck, brought out by the commotion and perhaps the lack of uninfected people left to attack in the bowels of the ship. They were dressed in their best but bloodied cruise attire with a few in crimson stained uniforms. Seeing the crowd that had gathered by the harbor, the Undead started to leave the ship to get to them, plummeting over the railings.

Some landed in the water, fighting for a few moments against the weight of their own wet clothes before disappearing beneath the surface. Others landed awkwardly on the wooden docks, climbing to their feet and starting to close in on the crowd that had gathered to watch. In their haste to devour, many of them were pushed into the water off the side of the docks. The crowd still hadn’t gotten the inkling that they were in grave danger. It wasn’t until the first Undead actually managed to traverse the twisting network of wood that the danger of the moment actually penetrated the laze of concern that had befallen the crowd.

The massacre was awful - and caught on tape by the bystander on the neighboring cruise ship along with the Undead that turned their attention to trying to board the other ships moored in the harbor. Once the situation was recognized for the danger that it held, the other ships started to leave the previous sanctity of the harbor.

The last moments of the video showed the shore populated by the Undead receding from view. Stories like this are appearing by the hour. Pretty soon there will no place left on earth safe from the Undead.

Our escape took us through Arizona today. The benefit of having the truck and four capable drivers is that we can pretty much drive for twenty-four hours straight. Periodically we stop out of necessity particularly in the hotter states because we don’t want the car to overheat and for the sheer fact that we need to keep the truck fuelled.

So far we haven’t had to drop much below a half a tank - and we have reserves of gasoline stored in jerry cans in the back. There is no telling though when we will no longer have access to the pumps or when the tanks at the stations will run dry. At this point we are fairly certain that no one is out there delivering to your local Texaco station…

The roads are beginning to look like something out of The Stand. Burned out carcasses of vehicles are littered everywhere making passage tricky at times; especially when a few unexpected Undead appear as you are trying to deftly maneuver around wreckage in the dark without ending up in the ditch.

Hopefully we can reach the coast sometime in the daylight either tomorrow or the day after. At this point in time, we are thinking of hi-jacking a boat or yacht that someone out there is less likely to need. The only issue is this: we have no idea where to go from there. If the epidemic is becoming more and more widespread as the days go on, soon there will be no safe havens.

I think that is part of the reason that I scour the Internet. I’m looking for that one place that is going to be free from the Undead. It may be a stupid mission but in the end, if you don’t have hope you don’t have anything. Ideally, I’ve been thinking about the fact that we need to find an isolated island with a very small population that is essentially shut off from the rest of the world. Seems like a fool’s errand in this interconnected and reliant world of ours, but there
has
to be a place. And I will find it. That I have to believe.

I’m also not sure how long I will be able to keep posting these communications to you. My mobile Internet service provider could stop providing me with service at any point and while I could scan the area for unsecured Wi-Fi connections it would mean staying in one place for longer periods of time, especially while I researched the web for news. That could be the difference between life and death for us.

The Undead army is growing exponentially and nothing seems to be able to keep it in check. Is there nothing that can kill them? There’s the obvious “shoot them in the head” kill shot or decapitation but there has to be something else that can stop them - or at least slow them down.

Fire had appeared like it might be a viable option to someone in Philadelphia. Unfortunately the plan backfired (forgive the pun) and now the entire city is burning. I don’t know exactly what their plan was but it didn’t work.

Unlike a living victim, the Undead don’t feel pain and they just kept right on coming, only at that point they were also on fire. And the fact that they are dead and going through at least some of the stages of normal decomposition they would act like torches in a sense. Fuelling the fire on them until the last possible moment of second death. And even after that, their bodies would likely still burn until of the fuel comprising it had been consumed. Terrifying thought, and one I wouldn’t want to be faced with. The Undead are frightening enough, but can you imagine the flaming Undead?

We started a silly conversation today that just reminded us of how much of the world we’re going to miss. Ben posed the question, asking each of us what we were going to miss the most. Immediately Max answered with Melissa, then followed it up with fresh baked chocolate chip cookies and cold milk.

Bob was quiet for a moment and countered with seeing a long awaited movie on opening night at the theatre with the never ending bag of hot buttered popcorn and ice cold Coca-Cola.

Ben piped in with long walks along the boardwalk of the Beaches on Lake Ontario’s shore while eating ice cream. After that the three of them took turns trying to one up each other. Max: cold beer. Bob: vacations. Ben: still warm pecan butter tarts from his favorite bakery. Bob: lazy Sunday mornings with the paper and a cup of coffee. Ben: the joyful, innocent play of puppies at the pet store. Max: listening to the new album from his favorite group. Ben: sleeping in, just because you can. Bob: sex.

Bob’s last answer stopped each of them for a moment. Max turned to me from the passenger seat and gave me a long, hard look. It wasn’t a look that I interpreted as interest in sex; these men were my family and I trusted them implicitly.

After staring at me for a moment, he said that I hadn’t offered an idea of what I will miss most. I looked at him, hating to end the moment of boyish excitement. My answer: freedom.

So I leave you tonight with the hopes that I will be able to touch base with you all tomorrow. Godspeed to you all and I pray for the living.

Day 16:

We had hoped to reach the coast today. It looks like that is not going to happen. I’m trying really hard not be pessimistic at the moment but with the day that we’ve had there’s nothing to be optimistic about.

It all started out on our way through the southern part of Nevada. We had planned on avoiding the large urban sprawl of Los Angeles and San Francisco and aiming a little further north for areas like Crescent City and Eureka, maybe some of the smaller coastal towns in between. We saw no reason to put ourselves into any danger and driving through Los Angeles or San Francisco might attract too much unwanted attention from the Undead while we were attempting to scope out the perfect vessel to borrow for our escape from land.

At some point while passing through Nevada today, we picked up a bus load of survivors. I’m using the phrase “picked up” very loosely of course. They saw us moving on the road and decided to follow us. The bus was the 101 Capital Metro Transit from Austin, Texas (I only know that because I Google…). You could see the bloody hand prints and smears across the vibrant green hue of its protective shell. Through our binoculars the people on the bus looked exhausted and terrified but there was an overall look of relief that they were moving and somewhat safe.

You could clearly see the looks of horror and skepticism that they carried. I wondered if our faces bore those same emotions? Confusion, determination, fear, nausea, strength; those were the looks that we could see through the binoculars. There were nineteen people on that bus and each of them looked haggard. Men, women and children - all of them looking like they hadn’t slept in days.

This may sound callous but we didn’t want them following us. We didn’t want to be responsible for a group of people that firstly we didn’t know, and secondly, we weren’t sure we could trust. For all we knew, someone on that bus could have been infected and in the incubation stage. Any one of those people could become one of the Undead at any moment.

If we did decide to let them tag along that would be X amount of people that we would then potentially have to protect. We had no way of knowing who was on that bus and what kinds of skills they might have. And in the end, we really didn’t want to give up any of our limited gear in the event that they were unarmed.

Besides there were more of them than there were of us; we could not run the risk of their intentions being less than honorable. Unfortunately in these times we really need to be on the lookout for those people that were willing to pirate anything and everything that you’ve managed to accumulate.

It’s better to be safe than sorry. For the time being, they could follow us but only because we couldn’t prevent them from doing so.