Deadfall: Survivors (16 page)

My brother and I are from a small town outside of Jacksonville, Florida, called Callahan. My entire family is actually from Savannah, Georgia, but my father was down working in Jacksonville, contracting for the military. He did research for the Navy, a lot
of which took place off shore. At the time that the zombies came, I was going to school at the University of North Florida. They had suspended classes because the comet was about to hit Earth, so I had been staying with my parents. When the comet had been destroyed, I had returned to the school, which was going to be restarting classes that fall. The night before my parents were attacked, I had actually gone out with some friends drinking and having fun. Everyone was so relieved, that even if it had been almost a month already, many of us routinely went out a lot. It had been a long year; most of us were so sure the world was nearly done with, there was still so much relief in the air.

That next morning, I drove home to what would be the beginning of the end.
Already, everything seemed different. I was listening to the radio station, the one that only ever played music, and even those guys were talking about riots or something going on in the streets. I almost ran over a few guys when going back through Jacksonville, but I didn’t think much about it. Something like that just didn’t register in my mind. To me, people were just people.

When I pulled into our small neighborhood, there was this large fire truck parked right over a curb on the street that turns in
, and I thought something was going on. And then when I pulled into the driveway, I noticed there were a few firemen at the door of the house, and that they seemed agitated, and there was a commotion at the door. As I got out of the car, my mother’s screams reached my ears right away, and my heart started racing. I kept hearing my father yelling to run away, and my brain just couldn’t figure out what was going on. As I started walking towards the door, one of the firemen turned and looked at me, and that’s  when death stared right at me. His face was torn off; no skin, just the meat and blood underneath with two pale and distorted eyes, looking in my direction. I screamed and froze.

Beh
ind him, two more firemen were destroying my mother. That’s  the only way I can describe it. They were tearing her limb from limb, biting her. I had never heard screams of pain like that ever in my life. It was a sight of blood and grime. It was like a movie, yet, it was real, and it was my mother. My father was behind her, something in his hands, trying to beat the firemen as hard as he could, but they simply weren’t flinching at any pain. Instead, they just kept flailing at my mother. I know that she died in a lot of pain. I hope she’s  at peace.

One of the firemen reached out and grabbed my father, and it was like they had super strength, because they just pulled him over my mother with ease. He fought, and I kept hearing him scream my name, and yelling at me to get my brother. The whole time, I was frozen. I couldn’t react. I was so afraid. The one that was looking at me, I don’t think could see me. He stood there, mostly turning around in circles, never really focusing on me. That’s when I saw Chris.
I could see him through the living room window with what I'm sure was the same face that I had, if not even more terrorized. He was just feet from dad, who was trying his hardest to block the doorway entrance with his body, and was paying for it with his life.

I yelled at Chris, telling him to go out the side door, into the garage. He came flying out, and that noise was enough to get the attention of the blind zombie, so much so that he came stumbling over some of the bushes as
he fell over, just a few feet from where Chris came out of the garage. I screamed for him to get into the car, and we sat there for a second before I began fumbling for my keys to start the car. As I was driving down the road, I felt so ashamed that I was leaving my parents behind, ashamed that my fear had not allowed me to do anything for them, even if there was nothing I could have done.

We began driving north, out of town, without a clue of what to do or where to go. We began to see evidence of the zombies, with those “rioters” out on the streets that I could now see clearly as to what they were. Most simply avoided the car, or just ran into the side of it. There was such a panic in the air. At one point, two young women tried to get me to stop to get into the car, but when I stopped
, one of the zombies was right there on one of the women and drug her down, just as the other woman was getting into the back seat of the car. From that point on, I refused to stop the car for even a red light, which seemed kind of pointless.

The other woman’s name was Megan. She was a bit younger than me, worked at some store in town. She was hysterical for a few minutes
, before settling into a horrified silence. We just kept driving north until we got a little ways out of town. I then pulled over and stopped the car, but Chris told me not to and to just keep driving. I had been so worried about how terrified I was, that I had forgotten  my brother had been there with me, and was probably just as scared as I was.

I told him to grab my
cell phone out of my purse, and I called about the only person I could think of. My on and off boyfriend, Cal. He was a soldier stationed at Fort Benning up in Georgia. At one point, we had been engaged, but then I had broken it off for my own reasons. Now, I selfishly called him up, hoping he could answer my fears. It took a few calls, but he answered. There was a lot of commotion on that end. He said that the base had come under attack, but that they had repelled the attack. I told him what had happened, and he told me exactly what I wanted to hear. He told me to go there, that we could be safe there until they found out what was happening.

I remember trying to ask him how to get there, but the call was dropped. In hindsight, I think I was really lucky I got through that one time. That was also the last time I ever heard his voice. Chris suggested I use my phone for directions. The young woman, Megan, while still in shock, just shook her head when I suggested the army base. We were Americans, the idea of hiding out a catastrophe at an Army base seemed
like a very logical thing to do.

The drive there was only a few hours. I had a full tank of gas, so I never had to stop, and we never wanted to. I remember there was a huge accident near an interstate overpass
, and the traffic there was completely backed up. I was glad I wasn’t going on there. We didn’t have to go through any big cities on the way there, and the few zombies we saw, we simply avoided. We drove past a school bus and I remember feeling so terrified, but, it had been empty. School still hadn’t started up.

At some point in the early afternoon, we got to the southern entrance to the base, after a small town that appeared to have been taken over by the army. They had roadblocks everywhere, and we were forced to get out and walk the rest of the way to the gates. I kept trying to tell people that I knew Cal, a sergeant, but we were mostly ignored. They took ou
r names and where we were from, and then we were boarded into buses. They were going to take us further into the base, where camps had been set up for refugees. That’s what they called us, and I asked them if there was a war, but I could never get a right answer. I guess they really didn’t know either.

Right before we got into the bus, we heard the crashing sounds of gunfire coming from behind us, and then shouting. We were pushed into the bus
, and the bus spun about as quickly as a large bus could, and we were headed back into the base. But we weren’t taken to any fort. Apparently, I had a completely wrong idea of what an army base was. There is a base part, with housing and barracks and military type buildings, but the rest of it is just wilderness. They brought us out to this place in the middle of nowhere, where they had set up this tent camp. They dumped us off there, and the bus turned right around and left. Soldiers there gave us a bag with some food and a sleeping bag, and told us to find a place to sleep. I asked about Cal, but the one soldier I talked to said he didn’t know him, and told us to get a tent, because it was supposed to rain that night.

I didn’t sleep that night. I kept hearing my parents screaming. I kept seeing my parents being torn apart. To this day, I see and hear that every night. I don’t know how it will ever go away. I'm in tears now just thinking of it. I did nothing. I couldn’t do anything.
I’ll never be able to do anything. I’m  a nobody. I almost failed in even keeping my own brother alive.

That night, Megan and Chris slept, although it was fitful. I didn’t sleep.
At all. I was so exhausted, yet my mind kept racing, replaying those scenes over and over in my head. It was while I was awake that I heard the group of soldiers rushing to the main gate. I have no idea what time of the morning it was. It was still raining, and the sun was nowhere in sight. A bus had returned from the gate, or somewhere, I wasn’t sure really. This time, they weren’t offloading people, but soldiers, wounded soldiers. I sat up in the tent and watched, as I had a clear view towards where the bus was.

The soldiers were carried off and taken to a large tent, a hospital of sorts I guess. There was a lot of commotion around the bus. Some soldiers were yelling at others, giving orders
, by the way they were pointing around. I couldn’t understand anything clearly over the sound of the rain. Within a few minutes, three army type trucks came rolling in, and out came a whole bunch of soldiers, all armed and carrying their guns. One of them came running over to the guy that seemed to be in charge. They talked briefly, and then the guy in charge turned and looked towards the camp. He turned back and made a sweeping motion with his hand, pointing at the camp. He pointed at several of the soldiers, and then went back to talking with the soldier who was in front of him. That soldier then yelled back at the soldiers, who looked at him, then began climbing back into the truck. Within a few minutes, those soldiers, along with a whole bunch of the soldiers that had been at this camp, had been loaded up in the trucks, and the trucks had driven off.

I felt really odd about the whole situation. Only five soldiers had been left there
, and they were all by a road barricade that had been pushed into place after the trucks had left. They had ducked down behind the barricades, and had their guns pointed out into the wet blackness of the road. They were waiting for something.

Before the first gunshot, I was already dragging Chris and Megan out of their beds, grabbing whatever food I saw left behind. I had no idea where I was going to go, but I had a horrible feeling that this camp was about to be the least
safe place around. A sleepy Chris and Megan were following me out into the cold rain, when the first shots started cracking into the darkness.

At first it was one or two short shots, but then it opened up into multiple shots being fired. The whole camp burst into life
, and people were slowly and sleepily walking out of, or just peering out of their tents. I took a few quick glances back, and could already see a large crowd of people moving towards the camp from out of the darkness. The gunshots kept going for a while. The three of us kept moving in the opposite direction, headed towards the end of the camp. Then, the gunshots stopped, and from the whole camp, even above the sound of the rain on the tents, came a loud cry. It seemed as if all at once, everyone that now saw the horde coming at them realized what was coming, and they all cried out at once.

We reached the end of the camp
, but it was only more woods. There were two dirt roads that led out in that direction, so we just picked the one on the right and kept moving, walking as fast as we could. We were joined by a few people, but most seemed to have stayed behind. They were in shock, or didn’t know where to go, I'm not sure. I just walked. I closed my eyes as I walked, and I could see my mother and father being torn apart, but this time, what I heard were the shouts and screams of those back in the camp. I cried the whole way.

We walked till the sun began to come up, a small group of us, maybe seven or eight. I
can’t remember. Megan, Chris and I ate whatever food we had managed to get that night before, saving a little for later. We drank from whatever dripped off into our mouths.

As the darkness began to fade, it continued to rain,
and we reached a paved road. Within a few minutes, all sorts of green camo trucks and jeeps, or whatever kind of cars the army has, went flying by every few minutes. We tried stopping them, but we were ignored, and we had to be careful because they were oblivious to us as they flew down the road. At least we were going in the opposite way. I wouldn’t want to go in the direction they were going to fight whatever it was that was out there. Unless, we were heading into it and they had already lost. So we kept walking.

I don’t know when it was, but maybe it was in the afternoon. It had stopped raining
, and slowed to a drizzle. I know we had eaten the last of our food, and were still walking when a small truck pulled up next to us. I hadn’t even heard it driving down. Inside were three soldiers. When I noticed that they had stopped, I ran up to them, hoping we had finally found some help. When the driver rolled down his window, he asked if we needed a ride. I said yes, please, we were lost. Then, he looked at me, and asked me, “What do you have to offer?”

The question caught me off guard, as if I hadn’t heard what he had said. Before I could say that I didn’t know what I could offer
, one of the other soldiers got out of the truck and pointed a gun at me. I was completely confused; I couldn’t understand what they were doing. I started talking about how we hadn’t done anything wrong, and then when I thought that maybe they were confusing us with those diseased people, the zombies, I tried telling them that we weren’t ones, but before I could say anything, he hit me with his gun.