Deadfall: Survivors (3 page)

Funny note
from that wee: I remember a certain group of religious fanatics being so incredibly angry that the rockets had actually worked in destroying the comet. These people had tried to sabotage the rocket launches, and gotten themselves killed for it, while the rest of them had actually built a large temple on the island of Curacao, off of Venezuela. You can guess as to the purposes of the temple. There were going to go to their god in style. Within hours of the rockets doing their job, camera crews were set up on Curacao at their temple, and the fanatics were in tears. Police and military were called in because it was rumored they were all just going to kill themselves anyways. It was a mess, but a mess that drew ratings on TV.

So the end is averted right? Not quite. You see, the comet had one more surprise for us.

I remember the morning of the 17
th
of August; the beginning of the end of the world.

You know, that whole term, the end of the world is quite overblown. I mean, I'm still here. Certainly the “world” is still here. I'm fairly certain that in other places
, other people are still alive as well. Some might say it’s the end of civilization, but, I can attest to that not being completely true either. So what do I call it? Do I need some catchy phrase?

Speaking of (writing actually) catchy phrases, I thought of something yesterday that made me chuckle. As I was walking up to the Inn, I had been watching a pair of squirrels chasing each other among the trees
, and that’s when I first began thinking about the resurgence of wildlife I mentioned earlier. So, I thought to myself:

“It’s good to see so much wildlife as opposed to
wilddead.”

Wilddead
. Undead. Zombies. I really wish I could trademark that somehow.

The not so funny thing about being alone all the time
, is that you laugh at quite stupid things.

I need to find something to eat.

Back to the 17
th
of August, the day the comet hit earth. Well, the tiny little chunks of it that were left over. But whatever was in that comet turned the sky a hazy green that morning. That’s  what I woke up to. I remember walking outside and not really glancing up at the sky,  wondering if there was just a lot of extra eye gunk in my eye that morning, as the coloring outside was certainly off. I kept rubbing my eyes, not in a gesture of disbelief, as I hadn’t really seen anything yet, but because I kept trying to clean my eyes out. Convinced, finally, that my eyes were clear, I began looking around and instantly saw that the sky was green. A bluish green really, but still, not blue, or grey cloudy, but clear, and green.

According to the news
, the bits of the comet that had survived the blast had hit the atmosphere and broken up. Not a single piece actually reached the ground. But the ice had been carrying something in it, obviously green in color. As the day grew on, the green became brighter and brighter. Scientists on TV were theorizing that it might be some kind of plant like living thing that was getting light for the first time in a long time, and was feeding off of it. Of course, there would be no hard proof till Air Force airplanes scoured the high skies, getting samples of the green stuff. Meanwhile, it spread over the world from its entry point somewhere over the Atlantic.

August 19
th
, or 20
th
, I don’t remember precisely which day it was, but the green cloud had covered the whole earth now and people were beginning to panic. But it was an odd sort of panic. Nothing was wrong, nobody was getting sick, and no one was dying from this green cloud. As far as anyone could tell, it was still stuck up high in the sky, up above the clouds. It wasn’t as if it was raining green acid rain on us.

Anyways, it was on one of those days that the news people informed us that the green stuff was some kind of living creature, not quite plant or animal. It was obviously not from this planet
, and so was at that time baffling scientists. It clearly fed off the sunlight, but nowhere nearly as efficiently as plants do. All their tests had shown though that this new creature from outer space wasn’t interacting with anything else here on earth, different DNA structure or some scientific jargon of sort. Also, it was dying off.

This
was the whole mess with the world at the time. It had been a complete rollercoaster of emotions lately. We were going to die, we were not going to die, we might die, we probably wouldn’t die. One day the news bands were saying life as usual, the next, that life would end soon.

So it went like this. A few days later, the green stuff began clearing up; great news th
at day. Next day, the TV informed us that the government smart people had discovered that the green stuff was no longer green, and was actually floating down from the sky.  I really wish I had purchased stock in whatever company made those little white masks people put on their face when they think there is an outbreak of something. Those went in a hurry. Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the money.

So the stuff
was among us now. The entire world was breathing in this new critter from outer space. People were locking themselves up in their homes, in caves, or in subway tunnels. Once again, there was this overwhelming sense of panic about to explode, but nothing clear was happening. No one was falling over dead from the stuff, despite the absolutely terrible news that the little white masks did nothing to stop the green things from getting inside us, and that unless you lived in a completely environmentally sealed glass ball, it was getting in there, too.

The whole world
was uncertain. People weren’t going to work, kids weren’t going to school, and everything was coming to a standstill, yet not falling completely apart.

My dad and I stayed up at our mountain hideout. We had already planned to stay up there for some time, so our plans didn’t change much.

Within days, the government, our president, and plenty of other smart (or at least smart looking) people began to tell us to get on with life. Apparently, this new thing was going to be a part of earth’s biology, and that everything we could see showed us that it did nothing to us and certainly wasn’t harming or killing us.

And so, because there was no immediate danger, because your
neighbor wasn’t puking blood, or your co-worker wasn’t dying sweating and screaming in his bed with a high fever, people went on with their lives.

At the end of the two weeks, I went back into town to my apartment. There were still a few weeks till school began (everything had been pushed back due to the excitement)
, so I cleaned up, began to get my lesson plans in order and, as everyone else was, began going back to life as normal.

Life as normal.

My hands are completely cramped up and I refuse to write anymore today. I do believe I will stay here at the Inn one more day though.
I’d rather have a nice table to write on with as much I need to tell tomorrow.

Notes: For more information on the events leading up to Deadfall, please read Volume 1 of these series.

Evans Notes: You know what the funny thing is? I honestly do not remember these events as well as Brian does. I was too busy in school and hitting on girls. I had never been the kind of guy to follow the news, and really only got into it when the rest of the world started to panic, just a few weeks before the rockets went up.

I also find it a bit amusing that Brian only hints at the vault and what it actually entails. He wasn’t writing to anyone in specific, yet he hides so many details.

Entry 4
[4]

I woke up really early this morning, just a bit before dawn. Something was rustling outside the balcony. Maybe it was the bear. I hope it was the bear. I never would have said something like that just a few years ago. In any case, I saw that the sky was clear, and I opted against staying for one more day here. I packed up quickly, and was on the trail in just a few minutes, chomping on some breakfast bars I had along with me. Honey Nut Cheerios bars. I wonder just how many of those I have back home. I wonder if I would be exaggerating if I said over ten thousand of those bars.

I had originally set this day aside to explain the second part of the end of the world
; the part that actually set humanity back. Well, nearly all the way. Instead, it seems, I decided to witness a little more of the zombie horde on my own.

My hike went really well. A nice cool morning greeted me as I took to the Blue Ridge Parkway
, headed towards Asheville. There was not a single breeze in the air and everything was very silent this morning; a little different than the past few days.

About seven miles down the road,
there’s  a trail that veers off south, down off the mountains, headed in a somewhat southeasterly direction, in as much as a trail can go. It drops off really fast, until you get to a creek that my maps said was called Fletcher Creek. From there the creek joins into Mills River, which hits up the French Broad. You can then use the French Broad to navigate yourself to either Hendersonville, or head north and reach Asheville. You can even follow it into Tennessee, if you somehow needed to get there, and you had no maps. I tend to follow the rivers, mainly because it provides me with water, and it keeps me a bit off the beaten path.

Zombies like to stay on nice
, easy to traverse paths. Interstate 26 is like a river of rotting and walking flesh.

My overall plan was to head into Hendersonville, rummage around, see if anyone was alive, and hopefully, not get myself mauled to death by dead people.

My hike went really well. And by well, I mean that it was devoid of zombies. That was, until I started getting into the farmland that the Mills River was spilling through. At this point, it was really hard to avoid the houses that dotted the countryside.

Towards five in the afternoon, I began to think about perhaps finding one of these homes and making it my shelter for the night. I had no problems sleeping out in the open up in the mountains, but down here, I much preferred being in a lockable room. One with a basement was preferable, but not all of the houses here had them.

I spotted a two story house almost right up against the river. This would provide me with easy water access. The only problem was, as I neared the house, there were  two dead, yet not quite dead, people on the top balcony on the front of the house. One was stuck on something; ropes or chains. He was a man; maybe an older man when alive. The ropes or chains were snagged around his legs, and pulled up and tied on something on the wall. This left him half dangling as he clawed at the porch railing. The other was a smaller person, so maybe a woman, or just, a small person. I couldn’t tell anymore. She, or he, well, really it, was on its feet, but as it walked back and forth on the balcony, it kept getting tripped up by the others arms. The whole scene was somewhat comical.

I was in a bit of a quandary
, as I really didn’t feel like continuing my search for a nice house for the evening, but, I really didn’t have any good way of dealing with them. I didn’t have a gun.

Yes, here I am, living out the end of the world populated by dead human bodies that want nothing more than to tear you to pieces, and I have no gun.

The problem, without getting into much detail, is that I completely stink at using a gun. I understand the mechanism; point and shoot. I know very little past that. I don’t know how to clean guns, or take them apart and put them together again. To top it all off, my biggest fear is that somehow I’ll shoot myself. So, I have avoided having a firearm on me for quite some time.

Back at the house, there is one room completely dedicated to firearms. It’s like a room for movie props.
MK somethings and AR other things. Tons of cool names, like Desert Eagles and probably many other kinds of animals that give you a sense of total badassery. I have often wondered if I have a bazooka in there. That’s really about the only weapon that I know of.

Not true, I know plenty of gun names, just none from our era.

So what to do with these two zombies? Nothing, not a thing. I went into the house, slowly of course, to make sure there were no more of them; the rest of the family perhaps. After finding out that they were the only dead residents, I went up to the second floor and barricaded the door to the balcony as best I could.

From everything I had seen up to this point, our new dead residents on this planet weren’t really the smartest things around. Most of their brain capacity was wasted on moaning and groaning
, while the rest was used to walk them around from corpse to corpse. I went downstairs, and after bringing in a few buckets of river water, I locked everything up as best I could. The whole time, the two I had locked up upstairs made their wonderful death moans, but after I settled into a bed that I REALLY hoped did not belong to them, they quieted down, too.

Oh, and I had another cereal bar for supper.
Too lazy to cook anything. Did I mention I had a lot of these?

Evans Notes: Brian really didn’t know anything about guns. In fact, in all our time together, I don’t think I ever saw him shoot a single gun, not even once, certainly not at any zombie.

He is spot on about the zombies, though. If it wasn’t for the fact that on most occasions they swarmed you, they were completely utterly dumb creatures.