Five Years Ago, When it Began
There was mayhem ensuing outside, instigated mostly by the National Guardsmen and not by the walking corpses. At seventeen, Courtney understood this much. Her father was watching the chaos through the living room window and ranting about it in a hushed tone. Sitting on the couch across the room, maybe she was supposed to hear him and maybe she wasn’t, but she did, so this was one of her last memories of him.
His words were: “Look at them. Idiots on power trips. Just out of high school, three months of boot camp, and now they’re walking around with a gun strapped to their back.” Then, in singsong, he added, “This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun.”
Finally she spoke up. “What are you talking about, dad?”
He glanced at her long enough to show her a fake, everything’s-all-right smile, then gazed out the window again. “Those guys,” he said. “They’re supposed to be protecting us. But did you see what they did to Mister McGreevy down the street? Took him out of his house; bullied him around. They’re just kids, barely out of high school, no more than a year older than you, Court. They’re too stupid to go to college, to get a scholarship or whatever, so they join the Service. Get bullied around in bootcamp. They learn responsibility, but not intelligence.” Another gunshot spliced through the air. Her father winced, but otherwise didn’t pause. “They talk about how wearing the uniform gets them girls. So the fact remains that they’re still stupid, but now they’re on a power trip because they’ve got a gun. They’re still kids, though, so they’re scared. Just as scared as the rest of us. Add all that up and you’ve got a bunch of scared little kids who have guns, who are given positions of authority, but no intelligence to use it properly, and are therefore on one gigantic power trip. Promotions occur from within, so there’s always going to be an idiot in charge. Disaster, I say. Disaster.”
He had scared her now quite thoroughly, but she didn’t tell him. The National Guard—the frickin’ Army—was outside in the streets shooting off their guns and that was scary enough. Now she was hearing that they might not be the heroes her father was expecting. Even worse, his pessimistic attitude was beginning to make perfect sense and it frightened her to the very core.
“Did you get your mom a glass of water?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“Take her some aspirin?”
“Yeah.”
“Check the bandage?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s it look?”
She hesitated a moment before replying, “Gross.”
A look of worry showed on his face for the briefest of moments, then subsided. He mumbled, “Goddamn medics. It’s just a bite. Why the hell can’t they make it better?”
Courtney cried then, putting her palms over her eyes and resting her elbows on her knees. She made sure she wept softly. She didn’t want to be the center of attention.
Her father was a strong man—a smart man. He lifted weights regularly in the basement. He had a government-funded job in an office designing respirators. Like everyone else on earth, he had had a life and a history and so he was unique—and just as could be said about most people, he was so unique no amount of words could describe him. Like many daughters, Courtney saw her father as one of the strongest men in the world. But he was scared and he had made it evident. He let it slip. Maybe it was by mistake or maybe he just didn’t care anymore. She was used to seeing him handle problems one way or another, either by muscle or by brains, but here he was helpless. She knew he understood that as well as she did.
When the dead guy had broken through the back door, her dad took it to the ground and pummeled it with alternating left and right fists. He had been watching the news enough over the past week to know what was happening across the country, but he never figured it would spill onto the north
But then the dead guy got back up and bit into her mom’s shoulder. It wasn’t much—it wasn’t much at all. Just a scratch. Nobody was supposed to get sick from a scratch.
Her dad went after the intruder again, attacking it this time with the entire kitchen table, lifting the table up and slamming it back down again and again on the dead man’s spine. The dead man still moved after that though, albeit pathetically, as it seemed paralyzed from the neck down. They stood there and watched it, the three of them—Courtney, her father, her mother, until Courtney realized:
“Dad, that’s Mister Coolidge!”
Her father’s eyes opened wide at that point, when he too realized he had just fought with Mike Coolidge, the guy who had the house that neighbored theirs in the back. He was a mess now and had several small bite wounds of his own across his arms. Her father put on a pair of dishwashing gloves and dragged the wriggling body onto the back porch and tied it to the grill with a roll of duct tape. He was then going to go to Mister Coolidge’s house to check on his children and make sure they were safe.
He didn’t get the chance.
That was when the National Guard rolled in and royally fucked up everything.
They were somewhat helpful at first—making sure everyone was okay, treating the bite on her mom’s shoulder, sealing off the streets with tanks, patrols, and barbed wire. It should have made for an impenetrable barricade. They were even treating the situation rather lightly, in her opinion, by posing with the walking dead and taking photographs with full-on smiles.
But then bad things started happening. They started losing contact with other battalions stationed throughout the north
The National Guardsmen outside Courtney’s home started fighting amongst themselves as they argued over who was in charge or who was going to be in charge. Any of the soldiers who were pacifistic and willing to take orders just wanted someone—anyone—to be given an impromptu promotion so the confrontations would end, but the more aggressive ones continued shouting back and forth until it escalated into violence. A couple of them shot each other, which—among other factors—caused a couple of the pacifistic soldiers to shoot themselves. Even elderly Mr. McGreevy was assaulted when he tried to bring order to one of the gun-toting youths. Apparently no civilian was going to be permitted a voice in this debacle.
This all led to Courtney’s mom resting in bed, sicker than she’d ever seen her, pale and vomiting, and her father staring out the living room window cursing the soldiers who were supposed to be their saviors.
It went on this way for a couple of hours. It was then that her father started seeing the Guardsmen going door to door and taking people from their homes—forcefully at times—and loading them into deuce-and-a-halfs. Courtney always believed her father knew what was going on before she did, which was probably why he told her to go upstairs and put some clothes into a backpack. When she came back down with backpack in tow, he was already unzipping it to stuff in a couple of oranges, bottles of water, and some hastily-made sandwiches. He hugged her, told her he and her mother loved her, and kissed her on the forehead. He seemed uneasily calm.
She really didn’t have enough time to have a good cry or even time to think up any words to tell her father. The Guardsmen were already at the door.
The first soldier aimed his gun at her father while the second stated, “Uninfected women and children only.”
With that, the soldier took Courtney by the arm and ushered her out the front door. She heard the second soldier ask if there was anyone else matching the criteria and heard her father tell him no, followed by, “Take care of my girl.” She didn’t hear anything after that. The soldiers didn’t answer her father or even acknowledge he had said anything.
Tightly gripping the straps of her backpack with the fear it would be confiscated, she was put in the back of the deuce-and-a-half, which had only been partly modified to resemble an armored personnel carrier. There were other women and children in there with her—all people she knew, all equally frightened, and most of them she would see die before the day ended.
The big diesel monster took off down the street with a thunderous roar and would later join with a convoy of humvees, tanks, halftracks, and more deuce-and-a-halfs.
It all seemed to happen so quickly.
And that was how it began, five years ago.
0 comments:
Post a Comment