Blood - A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

Playtime

Playtime

Three weeks later we were on the move again. Jacob had wanted to stay longer, but I’d insisted we got out. I couldn’t stand being in that house, trapped in that dimly lit tomb. It was too constricting, too closed, too dangerous. Jacob had tried to convince me that it would have been safer, smarter to stay. We had resources to last us a while, and the property was secure. But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t take being inside any longer.

So we’d left. Deciding where to go had been the toughest thing. Where do you go when the world has died? In the end we’d decided to just walk. See where to road took us. Try find if the other new cities that had only just begun to reclaim civilization had been overrun again, or whether they had taken proper precautions against the possibility of re-infection. If there even were such things as ‘proper precautions.’

See, when the infection first hit, no one had really believed it. They’d seen the news reports sure, of a small island being completely decimated by a freak virus. 2/3 of the population killed in a matter of days. That people had believed. That they’d lapped up as if they had been waiting for it. Facemasks became standard attire halfway across the world. Churches proclaimed it as the day of reckoning. Hand sanitizer sales rocketed. It was as if people had been expecting it. As if it was only a matter of time until a deadly plague took out the entire human race.

Problem was, suddenly people weren’t just dying anymore. They were getting back up. They were undead. Zombies. That no one could wrap their minds around. Something like that couldn’t happen. Not for real.

Sure, there had been plenty of extremists who immediately began constructing their zombie proof fortresses, but most of the population just didn’t accept it as truth. A lie, made up by the media, or a gross exaggeration. A fake. A myth. Anything but reality.

We’d even joked about it. Our zombie apocalypse preparations we’d all been quietly making ourselves for the past few years were released and discussed in detail with each other. It didn’t worry us, we were sorted, should the worst come to pass. We had our plans. The schools even introduced new evacuation plans, which naturally we’d all but ignored. If a zombie’s ran into school no way we were lining up on the courts like good little children. No, we were thinking more along the lines of feed them Ms Mackay for bait, then gapping it to the back field.

Strangely enough, that had been the time that the student body was the most friendly and co-operative it had ever been. We were united against the stupid adults with their panic and false plans. We knew what we were doing, unlike them. It was easy enough to keep it lighthearted because we knew it wasn’t real. It was just another fad, like global warming or 2012 that would come to pass. None of this was actually going to happen.

And gradually, it did seem to pass. The TV stations showed less and less of that poor island, as all there who were capable of reporting the story met the same fate as their subjects. Everyone relaxed. Yes it was horrible what had happened to them, but at least it was isolated. No one had been allowed on or off the island since the beginnings of the infection, and with no survivors there was no one to carry the plague to us.

It didn’t seem to occur to anyone the possibility that it might be airborne.

Then one day, after the world had been infected and we discovered that perhaps we had taken the threat a little lighter than we should have, it stopped. Those with the infection just disappeared. Gone. The infection was gone. Armageddon was over. And we were left to resume society.

Yeah, that’d lasted long.

“Hey,” Jacob grinned and gave me a nudge. “Check it out.”

After a day and a half of walking we’d found ourselves in a rural area some distance from the reformed township, wandering along an endless gravel road. After much deliberation we’d opted to leave the car behind. Besides the fact that it was half destroyed from our first ride, we didn’t want to risk the noise attracting the hoard. Sure it would get us to our destination faster, but when you don’t have a destination, what’s the point? Walking was fine, almost relaxing in a way. Just stumbling along, letting the road take us and finding whatever enjoyment we could from just being in the outside air. We were more in control on foot. I didn’t particularly want to repeat the ordeal of Jacob’s driving either.