From Dawn (published)

Eleven

Sunday

dawn

Kay had screamed when her friend collapsed to the floor. The hospital staff had rushed to her aid, but Dawn had fallen into a sudden coma. Despite their best efforts, that was how she remained for hours.

Dawn's mom came. She and Kay spent the whole night sitting by her bedside, hoping for a change, watching for any sign that Dawn was going to wake up. Kay was so distraught over her friend's condition that she completely ignore the throbbing in her own head that only got worse as time wore on.

Doctors came and went, running tests and silently taking notes in Dawn's file. She was one of four people who ended up hospitalized with the same mysterious symptoms that day.

Those four were only the beginning.

By the end of the next day, Kay would join the growing number of people stricken, but as the sun came up that Sunday morning, she wasn't thinking about herself. An alarm had started to blare, bringing a flood of scrub clad people into Dawn's room.

Kay and her mother had stayed back, watching as they tried desperately to keep Dawn alive. But it had not worked in the end. The first rays of the morning sun had just started to peek into the room when the doctor declared Dawn dead with a defeated tone.

The morgue was on the lowest level of the building, and the man who wheeled the body into it's quiet depths had made the trip more than a few times over the years. There was rarely anyone down there, so he wasn't at all surprised to find the place empty. Pushing the body toward the cooler, he pulled open the door, and stopped in his tracks.

Inside the walk in cooler, another body was zipped into a black bag. Except this one was moving.

Panicked that a live person had somehow been mistaken for dead, the man rushed forward to unzip the bag. A face that , if she was still alive Dawn would remember as the demanding customer whose drink she had spit in, emerged from the bag. Except, the would be savior had gotten it wrong. That bloated grey face belonged to a dead man after all.

Screaming in terror, the hospital employee had fled the morgue, failing to close any of the doors behind himself. By the time security arrived to see what the incoherent worker had been babbling about, there was no sign of the body that belonged in the unzipped bag.

They did, however, note that the body bag still on the gurney outside of the cooler seemed to be moving. Moving closer, the older of the two guards reached to pull the zipper down.

From inside the bag, slim grey hands emerged, clutching at the guard with unusual strength. Yelping, the guard tried to pull his hand away, but Dawn's corpse followed him, her hands and teeth clamped onto his forearm.

The guards were otherwise occupied, trying to avoid becoming lunch for a dead woman, and they didn't respond to the calls about a sickly, disoriented man wandering the halls and growling at people. It was only after that man violently attacked another patient that police came and put an end to his short campaign of terror.

If they had had time, maybe someone would have eventually traced those first cases back to the first person infected. As it happened, the illness spread too fast, and before they even knew what was happening, the body count soared.

No one ever figured out that the zombie outbreak had come from Dawn.

***

That's it! I hope you all enjoyed From Dawn. This story was just a bit of fun that came to me one day as I was contemplating the intricacies of a zombie apocalypse (thanks to The First 30 Days, lol). It struck me that I'd never given much thought to the very first infected person, and what their last hours would be like. I tend to automatically jump straight into the gritty part of the story, and I wanted to explore this idea a little more.

I hope I did it justice.

Next up for me, is After 30 Days. I have already begun work on the sequel to The First 30 Days. I plan to begin posting chapters on Radish 9-30-17, and here on Wattpad 10-30-17. (As of this posting, The first 3 chapters are now up on Radish).

As always, you all keep me coming back. Thank you for reading From Dawn ❤

~Lora