Necrocide

Chapter 59

YEARS AFTER THE OUTBREAK...

As time progressed, the walls of Matheson seemed to rise into the heavens. In fact, one wouldn't even see them as walls. As far as anyone knew, this tower was their world and these walls were borders. Anywhere beyond it wasn't a place where humans belonged.

Matheson was no longer a shelter from the storm. It was an entirely new civilization built from the remnants of an old one. Shops and markets sprung up in the Commons, children played around without a care in the world, and people still found time to entertain themselves. The fact the Commons had a pub certainly helped.

Thus began the journey of maturity for the Cod Squad.

A year after their arrival in Matheson, thirteen-year-old Aaron and his friends gained a mild education from classes hastily set up by a few adults willing to help out the children. Mrs. Hecox found a job in the tower's library and continued to look after and feed her kids. They didn't make much friends, but all they needed was each other. Even if Natalya kept growing more reserved, even avoiding her own twin sister, Kat made a nice addition to the Cod Squad given her enigmatic background. And even after all those years, they hardly knew anything about her, except that she was glad she wasn't in London anymore.

But things changed after their second year in the tower. Due to a brief shortage in medical supplies, sickness was a recurring problem in the tower. People were so busy avoiding being infected by Deadmen, they seemed to forget other diseases still existed in the world. And sadly, it was Kat's fifteenth birthday the day poor Mrs. Hecox past away. Instead of a party, they attended a mass funeral for those who died of the sickness running rampant through the tower and said their final goodbyes to the one person that gave them hope.

The worst part was that burials were no longer done. In order to prevent reanimation, all corpses were cremated. The memory of Mrs. Hecox would live on inside a poorly-crafted urn like everyone else. But instead they asked the AIS officers to spread her ashes outside the tower to honor her for protecting them on their way to their new life.

Fourteen-year-olds Aaron, Nika, and Jonah along with Kat, who was a year older than them, were now alone. Even in a place as cramped as Matheson, Natalya was impossible to find, to the point they thought she had simply left the tower. They had no teacher, no mentor, and no guardian. They spent the next few months begging in the Commons for Ration Cards and getting sleep in a makeshift cube-shaped building in the Commons that functioned as an orphanage.

It wasn't until Aaron had the craziest idea of his life that he and his friends would be saved from starvation and neglect. "What if we became Deadman hunters?" he asked one night.

Since the Outbreak, the Anti-Infection Squad believed they had failed to fulfill their main purpose: to prevent infection. Now that all of England was swarming with Deadmen, they had more than enough proof this was a problem too big for them to handle. As a result, they reestablished themselves as the Dead Zone Infantry, a paramilitary group dedicated to exterminating the Deadmen and reclaiming the infested territory known as the Dead Zone. Colonel Schaefer had reopened their zombie-killing business through the DZI, and unsurprisingly the zombie-killing business was booming.

Jonah and Kat didn't hesitate to support Aaron's idea. They jumped up and down like joyful children as soon as he mentioned joining the DZI. However, Nika, proving herself to be the best shooter of the group during their escape from London, couldn't bring herself to join them. As monstrous and disgusting as those Deadmen were, she couldn't help but think about how they used to be people. Every time she killed one, she felt like she was murdering a puppet, something manipulated against its will by a more malevolent force. She passed on the idea and continued working in Matheson's library having developed a love for books thanks to Mrs. Hecox.