The North (#wattys2016)

Chapter 1

Journal Entry: 12 November 22:15 HRS ZULU

I’m on sentry duty in about fifteen minutes, so a quick note. There are only eight of us left now that Sgt. Green is gone. Sid Toomey is now the oldest person in a group ranging in age from eight-years-old to seventeen.

Mom is dead. I should be mourning her loss but I’ve given up on the idea because there’s just no point anymore. Maybe in the madness of the days and weeks following the siege Mom fell into the inescapable blackness of depression over our hopeless situation or maybe her mind simply wouldn’t accept what her eyes bore witness to. Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter now because part of me believes that nobody will survive. I didn’t tell Jo I found a gun lying next to Mom’s body or the right side of her head was missing.

But I took the gun.

Death prowls in clusters of ten or twenty that can sometimes grow as large as a small army if the creeps ever catch a whiff of your scent. Their outstretched arms and claw-like hands drip gore onto the pavement, and their shuffling feet echo in the distance when the night is clear and cold. When they swarm you; their inhuman voices will cry out, screeching, raging and animal-like, and it’s only a matter of time until they burst through the barricade of your hiding place wherever it might be.

I’m all that Jo has left; it falls on me to save her life and perhaps my own, though lately, it’s near impossible to believe that any life can be saved when the sun hasn’t shone in more than six months. The sky is a flat grey canvas that blankets the burning cityscape like a body bag, and the air is tainted with the smell of smoke and blood and putrefying bodies because the dead surround us. We can’t stay here in the armory. We need to get out of the city.

 

I took the first sentry shift at 23:00 along with Melanie Dixon. She was sporting a doo-rag and she’d recently shaved her head. That Pam Cruze had also shaved her head and was wearing a doo rag had me thinking the pair might be an item, not that I or anyone else left alive gave a damn. If Cruze and Melanie had found something resembling happiness in this hell-hole new world, even temporary satisfaction, then good on them. We stood atop the north tower and gazed out over the blocks of overturned and smashed up cars and trucks that clogged the streets surrounding the armory. Less than a hundred yards away shambled small groups of the monsters, tripping and stumbling through the debris of a city that had transformed into a nightmare world where the dead don’t fucking stay dead and the living are just meat. Four stories below us in the parking compound a fire blazed furiously, fueled by the bodies of the creeps and Sgt. Green.

He kept us going. He kept us alive even though our numbers whittled away in the weeks and months after Day Zero, the day when the old world ended.

“It doesn’t seem right to burn his body along with the monsters,” said Melanie as she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her combat jacket. “We should have known those three were infected.”

When she said “we”, what Melanie really meant was that I should have known. I had been Sgt. Green’s 2IC, his second-in-command. I had only a year under my belt as a militia soldier, but I’d shown a knack for organizing the team and the wily old Afghanistan war veteran picked me to be his back-up. That was two months ago.

“I don’t know what we could have done any differently, Mel,” I replied, as I spotted a creep stagger through a debris-filled alleyway and fall flat on its face. It slowly got back to its feet and continued stumbling mindlessly down the middle of 9th Avenue. “They probably became infected when the creeps swarmed the fence two days ago. It was dark and we couldn’t exactly start shooting the fucking things because gunfire attracts every creep within earshot.”