Pandemic - Prologue

I woke up with a start. I looked around, but everything was normal. I guessed the plane had hit some turbulence. Most of the other passengers hadn't woken up, which I decided was normal for an overnight flight from Las Vegas to New York City. "I look drunk." I thought. My white button up shirt was un-tucked in places and my tie was loose. "That's what you get from a week in Vegas." I tucked my shirt in and fixed my tie. Then I leaned my seat back and closed my eyes.

The fasten seat belt light came on. I looked out my window as the plane approached the bright lights of nighttime... somewhere. "That's not New York." I thought out loud. Almost immediately the pilot came on over the intercom, saying that there was a slight change in their flight plan and they were landing in some small town that I had never heard of. "Must not be that small if its airport has room for a 747." I thought to myself. As the plane landed, the captain informed everyone that it would be awhile before they actually taxied to the gate, as there were about fifteen planes in front of them.

I turned my phone on and tried to call my boss, with no effect. I saw that I had no bars, which was weird for an airport. I put my phone back in my pocket. I got my laptop out of its carrying case in the overhead bin and sat back down. I checked and saw that it didn't have a signal. I looked out of my window and saw that my plane was finally pulling up to the gate. The fasten seat belt light turned off and everyone stood up simultaneously. Everyone surged forward in unison as the pilots voice came over the intercom again, "Thank you for flying US airlines, we hope you choose us again-", and the pilot's voice was drowned out. I sat down to let everyone pass, preferring to wait a little longer than to have to shove my way out of the plane.

In the terminal, I got my luggage from the baggage claim area, and then I bought a horrible Dunkin Donuts coffee. As I sipped, I rolled up my sleeve and looked at my watch. It was eleven o' clock at night. I figured I should get to my apartment. I walked to the rental car place and talked to the old man behind the counter. There were three cars left: a Jeep, a BMW convertible, and a Nissan... thing. In the end, I settled on the convertible, since I liked to ride in style. Thanking the old man, I pocketed the keys and headed out to the rental car lot. I saw my car and hopped in. I turned the ignition and locked the doors. Since it was a particularly chilly night, I decided to keep the windows and top up. I pulled out of the lot, my headlights arcing through the darkness as I turned onto the road.

I sped along a nearly deserted highway toward New York. I weaved in between the few cars I came upon, occasionally switching lanes or making turns as the green signs directed. I saw another sign, this one saying that New York was only five miles ahead. As the pre-dawn sky began lighting up, I drove even faster. I checked my watch again. It was one in the morning.

I pulled into my apartment complex's driveway. I chose a parking spot close to my building and killed the engine. I had always thought that they put me in the last apartment building on purpose, since I specifically asked to be as close to the gate as possible so that I could get to work that much faster. Oh well. My dress shoes made loud thuds against the wooden steps as I jogged to my second floor apartment. At any point in the day, I'm usually thinking about work or something, but I couldn't think of anything to think about. That sounds weird, but I usually don't waste my time with idle thoughts, so I choose a topic to exert myself on. The sun was coming up. I unlocked my apartment door with the key I keep in a flowerpot and walked inside.

I set my suitcase down on the table and flicked on the lights. "My home away from home." I thought. It was smaller than I remembered it. But it was still roomy, with its small kitchen, its two-couch living room, its one bathroom, and its one bedroom. And did I mention it's all one story? So yeah, it wasn't the largest apartment out there, actually it was probably one of the smallest, but it was still clean and close to work, making it a fair trade. Hopefully. I sat at the coach with a bowl of cereal and turned on the TV. Everything was static. Weird. I flicked through all the channels, with static on every one of them. I turned off the TV and sat in silence. The clock cat a neighbor gave me seemed to be louder with each tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. I put the remote down and stood up, then I went to my room to get a book. Lying down on the couch, I read until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore and then fell asleep.

In the morning, I made coffee and showered. As I was getting dressed, I realized that if I returned the rental car, then I wouldn't be able to get back. As I was pondering the situation, there was a knock at the door. I walked over and opened it. A large man in a Hazmat suit stood in front of me. "Step aside." He said. He was very intimidating, so I did. He also had a gun, which helped somewhat. Another person dressed exactly like him followed. They looked like they were in the military, so I didn't say anything as they looked through all my stuff. A soldier told me to stand by the door while the other men searched through my rooms. When they were finished, they filed past me out the door, and one of them told the soldier that I was "Clean". While I didn't know what that meant, it sounded good, do I didn't panic. Looking up and down the hallway, I could see my neighbors' rooms being searched, too.

The soldier told a SWAT team member who looked just as confused as I was to take me to the trucks. The soldier looked at me and said, "If you've got anything important to you, like medicine, an ID or your passport, you'll want to get it now. Then this guy", he pointed at the SWAT officer, "will take you to the trucks. Will you comply?" It sounded more like a demand than a question, so I said yes. "Good." He said. Then he walked down the hall to help out with... whatever was going on. I was obviously very confused, so the SWAT guy had to tell me a couple times to get my stuff before I actually did. I ran back inside, grabbed my coat, my wallet, and my passport, and then ran back outside. The SWAT guy walked me down the hallway and outside. As he pushed open an emergency exit, I put my arm up to shield myself from the bright early morning sun. When my eyes had adjusted, I put my arm down and saw a scene of chaotic order. Helicopters flew overhead toward the city center, and a jet screamed by somewhere high above.

Four large covered trucks idled in the center of the apartment complex. I could see people finding seats and helping others on while a tall man in officers' uniform barked orders into a megaphone. My very first thought was that not everyone would fit. And the very first thing that happened after we took two steps outside was another soldier running up and whispering to the SWAT officer that he didn't think everyone was going to fit. This worried me. The SWAT officer and I walked across the courtyard toward the trucks. I overheard an officer yelling into a walkie-talkie to "Hold the line." I overheard two soldiers that were whispering while they walked over to an apartment building, and one of them said, "They were running now." I took a step toward a truck with a large eighty-three painted on the side.

"It's full." Said a heavyset NYPD cop who looked like he hadn't had time to shave or shower this morning.
"What about the next one?"

"They're all full." He said. And with that, he knocked on the truck driver's door. The truck pulled out of the lot and started driving away from the city. The other trucks slowly pulled out and followed it. I still wasn't sure how this affected me, or why I should be on those trucks. And then five jets screamed by that seemed literally inches above our heads, though I'm sure that was just the sound making me think it was closer than it was. Seconds later I heard a large explosion, followed by four more, coming from the direction off the city. I was understandably worried at this point. The soldiers were all packing up there gear and getting into Humvees. The officer with the megaphone started yelling for "Everyone to pull back" immediately. Creepy. The SWAT guy pulled me to a Humvee and whispered to the driver. The next thing I knew, a soldier had helped me into the back, then ran around to the other side and gotten in next to me.

The driver was a woman, surprisingly, and in the seat next to her was a wounded soldier gibbering hysterically. He was clutching his sleeved arm, which was bloody from whatever wound was under it. The driver pulled onto the road. She had a sense of urgency, as if she wanted to drive away as fast as possible. I also had a sense of urgency, though mine was because New York seemed like a warzone. "CDC has already pulled out." The soldier next to me said to the driver. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror. She looked like she didn't want to talk around me. Finally, she gave up and said, "How many civilians saved?"
"Only a couple hundred. Maybe a thousand." Said the soldier next to me. The driver didn't speak. The only sounds in the Humvee were the soft drone of the wheels on the road and the wounded man quietly mumbling to himself. I finally broke the silence.

"Um... what were the civilians saved from? Or... not from?"
There was another long silence. "Want to know the truth? Said the guy next to me. "We don't really know what they were."

"What?" I said.
"We don't know what those things were that we saved them from. Or... didn't save them from."
"How could you not know? It's got to be something, terrorists or militants or... something!"
"Those things... weren't alive anymore..."
Before I could say anything else, the wounded man passed out and slumped over in his chair. The soldier next to me reached over and took his pulse.
"Um.... he doesn't have a pulse." Said the soldier.
'What?" Yelled the driver.
"He does-"

"I heard you the first time!" Yelled the driver.
And then the wounded soldier's entire body shuddered. The driver stopped the Humvee at the side of the road. Everyone was silent. I think everyone was hoping that we had just imagined it, that it had just been a trick of the eyes. The driver was the first to speak.
"Mark," she said to the soldier next to me, "Check his pulse again." He reached over and checked.
"He still-"
"Everybody out of the Humvee!" Yelled the driver.

Everyone got out of the Humvee and slammed the doors simultaneously. Inside, the wounded man shuddered again. A black foamy liquid started leaking out of his mouth. And then his eyes snapped open. Everyone gasped and stepped back. The... thing, it wasn't a man anymore, started struggling against its seat belt.
"What the f-" I started to say, but the driver cut me off.

"Shish!" She said, holding a finger to her mouth. "It hasn't seen us, yet." The soldier, Mark, was about to say something when the thing started trying to bite through its seat belt. And, the extremely frightening thing was that it was succeeding. With just a few bites, it had bitten through the seat belt and started smacking the window. If it hadn't seen us before, it definitely saw us now. I looked into its eyes, and the thing that looked back definitely wasn't human. The thing hit the window, and a large crack appeared in the glass. It raised its arm to swing again, and we started running down the road away from the direction we had come from. We rounded a curb, and heard the sound of glass shattering behind us. I didn't look back. We continued running. On one side of us there were fields and farmland, and on the other side there were trees and what looked like a trailer park. Straight ahead the road turned into dirt, and a sign overhead showed that the small town my plane had landed in was only a few miles ahead. I wondered why we had been driving on side roads instead of the highway. After we had run for what felt like hours, we stopped to catch our breath.

"What was that?" I said a little too loudly. I stared at Mark and the driver. From the direction of the trailer park, we heard screaming.
"We should g-", Mark started.
"No, not until you tell me what that thing was!" I yelled, grabbing Mark's arm.
"We don't know, ok? We, the military, the government, nobody knows."
I stood there for a moment and then let go of his arm and turned to the driver. "Where are we going anyway?"
"Away from New York."
We heard another scream from the trailer park. We started running.

It was getting dark. Up ahead, a barn stood next to a farmhouse, with its doors wide open. We crept up outside and listened, and then, satisfied that no one was inside, we sneaked in and climbed into the hayloft. Pulling the ladder up behind us, we settled down for the night on makeshift beds of hay.

I couldn't sleep. It was partly because I was lying on hay and partly because the dead were walking. I closed my eyes and tried listening to night sounds. I could here cicadas calling and crickets chirping. A bird or two were singing to each other. I began to nod off, smiling slightly because nature had reminded me that everything would be ok. Then everything was silent. I heard something between a shriek, a moan, and a scream. I heard someone running across the field outside the barn, pursued by one of those things, its uneven running, more like loping, making soft thuds as it chased the person towards the barn. It sounded like it was limping while it ran. It also sounded like it was still faster than the person. I heard a scream, human this time, as the thing pounced on the man. I covered my ears, telling myself that at any moment the infected would kill him and he would be quiet. I clenched my ears even tighter, mumbling a prayer to myself. But it never killed him. And he never stopped screaming.

The next day, I woke up before the others. I wanted to make sure the man was dead. I lowered the ladder and climbed down. I reached the bottom and stepped onto the grounded, telling myself that this was stupid and that I was going to get myself killed. Trying to hear anything that might be outside, I made no sounds at all and crouched down. Satisfied, I stepped outside and immediately regretted it. There, in the middle of the field, was a corpse. The ground around it was stained with blood, and I could see the grass near it had been flattened. I could also see that the entire inside of its torso had been eaten, with its broken ribs exposed to the morning air. Its throat had also been violently ripped out, and its arms and legs had large bite marks all over them. It looked like part of its jaw was also gone. A wave of exhaustion rolled over me and I sank to my knees.

Looking down at the ground, the thought occurred to me that we were facing an enemy that was impossible to beat. I looked up at the corpse, or would it be better to call it a carcass? It was disgusting, its ribs picked clean, chunks of its arms missing, places in it where the bone was exposed. I couldn't handle looking at it. So I passed out. While I was unconscious, I dreamed that I had been dreaming, with me waking up in the morning at my apartment and everything being fine, and me going to work in the morning. In my dream, I owned the BMW, and I was the CEO at my company. I knew it was just a dream, but a subconscious part of me, a part deep inside me but at the same time making up most of me, wanted to believe that it was real. And so I did. I lied to myself, telling myself that I really had just dreamed the whole thing, that I really could afford a BMW, that I really did run a company that, in real life, I could not even remember the name of. When I finally woke up, Mark was shaking me, and I could hear the driver, vomiting somewhere behind me. What was her name? I realized that she might have saved my life back at the apartment complex, which seemed like it was years ago. I shakily got to my feet. Mark stood several feet in front of me, staring down at the body. It sounded like he was praying. I turned to the driver.

"Thank you."
She looked at me questioningly. "For what?" She said, wiping the dirt on her hands onto her pant legs.
"For... for letting me into the Humvee. And not just leaving me out here." I said, gesturing to the world around us. I extended my hand, and she took it.
"I'm glad I did." She said as I helped her to her feet. I could tell she meant it. Mark walked over to us.
"So," he said, "Where are we headed?"