Resurrection of the Fallen (Book 1): Surviving New York (4 page)

Chapter 5

New York- September 12, 2020

Sometime in the morning

I
t had been four long years since the destruction of mankind. Four long years of being on the run from certain death. Four long years to watch my companions and family suffer, only to lose their minds slowly. The ferryman, who we came to know as Rob, was the first to do so. It was difficult to watch him go through the mental anguish that he had to deal with. He had found out the hard way that his wife and daughter had turned sometime while we were making our way to Coney Island. We hurried to his home, which was the closest to the docks. The streets were surprisingly quiet and deserted for that time of day. It only added to our confusion and fear after the death of my step mom. His neighborhood was no different. The homes were quiet with no one outside. Upon walking up in front of his driveway, though, it was clear that his family had fallen victim. They were attacked outside their door with a load of groceries in the van. We didn’t have to wait long to find out what had happened to them. The blood on the porch was more than enough of an indication before they came walking from the backyard, undead. His stop was the first and only one we made that day and it was easy to see he couldn’t handle it. His mental capacity diminished rapidly. A few months into our fight for survival, we watched as he left the safety of our locked down office building and meandered out into a mass of zombies, ending his life in the most awful way I could possibly imagine at that point. We all felt that he had blamed himself for not being home that day to protect them and this death was his way to make himself pay for his mistake.

The captain, who we learned was named Jessup, took a little longer to reach that same point. A year and a half after Rob’s suicide, he stole Brantley’s revolver in the middle of the night and shot himself in the head outside as we slept. The gunshot had startled us awake in time to see a horde of zombies jump onto his limp body. Retrieving the gun back later was easier said than done. We had to wait two days for the undead to dissipate from the area, and from Jessup’s body, before we could safely go out and get it. Then there were five of us left: me, my dad, Samantha, Reagan, and Brantley.

Even though we stayed a group after the Coney Island incident, it was clear that there were three factions within it. My family and I stayed to ourselves pretty much while Reagan and Brantley stayed to themselves. Occasionally, Reagan would interact with me. It was hard to ensure everyone’s survival like that, especially with Reagan wanting to follow her own set of rules. I can’t even recall how many times she and Brantley almost killed us all. Her ‘survival’ schemes were ill-thought out and usually ended in zombies chasing us down. Every time we had to leave supplies behind and find a new place to live. That didn’t stop her plans from coming, unfortunately. She continued her adolescent-like ways no matter what the cost. In fact, the only good thing she ever did was to figure out these things were blind to light.

She captured a zombie once, about two years ago, and brought it to the office building we were hiding out at. Our horror was unimaginable to be sleeping and get woken up by the distinct shuffling of a zombie walking through the floor we were on. We awoke, startled, and reached for our knives only to find a zombie wrapped up in a bed sheet being coaxed over to us by this insane twenty-three year old woman. All she could say was ‘Good, you’re awake. Watch this’ as she shined her flashlight into the zombie’s face. He paused in his hunt of her for a moment, raising his nose to sniff out the air, before stumbling around like he was drunk. She started to talk to him, letting him hone in on her voice, and led him to run into one of the walls. Knowing that she had proved her point, she deftly pulled out one of her many daggers and delivered the death blow to the back of his head. Scared as we were by her disregard to our safety, we couldn’t believe our luck with this news. We could safely move about in the daylight. The only thing Brantley could say was ‘you just had to kill that thing in here, didn’t you?’ I agreed with him, but I’d never tell her that. After all, this was our living space and now there was a zombie dead within it and the blood stained the floor.

Brantley was the first one I secretly hoped would fall victim to the outbreak. I still hope for that now, although I might just kill him myself before it’s over with. I would often catch him pulling my sister over to the side every chance he thought he wasn’t being watched. His explanation was that he had lost his sister ten years ago when she was the same age as Samantha, but I couldn’t believe he was doing it because he missed his sister. A brother, and someone that was supposed to be harmless, wouldn’t touch a child’s arm the way he would touch Samantha’s. Anyone in their right mind wouldn’t caress a child’s arm with their fingertips as they whispered in hushed tones. I brought my concerns to my father a year ago and Samantha stopped going around the creep. He developed such a horrible attitude when that happened that no one really wanted to be around him. That in itself proved what I knew in my heart to be true.

How we survived this long with two people like Reagan and Brantley, I’ll never know. How we survived at all is something that I’ll never understand. One thing I do know: had my dad died four years ago instead of my step mom, Samantha and I wouldn’t be here. I chalk our luck up to the fact that my dad was a ranger and it taught him so much over the few years he worked as one. My step mom would’ve shut down had the game been reversed and Samantha and I would’ve fallen victim not long after the outbreak. We would’ve been a part of the problem instead of a possible solution to it. Perhaps it would’ve only taken a few months after the outbreak. I’m not saying that I’m glad she’s gone because I’m not. All I’m saying is that my dad being here with us was our saving grace.

Her loss still takes its toll on him even now. I can see him suffering internally and I have a theory about what keeps running through his head daily. I know he regrets every decision he made that led us to her doom. I know he thinks about how much easier it would be if we were where she’s been. And I can see that he’s lost his faith over the years. Before the outbreak, he was a devout Christian, but it was clear that this virus has broken him. He keeps saying she’s in a better place, but keeps questioning why his children aren’t; why Samantha isn’t. I know he tries his hardest to hold onto the last shred of faith he has left, but he’s crumbling. Now he’s only half the man he used to be, or so he claims. His only motivation to get up and keep going now is his children that are dependent upon him for everything. He couldn’t leave us to fend for ourselves.

Poor Samantha… She hasn’t spoken much since she witnessed her mother being beaten. She sits by herself in her own little world playing with the little baby dolls we had found for her over the years in abandoned buildings. One of them she favored the most: a little doll with tight, blonde curls and brown eyes just like her mother. We went through a great deal to get that one for her. I closed my eyes as I thought back on that moment in time. She had seen the doll sitting in one of the windows we passed by on our search for a new place to live. She cried for it until our dad stopped the car so we could retrieve it. Unbeknownst to us at the time, the building, a small retail store, was swarming with undead creatures. They had been hiding out toward the back of the place where the light from the window couldn’t reach. We fought for our lives, almost losing my dad in the process. We were surrounded at one point, but managed to stay on top of the fight and defeat the zombies. It wasn’t worth risking our lives for, but it pained me to see her hug and kiss on it knowing she longed for what was taken from her.

She had shut everyone out, including our dad. The only thing she cared about anymore was keeping that doll by her side. That first year, she had lost a significant amount of weight and had started looking like the beasts that hunted us down. She got so sick that I ended up having to force feed her anything she would keep down. We feared that she wouldn’t make it, but she did. Now, at ten years old, she has become independent. A tiny, little adult with her own needs and wants to satisfy. Something about all this turns even the softest people to hardened fighters.

Once we had moved locations to a hotel a few blocks down from the library in New York, Samantha spent her afternoons playing with dolls while I spent mine out on the balcony of our room. I would observe everything that happened below us on the streets. When the outbreak first occurred, the zombies would hibernate during the day. I guess because there were plenty of normal people left that they didn’t need to stay on the move to eat. Now with our kind’s numbers dwindling rapidly, zombies are out all day and all night scavenging. They would comb every building that they could get into. Cars weren’t safe and God forbid you were located by even one of them. Within seconds, a swarm would surround you. They would stop at nothing to get to their next meal. The most shocking part was that some had turned to eating one another just to be able to eat something.

Many times I’ve laid there on that balcony and watched as one zombie ate another. It’s horrific, but it gives me hope that we could survive this. I’ve learned that they can eat each other, but it also kills them from the inside out. It was almost as if eating their own kind was a poison for them. I’ve watched the same zombie eat others over and over just to see how sick it made her. She would be fine for three hours or up to three days before spewing black ooze through her mouth from her stomach. It didn’t matter how much she ate, it would always end the same. The first time I saw it, my stomach turned in circles and I threw up along with her.

She did this for a month, every time the sickness got worse and worse, before she fell over and never got back up. The next morning, while the sun hung high in the sky, I went out to check on her to see why she wasn’t moving any longer. Her corpse was beyond disgusting. She had already started decaying beyond the point of recognition despite the fact that it had only been about twelve hours that passed between her going down and me checking on her. Her exterior layer of skin had completely dissolved away, leaving behind gray muscles and tendons in its absence. This probably wasn’t something that the Russians and Germans had in mind when they designed this, but it was the answer to mankind’s salvation. They were going to destroy themselves eventually. We just had to wait it out.

It was easy to tell that it might not be much longer until they all started feeding on each other. More and more of them were doing it now. It wasn’t uncommon to see a group devouring a single corpse. No matter the security that their predicament gave me, it created a horrible consequence. The city was starting to fill with a worse stench than rotting corpses: the stench of the corpses after being digested in the stomachs of their own kind. At times like this, I couldn’t help but to wonder how we were going to get that smell out of the city once the zombies were gone and we reclaimed it again. It would probably take a ton of bleach and water hoses to get the job done.

It started to get darker out, but I waited around to see our other salvation: the blue light. Not long after the outbreak, a blue beam of light began to light the night sky. It was coming from somewhere on the other side of the city out in the country. I wasn’t sure of its origins, but what I do know is that it’s saved us more than once. It was so bright that it illuminated the entire sky over New York, turning it a pale blue color. It was brighter than the moon’s beams shining down on the city and offered us a sanctuary; a way to survive when we were most vulnerable. At first I thought it was to help us see so we wouldn’t be taken by surprise, but when we learned of the zombie’s blindness in light, I knew that was why it was designed. Someone was out there and had learned the secret to surviving before we had and they wanted to help us live.

I’ve tried for years to convince my dad to seek these people out. I was sure that we could find them without much of a problem now. The herds of zombies were thinning out in the city. Some had gone on to other places while others simply hid away within the darkest alleys and corners. They were growing too weak to do much to us now. If we wanted to be safe, now was our chance to make a break for it. He just didn’t see it my way on this. He felt that we could wait it out here in this hotel another four years and be fine. He thinks it’ll all be over by then. The rest of the group felt mixed about it, too. Reagan loved my idea, which wasn’t surprising. She wanted the chance to kick some zombie ass instead of being held up here much longer. Brantley sided with my father on the issue. He felt it was too risky to make a break for it. Finding food was hard enough in his opinion.

They discussed it every night when the light would cover the sky. It was a constant push for some to convince the others we needed to leave here, but Reagan was just more vocal about it than I was. I think she loved questioning my dad’s leadership and knowledge. Almost as though she was trying to see how far she could push until he’d back down and let her take over. I knew that she’d be in for the long haul despite her efforts. My father was a hard one to get to crack.

Sure enough, once the sun went down and that beautiful blue color filled the streets, the arguing started within the walls of the hotel room. “We are
not
going to leave this damn place until this is all
OVER
!” my dad yelled. It had happened so often that I could picture his face in my head in that moment. Bright red with fuming eyes and his teeth gritted together. It was a scene that I had seen many times. He was a bit of a hothead when people continuously defied him or disbelieved him. He used to have a bad reputation back home for beating a neighbor to the brink of death. Had he not been a steeple of the community, and the neighbor hadn’t been a child molester, he would’ve been thrown in prison for about five years, maybe longer had he not stopped when he did.