Rise (6 page)

This is what we get for letting our guard down. The undead found us around midnight last night. We were all sleeping in the same room, the curtains were drawn and lights were out. I was on watch, sitting quietly in a chair out front with the Glock in hand, watching the stars, when I heard a moan. I looked along the path to the road and saw a shambling silhouette approaching. I thought I could see more shapes behind that. My guess was it was the owners of this place, come for a deposit. I quietly went back inside and woke the others. I locked the door, and we all sat quietly in the dark, waiting. For a while nothing happened. Then a footstep could be heard outside, and then the door shook as something banged into it. I heard Jess loading her rifle, and I chambered a round into the Glock. The door banged again as whatever it was tried to push it open, and then the moaning began. They knew we were in here, damnit. I heard at least four separate voices moaning, and we all stayed away from the windows. We weren't worried about them getting in that way, as there were good security bars on all the windows. We stayed the night there, with four or more undead banging at the walls and door. They kept it up right through the night and into morning. Needless to say we didn't get a lot of sleep last night.

Now... well, now there are six of them. I counted them through the bars. They can tell we are here, and are almost frantic to get in here and feed. I am not sure what we are going to do. Sarah said she has a plan, so we'll listen to her and see.

It was a close thing, but we all got out. For the remainder of the 3rd and all of the 4th we stayed inside, away from the windows. Around dawn today, when we had all eaten breakfast and finished the last of the water we got on with the plan. I opened the bathroom window at the back of the building, leaned out and yelled loudly for the dead things. They wasted no time in coming around to the back where I yelled at them through the small barred window. All but one, that is. A seventh walker had shown up late last night, and was missing his lower jaw and both ears, possibly from a badly aimed shotgun blast. I guess he couldn't hear the noise I was making, and so stayed put out front while his brother and sister undead wandered to the back.

The vehicles were nearby, and had only been investigated a little bit by the creatures, since they were mainly interested in us. So while I kept them busy out back the others got ready to make a break out the front. We didn't want to waste ammo, as the noise might draw more undead from wherever these had come from. Sarah took the baseball bat and opened the front door. While Jess and Darren both covered her, and I watched the bathroom window closely to make sure they didn't tear the wall down, Sarah stepped outside and stood where the jawless, earless monstrosity could see her. It immediately approached, arms raised and clutching, and Sarah swung at its head with a lot of oomph. She's no slouch, my sister. With a horrible wet smack she connected, and the zombie dropped like a rock. It twitched and rolled when it hit the ground, but didn't get back up. We all grabbed our things and ran past it, Sarah reaching the van first, then Darren, followed by Jess holding little Michael, and me bringing up the rear. We all started to pile in the vehicles when I saw the crowd of corpses come back around the building toward us. One in particular was moving fast enough that she could catch us as we got in, so I turned and raised the Glock. My first shot missed her head and shattered a window in the motel cabin, but the second hit right above the left eye, and she went down. Sarah was yelling for me to get in the Rav4, and she started to drive away. I jumped in, passed Darren the Glock, and hit the gas. The five remaining undead were close behind, and I was able to see their faces as we left them behind. They had no expressions, not in the true human sense. This was more like looking at animals, though even my cat had more life and intelligence in its eyes than this bunch.

We spent most of today slowly driving up the highway. We stopped to drain the tanks on a few vehicles, but kept going. As I type this we are still driving, ever north, but slowly. We stop often to stretch, but we are very careful. We pass houses often, but the dead seem to congregate at them, so we don't stop. Abandoned vehicles, sometimes with telltale bloodstains, get a more thorough look. We have managed to keep the tanks on both vehicles above half. I don't know where we are going to stop tonight.

Sarah and I had a long private talk yesterday about our family. We went off a little ways from the others and sat pitching stones into a river from a bridge right by where we had stopped for some lunch. We both realise that our parents are surely dead, along with the uncles and aunts, cousins, and assorted others back east. Luckily we have no other siblings. Sarah had been considering going to look for Mom and Dad, but thought going east again would be suicide, since the number of undead on the prairies would be a lot higher than here in the mountains. So we are going to stick with the plan of getting up past Prince George and see where we can find a safe place to stop.

I have been wondering how we are going to survive this coming winter. It's tempting to maybe head through the mountains all the way to the coast and find a small island to grow food on. That should be safe enough, a landmass surrounded by ocean. Maybe there are islands with survivors on them. Certainly the coast temperatures will be more moderate than here in the mountains. The only trouble will be surviving the trip.

It was worse than Kamloops. It had been raining for a day and a half when we got to the outskirts of the city, and the roads were in bad shape. Water was everywhere, and with no maintenance crews ever again I can't imagine the roads will survive the coming winter very well. The closer we got to Pr. George the more cars we found wrecked or abandoned. One section of highway was almost clogged with a large accident scene. A truck had jackknifed on a bridge, and several cars were crushed and pinned. There were still people in the cars where they had died, but they were not still moving, and there was nothing we could do for them, so we kept going. We have managed to siphon enough gas to have both tanks full and the spare gas cans full as well. The city had about 72,000 people before all this started, so I cannot even imagine what kind of hell it is now.

We approached from the south along Highway 97. Low mountains and hills were all around, but the road was generally pretty flat. With the rain, visibility was low. I was leading in the Rav4; Sarah was driving the Odyssey behind me. This time Jess and Michael were in the Rav4 with me, and Darren was in the van. We switch around. We passed a turnoff for Pineview, and turned a bit more northwest, and it was a bit farther on that we stopped and looked down onto what remained of Prince George. We parked on a ridge, and below us we could see the Fraser River that runs all through BC to the sea at Vancouver. From here we could see that a lot of Prince George had burned too. More than Kamloops. There were a lot of burned buildings, and across the river was a huge burned swath of destruction. With no living fire crews, this must have raged unchecked for a long time. Darren spotted movement on the road below the ridge, and we looked down to see someone walking along the roadway. Jessica looked down with her rifle scope, and reported that it was a walking corpse of a man, badly decomposed. We spotted more of them after that, mostly alone, but some in groups. I had found a pair of binoculars in a truck a day ago, and used those to look at the city, hoping to see signs of survivors or if the road through the city was clear enough to use. There was no obvious way through on the roads I could see. Most were blocked either by large accidents, fallen buildings, or large walking clusters of undead.

We regrouped at the vehicles, and with all of us having an eye out for straggling zombies we discussed what to do. Neither Sarah nor Darren had any interest in going into that wasteland of a city, and suggested we find a way around it. Jess said we needed food pretty soon, and suggested we go back and take the turn to Pineview and see if we could find some supplies there. My suggestion, which I finally aired after thinking about it for days and days now, was that we resupply and take the road to the coast, find an island, and wait this all out. We decided to return to the turnoff for Pineview after some debate.

Darren has food poisoning. Yesterday we stopped at a house we saw through the trees, just off the road to Pineview, a two-story farmhouse with a few trucks parked in the driveway, a fenced area for horses or cattle, and a barn behind the house. We all got out of the vehicles, except Michael, and quietly listened for a good five minutes before we approached the house. We saw no zombies anywhere in sight, but that means nothing. There could be a dozen inside the barn or house for all we know. Jessica stayed near the van with her rifle, and Darren and Sarah and I approached. I had the Glock, Sarah had the .22, and Darren had the baseball bat. The trucks were locked, and judging by the thick dust covering them, looked like they hadn't moved in a while. They looked like well used farm trucks, both Fords. I glanced inside one on the way past, and saw a few CD's on the dash, a pair of leather gloves on the seat, but nothing else.

The windows on the house were intact except for one which was broken all over the porch. Whatever broke that window did it from the inside. We all stepped up by the door and listened again for a few minutes. Darren knocked, and after a minute more we tried the door, and it was unlocked. I pushed it open and looked inside. The smell of rot wafted out, and I nearly gagged. I pulled the shirt I was wearing up over my nose and walked in, Sarah right behind me. She told Darren to stay there and watch the area, and he seemed happy to do that. There was a hall ahead of me, a kitchen and dining area to the right, and a stairwell left. I turned right and took a step into the kitchen, and nearly jumped out of my skin when a cat ran up and meowed loudly at me. Sarah was just as surprised as I was, and after we calmed down again we had a chuckle. The cat didn't look underfed, so I assumed it would be okay for a few minutes while we cleared the house. In another five minutes we knew we were alone here. I found the source of the smell in the backdoor porch. There was a dead dog there, locked in between the door to the house and the door outside, a collie by the look of it. It had starved to death, and there were scratch marks on the walls and doors where the poor thing had tried to get out. We found a huge bag of cat food torn open at the base and spilled all over the floor, so that’s why the cat looked well fed. There was water in several large buckets, though it was all stale by now. The cat followed us around meowing until Sarah picked it up and stroked it. It had a collar, but no tags.

Upstairs we found some useful things. There was a large gun case in the hall, and we could see two rifles and a shotgun inside. They were locked up, so we'd need to find the keys to the locks before we could use them. Also there were two large bedrooms and a bathroom. I turned a tap, but nothing came out. I called down to Darren to come inside, and we all looked around for food. We found a pantry full of preserves and canned goods just off the kitchen, but the contents of the refrigerator were all bad. Sarah was looking out the back window as we searched, and saw something interesting, an old-fashioned hand water pump. I went back out front to tell Jess what we had found, and I guess it was then that Darren opened a jar of preserved eggs and ate one or two. Anyways I told Jess to drive the van around back by the water pump, and we met the others there. We were all pretty happy when Darren pumped it, and within a few seconds fresh cold water was spilling out onto the ground. We were all standing there grinning like fools when the zombies came out of the barn.

There were three of them, a middle-aged man and woman, and a teenaged girl. The man was missing his left arm and part of his neck, the woman looked like she had at least a dozen bites out of her arms and torso, and the girl was mostly intact, I couldn't see any injuries on her. They were all moaning and advancing on us, and I had the Glock up and aimed really fast. I didn't even get the chance to shoot before I heard a shot, and the male zombie fell with most of the top of his head missing. I switched targets and shot the woman in the face twice at about ten feet, and she dropped. The girl was a little faster than I expected though, and before Jess or Sarah could take her down she had grabbed onto my arm and was trying to bite me. She was ice cold and clammy, and her skin actually peeled off her hands as she tried to grip tighter. The others backed off and I dropped and rolled backwards. The girl fell on top of me, but wasn't able to maintain a grip as I rolled away. I rolled about three more feet and turned over to aim the Glock when two shots went off, Jess and Sarah both shooting at her. The girl's body flopped for a second then lay still. I got up and grabbed a handful of grass and used it to wipe the girls’ skin off my arm as fast as I could, then went over and pumped some water so I could wash.

Darren said that he thought the shots were really loud, and that any zombie nearby that heard them was now on its way here. We all agreed. Damnit! This had turned from a potential place to stay for a day or so into a smash-and-grab. We all headed inside except Michael and Jess, and we grabbed all the food we could find that wasn't rotten. The cat came to us again, and followed us around while we grabbed pillowcases or bags, whatever we could find, and threw cans and jars into them. Then Sarah remembered the guns upstairs and started looking for keys. She didn't find any, so we just smashed the glass on the case and took the weapons out with the locks still in place. There was ammunition as well, and I grabbed everything I could see. On the way out I stopped in the bathroom and checked what might be useful there. I took a 12-pack of toilet paper, three new bars of soap, a new tube of toothpaste, and an unopened pack of razors. I know I needed a shave, and the soap would be useful too. We were all filthy.