secret_history (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
secret_history) wrote2006-12-01 01:16 am
secret_history) wrote2006-12-01 01:16 am
November 3rd, 4:44.
Everything was quiet. Chuck had made sure that almost everyone was asleep before putting the first part of his plan into motion. It was suicide to stay with these people, that much he’d figured out soon enough. They had turned his shop into a giant beacon for the zombies. They might as well have hung a huge flashing neon sign reading ‘Live Human Buffet —All You Can Eat!’ above the front door. The shop had been safe enough as long as it was just him and Kurt, and even then he hadn’t been too sure about Kurt’s presence. He’d been prepared, in the event that even two people turned out to be too much of a temptation for the flesh-eaters, to take whatever measures were necessary. He liked Kurt, of course, had worked with him for years, and thought he was a nice enough guy, but survival was survival, and if getting rid of Kurt meant he’d be safe, well, then, Kurt had to go.
That was all moot now, of course. Nine people in the same place was nothing short of a smorgasbord for zombies, and it was only a matter of time before the place was surrounded with moaning, desperate undead. He felt a surge of anger when he thought about the way these idiots had ruined his chances of waiting out the crisis here, where he’d be safe. He was even angrier at Kurt for letting them inside. Soft-hearted idiot had doomed them all. There wasn’t room for compassion in a situation like this, although now that the damage was done Chuck was doing his best to seem as though he was sympathetic. No use in making them suspicious, or to make them dislike him. The girl was the easiest to fool: she had a trusting nature. Thought everyone was like her, a bleeding heart who thought too much. More fool her. That was probably why she worked for 911 —the place was full of bleeding-heart whiners who bitched and moaned when the world didn’t live up to their lofty ideals. Well, screw ‘em, was all he could think. They could rot, for all he cared.
So all he had to do now was get away without alerting the others to the fact that he was abandoning ship. So far he hadn’t had any problems: they were keeping a rotating watch on the dying kid, and each person on watch so far had just assumed that he, too, was keeping watch. He was content to let them think he was keeping an eye out for zombies, making sure that no one unwanted got in. To a certain extent, that was exactly what he was doing, except that the intent was different. He needed to make sure that the coast was clear before making a break for it.
For the past three hours, in the dark of night, he’d made surreptitious trips to the store’s van every fifteen or twenty minutes, carrying as much gear as he could without attracting undue attention. Most of the newcomers were too exhausted from running around the city for two days straight to stay awake for long, so it hadn’t proved too difficult. He’d managed to persuade Kurt to take an early watch, assuring him that he could more than handle the dead-of-night shift and would wake him as soon as it was light to take over. He was planning on doing no such thing, of course, but with Kurt and most of the others asleep, it would buy him a few hours at least before anyone noticed that he was gone, and even more time before they figured out that he’d made a run for it with most of the food in the store. He supposed he ought to feel bad about leaving them in the lurch like this but, in reality, they’d brought it on themselves. If they hadn’t barged into his haven the way they had, he wouldn’t have been forced to take drastic measures. Darwin had been right about one thing: it was the law of the jungle out here, the survival of the fittest.
One more hour, and he’d be out the door. It was too dark now to be safe to go out. He was tired himself, even though he hadn’t reached the level of exhaustion of some of the others, and being tired led to mistakes, and mistakes were very likely to be fatal. Better to leave during the pre-dawn hours, when the first false light began to creep over the horizon. That guaranteed everyone would still be asleep when he left, but that by the time he hit the open road, he would have enough light by which to see. He glanced at his watch, confirming the time, and then casually strolled toward the back room to check on the dying kid. The last thing he needed was for the kid to die before he left and wake everyone up: it would jeopardize everything he’d worked for.
The room was plunged in darkness, the only light source the dim lights they’d left on in the main area of the store. He could see the others only as indistinct silhouettes huddled on the floor, their forms half-illuminated and half-shrouded in darkness. They hardly looked like people anymore. Over in the corner he could see where the kid was lying, could hear each breath rasping slowly and painfully in his chest, and he crept across the floor to stand beside the prostrate form.
The other younger boy, Donnie, was the one meant to be keeping watch over him now, but he was fast asleep, slumped against the wall. Even in the poor light, Chuck was certain he was drooling. Disgusting. They were all doomed anyway: they were soft, flabby, out-of-shape, the products of post-industrialized conditioning due to living in a world where their main concern was the mileage on their cars and getting their hands on the latest gaming system. He was doing society a favour, really, by making sure they wouldn’t be weakening the species any further. As horrible as the zombies were, they were probably doing all of humanity a hell of a favour.
At his feet, the sick kid moaned and shifted uncomfortably, but didn’t wake up. Chuck was amazed he’d held out this long, but he knew it couldn’t last, and his entire plan hinged on this kid not disrupting anything. Carefully he picked up a discarded sleeping bag, unrolled it, and knelt next to the kid’s head. Then, again taking infinite precautions, he placed an edge of the bag over the kid’s nose and mouth, and clamped his own powerful hand over it, cutting off the kid’s air flow. It was surprisingly easy. The skinny body stiffened, writhed a bit under his hands, but the kid was too weak to put up much of a struggle. The arms and legs scrabbled a bit, but the sound was muffled by the blankets and contained by the sleeping bag in which he’d been encased to keep him warm. It was all working far better than he’d hoped for or anticipated.
When finally the body lay completely still, he removed his hand and put the sleeping bag aside, listening intently. The body didn’t move, there was no sound at all, no sign that it was still trying to draw breath, no tell-tale rise and fall of the skinny chest. He glanced around, but no one stirred. The job wasn’t finished, though, he reminded himself: it was only a matter of minutes before the body reanimated and tried to destroy them all. Self-preservation, that was all it was. Quickly he drew his bowie knife from its sheath, looked around once more to make sure no one had awoken to see what he was about to do, and drove the blade as forcefully as he could into the skull. There was a wet sound of snapping bone, which sounded louder than a gunshot to his ears in the stillness of the room. He extracted the knife and waited, heart hammering in his chest, the blood roaring in his ears, for someone to sit up, to speak out and alert the others. He knew it would be only too easy to tell them that the kid had died and come back: it was so close to the truth that the lie would come easily, and they would believe him. But no one so much as stirred, all of them overcome by exhaustion.
He crept out of the room, and washed the blood from his knife blade in the bathroom sink, drying it carefully with a paper towel. He’d need the blade to be in good working order if he wanted to make it out alive. He checked his watch: another twenty or thirty minutes, and it would be time to get going. He would make for his old hunting cabin, he’d decided when the first seeds of his plan had begun to germinate in his mind. With the rations he was bringing and his guns and water purification tablets, he’d be able to survive for months. He’d lived on his own in the wild before, testing his own ability to survive, although every time before he’d had a satellite phone with him just in case he ran into trouble. This time around, however, he was going to be entirely on his own, without backup, and that was fine by him. He’d never needed to call in for help before, and this would put to the test everything he’d trained for.
He sheathed his knife and made his way to the front door of the shop, drew back the blinds to make another check of the street. The van was parked on the other side of the street, about twenty yards further down, almost out of sight of the store. He knew Kurt had forgotten all about the van, and that was all to the good: otherwise the fool boy would have told the girl about it. Kurt had always been a sucker for a pretty face, and that pretty face was smart enough (for a whining bleeding-heart) and could wield a gun, which meant Kurt was probably hyperventilating with excitement around her. The last thing Chuck needed was for Kurt’s hormone-driven enthusiasm to cost him his escape plan. He peered into the darkness, shielding the small section of window from the light so he could see outside, and cursed under his breath.
Zombies. Dozens of them. They were milling about outside uncertainly, bumping into each other as they stumbled blindly in the vague direction of fresh, live meat. He swore again: he’d waited too long, and now his escape was going to be ten times as difficult to make without alerting any of the others to what he was doing. He felt another surge of anger course through him, and wanted to scream with impotent rage at the turn events were taking. The whole world was against him, when by rights he should be the one in charge. He was the only one who knew what he was doing in all this, and instead everyone acted as though this wet-behind-the-ears girl was the be-all and end-all of their measly little existences.
Well, damn them all. He was going to make it, in spite of them. He forced himself to take deep breaths, to bury the anger until he needed it, much later. It would be more difficult to get out now, sure, and he might not be able to slip out surreptitiously, but by God he was going to do it. It was just a question of adapting to the new situation. Just like Darwin had said: it was the individuals who were best at adapting to new situations that survived, and Chuck was nothing if not a survivor, having learned his lessons well. Up at his hunting cabin, he kept a copy of ‘The Origin of Species’ and the complete works of Nietszche, which had taken him years of painstakingly slow reading to get through. He knew what he was doing, and he knew why he was doing it and why it was right for him to survive and the others to perish. It was just the way of things, and that was all.
It took only a few minutes to alter his plan slightly, and to prepare accordingly. He’d have to go sooner rather than later, not wait for light, and fray himself a path to the van. He had a remote starter for it, which he hadn’t planned on using, but now every second would count. If he could jump in the van and hit the gas pedal right off the bat, it could mean the difference between life and death. He would take one of the crowbars the others had brought with them (at least they would have served one useful purpose in all of this, not that it served to counterbalance any of the problems they’d caused, not in the least), and use it to fray himself a path to the van. He would leave the door of the shop open, thus guaranteeing that at least some of the zombies would prefer to head for the bigger source of flesh inside rather than come after him.
He slung his shotgun across his back, hefted his crowbar, and headed back toward the front door. When he was about twenty paces away, however, he stopped in his tracks, unable to believe his eyes. A familiar shape had come hurrying out of the back room, moving almost entirely silently on rubber-soled feet.
That was all moot now, of course. Nine people in the same place was nothing short of a smorgasbord for zombies, and it was only a matter of time before the place was surrounded with moaning, desperate undead. He felt a surge of anger when he thought about the way these idiots had ruined his chances of waiting out the crisis here, where he’d be safe. He was even angrier at Kurt for letting them inside. Soft-hearted idiot had doomed them all. There wasn’t room for compassion in a situation like this, although now that the damage was done Chuck was doing his best to seem as though he was sympathetic. No use in making them suspicious, or to make them dislike him. The girl was the easiest to fool: she had a trusting nature. Thought everyone was like her, a bleeding heart who thought too much. More fool her. That was probably why she worked for 911 —the place was full of bleeding-heart whiners who bitched and moaned when the world didn’t live up to their lofty ideals. Well, screw ‘em, was all he could think. They could rot, for all he cared.
So all he had to do now was get away without alerting the others to the fact that he was abandoning ship. So far he hadn’t had any problems: they were keeping a rotating watch on the dying kid, and each person on watch so far had just assumed that he, too, was keeping watch. He was content to let them think he was keeping an eye out for zombies, making sure that no one unwanted got in. To a certain extent, that was exactly what he was doing, except that the intent was different. He needed to make sure that the coast was clear before making a break for it.
For the past three hours, in the dark of night, he’d made surreptitious trips to the store’s van every fifteen or twenty minutes, carrying as much gear as he could without attracting undue attention. Most of the newcomers were too exhausted from running around the city for two days straight to stay awake for long, so it hadn’t proved too difficult. He’d managed to persuade Kurt to take an early watch, assuring him that he could more than handle the dead-of-night shift and would wake him as soon as it was light to take over. He was planning on doing no such thing, of course, but with Kurt and most of the others asleep, it would buy him a few hours at least before anyone noticed that he was gone, and even more time before they figured out that he’d made a run for it with most of the food in the store. He supposed he ought to feel bad about leaving them in the lurch like this but, in reality, they’d brought it on themselves. If they hadn’t barged into his haven the way they had, he wouldn’t have been forced to take drastic measures. Darwin had been right about one thing: it was the law of the jungle out here, the survival of the fittest.
One more hour, and he’d be out the door. It was too dark now to be safe to go out. He was tired himself, even though he hadn’t reached the level of exhaustion of some of the others, and being tired led to mistakes, and mistakes were very likely to be fatal. Better to leave during the pre-dawn hours, when the first false light began to creep over the horizon. That guaranteed everyone would still be asleep when he left, but that by the time he hit the open road, he would have enough light by which to see. He glanced at his watch, confirming the time, and then casually strolled toward the back room to check on the dying kid. The last thing he needed was for the kid to die before he left and wake everyone up: it would jeopardize everything he’d worked for.
The room was plunged in darkness, the only light source the dim lights they’d left on in the main area of the store. He could see the others only as indistinct silhouettes huddled on the floor, their forms half-illuminated and half-shrouded in darkness. They hardly looked like people anymore. Over in the corner he could see where the kid was lying, could hear each breath rasping slowly and painfully in his chest, and he crept across the floor to stand beside the prostrate form.
The other younger boy, Donnie, was the one meant to be keeping watch over him now, but he was fast asleep, slumped against the wall. Even in the poor light, Chuck was certain he was drooling. Disgusting. They were all doomed anyway: they were soft, flabby, out-of-shape, the products of post-industrialized conditioning due to living in a world where their main concern was the mileage on their cars and getting their hands on the latest gaming system. He was doing society a favour, really, by making sure they wouldn’t be weakening the species any further. As horrible as the zombies were, they were probably doing all of humanity a hell of a favour.
At his feet, the sick kid moaned and shifted uncomfortably, but didn’t wake up. Chuck was amazed he’d held out this long, but he knew it couldn’t last, and his entire plan hinged on this kid not disrupting anything. Carefully he picked up a discarded sleeping bag, unrolled it, and knelt next to the kid’s head. Then, again taking infinite precautions, he placed an edge of the bag over the kid’s nose and mouth, and clamped his own powerful hand over it, cutting off the kid’s air flow. It was surprisingly easy. The skinny body stiffened, writhed a bit under his hands, but the kid was too weak to put up much of a struggle. The arms and legs scrabbled a bit, but the sound was muffled by the blankets and contained by the sleeping bag in which he’d been encased to keep him warm. It was all working far better than he’d hoped for or anticipated.
When finally the body lay completely still, he removed his hand and put the sleeping bag aside, listening intently. The body didn’t move, there was no sound at all, no sign that it was still trying to draw breath, no tell-tale rise and fall of the skinny chest. He glanced around, but no one stirred. The job wasn’t finished, though, he reminded himself: it was only a matter of minutes before the body reanimated and tried to destroy them all. Self-preservation, that was all it was. Quickly he drew his bowie knife from its sheath, looked around once more to make sure no one had awoken to see what he was about to do, and drove the blade as forcefully as he could into the skull. There was a wet sound of snapping bone, which sounded louder than a gunshot to his ears in the stillness of the room. He extracted the knife and waited, heart hammering in his chest, the blood roaring in his ears, for someone to sit up, to speak out and alert the others. He knew it would be only too easy to tell them that the kid had died and come back: it was so close to the truth that the lie would come easily, and they would believe him. But no one so much as stirred, all of them overcome by exhaustion.
He crept out of the room, and washed the blood from his knife blade in the bathroom sink, drying it carefully with a paper towel. He’d need the blade to be in good working order if he wanted to make it out alive. He checked his watch: another twenty or thirty minutes, and it would be time to get going. He would make for his old hunting cabin, he’d decided when the first seeds of his plan had begun to germinate in his mind. With the rations he was bringing and his guns and water purification tablets, he’d be able to survive for months. He’d lived on his own in the wild before, testing his own ability to survive, although every time before he’d had a satellite phone with him just in case he ran into trouble. This time around, however, he was going to be entirely on his own, without backup, and that was fine by him. He’d never needed to call in for help before, and this would put to the test everything he’d trained for.
He sheathed his knife and made his way to the front door of the shop, drew back the blinds to make another check of the street. The van was parked on the other side of the street, about twenty yards further down, almost out of sight of the store. He knew Kurt had forgotten all about the van, and that was all to the good: otherwise the fool boy would have told the girl about it. Kurt had always been a sucker for a pretty face, and that pretty face was smart enough (for a whining bleeding-heart) and could wield a gun, which meant Kurt was probably hyperventilating with excitement around her. The last thing Chuck needed was for Kurt’s hormone-driven enthusiasm to cost him his escape plan. He peered into the darkness, shielding the small section of window from the light so he could see outside, and cursed under his breath.
Zombies. Dozens of them. They were milling about outside uncertainly, bumping into each other as they stumbled blindly in the vague direction of fresh, live meat. He swore again: he’d waited too long, and now his escape was going to be ten times as difficult to make without alerting any of the others to what he was doing. He felt another surge of anger course through him, and wanted to scream with impotent rage at the turn events were taking. The whole world was against him, when by rights he should be the one in charge. He was the only one who knew what he was doing in all this, and instead everyone acted as though this wet-behind-the-ears girl was the be-all and end-all of their measly little existences.
Well, damn them all. He was going to make it, in spite of them. He forced himself to take deep breaths, to bury the anger until he needed it, much later. It would be more difficult to get out now, sure, and he might not be able to slip out surreptitiously, but by God he was going to do it. It was just a question of adapting to the new situation. Just like Darwin had said: it was the individuals who were best at adapting to new situations that survived, and Chuck was nothing if not a survivor, having learned his lessons well. Up at his hunting cabin, he kept a copy of ‘The Origin of Species’ and the complete works of Nietszche, which had taken him years of painstakingly slow reading to get through. He knew what he was doing, and he knew why he was doing it and why it was right for him to survive and the others to perish. It was just the way of things, and that was all.
It took only a few minutes to alter his plan slightly, and to prepare accordingly. He’d have to go sooner rather than later, not wait for light, and fray himself a path to the van. He had a remote starter for it, which he hadn’t planned on using, but now every second would count. If he could jump in the van and hit the gas pedal right off the bat, it could mean the difference between life and death. He would take one of the crowbars the others had brought with them (at least they would have served one useful purpose in all of this, not that it served to counterbalance any of the problems they’d caused, not in the least), and use it to fray himself a path to the van. He would leave the door of the shop open, thus guaranteeing that at least some of the zombies would prefer to head for the bigger source of flesh inside rather than come after him.
He slung his shotgun across his back, hefted his crowbar, and headed back toward the front door. When he was about twenty paces away, however, he stopped in his tracks, unable to believe his eyes. A familiar shape had come hurrying out of the back room, moving almost entirely silently on rubber-soled feet.