Monday, January 18, 2010

Rabies?

About a week ago Keith came over and told us that he had seen on the news that we weren't supposed to leave our houses after dark. He said some weird disease was spreading and the city was under quarantine. I knew people had been getting sick, half the people from work hadn't shown up in a few days. Nobody called in just stopped showing up. I had no idea it was that bad at the time though. We didn't really know what to do so the next day we went to the Super Center and stocked up on food, just figured we'd ride it out. Then, last Tuesday the news actually started telling us a bit of what the hell was going on. They said-" "Yeah, yeah," John interrupted, "I know what the news said the first day. A new strain of the flu has crossed with rabies. Mass amounts of people are going rabid. The disease is airborne and highly contagious. Contact with diseased people results in infection 90% of the time. Blah blah blah. What happened to Keith?" "I'm getting to it." Alex explained, "hold your horses. When we heard that people were going rabid we decided this whole thing was gonna be a lot worse than we thought. We went down to the gun shop, thought we'd be ready just incase things got hairy. As we were driving into town we saw a bunch of soldiers all through town. When we finally got to the gun shop the place was closed, should've figured I suppose. No other place was open. Why would they? We started to leave when one of the soldiers motioned Keith over to him. He came back a few minutes later and I asked him what the soldier wanted. He said the soldier had no idea what was going on but it was getting worse by the day. He said we were the first healthy people he had seen in two days. The back door to the gun shop had been broken into yesterday. He advised us to arm ourselves as best as we could and leave town. They were setting up evacuation centers in major cities, Norman, OKC, Stillwater, Tulsa, anywhere with a decent sized population. Enough to make the amount of immune worth the effort of evacuating people. We went around back and sure enough the door had been broken down. A few other soldiers noticed us and we backed away from the door but they just nodded at us and we went inside. There wasn't much left, 3 or 4 handguns, coupla shotguns but not much ammo. A few boxes of shells, a scattered pile of handgun rounds and good amount of rifle rounds. Like I said no rifles but we figured we'd take some anyway. As we left we told the soldiers the building was empty so they didn't need to stand guard over it anymore. One just replied, 'You were never here. Take the South road out of town between 10 and 11 tonight. If you come across any military personnel flash your lights. Do NOT adjust your speed whatsoever.' We went home and packed up all the food we could. We were planning on leaving for Lawton. It was the closest place with and evacuation center. That's when you called. Figured if it was that bad we wouldn't fair much better in Lawton, so we decided we'd take Keith to you and we'd all try to find someplace to go. The more the merrier. At 10 we set out. Like the soldier said we passed three units. At each one I flashed the lights and we drove past. No big deal. When we got onto the highway there weren't too many people around, just the odd car here or there. After a while we were following behind a car and everything seemed fine. Then somebody... something, ran into the road. The car in front of us swerved to avoid it and drove into the ditch. I guess the driver hit his head and slumped onto the wheel because the horn went off and didn't quit. We pulled over to see if we could help. We got to the car and saw the driver had died, or was about to. He had cracked his head open. Never saw so much blood. Keith said he heard something so Grant pulled the driver off the wheel. We stood still straining to hear. Nothing.

Then it started again. Sounded like people, almost. People screaming but somehow more twisted, like they were all in pain. That's when they started running out from the woods.