Fatality

They came from all sides and there must have been at least a hundred of them. Best I can figure they were all the people who turned while they were driving down the highway. As soon as we saw them we started running back to the truck. Grant and I got to the truck and jumped in when we realized that Keith had tripped on something and was on the ground with the whole crowd closing in on him. We grabbed the guns and loaded them as quick as we could. Don't know why we didn't load them before we left. "Yeah, I've had plenty of experience with unloaded shotguns," I interrupted looking at my arm. "Looks like it," Alex said before continuing. "We got the guns loaded and I yelled for Keith to drop back to the ground. He had started to fight his way to his feet. He dropped down into a little ball and we let loose. They were so close together it only took about 5 shots or so from each of us before Keith was clear enough that he could get up and hobble over to us. He was pretty banged up at that point but nothing that seemed too God awful. Grant handed him a pistol and helped him get back to the truck. I did my best to cover them. Then something, I have no idea what, blasted out of the woods like a damn train and ran straight into both of them. Keith got knocked into the truck and I guess it caught Grant cause a second later it was pickin him up and slammin him into the ground I ran over to him as quick as I could and blasted the bastard twice straight in the back of the head. I had to help Grant struggle to his feet the damned thing had knocked all the air out of him. I tried to shoot a few more of the people but I couldn't aim the shotgun for shit with Grant leaning on me. I grabbed the second pistol he was carrying and managed to keep them back long enough for Grant to catch his breath. I looked back at the truck and saw that Keith had managed to get in and was trying to get it back on the road. Grant and I made our way over and barely managed to climb into the bed when some sort of rope shot out of the woods and wrapped around me. It started to pull me out of the truck but luckily Grant was able to cut it with a hatchet he had. He yelled for Keith to get going while he pulled me back onto the truck. Keith hit the gas and we fell back into the tailgate. Thank God it didn't pop open or we'd be dead right now. We sped off down the road with at least 20 of those things still chasing us and they didn't stop chasing us. We just kept going until we couldn't see them anymore. "Ok ok, you fought off zombies but how did Keith die? Get to the point old man," John demanded clearly frustrated. "I'm just about to," Alex explained. "Ok so we just got far enough away from those things when Keith pulled over and said he didn't feel good. Didn't know what was wrong he just said he was cramping all over and his mouth was dry. I looked him over and he was covering in cuts but nothing too serious. Then I noticed that all of his cuts weren't bleeding. It hadn't been more than 15 minutes but all of the cuts were dry and cracking. Not scabbing over just like he had run out of blood somehow. I didn't know what to do I've never really been that good with first aid and I don't think anybody had seen anything like this. I looked through the first aid kit and all I found that I thought might be helpful was a few syringes of adrenaline. I figured it would at least help prevent him from going into shock. Grant said we needed to try to find somebody to help so we put him in the back of the truck and Grant sat with him and I started driving. Grant called to me through the back window said Keith was starting to seize. A few seconds later I heard a scream and Keith was attacking Grant. I pulled the truck over and Keith managed to throw Keith out of the truck. He fell to the ground but got back up quick as flash and started running back towards us. His eyes were glowing with and eerie greenish-yellow color. I knew what had happened. I pulled out my pistol and put one right through his head. He dropped to the ground in sickening lump. Grant vomited at the sight. I told him my guess is that the crowd of people must have been his first encounter with the virus and he wasn't immune like we had thought. After that we took a minute to rest. Buried the body and started driving. Picked up Elizabeth this morning like a said and we showed up hear. And that's the whole story.

"God dammit," John said as he slumped back on the couch covering his face with his hands.

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.

Looking for More.

The next week passed without incident. After the first day of just lying around waiting for Keith, John decided we needed to be in better shape incase we had to abandon the car. I wasn’t out of shape but I certainly was not in it either. We spent each day running laps around the house and taking turns using John’s set of free weights. I could only lift with my left arm and couldn’t run faster than a jog. The first time I ran I almost passed out and had to lie down for a few hours. After the third day my arm finally started to heal, though I could still only barely use it. Between exercises we practiced shooting in the backyard. John had been hunting since he was 10 so he was already a pretty good shot. I on the other hand hadn’t held a gun until I caught the shotgun a few days before. It took a while for me to finally get the feel for shooting since I had to shoot left handed but after a few days I had improved significantly. By the 5th day of exercising and shooting from sunrise to sunset we were both completely exhausted. Since we didn’t have anything else to do but sit and wait we both pushed our selves harder than we should have.
On the last day at John’s house we still couldn’t run a marathon but we were better off than we were before. That afternoon John and I were sitting on the porch talking about how much longer we should wait when we saw a truck coming down the road. “Do you think that’s Keith,” I asked John. “No, he said he’d be coming in a red Jeep. Go get the rifles.” “Way ahead of you,” I said as I hurried inside. I came back outside and handed John one of the guns. The truck had stopped at the end of the driveway. Two men and a woman stepped out of the vehicle. John and I aimed our rifles at them. Using the rifles scope I could see the woman and the shorter of the two men looked to be in their mid-twenties. The taller man seemed to be in his fifties. “What do you want?!” John yelled to them. Seeing our guns the three immediately put their hands in the air. “Are you John?” The taller man called to John. “Yeah, who’s asking?” “We’re friends of Keith’s. We were coming with him to meet you.” “If that’s true where’s Keith?” “He… He’s dead.” “Dead? How’d that happen?” “Well, if you put the guns down we’ll come tell you.” I saw John lower his weapon and I followed suite. “Alright come on in, but bring the truck around the back of the house.”
“Alright, so who are you and what happened to Keith?” “I’m Alex,” the older man answered, “this is my son Grant, and this is…” “Elizabeth,” the girl finished for him. “Elizabeth that’s right. We just picked her and her dog up this morning.” “Dog?” I asked having not seen or heard one. “He’s in the back of the truck,” Elizabeth explained. “I was attacked last night and he has a bad cut on his back, but I think he’ll be ok.” “Ok so what happened to Keith?” John asked impatiently. “Grant and I were Keith’s neighbor’s before all of this started.

The Arrival

I awoke in a fog, literally. I peered out from the truck and could barely see John's house 15 ft away. "When did we get here?" I asked, still slumped against the truck door. Silence. I slowly turned to the driver's side and saw that John was no longer in the truck. A panic took hold of me as I wondered where he could've gone. I felt my arm and was relieve to see it had stopped bleeding although I could only move it with great effort. What a perfect time to become left-handed. I carefully climbed out of the truck and headed towards the house. I was too weak to open the heavy oaken door. "JOHN!" I yelled as I began to kick the door. The door suddenly opened and my kick, having nowhere to land, caused me to stumble forward. "Whoa," John said as he caught me. "I didn't think you'd wake up yet. I was getting a place ready for you to lie down." "When did we get here?" "About ten minutes ago. You've been out cold all day." "We just got here? What time is it?" I asked confused. We were at the gas station around midnight and John's house was no more than an hour from where John had told me we were. "It's about 3. All the main roads are blocked, cars are scattered everywhere." "Damn." I sat down on the couch and absentmindedly turned on the TV. "Satalite is down," John said. "Well what are we going to do now?" I asked. "Well we have to wait for a few days for Keith to get here. He called me last night and said he was bringing a few people. Then the phones cut out." "If it ain't one thing its another," I replied, "Do will still have food?" "Yeah, we have enough food to last about a week and we've got 2 or 3 rifles I used to hunt with." "Fantastic, they have ammo, right?" "Yeah I've got plenty of ammo. We'll be fine for a while."

Bleeding out

"Let's get the hell out of here." Way ahead of you," John said as he climbed into the truck. As we drove down the road I tore off the bloody sleeve and tied it around my arm as a make-shift bandage. "Hey, eat that candy we found. You look kinda pale." John threw me two of the candy bars we found. I ate them slowly. I was light-headed from the injury. The bandage was already soaked full of blood and was steadily dripping onto the seat. "John, You're gonna have to pull over and rebandage this. I don't think I wrapped it tight enough myself." I felt the car pull off onto the shoulder when my head slumped forward. I was out.

Incap

"So is anybody meeting us at your house?" I asked John as we walked back to the truck. "Only person I could get ahold of was my buddy Keith. He's a friend from high school. A little crazy, but he's cool. Man, I remember this one time, Keith-" A vicious scream stopped his story short. "What was that?" "I have no idea," I said, "but it doesn't sound good." Suddenly, a hooded figure pounced out of the darkness knocking John over and pinning me to the ground. The fall knocked the breath from my lungs and I barely managed to fight back. The creature feverishly clawed at me while more hellish screams escaped from the face cloaked in shadows. I struggled to raise my new-found shotgun to the creature's chest. I pulled the trigger, expecting the blast to free me from the assault. CLICK. "Fuck! John get this thing off me!" My face burned as a claw caught me just under my eye. John ran up and punched the creature across the face, it recoiled slightly, and then John grabbed it by the collar and managed to throw it off of me. Four quick shots followed as he all but emptied his gun into the creatures chest. It slumped to the ground dead. "Probably should've checked to see if it was loaded," John said reaching down to help me up. "No shit," I snapped. I reached for John's hand and a felt a blinding pain in my arm. I looked down and saw my sleeve was soaked in blood. I rolled my sleeve back and saw a deep gash across my upper arm. "Goddamn," I said. As the adrenaline faded the pain became more significant almost overwhelming. It would be a while before I could use the arm for anything serious. "This just got a lot worse."

Guns here!

I quickly looked around for something, anything, I could use as a weapon. "Fuck" I groaned as I grabbed a lonesome squeegee off the ground. I ran into the gas station and found John pinned against the counter trying desperately to hold of the two attackers. Without hesitating I swung the squeegee as hard as I could at the closest infected. Caught on the neck, it stumbled into an empty snack shelf. I went to swing at the second but the minor relief was all John needed to kick the it through the window. Turning back towards the first I noticed the plastic end of the squeegee had broken off leaving me with only a cheap wooden stick. I searched frantically for something better to defend myself when the creature lunged at me with a surprising speed. A single deafening blast cut the attack short and as the infected fell back onto the fallen shelf, a single hole just above his right eye. I turned around and saw John holding a revolver still aimed just to the left of me. "Where the fuck did you get that?" I asked, ears still ringing. "I've had it. They just got the jump on me is all." "Well hang on there is still one more". John cautiously went outside to deal with the zombie he had kicked through the window. "He's dead," he called after a moment. "Landed on his neck." "That was lucky." "Very. C'mon lets see if there is anything here worth taking." We searched the gas station and found a few candy bars and 3 bottles of water. "Look what I found," John called to me. I looked up and found him holding a sawed-off shotgun. "Damn, gunslinger. How many guns do you have?" He laughed, "Just the one. I found this hidden under the counter. You take it." He tossed it to me. It was heavier than I thought it. I looked down the smooth black barrel thinking how cliche this weapon was but I didn't really care.