A Darkness Shattered

CHAPTER ONE - Outbreak

He sat in the darkened living room looking out a corner of the window in the townhouse. The pale glow of dawn hung in the eastern sky. In the street, a handful of figures moved in random directions. Some wandered in pairs, some in groups, and still others singly with no apparent pattern. He knew the figures for what they were - hungry ghouls seeking their next meal. For seemingly the hundredth time in the last hour, he looked at the front door to ensure it was barricaded. Now and again there was a soft moan from the front porch accompanied by either a thump against the door or a rattling of the doorknob. Taking care to avoid rustling the blinds, he looked at the source of the disturbance at his door. Mr. Elliott, the bachelor from next door was standing on the porch. He would alternate between looking expectantly at the door, shuffling around on the porch or leaning his head back to look up and moan. When he looked skyward, he would involuntarily lean back and bump into the door. This had been going on now for most of the night and it was really starting to get worrisome. He had no doubt Mr. Elliott (or whatever was left of him) knew he was inside the house, but was unable to operate the doorknob. The door had been secured with both knob and deadbolt, and the heaviest chair in the living room had been slid up against it. He had wanted to do the same with the back door but didn’t have anything sizeable to block the door with. He wasn’t really sure it was necessary anyway as the stout wooden fence had kept them out of the backyard so far. It had been eight days since he had barricaded himself in the house now and he leaned his head on the wall and fought down tears of hopelessness.

Michael Matthew Nelson was sixteen years old and the only child of his parents, who were both doctors. He was by nature a loner. He had only two casual acquaintances at school, and none at all in his neighborhood. This wasn’t really all that surprising though as he was one of the only children in the housing community. Michael was a large boy, tall and overweight. He also suffered from asthma which made playing sports difficult for him, so he generally avoided participating altogether. His passions were reading, video games and watching movies. He had a sharp mechanical mind and planned to go to into mechanical engineering when he graduated from high school.

He had always been an emotional boy, quick to tears and just as quick to anger. When he was younger, some of the kids had discovered this and teased him mercilessly just to get a reaction out of him. His mercurial mood swings had worried his parents that he might be bipolar so they had taken him to psychiatrists who all ruled out any mental disorders but did recommend he be placed on anti-psychotic medications. After many debates and discussions, they chose not to medicate him and instead took him to psychologists to learn how to deal with his mood swings. They had taken their fair share of grief from peers and teachers, but didn’t allow that to sway them from their chosen course. They were always there for him and supported him in any way they could, but just wanted him to cope with life’s disappointments with a clear head.

Much of his solitude was self-induced to avoid teasing, but some was because the other children were simply confused by him and couldn’t be sure what would cause him to have an intense reaction. On the other hand, he didn’t have any enemies either. None of the other kids really disliked him; they just felt it was best to avoid him entirely. Michael was always pleasant to everybody he met and willing to help wherever he could. His family was not really religious, but lived by the motto ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. His parents had taught him it was virtuous to help those less able than he was, and perhaps that was why he didn’t have any serious problems at school. When schoolmates would ask him for help with assignments, he never once felt a superiority complex; he did it for the simple joy of assisting someone in need. These were generally the guys who played sports, and they reciprocated by keeping the troublemakers at bay. He knew he would never be part of their world and that was okay with him. He also had nothing to do with any of the girls in school because basically, he was terrified of being around them. They confused him, always with their heads together giggling about something, and he was sure they were laughing about him for some reason. That’s not to say he wasn’t interested in girls, and the older he got, the more interesting they became. He was an intelligent and well-spoken boy, but whenever he was around girls, it seemed he couldn’t put two words together or even say hi without stammering or sounding like an idiot. Therefore, he chose to stay as far away from them as he could and spare his dignity.

Michael risked another furtive look at Mr. Elliott, sighed and took stock of his current situation. He had several cans of food left, but was down to his last four bottles of water. The faucets had stopped working three days ago about the same time the power failed. He was afraid of what was happening in the world and also terrified that he wouldn’t see his parents again. He hadn’t heard from either of them since his father had called on his way home from work the night all the insanity had started.

He had been kicking some serious ass in Call of Duty when he noticed that he had been hearing sirens constantly for over an hour. Curious, he logged out and He turned on the news and was shocked at what he saw. The anchor woman’s hair was in disarray and she was clearly rattled. Her makeup was smudged across her face and her eyes had a wild look to them. As she reported, it was obvious she was having trouble believing what she was reading on the teleprompter. She was saying things that didn’t even make any sense to him. He checked to make sure he wasn’t on a science fiction or horror channel. The news set was in chaos. There were people running around on the set and making so much noise it was hard to even hear what she was trying to say. Every time she heard a noise, she would jump and look around, then turn back to the camera and try to find her place again.

He was still trying to understand what she was talking about when his phone suddenly rang. The sharp sound startled him and his hand jerked and sent the phone skidding across the floor. He scrambled after it on all fours and answered, it was his father and the connection was terrible.

"Michael! Stay inside and do not go out for any reason," his father had told him, breathlessly.

Where are you? What’s going on, dad? The news is saying some really weird stuff.

I don’t know son, I think it has to do with those reports we’ve been hearing and it isn’t good. You need you to stay inside, lock the doors and stay away from the windows, alright? His father had shouted into the phone. There was a tremendous amount of screaming and hollering wherever his dad was, and he had to yell to be heard.

Michael’s answer was lost in a long burst of static.

Michael! Did you hear me? Stay inside and lock the doors! His father sounded frantic. I haven’t been able to contact your mother yet but either she or I will get home as soon as possible. She may be on her way now.

I will dad. Why is this happening? Michael was scared and slowly stood up, barely breathing.

Keep the doors locked and don’t open them for anybody but your mother or me, understand? Michael, this is very important!

Ok. When will you be home?

Get the gun out and use it if you have to protect yourself. Don’t trust anybody!

Now he was really afraid. His father would not have said that if he wasn’t scared himself.

Who the hell are you? Hang on, Michael.

His father covered the phone handset, but he could overhear an authoritative sounding voice in the background. He was unable to make out any words, but the speaker’s tone was unmistakable. It was the sound of someone who expected to be obeyed.

Yes, I am. His father said. There were more unintelligible words. No, I’m sorry but I can’t possibly. The speaker’s voice became more insistent. Listen pal, my wife is in this hospital somewhere. The only thing I’m planning is to find her and get home to our son. I’m not going anywhere with you. Now if you’ll excuse me…Hey! Get your hands off me! The phone was dropped in the ensuing scuffle and Michael could hear men grunting with exertion. Abruptly, the line went dead with a loud click, leaving him with an ominous feeling spreading outward from the pit of his stomach. He slowly turned his eyes back to the TV, the phone still pressed to his ear.

…avoid contact with them at all cost. We are keeping the list of active rescue stations running across the bottom of your screen. As she said this, the crawl was removed from the screen for an instant, and then reappeared. He noticed the community center was not in the list any more. "Please do not go to any rescue stations that are no longer being shown. If they have been taken off this list, we have lost communication with them and must assume they have been lost. The list, he noticed, was not very long. …will stay on the air as long as we are able to. To repeat it would appear that the recently deceased have come back to life and are attacking and eating the living. As she said this for what was probably the thousandth time, it looked as though she still had to force the words out. We have reports that the bite of these monsters causes an infection that will kill within anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, and after dying, those bitten also reanimate. Do not attempt to reason or even communicate with them. We don’t know why this is happening or what may have caused it. Authorities are requesting that you stay in your home and lock the doors. If you are forced out of your home, head to one of the rescue stations listed on the bottom of your screen. He had seen the crawl go off the screen and reappear a couple more times, always with fewer stations listed. The city is now considered unsafe everywhere west of the Broadway Boulevard/Wornall Rd line. Highland Hospital isn’t answering our calls any longer and caution is urged if you are planning to go to-. The anchor woman’s eyes suddenly widened and she stopped talking in mid-sentence. With anger, she pulled her earpiece out and threw it on the desk. This is bullshit! She screamed. What the hell are we doing here? We’re sending people off to get killed! She got a venomous look in her eyes and said, The hell with you Dan…and the hell with all of this! I can’t do this anymore!" She got up and stormed out of the camera view. Shocked by her behavior, Michael looked at the names of the rescue stations and realized over half of them were in the unsafe area of the cities. The camera stayed on the vacant desk for a few seconds and in the background, the departed anchor could be heard shouting with somebody.

CHAPTER TWO – Outside view

Suddenly, the TV picture jumped and cut to a live feed from somewhere in the city. A pretty blonde reporter was smoking and nervously watching something to her left when the cameraman got her attention. Caught off guard, she quickly threw her cigarette away and unconsciously fixed her hair while gathering her thoughts.

This is Pamela McCarty, KMBC-9 and I’m live with Colonel Jerry Thomas of the Kansas National Guard. She was wearing a bright red dress that would have been more appropriate at a movie premier. They were on location with soldiers in an area of the city that had been overrun, and they were in the process of retaking it. The camera followed her as she walked over to an officer in a military vehicle talking on a radio. As she waited for him to finish his conversation, the soldiers in the background could be heard laughing and joking about the monsters. Every now and again, there would be a burst of firing followed by raucous cheering. She was frightened and jumped noticeably at the sharp crack of the rifles.

How’s it looking here colonel? She asked. She was fidgeting and her eyes kept darting nervously off beyond the officer as she held the microphone out for his response.

We’ve advanced up Walnut Street about four blocks, and we’re making good progress, the colonel replied in clipped military speech. He fit the description of what one would expect a colonel to look like. He was a grizzled looking man with hard eyes and an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. He didn’t smile at all, and didn’t wear a helmet either, preferring to wear his beret. The boys are doing alright so far. Give us another hour or two and we’ll have this area cleared and move on to the next. A tank whined past them heading in the direction the troops were firing. With jerky motions, the cameraman followed the tank as it pulled into line with the soldiers. There was a six story apartment building a half a block ahead of them, and they were firing at zombies as they staggered out through the main doors. Suddenly the camera zoomed in on one of the fifth floor windows. The view wobbled around as the operator attempted to control it, the auto focus adjusting back and forth a couple of times until it found the range. Leaning out the window was a young man and woman, waving frantically to the soldiers. The woman was holding a small child in her arms and they were both calling to the men below them. They suddenly wheeled around in alarm at something occurring behind them and the man ducked back in, vanishing into the room. The woman watched whatever he was doing for a few seconds then she climbed out and sat on the window sill with her feet hanging outside. Sobbing in terror and clutching the baby tightly, she pushed off into thin air as several pairs of grasping hands filled the now empty space behind her. The camera followed as the desperate pair plummeted down the side of the building and slammed into a brick window ledge at the third floor. The ledge brought them to a sudden stop for an instant and knocked the child loose from her arms. Like a rag doll, she slid off the ledge and continued her fall, clipping another projection before cartwheeling into the ground where she bounced once and then laid still in a crumpled heap. The child had flown away from the building, and landed some ten feet out on the sidewalk.

The soldiers watched the entire event unfold in stunned silence, unable to comprehend the horror that would make a woman jump to her death with her child. In a single enraged voice, the troops all began shooting at the window she had jumped from. The window was obscured in a cloud of dust and wood chips as they took their anger out on the zombies in the opening. The tank’s heavy machine gun added to the destruction and the window vaporized as the big bullets tore into it.

Oh my God! The camera whipped back to the reporter as she cried out. She and the colonel were looking at a disturbance to their left. The front doors of another apartment building had been forced open and zombies streamed into the street and poured into the unsuspecting soldiers who were still shooting up at the window. As the troops were engulfed, the gunfire dropped off to nothing and the only sounds were the shrieks and cries for help from terrified men. The colonel’s driver was shooting as fast as he could into the flood of zombies, and the colonel stood up and joined him.

The reporter had seen enough. When the flood of zombies had reached the soldiers, she and the cameraman had started backing away from the action. Totally horrified, she pointed and screamed something to the cameraman that was lost in the roar of a large turbine engine. The cameraman was well trained, and moved the camera in the direction she pointed. The tank driver had decided to bug out, threw the vehicle into reverse, and hit the gas. Over sixty seven tons of steel slammed into the colonel’s vehicle, knocking it back several feet. The force of the impact threw Colonel Thomas violently to the hood where he lay dazed, blinking his eyes. The Humvee tilted as the tank tread caught and rode up over it. He never knew what hit him as the tank crushed him into the mangled steel of his vehicle. The now discarded camera rocked to a rest on its side looking down the street away from the action. The reporter could be seen running in her stocking feet as fast as she could, the cameraman following behind. As the shadow of the tank came over the camera, the reporter ran into a crowd of zombies that came from a doorway she was passing. She went down in a pile of grappling arms just as the connection was terminated by the tank tread, leaving her fate unknown. The screen was blank for a few seconds before returning to the news desk, where a man sat in the recently vacated chair. He had been watching Pamela’s feed and his face was blank with confusion as he stared at the now blank monitor. His mouth opened and closed several times as he tried to find something to say, then gave up and squinted into the teleprompter, picking up where the anchorwoman had left off.

To repeat, Highland hospital hasn’t answered our calls for two hours now, and the National Guard won’t let our mobile team through claiming the area is too dangerous to enter. Also, we have been asked by officials at Lincoln hospital to pass on that they are no longer able to accept new patients. They have been overwhelmed with casualties and supplies are running dangerously low. They will continue to care for those they are already treating, but are unfortunately unable to see anybody new. They ask your understanding and patience in the current crisis, but want to assure everybody they will be back to full speed in a day or so when the situation stabilizes. We have just received some video footage taken at Lancer hospital taken earlier today by a TV 9 viewer. A video that looked like it had been taken by a cell phone showed the hospital campus from a distance. Large groups of people could be seen running in all directions. The groups would split into smaller ones, each going different directions in what looked like a general attempt to flee the hospital. Michael recognized the main entrance as he had been through it several times in his life; his parents both worked there. Suddenly the camera jerked as the holder of the phone was startled by a high speed helicopter passing low overhead. It was a Lifeflight aircraft flying erratically toward the hospital, and as it closed on the large building the pilot never slowed or changed course and simply crashed into it, exploding in a large debris-laden fireball and adding to the general chaos in the area. The video had pulled back to show people running from the building again when it ended and the anchorman came back on screen.

The latest report indicates that the hospital is still burning out of control and… Michael had stopped listening. His mother worked in the building the helicopter crashed into, and her office window had been the point of impact.

It had been two days since speaking with his father and he had been glued to the television the entire time. A doctor from Kansas University was the latest in a long line of experts the station had found. He was describing in great detail how to kill the zombies. He said the brain had to be destroyed because otherwise they would just keep coming after you until you did. He referred often to a chart that illustrated his theory of what happened in the brain that was causing the dead to reanimate.

At the beginning of the crisis, Michael had been fascinated by the various experts on the news. He would sit captivated before the television as expert after expert was wheeled before the camera to hypothesize on what they felt caused it. They ran the gamut from government conspiracy theorists to religious fanatics. The station had even found a man who claimed to have proof that global warming had melted the polar cap and released frozen enzymes from the Pleistocene epoch. These enzymes he said, were feeding on humans and everyone that didn’t drive a hybrid vehicle was responsible. He became more and more animated as he spoke and when finally he was physically ushered from the set, he screamed that his lawyers were putting together a case against humanity and everybody watching was on his list. The stations had gone off the air one by one and he could only assume they had either been overrun or decided to shut down. For the last day, he had left the TV tuned to the only local channel still broadcasting.

Now, watching the professor explain his theories patiently to the news man, Michael had just become numb to the whole thing. On the first day, he had worried so much about his parents that he had suffered two separate asthma attacks. The second day he had been enraged at the unfairness of it all and had spent the better part of the day smashing things in the house out of frustration. By the time he fell asleep, he had exhausted himself both physically and emotionally. Today, he just sat in front of the television like a vegetable. In his mind, he imagined that he looked like the girl with no mouth in the Twilight Zone movie from the 80’s, staring at the television with wide open darting eyes. He was beginning to doubt he would see his parents again, and his mood swung from despair to resignation in a never ending cycle. The doctor was detailing the electrical activity in the synapses of the cerebellum when there was a loud crash of shattering glass in the studio. Immediately, people started screaming and yelling as order vanished. A large group of people ran past the camera as it spun around to show a horde of the ghouls in pursuit. Many of the shrieks for help were cut off in mid-scream. As Michael watched horrified, a zombie with half its’ face torn off shuffled past the now abandoned camera gnawing on an arm. The station never recovered after that. For the next few hours, the last thing being broadcast from Kansas City was the view of a dimly lit studio with an occasional zombie lumbering across the screen. When the power failed, the station feed mercifully went with it.

CHAPTER THREE - Herbie

He knew he was on his own now and had better start preparing to get away from his self-imposed prison. He figured it was only a matter of time before Mr. Elliott attracted attention and got some help with the door. Michael wasn’t sure, but he assumed enough of them would be able to break through the door and get in.

He looked at his dad’s 12 gauge shotgun. It hadn’t left his side in the last week. He had never fired it, but his father had shown him how to load it and also how to care for it. He had promised to take him out to the woods one day and let him shoot it, but they had never quite gotten around to it. Into his book bag he packed his four bottles of water, all of his dad’s ammunition for the shotgun, some food, spare clothes, a flashlight and binoculars. He also packed his asthma inhalers and some Band-Aids. He wondered how he would manage when the inhalers ran out, but guessed he’d cross that bridge when he got to it. He stood in the middle of his living room and looked around one last time at the home he had known his entire life. His eyes paused at the family picture he and his father had disliked so much. His mother had insisted on getting the photograph made the year before. In it, they were all wearing the same casual/yuppie type clothes. He remembered sadly how his father had always teased her that they looked like a bad advertisement for the Martha’s Vineyard tourism board. She would raise her eyebrows and stare at him until he apologized and gave her a hug to which she would laugh and tell him she was just trying to put a little culture in her rustic husband. It was a favorite game of theirs and he could clearly see their love for each other every time they did it. He took the picture off the shelf, removed it from the frame and lovingly put it in his backpack with the other supplies. Fending off an overwhelming sense of loss and despair, he shouldered his backpack, picked up the gun and headed for the back door.

The last emergency shelter he had seen still operating was the Lincoln Sports Complex. He had