The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Read online

  “The Enduring”

  Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse

  Nicholas Ryan

  Copyright © 2016 Nicholas Ryan

  The right of Nicholas Ryan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Foreword:

  The story of America’s rise from out of the apocalyptic ashes is not a grand tale of bloody combat.

  It’s not a triumphant collage of soldiers and tanks charging into battle against the undead hordes.

  It’s simpler than that.

  It’s more heroic.

  America’s rise from the horror of the Apocalypse is the stories of her survivors; the men and women who refused to submit, the stoic determination of a proud resilient people who stood fast and fought back in isolated pockets and in small bands until the undead were purged from the world.

  These are the stories of America’s real heroes who won back the land from the infected, and never gave up hope.

  Their stories are our stories. The tapestry of their tragedies, hardships and horror when woven together becomes the fabric of who we were… and who we have become.

  – John Culver

  Washington D.C.

  New America.

  Riverton, Wyoming:

  Dust.

  It was everywhere – just dust, and the black burned bones of a hundred buildings that once had been the homes and businesses of folks in Riverton, Wyoming.

  Just two years after the end of the Apocalypse and the death of the last of the ‘Afflicted’, there remained very little left to serve as a reminder that this town was once a thriving western community. But for Stacie Morton and her family, Riverton was still home. She couldn’t let go.

  She wouldn’t move on.

  She was standing in the middle of the road, waiting for me. She was staring away to the west, her face uplifted, gazing at the craggy ragged edges of the Wind River Mountain range, their caps still blanketed in the last of winter’s snow. The wind whipped across the ground, stirring up swirling clouds of dust and black sooty ash. She didn’t turn to greet me. There was something distant and forlorn in her expression.

  I got out of the car and pulled the collar of my jacket up high around my neck. The taste of dirt and grime filled the back of my throat.

  “Stacie Morton?”

  She turned then and her expression slowly transformed – like someone coming reluctantly awake. She nodded her head and scraped hair away from her face.

  She was an attractive woman in her early forties with long auburn hair, tinted into shades of orange by the sunlight. She tried to smile, but amidst all the heartbreak and devastation that surrounded us, I guess it was just too much.

  We shook hands. “I’m John Culver.”

  “The reporter.”

  I shrugged. “Freelance journalist, actually.”

  Her grip was firm, her fingers calloused, the nails broken and cracked by the toil of hard work.

  “Thank you for meeting me,” I said. I tucked my notebook and pen into the pocket of my jacket and squinted my eyes against the swirling dust. The wind was blood warm against my face.

  Stacie shrugged her shoulders.

  We were standing in the middle of the town’s main road – four lanes of blacktop almost completely covered by layers of shifting dirt and dust. On the far side of the street was a low brick building, its walls crumbled, its windows like vacant blank eyes. It looked like it had once been a bistro. I followed Stacie silently and we stepped onto the cracked concrete of the sidewalk where we were shaded from the sun and protected from the persistent wind; it moaned through the broken building and rattled rusted sheets of corrugated iron so that they flapped like the wings of prehistoric birds.

  “Thank you for meeting me,” I said again.

  “It’s no bother,” Stacie said. There was something thin and strained in the tone of her voice; it was like the color had been bled from a picture. She sounded hollow – emptied of hope and future. She thrust her hands into the pockets of her faded denim jeans and stared back over my shoulder. Her distance was disconcerting; it was as though she were somewhere else – some other time. I cleared my throat and turned to see what she was staring at.

  On the opposite side of the wide road, at the arms of an intersection, was a two story square brick building. The front of the structure had been ripped away leaving a pile of red bricks and building rubble spilled across the sidewalk and onto one lane of the road. The interior looked scorched and blackened.

  “What is it?” I asked gently.

  Stacie pointed. “This road was East Main Street before the Apocalypse,” she said, the words still without tone or inflection – just a dry sound in her throat. “And that was the Post Office.”

  I looked with fresh eyes, past the dust covered traffic lights that still swung like rusted hinges from their poles, back to the intersection.

  “And was the post office significant?” I asked.

  “To me it was,” Stacie said.

  “When the first of the ‘Afflicted’ reached Wyoming?”

  “Yes.”

  We stood in silence for another long moment and the wind seemed a mournful lament. It undulated into faint little breaths of breeze and then came back stronger, more determined. I keep my eyes narrowed to slits. Stacie Morton glanced sideways at me.

  “You get used to the wind if you stay around these parts long enough,” she said simply.

  “Is it always like this?”

  “No. Only since the Apocalypse.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged and then sighed. She turned to me then, her face powdered in a fine grey dusting of grit. “Some say it’s the restless souls of native Indians,” she began. “This whole part of Wyoming was once a reservation.”

  “And what do the others say?” I raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “Others say it’s the restless souls of everyone who died here during the horror of the Apocalypse,” Stacie’s face was grim. “Over ten thousand dead in less than a day – each of them contaminated with the ‘Affliction’. Each of them turned from living into the undead. Some folks believe it’s their spirits that haunt Riverton.” She sighed and squared her shoulders like she was shrugging off a weight. “Either way,” her voice hardened. “Nature wants the town back. And it’s getting it too. Every day the dust and dirt hide just a little more. In a few years time there will be nothing left – just wasteland.”

  “Will you leave then?”

  “No,” Stacie’s voice became dismissive and a glitter of enduring pride shone in her eyes. “We don’t give up that easily, Mr. Culver. We’re tough out here. You need to be to survive.” She shook her head and drew a deep breath. “We’ll stay. It’s our home. It’s where I belong.”

  I reached into my coat pocket for my notebook and wrote a page of hasty notes. “You said, ‘we’?”

  Stacie nodded. “My husband, Wade and my daughter, Savannah.”

 
; “Where are they now?”

  “Home,” she said unhelpfully.

  In compiling the interviews for this book I had learned that no two people dealt with the shock and devastation of the undead Apocalypse in the same way. For some, talking about their experiences had been cathartic – they had talked freely as if to share what they had endured somehow purged them of their guilt and burdens. For others – like Stacie Morton – the horror was something they kept bottled inside; a poison they sought to keep contained.

  I propped my shoulder against the crumbling wall of the old bistro and stared back at the ruined Post Office building. Stacie Morton shuffled her feet, kicking her boots in the dust. On the ground nearby was a child’s sock patterned with delicate designs of sunflowers. It was thick and grey with dirt.

  “Where were you when you heard about the spread of the ‘Affliction’?” I asked carefully, uncertain whether she would respond.

  “At work,” Stacie said grimly. “I was a registered nurse in the operating room.”

  “Is the hospital still standing?”

  “No,” Stacie said bleakly. “It’s about five miles west of town. It was the first building the Air Force bombed once the ‘Affliction’ broke out. We thought it was contained.”

  “Within the hospital building?”

  “Yes.” She lapsed into a long silence and I could see the shadows of nightmarish memories flicker behind her eyes. Her mouth worked like she was chewing her lip. Then finally the tension seemed to seep from her body, until she appeared almost exhausted. “A man was brought in to the hospital,” she said at last. “He came in to the Emergency Room. No one knew what was wrong with him. He was isolated and the nurses on duty started drawing blood. The man suddenly acted like he was possessed. He bit one of the nurses.”

  “You saw this?”

  “No,” Stacie shook her head. “I only saw the blood. It was running in puddles across the floor when I was leaving.”

  “You left?”

  “We all did,” Stacie said with a tone that sounded like injured pride. “The police were called. The man was barricaded in a room eating the corpse of the nurse. There was blood on the walls, the floor… everywhere. The door had been locked and several of the doctors had piled chairs and tables across the hallway to keep him trapped.”

  “The nurse… did you know her?”

  Stacie Morton turned on me and her eyes glinted grey as the blade of a dagger. “Of course I did, Mr. Culver!” she lashed. “We all knew each other. It’s a small town – small community. Everyone knows everyone else.”

  I made a gesture of contrite apology and lowered my head over my notepad, hoping she would continue. I waited for several minutes.

  “When the police came they evacuated the hospital – sent everyone home,” Stacie went on eventually in the far away voice she had used when I had first met her.

  “Did you know that it was the ‘Affliction’? That the man was a carrier?”

  “Yes,” Stacie said. “It had been all over the news of course, right up until the transmissions ended and the world started blacking out. There were Ham radio operators… we knew the east coast was lost. We just didn’t figure the ‘Affliction’ would reach so far west – not out here…”

  “But the police couldn’t contain the infected patient?”

  She shook her head. “He broke out of the room and attacked two of the local officers. One was little more than a kid. They both turned, of course… and that was the beginning of the end for Riverton.”

  “What happened next?” I asked in a small voice.

  Stacie drew a deep breath. “We were all outside the hospital, standing behind these barricade fences that the local fire brigade had erected. Then we saw the front doors of the hospital smash open in an avalanche of glass, and all the police came out, running for their lives, turning to fire over their shoulders. It was chaos. A ripple of panic went through the crowd of bystanders. Then one of the cops went down on the lawn. An ‘Afflicted’ seized him by the ankle. The cop shot the undead from point blank range, but it was too late. The policeman had already begun to turn.”

  “Everyone ran for their lives?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Air Force arrived?”

  Stacie shook her head irritably. “No. That wasn’t until the next day,” she said. “When they knew the town had been completely overrun. A couple of jets flew low over the town and carpet bombed the area.”

  I wrote the details down, scratching into the notepad as quickly as I could. “You and your family were lucky to survive,” I offered.

  Stacie scowled. “No we weren’t,” she said bitterly. “We were prepared, Mr. Culver. Luck had nothing to do with us living through the Apocalypse. What got us through was preparation.”

  I looked up from my notebook curiously. There was steel in Stacie Morton’s tone and in the way she held herself. I sensed it was best to encourage her to tell her story of survival rather than to try to steer the interview into the details that interested me. “Tell me what happened next,” I said simply. “In your own words.”

  For a long contemplative moment of utter silence, Stacie Morton seemed to waver. She sighed at last and her gaze seemed to turn inwards, recalling. Remembering.

  “When the ‘Afflicted’ attacked the police officers at the hospital I knew it was the beginning of the end,” she said forlornly. “I think we all knew. Everyone at the barricades ran. It was the insanity of fear. People became inhuman. They pushed others out of the way, they trampled on anyone who fell. It was the instant we stopped being people and became…” she shrugged her shoulders, “… like them.”

  “But you made it to safety.”

  “Yes. I got to my car and headed back here, into town. Wade – my husband – was shopping with my daughter. He was off work for the day and Savannah was on summer break. I drove as fast as I could.”

  “What happened when you got back here?”

  “I parked in front of the Post Office,” Stacie said with a humorless grin of irony. “Right where all that rubble is now.”

  “What was it like in town?”

  “Normal,” Stacie sounded surprised. “They didn’t know yet. No one in town knew what was happening until the rest of us who escaped from the hospital arrived back. Suddenly car horns were blaring, alarms were wailing. Two police cars went racing away towards the hospital with their sirens howling. Everything went from calm to chaos like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Something in the air changed,” Stacie frowned like she was trying to understand at the same time she was explaining. It was like she was talking through a problem, groping towards an improbable solution. “At the time I didn’t really think about it. I was in a panic. I was driven by fear… and that’s what was in the air. It was like the vibration of the world changed – from soothing laid-back music to a deafening screech.”

  She looked at me, her mouth wrenched into an expression that was almost like pain. “Does that make any sense?”

  I shrugged. “I think so,” I said quietly. “You believe the fear and terror spread through everyone in the town.”

  “Yeah…” she said vaguely, not quite satisfied with the words I had offered, and still frowning. “Without any screaming or shouting – the panic spread. It became contagious. Suddenly people were running, scrambling. Cars screeched out into traffic and there were a couple of collisions. Fistfights broke out and a couple of the grocery stores were looted. We were a community up until that moment. Then we became something less noble. We became survivalists. It was each man for himself.” She sounded almost ashamed – as though she had expected better. I was sorry for her.

  I wrote down everything Stacie said, taking my time – giving her a few moments to gather herself. “We lost our humanity,” she muttered softly and lapsed into a dark brooding silence.

  “Everyone did,” I said simply. “Your story is not unique. I’ve heard it time and time again from those that have endured the Apocalypse. There is a moment –
an instant – where suddenly everyone forgets civility, compassion… all those things that bind us together as people. It gets lost, and in its place we revert to the kind of animal instinct that is required to survive. It’s not polite – it never is, Stacie. It’s crude and raw and callous… and I guess, when you peel manners aside, it’s what mankind is. We’re desperate survivors.”

  The wind came up again, rippling the dirt that lay across the blacktop and whipping up a swirling cloud of dust. I closed my eyes and turned my back against the gust. We were outside the door to the burned out bistro. I plucked at Stacie’s elbow and we went inside. There was no roof – I guessed that it had collapsed in upon itself at the height of the fire. The floor of the structure was littered with blackened wooden beams and little mounds of gritty dirt. In one corner was a pile of broken chairs and tables. We found a corner of the building where the intersecting walls still stood. Overhead the sky was turning sunset yellow.

  “You stayed in your home throughout the Apocalypse, right?” I asked.

  Stacie nodded. “I found Wade and Savannah on the main street and we drove home in convoy,” she said.

  “What about others – the other people around this area who survived?”

  Stacie shrugged. “Some were prepared like us,” she admitted. “The others fled up into the mountains.”

  “The mountains?”

  Stacie nodded. “The terrain around these parts is perfect for survival,” Stacie explained. “There are wide open spaces where you can see anything coming from miles away, and there are old abandoned mines and cabins in the hills that people turned into their homes. There is plenty of firewood – plenty of wildlife…”

  “Did you consider taking your family into the mountains when the ‘Affliction’ spread?”

  Stacie shook her head. “Our home was well prepared.”

  “How?”

  “Mr. Culver, this is Wyoming,” Stacie said as though that explained everything. “We’re not city folks. Out in these parts, most people are self-reliant. Our home has a full finished solid concrete basement with only four windows, and each of them is too small for a person to fit through. The upstairs windows are high off the ground and they’re all constructed out of vinyl for energy efficiency, not glass. They’re virtually unbreakable and can be locked from the inside. The basement was fully stocked when the ‘Affliction’ broke out. We were prepared for anything.”