Reworking the Dead - Xautnis Leonhart (smart ebook reader txt) 📗

The apocalypse. Nobody knows how it really happened, it just did. Sometime around 2:17 PM on the twenty-third of December, in the year 2012, signs of some kind of zombie viral outbreak broke out in the streets of Seattle; I was eight years old when it happened. Within a matter of hours, it utterly decimated the whole city and it quickly spread across North America. After three weeks since the first outbreak, the virus was soon sighted in the city of Shibuya, Japan, and it was virtually erased from the map in a mere two and a half hours. From there, it quickly spread into Europe and it too fell to the outbreak as well. In two months, the whole planet was infected with the virus; the dead walked the streets while the living cowered behind closed doors. They thought they could be safe. They were wrong.

According to a few of our scientists, about six months after Seattle, something… changed about the dead. They seemed to grow more intelligent, more quicker, even more deadlier. Some of them had begun to change, mutate into more scary monsters. With these enhancements, the dead spread their plague more easily, killed more innocent lives. During the beginning, some military morons thought dropping nukes on the empty cities and towns would fix everything, and naturally they were so wrong. When they managed to kill one, two more always seemed to take their places, and the radiation from the nukes only made the dead mutate even further.

With careful studying, we managed to identify most of the mutated infected: there were the ones who could outrun the fastest human, the Speeders; the ones who were unnaturally strong and could destroy what few barricades we could put up, the Supers; the ones who could jump several feet high without any effort, the Jumpers; and then there were the ones who showed intelligence, the Smarts. Whenever there were large hordes of the infected, there were always two or three Smarts leading the way; there were even rumors of survivors actually seeing a Smart speak, though we don’t believe that the Smarts are that intelligent. What we did know of them was that they appeared to be the generals of the groups we ran into, sending out orders by motioning and grunting in a specific way.

Now it’s 2038, twenty-six years since the Seattle outbreak, and I’m already thirty-four; my name is Nathan Winchester, and this is where everything changes.

I ready my shotgun as I press myself against the side of a dead car with broken windows. I glance over to my right, and several yards away hiding behind a cloudy telephone booth was Thompson carrying a heavily worn sniper rifle in his steady hands. I give him the sign to hold his position, where I hold my palm up then jab two fingers at the ground, and he acknowledges my order by nodding and patting the barrel twice. Then, I glance to my left, where Jackson and our newbie Johnny were lying behind another car; they nod as well when I give them the order as well.

Carefully, I pull out my night-vision binoculars and slowly straighten myself out to peer over the hood of the car. The surrounding night around us made things difficult to see, but we had done similar runs like this before, so our eyes adjusted to the suffocating dark rather easily. The street was clear except for the occasional semi-fresh body lying around, sometimes human, other times not. I held the binoculars up to my eyes and slowly panned over the empty road; all seemed quiet on the northern front.

Quietly, I hid behind the car again and delivered the following order to the others: All clear, nothing in sight, but be careful anyway. Once they understood, they shifted themselves to their feet, they waited for me to lead the way, and on the silent count of three, I cautiously jogged down the road on the balls of my feet, holding up my shotgun in a ready position as I panned it left and right repeatedly. After several seconds, we finally reached our target: a small run-down grocery store. Now granted, most of the food inside that hadn’t been taken had rotten away, but there was a small stash of cans that the last team had hidden behind the panel of the frozen fish area; the smell was so sickening, the last man who breathed in its fumes was bedridden for a week and a half and was coughing up blood during half of that time. That was why we had gas masks on-hand once we got there.

Thompson slowly pulled the door open and let us through, and softly closed it once we were inside. When we were inside, we left out a relived sigh and our grips on our weapons softened as we relaxed. “Alright, you know what to do. Jackson, you search for the medical supplies; medicine, first-aid, anything you can find. And take Johnny with you; show him the ropes.” He hoisted his magnum handgun and gently nudged the nervous rookie’s shoulder to follow as he walked away. As the two left, I turned to Thompson and said, “Thompson, you come with me, and get your mask ready; we’re going for those canned foods.”

With an acknowledging nod, he said, “Sure thing, boss.” I turned away and walked down to where the fish were kept while pulling the gas mask out and adjusted the straps on it. Once the smell met us with a rather violent slap in the face, I glanced to Thompson, nodded, and we put our masks on together, clearing the nasty smell from our noses. We continued on, eventually finding the source of the horrible smell. As we walked by the endless fish stalls full of rotten meat and tiny skeletons, I pulled out a flashlight and clicked it on, running the dim light across the general area; the light flickered out a few times, where I smacked it against my thigh until the light came back on. “I seriously need to find more batteries for this piece of junk…” Whether or not Thompson heard my words, he didn’t acknowledge my speaking.

Once the beam was strong enough, I began to search along the wall, trying to remember what the leader of the previous team had said to him weeks ago. “He said they hid a couple cans behind a panel built into the wall… Was it eight panels down or nine…?” I could hear Thompson search as well, but I didn’t pay attention to him. I continued to think hard about what he had said. “That’s right, he said it was the eighth panel from… Ah ha!” I eventually found what I was looking for: someone had carved my initials NC into the wall and beside it was an arrow pointing to the right. I counted to eight as I passed the panels and when I found the eighth one, I whipped out the pocket knife, swung the blade into place, and began to slowly pry at the edge while calling out to Thompson. “C’mere, I found it!”

Once he arrived at my side, I finally managed to pry the panel off the wall to reveal a small hollow, possibly as long and deep as my whole arm, and inside were several cans with faded stickers and wrappers on them. I could tell that one or two of them were canned beans or corn, but I couldn’t make out the rest of them. “Good find, boss. Want me to go find the others?” I didn’t voice a response, but I nodded slightly, so he stood up and walked away as I collected the cans.

Finding as many cans as these was a good find; it was difficult enough to try to find ones that hadn’t expired, but it was even harder finding more than two or three cans in a store. And for the past month and a half, we’ve been having a slight food shortage with the group of survivors we’ve been a part of, and during those long weeks, we’ve been having more and more fights amongst them, not to mention how we’ve been forced to leave a few of our camps because of the dead.

I placed the last can into the pack slung across my shoulder and stood up, rubbing my knees slightly as I thought for a moment. With this many cans, we’ll be able to last a little longer than before. Once the bag was secure so none of the cans could fall out, I jogged away to where Jackson and Johnny had separated from us, and that was where I found the others. “Alright, we got what we came for, now let’s get going, guys.” I led the way to the front door and was just about to open it when suddenly, an ear-splitting metal-on-metal clang echoed throughout the whole store.

I spun around to see Johnny staring at a couple metal pans lying on the floor from the stand they were just hanging from. “O-oh my god, I-I’m so sorry, I-I didn’t mean to-!” He was interrupted, not by one of the others or myself shoving him away or punching him to the floor, but by the cracking of glass. When I looked back, covering the entirety of the door and part of the windows around it were spider-web cracks and in the midst of the cracks was a single blurry dark figure that I didn’t have to look twice at to know who- no, know what it was. “Run!!”

No sooner had we spun around and bolted in the other direction when the door was utterly destroyed when multiple figures threw themselves through the glass. I glanced back with just enough time to recognize what they were: they were three muscular Supers. “Ah shit!! Supers!!”

A Super looked like a wrestler, but instead of a normal one like that pro-wrestler who went by “the Rock,” their bodies were covered in inhuman-sized muscles. It was a wonder how those steroid-fueled freaks were still able to move around with those muscles.

Two of the three Supers caught sight of me and were beginning the chase as the third stood its ground and just waited for others to come in. I caught up with the others and quickly ordered, “Split up!! Don’t stop!!” When we came across a split in the aisles, two of us took the left and the other two took the right. Judging by the sound of destruction behind us, one of the Supers had broken off its chase and was coming after me and Thompson. I could hear Johnny shouting out in fear and pleading for someone to help him somewhere on the other side of the store.

“That bastard’s getting closer, boss!!” said Thompson, keeping pace with me, “We need to take him out before any more of ‘em show up!!”

“You read my mind, Thompson!!” As we dodged between the aisles, I grabbed the machete from my left hip, yanked it free of its sheath, and held it a ready position in my hand. Instead of how people normally hold machetes with the tip of the blade pointed skyward, I held mine “backwards” with the blade pointed down. I tried it the “right” way before, but I was too comfortable with the way I held it now. “You get its attention, I’ll go for its neck!!”

“Right!” With that, he suddenly stopped and I kept going. Caught by surprise, the Super stumbled over itself and fell onto its side, crashing into a stall and crushing the weak wood into brittle firewood. As it began to stand, I quickly double-backed from the opposite direction as Thompson yelled at it to keep its attention entirely on him. As I approached it from behind, I was eyeing the nape