May 24, 2015
Brady looks over test papers intently when someone knocks on his open office door. “Come in,” He says without looking up. “Also, make it quick. My office hours end in ten minutes.”
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Brady looks over test papers intently when someone knocks on his open office door. “Come in,” He says without looking up. “Also, make it quick. My office hours end in ten minutes.”
Paul looks out the window, watching the street below. The crowd moves about their daily lives, far enough away that the sound and smell of them do not reach his senses, but instead invoke a memory-- fleeting and flashing before his eyes.
But With a Whimper | [1 of 6]
"This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper."
-T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
She never meant to leave her recruits behind, but considering that they’re in the middle of what the radio is calling “the end of the world”, she didn’t have much of a choice. She doesn’t even know if they made it out of Division. The bunker was overrun with the walking corpses. Zombies. If it wasn’t her living hell, she never would have believed it.
Her house was still intact when she arrived—she’d been less worried about a zombie invasion than the ravages of her neighbors—but she can’t stay there for long. DC was the target of what the radio is calling “a bioterror attack of unforeseen proportions”. DC has a lot of cemeteries, and a lot of people. DC is a war zone.
So she gets out. It isn’t her car that she climbs into, but it’s easy to hotwire and suitable for a long trip, and for warding off the undead hoards. She doesn’t even feel guilty about it. A range rover that she practically has to haul herself into because it’s so high off the ground, that she throws camping equipment and food supplies and water bottles into the back of. She puts her telescope into the passenger seat because she can’t bear to leave it behind, even though she knows she probably won’t get the chance to use it again. Or maybe she will. She isn’t sure how far the zombie hoard has spread, and neither is the radio, which is only reporting that, “signs of infection are showing up across the country”.
And then she drives through and away from the ruined city, and doesn’t look back.
But With a Whimper | [2 of 6]
She stops three towns south, hoping to gather information and supplies, maybe allies. The town is already virtually in ruins, and she realizes that people are as much of an enemy as the zombies are. Panicked, desperate people, willing to do anything to stay alive and not fully understanding the steps that they should take in order to do so.
They’re also not particularly good at separating out the important things from the unimportant, the sentimental things from the necessities for survival. She sees almost as many missing picture frames as she does empty pantries. Bad for them, good for her. She has no need for their personal treasures, but the portable cooking stove in someone’s basement, the can of gasoline in a garage down the street, those are all worth taking. If the world is ever in a state for them to return, she can pay them back, providing she’s still alive to do so. Providing they’re still alive. Providing she even remembers what she took from whom. It’s not like she’s keeping a ledger.
She grabs a spare tire, as well, because she can’t imagine anything worse than getting a flat as she’s fleeing a grasping, moaning crowd of the undead. Not that she’d have time to change it. She figures she can shoot them, if they get too close, but she’s only got one gun and not a lot of spare ammo. Her best chance is to flee, not fight.
So when she starts to hear the keening in the distance that indicates that they are coming, she is back in her car and flooring the gas pedal down the empty highway.
But With a Whimper | [3 of 6]
The emptiness is eerie. Broad daylight, and she’s the only one around. She flicks the radio back on. A couple of stations that she’s sure she had before provide only static, but the one that is left answers her unspoken question. “Death tolls are at record proportions as citizens flee the Washington, DC area.” No one is here because many are dead. The hoard is growing.
She wonders what it would be like to die, crushed between upright, moldering corpses, feeling slimy decaying fingers rend your flesh and knowing that you would become them as the world went dark around you. The thought makes her shudder, and she banishes it quickly, only to have it replaced by a worse thought—how many of her recruits died like that?
She parks in an empty gas station, fills up her tank, and eats a bag of Lays and two granola bars for dinner. The refrigerators are still running, and the sodas inside are still cold, so she drinks one. It isn’t like anyone else is going to. Then she climbs back into the SUV and lies down in the back seat, ear pressed to the cold glass. It’s not a particularly comfortable position to sleep in, but she is counting on the groaning of the creatures to wake her before they get there. Counting on it so that she can escape.
But With a Whimper | [4 of 6]
It’s amazing that it takes nearly a week for it to happen, but she miscalculates one evening, and is under attack before she is fully awake. She’s north of DC now, she figures, somewhere in Maryland. The zombies have spread out, at least—they aren’t one massive cloud of death, but have splintered off into little subgroups of disaster and destruction. Seven of them are around the car, making that horrible screaming noise in their throats that they always do. She wonders if they’re in pain. It’s a little different, from all of them, depending on the intactness of their vocal chords, but they are all making some degree of awful sound.
She puts a bullet into the brain of the first one, and shoots the second straight through the heart, and is about to nail the third when she realizes that they’re still moving. Bullets, it seems, do little to discourage the undead, and she says, “Oh, shit,” and then thinks, those are terrible last words.
They aren’t last words, though, because the zombie heading for her throat loses its head and falls to the floor. So does the next one, and the person informs her, “You’ve got to cut their heads off or burn them. Preferably both,” and then Xander is grinning at her even as he hacks the creatures to pieces. “Hey, Amanda. Long time no see.”
She douses the zombies in gasoline and lights them herself, even though they’ve stopped moving. It’s a macabre little fire pit, and it reeks with the scent of burning moldy limbs, but she takes the opportunity to look over her new companion in the half-light of morning. His hair is too long and he’s splattered with blood and dirt and she realizes that she can’t be much better. His limp indicates that his leg hasn’t healed properly, but he’s abandoned the cane. “Where did you go?”
“Before all this?” he asks. “New York. I have family there, and…” he shrugged. “I needed to take a break from teaching fencing, with everything.” With my injured leg, she mentally replaces the phrase. “What about you, heard anything from your secret government overlords?”
She shakes her head. She’s been saving phone battery, turning it on once a day to check for messages, or instructions, but if Olivia Steele is alive, she has been oddly silent.
But With a Whimper | [5 of 6]
He gives her the second sword he’s been carrying. They’re proper swords, not foils, more ideal for killing zombies than anything other weapon she’s come across. “You could use an axe, I guess, but they’re more unwieldy. A machete might be best, but…” Amanda considers it and decides she’d like a machete, but they seem to be in short supply in the desolate New England towns they keep stumbling through. She’d also like a flamethrower, come to think of it, but she can’t imagine where she’d acquire one of those, either.
She wonders where they’re going. Breaking and entering has become commonplace, and she finds herself going through places that have already been looted by at least ten other people, looking to see if they’ve missed anything. They find a house that still has running water. Before she climbs into the shower, she looks in the mirror, and barely recognizes herself. Her skin is buried under a coat of grime, her hair stiff with sweat and blood, her clothes stained and torn beyond saving. She takes new ones from the closet of the master bedroom, and wonders when the guilt she used to feel about snatching the possessions of others went away.
Their travel is aimless and endless. The radio has long since stopped providing any information at all, only a buzzing static that gets on her nerves. She leaves it playing anyway until Xander snaps, “Turn it off.” Until the unease and irritated outweigh the hope that someday, someone will contact them. They meet the zombies a few more times, and they fight. She gets a bad gash on her shoulder, and Xander’s limp continually worsens, until she retrieves a cane someone’s abandoned and hands it to him wordlessly.
She looks for signs of life, but the nearest she ever gets are semi-fresh corpses.
But With a Whimper | [6 of 6]
It has been several weeks, but not more than a month, before Xander says abruptly, “I’m out of medication.”
“What?” is her only response.
He’s impatient, “I’m out of anticonvulsant medication.”
“What does that mean…for this?” This being their continued survival, the constant traveling from place to place, their collective injuries, the zombies that multiply and the supplies and shelter that grow more scarce.
“Well,” he hesitates, which worries her more than anything else. It’s unlike him. “I might be fine, for a little while. And then I’m going to start having seizures. Maybe not regularly, but maybe every day. Some of them will be small, and some of them won’t be, and it’s going to make it harder for me to do things.”
“Will they kill you?” she wants to know, because if they are the only people alive and he dies, then she will be alone.
“The seizures won’t,” he shakes his head. “But falling might. Getting caught by zombies because of them might. I’m going to be a liability, and it’s going to get worse, and I’m going to die.”
She wants to comfort him, but there’s nothing to say. He’s more familiar with his condition than she is.
“So what do you want to do?” he asks, a few hours later.
“Do?”
“Yeah,” he’s looking at her, “Before I drop dead. Let’s do something. Besides this. This kind of sucks. Besides, isn’t there anyone you want to look for, family or something?”
“Or something…” she says, hesitant. “There are some…people…that I work with.” The care not to mention Division by name, not to specify anything, is ingrained in her.
“Right, secret government thing. You know,” he comments, offhand, “They haven’t contacted you or anything. You’re probably good to tell me, if you want to.”
Amanda doesn’t say everything, of course, but she explains a little. “I’m training agents, for the government. My recruits…we need to find them.”
“Great,” he stands, leaning on the cane. “Let’s go.”
She thinks about them. Her agents, Valentina and Rachel and Cambria (and Cambria barely, only enjoying her new freedom for days until the infection began), none of them had been in the bunker. Maybe they had escaped, maybe they were alive. The others…they could have gotten out, maybe. Stubborn Jane and irritable Emma and wild Jennifer and calm Eva and lazy Darcy. And if they had gotten out, if they were running for their lives like she was, it was her obligation to find them.
Some second chance she’d be giving them if she didn’t.