Alone

Alone

GM Chesla

June 2015

One year and one day ago, Tony was living a normal life in his home town of Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

A normal life in Uniontown, a town about forty-five miles southeast of Pittsburgh and fifteen miles north of the West Virginia border, was a simple and quiet life. It consisted of rooting for the Steeler’s football team in the fall and winter, tolerating the Pirate’s baseball team during the summer and hanging out with the guys.

One year ago, that all changed.

Within days, the residents of Uniontown had become infected, died and then unbelievably came back to life.

More accurately, the dead began to rise and attack the living. Other than the fact they moved, little else about the dead resembled life in any way.

Within days, Tony saw his family, one by one, become infected and die. A nightmare that was only beginning.

Tony escaped and found some of his friends that had also managed to survive. They banded together to try and survive the relentless pursuit of the dead, the snow and cold of the approaching Pennsylvania winter and to find enough food to keep from starving to death.

By spring, Tony was the only one of his group that was still alive. He witnessed his friends die over the cold winter months. Their lives were claimed by the cold, by disease, by accidents and by the dead.

One year later, Tony finds himself alone and barricaded in an old warehouse surrounded by the dead. He is desperately trying to find a way to survive and cling to his hope of one day finding another living being.

Over the next week, Tony will have to rely on all of his knowledge and experience to survive as he confronts his hopes and his worst nightmares.

Chapter 1

Tony woke because of the sweltering heat in the upstairs room he was using as his sleeping quarters. It had become too uncomfortable to sleep any longer. The tin roof over his quarters radiated the heat down on him as if he were in an oven being broiled alive. It was obviously another hot day. The sun must be out, shining down brightly on the warehouse. The humidity must also be high again as he found himself on a soggy sleeping bag that covered the bright blue inflatable pool raft that he used as his bed. The sweat was pouring off his body.

He would have slept on the ground floor of the old warehouse where it was cooler, especially in the morning hours when the sun shined directly on the roof over him causing his room to get hot. But the upstairs office was the safest place in the warehouse.

The ground floor was cooler, but he would be in big trouble if they broke in during the night when he was asleep.

When he had first discovered the warehouse, he hadn’t been able to sleep very well at first. The noise they made constantly gave him nightmares as he tried to sleep, but over time he became used to the haunting sounds they made. He learned to ignore the banging sounds they made on the walls and doors. They constantly made noise because they knew he was here inside the warehouse.  The constant groaning and the never ending pounding on the walls and doors echoed through the warehouse day and night.

The warehouse had turned out to be very secure, much more secure than any of the houses he had used to hide from the dead. The dead always had managed to eventually find a way inside the houses he had used for shelter. No other place of refuge had managed to keep the dead out for more than a week before he was on the run again.

The warehouse, with its two large metal doors and only one small window that was high up near the top of the warehouse had fared much better. It had been almost a month since he had found this place. The old warehouse had managed to keep him safe and the dead out.

Even though he felt safe here, for the first time in almost a year, he still took the precaution to sleep in the small upstairs office he had found. The only way to get in the little office was up an old metal ladder that was bolted to the wall outside the room. He knew they couldn’t climb the ladder up the thirty or forty feet to his den.

Tony didn’t know what the little office had been originally used for, it seemed like a strange place for an office. It was difficult to get up to the small room. Maybe the metal stairs that laid on the floor in the middle of the warehouse, mangled and twisted, had once gone up to the office. Possibly the dead bodies he had found scattered on the floor below the room had been the men that had worked in the office. In desperation they had removed the bolts that had held the stairs to the inside walls so it would crash down to the bottom of the warehouse, so the monstrosities that had chased them into the warehouse and up to the office couldn’t get at them. One of the workers in the room must have been infected. When he turned into one of “them”, he had attacked the others, infecting the rest of his group.

When the infected workers died and came back as the walking dead, they staggered out of the office in search of living flesh. They fell to the floor thirty feet below. The fall had crushed their skulls, killing them for good.

When Tony ran into the warehouse looking for shelter from the hoards that were chasing him, he was lucky to find the warehouse empty, except for the dead bodies lying on the floor below this strange looking room.

He had moved the bodies into the small bathroom located in the back of the warehouse after his first day in the building so he wouldn’t have to look at them. The bodies were now dried out and barely weighed thirty pounds. After he had put them in the bathroom, he moved a few heavy boxes in front of the door. He wasn’t going to take any chances. The bodies looked like they had been dead and had been lying in the same spot for months, but he had seen so many weird things over the last year, you could never take anything for granted. The bathroom was no longer functional and no longer served any other purpose. He had an old bucket in the office that he used when he needed to go to the bathroom.

His office had the only window in the entire building.

He got a small sense of satisfaction after going to the bathroom in the bucket. He would throw the waste out the window, down on top of the groaning creatures banging on the sides of the building.

He got a kick out of watching them grab at the waste when he threw it down on top of them. He knew it was a sick source of amusement, but not as sick as what they would do to him if they got their hands on him.

Like what they had done to his family. He had nightmares for months after he had witnessed what they had done to his family and neighbors.

If that wasn’t bad enough, it was even worse to see his family and neighbors become one of those things and then attack other friends and neighbors.

It was the worst nightmare he had ever imagined when they turned on him.

He had lived with his family in Uniontown, Pennsylvania for eighteen years, his entire life. Uniontown was about forty-five miles southeast of Pittsburgh. It was the largest city in Fayette County. The city covered only about two square miles. It had a population of around ten thousand people. In the 1940’s and 1950’s Uniontown had a population of well over twenty-five thousand people. Fayette County was the center of the Pennsylvania coal industry and had been the wealthiest county in the country. In the 1960’s the steel industry began to die out when steel could be produced cheaper overseas than in the U.S. When the steel industry died, the coal mines began to shut down. Soon the population began to drop as the people left to find work elsewhere. Uniontown went from being a busy growing city to just another dying town in the Appalachian Mountain Range.

Tony had always liked living in Uniontown. He of course never lived here in its heyday when it was a larger, hectic, bustling city. He only knew it as it was now and had always enjoyed the small town atmosphere.  His family had lived in a little house on Coolspring Street, in a quiet section of the city.

But that had all changed.

He never really knew what had happened. He had seen some reports about a virus or something spreading around the world. It was an unbelievable story about people dying then coming back to life and then killing the living.

The first reports said that an unknown virus had begun to spread around the world at an alarming pace. No sooner had the reports started, they stopped. All communications from outside the U.S. ended with in a few days. Soon communication with all the major U.S. cities went out, followed by all the local TV stations. Next the phones and electricity stopped functioning.

His family did the best they could without electrical power.

Soon the water stopped flowing. There were no longer any deliveries of gasoline to Uniontown and soon it was unusual to see anyone driving a car.

Food deliveries to the local stores had also ended and then there was nowhere to go to buy food or anything else.

It had all happened so fast.

He didn’t know how the virus made its way to Uniontown. When the report of the first infection in Uniontown was announced, it hadn’t been more than a few days before all power and communications were out. It had been strange living without power, working stores, food or cars. But Tony didn’t know how strange things could become until the virus hit Uniontown. One day later the infection reached his street.

Life quickly turned from strange to a nightmare.

He was sitting on the front porch with his family when they began to hear screaming. They couldn’t believe their eyes when their next door neighbor chased his wife out the front door, off the porch and into the street.

His Dad was about to run out into the street to calm the neighbors down. The Nelson’s had a history of arguing and yelling at each other. The police had been to their house at least once each month over the last six months, but their fighting had never spilled out into the street before.

His Dad had just stepped off the porch when Jim Nelson caught up to his wife in the middle of the street. His Dad stopped and stared as Jim began to tear and bite his wife, ripping flesh from her neck. The blood sprayed across the street and onto the sidewalk at his Dad’s feet.

It wasn’t just the Nelsons, the sound of screaming from many other homes up and down the street soon drowned out the sounds made by the Nelsons.

His Dad made Tony, his mother and sister go in the house and lock the doors.

Soon the neighbors, or what had once been their neighbors, were pounding at his door trying to get in.

After twenty minutes the commotion started to calm down.

Tony’s sister Diane was the first in his family to be infected. When a tapping sounded at the front door, his sister opened the door without thinking to see who was there. She was savagely bitten by what was once Mrs. Nelson. Mrs. Nelson growled and snarled the entire time, like a rabid dog, trying to get passed Diane and inside the house as his family stared in disbelief.

His Dad pulled Diane back in the house as he fought off Mrs. Nelson and finally managed to get the door closed behind them.

His Mom took Diane upstairs to bandage her wounds while Tony and his Dad boarded up the windows to keep the terrifying savages that had once been their neighbors from getting inside the house.

His sister started to run a high fever and soon was delirious, then unconscious. His Mom sat up with her all night. Tony and his Dad were not able to get any sleep that night between worrying about his sister and all the groaning and screaming they heard coming from the streets outside their house.

During the night Diane had passed away.  His Mother was holding Diane crying when his sister’s eyes shot open. His Mother had looked stunned to see Diane moving again.

His Dad ran into the room when his Mother started to scream. He was horrified to see Diane savagely biting into the flesh on his wife’s arm.

His Dad had pulled Diane off and restrained her, while his Mom wrapped a towel around her badly bleeding arm.

He couldn’t believe the look of savage evil on Diane’s face as she growled incoherently. He couldn’t believe how cold Diane had felt.

He tied her down in the bed to restrain her so she couldn’t continue to attack them while he tended to his wife. Tony’s mother had cried as she told his dad how happy she had been when she thought Diane had recovered. She had explained how her joy had turned to fear as she saw the look in Diane’s lifeless black eyes.

By morning their nightmare had become even worse.

Tony had run to his parent’s bedroom when his Dad began to frantically call out his name.

He had entered his parent’s room to see his Dad sobbing, blood running down his arms as he restrained his Mother.

His Mom looked up at him and growled. The savage unhuman look on her face was terrifying.

His Dad’s face had slowly turned to look at him as Tony ran into the room, tears running down his face.

His Dad had sadly explained to Tony that what they had heard before the television stations had stopped broadcasting. What they hadn’t believed possible was in fact true.

Diane had become infected, died and come back to life and infected his Mother. His Mother had in turn infected his Dad.

His Dad explained that he believed he too would soon become ill and die. That he would become one of the undead like Diane and his mother had done. His Dad had said he could not let his wife and daughter suffer this way. He said he didn’t know if they had any memory of who they had been or if they knew what they were doing. If they did, he would not allow them to exist in that living hell. He said he would not allow himself to become one of those things and hurt anyone else, especially Tony.

He asked Tony to get him his gun and to load it before giving it to him.

He had told Tony that he should try, as soon as he could safely get out of the house, to go find his friends and get as far away from here as he could.

He had told Tony he loved him then asked him to go downstairs and stay in the living room and not to come back upstairs. When everything became quiet it would be over. His Dad had said he didn’t want Tony to try to bury them afterwards. He didn’t want him to remember his family this way. What would be left would not be his family, they would be gone.  It would be too dangerous to try to bury them. The house would be their tomb.

His Dad wished him well and hoped he could find a way to have a safe life somewhere away from all of this.

His Dad’s face and his words had appeared in Tony’s dreams many times over the past year. It was his Dad’s courage that had given Tony the will to go on during the many times he had felt like just giving up.

After talking with his dad, Tony had gone down stairs and sat on the couch and listened. He started to sob when he heard the first shot.  The tears came faster when he heard the second shot. Tony felt like his entire world had ended when he heard the third shot.

Then there was silence.

He sat in the quiet and stared at the family pictures that hung on the living room wall. The pictures of Tony with his family over the years.