DEADLAND - The Beginning Of The End

TV cameras captured the moment that we faced our doom.

The shout jolts me awake.

I’m laying on my front over my makeshift sketchpad, my drawing of a terror-free life smudged. The image of an idyllic countryside is now covered in what looks like a thin black fog, like the dust kicked up by the hordes of walking corpses stumbling through the dry streets.

Dawn has yet to peel back the curtain of night. Smoke from my burned-out candle tickles my nostrils. I dare to think for a moment that the shout was a fragment of a nightmare, until I hear it again.

It’s coming from the living room. Is it Father?

I get up slowly and pad to the bedroom door. There are noises, voices, and none of them are Father’s.

I open the door a crack. Dappled light dances across the walls. Father is in his armchair, backlit by the television mounted on the wall.

I tip toe to the window. Outside, there are a few of our dead overlords slowly roaming around the street and apartment buildings opposite ours. The light from the TV ghosts across the pavement, all too obvious in the dead, pitch black city. I close the blackout curtains before anything notices us.

When I look back, I can see that Father is asleep. A bottle of vodka is on its side on the carpet, the empty glass in his lap along with a tattered, dishevelled notebook. The pages are full of scrawling and scribbles in shorthand. I can barely read his handwriting; much of it seemed to have been fuelled by alcohol. I can make out very few words clearly. Swarm. Horror. Dead. Too many.

How did it all go wrong? is written at the top of every page. Occasionally it transitions into the more colourful: Where did we fuck this up?

I turn to where he was when he fell asleep. Across one entire page, on top of all the mad scribbling, is a bold, frustrated statement:

They annexed our living world and made their own dead one.

I look up at the TV. News footage is playing, the local broadcast, a recording Father took on a hard drive when everything happened.

The centre of town. Windows on all sides boarded up, doors barricaded with wood and sheet metal. Barbed wire and sandbags in the street. Mines in the road.

I can’t even begin to count the soldiers. Battalions of them are arranged into squads and firing lines. The national guard and police have mobilised together. I remember them roaring down the road past the apartment, sirens wailing, leading armoured personnel carriers and tanks towards the battle site.

“We are being told that the enemy are a mile away.”

The reporter’s voice is female. The camera pans around to show her, brunette hair in a messy bun, wearing a helmet and ballistic vest. The word PRESS is printed in white on the chest plate.

“There are, we’re being told, roughly one thousand men and women prepared to defend this community.”

On the TV, there are a number of gunshots from up the street, out of sight. They crack sharply over the distant, monotonous roar of the enemy. That roar has been such a constant in my life since, at first I didn’t even register it in the background. The reporter flinches at first, but then steadies herself quickly.

“As we can hear, the battle has begun. It is a matter of minutes before the main defence force engage the enemy. National Guard officials are confident that they will be able to repel the attacking forces, and that lessons have been learned from the engagements at San Diego, Chicago and New Orleans.”

Father murmurs in his sleep. I remember how terrified he had been when news from those cities reached us, how he and Mother argued about what was happening, how urgent the problem truly was. He hoarded plenty of food and clean water, built a filter.

Mother left us ... and then came home.

Her chains rattle, and she growls from her room. I quickly turn the TV down, waiting until she settles. I can still hear the reporter’s voice, and the cracks of rifle fire, increasing in number and intensity. The roar is growing louder and more furious.

“The shots you are hearing now are to draw the horde forwards into the killzone the military have established at this intersection here.”

She gestures back behind her. The four-road junction is barricaded by sandbags, breeze blocks and military vehicles cutting off two of the roads. The plan was a bottleneck of focused fire, a wall of bullets to overwhelm the dead.

The gunshots begin to fall away as they get closer, and after a few more seconds they stop.

“It has been agreed with the producer and broadcaster that we will be able to show up to the entirety of the battle. Um ... as you can hear, the forward scouts drawing the enemy here have ceased their firing ... we can only assume that means that their task has been a success, and that they will be returning to the intersection shortly.”

Father grunts in his sleep, and words murmur from the corner of his mouth. “Nnn ... let ‘m go...”

On the screen, a motorcycle screeches around the corner. The rider pumps the brakes and tumbles off the bike in the middle of the intersection, nowhere near the barricades. He is a police officer, young, tall and strong. His uniform barely contains his muscle.

This potential warrior is terrified. His uniform is covered with dark patches, his face is spattered with scarlet. Even with the sound close to muted, I can hear him screaming for the battalion to run, to fall back.

The reporter hesitates for a moment. “I ... uhm ... there ... seems to be...”

Captured on ultra high definition camera, the end of the world surges around the corner. The officer is quickly swallowed up by the horde of decaying flesh and ravenous hunger. The soldiers and police officers are paralysed by shock for just long enough to condemn them all.

The barrage begins just after the reporter says her last words.

“Oh my God...”

Small arms fire thunders. The mounted 50.cal machine guns atop the jeeps and APCs boom into the horde. Many of the rotting enemy fall, but are replaced with more immediately, trampling over the inert corpses.

Through sheer volume of bullets, the horde is slowed, but they surge as a flood would, pouring through the barricades of apartment buildings and straight out of the windows. They rain down onto the living, and the firing lines break one by one.

The reporter screams.

The feed cuts.

As if she knows what I’ve just seen, Mother strains against her chain and snarls.

I turn off the TV, then shake Father gently. He grumbles and grits his teeth. “Nnnno...”

“It’s me, dad.”

He grabs my wrist as his eyes tear open. They’re bloodshot and unfocused, and his hand tightens.

“Ow ... dad!”

He blinks and grimaces, letting go off my arm. After a few breaths, he pats me on the shoulder.

I hope for a moment that he’ll hug me, like he used to. When he gets up, though, he just trudges over to the TV and turns it off. Mother is still riled up, and he grunts at the locked, bolted and barred door.

“Go back to bed,” he mutters.

“Dad...”

“I’ll … calm her down ... don’t worry. Go back to bed. You need to be rested and alert.”

You need to be sober. “Okay, dad.”

At my door, I look back at him. His hand is hovering over the door into the bedroom, where Mother waits. He lifts the bar and starts unlatching the bolts, before his eyes find me again. Before he can speak, I duck back into my bedroom.

The moans of the walking dead in the street seem louder. I check at the window, but there are still only the night crowd out, the ones that had been homeless, or late night workers, or party animals in life. Without prey, they shamble, tragic figures and shadows of what they used to be.

It’s easy to forget what they turn into when presented by a morsel of meat. That’s all the dwindling living are now. Just morsels.

I stare at the ceiling, sleep nowhere near. I can hear the roar of the horde in my memory, and a grim thought nests in my mind.

That roar will be the last thing I hear, probably. Not Father telling me not to be scared, or that he loves me.

It will be the ravenous cry of monsters, eager to rip me apart.