My own Apocalypse

Copyright © 2024 W. G. Sweet, all rights reserved foreign and domestic.

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This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual living person’s places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

ONE

Ethan

Ethan pulled Janelle’s tattered notebook from his pocket and read it once more in starts and fits as he thought about the last few days. Eyes rising to the factory walls, the entrancement, and then back down to the notebook. Occasionally a fat teardrop rolled down his cheek unseen and fell to the cold concrete floor.

Tarps overhung the shattered factory entrance. The building itself was solid. He had checked it with a flashlight. Why it had survived the earthquakes he did not know, but he was glad it had.

It was even stocked with canned goods. Someone had gone through the trouble of building a fireplace. Rock from the nearby river, most likely, Ethan thought. The fireplace occupied a central part of the floor. Wood piled by it. He had almost passed on it, thinking that whoever had set this up would be back, but the fire was cold, the tarp had blown partly off the door too, and there were too many of the dead now, wandering the streets and alleyways. They seemed to shy away from daylight, but at night, they roamed freely. He needed the protection of a solid building and a fire.

He had heard the screams of their victims more than once over the last several nights as he huddled in this doorway or that. He had found a second floor factory to call home for two nights, but there were too many ways in to it, too many entrances to guard. The dead had found him on the second night and he had only escaped because they were too slow to chase him. He had found a shallow cave a few days before along the cliffs that faced the river. He had fled to it, hoping that no one or thing else had claimed that small space. It had been empty and he had spent the night snapping awake every time there was a strange sound. The next morning he had found the cave. The windows bricked up long ago, the entrance a crumbled ruin, but that was the only way in. He had learned that first night that the dead were afraid of fire. They would not come near it. He could hear them out in the night, moaning, stumbling from one place to another, but they never approached where he could see them, and in the morning there were none to be seen. They had secreted themselves away in the dark places that they passed away the daylight hours in.

He had built the fire in the pit, and then another outside the entryway that evening and had managed to get his first night of sleep the next night, when it was clear they would not come near the fire under any circumstances.  He paused, thinking back, and then began to write out his own story.

Ethan’s Notebook.

 I’ve heard gunshots more than once. And the nights are alive. Screams, the dead walking about, stumbling and crashing. I’ve heard a dog barking too. And I’ve seen a few dogs, cats, squirrels. I’ve also heard what sounded like a car or a truck, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Everything is so quiet during the day; it could be anywhere.

The sound of the river drowns things out. I haven’t seen any other live people. None.

I have no idea what has happened, even here in Manhattan. It doesn’t really matter either, except to tell you, whoever you may end up being, what happened from my point of view, I guess. Maybe it’s the same for you. Maybe writing this out is a waste of time. But it keeps my mind off shit.

There were more planes overhead in the night. I know that sounds crazy, but I awoke to hearing them. It took me back to the day in the park when they overflew us and sprayed us.

I’m going to start looking for people. I think there are dozens of people close by but they’re all hiding. I’m going to walk down by the river, all those lofts, warehouses. I figure that if anyone is still alive that is where they would be. Hiding in all of those buildings.

I’m warm. I’m dry. I’m pretty much okay. My fingers are sore and I’m tired, so I’ll pick this up tomorrow.

Ethan closed his notebook and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He sat quietly for a few moments and then lifted his eyes looking around the factory floor. The longer he was here the more convinced he was that someone had been here for a length of time directly after everything fell apart. His eyes fell on the three  where they had settled in.

There was some sort of tension there that he couldn’t quite define. For the last few hours it had seemed as though a whispered argument of some sort had transpired between Rose-Lee and John. Ethan didn’t think much of John, but he was surprised that Rose-Lee was with him. She seemed too strong to need someone like that. He turned away and shook his head to clear it. People belonged to themselves, maybe more now that they ever had. The wrong thing for John to be thinking is that he could tell a woman like Rose-Lee what she could or couldn’t do. He stared back into the fire for a moment and began to think once more about his own losses, wondering where Janelle might be. It was always like that. ‘I need to get some batteries, maybe some more ammo too, and I wonder how Janelle is?’ … ‘Looks like rain today, but I can still get some things done, and I wonder if Janelle is safe and dry somewhere.’ Her memories kept sneaking up on him. His feelings, his longing for her, something like that, kept it absolutely fresh and ever present. It made his chest ache almost instantly and so he turned his thoughts in a different direction.

Ethan had been sitting out front of the factory building a few days back when he had met a guy that said he had worked at the Army base over in Jersey. He said he knew what it was. He said the planes came from somewhere down south, but stopped there on the way back to re-fuel. What he had said was that the blue stuff was designed to strengthen the survivors, keep them alive a little longer, make them stronger somehow. Some dip shit scientist’s idea.

Ethan supposed it was meant as a boost for human kind, a help. The world had fallen apart; everything stopped working. They knew the government couldn’t get to the survivors to help them. They would die. So they sprayed the blue shit on everyone, and Ethan supposed further that some of them had survived the first few months because of it. He couldn’t prove it, but he suspected it did help them evolve into…

He didn’t know. Whatever the hell they were now. He knew they we’re alive. He knew his heart beat. He still felt human, and he truly thought he was still human. If it made changes to the living, they are very small changes… at least so far.

But the dead – oh, the dead. That was a different story. It did something else to the dead.

He sat now thinking his thoughts. He was lost in them for a few seconds. But he came back fast when he caught a disturbance across the factory floor.

Rose-Lee had been watching him from across the factory floor where she had made a clearly defined space for herself and Alice a few feet away from John. John hadn’t liked it at all. But she didn’t really care too much about what John thought. He was all right, but he was not her leader… She wasn’t sure what kind of a leader she needed, but not a leader that didn’t respect the boundary lines of a relationship. She looked over at Ethan where he sat close to the fire. Maybe she had found her leader, or at least someone she was willing to follow. She hadn’t wanted to interrupt him while he was writing, but now that he seemed finished. She got to her feet, dusted her palms.

“Baby?” Alice asked.

Rose-Lee squatted back down beside her. She smiled and then leaned forward and kissed her lightly. “You know I love you, right?”

Alice smiled back. “I do…” Her smile slipped. “But?”

“Just got to have a conversation…. See if this is someone we can travel with… I’ll be right back.” She leaned forward and kissed her quickly, and then stood. She caught Johns eyes as she straightened.

“Him?” John asked. He shook his head and turned away. Rose-Lee shook her own head and then walked over to where Ethan sat.

“This was really nice of you,” she said as she walked up. “We were staying in that old school building. None too stable. Last night was the best sleep I’ve had in awhile.”

“Funny,” Ethan replied, “I was thinking the same thing. For me it was just having companionship.”

Rose-Lee smiled. She caught his eyes and smiled again.

“Mind?” She asked, gesturing at the ground beside him.

“Not at all,” Ethan smiled.

The silence stretched out for a few seconds, each of them looking around the factory floor waiting for the other to begin.

Rose-Lee fixed her eyes on him. “I was just wondering what you were planning on doing. I mean, have you thought about leaving? I know you spoke a little bit about it yesterday when you were talking to John. Seemed like you two don’t really see things the same way.” She let the last words rise like a question.

Ethan looked at her levelly. “Yeah… I guess it does show. We just don’t click. I wondered if you were coming over to tell me that the three of you might light out… I guess it’s obvious we don’t see things the same. I guess I also wondered what you thought as an individual… You don’t seem like the kind of woman that follows.” Ethan shrugged. “I know I can’t be nobodies soldier.”

Rose-Lee nodded. “It’s the same with me. I do my own thinking.”

“Exactly,” Ethan agreed.

Rose-Lee nodded. She fixed him with her serious eyes once more. “So what will you do?”

“Probably like I said, like everyone else is doing. I don’t see them but I can feel it… It’s like a drain on the city… The living moving out, the dead moving in. So I guess that’s me too… I’ll leave. Get out of this city… That’s first. It’s bad here.” He raised his arms to encompass the factory. “I’ve been here few a days… False security. They won’t come near this place, but that isn’t getting me out of the city either. I have got to quit procrastinating.”

“What’s next do you think?” Rose-Lee asked.

“As this goes on?” Ethan shook his head “I guess I’m just waiting to see how this goes too… Like everyone. But…. I think the dead are getting smarter… Faster too. I know that sounds like bullshit, maybe even paranoia, but I’ve been paying attention. I saw three the other day that seemed to be working together to break a door down to a building.” He nodded when Rose-Lee raised her eyebrows. “Back on Park Avenue with my woman, Janelle? …” He blinked and stumbled with his words. “It was after she was gone.”

“I see that… Sorry,” Rose-Lee said softly.

“So I had to leave… Couldn’t stay there…” Ethan swiped at his eyes, embarrassed at the instant tears that had appeared. He cleared his throat. “The dead… The dead had been attacking every night. It’s like they knew I was there. At first they just stumbled against the stuff I had piled up in the stairwell to keep them out, made a racket all night long, but after a while it was like they saw it for what it was and began to work to remove it. The morning I left they had nearly made their way through overnight.” Ethan raised his hands, palms out and shrugged his massive shoulders.

Rose-Lee hung her head and shook it slightly. “That’s the last thing we need,” She said as she scrubbed at her face with her palms.

Ethan nodded. “So, what happens next? I’ll probably leave,” He smiled. “I guess that was a long drawn out answer.”

“No. Not really,” Rose-Lee answered. “I’m in the same place.” She looked around.

Ethan shrugged his shoulders. “Jersey’s looking better and better, huh?” He laughed a little.

Rose-Lee looked up from her contemplation of the floor. The laughter had caught her by surprise. She laughed too. “It is starting to look better.” She smiled at Ethan.

“Been over there,” Ethan told her. “Wandered all over for a few days. It’s not so bad. Thinking it might be time to at least spread out a little. I thought that was what John was suggesting at first. Get a truck and get out, but then he wants to come right back. I don’t really get that.”

She nodded and then continued. “Me either… Anyway, I…” She raised her head level with his and locked her eyes on his own. “I just wanted you to know I’m seeing it the same way as you. I mean… I mean I want to be on your side of it… Me and Alice both” She gave a nod, then firmed her mouth, set her jaw and spoke once more. “I have Alice to think of,” She blushed and turned away, and then turned right back.

“I see,” Ethan said.

She nodded and smiled carefully, “Didn’t know what side of this you might fall on… John is against it… Thinks I need a man. I’m taking you at face value, I guess.” She smiled.

Ethan laughed. “What a dick.”

“I just wanted you to know the deal… I don’t want to mess this up.,” she said quietly, her eyes serious.

“So we’ll go looking tomorrow,” Ethan said. “We’ll decide things between us.” He turned toward John “Him too if he wants.”

“I don’t see that working for him, but it works for me, Ethan” Rose-Lee said.

“Okay Rose-Lee,” Ethan agreed. Tomorrow it is.”

“Rose-Lee,” Rose-Lee told him. “We’ll be with you tomorrow.”

Ethan nodded, “Rose-Lee it is,” which caused a huge smile to spread across her face. His own smile answered it. But he thought, did she really mean it? He didn’t complete the thought as she stood and walked across the factory floor to where she had put her things and spent her first night. Alice followed her and then her eyes came up and seemed to question Ethan. She turned and looked back at Rose-Lee. Ethan stood and walked over to help them move their things to their own area. Ethan saw the tension in John’s shoulders as he helped them move, but John said nothing.

John watched as Ethan helped the girls move their sleeping bags and back packs over to a clear space on the factory floor. He didn’t see what Rose-Lee saw in Alice, but it was her choice, and she wouldn’t get a second chance with him. He came close to slamming his fist into the cement floor. Not frustrated at all, he told himself. Not even a little.

He was about to roll out his sleeping bag and go to sleep, maybe tomorrow would have a different spin, he thought briefly, when Ethan walked over and dropped down in a squat next to him. He moved so fast and easy for a big man. “Hey,” John was startled into saying.

Ethan smiled. “Didn’t mean to startle you… Thought you saw me coming.”

“No… No, you didn’t startle me at all,” John lied.

Ethan nodded. He cleared his throat a little. “Rose-Lee and I talked a little… This place is safe, but it isn’t where we need to be, so we thought we’d light out… Maybe tomorrow… Jersey, maybe further, either way, out of the city is the goal.”

“Rose-Lee?” John asked. “So it’s like that.”

Ethan kept the smile on his face. “Listen,” he leaned close, too close, but it was a tactic he reserved for situations just like this back in the old world. “She wants to go… With Alice,” he spread his hands, huge hands, “It is what it is, man.”

John shook his head. “I don’t see it. It’s a new world… Who knows how many of us may have died off… If you look at New York alone it’s got to be millions.”

Ethan nodded, not really sure where John was going.

John leaned close. “So how do you build a population back up if the women are only fucking the women?”

Ethan shook his head. “You know what I said to Rose-Lee a few moments ago?” He didn’t wait for John to answer. “She said something about the way you have a tried to impose upon her that she needs a man, and I said, ‘What a dick.’ That’s what I said, ‘What a dick.”

John just glared from under his lowered brows.

“Grow the fuck up, John, or go your own way. But as for those two?” He looked over at Rose-Lee and Alice. “Don’t fuck with them anymore… I understand your thoughts might have gotten fucked up… It’s tough times like this that can do that. But they are their own, not your own.” He patted one huge hand against John’s shoulder, smiled and then stood and walked away.

Ethan

They had risen early and made the trek out to the strip area where car lots and small business dotted the sides of the feeder roads for what seemed like miles.

They had met no one along the way. Before nightfall, they had been driving a pair of new pickup trucks. John and Ethan in one, Rose-Lee and Alice in the other, weaving in and out of traffic heading back into the city.

They had ended up in a house over in Harlem, with gas lanterns for light, the windows boarded up. They had decided it was too late in the day to head out so a place in the city would be safer. The house was close. The factory was out of the question, too deep in the city and it’s clogged streets to get to.

They had been sitting around. Spirits raised, talking easily, but sometimes seriously about the world and the changes they had encountered. What it meant to them as individuals, as a society.

“I can’t help but wonder what it feels like,” John said. “To be dead, I mean.”

“Fuck that,” Ethan said. “Feels like dead. Look at those fuckers. I mean you can see it… Listen…” They all fell silent. The windows were solidly boarded over. The dead scratched and cried and pleaded, but they could not get in.

Rose-Lee shuddered. “It fucks me up… It really does.” Alice’s head lay against her breast, her arms around her holding her.

“Yeah,” Alice agreed I do not want to be dead.” She raised her head from Rose-Lee’s breast. “If…”

“Go on, baby,” Rose-Lee said after a few moments of silence.

“Well if we have to we should have a pact. I mean… I mean I know you wouldn’t let that happen to me,” She looked at Rose-Lee with wide eyes, “But,” she raised her head. “We should have a pact to not let that sort of thing happen to any of us, right?”

“Right,” Ethan agreed. “Right.”

“Oh bullshit,” John said.

“If I ever have to, I won’t hesitate,” Rose-Lee had said, “Once I’m dead, I don’t want to come back.” She had shuddered and grimaced at the same time. “I’ll do it myself, but it would be nice to know if I couldn’t one of you would.”

“Absolutely,” Ethan agreed. “Same as I would expect one of you to do it for me.”

“In a minute,” Rose-Lee agreed.

“I would,” Alice agreed. I wouldn’t like it but I would.”

“In-fucking-credible,” John said.

“Dude,” Ethan said. “Why in fuck is it that you have to always be on the disagreement side of shit every time?”

“Oh, I didn’t know black men used dude like that.” John shot back.

Ethan’s tongue came out and licked at his lips. He spun the cap slowly from a pint of whiskey he carried, and took a drink. “You got that one. One is what you get. Don’t forget I said that.”

John’s mouth opened and then snapped shut.

Silence held momentarily and then the conversation restarted between Alice and Rose-Lee and soon John and Ethan were drawn back into it.

They passed the small bottle back and forth. Nobody wanted to really get wasted, it was too important to have your wits about you, but the constant scrabbling of the dead against the boards was enough to make anyone crazy.

“Gotta piss… Has to be a bathroom here somewhere,” John said as he got up from the kitchen floor.

“Thanks for sharing,” Alice said from beside Rose-Lee.

“Any ti…”

The sound of splintering wood and a heavy crash came, cutting off his words, as he fell through a rotted section of floor in the house, impaling himself on a pipe in the basement.

They had all scrambled quickly to their feet and then slowed down as they came to the hole. Holding the lanterns over the abyss to see better.

There were a half dozen dead in the basement, one by one they had shot them. There seemed to be no way in.

“More?” Alice asked.

“I doubt it,” Ethan answered. “Probably been there from the start.”

“What about, John?” Alice asked.

Ethan looked him over. His eyes were shut, his chest rose and fell, but the blood was leaving his body at an alarming rate. He had stopped moving, probably passed into unconsciousness. Death had to be close. Even if they could get him off the pipe without killing him or he himself dying from the shock and blood loss, he would die from massive infection at the least.

“Think any of them bit him before we got them?” Rose-Lee asked.

“Just was,” Ethan agreed. “What about his arm… See his arm?”

“Could have been from the fall,” Alice said.

“Maybe,” Rose-Lee agreed. But his pants are also ripped… That could have been them too.”

“Yeah… Yeah,” Ethan agreed.

John’s eyes suddenly fluttered open and he turned his head slightly to stare at Rose-Lee. His jaw worked, but he said nothing. His eyes slipped closed and he let his last breath out in a shuddering groan.

“Oh my, God,” Alice sobbed. She lowered her head into her hands.

 Rose-Lee leaned forward and shot him in the head nearly as soon as he stopped his struggles. Alice bent double and vomited.

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