Pallor

Chapter 1 - Holland (second draft)

1

         Total chaos ensued. There was no time to prepare, there was no warning. Shit just started to happen and that was it. One minute you’re walking down the street, feeding your dog at home or arguing with you significant other, the next something abnormal and surreal in every respect walks through the door, climbs over the fence or appears on the pavement in front of you and your brain grinds to a complete halt. You stand on the spot in mid action – mid step with shopping bang in mid swing, fork holding a chunk of meat at the edge of a tipped can, hand raised with mouth open ready to rant. It is a second of eternity in which the broken brain absorbs every aspect of its surroundings. Then the thrown ring lands on the floor, a plop of gravy reaches the bowl or the shopping bag returns to its rightful place and the spell is broken.
For a second eternity was real, experienced.
Then total chaos ensues.

Fight or flight.
Fight or flight.
In that second of eternity you brain makes the decision. Do you stay, fight and hope to live? Do you flee and hope to find safety?
Fight or flight or fight or flight.
It is a rather important question and you don’t want, or need, to make the wrong choice. The shopping bag man had no choice. The abomination was too close to him, so he tried to fight. It didn’t work for him. Dog food guy, he flew like a bird while his dog attacked the thing infiltrating the back yard. That choice worked fine. He got inside. The fighting couple fought the thing outside and locked the door behind it. Again a good choice, for them.

         I was working when I had this moment, and I chose to hide in a closet for three hours. I lived, but sometimes you must wonder if it was really worth it. So everyone is guaranteed to have these two moments when chaos breaks out. Be it big or little – the “oh shit” moment and the stay or leave moment. Everything after that is variable.

My story, your story – it doesn’t really matter, in situations like this you hear one story, and you’ve heard them all. No one escapes from it, not the youngest or the oldest.

I’m not going to tell you my story.

That is private and boring for me.

This is the story of my friend, my good friend, Holland. Holland Grey, the unemployed student from where ever you want to imagine him from. It doesn’t matter, his story happened everywhere. It is all the same. Holland’s oh shit moment happened on his way to the library. He was looking up something for an exam, something on medieval literature or the creation of the universe. To get to the library from the car park he used he had to walk down a walkway lined with trees. The big towering things, thin smooth branches sporting leaves so green that light made them seem to glow, to become see through. The trees were evenly spaced down the pathway and everything was quiet.


Holland is rugged up pretty good, jeans and a red hoodie topped with a black beanie. It is clear but crisp outside, early morning. Smoke spirals above his head from his morning smoke, headphone wires hanging down from underneath the edges of his beanie. Half way down this walk way he pulls the backpack strap leading over his right should up a little, making the pack jump on his back. The empty grass fields around the library gleam in the sun. Almost at the door, a figure steps out from between the trees in front of him. It looks like the female librarian that doesn’t like Holland all that much.
He looks up at her and continues walking, but then stops in mid step, the music pumping into his ears a blur of noise while smoke lazily drifts from his mouth into the air.
It is her, Ms. Jacobs, but it isn’t her.
She is standing in an odd posture, legs lightly bent, head to one side. Her dark eyes wide, she is staring at him. Her tongue comes from her mouth in stabbing motions as she sniffs the air. Her head snaps to the right quickly and she stares, then a low growl forms in her throat. The cigarette falls from Holland’s hand, showering sparks on his feet, and he pivots on one foot, running back towards the car. From behind he hears a screech and the sound of running.
She is chasing him.
Holland gets to the car first, gets in and locks the doors. The crazy librarian arrives at the car just as he starts the engine and before she has the chance to do anything, he is speeding from the car park.

It was in this moment that Holland realised something was horribly, horribly wrong.

Inside the car Holland was panicking.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” he kept saying to himself over and over again.
When he reached the outskirts of the university campus he slowed down, the panic subsiding, being replaced by disbelief. As he drove into the urban areas, however, he was gripped by terror. Chaos had broken out, there were fires, car wrecks, dead people in the streets. Smoke was billowing into the clear sky, the air filled with the sounds of screaming, crunching metal, explosions and other, more primal sounds. He turned the car around and made his way back towards the university, hoping to find another way home, something less dangerous. He suddenly wished he had taken his cell phone with him, he had no idea what was going on around him.
There would be no exams today.

He drives back past the car park near the library at the university and sees the librarian again. She is standing in the middle of the empty lot, swaying slightly from side to side. Her eyes are glazed over, dead. When she sees the car she snaps to life, running first alongside and then behind the vehicle until Holland is too far ahead to catch. When she stops running she just stands there, swaying, dead eyes watching the back of the car get further away. Holland keeps driving, finding his way around abandoned and wrecked cars scattered along the road. He is just outside the town limits, and he silently says a thank you to god that his parents can’t afford a better, city located university.
Ahead he sees humanoid figures on the road, standing still swaying, he decided to take the scenic route.

Holland told me, after we met, that “the scenic route” was the parkway where the teenage boys drove on the dirt and through bush, drank beer and tried to get girls to “break in the new seats”. He had spent a great deal of time there as a teen and had seen many sights there, from a mother beating her son around the head so hard his nose bled to a dead junkie, bloated and grey, laying on top of the park bench. Nothing he saw had prepared him for what he witnessed when his car careened down a ditch, bumper digging into the dirt and ripping off.

The car coasts along after the impact, Holland’s foot dangling above the gas pedal in case he has to drive quickly. The bonnet of the car slowly brakes through the bush line around the children’s playing area, he doesn’t want to hit a child and add to the day’s problems. He revs the engine just a little until the windscreen breaks through the succulent green curtain. His mouth drops open and his mind freezes. In front of him, in the middle of the park, six young children, about ten years old, are eating from the body cavity of a middle aged woman, perhaps a mother. Holding the woman down are two older children, two of the teenage boys who liked to drive on the dirt track now.
The woman is alive, crying.
“Please, Johnny, please,” she moans, and every time she utters the name a fair haired boy twitches and glances at her, then stuffs more gore into his mouth. One of the teenaged boys looks up at Holland, then back at the woman. He knows the boy, the younger brother of one of his best friends. He is grey now, like the librarian, and his eyes seem cold and hard. Holland almost gags when he sees, disappearing into his flesh, a metal poke skewering the young bor. The end sticks out his back. It had obviously been thrust in in a downwards angle, the tip now scraping in the dirt between his fee, black blood dripping from the metal.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck” Holland chants again and drive straight at the woman in front of him, he doesn’t want her to suffer and no one could save her now. His car bounces sickly as he hits the woman, the others groan loudly in anger and begin chasing the car. Holland floors it and heads for home. He wants to get to his parents before something else does, before one of those kids does, or others like them. Houses are on fire, the suburb shrouded in a thin layer of smoke. Ruined bodies lay on the side of the road, he sees more of the possessed eating the living. He sees his ex-girlfriend chasing down her current boyfriend, and not long after pulls up outside his parents house.
The doors and windows are shut, blinds drawn.
He can hear the television on inside, a news report.
He fishes out his key and opens the door, ducking as his father almost takes his head off with his own baseball bat.
“Oh thank Christ it’s you Holland” his father says, giving his son a bear hug and dead bolting the door again,
“Something is very wrong, very wrong” his mother mutters from the kitchen.

This was how Holland was introduced to the new world order, his first taste of what was to come. He told me this story one night when we were drunk, off duty for a change. We got completely shit-faced and told each other our tales. When there is nothing left to do there are two choices, you can laugh or you can cry.

My dad always told me that crying was for bitches.