Curse of Life

DISCLAIMER- THIS WORK IS NOT YET COMPLETE. I SHALL UPDATE IT AS I HAVE TIME BETWEEN WORK AND COLLEGE. ALL REVIEWS ARE WELCOME! THANKS FOR READING!

Introduction

In school they always taught us that every being and creature that lives on this planet's life must come to an end. Sometimes the end comes peacefully. Perhaps your grandma passes quietly in her sleep with no pain after living a long, fulfilling life and touching the lives of everyone she came in contact with or perhaps you have to put down the family dog that you have grown up with for most of your life. More often than not, however, it seems that the end comes in an abrupt and untimely matter. A soldier loses his life in a violent battle over seas, a young child is hit and killed by a car after carelessly chasing a ball out into the street, a thug kills a man for "being in the wrong neighborhood", or a troubled teenager kills himself; the list goes on and on. It seems that no matter who you are or what you do, it is impossible to escape the curse of death. This always scared me; or at least I thought it did. Why should a young man in the prime of his life have to be concerned about the inevitable shroud of death that will one day come to consume me, everyone I have ever known, and everyone that will come after us? He shouldn't. I didn't want to die, and I sure didn't want to see the people I care for die either, but the world sure has a good way at messing things up.

In the world we used to live in, I liked to consider myself one of the good guys. I lived in a middle class neighborhood, had a family, and went to church. I lived the dream and was a living proof that there was a good life to be lived and that you could accomplish your dreams if you worked hard enough. However, when the world went to hell, my good guy perspective went along with it. Good guys ceased to exist; if you weren't bad, you were worse, and that was one of the harsh realities of adapting to the new, black world that we now live in where almost everything around you either wants to eat your flesh, steal your belongings, or just wants you dead, often times for no good reason whatsoever. In the beginning, I tried to retain my sense of morality and good virtues. I really did try, but the worse things got, it became clear that if you wanted to survive in this world, you couldn't be the good guy; you had to be the survivor, the alpha male of your territory, and master of your world. This often meant doing things that no man in a normal state of mind could be proud to do. They say that everyone has chance to come back from the awful things they have done or experienced, but I no longer believe in that, and haven't for a long time. The new world has set me down a long and dark path that I could never possibly hope to come back from even after a thousand lives worth of good deeds. My mind is scarred and broken and I will never forget this path of life I've been forced to take as much as I have tried to erase it from my memory. For that reason, I will start my story from the beginning of that path. There is no way to tell when this path will end, but when it does, I pray my maker can find it to forgive me as I stand before him one day awaiting my final judgement. This story is about that path I must walk and the realization that death was never a curse, but the greatest gift I could have ever hoped for. This is my story, and this is my curse of life.

Chapter 1: A New World

I think that one of the hardest concepts to grasp about the beginning of the end of the world was that everyone's beginning was different. When you think of the end of the world, you think of everything falling apart all at once, but this wasn't the case. For a while people were able to hide from the realities of what was happening in the world by turning their cheeks the other way and hiding beneath a blanket of government lies. "Everything is under control" became the unofficial motto of the CDC before everything ultimately went to shit, and boy did we believe them. Or we pretended to at least. Everyone seemed to ignore what was going on out there until it was right at their doorstep, and by that point it was too late. Everyone pretended not to talk about it, but the uneasy whispers of people always traveled in the wind filling local hangouts with a nervous tension so tight you could cut it with a knife. The plague started out in the western states and slowly began to make it's way around the world. Within a few weeks it was estimated that nearly a quarter of the world had become sick with this new disease that caused flu like symptoms and major aggression in the infected. "It's just another strain of the flu" they kept telling us. Boy were they wrong.

It only took a few weeks for the World Health Organization to conjure up a vaccination for the disease. The problem was, however, it didn't actually cure the disease in the individual, it just prevented the disease from being contagious, or so they thought. We later learned that a bite from the risen dead transferred the infection at a rate of one hundred percent, so at the time, It seemed like a great victory, but it was really impossible at this point to locate every single person in the world that had the disease when over a third of the world now had it. Nevertheless, it was a great step forward in combating the disease, and people were able to rest easy for a while, but then something happened.

The infected began to die. All of them. Hundreds of thousands of people all just started dropping like flies, one wave of infected after another. The mortality rate of the disease was one hundred percent, and nobody could do anything about it. Angry people began to take to the streets in hopes of avenging their loved ones. I remember seeing impossibly huge riots taking place on TV all over the United States and thinking to myself, "That will never happen here. Not in my city." But then it did. That and so much worse.It took only four months for the United States to fall into anarchy. The last I saw, parts of Africa and Asia were dealing with the same problems, but other than that,I don't know about the rest of the world. I assume nowhere else can be much better. Just when we didn't think it could get any worse, something happened that I don't think anyone could have possibly been prepared for, and that's when people truly had something to be scared of.

The dead came back to life. It was impossible. Fucking ludicrous, but somehow it was happening, and it was happening fast. That's when I knew things would never be the same again. It was like I was in a bad dream. These are the sort of things they write up in movies or books, but the problem was, I wasn't in a dream. I was alive, oh so very alive. However, I couldn't say the same about most of the people I knew. When the first of the dead reached our neighborhood, our block tried to hold them off, but we failed miserably. There weren't even that many; twenty of us and maybe fifty of them tops. We stood at the end of our block with what weapons we had,baseball bats, pipes, a few pistols, and a shotgun, and waited for them to get close enough. Once they got into firing range, Terry Tanner, my neighbor of ten years, fired the first three shots. His first two shots hit his target in the chest, and the third ripped through the man's neck. It fell backwards several feet and hit three of it's comrades and they all tumbled over each other, tripping more of them in the process. It would have been comical if it wasn't for the fact that we all knew they were coming to attack us. And oh yes, I should probably mention...the one who got shot three times? He got up and continued to approach us as if nothing happened.

We all stood there, shocked. This man just defied the laws of reality right before our very eyes. He just suffered wounds that would have killed any other man, yet he was unaffected. That didn't sit right in the minds of anyone that had just witnessed what had happened, and panic quickly overwhelmed our group. Our shooters quickly unloaded on the group of undead and it didn't do anything but slow them down. We ran forward with our bats and pipes and took on these creatures in a melee, breaking ribs, shoulders, and other bones with each swing we took, yet they still kept getting up.

Our group quickly fell apart as people became overwhelmed by the undead, due to group members allowing themselves to be surrounded, which was the result of a total lack of intelligence and complete stupidity. It doesn't matter if you have superior fire power; if you allow yourself to become surrounded by the enemy, you are ten times more vulnerable and a hundred times weaker. I wish Mr. Sheldon would have known that as he fired the last shot of his shotgun and turned around only to see the infinitely hungry eyes of the infected man that bit into his throat like it was Thanksgiving dinner and literally gnawed his face into a bloody, pulpy, mess. This scene repeated itself seemingly over and over as my friends and neighbors fell to the infected. The screams and gunfire that radiated out of our block must have reached the ears of other infected in our area, because within minutes it seemed like the infected went from a few dozen in number, to at least a hundred.

Because we had stopped working as a group, people began to stop thinking about each other and only about themselves. I watched as Alberto Hernandez ran into the forest to the east of our block and disappeared into darkness never to be seen again. He had told his family to stay in their house and that he would come get them if he decided they had to make a run for it. He never did come back for them and I don't think they ever made it out of our neighborhood alive.I figured their blood curdling screams made it obvious.

I, however, had a family I cared about and needed to get them out of this place alive with me. I ran down our street, trying to stay as discreet as one possibly could given the circumstances, and made my way towards our house. I was nearly three quarters of the way there when one of the infected had lunged out from under a car and grabbed my ankle, causing me to fall over. It was a lady. She was horrifically overweight and I'm not sure how she was able to come out from under a car, let alone so quickly. Trying not to become her fourth or fifth meal of the day, I frantically rolled over and kicked her once in the face. She still held on to my other ankle. Twice in the face, she still held on. I kicked her once more and that loosened her grip just enough for me to shake myself free. I scuttled backwards on my ass and bumped right into the knees of another one of the infected. This one was a skinny, elderly man, at least eighty years in age. He bent over and tried to bite into the top of my head, but luckily I was able to raise the pipe I had brought with me across his throat and pushed up with enough force to send him staggering far enough back for me to spin around and take a swing with my pipe at him. It was a low blow, connecting just at the side of his knee cap. I watched as his frail leg cracked and bent inwards causing him to drop to one knee. By this time I was up on both of my feet looking down on the man. He looked back up to me after a moment and I was surprised to see no pain in his face, just an open mouth and a blank face that seemed to show nothing but a look of a hunger so great it could never possibly be satisfied. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the man for a moment. I raised my pipe up over my head and it sat there suspended in the air for just a moment as I reconsidered what I was about to do. I quickly made up my mind and brought the pipe down right over the top of his head. There was a gooey crunch as his skull caved in, and he instantly went limp and dead, for real this time. A blow to the head, that's how you kill them, I realized.

I felt terrible. Never in my life did I ever envision myself beating in a senior citizen's head in with a lead pipe. This man didn't deserve what happened to him. He probably had people somewhere out there who were alive and cared for him very much. I kept trying to tell myself he was already dead, but that didn't help much, because I still very much knew he was a person once. Maybe he still was, I didn't know. I didn't know if he was still capable of processing thoughts before I brought his existence to an end, and I didn't know if he felt anything that I had just did to him. Unsatisfied, I continued to search the depths of my mind for justification. I proceeded to trying to tell myself that he attacked me first which advocated what I had did to him, but he was an old man. Maybe an unfeeling, crazy old man that wanted to eat me alive, but still just an old man, and that made me feel like a pussy. I finally justified it as a mercy killing. He was in such a state that he would never be able to live the life he was accustomed to living, so I made the choice to end his life because he couldn't in order to end his suffering.That's how I justified this killing, and many others after it. I was an angel left here on earth to carry out the work of God. What a fucking joke.

I carried on, still shaken up by what had happened. I ran up the driveway of my house and proceeded up the stairs to the front door. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my keys, unlocked the door and walked in. "Amanda, where are you?" I quietly ask. I heard a pair of feet walking down the hallway upstairs and moments later I saw my wife's head pop out from around the corner of a wall.

"Ricky." She said to me coming down to give me a hug, which I was barely even responsive to.

"We have to go, now. It's not safe here. Outside...", I paused for a moment, searching for the right words. I couldn't find them "It was a fucking massacre.We have to leave this place. Get Missy, I'll grab our bags, and we're getting out of here." She nodded her head and went back upstairs to grab our daughter. I walked into our living room and grabbed our things. It wasn't much, just some clothes, medical supplies, and some food and drink, but I thought it would last us until we could get some more supplies. I got in our SUV and started the engine. After a few impossibly long minutes, Amanda entered the garage carrying Missy, who was then four years old, and opened the back left door of the car and put her in her car seat. She then quickly walked around the front of the car and entered the passenger's seat. I opened the garage and began to back out.

"Daddy, where are we going?" Missy asked me in her typical happy, go lucky attitude. It always surprised me that even though the world obviously was falling apart behind us, she always remained so carefree and always noticed the beautiful things that remained untouched.

"I'm not sure darling, I'll know when we get there. She gave a grunt of approval and pulled out a teddy bear she named Mr. Growley, a companion most suitable for any four year old girl, and began talking to him about the weather, the road trip we were going on, and all sorts of other things

I drove down our street, careful not to run over the bodies of the infected and our now dead neighbors.Amanda gasped in disgust and covered her eyes. Missy paid no attention, still too fixated on Mr. Growley. "What happened out here?" Amanda chimed in after a moment.

I looked over to her. "You know what happened. You heard the gunshots, you see the bodies. They attacked. We died, they didn't."

"Well what about that old man over there?" She said, pointing to the man whose skull I had smashed in no more than a half hour ago.

"I... did that." I responded to her, obviously disgusted the answer I had to give her. "I had to do it. Amanda, these people... they aren't like you and me."

"What do you mean? She retorted.

"These aren't the sick people you've heard about on the news. Remember a few weeks ago when we heard rumors that the dead infected that came back to life crave the flesh of the living? It's true. These people, if you can even call them that, are relentless. I watched a group of them tear into Mr. Sheldon. It was terrible." I looked over towards Amanda briefly, I could see just by the look of terror in her face as she stared out the window, that the reality of all that was happening was beginning to hit her, just like it had began to hit me. "They are relentless Amanda. Terry shot one twice in the chest and once in the throat and it just got back up like nothing happened. I broke the knee of the one that had attacked me and it still kept trying to grab at me. It didn't stop until I smashed my pipe over the top of his head."

"Oh my God." Amanda said, in the most quiet and delicate voice I had ever heard in my life."What has happened to the world?"

"I don't know baby, I don't know." I said as I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

"Things are never going to be the same again" Amanda started. Help isn't coming. How are we going to raise our girl in a world like this?" she looked over to me and I told her that we would find a way. The rules of the game had changed and we needed to figure them out is all. She paused and took a few breaths before she began to speak again. "This is all so unreal.I just.. I just.. I don't know." and with that she began to cry. I put my hand on her shoulder and began to rub up and down her back as the three of us drove together deeper into this new and terrifying world.

Chapter 2: A Road to Nowhere

I knew where I wanted to go, but I didn't know how to get there. I wanted to find a place that was safe and where I could raise my daughter away from the horrors that now filled the world. It felt impossible. We had now been on the road for five days and it seemed like everywhere we went the same scene of pain and death panned out, just with a different setting. I wasn't even sure how far we had driven. Fifty miles? Maybe. Couldn't have been more than more than one hundred, but it was impossible to tell because of how much detouring and backpedaling we had to do because many of the roads were either filled with abandoned cars or the infected. Sometimes it took hours just to navigate through even the smallest towns and that really tested my patience.

We tried stopping at three gas stations by this point and each one was pumped completely dry. We had less than a quarter of a tank left and it was only a matter of time before we putted out on the side of the road.It was a miracle we had made it even this far. Luckily we were fortunate enough to find a few jerrycans of gas left in an abandoned car a few towns back and that allowed us to make it as far as we did. Regardless, we kept on driving. I wasn't sure what direction we were traveling but I think we were going northwest judging by the location of the sun in the sky.

Amanda and Missy had been sleeping for the past few hours, which I thought was a good thing. We had been on the highway for quite a while now, and surprisingly, the amount of abandoned cars that had littered the highway began to become lesser in number. I was finally starting to feel relaxed and then something happened.

We approached an overpass and there was a car hanging over the edge of the barrier. I noticed three infected were climbing onto the back of the car reaching for something. As we got closer I saw what they were trying to reach. A young man was trapped inside the car. He was dirty as could be and looked like he hadn't slept in days, but that wasn't all that surprising. I felt like I hadn't slept in weeks either.

The man saw us and tried to signal me to help. I didn't stop. As we drove past I saw the man become overwhelmed with anger and panic, which quickly turned into a sadness so deep and hopeless that for a moment I considered turning around. As I looked into my rearview mirror I saw the infected smash the back window of the car in. They began to pile into the back of the car and the man shuffled forward to the front of the car and frantically began trying to kick the windshield out. He kicked it out just as the infected began to reach him. He lunged out the front window of the car and at that moment the weight of him and the infected counterbalanced the car and it slowly flipped over the edge of the overpass. There was no way he could have survived that. It was a better way to go than becoming one of the infected though I told myself.

I lost a little bit of my humanity that day. If Amanda would have ever found out that I left that man to die, she would have never forgiven me. It didn't matter though. She never did find out.

We continued on. Our car was nearly out of gas. The empty tank light flicked on maybe twenty miles back. We were out in the middle of nowhere and I was so damn angry. How did we make it this far just to run out of gas on the side of the road? We were going to have to abandon all of our supplies just to carry on, and we still had nowhere to go.

I pulled over to the side of the road. Amanda and Missy were still asleep. I reached over Amanda and opened up the glove box. I pulled out the pistol that I always kept in the car and I set it on my lap. I took two slow breaths and checked the clip of the gun. Full clip. Good. I lifted the gun and pointed it at Amanda. I could do it while they were sleeping. I could kill them both while they slept, and then myself I thought. They'd never know what happened and none of us would have to live in this shitty world a moment longer. I pulled the hammer back on the gun and put my finger on the trigger. Sweat rolled down the side of my face and my body was shaking all over. I was so close to pulling that damn trigger and then I heard Missy roll over in the seat behind me. I quickly put the gun back down on my lap and just sat there.

"Daddy, are we there yet?" Missy had quietly asked me as she juggled back and fourth between being asleep and awake.

"No, sweetie. Just taking a break from driving." I said looking back at her. She smiled and nodded and quickly fell back asleep.

I sighed and looked around for a moment. It was a beautiful day out. Out here in the countryside you couldn't tell anything was wrong with the world. The wind gently blew and the corn stalks leaned with the breeze that danced through them. Birds were sitting on the telephone wire chirping away. I wondered if the infection had even reached this part of the United States. My question was quickly answered as I saw a man stumble out of the corn ahead of us. I put my car into drive and continued down the road in the infected man's direction. As we passed him he made a lunge for our car. He missed and fell forward onto his stomach. The infected man then got up and shambled down the road after our car. I watched him follow us until he slowly disappeared out of view in my rear view mirror. Poor Bastard.

Just as I began to run out of hope our big break came. A gas station! I couldn't believe it. I hit the gas and flew towards that beautiful little relic we had been searching so long for. My excitement woke up Amanda and Missy and soon enough we were all chattering with excitement, looking forward to finding the supplies we needed to continue our journey.

We pulled up to the gas station. It was a tiny, run down little place with only four pumps. We pulled up to the pump nearest to us and tried to fill up with gas. The pump was dry. Great.

"Try the next one, they can't all be dry." Amanda said to me. I nodded, doubtful of what she had just said, and pulled the car forward to the next pump. I hopped out of our car and stuck the nozzle into the gas tank. I tightened my grip on the handle and heard a click.

"Dammit." I sighed. "Onto the next two, I guess." I made my way around the pumps and just as I was about stick the nozzle into my car I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. A car. The door was hanging wide open and the vehicle was still running. I looked a little bit closer and saw blood on the ground near the open door. Fear started to well up inside of me as I imagined what could have caused the scene that was set before my eyes. I reached into my car and grabbed my gun, telling Amanda and Missy to keep their heads down and stay quiet and that I would be right back. I looked towards the station, which now looked like it was one hundred miles away, and began to approach it. The hot sun beat down on the station, making sweat roll down the sides of my face. Sand blew in the wind, hitting the walls of the station, making it's rusty, water stained walls dirtier than they already were.I approached the front window, wiped some sand and dirt off the windows and looked inside. It looked empty, however deep in the corners of my mind, something told me it wasn't.

I opened the door to the gas station, which surprisingly made almost no noise, despite the fact the hinges were so rusty it was a miracle the door didn't fall to the floor. The small building was really a mess. The shelves to my left were either empty or tipped over, the cashier's booth to my right was obviously the scene of something far more gruesome than my mind could imagine. Blood and bullet holes covered nearly everything inside the booth. A shelf that was used to hold cigarettes and booze was tipped over. Underneath the shelf was a man. The cashier. He was shot to pieces. Bloodstains covered his bullet torn clothes, and his head was smashed in by the cash register. A warm bile began to creep up my throat and I forced myself to look away for the sake of not puking all over myself.

I looked around, puzzled. If there was someone in here, I wasn't sure where they were hiding. I took a gander towards the back wall on the other side of the station and noticed the was a set of cooler doors that once held milk, pop, and other cold drinks for people who found themselves out here in the middle of nowhere. That was during a better time though. Now, the only thing the shelves held were piles of dust and whatever bugs crawled up and down the cooler's milk racks and shelves, hoping to suck up what little bits of dried up corn syrup and expired milk that remained.

I looked at the coolers for just a little bit longer and I realized something that didn't seem right. In most gas stations I've been to, the backs are usually open so the people who worked the stations could fill the shelves with already cold product from behind. However, behind these shelves, their were boards covering the back. It didn't look at all like it was supposed to be there, and then I noticed that one of the doors wasn't boarded up but was covered with a sheet, preventing anyone from seeing inside. It was a hiding spot, and a real clever one at that. If anyone was in here, they had to be in there.

I crept my way across the gas station toward the coolers, careful not to step on glass or any other debris that littered the floors. I noticed a half opened hunting knife on the ground and attached it to my belt. As I approached the door with the cloth I heard the sound of voices on the other side. It sounded like there were two, maybe three of them. They were talking very quickly with great intensity in their voices. I quietly opened the door and peaked in. There were three men. One was tied down to a chair and the other two were in front of him, giving him a real good beat down. I don't know what the man did, but judging from what the two men kept yelling, he owned them payment for something or another.

I had heard all I needed to hear. Whoever the man tied down was they were going to kill him. I began to creep in the door and I heard a huge crack. I looked down and saw shards of glass all around my feet. The three men instantly went silent and looked my way. God dammit.

The two men quickly reacted.. The first one threw a glass bottle at me, which hit my chest and cracked into a thousand pieces before it fell to the floor. The second man charged at me and hit me right at my waste, lifting me off the ground and my back smashed into the wall behind me, knocking all the air out of me. I managed to bring my elbow down on the back of his head and I felt his knees buckle and his grip on me loosen. I used the moment to push him away, and he fell backwards into the man tied down and breaking the chair he was in as they came down.

The other man then came at me with a club in his hand that he was using to beat his captive with. He took a swing at me and missed, causing his club to connect with one of the boards covering the cooler and put a huge dent in it. I came up under his jaw with a huge uppercut and sent him backwards, grabbing his mouth and spitting out blood. I drew my knife and began to charge at him. He regained his balance as I moved in and took a wide swing at me. I ducked under his punch and at the same moment I sliced my knife across his throat. He grabbed his throat and looked at me in disbelief as he toppled backwards and fell over a table as he choked to death on his own blood. I froze for a second. I never killed anyone before. Did I really have to kill him or was this justified self defense?

I quickly remembered there was still the other guy in the room to deal with. I began to turn around to dispatch the other man and was greeted by two punches to the face before I even turned half way around. My knife flew out of my hand as he hit me, again and again, and eventually I fell on my back unable to defend myself. He hopped on top of me and began to let loose, hitting me in the face with his gigantic fists, rattling my brain all over the inside of my skull in the process. He then grabbed my head and began to smash it against the glass covered floor cursing me for killing his friend. The world was beginning to go dark around me and I saw a man standing behind my attacker. I was convinced it was Jesus coming to take me and I disowned myself inside my head for knowing I would no longer be able to keep Missy and Amanda safe. My body went limp and I was about to give in when I saw Jesus bring an object down over the head of the man. Blood and bone spattered all over my face and the man's eyes rolled into the back of his head as he fell on top of me. Jesus lifted up whatever he held in his hand and as he did, blood and guts clung onto it in gooey tendrils that still stuck to the back of the man's now caved in head.

As I came back to my senses I realized this man wasn't Jesus, but the man who had been tied down to the chair moments before. He must have been able to shake himself free after the chair broke and was able to come to my aid just in time.

"Fucking bandits." He said to me, helping me to my feet and putting my knife in my hand. "Come on, we don't have much time." he said as I recollected myself.

"What are you talking about?" I asked him as we made our way out of the cooler.

"Bandits. Are you deaf man?" he said to me like I was an idiot. "They're everywhere. We gotta move."

"I have a car outside." I began. "My wife and daughter are out there. We can--" That was as far as I got. What I saw next turned my heart into ice.

Amanda sped off out of the gas station and down the road. One car followed quickly behind it and another pulled into the station, filled with men who looked very similar to the men I just fought.

I ran to the front of the building and yelled Missy and Amanda's name as loud as I could, drawing only the attention of the five bandits that hopped out of the car that now sat in the spot that my car was just a few seconds ago. The man biggest of the men, who was obviously their leader, looked in my direction as they got out of the car and sported one of the most terrifying facial expressions of pure evil I had ever seen. He walked a few steps toward the gas station and raised his fist. The four men behind him then raised the guns they carried and began firing into the gas station.