attempt to help, and at the same time the woman, who by now had blood literally pouring from her head and hands, stumbled right into him. They collided, but her rescuer managed to get a grip on the thing. The impact with the man sent her tumbling harshly to the ground while the mad squirrel came away from her head clutching a huge tangle of dark brown hair. I could see in the well intentioned guy's eyes a momentary pride that he had gotten the monster off of the woman. That look was completely erased in a sparse second as the squirrel turned on him. Pain showed plainly on his face as teeth and claws sunk into his hands. He added his screams to the woman's, who by now was sobbing while screaming. The rescuer, now victim, reacted by shaking his hands around wildly, throwing the creature to the ground.
The little hairy fiend hit the asphalt with a solid "thunk" and lay there momentarily stunned. The thing landed no more than a foot away from a burly guy who had just gotten off of a Honda motorcycle. A brief moment passed, and the squirrel from hell (wild-eyed and tangled hair all askew to begin with, now practically covered in the blood of its victims) started to twitch and recover. There was a small amount of panic in the biker's eye as he went to stomp the squirrel to death with his heavy boots. I could plainly hear the maddened tree-rats skull and bones breaking and crushing as the big, 300 plus pound biker repeatedly put some serious boot leather down, over and over again until there was naught left but hair and gore.
My Gandalf (the brand name of the computerized dispatch system) went off then, telling me I had a fare to pick-up. I left the scene, driving slowly away thinking this was an isolated case and would make a hell of a story to tell my friends.
How wrong I was. It wasn’t an isolated case. This same scene was playing out all over the world, and it wasn’t just squirrels going mad. Whatever rats survived went into a blood frenzy...and mice...and cats, both feral and domesticated...and raccoons, to name a few. Basically all the smaller species of mammals went hell bent for blood. Dogs, horses, cattle, things like that, they didn’t go mad, but they also suffered the onslaught.
The crazed critters didn’t just attack people, they attacked anything that moved, even each other. Over the next few days, as Mother Nature turned on herself in an orgy of violent, pointless destruction, everything practically came to a halt worldwide.
The American CDC and the British NHS both announced that the cause was due to some kind of new parasite. Stay inside until this was over they said.
This dreadful single celled menace seemed to lodge in its hosts’ brain and shut down any serotonin production, while putting the aggression and anger centers into overdrive. The parasites eggs were transmitted into a new host through the saliva into the victims’ bloodstream.
A mass killing of cats and hamsters and any and every other small pet ensued, adding to the death toll that was happening outdoors.
As humanity waited for the unbelievable, horrible act to play out, and the animal madness left, Scarlet fever strode onto the stage. There was already the smell of death and the rotting of flesh in the air from the billions upon billions of animals who died within the two, seemingly eternal, weeks it took for the infected ones to starve off.
I stayed in my apartment for those two weeks, until the wave of horror subsided. It hadn’t completely ended, but I was broke and absolutely had to get back to work. I guess the same could be said for most people, as we tried to get back to some semblance of normality. Unemployment went down, as animal corpse collection, and elimination (mainly by burning the corpses) became a new career choice. Teams went out dressed in heavy riot gear and killed any animal they even suspected of being capable of being infected. The heavy black smoke of the burn piles and the constant sound of gun-fire added to my overwhelming feeling that I had somehow breached the walls of hell and had ended up in some obscure ring of Dante’s Inferno.
That was nothing compared to what was starting up. The first symptoms of Scarlet, small red freckle like splotches, started showing up on everybody. Everybody except the ten percent, or so, of us that were for some reason immune.
I’ve got to go and check on the spread of the fire now. From the thickness and smell of the smoke, I think that the building next door has started to burn. It may be a huge danger, one that may roast me, but it may also be my savior if my plan works.
5
I did it! I made it out of there! This new place is good, and it's isolated, and it's got food! I'm going to eat. Then I'm going to get to work on making this place more secure. Then I'm going to get some rest. Somebody had already started on some fortifications here, now I'm going to finish them. There's also a hell of a lot of blood, blackened and dried, not only in the entry way but spread throughout the house. Oddly there are no bodies or, thankfully, zeds. Whatever happened here it took place possibly months or more ago. The place is abandoned now. More later.
Ok, I feel better than I have in a long time. It's abso-fucking-lutely amazing what a meal and some decent sleep can do for someone. Before I continue with what I remember with the rise of the Scarlet, I want to tell you how I got out of the tool and die shop.
There was nothing special about the shop, it was a standard set-up. Offices on the second floor, loading dock and machinery on the first. The loading dock had a sturdy metal roll-up door and although it bowed inward and shook and moved with the weight of the zeds trying to gain entry, it held quite nicely. There was a propane fueled Hi-Lo and an assortment of chain hoists and tools, as I suppose there is in every machine shop.
Until the fire started, I didn't think of any use for the Hi-Lo besides driving it out of there. That would be suicide, most of the zeds can still shuffle along quick enough to catch up to a slow moving Hi-Lo. I have to say though that they do seem to be slowing down. It's about god damned time too. After almost a full year they're finally starting to show some signs of true decomposition.
There was a small window, the old fashioned kind operated by a little hand crank, at the top of the stairs facing the burning buildings to the west. It wouldn't open more than a crack and the glass was the opaque kind that you couldn't see through. I used a sledge hammer I found in the shop below to bust apart the window. At the time I was mainly interested in just having a better view of the spread of the conflagration. It only took a couple of good whacks from the sledge to knock the window out.
The undead bastards immediately started converging on this side of the building. There were a bunch of them here already, but now they were just piling into the area. Their hearing isn’t very good but they were already close enough to hear the window being shattered from the other sides of the shop.
(I have to comment on something though, as long as I’m writing. The zombies in the movies always either moaned or hilariously shambled around muttering “Brains...” In reality though, they never uttered a single intentional sound. Occasionally they will bump into each other, forcing putrid air out of their lungs and past whatever is left of their vocal chords, making a sound that’s an odd cross between a sigh and a whimper. The multiplied chorus is completely unnerving when they group up in a “herd”, packed close together and in large numbers. Combined with the foot dragging, they sound like some huge beast thrashing around in agony in the dirt and whining in its death throes. I guess in some way, that is exactly what is happening.)
I got pissed at the abominations and started throwing pieces of the window down at them. The pieces just bounced off, of course, and I started looking around for something heavier to drop on their heads. In a rage I started to destroy the surrounding wall, hoping to get a whole block of the construction masonry to come apart to crush some skulls. It wasn’t working though, the sledge was just busting off fist sized pieces. I dropped the heavy hammer as the blaze swelled rapidly, engulfing almost the whole of the building that was merely ten to fifteen feet away from me.
Downstairs I found iron and steel and brass rods and bar stock. Not quite what I was looking for. The rods were approximately a half an inch in diameter and about twelve foot long. I brief
ly thought about making a spear with one of the pieces, but then something else caught my attention. There was a propane canister rack where the Hi-Lo was parked.
The full canisters were heavy enough by themselves to crush a zeds head by throwing it down on them from above. As an extra added bonus, I knew they could explode. I didn’t have any idea of how to make that happen, nor could I find any flares or something to attach to them. I figured that I could toss them into the inferno raging next door, and that the flames would be hot enough to cause the canisters to fail and release a nice fireball. It was dangerous, bordering on insanity. I really knew nothing about if they would actually explode, or for that matter, how big the explosion(s) would be. There were six full propane tanks and I dragged them to the upstairs landing, setting them under the gaping hole in the wall where the window used to be.
It took no time at all before the building wall opposite me started to catch. The zeds seemed oblivious to the fire with some getting so close to the heat that the rags they wore started to smoke. I had to be sure my plan would work so I waited until the most opportune moment to toss those babies into the voracious crowd of