Airborne

The world around me was on fire, a torrential downpour of chaos. There were cars where they shouldn't be, slammed inside of random buildings, as if the driver just felt like making things ten times worse. Nothing was intact; the damage surrounding me was so extreme that it was hard to imagine the city any other way.

Cars on roads? People not carrying guns? Everyone in perfect health? Unthinkable. At this point in time, I would have believed someone if they told me the world started that way.
Of course, I wasn't there when the world began.

Maybe the beginning of time started with a zombie Apocalypse.

My heart was beating frantically in my chest as I sprinted across the obstacle ridden expanse of the blood covered road. I clutched a gun tightly in my dirty, sweat covered hands, holding it to my chest. Beside me was my best friend Cleo, my brother Justin, and my Uncle Spencer. Each of us wore the same expression, one of desperation and fear. Those were the only feelings we’d experienced for the past few weeks.

I tripped, hitting the hard road, my knuckles stinging and tearing open due to my determination to not let go of my gun. None of them stopped, they just continued plowing forward, leaping over bodies, climbing over cars. I clambered to my feet, almost falling over again. I caught up to them soon.

Usually, people would find it upsetting if their friends left them to die on the road. But I understood, and if I had been in their place, I would have done the same. When the apocalypse started, two weeks ago, we all made a promise, that if it came down to it, we would leave each other behind. We would allow each other to play hero, to sacrifice themselves, or for them to give up. Because when you're living in a world where the majority of the time you're fighting for your life, you want to be the one that wins.

Winning means you're willing to compete with someone. We were competing for survival. Not in the sense where we were willing to kill each other ourselves, but in the sense that we were willing to let someone lose.

"That's it!" Cleo said, pointing to a building a few yards away. It was tall, most of the windows smashed in and broken. I could see fire on the higher floors, but the bottom six were fine. At least in the pyrotechnics department. None of us stop when she spoke, we just tried to gain speed. Before the outbreak, I had been a cross country runner. A good one, if we're being honest. But even after my hours of training, my conditioning, and my calm morning jogs, I still could barely handle the amount of running we'd been doing. My muscles always burned, always ached.

Besides the physical pain this apocalypse brought on, there was also the emotional pain. Which was also something we had no time to think about. There was never any time for mourning, or talking, or feeling. In our fight to stay alive, we'd lost something key. Our lives. Already, we were barely people. We were emotionless robots that were programmed to kill the undead and run.

Well, we weren't quite to that point, but we were close. Dangerously close. In our brief and relished moments of peace we spoke, we felt. Not very much, but we could still see the fight in one anothers eyes. Still see the longing for out past lives.

Still see the humanity.

But how long could it last? How long could we go on behaving as people? After a while, firing a gun became a habit, not a choice. Soon we'd be murdering just because it was our nature, not because it would bring us safety.

Although we had made our pact to only look after ourselves, sometimes we couldn't help but look after each other. If one of us died because we were too oblivious and selfish to help them, the guilt would surely get to us. Well for now it would.

Soon a dead friend would be the same as a dead zombie.

People who were infected by the virus were exactly the same at first. They behaved normally, spoke normally. They were pure normality. The only sign was a stuffy nose and a sore throat, which could easily be mistaken for the common cold.

Except the common cold didn't give you the desire to eat your friends flesh and brains. Mortuulantem, the disease that did create the desire, was highly contagious. I don't think writers of zombie movies realized how deadly accurate they'd be, when they created zombie rules.

The possible ways of catching Mortuulantem were the following:
1. Get bitten.
2. Get scratched
3. Ingest the blood or saliva of someone inflicted with Mortuulantem.

You'd be surprised how easy it was to have these things happen.

A shriek ripped through the air, and we immediately froze, raising our guns. My eyes darted across the destroyed landscape, my heart beat immediately kicking up a few notches. I grit my teeth as a zombie burst out from behind an overturned car, slamming into Cleo. I fired a shot in it’s direction, another one slamming into me. I hit the ground, bending my neck forward in an attempt to stop my head from knocking into the road.

Before the zombie could do anything else, I grabbed either end of my gun, holding it back with the barrel and handle. It snapped it’s bloody teeth at me, and I turned my head as saliva dripped out of its mouth.

“I need some, I need some!” It –she- said, latching her fingers in my hair that was French braided into a bun. There was one thing Zombie movies got wrong. The infected did not immediately become inarticulate groaning bags of rotted flesh. They went through stages.

Stages of Motuulantum:
1. Coughing, sneezing, stuffy nose.
2. Headaches
3. Fatigue
4. Seizures, vomiting, generally blood
5. Death
6. Reanimation of body, more vomiting
7. Intense hunger, inflammation of brain, still able to speak and think clearly
8. Decay of mind, Insanity
9. Decay of body
10. Second death (This only occurs in the elderly and children.)

Judging by this woman’s behavior, she was in stage seven, looming over stage eight. Beyond her gasps and cries of pain and blood lust, I could here more screaming. Damn it, this was a group attack. If it had been a horde of zombies, we’d be dead in mere seconds, with there only being four of us. A few zombies we could handle though, so more then likely we’d all be making it out of this surprise showdown alive.

I shoved my gun up abruptly, using all my force to roll us over so I was on top of her. Quickly, I leaned up, slamming the butt of my gun into her temple. It cracked, with a sickening squelch, blood oozing slowly out. She continued to scream, either unaware of or simply ignoring her head wound.

I turned my gun around, firing one shot into her face. Her head burst open, blood splattering across my arms, chest and face. I spat on the ground, although I didn’t feel any blood get my mouth. Her arms dropped to her side, her body seizing all movement. I stood, swinging my leg over the body and scanning my surroundings. There were five Zombies, not including the one I’d just killed. Spencer was fighting off two of them, Justin had just shot one of his two in the stomach and then head, and Cleo was still wrestling with the first.
I raised my gun, aiming at the zombie on Cleo. I aimed at the center of its back, not its head, the risk of accidentally shooting Cleo too high.

“Cleo, shut your mouth!” I said, warning her of the possible blood I was about to spill. I shot, my shoulder aching with the kick back of the gun. I used an air powered machine gun, it was powerful, and easy to use, but it was harder to find the right ammo.

The zombie cried out, turning to look at me. This one was more bloody then mine, and the eyes were more clouded over, but it still didn’t seem like a stage eight. I fired again, the bullet clipping it’s left cheek, shattering the bone, blood pouring out.

Cleo let out a closed mouth scream, shoving it off of her. I shot it once more in the head, it too becoming immobile, reaching its second death. Spencer shot his last zombie, and we each turned to Justin.

The zombie was running at him after being kicked by Justin and stumbling a few feet away. Before any of us could do anything, Justin let out a war cry, firing rounds into the zombies abdomen, neck and head. It crumbled to the ground, a pile of barely decayed flesh and blood.

“Well,” Justin said, wiping his forehead, “that was fun.”
We all nodded, not bothering to speak. Spencer panted, gesturing for us to keep moving. We all broke back into our runs, but not quite with as much fear. The adrenaline from fights like that made us all feel invincible, there was no denying it.

Before we became mindless killing machines, we’d first develop a god complex.
We reached the building and Spencer wrenched the door open, ushering us inside. He stood at the door, glancing around frantically, making sure we didn't have any decayed followers.

"They should be on the second floor," Cleo said, sprinting up the stairs a few feet ahead of us. Her voice was ragged, and she was panting heavily. We all were.

"Are you sure?" Justin asked, his voice echoing up the deserted stairwell. His blonde hair now looked brown, due to the dirt and the sweat and the grime. We were all completely filthy. We'd probably kill each other if it meant being able to shower.

"That's what it said on the last note."
My mother had become infected two days before the disease became an epidemic. She'd assumed she just had a cold, like everyone had. Even when the news had done a story on the disease, explaining the symptoms, we'd all brushed it off. That was until at the dinner table she abruptly bit into my father’s arm.

As soon as she'd done it she'd snapped back to normal. We'd all been shocked, because really, how often does one parent take a huge bite into the other at the dinner table?
She'd apologized repeatedly, going straight to bed with a stomach ache. Although it had been strange, we'd moved on, excused it. No one wants to believe that their mother is turning into the living dead.

But then mom wouldn't wake up one morning, and dad was coughing up blood. Justin and I knew what was happening. And so did the whole world. A few hours later when we found dad vomiting blood into the toilet, and mom's skin was turning a sickly pale green, our house was attacked. Only by one zombie, who crashed through the living room window, screaming bloody murder. Dad shot him.

But soon, mom was awake, shrieking and crying out for her pain to be relieved. We knew we had to leave. Justin and I took dads gun and fled from the house, leaving behind our diseased parents. We were lucky they both had only recently gotten it, or the two of us would have joined them. No, because they weren't quite psychotic yet, we were able to escape with our lives.

At least, what was left of them.