Day 1 - A Survivor’s Guide

 September 15, 2023

It is a dark and stormy night. The wind howls, pounding against the roof of our shelter. The echoes of thunder shiver through our bones. Though it does not come in, the rain strikes loudly and harshly.

Despite the inclement weather, it is comparatively peaceful. I am tired, but I want to finish recording this day, especially while I have a quiet moment, watching Kiana, my five-year old daughter, sleep. I don’t know how many more of these quiet times I will get.

We have been in this shelter for about nine hours. Some are lucky enough to have their whole families; others, like myself, were cut off by the day’s events. I was fortunate enough to have been warned by Louis, my husband, before I put Kiana on the bus to school. I wouldn’t have her with me otherwise. There are few school-age children here. Part of me wonders if it would be less terrifying to be certain of her death than to feel like I will be soon watching it. Part of me thinks of Louis as dead.

I’m not a scientist; I don’t even have a completed college degree. I was an English major. I only barely finished my second year. I don’t know all the how’s and why’s of how this happened. I barely even know what happened. I don’t know how useful this journal will actually be, but I want to leave what information I can, if something happens to me.

Everything started, for me, with a panicked phone call from Louis at almost 5:30 am.

His workplace had been hitting a major breakthrough in one of their main projects, and as a result, for the last month the lab had at least two people working in it twenty-four/seven. Louis worked early morning shifts, midnight to 8:30 am. It made for a quiet house most of the day and upside-down weekends, but he was so excited about it. He didn’t normally work overtime, either; he simply got distracted on occasion when working on something and lost track of the time. It helps that we lived only a few miles from the lab, giving him a short commute.

I don’t know the details of the project. The lab is privately owned, but this project was government-requested, or sanctioned, or – something. Louis is (or was) a chemist, and he had been selected for a management track. He’s one of the four people running the project.

Being government work, strict privacy rules prevented Louis from telling me more than vague generalities. Technically, I don’t think he was supposed to do even that much. I do know is that it was related to the brain and how it ages in relation to the rest of a person’s body. I suspected it to be related to dementia studies, though I couldn’t figure out why that would be secret. Now I know it was related to de-aging – specifically, reversing death.

Here’s our conversation, or as much as I can remember of it:

“Cindy, wake up!”

“What – who is this?”

“It’s me.”

“What – Louis? Why –” I looked at the alarm clock. “It’s, like, five – what’s wrong?” I heard shouting. “Are you –”

Louis cut me off. “There was – an accident. In the lab. We just started testing on volunteers yesterday – no, two days – and then one woke up, in pain, and I was running some tests so Pat went out to them.” (Pat was his usual partner on the night shift) “If the door between us hadn’t been closed… if it didn’t stick…”

He stopped. “Louis?” I asked. “Why are you calling me? Shouldn’t you be calling an ambulance?”

“No – no! This is beyond –” he cursed. (I’d never heard him do that before, and almost dropped the phone.) “Cindy – what we were doing – we were just figuring out how to keep people from dying, or just giving them more time. Reversing age. That’s all. But – I don’t know how it happened. There was no contamination, nothing – nothing cliché!”

“Louis?” I asked uncertainly. “I don’t understand.” He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Run. Take Kiana and get out of town. Get as far away as possible.”

I stumbled out of bed. “But – where are you? What happened?”

“They’ve started breaking out of the lab – there’s nothing I can do! They tore Pat apart. I can try to keep them from getting in to me. I saw one knock some acid over, and they’ve stayed away from that. I’ve got that, at least.”

“WHO?” I demanded.

“The volunteers!” he wailed, over the sound of increasingly loud thumping. “There’s no other word. They’re zombies!”

The phone clicked, and I was left with only a dial-tone.

Louis has never been the type to play practical jokes. He certainly would never have joked about Pat that way.

I sat in the bedroom for a while, trying to call Louis back. There was no answer. I tried calling the lab, but although that phone was picked up, I only heard a guttural groans before there was a horrible crunch, and then a dial-tone.

Sure that something had gone wrong at the lab, even if I didn’t know what, I tried the police department. I received a few irritable comments about people playing jokes about zombies and an uncertain comment about the possibility of a riot near the lab. I was told to stay away in case that was true. Some officers would go there. They probably were, but I think I was told that mostly just to get me to hang up.

Kiana woke up, all set to get ready for school, but I called the school and declared a family emergency. Her excitement about the unexpected holiday distracted me for a few hours, but after multiple failed attempts to learn anything from the lab or the police, I gave up. We ate an early lunch, and then, feeling slightly crazy, I got a suitcase, packed some clothes, food, and money, and started up the car. I turned on the radio to our town’s emergency channel and headed towards the freeway. It was only five miles away. I never got there.

Half-way there, we were attacked by a group of about twenty – they tore the car apart as it was moving. Flying pieces of car slowed them down, giving me enough time to grab Kiana, who was clutching her small backpack and crying, and ran. I left behind everything else.

I’d always thought of zombies as slow. These weren’t. If this was what Louis had described, the de-aging had worked partial wonders. They were fast. Strong. They smelled of decay, though. Except for the activity and the horrible moans filling the air, they looked dead. Bits of flesh fell off when the car parts hit them.

I was grateful Kiana couldn’t see most of what happened until the car came apart. It’s hard to think objectively about all of it, but I know this is important. While driving, I saw them attack three people. Two were ripped to shreds, after which of all the zombies nearest gained speed – it was the second attack that allowed them to catch up with the car, and I was driving as fast as I could by then. Another was merely bitten, and then, after collapsing, he promptly stood up and started running with the rest of them. I didn’t get a good look, but I did see what looked like clumps of his hair falling off.

As hard as I ran, they were faster. Just as I felt a hand slide through my hair – I later found bits of skin that had peeled off from the zombie in it – a loud explosion surrounded me. I stumbled and fell.

“Get up!” a male voice shouted. I jerked and, because of Kiana, lost my balance and nearly fell again. He caught me and pulled me to my feet. “Smoke dissuades them, but it doesn’t do much else, and it affects us too. Keep going – I’ve got a shelter.”

I did as I was told. I almost ran smack into a shed’s walls, and a woman pulled me inside. She hissed all sorts of questions at me, half of which I didn’t understand, asking if they’d touched me and where we had come from, all while patting me down, like I was carrying dangerous weapons. I was too disoriented to object, and now that I think about it, well, I could have been carrying a dangerous infection. It was impressive, actually, to be willing to touch someone who might be a zombie, just to try to help a stranger.

She freaked out when she discovered the skin in my hair, and immediately cut it and threw the affected part out the shed. Satisfied, she opened a hatch in the floor and snapped, “Go, quickly. Put her down – she’s big enough to climb ladders on her own.”

It was fortunately only a short distance down, and Kiana didn’t have too much trouble, and in the wide cellar below we met nine others who had stumbled their way in this direction.

In the nine – almost ten – hours since, fifteen more have joined us. Only seven had brought food. The rest had either no chance to grab anything or, like me, had lost most of our supplies while running. Kiana and I have her bag, which has a single change of clothes for her, this journal, and two granola bars. I say nothing about them. If we have to run again, she’ll probably grab her bag, and then she’ll at least have something.

We’re going to have to figure out a system to manage our food, quickly. The owner of this place, John Sultz, is a survivor enthusiast and had turned his tornado cellar into a storage facility that could last six months for one person. With twenty-eight of us, that won’t last too long. We ate a slightly bigger meal for dinner than we should have, perhaps, but everyone was too exhausted think too hard about it.

Once Kiana recovered from her fright, she and the other four children in the shelter had run around and played for hours as everyone tried to come up with a plan. I mostly stayed out of it.

Sometime in the last couple of hours, just before the rain started, the shed had collapsed, which was likely why no one else had shown up – no obvious marker that other people were here. John has a disturbing amount of weapons, although most of it didn’t affect the zombies. He was delighted to hear what Louis had told me about the acid.

Although everyone else was displeased to hear where the zombies had come from, I think it provided some relief to know how this happened. Some wanted to go fight – and there’s a group that I think might sneak out – but the main argument against it was that we didn’t know how many of them, and what was the point of taking out one if another turned you into a zombie? The other popular idea was digging a tunnel and getting away from the town, which I suppose might work.

In the end, it was decided to wait until morning, and to let everyone get some sleep. I found some blankets for myself and Kiana. I also found some scissors and convinced another woman to help me straighten out my hair, after the impromptu uneven haircut.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Perhaps the worst will happen. Perhaps the zombies will break in. Perhaps there’ll be a solution. In any case, I’ll put this journal in a hole in the flooring, near our bed. I sincerely hope I’ll have a chance to keep writing in it.