Chris Wakes Up

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The authors have taken great liberties with locales including the creation of fictional towns.

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eBook First Edition - December 9, 2011

Revised May 24, 2012 to add samples from

Yesterday’s Gone: Episode 1

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* * * *

Chris Wakes Up

Chris woke to an explosion in the distance, slightly worse than the eruption between his ears. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids were heavy, sticky, and refusing to open to the bright light on the other side.

And then he remembered.

His eyes shot open. There she was beside him, motionless, the top half of her head gone in a bucket of blood plastering the wall behind her.

Allison.

He looked down at the gun, shaking in his hand, then threw it to the end of the bed, disgusted. An ice-cold blade of sorrow cut into his heart and he closed his eyes, sobbing. He shouldn’t be here. He should be with her.

Yet, here he was. Still alive.

He reached up, felt his head, sticky with blood. He stood, groggy, a screaming, hollow pain shooting through his entire body. There was another feeling there, too. Something like fire flooding his veins and baking his skin. His head felt as if it were stuck in a vice which someone was turning from all sides, and digging into his temples with barbed metal pins.

He stumbled toward the bathroom and stared at his ghastly reflection.

The gunshot had taken out the top left chunk of his head, in through the temple, then out the top. The wound was open gore, skin raw. It was bloody, but not bleeding, and seemed, oddly enough, to be in the beginning stages of healing.

He returned to the bed and knelt beside Allison, trying to unsee the truth of the horror before him, trying to imagine her as she’d been . . . before she got the sickness. Before the gunshot wound. Seeing her there, lifeless, the bottom half of her body still beautiful in blue sweats and a grey long-sleeve tee shirt, somehow made the reality more impossible to accept.

Chris reached out and touched her hand. It was cold and stiff. Tears streamed down his face as he whispered her name, or at least tried to push the three perfect syllables through his tortured moans. He spoke again, but what he was saying in his head was nothing like the sound he was actually making, as though his mouth had lost his mind’s transmission, delivering broken garbles rather than words.

The gunshot. I must’ve hit something affecting my speech.

Or . . .

He didn’t want to consider the alternative.

Couldn’t
consider the alternative.

He scrambled back to the bathroom, found his reflection, and leaned into the mirror, scrutinizing every detail, looking for signs.

There was something different in his eyes. They were still blue, but clouded, pupils dilated large and black, which explained the impossibly bright light. His skin was pale, but that was no different than normal. But there was something else, a slight change of color to his flesh. Almost gray. And then he saw the circular dark splotches on his neck.

No, no, no.

He looked down at the framed photo on the counter between the his-and-her sinks. The frame was wood with ornate vines twisting and turning around the photo of their hands clasped together, holding a stick and drawing a heart in the wet beach sand.

He flashed back to last night, his last moments with her.

“I’m sick,” she said earlier in the day. He’d suspected it, but didn’t want to ask.
Didn’t want to know.
She showed him the two small rings on her neck, one of the surest signs of infection. The one the doctors had been talking about mostly. The one that the soldiers looked for before deciding whether to shoot you on the spot. The other sign was a change in skin color to an almost grayish hue. But skin color was hard to judge when they’d spent a majority of their time indoors, hiding out. He stared at the rings on her neck. There was no sugar-coating this. She was infected. Surely, he was next. Unless he was one of the estimated five percent who were somehow immune. Now, they waited. They would either die, or become one of the creatures roaming the streets, feasting on anything they found, animal or human.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, backing away and into the bathroom. “Lock the door, protect yourself!”

“No,” Chris said, “It’s too late. If I’m gonna catch it, I’ve already caught it. You’re infectious two days before the symptoms, remember?”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again, crying as she fell against him. “I shouldn’t have opened the door.”

They spent the rest of the day talking about all the things they’d talked about a hundred times before, but Chris didn’t mind. His wife’s childhood stories warmed his heart. His own childhood had been pretty shitty, so Chris found her family stories, of how she fought over stupid stuff with her sisters and got caught lying about her grades, amusing and sweet. He had often wondered what it would have been liked to have a big family like you saw on TV and in the movies. He hoped to someday make a large family, once she got off the pill and was ready to raise children. Of course, talking about Allison’s family made her wonder again if they were alive. The phones lines were down for good. Cell towers, too. She’d gotten a text a week ago from her older sister Meg, who said their mother had gotten sick, and Meg suspected she might be, too. That was the last they’d heard.

Three days ago, Allison decided she had to find her sister to see if she was okay. Chris said no, it was too dangerous. The military was shooting people on the streets. Citizens were supposed to stay inside until order was restored. Once a week, every Monday at 5 p.m., a truck brought supplies to a nearby park. Food, bottled water, and sometimes blankets. When the curfews began, he had to wait in a line of more than 200 people for his allotment. Last week, there were less than 15 people in line. He wondered how much longer the trucks would come when the number of people grew too few to make the trips worthwhile. If you were caught outside at anytime other than Monday during the hours of 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., the roving military units that swept the streets for creatures, and survivors under attack, were allowed to shoot on site.

The curfews had kept all but the brave and foolhardy indoors. Despite the threats, Allison decided Friday that she had to attempt to see her family before her mom was gone. She grabbed the keys to the car and asked Chris to come with her.

“We can’t go!” Chris pleaded, afraid for her more than himself. He couldn’t even imagine any harm coming to her, let alone watch her succumb to the sickness.

“I’ll go, myself!” she said, running outside and starting the car.

He followed, reaching into the car and grabbing the keys, then ran back into the house. She chased him. Once inside, Chris slammed the door shut and locked it.

“Why are you risk going there?” he asked, pissed. “What are you gonna do? Are you some kind of doctor who can cure her or something? If they’re sick, there’s nothing you can do. If they’re fine, you’ll see them when this is all over.”

“I can’t let them die alone,” she cried. “They’re my family.”

“And if you go there, you’ll get infected and you’ll die,” he said. “I can’t live without you, Allison.”

“Give me the keys!” she yelled.

“No,” he said, putting them in his back pocket.

She ran at him, infuriated, pounding her fists into his chest like a crazy person, “Dammit, give me the keys!”

“No,” he said, grabbing her, holding her tight even as she screamed and battered his chest. Finally Allison surrendered to tears, and they fell to the ground crying together.

That was three days ago.

“Please, kill me,” she said last night, as they lay in bed together. “I don’t want to suffer. I don’t want to become one of
those things.
”

“There’s got to be a way,” he said, “Maybe you’ve got something else. Look at me, I’m not sick yet.”

“I can feel it,” she said, “It’s in me. I’m dizzy, confused.”

Her health faded quickly. At 5 p.m., she seemed like her old self, more or less. By nightfall, she was a shell of the woman he knew.

By 9 p.m. she was laying in bed, burning up, barely able to move, her whole body shaking. Her eyes had turned dark, and her voice had decayed to a slur. The worst part was how she kept talking, though none of the words made sense. Her face was like wounded cat’s, seeming confused by the world around her, and more alarmingly, by Chris. At times, she looked at him nervously, as if she didn’t know who he was.

He stopped telling her he couldn’t understand since it only seemed to upset her. Soon enough he was nodding along to whatever she murmured as he wiped her forehead with a cool towel.

At 10:31 she managed two words through the slurs. “Kill me.”

He got the gun from the nightstand, his hand shaking, barely able to turn the safety off. He looked her in the eyes, hollow sockets of confusion. But when she saw the gun, a smile crept to the corners of her mouth. He leaned down, closed his eyes, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered, “I love you.”

Then he pulled the trigger.

He prayed over her dead body, tears streaming down his face. He prayed for forgiveness, prayed for her to go to heaven, then prayed God would allow him to join her. He was pretty certain God would see his act as mercy. Suicide was another story, though. He’d have to take his chances and beg for some mercy from whoever judged such things. He prayed to soon be at Allison’s side.

Chris put the gun to his head and said, “Please forgive me.”

He pulled the trigger and everything went black . . .

Until he woke this morning.

Chris shook his head, closed his eyes, then forced himself back into the bedroom. Outside, another explosion detonated in the distance.
How far?
Sounded like the gas station near the highway. He stopped, pausing to recall the name of the station, but couldn’t.

He shook his head, annoyed.

Why can’t I remember? I go there three times a week.

He could distinctly remember putting gas in his car, looking into the store. The window had a clear view into the small sandwich shop inside the station. He’d often wondered if he’d ever be hungry enough to buy a sandwich from a gas station. He hoped not. He remembered a sign above the door with the shop’s name. Yet, all he could remember was a vague blue circle. Or maybe a square. His thoughts were jumbled by the sound of a million bees buzzing in his head, distracting him. The sound was low, maybe a two on a scale of one to ten, but it was loud enough to scramble his thoughts and make concentration nearly impossible.

Chris shook his head and pressed on his ears, but nothing silenced the sound. He groaned, frustrated, and started clawing at his arm, shocked when a chunk of flesh fell into his hand, and some of it onto the floor. Blood flowed from the gaping wound in his forearm, yet he couldn’t feel the pain. Couldn’t feel anything, other than the headache pounding between his temples. He stared at his handful of meat and his stomach twisted. He threw the chunk of flesh to the ground and went back into the bathroom and tore open the medicine chest, knocking bottles and boxes into the sink, desperate to find something to stop the bleeding.

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