In Hiding: A Survivors Journal of the Great Outbreak
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Authors: ,ichael Elliott
Tags: #zombies
In Hiding:
A Survivors Journal of the Great
Outbreak
By Micheal Elliott
Copyright©2014 by Michael Elliott
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information
storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author.
The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents:
I
am not exactly sure where to start. I mean, I really don’t know how to put
everything I’ve seen into words to help you understand just how bad it was. I
guess it makes sense to start at the very beginning of all this, but even that
I have a hard time wrapping my head around. You see I don’t think anybody
actually knew where the outbreak started. It wasn’t like there was a patient
zero or country of origin that we knew about. It was like it just magically
appeared out of thin air and before we knew it, or should I say accepted what
was happening,
it seemed like it
was everywhere.
All
the things I took for granted, relied on, or just accepted as being there and
holding the world together, vanished far quicker then I ever could have
imagined. As of now, there are no more laws, there are no more rules, and last
I heard the governments of the world are barely holding on.
People, well at least a good
percentage of them, have started to turn on one another in what I would call a
desperate attempt at survival. Even more unbelievable, the thing responsible
for breaking our spirits and that had us questioning our sanity is what this
plague has turned the people we once loved into. What has happened here is
unimaginable and I still have a hard time understanding how it’s even possible.
My name is Jake Frattin and I have survived the Great Outbreak so far.
What
I am writing here is an account of everything that has happened to me during
those first days of the so-called Great Outbreak. It is a record of everything
that I have seen and everything that I have been through. I am writing it all
as I remember it and believe me when I say that I remember it all in great
detail. What I have been through isn’t something that I will ever forget. Trust
me when I tell you that the things that I have seen will stick with me for the
rest of my life.
How
I got here? Luck I guess. I mean the day I found my way here feels like an
eternity ago. But I really should start with what happened at the very
beginning of this mess. Before anyone had even deemed this an official
outbreak. Before the around the clock news coverage began and the police and
military were out in the streets. I should start when the first signs of this
started to surface and as crazy as it all seems, how they would lead to the
darkest period in human history to date.
The
Great Outbreak, or so they called it. That was the name every major news outlet
settled on I guess. It was only days before I arrived here that they made the
decision that this crisis warranted a title. But in truth, the warning signs
had started to appear long before that. I would say that it was probably about
seven or eight months ago when the first reports started to emerge from
different parts of the world. Of course at that time we didn’t realize what we
were watching or what it would lead too. After all the first reports didn’t
seem to be anything out of the ordinary and like so many others, I simply chose
to ignore them.
The
decision to ignore those warning signs as long as I did is probably the single
most reason I am where I am today. That same decision made by authorities and
countless leaders during the early stages of this is most likely why the world is
in the state it is today. I still have a hard time understanding why or how it
spread so fast. But to be fair, I don’t exactly have all the facts.
But
I should really get back to the beginning and the first reports that I was
aware of. The first related story that I can remember came out of Japan. A
businessman was arrested after assaulting a young couple one evening. He
followed that up by severely injuring three police officers when they tried to
restrain him. Some of the witnesses described the man as wild and deranged. I
naturally assumed the man was just high on something.
The next report that caught my
attention was a series of bizarre murders in a remote area of India. I mean
some of what I was reading about those just didn’t make sense. So I didn’t give
either of them much thought at the time, but it’s funny how I
remember them now.
They
were just like the news stories I heard almost every day and they came with
what I thought were reasonable explanations at the time. Whether it was drugs or
a case of misidentification there was no reason to think they were something
bigger then what they appeared. Even if there was an interview with an
eyewitness, they always had a hard time describing exactly what they had seen.
That was probably because what they had seen made little sense to them. Just as
it made little sense to me the first time I witnessed the effects of the virus.
As
it turns out, those stories should have been the early warning signs of what
was to come. But it wasn’t just that those reports were easily lost in a world
of twenty-four hour news coverage and instant Internet updates. We chose to
ignore those stories because what they were suggesting was just so
unbelievable.
They
sounded like people being attacked by zombies. Now almost everyone has seen the
movies or at least has a basic understanding of what a zombie is. Almost
everyone also knew that zombies weren’t real. So when stories on the web
started to surface describing what sounded like zombies attacking everyday
citizens, almost everyone immediately dismissed them. I know I did. Besides, at
that time there was no real evidence that those reports were connected in any
way and it was just hard to believe that any part of them was true.
It
was a few weeks after those initial news reports that a few individuals on the
Internet started piecing it all together. They started to connect the dots long
before any of the governments or mainstream media would. Initially their
reporting and ideas were ridiculed and deemed a work of fiction by people with
too much free time on their hands. But those of us who looked at it closely
could at least see that there was a pattern emerging. Something big was going
on. The problem was that nobody knew exactly what it was.
There
were terrifying stories of people dying and rising again. I easily dismissed
those. But then I read one unbelievable account about a pack of cannibals
moving through rural villages in Western Pakistan. It would have been easy to
dismiss that as well, but when I saw it on the national news one evening, it
became a little harder to ignore.
Then
it seemed like overnight it wasn’t just a story on the Internet anymore.
Similar things started to show up on the news and in the papers. Don’t get me
wrong. I still wasn’t buying the theories of zombies walking around killing
everyone who they crossed paths with. So that was when I started to dig a
little deeper for answers, hoping to find some reasonable explanation for some
of the strange things I had been reading about. All the while my life just went
on and I pretended it was nothing to worry about.
Honestly,
around that time I had actually convinced myself that it was a hoax of some
kind. People had faked things like this before. Maybe not to that level, but
that made more sense to me then the alternative. I mean to actually believe
that any of this was real. How could I? How could I or anyone else for that
matter believe that there were zombies out there? So a few more weeks passed
and I just assumed that an answer would eventually come.
A
couple of weeks later it did. Countries around the world started to acknowledge
that there was some truth to those strange reports. They announced the
discovery of a new virus, a viral strain the likes of which we had never seen
before or at least that’s what they told us. For most of us here in America it
seemed like we finally got the reasonable explanation we had been waiting for.
It quickly turned into another overblown news story. It was SARS again, it was
H1N1, and for most of us it was just another overreaction by the CDC and World
Health Organization. I assumed they were preparing us for the worst like they
always did. But the worst was something we usually never saw here at home. It
seemed like sooner or later it would all just go away.
Then
about a few weeks later, it happened. The first confirmed cases in America were
reported. Even at that point it didn’t seem like anything to be overly
concerned about. A few isolated incidents, it wasn’t like our medical
facilities couldn’t handle it we told ourselves.
It wasn’t really until the first video
and images of what the virus did to people, what it turned them into, what it
made them do, did people really start to worry.
I
can still remember the first video that I saw. A friend of mine had emailed me
a link to a video on an Internet site. It had been recorded on someone’s smart
phone from somewhere in Ohio if I remember correctly. But that’s beside the
point. The person with the phone started filming a situation in a restaurant after
one of the infected pushed their way through the front door.
He
looked like a normal guy at first, except for his clumsy and jerky movements.
There was that and something that looked like a giant stain that covered the
front of his dress shirt. His face was pale, but from what I could see he
didn’t look like the monsters that I had been reading about. Anyway, as the man
walked through the restaurant he stumbled all over the place. You could hear
the people recording the video laughing at him as he knocked over chairs and
bumped into tables. They thought he was drunk.
It
was a woman that first ran over and offered to help him. She was a waitress and
she went over to try and support the man before he knocked anything else over.
But before she even finished asking if he was okay, the man bit down into her
neck. Blood went everywhere as he pulled his face back, taking with it a huge
chunk of the poor woman’s flesh. That was the point in the video when everyone
started to run away. Then as the video went blurry, the only thing I could hear
were people screaming and the sound of gunshots.
My
first instinct told me that it couldn’t be real. I thought it was just a clever
new marketing campaign for a new horror movie trying to capitalize on the
latest threat to humanity. That was until the same video started to show up
everywhere. In the weeks that followed it seemed like there were new videos and
pictures coming out every day. More reported cases closer to home and more
footage then I cared to see and it made me realize that it was almost
impossible to deny it anymore. The outbreak was real and now it was here in the
United States.
As
the evidence started to pile up that the outbreak had arrived. I could see the
changes in society all around me. People on the streets were wearing surgical
masks and gloves, nobody shook hands anymore, and if someone coughed everyone
around them took a few steps back as if they had the plague or something. I
remember reading about how medical supplies and gun sales were shooting through
the roof as panic started to set in. As much as people didn’t want to believe
what was happening, most of them were scared enough to start taking
precautions. At that point, I could have never guessed what was to come.
I
found myself addicted to the news and like so many others I spent my evenings
planted in front of the television with my laptop open waiting to see what
would happen next. I think I was looking for some kind of guidance, some idea
of how to protect myself from the virus. Those answers would never really come.
The only thing I could find was opinions and theories and there was no shortage
of those. Most of the experts seemed to have agreed that we were dealing with a
virus, but they admitted they didn’t understand anything about it. But the less
I knew the more I watched. The more I watched, the more I read and the more
time I spent searching for answers. I remember just wanting someone who was
qualified to walk up to a podium and tell me what it was and what I needed to
do about it.
News
shows were filled with those so-called experts debating all the various issues.
Was it terrorism? Was it air born? What were the early warning signs of
infection? Was the government doing enough to protect us? As the weeks passed
the debates continued all the while the number of reported cases in America
increased dramatically. There were several more cases being reported in Maine,
North Carolina and Florida. Then the first cases were confirmed in
Massachusetts, New York and here in Pennsylvania. The outbreak was spreading
and it was spreading fast.
The
United States responded by shutting down all international flights and then
began to recall military units from abroad. That was when I knew something much
bigger then another SARS or Swine Flu was happening here. Around the world
other countries closed their borders in a vain attempt to try and control the
spread of the outbreak but even that didn’t seem to stop it.
Soon
after that sporting events and concerts were cancelled or postponed until
further notice. Schools and Universities cancelled classes and closed their
doors. That was about the same time when the National Guard and other Military
units started showing up in most of the major cities. Officially they were
there to set up medical camps outside of hospitals to help with the overflow of
people. Well, those infected with the virus didn’t exactly walk into hospitals
seeking treatment. Instead, all kinds of healthy people flooded emergency rooms
and clinics insisting they were sick. Waiting rooms were packed with people
afraid they had contracted the virus and demanding some kind of cure. Most of
them were just scared, they weren’t sick, at least not yet.