Us vs. the Apocalypse
Title: Carnival
Word Count: 1220
Back when I was still a somewhat normal kid and my only severe psychological hangups were the ones that every human experiences in public school, I had a weakness for watching my mother's collection of horror movies. She wasn't much into zombies - I actually never got any exposure to the zombie flicks of old until Dixon demanded I watch them with him, over huge bowls of his mother's homemade mac and cheese - but she had just about everything else with a focus on b-grade or worse. I'd never known you could go worse than a b-grade until I got into some of those gems, I tell you.
"I wanna get out! Let me out!"
One particular favorite of mine was a vintage film with a carousel that would make you older or younger, depending on what direction it turned when you rode it. I was obsessed with the damn thing. I watched those scenes over and over, wishing it was real, especially in the long nights I spent holed up in my room after my mother died to an illness far older than the Ollies. Dad would labor away at his own dispatch, answering the phones all night as he tried to save the people of Ansin City, and I would wrap my mother's afgan around my shoulders and wish I could just make someone take her place. The great irony of it, of course, was that if I hadn't been at my mother's grave the day they sealed the wall, there's a good chance I'd be one of the poor bastards wandering the Dead Zone right now.
"Mommy, I wanna get off! Daddy!"
All those nights and all that wishing got pushed away a long time ago, locked up along with things like my favorite restaurants and that high school teacher I hated and anything else that could remind me of life before this happened (though it was a small victory when I put a bullet through the sinuses of the man who failed me in math my freshman year). But as soon as we pulled up to the abandoned carnival nestled in the massive parking lot of Langford's outlet malls, I knew there'd be problems. And when twelve pairs of dessicated little arms reached out to me from the carousel, I was suddenly eight years old again, watching that movie with my mother for the first time.
"Mommy, I wanna go home!"
"Let me off!"
"Where's my Daddy?"
"I'm hungry! Mommy, I'm hungry!"
In some cities, the coming of the end was long and slow, like the creep of the sickness that took my mother's life. Back at Haven, it had felt like frantic preparations for a stormy winter, a gradual transition between a season of life and virility to one where everything became skeletal and dead. But in places like Langford, where human life only existed in throngs of people that surged in during shopping hours, the end had dropped like a bomb from the sky. The Ollies must have come in a pack, judging by the scores of partial remains.
The virus is a tricky thing. It has to gain its foothold in living tissue, but it thrives in dead flesh. It's designed to kill the organism it infects, but keeps it alive post-mortem so that it can grown and spread. It needs only three to eight hours to kill its host, but forty-eight to one hundred twenty hours to cultivate enough of itself to infect another host, and to this point, years later, we still don't know what it takes for it to die. Even when the bodies are too weak to move, when they just start falling apart from the relentless movement and strain the virus puts on it, the flesh still shows the virus alive and breeding. It stops the decay process and secretes a chemical that keeps the flies and insects at bay, and so the bodies last far longer than they should. We had hoped, in the beginning, that they would eventually starve to death, but then we realized that the Ollies don't need to eat. The biting is how the virus transmits. The eating is just confusion left over from the part of the brain that retains basic human needs and desires.
Needs and desires. Like going to work. Like going home at night. Like calling for your parents when you're lost.
"Mommy!"
"Mommy, I wanna go home!"
When the Langford summer carnival was torn apart, it must have come with the fierceness of a locust swarm. Panic, mayhem, wholesale slaughter. A stampede. The bodies lying on the pavement, the crush injuries and bashed skulls, at least indicated that some of the parents had tried to get to their kids. I wondered if the ride operator had abandoned their post, leaving the music playing, the horses rising and falling on their metal poles, the mirrors twinkling with reflected sunlight, the movement of the ride making it so difficult for the adults to catch the youngsters before they were overrun.
An empty paper bag, the kind that would hold funnel cake or mini donuts, skittered along the pavement in front of me, and twelve pairs of confused eyes followed its movement.
Turned children are a rare sight. Something about the bodies of children is off-putting to the virus. Maybe they're too small, maybe they're too weak. Quite often they'd be trapped in with adults - parents, relatives, or just someone at a shelter - and would starve to death or die of exposure, or be consumed entirely by a team of the hungry turned, but sometimes they'd get bitten and manage to run away, hide out somewhere until the change happened. When we found any Ollies under the age of ten or so, it was a shocking and entirely unwelcome discovery.
The ones on the carousel were such a discovery. Some of them were bare bones from the knees down, picked clean by injured or scavenging kin. Others were missing hands or fingers, sometimes entire faces. Their leathery skin was marked with the network for grey-black veins, little hands curled into claws. When they were still fresh they would have possessed the manual dexterity to open the buckles and harnesses holding them in place, but they were only children. They needed the kind embrace of a parent to do that for them, careful hands to press the buttons and lift them from their seats, perhaps to have some cotton candy or a hot dog or to visit the petting zoo.
"Daddy! Daddy where are you?"
"Let me off!"
The sun beat down on their little dried faces, their tiny twisted bodies. They stared at me with a mixture of awe and hate, probably the first living creature they'd seen in months, maybe years. Their little voices were raspy cries and croaks in the stillness, and I stared at them with a mute horror I hadn't felt since I watched that movie for the first time, the spinning of the carousel to propel you either forward or backward through time, and wondered what hateful God had abandoned these little ones like this, left them stuck on an evil contraption going in neither direction, condemning them to an eternally lonely childhood, arms outstretched, crying for parents that would never come.
Word Count: 1220
Back when I was still a somewhat normal kid and my only severe psychological hangups were the ones that every human experiences in public school, I had a weakness for watching my mother's collection of horror movies. She wasn't much into zombies - I actually never got any exposure to the zombie flicks of old until Dixon demanded I watch them with him, over huge bowls of his mother's homemade mac and cheese - but she had just about everything else with a focus on b-grade or worse. I'd never known you could go worse than a b-grade until I got into some of those gems, I tell you.
"I wanna get out! Let me out!"
One particular favorite of mine was a vintage film with a carousel that would make you older or younger, depending on what direction it turned when you rode it. I was obsessed with the damn thing. I watched those scenes over and over, wishing it was real, especially in the long nights I spent holed up in my room after my mother died to an illness far older than the Ollies. Dad would labor away at his own dispatch, answering the phones all night as he tried to save the people of Ansin City, and I would wrap my mother's afgan around my shoulders and wish I could just make someone take her place. The great irony of it, of course, was that if I hadn't been at my mother's grave the day they sealed the wall, there's a good chance I'd be one of the poor bastards wandering the Dead Zone right now.
"Mommy, I wanna get off! Daddy!"
All those nights and all that wishing got pushed away a long time ago, locked up along with things like my favorite restaurants and that high school teacher I hated and anything else that could remind me of life before this happened (though it was a small victory when I put a bullet through the sinuses of the man who failed me in math my freshman year). But as soon as we pulled up to the abandoned carnival nestled in the massive parking lot of Langford's outlet malls, I knew there'd be problems. And when twelve pairs of dessicated little arms reached out to me from the carousel, I was suddenly eight years old again, watching that movie with my mother for the first time.
"Mommy, I wanna go home!"
"Let me off!"
"Where's my Daddy?"
"I'm hungry! Mommy, I'm hungry!"
In some cities, the coming of the end was long and slow, like the creep of the sickness that took my mother's life. Back at Haven, it had felt like frantic preparations for a stormy winter, a gradual transition between a season of life and virility to one where everything became skeletal and dead. But in places like Langford, where human life only existed in throngs of people that surged in during shopping hours, the end had dropped like a bomb from the sky. The Ollies must have come in a pack, judging by the scores of partial remains.
The virus is a tricky thing. It has to gain its foothold in living tissue, but it thrives in dead flesh. It's designed to kill the organism it infects, but keeps it alive post-mortem so that it can grown and spread. It needs only three to eight hours to kill its host, but forty-eight to one hundred twenty hours to cultivate enough of itself to infect another host, and to this point, years later, we still don't know what it takes for it to die. Even when the bodies are too weak to move, when they just start falling apart from the relentless movement and strain the virus puts on it, the flesh still shows the virus alive and breeding. It stops the decay process and secretes a chemical that keeps the flies and insects at bay, and so the bodies last far longer than they should. We had hoped, in the beginning, that they would eventually starve to death, but then we realized that the Ollies don't need to eat. The biting is how the virus transmits. The eating is just confusion left over from the part of the brain that retains basic human needs and desires.
Needs and desires. Like going to work. Like going home at night. Like calling for your parents when you're lost.
"Mommy!"
"Mommy, I wanna go home!"
When the Langford summer carnival was torn apart, it must have come with the fierceness of a locust swarm. Panic, mayhem, wholesale slaughter. A stampede. The bodies lying on the pavement, the crush injuries and bashed skulls, at least indicated that some of the parents had tried to get to their kids. I wondered if the ride operator had abandoned their post, leaving the music playing, the horses rising and falling on their metal poles, the mirrors twinkling with reflected sunlight, the movement of the ride making it so difficult for the adults to catch the youngsters before they were overrun.
An empty paper bag, the kind that would hold funnel cake or mini donuts, skittered along the pavement in front of me, and twelve pairs of confused eyes followed its movement.
Turned children are a rare sight. Something about the bodies of children is off-putting to the virus. Maybe they're too small, maybe they're too weak. Quite often they'd be trapped in with adults - parents, relatives, or just someone at a shelter - and would starve to death or die of exposure, or be consumed entirely by a team of the hungry turned, but sometimes they'd get bitten and manage to run away, hide out somewhere until the change happened. When we found any Ollies under the age of ten or so, it was a shocking and entirely unwelcome discovery.
The ones on the carousel were such a discovery. Some of them were bare bones from the knees down, picked clean by injured or scavenging kin. Others were missing hands or fingers, sometimes entire faces. Their leathery skin was marked with the network for grey-black veins, little hands curled into claws. When they were still fresh they would have possessed the manual dexterity to open the buckles and harnesses holding them in place, but they were only children. They needed the kind embrace of a parent to do that for them, careful hands to press the buttons and lift them from their seats, perhaps to have some cotton candy or a hot dog or to visit the petting zoo.
"Daddy! Daddy where are you?"
"Let me off!"
The sun beat down on their little dried faces, their tiny twisted bodies. They stared at me with a mixture of awe and hate, probably the first living creature they'd seen in months, maybe years. Their little voices were raspy cries and croaks in the stillness, and I stared at them with a mute horror I hadn't felt since I watched that movie for the first time, the spinning of the carousel to propel you either forward or backward through time, and wondered what hateful God had abandoned these little ones like this, left them stuck on an evil contraption going in neither direction, condemning them to an eternally lonely childhood, arms outstretched, crying for parents that would never come.