America Undead: Out of the Darkness & Into the Dark Read online

  Chapter 1: The Darkness

  I am, or was, Dane Sampson. If you're reading this, I'm probably dead, which most likely means you killed me again and found it in my backpack while scavenging for supplies the way we all do. Or it could be years from now, civilization has returned to some kind of normalcy and you got it from a library, but I doubt it. It would be more likely that you're an archaeologist from some other planet and the human race has long been gone from this wretched world and you've found it alongside my remains.

  I guess the best place to start would be to describe what life was like in what I long believed to be an underground bunker. It was a bunker, yes, but not so much underground. Growing up on the inside, all I ever saw was gray concrete block walls and a concrete ceiling when I saw anything at all. There were no windows and the only light we ever had was when Dad was fortunate enough to find lantern fuel or gasoline for the generators that powered the lights, which wasn't very often and was even more seldom as the years went by so I spent most of my young years groping around in darkness. It wasn't that hard though. Being so used to where everything was, when we did have light I would sometimes have to close my eyes to find stuff.

  Our bunker was a great deal larger than most of the ones I've found since I left. Most are old storm shelters but ours was some kind of government storage facility, 80 feet wide and about 120 feet long from the front door to the back wall, about 40 feet to the ceiling and full of metal shelving filled with things Dad had acquired over the years on his occasional supply runs.

  Mom was the nurturing kind but Dad was all business all the time which, I've come to understand over my years on the outside, was probably the only reason we all survived as long as we did. My sister, Beth, and I had chores to do every day; keeping the bunker clean, organized and most importantly, secure. Mom had chores as well but they were more an understood duty then a rule. Dad's main chore was to make a list of chores and see that they were all done to the highest standard.

  There used to be a couple of other families who lived with us in the bunker but throughout the years, the men died on supply runs and the women and children died of disease or starvation, or so I've been told. I was old enough to remember only the last three who died.

  The first I can remember was Steven. He was the father and husband of the family who lived with us. I was maybe eight years old and he had a daughter who was four, I think. He and dad went on a supply run and when they came back Steven had been bitten. His wife cried and held her daughter close but offered no protest as Dad made quick work of driving a knife into the back of Steven's neck and disposing of the body. He gave no apology until days later.

  The bunker was actually an above ground concrete structure covered with earth, all but the very end of it. At the exposed end was a massive steel door, 10 feet high, 8 feet wide and 6 inches thick, that slid open to the side by a mechanism of chains and gears, and outside that was a loading dock. The only other exit was in the roof. Dad had, at some point before I could remember, built a makeshift ladder from broken apart metal shelves and somehow bored a hole in the ceiling just wide enough to fit himself through. He then built a door out of steel and fastened it to the top of the concrete which was still about 6 feet below the surface of the dirt on top. It would just barely open up into the tunnel and I still remember the sound of it slamming shut when he would climb out.

  Whenever it was time to make a town run he would simply open the front door enough to fit the barrel of a shotgun through it, bracing it on the side with a shelf to keep it from opening too far, and start shooting. This would do two things, thin out the crowd and draw the dead away from the other exit. Then dad and whoever was helping him would make a break for it out the top.

  We had walkie-talkies that dad would call on when he was almost home so mom could start shooting again and Steven's wife could prop the door open enough for dad to pull it the rest the way and get in. On the day Steven died everything had gone wrong. One of the main reasons for the run was to get more batteries for the radio so, of course, the batteries died on the way back and there was no way for them to call ahead. When they reached the bunker, the door wasn't already propped open and there wasn't enough time to get in before the dead reached them. As they were firing, trying to keep them back to get the door open, one with no legs or lower torso, that had never made it to the bottom of the hill to begin with, drug itself to him unnoticed and bit him through his boot just above the ankle. It barely penetrated the leather but apparently was enough to break the skin and introduce infection. Dad sat up all night, watching him spend his last moments with his family and as soon as he started looking a little under the weather, drove a knife under the base of his skull and wiggled it a little to make sure the spinal cord was severed.

  It wasn't long after that, his wife left the bunker, don't know why. She didn't make it far though. We could hear her screaming even over the gunshots. When she left out the front door without telling anyone she was leaving, one got in before we could get the door shut. It bit and killed the girl before dad made it there with the shotgun. Once he killed it, he put one shot through her head too, just to make sure she wouldn't come back. She had just turned five a week before and we had eaten protein bars with little pink candles stuck in them.

  It was the first time I'd seen someone killed up close. Her lifeless body lay there, the lower part of her jaw ripped down to the bone and a big chunk of her neck gone. There was one hole in her forehead and the blood ran out from the back and mixed with the rest coming from her neck in a bright red pool with little white chunks. It was the first and only time I ever saw my father cry, wiping the tears away with a dirty sleeve and trying to keep a stiff upper lip.

  It was also the first time I'd seen one of the infected dead. It had been dead for years, eyes sunken deeply into their sockets, the skin pulled tightly over the bones of its face and hands. The clothes were torn and faded from the sun and hung loosely from his frail body. The brown, rotting teeth of its top plate glistened as the lip was shriveled and drawn back in a permanent expression of fear and agony. Its bottom jaw was shattered and the two ends hung down, teeth lying on the floor behind where it lay. Besides the damage from the shotgun there was one very old bite on its hand, a large chunk of it gone along with one finger. As it lay there slain, I noticed that the shirt seem to hang loosely from the bottom of its rib cage to the tops of its hipbones like a hammock. I lifted the shirt and underneath, wasn't much. The flesh and muscles of the stomach were mostly rotted away except for a few hanging bits and the exposed stomach was torn wide open and dried up. The intestines and all the other organs were shriveled and hanging loosely by their connections revealing the spinal column.

  Dad quickly pushed me away from the decomposed body and told me never to touch one of them. "Don't touch one unless you want to be one." he said. It was then that he started teaching me. I heard him tell mom that he was worried he wouldn't come back one day and I needed to know how to survive and take care of the family.

  He taught me how to shoot, how to fabricate armor, where to find food, how to work on cars and everything he knew about the living dead. He knew a lot, but there was far more that he didn't know; like where the dead came from, or that there were this many other survivors out here.

  I didn't decide to write this until a few months after I left the bunker. I didn't even know how to read and write until I was 10 or so. When Steven's wife left and his little girl got killed I had to take up their part of the chores which included cleaning the shelves in the back end of the bunker.

  While cleaning one day I found a box full of books; westerns, science-fict
ion, horror, a few biographies. I couldn't read but the curled up corners, the yellowed pages and the smell of old print and paper made me feel like there was something in those books that I had to have.

  I begged mom to teach me how to read and by the next month I was reading a book a week. I would've read all the time if I could but I had to hide from Dad to do it, reading only when he was asleep. He considered it a waste of time. The only thing important to him was learning how to survive. The only thing from the past that mattered was canned food and bullets, he would say.

  Speaking of the past, of all the books in that box, my favorite was an American history textbook with a stamp on the back cover that read, Property of Picayune Memorial High School. It started with the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and ended with the religious liberties bill of 2018. If they had only known what it would bring. Of all the stories in the book, the thing that held my attention the most and eventually inspired me to leave the bunker was a list of names and dates handwritten in the front cover.

  Jennifer Smith, aug 2018

  Jared Stockstill, jan 2019

  Matthew Johnson, aug 2019

  Kristen Breaux, jan 2020

  Jaime Lee, aug 2020

  The other thing, what really pushed me forward, was a letter I found in between pages 197 and 198. It looked to be a note passed back and forth between the last girl who owned the book and her boyfriend, Curtis. I only know his name because there were hearts drawn throughout the book, on the edges of pages and in the margins, with his name inside them. I think his last name may have been Jones because she had written Jaime Marie Jones on a few of the pages in various fonts.

  "Are you going to Pearson's after the game Friday?"

  "Don't think I can. Dad's got me boarding up the windows and doors tonight and tomorrow after school. Are y'all already boarded up?"

  "I don't think we're going to. Dad says they'll never make it further south than Maryland with all the military that's in Washington."

  "You didn't see the news this morning? They started fighting in Washington last night and there have already been murders reported as far as Virginia."

  "I got my phone taken away, remember? I'm not worried. I promise, if they make it to Alabama I'll run away and come stay at your house."

  "Instead of going to Pearson's why don't you come over and help us board up?"

  "I need to go to the party to say hi to some people. Got to keep up appearances, maybe I'll come over after."

  There were a lot of other notes but they were very personal in nature and not historically relevant so I won't go into those. This was the first glimpse I had into how things were in the past and how things came to be the way they were now but I felt that there was so much more to know and this is why I soon left the safety of our home. For the next six weeks I became sort of an insomniac, my mind playing hundreds of imaginary scenarios over and over. I don't think I slept more than three or four hours a night until several weeks after I had left home when I finally found a securely boarded up house with a hole in the roof, where a tree had fallen across it.

  For weeks, as I lay there trying to sleep, I would hear Mom restlessly moving about when dad was sleeping and beg her to tell me about the past. One night she had had enough of my pestering and finally broke down.

  Chapter 2: Mom’s Story

  Things were so different then, it's hard to know where to start. How do I explain things to you when there's no common point of reference? I guess the biggest difference back then was money. It seemed like such an important thing. We spent the majority of our lives working to get it. Some would lie, cheat and steal just to have enough to get by when most had more than they could ever possibly need. And no matter how much a person had, they still did everything they could to get more.

  It was a kind of measuring stick, a way for one person to tell another what something was worth. Everything here; the food, the guns, the roof over our heads, at one time could all be bought with money. I can tell you don't understand.

  You see, say there's a farmer. He would use money to buy seeds. He would spend time planting and waiting for the seeds to grow. Then he would give a little more money to some people to help him harvest the crops and a little more to a truck driver to take them to a grocery store. Then the farmer would get paid by the store for his crops. Then the people he gave the money to for the time they would spend helping him would go give the money to the grocery store in exchange for the food.

  I know it sounds ridiculous now but that's how it was. It was good in a lot of ways though. Money and the need for it created order. There were laws then, rules about how people treated one another but were basically about what you could and couldn't do for money. If you broke the law you had to give the lawmakers your money. If you didn't have enough they'd lock you away and you'd pay with your time, the one thing you can never make any more of. Of course, there were a lot of laws that made you give them money whether you had done anything wrong or not.

  See, I knew I couldn't make you understand that part of it. But I guess it doesn't matter now. Just know that every day, your Dad would go to work and there was no part of me that ever had to worry that he might not come back. He would leave in the morning and nine hours later he'd walk right back through the door, every day, you could set your watch by it.

  The only time I worried was when he went on a mission or deployment, but even then it wasn't as bad as now. Then, I could at least expect that he would make it back or if he was killed I could expect an explanation. Now, I've learned that every time he leaves, I just have to accept the fact that he's gone for good, just in case he is. But you want to know how we got from there to here, don't you?

  Your Dad was gone for six weeks on that last mission. He didn't call when he landed like he usually did. I didn't even know he was back in the country until his friend Mitch stopped by the house looking for him. Mitch was a Sheriff's deputy and seeing him in uniform standing on the porch, my heart dropped into my stomach. I opened the door holding my breath, waiting to hear the worst. Instead, he was there to warn me that there was an arrest warrant for your Dad.

  "I'm sorry to do this Kaylee, but have you seen Chuck?"

  "No, he's on a mission."

  "Actually," he rebutted "they got back last night and he went awol. I saw the warrant on the Sheriff's desk this morning."

  I couldn't believe it. He had never gone awol, never even complained no matter how ridiculous an order seemed.

  "And you're here to arrest him? You've been best friends since high school."

  "No, that's not why I'm here. I just came to warn him before I am sent for that. The Sheriff doesn't even know I'm here. Besides, he knows we're friends. I doubt he'll send me."

  "Well, I haven't seen him. I didn't even know they were back."

  "Okay. If you see him could you please tell him to call me."

  "Sure, of course."

  I knew if he had gone awol he had a good reason. I just didn't know why he hadn't come home yet. I even got so paranoid that I wondered if something else had happened to him and going awol was just a cover story. I knew he wouldn't just leave them, or especially leave me wondering, unless he had a good reason.

  Only an hour or so after Mitch stopped by, just before dark, there was another knock at the door. It was a man in a suit who didn't realize I saw his partner, slinking around the side of the house, out the kitchen window.

  "Ma'am, I'm agent Frost with homeland security. Have you seen your husband today?"

  "No, he's gone on a mission, somewhere in the Middle East I think."

  He handed me a card. "If you hear from him please give me a call. It's a matter of national security and very important that we speak with him."

  "I sure will." He stepped off the porch and walked toward his car, parked halfway down the drive. "Don't forget your friend around back." I called to him.

  He paused for a moment then nodded and waved his partner out of the woods. As they drove away, I
knew that our quiet little life was about to change drastically. I didn't want to move from that spot on the porch until he was home and could tell me what to do next.

  So I did the only thing I could do and got on the internet to see if there was anything in the news, to see if there was anything that looked like something he might be involved in. Of course, I found nothing. There were hundreds, even thousands of things that happened in the world every day and with more access to information than any other time in history, less than ever was actually being reported. The news media would fixate on one story and talk about nothing but that for a few days then move on to something else. A lot of people thought it was some government conspiracy to distract us from more important things. I guess it worked.

  About four hours later, I was still sitting in front of the computer, the house completely dark and I heard his voice behind me.

  "Baby?"

  I jumped from the desk and hugged him. "What the hell is going on?"

  "I don't have time to explain. I can't stay long, they're probably watching." He said then let me go and went straight to the pantry. He started throwing all the canned food into a backpack along with some matches and bottles of water. "Your dad is coming over tomorrow, just do whatever he says."

  "I don't understand. Why did you go awol?"

  "I'll explain in a few days...maybe weeks. Look, things are going to get really bad. At some point they'll get bad enough where it won't matter what I know and I'll be able to come back. Until then, if anyone asks, you haven't seen me. I'll be watching though and I promise everything will be alright."

  "What about Mitch. He came by earlier and said it was to warn you?"

  "Not even him. Not yet anyway. If I'm going to be here to protect you no one can know I've been here. Okay?" He said then went to the back door. "I'll be back, I promise."

  I gave him one last hug and kiss and he left. There were twenty acres of woods between our house and the creek. It wasn't much but enough that he could hide well enough no one would find him that didn't know where to look. Without the porch light on, he disappeared before he even reached the woods.