Necropolis

The sun was out, shining gloriously down on the small camp of Grim. Bloated, blood-soaked, skeletal birds sung their wonderful romantic songs, multicolored leaves rustled and fell from their sticks, and bellies were growling ferociously.

Smoke pumped out of each and nearly every cabin, despite it being hardly November, and people wearing cobbled-together winter gear dug into their gardens desperately for anything. Grim’s walls weren’t anything special, just some stones piled on top of each other, kept in place by tall logs, sharpened at the top. The good people had completed that task back when their chainsaws still had gas. Back when vehicles weren’t more than easy and solid but immobile tents. Back when civilization was more civilized. The front doors of Grim stopped opening a long time ago, when caravans from other nearby camps stopped arriving. They still worked; That was the bonus of being built around an old steam-train yard. You had lots of coal to heat up homes. As such, Grim was entirely surrounded by one of Yukon’s many deep and thick evergreen forests, with trees that almost made them think of skyscrapers. There was a passing Horde every now and then, a few beefy Infected, but nothing that could dilute Grim’s never ending sources of coal, wood, and joy. Until, that is, the food ran low.

“I’m going to be entirely honest with you,” said Jack, who sat in his worn chair at his even more worn desk, “we are going to starve.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” muttered the old man who was seated across the desk. “I’ve never once gone out and not found even a rabbit.”

“It’s rough. It really is.” Jack sighed, crossing his arms. Jack was a big man, with strong arms and fingers built for a pen, but ones that knew their way around a spear or rifle. Jack was Grim’s unofficial mayor. He knew how to lead. He knew how to deal with rowdy people who were anything but pleased at the limited ration rate. He knew what to do. Right?

“You do know what to do, right?” asked the old man. Jack chuckled mirthlessly.

“Absolutely not. It being a colder year, our crops failed. Corn, nothing. Carrots, little. Potatoes were great, but the amount we planted will get us mid-December, maybe. You know full well about the lack of meat, and that’s what normally got us through the winter.”

“Lack of pure meat,” put in the old man. “Lots of Infected meat out there.”

“Right. With the plague spreading and growing… frick man, it’s even got the crows.”

The old man started, but then realized Jack was talking about the animal, and settled down. “It’s harder to eat unmutated meat, that’s for sure.”

Jack looked out his window at the small community of Grim, smiling to himself. “Man, remember burgers?”

“Of course. Eighteen years isn’t too bad.”

“I think it was more like twenty, mate.”

“I’m old. But I don’t think I’m that old.”

Jack racked his brains trying to remember. Remember the life before. “Hell, remember having chicken?”

The old man liked chicken. He hadn’t had it in years, once the plague got their farm of thirty or so birds. He also missed eggs. Some scrambled eggs and ketchup… he felt his stomach rumble in annoyance. How dare he think of those things. No, the only thing he’d tasted in a while was cabbage or potato soup, cured jerky, and maybe a few berries when he was out hunting.

“Kentucky fried chicken…” reminisced Jack… “or Tim Hortons. I miss a good thing of coffee. A Double Double, man.”

The old man’s stomach groaned again. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Okay. The numbers don’t lie here. I’ve got everything we’ve managed to pick, rummage, find, and hunt, whatever…” he faltered.

The old man stayed silent. He’d read the little whiteboard in front of Jack before sitting down. He knew how bad it was. Jack knew he knew, and sighed.

“It’s. Not. Good.” He croaked. “At. All.”

There was a knock at the door; Good. Something to change the topic from this hopeless conversation. The old man brightened when he saw who it was.

Natalie burst into the door, much to Jack’s disapproval.

“I just got that fixed!” he sputtered, as Nat shoved the door open. Her hair was a mess, her young face streaked with sweat, and she huffed maniacally.

“Down at the gardens,” she gasped, “they said you already took note of what we had. And Jim down in the coal store also told me you counted our stock. Do we have enough? Are we fu–”

Jack put out his hands. “Now, now, Natalie I know I can trust you but I can’t give you secrets that would normally be reserved for managers of their respective compartments. Your father here is the head of the hunting department and…”

“I deserve to know as much as he does,” Natalie said strongly, not backing down. “Please. I want to know if I’m going to survive this winter.”

Jack’s impassive face and the old man’s bleak expression told her what she wanted to hear. With a heavy swallow, she ran out of the room without another word.

“I should probably go talk to her,” the old man said, and at the same time, Jack said the same.

“You should… it’s hard news. That’s why I don’t tell everyone about the numbers.”

The old man grunted as he got to his feet. “I’m not really a numbers guy.”

Outside was extremely cold. He’d noticed a trend in the temperature, and that steadily growing number was decreasing rapidly. Year after year since the outbreak in 2020, it had gone from breezy to chilly to cold to frigid. Usually they didn’t have to start up the boilers to deice the water in the pipes until the beginning of December. Now here they were, using up more coal. Sure, they may have a lot of coal as of now, but every year it dwindles. The colder it is, which it was, the more of their store they’d gobble up. It wasn’t going to last forever. But the old man could take solace that he wouldn’t die of hypothermia, because they would all succumb to starvation long before then.

He enjoyed the what little warmth his makeshift outfit offered (in the case of the Bubonic Plague returning and mutating and evolving and triggering an apocalypse, you truly are not worried about fashion), which consisted of a aviator-style bomber hat, one of the really fluffy ones with long ear flaps that went down past his jawline, a big and long coat, which was in amazing condition, and simple scavenger boots that were worn and not only well-used, but threadbare and not very warm. The old man himself wasn’t very old, uh, old-ish. He refused to believe he was a year away from fifty, not because he cared at all about his age, but because realizing it would make his body start to act so. He was in commendable shape, but more lean now with hardly any food.

The cold outside Jack’s hut caused him to shiver, but smiled when he was met with a friendly bark. He kneeled down to the waiting dog, who sat patiently at the door of Jack’s little shoddy cabin.

“Good boy, Pup,” smiled the old man, scratching the mutt behind the ear. Pup was a solid Caucasian Shepherd Dog, also known as a Russian Bear Dog. Despite his young age, he was already fairly large and fluffy. What a Russian breed of a dog meant to hunt bears was doing in Canada, the old man could only guess he was the son of some breeder’s pets. Pup was found in an abandoned tree fort turned into a survivor’s base, with no owner nearby, and Natalie had insisted upon keeping him. This was when the old man brought Nat out to teach her how to hunt. Back before she got the hang of it and before she realized tending to the food that didn’t attack her over in the gardens.

The old man didn’t know how well it’d go over with Jack with bringing in another hungry mouth, but Jack was surprisingly fine with it, and that could have been with the fact that Pup managed to sniff out a rabbit’s hole right below their feet as they spoke outside Grim’s walls and clamp his young jaws down on a little bunny’s head, effectively catching dinner. So Pup stayed, and the old man’s bond grew with the puppy, who was clearly smart and good at hunting, and growing very fast. And the old man didn’t regret it. The dark gray, bright green eyed dog had proved his worth time and time again. He was also incredibly cute and soft to pet, a spark of light in a dark world.

Behind him, Jack’s door opened and closed as the unofficial mayor walked out, his thick and very warm looking cowl up on his head. He breathed out, a sign that the old man both saw in the cold and heard.

Emptily, he stared at the wooden cabins that surrounded them. This was it. This was Grim. Everything they were, everything they could rely on, there was nothing else out there that would assist them but themselves. “What are we gonna do, man.”

“That’s for you to decide.”

“Sometimes, I don’t have all the answers.”

“So who does?”

A light grin touched Jack’s face. “I dunno, but when you find him, bring him to me. I have a few questions to ask him.” Then he went back to business mode. “But how am I ever going to break the news to these people? ‘Hey, guess what guys, we’re outta food!’.” Jack looked up and down the dirt path as if someone would overhear. Good thing too, because Amiee just walked out of her cabin. Amiee was always known for her massive, eleven-foot long, white, black-striped scarf. She waved cheerfully at the pair. They waved back, and she walked off.

“I’ll figure it out,” muttered Jack, shaking his head. The old man stood and clasped a firm hand onto Jack’s shoulder, smiling painfully all the while.

“I’m sure you will. After all, you’ve been good to Grim so far.”

“Yeah… what’s the worst that can happen? We all die?” The joke floated silently away in the chilly breeze. Jack cleared his throat. “Storm’s coming.”

The old man looked up at the dark cloud that was rolling in. “Means they’re coming.”

Jack sighed. “Yeah. I should call back the hunters.”

“You should. A Wandering Horde is nothing you want to be caught out in.”

“Didn’t you once? What was it like?”

“I hid up in a tree holding Pup as hundreds of brain-dead Infected mumbled and slouched on by below me.”

“Oh. So not fun, eh?”

“No. And impossible to get rid of.”

“What if we had a machine gun? Just mow them down like grass. That’d deal with them.”

The old man glanced at Jack. “Not a chance. Good luck actually getting any headshots with one of those heavy weapons. Otherwise you’re just going to need a lot of ammo in order to shred them to pieces.”

“That’s why you use a shotgun, right? Surefire kill when you blow the head apart?”

“Ensures that the head will be reduced to nothing but leather. The only way to survive a Horde is to wait until the sun comes out or the cloud goes away and they all go back to sleep in the warmth. If the Heatseekers couldn’t do nothing, we don’t have a hope.”

“The Heatseekers did their best. But with their numbers…”

“Jack, have you ever even met a Heatseeker?”

“I mean, we’ve all heard stories, right? They’re unstoppable.”

The old man grunted. “I’ve seen more than one Heatseeker corpse. Professional military training or not, they’re human, they can be killed.”

“Everyone dies. We just need to take out as many Cros and Infected as we can before leaving for good. I think Heatseekers do just that.”

The old man knew Jack thought of Heatseekers as practically godlike, falling from the sky after jumping out of their military dropship, floating down angelically on parachutes of nylon, armed with high-end weapons and an ungodly amount of ammo. They came about five years into the outbreak. They were what was left of the government. Dropped into Yukon’s ‘hot zone’, they were meant for, designed for, and really good at controlling the plague, and were allowed to do so by any means possible. Infected were cut down. Their numbers diminished substantially for a year or so after the Heatseekers arrived… but it still wasn’t enough. The Heatseekers, for all their resources and knowledge, eventually fell from grace when the Infection worsened. Wandering Hordes engulfed them. Fast, newly turned Infected (dubbed ‘Noobs’ unlovingly) chased them down. Even the Ferals, easily one of the scariest breed of Infected, got a piece of the Heatseeker pie. Now, the strongest of the original Heatseekers wander. They’re warriors of a different age, a bygone one, older, wisened, and alone, left on their own after their government fell. Weapons that belonged to dead Heatseekers are popular among scavs, survivors, and the Cros alike. Being in excellent condition notwithstanding, they were the most advanced in technology that southern Yukon had ever seen. Solar-powered thermal scopes. Subsonic ammo paired with suppressors. Huge magazines. Big packs of rations that last forever. Straws that filtered water as you drank. The old man had seen a few obvious (and very, very bloody) Heatseeker weapons or goods sitting on gambling tables or hung around shoulders of hardened survivors, whom the old man wouldn’t put past to hunt down and murder a Heatseeker for their gear. Survival of the fittest. Everyone believed it, whether they openly admitted it or not.

The old man watched his breath in the air for a while as he remained lost in his own mind. Jack hesitated, then he cursed.

“I wish we could do something. Anything.”

The old man didn’t reply.

The wind rustled the pine trees around the little encampment of Grim emptily. It’d gotten colder. The sun wasn’t shining as bright as it used to. Jack, again, cleared his throat in lieu of speaking empty promises.

“Yeah, I should… go.”

The old man nodded, and just like that, he began to walk away, Pup at his heels. Grim, despite the mood, was as lively as ever, and even if it weren’t peak architecture, it was a nice, homey place. Its name was very misleading.

The old man made his way down the path, cold hands in his pockets. It wasn’t very windy, as the thick wood and stone walls blocked any but all of the wind that somehow maneuvered through the pines that surrounded Grim and went over the walls brushed lightly against his soft cheek. His stomach grumbled again when he passed Bick’s meat ‘shop’ for lack of a better word. It wasn’t a shop, as nothing was sold, but merely a place to prepare meat that the hunters brought back from their trips. Bick could be seen through the window, carving out a chunk of female deer with a knife that seemed small in his massive fingers. The old man had caught that. It was the best find he’d gotten all month, other than rats, mice, and rabbits, and even then, there weren’t many.

Bick spotted the old man and waved with his bloody hands, and carelessly waddled over, his big boots pounding against the stone floor, and pushed open the plastic-lined wooden door to his shop.

“How is she?” asked the old man cheerily. Bick’s smile was infectious.

“She’s a big girl. Lots of meat. A super large heart, I’ll be making a stew later.” He perked up, as if remembering something. “Ooh! Hold on one second, I need to grab something.” The door slammed, and he came back a few moments later with a meaty, bloody bone. Carelessly he tossed it in Pup’s direction, not really aiming, because he didn’t have to. Pup jumped up on powerful hind legs and chomped down on the bone happily.

“Going somewhere?” asked Bick. “You look in a hurry.”

“Family matter. I’d love to talk more, but…” the old man shrugged, smiling warmly. Smiling as if nothing was wrong. Bick nodded.

“Solid. See ya later, then.”

Bick closed the door and the old man continued on, not rushing, lest people think something was amiss (the inhabitants of Grim were always a little too nosy), but fast enough to get to his shack quickly enough. At his door, waited Maverick, one of the youngest hunters they had. Maverick, despite his young age, was a fighter. He survived in the Wasteland for three years with his sister before one of Grim’s hunting parties stumbled upon the pair. Good thing too, because Maverick’s sister had been bitten, black-redish blood mixed with her own bright red stuff, and was rapidly going through the stages of the plague. Sudden chills, tiredness, swollen lymph nodes, and steadily progressing into blackened or colorless skin, and the sudden and violent urge to consume meat. This clearly wasn’t the result of the original Bubonic Plague. But seven-hundred years is ample time for something to mutate, isn’t it? They brought Maverick back, tried to bring his sister back too, but she freaked out and bit one of them. So a man had to put them both down. Chick. The double-barrel shotgun opened. A single shell was forced in. The other side was already full. This needed both barrels. Click. Two hammers were pulled back. Boom. The old man pulled the trigger. The sound of a skull imploding was nothing he wanted to hear again. He didn’t really have to kill the hunter, since the survivor knew what he had to do and put a round into his head himself. That’s it. That’s the only cure for the mutated plague. Piece of lead to the cranium. The old man just made sure it was done entirely. It was mercy. It would have been torture to aimlessly wander the Wasteland otherwise.

Maverick didn’t show any emotion towards the event that most likely saved his life, as that was four years back, and maybe didn’t remember, but the old man knew of the small printed photo Maverick kept rolled in his pocket. The frame, which had been in his sister’s bag, had cracked when she turned on them and took a bat to the back when one of the hunters panicked. Maverick never spoke of it. The short, scrawny little kid didn’t even show much of any other emotion, except for care and concern for Natalie. It was most likely the reason he was at the old man’s small cabin.

“Maverick,” he greeted when he approached. Maverick smiled tiredly and knelt down to pet Pup, who was wagging his tail excitedly.

“Hey. I came by to see Nat. Where is she?”

“Inside. I need to talk to her. Do you mind giving us a moment?”

“Of course. It wasn’t urgent, I guess. Just felt a bit lonely.”

Don’t we all. The old man ducked inside his door with a nod and shut it when Pup entered. Nat was in her room, on her bed, (or what could really be called a mattress sitting on some skids), looking at a picture she drew a long time ago of her, her father, and her mother. The old man needn’t knock; She knew he was there.

“What happened to her, dad?” Nat asked, somewhat silently. Turns out she also knew he was there, behind the door. “Why… why can’t I remember her?”

The grizzled old man remained woefully silent as he pushed open the door and moved toward her. He was unsure whether to sit or stand, but decided to awkwardly sit on the end of her bed.

“She’s… been gone a long time now.”

“How long?”

Thoughtfully, the old man forced himself to remember. “Ten years.”

Natalie was shocked. “Ten…? Why don’t… don’t I…”

“You were far too young, Nat. Even for myself it’s sometimes hard to remember her voice.”

“What exactly happened to her?”

With a sigh, the old man thought back to it.

“She survived the initial outbreak in 2020 with me. For five years, we were wanderers. Traveled around. It wasn’t too bad back then, we were able to survive with food from grocers and whatnot.”

“I know this. I was born two years after the outbreak.”

“Three.”

“And… when exactly did mom die?”

The old man didn’t like that word. Not at all.

“It was a while ago. After you were born, obviously. It was before we joined Grim. Before she saw you grow up.”

“And…” Nat’s eyes were drawn to a hand-drawn picture of a woman in a blue dress, but it was, as the old man knew, an elegant lady in blue scrubs. “She was a nurse?”

“Doctor. Certified. Went to a big, expensive school for medicine and disease control. One could say she dabbled in medicine and scientific… science… smart person stuff. In fact, she was working on a cure.”

Nat appeared very hesitant. “Then why are we hiding in here, and the monsters are still out there?”

Placidly, the man smiled. “The plague had other ideas… she… she did what she could.”

A moment of silence passed the two, as if they were mourning a future time that would never come to pass. So they continued to sit in silence, a sound that didn’t exist before the outbreak. The A/C, the hum of the fridge, the howling of animals outside or the soothing chirps and whistles of birds. There was nothing now. The birds were feasting on dead carcasses. Wolves cowered from Infected monstrosities much bigger than them. And no electricity means there wasn’t any hum of any radiator or fan. It was silence, with nothing but their thoughts to keep them company. Of course, for many, that was a hopeless friend. This was the case in the old man’s cabin.

“We… well, she did all that she could.” The old man continued. “She focused so much on something that could fight the cure, kill it, slow it, anything. She’d test it on me, give me the cure, and then take some blood, and Infect the blood. Never did it work. Always the blood turned that sickly black after a few moments, with only it showing a red sheen in the light. Always.”

Natalie listened intently. So the old man went on.

“When we finally decided to try the cure on a live, Infected rat, it died. Immediately.”

Natalie stared. The old man waited for her to understand. She did quickly.

“The same cure you had in your veins?”

“That’s right. I’d gained immunity to her cure. To anything else, it was poison.”

Confused, Natalie continued to blankly gaze at her father. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because she left her cure behind. She believed that, if it aged like wine, it would become viable. I wanted you to know that we can get out of this. Humanity can be saved.” The old man smiled. He truly believed it.

“Do you have the cure? Where is it?”

“Safe.”

“But what are we going to do about the food? The cure’s useless if we all die of starvation before it ages.” She seemed hesitant, but quickly went on before the old man could say anything. “Camp Whiteslope has a lot of food. Remember when the radio still worked? They said they raided the ski resort’s kitchen and got a huge store of canned goods. We can see if they can share any.”

“Whiteslope? Nat, that’s a week trip, at least. And what if we get there, and they decide to not share their food?”

Pup whined and sat down between them, resting his head on the bed. Natalie gave him a few mindless pets, causing his tail to wag excitedly.

“Well… we can bring along a few guns and…”

The old man was taken aback. “Are you insane? No. Don’t start thinking like a Cro.”

“Why? What’s so wrong with what they preach? What makes them different from us?”

“They believe that only the strong will survive. They slaughter whole camps, and when no one is alive in the end, they take all their stuff. Whoever survives their attack is either recruited or executed. Do you know how many camps they’ve emptied? How many lives they’ve taken? Charles Darwin, to them, was a deity, Nat. Survival of the fittest is their religion, not just science. Not that anyone cares about science anymore. Still, we can’t start thinking like a Cro. Or we’re no better than they. Grim’s served us well for the past five years. Remember the five years we tried to live, y’know, out there? In the Wasteland?” The old man paused. He knew quite well what he had to do to survive. And he wasn’t quite proud of it. “I do. And trust me when I say we are better now.”

She thought about that, silent for a while. “Dad… can I… can I ask what… what happened to mom? I know the plague happened and all, but what exactly happened? Where did she go? How did she… where was she buried?”

A pained smile touched the old man’s lips. “She was bitten, as I said before. Infected blood got in the wound… and… well…”

Click. Both barrels were empty.

“Well what?”

Chik-chik. New shell. Another. One would not complete the job. He wanted this to be painless.

“She ran off. She realized, probably, that when she lost her mind and got a taste for meat, you and I would be in danger. So she ran. Away. I don’t know what happened to her. She might even…”

BANG.

“... still be alive.”

Thud. Twin shells, still smoking, hit the bloody ground. A single teardrop followed them down.

The old man’s face was emotionless despite the forced smile. His daughter didn’t see anything off about it. Then her stomach rumbled. The old man heard it plainly. Mind still blissfully empty, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out an odd-looking rifle bullet attached to a string. It wasn’t of any caliber that the old man knew, and as of now, this was the only one in existence. He put it around Natalie’s neck, she held it like it was a diamond.

“Your mother was an excellent shot. She made her own bullets, like how I make my own shells, but she did it with oh-so-much more… elegance. Beauty.” He paused. “If she were still here, I have no doubt she could find a big moose and take it down with one of these babies. I want you to have it. To remember that humanity can persevere. That we can survive, and fix all this. It’s not over yet. I promise. That bullet was my anchor, a way to keep grounded, calm, non-violent, and see the good in things, as I didn’t do any of before I met your mother. I think you can use it to remain hopeful too. Please don’t lose hope, Nat, we’re going to be fine.”

Nat swallowed hard, eyes soft and hesitant. “Will we really?”

Then their world exploded.