An elderly man who was having trouble getting around his home was sitting on the couch with his wife. Not an unusual occurrence in this town. Many elderly people reside here because of the calm, laid back country life that goes on in this town. The man saw an ad on his old black and white television for a new walking stick. The man desperately needed a new one. His last one was worn out to the point it almost looked like a twig, rather than a stick. His wife looked at him and exclaimed, “My, look at how cheap they are selling that walking stick for. They might as well just give the darn thing away.” He grumbled a little but finally agreed with his wife. Then he stumbled over to his desk and grabbed a piece of paper and an ink pen from the bottom drawer and hastily wrote down the number for the company that was selling the walking stick.
After nearly an hour of talking about it, they both decided that they needed to call the company with the walking stick. The man was having trouble getting up and down. It was quite obvious to his wife that the eighty or more years of this man’s life was really taking a toll on his body. She told him to sit down and she would bring the phone to him. She got up off of the couch and quickly snatched the phone off of its receiver and presented it to her husband. When she went to give him the phone, he was not in his seat on the couch. “Where did that man get off to this time?” she wondered aloud. Moments later he staggered back into the living room carrying a small brown wallet in his hand. When his wife asked him what he had gone to get his wallet for, he had explained to her, “If the man on the other end of the phone needs my name, date of birth, or my address. Could you please hand me my reading glasses? I left them on the table in the kitchen when we had breakfast.” His wife left to go and get his glasses for him and came back a moment later with them. They were nothing special. They were old and the rust had slightly left its mark on them. They were also scratched in several places.
The man took the phone and his glasses out of his wife’s hands and thanked her. She plopped down on the sofa with a soft “poof”. He hung his reading glasses on his ears and dialed the numbers on the telephone almost as hastily as he had scribbled them down on the paper that he was now reading. When the operator picked up, the man gave him his name, address, date of birth, and social security number. His wife cringed as he gave him the social security number. “Why would anyone need that kind of information for to give someone a walking stick?” She thought inside her head. The man explained why he needed the new walking stick to the person on the phone. “It is so hard for me to get around, and I am afraid my old walking stick will break and I will far and get seriously injured.” The operator said a few more things, none of which his wife could make out, before he hung up. “The man on the phone said the package should be here in two or three weeks”, the man told his wife after he had hung the phone back on its receiver. “Why that’s great. I hope it is sturdier that the one you have now.” His wife said to him.
Three hours later, the couple was still lounging on the sofa watching television when they heard the “ding dong” of their doorbell ring. “Someone’s at the door. I wonder who it could be.” His wife exclaimed. “Probably just the local Girl Scouts selling their cookies again.” Her husband replied in a stiff tone. He bumped himself in many places on the way to the door. When he had finally got there, he opened the large oak door at the front of the couple’s home to find a thin, middle aged delivery man with Fed-Ex stamped on his shirt and baseball cap. “Package for you, I assume?” the young man said. “Yes. But… I wasn’t expecting this for two more weeks, at least.” the older man replied. He signed the paper the young man handed him with his wrinkled and gnarled hands. He thanked the young man, and the young man got back into his delivery truck and rode on down the dirt road, leaving a dust trail as he left. Once the dust settled, the older man turned around and went back into his house, letting the door slam behind him with a loud “bang”.
When he explained what had happened on the front porch to his wife, she as well was dumbfounded. She could not comprehend what had happened any better than her husband, (which was not at all). By this time it was late at night, and they both agreed to open the package up in the morning. So they slid the package into a corner and crawled up the steps, for they were exhausted.
Later that night, the husband was awoke by the sounds of rustling. It sounded like it was coming from downstairs. He grabbed onto the polished oak railing and eased himself down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped. He thought that he had just seen the cardboard package he had received earlier move. He didn’t know if he should yell for whatever it was to get out of his house, if he should go back up the stairs, or get his gun out of the kitchen. “I will have to move past the box to get to the kitchen”, he thought, “So that is out”. “It takes me too long to get up and down the stairs, so that is out too.”I guess that I will yell at this thing to leave.” He finally muttered to himself. Once he had gathered up all of his courage, he yelled at the top of his lungs, demanding that the thing leave at once. Moments later, the packing peanut that were in the package flew upward like smoke and a small, furry ball flies at his face, releasing its razor sharp teeth as it knocks the poor, unsuspecting man to the ground. The creature gnaws on the man until his face is nothing but bone. Then it left the man forever staring at the tile floor, as it made its escape through the glass pane of the window with a “crash”.
His wife heard the crash and ran down the stairwell and grabbed the flashlight from her nightstand, afraid that burglars had broken a window and entered the house. When she saw her husband lying face down in a pool of blood, she feared that he had been stabbed by the robbers. She then checked him for a pulse. Not finding one, she decided to roll him over, in an attempt to perform CPR on her husband. To her horror, she saw his skull grinning up at her. His face had been stripped clean of all of the skin and muscles. At that point, she laid her head on her husband’s chest and weaped.
After several minutes she decided to call 911. When the operator picked up, she explained what had happened. The operator said that she was very sorry for her loss, and that the sheriff and an ambulance would be on the scene very soon. Near the end of the telephone call, the lady screamed and there was a gurgling noise, followed by a low moan. “Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you alright? I will contact the police immediately.” The operator hung up the phone and contacted the local police station. She explained what had happened to the receptionist, who hastily dispatched two officers to go and take a look around. Little did they know, but they would be little help against what was coming.
On the way to the scene, with their sirens wailing and their lights flickering, the police officers stopped when they saw an older couple walking along the side of the road in the shadows. All that the police officers could make out was the couple’s outline against the glint of the moon. When one of the police officers rolled down his window and asked them if everything was alright, the couple did not respond. The officer asked again, yet still the couple would not answer. They just continued to walk on down the road, as if in a trance. Finally the officer had had enough of this. The officer took the keys out of the ignition, slipped them into his pocket, then stepped out of his patrol car and walked up to the couple. “Their breath sure stinks”, he thought to himself as he strolled closer and closer to the couple. When he flipped the switch on his heavy duty flashlight, what he saw turned his hair from a dark brown to white. The couple looked horrible! The man had his face literally ripped away, exposing the bone underneath. And the woman did not look very good either. Her long white hair hung down over her mouth and her bottom lip had been torn away, revealing part of the woman’s jawbone. The woman was also covered from head to toe in blood. Now that the officer looked closer, he could see a thin blood trail behind the woman. He was terrified. He wanted to scream and run so badly, however he found that his legs would not work at all, not even allow him to run from these monsters. He tried and tried to scream, but he couldn’t. It was like someone had turned his vocal cords off. He also couldn’t call for help. Before he knew what had happened, the couple attacked him. They ate nearly all the flesh that showed from under his uniform, and then let his lifeless corpse drop to the cold pavement.
The other officer called his name several times, but got no response. Afraid that something was wrong, he quickly exited the car. He called for the other officer once more, but to no avail. Something had happened to him, he just knew it. He flicked on his flashlight and started shining the beam around the area, trying to find the other officer and leave. As soon as his beam landed on the body of his friend, with the creatures kneeling over it and picking flesh from it, he scampered back to the police car as fast as he could. As soon as he got back into the car, he shined his light back over onto the body of his friend. One of the creatures had decided to crane its bloody head around to stare at him at the exact instant that he shined his light to watch the creatures. He accidentally shined the light right into the creature’s eyes, which glowed a fierce yellow. The beast was obviously upset. It stood up and ran at the car. The police officer hastily tried to start the car, before remembering that the other officer had taken them out of the ignition and slipped them into his pocket. It took some thinking, and then he came up with a solution to his problem, or so he thought. He was going to stay in the car and use his radio to call for backup. But when he tried his radio, it didn’t work. He tried again and again, but he could not get his radio to work. After quite a fit of angry swearing, the police officer decided that he would have a better chance if he were to run to the nearest house and ask the people inside for help.
So when he was sure the couple had gone back to the other police officer, he made a run for it. As soon as the creatures heard the car door slam, they took off running in the police officer’s direction. The police officer turned around and saw them. He quickly stopped and pulled out his handgun. He tried to fire the gun many times, before realizing that his gun was out of bullets. He could hear the maniacal laughter of the creatures following him. Frustrated and scared, he discarded his gun into some bushes on the side of the road and kept on running. At the first house, a small blue frame house, he ran up the steps and rang the doorbell numerous times, not at all noticing the “For Sale” sign tacked up in the front yard of the house. He was ringing the doorbell on the house so desperately that he did not hear the soft crunch of the leaves under the creatures’ feet as they snuck up on him. Before the police officer was able to turn around, the teeth of one of the creatures had sunk into the back of his neck, puncturing his jugular and sending blood squirting everywhere, covering the blue walls of the house. The last thing he saw was his partner with no meat on his face and arms. His face was covered in blood.
The next morning, on the other side of town, a young wife and her two children were sitting in front of their flat screen television in their living room watching the local morning news. One of the stories was about the brutal murders of an older couple and two police officers. “The 911 call that was recorded clearly states that a murder did occur last night.” The news reporter said on the television. “Blood was found at the older couple’s home this morning, along with a blood trail that leads from their home to a home that is for sale in the area. Blood pools were found on the porch of this home. Blood had also been sprayed on the wall outside.” The reporter continued the morbid story with, “A pool of blood was also found beside an abandoned police car. No bodies have been recovered.” At that, the Mom stood up and turned the television off. “That is enough of that. You kids need to go and get dressed for school, anyways.” “Yes Ma’am.” The brother and sister replied to their mother as they climbed the staircase that led to their second floor bedrooms.
Once the children had finished getting dressed, they walked back down the carpeted stairs with their backpacks. “Come in here. I have your lunches packed for you.” their mother called from the kitchen. They went into the kitchen, grabbed the sack lunches that their mother handed them, thanked her, and ran out the door to wait for their mother to drive them to school. Their mother was a teacher at the same school her kids went to.
When they got to school, the sister asked her brother what he thought the news reporter was talking about earlier that morning, and why their mother had so quickly sent them up to their room. “I don’t know what they were talking about on the TV this morning, but I do know why Mom didn’t want us to see it.” When his sister asked him why he replied, “Grown-ups don’t think kids need to listen to and see gross bloody stuff. They don’t think that we can handle it.” As he finished his sentence, their Mom stopped the car and got out with them and walked them to their classes before walking down the hallway to hers. Neither brother nor sister could stop thinking about what the news reporter had said that morning.
At lunch that day, several of the kids had decided to eat outside. It was a beautiful day, after all. Not a cloud was to be seen in the sky that day. Even a few of the teachers sat Indian style on the grass that morning. Then several of the students saw two police officers approach the students and teachers that were outside. A few of the kids went and alerted the teacher of the police officers’ prescience. One of the teachers placed her sandwich on the ground beside her, stood up, and asked what the police officers wanted. One of them rolled up his sleeves to reveal bones and then tossed his hat to the ground, revealing his dull white skull. The officer that had come with him did the same and also revealed bones. The first one pulled out a gun and the teacher stopped dead in her tracks. The officer cocked back the hammer of his gun with one body finger, and in front of all of the children, pulled the trigger. The teacher fell backwards and cracked her skull on the base of the flag pole. She did not move.
Right after this occurred, it was pandemonium. Sandwiches were flying everywhere, children were running, and teachers were making sure the children got back into the building safely. As the skeleton officer pulled back the hammer and prepared to take the life of a little boy, a teacher ran towards the boy. “No!” She screamed and threw herself in front of the boy as the skeleton shot the gun. The bullet hit her squarely in the chest and she fell to the ground like a ton of bricks. As blood poured from her mouth, she coughed and sputtered out a fountain of blood, then finally managed to mutter the word “run” to the boy before her eyes glazed over and she lay still on the ground. The boy took off running back inside, where many were crying and all were worried. As the students stared out the window, they saw the skeleton police officers chewing the flesh right off of two of their teachers’ bones right before their very eyes.
The principal had heard what happened because one of the teachers called her on her cell phone told her what had happened. She ordered all students and staff to lock all of the doors and head to the bathrooms near her office. After she got off of the phone with the teacher, she dialed 911 and explained what was going on.
Once all of the doors had been locked and the students were in the bathrooms, the principal started to call parents to come to the school and pick up their children. The front doors had been left open for the paramedics to get in and out. One by one the frightened students were checked by the paramedics for scrapes or bruises, and then picked up by even more frightened parents and driven to their homes. Most students only got a bruise or a scrape, but one little girl in kindergarten had been trampled by everyone else when she fell near the door. By the time teachers got to her, she was in very bad shape. The paramedics had brought two ambulances and took her away to the hospital in one of them. Her mother was informed about what had happened.
After all of the kids had gone home, the principal had noticed one boy had not gone home. It was the same boy that the teacher had stepped in front of to save. “Where’s your Mom?” the principal asked the boy. He pointed out the window to the lifeless body on the ground near the flag pole. “My Mom saved my life.” The boy replied, then sat down at one of the tables and started to cry. The principal hugged the boy and said that if he wanted to that he could go home with her and they could figure out what to do tomorrow. The boy agreed and together they got into her white Suburban and drove away without seeing the teachers’ corpse get up and walk away.
That night the boy missed his mother so much that he cried all night. When the principal went into the room that she had let him stay in and gave him a hug, he silently cried into her shoulder until he fell asleep. She gently laid him down on the bed, covered him up to his neck with quilts, and kissed his forehead before she left the room.
The next morning the phone rang at the principal’s house. When she picked it up and listened, a tear rolled down her pudgy cheek. She thanked the person on the phone and hung up. The little girl that had gone to the hospital yesterday had just passed away. She had to sit and weep for the poor girl for a moment before she could continue her morning. She was very saddened. When the boy woke up an hour later, the principal told him what had happened to his sister. He cried silently as the tears trickled from his eyes. She told him that everything would be alright and gave him a big hug.
Later that day, the principal came back home. (She had gone grocery shopping earlier that day.) She had also bought some flowers for the vases that she had in the boy’s room. She hoped that this made him feel better about what had happened to his family. When she arrived, the boy was staring out the glass pane of the window as a tear rolled his face. She saw in the reflection the boy had cast onto the window that his face was tearstained and his eyes were red from all of the sobbing he done that morning. She quietly placed the colorful flowers into the vases and left the room. Within minutes, the room smelled the sweet smell of flowers. The flowers did lighten the boy’s mood for a moment. Then he walked over to his baby blue backpack and after he had unzipped the backpack, he took out a small square object that was wrapped in wrapping paper. As he unfolded the crinkly, manila colored wrapping paper, the face of his sister emerged. When all of the paper had been removed, the boy put the picture of his sister on the table with all of the flowers on it, and went to bed early.
By the end of the week, the creatures had infected the rest of the city. As the boy stared out the window, he was frightened, shocked, but most of all completely devastated. Everyone the boy knew had been turned into a monster and were crawling around outside. The houses in that town used to be beautiful works of art. Now, they were crumbling ruins of rock and mortar. The roads were covered with blood, and several cars had been flipped over, spewing gas everywhere. Some were even on fire, and those that weren’t were leaking gas in the direction of those that were, causing large fireballs to fly in the direction the sky, like a soul going to heaven. A poor man that biked through the town was quickly knocked off his mountain bike and devoured by the hungry beasts, leaving nothing but a skeleton of the man he once was. As the boy continued to watch, the biker stood up on his leg bones, (literally), and trudged on into the crowd of monsters that laid in wake outside, waiting for their next unsuspecting victim. Unluckily for the boy, one of the creatures swiveled it’s skull-like head around and stared at the boy, before making what few strips of meat that were attached to its face twist into a horrific snear,then it stooped over and chattered amongst the other creatures before stalking over towards the boy’s window.
He tried to call for help, but then he remembered that the principal had said that she sleeps with earmuffs because she sometimes had a hard time sleeping through the train that blasts its horn as it passes behind her house at night. His next idea was to just open the door and run to the principal’s bedroom. But as soon as he turned the brass knob, he heard the screams of the principal and the hungry slurping of the creatures. By this time the creatures had already started to throw stones at the window to break it, which was working. The glass already had several hairline fractures near the center. If the shower of pebbles the creatures were throwing did not stop soon, the glass would give way and cover him completely with glass, then the creatures would finish turn him into one of their own. He did not want this to happen, (he kind of liked all of his skin intact), so he hastily grabbed his wooden “Louisville Slugger” baseball bat and looked the creatures in the eye, then said to the creatures, ” Let’s play ball!”, and slammed the bat down into his hand. This seemed to anger the creatures, and they busted through the glass, showering the poor boy in a cascading wall of glass fragments. If not for the hand he placed in front of his face to shield his eyes, he would not have been able to see anything after this attack had occurred.
As the first creature entered the hole in his wall, he swung the bat and knocked the beast’s head clean off of its decaying shoulders. He repeated this action several hundred times, until his arm felt it would pop right out of its socket. As the last of the monsters entered his house, he recognized one. It was his mother. He told her he loved her and that this would put her out of her misery before swinging the bat and taking her head off as well. “Mom, you were right. Baseball practice really did help.” He said as he grabbed his bike and some money and rode to the airport, hoping that this was the only area that had been contaminated with the filthy monsters. He could have never guessed just how wrong that thought was.
In another part of the world, a mother and daughter had just sat down on their floor to eat a warm supper of white rice, when all of a sudden; a small furry ball with wings came in through the open window and chewed the flesh off of the girl’s mother right in front of her. The girl picked up her fork and threw it at the monster, which stabbed it. The creature fell to the ground, squirming around in pain agony. After she made sure that the fork was lodged deep enough into the animal that it would not come out, she ran and got a glass bowl to put over the monster.
Once the bowl was secured over the creature, she ran to the kitchen to find a hand towel to put over her mother’s face. When the towel was in place she picked up the telephone, then called the police and told them what had happened. They told her everything was going to be alright and that they were going to bring an ambulance for her mother.
The police arrived in less than five minutes and asked the girl what had happened. The girl explained it as best as she could: Her and her mother were eating supper when something flew in the window and attacked her mother, at which time she threw her fork at it and then trapped it under the bowl. The police asked to see it and she hesitantly raised the side of the bowl up. One of the police officers said something in what sounded like Japanese and left, coming back momentarily with the animal control agency. They caged the animal up in a birdcage the girl had found for them, and then took it to their facility to study it.
Upon their arrival, they heard the animal make a blood curdling screech before going eerily silent. The animal control officers had to block their ears to stop the deadly sound from shattering their eardrums. One of the officers was not so quick to cover his ears, however. His ears began to bleed and moments later he slipped to the ground, never to move again.
The animal bent the iron bars of the cage and started chewing on the man that lay on the ground. To the shock of the other officers, his skin turned a sickly green and he stood up. He then came towards them and attacked them. Their screams could be clearly heard for miles, though no one came to help them, for fear of their own lives.
As the plane touched down in Tokyo, Japan the boy noticed something peculiar about the passengers. They were all turning a sickly green. Flesh was just dropping from their skin like snot from a runny nose. He needed to get out but how? He stood up and walked to the front to quickly exit the plane when he noticed that the pilot was losing some of his hair. He turned round and stared and asked him, “Now, where do you think you’re going, young man?” What was left of his jaw quivered as he talked, making the boy want to be sick right there on the spot. “Off of this plane, sir.” the boy replied, trying to sound nice in hopes of getting off sooner. “Fine by me, boy.” He thanked the pilot and ran through the door of the plane, out of the runway, and into the building before anyone could stop him. After he had ran through the checkout, he scampered onto his bicycle and ran to the nearest house that he could find.
Nearly all of the houses he rode by had been torn apart by the same creatures that he had tried to leave earlier. “These things are everywhere.” the boy said to no one in general. “I know they are.” a kind, singsong voice replied. The boy gripped his bat tightly and asked who was there. “I will not hurt you. Do come in.” He turned around and saw a sweet, pretty Oriental girl about his age beckoning at him to come into her home. She was the only living person he had seen all day. He gladly accepted, and went inside.
They exchanged stories once they had entered her home. He told her about his mother saving him, and his little sister dying, and the principal. In return, she told him about her mother and animal control. She explained that all of what was outside had happened in the last six hours. They exchanged laughs and tears for hours. Then they heard a bang on the front door. He told her to stay put and that he would go and check it out. He did not want her hurt, after all. He picked up his bat and quietly sneaked over to the door. When he did not see anyone, he decided to open the door. One of the creatures jumped out from behind a tree and came at him. He swung the bat and its head flew from its neck to the blood stained grass beyond. “Homerun!” he heard the girl exclaim from back inside the house. He laughed and shut the door.
After much thought, they decided it would be best to board up all of the windows and lock all of the doors. For extra security, they also placed wedges under the doors to keep the creatures from opening them. When they felt safe, they sat back down in the living room and pushed the button on the remote to turn the television on. The girl got it to the news station and they sat and watched it. After several minutes, the girl noticed that the boy did not understand Japanese, and turned it to the other news channel, the English one, so that he could understand it.
The news reporter showed pictures of France. These pictures looked horrible. Cars were overturned; buildings were demolished and lying in pieces on the ground. In all of the pictures, millions of decaying corpse were stumbling around. The pictures of Sydney, Australia were not much better. The Opera House had been destroyed. The pictures of England showed that the Royal Castle had also become rubble. In one of the pictures from England, you could see the Queen stumbling around in her royal attire. The Statue of Liberty in the United States had been horribly dented. And the Great Wall of China had been reduced to merely busted bricks on the ground. As the reporter neared an end, one of the creatures attacked the reporter, and another attacked the cameraman. The camera went fuzzy, then completely out, at which point the girl turned off the television. That night, they both slept on the floor that night, so that if they needed to they could escape out the door.
The following morning, they both heard a loud “boom”. She asked what it was, and he said that he didn’t know. He stepped out onto the porch and looked up into the sky. To his surprise, he saw military planes bombing the area, apparently to get rid of all the monsters. He rushed inside to tell her what was going on. “We have to get in the storm cellar outside. It will be our only chance to survive the bombing”, she said. He grabbed her by the hand and ran as fast as he could out the door. She pointed to the storm cellar and he ran to it, beheading many of the grotesque monsters as he ran.
Once they had shut the door on the storm cellar, the girl lit a lamp that was on a table in the center of the room. As the boy gazed around the room, he was stunned. The walls were lined with canned foods and jugs of water. He knew as soon as he glanced around they could survive for months, maybe even years down there. The girl asked him to follow her to a back storage room, and to bring the lantern. When the creaky door finally slid open, an entire arsenal of guns and other weapons gleamed in the light that the small lantern produced. There was even a sink and a toilet. After some digging, he came across a toothbrush and a large box of toothpaste.
For two months they stayed down there. They had plenty to eat and drink, and survived quite well down in there. The entire time they listened to the bombs going off and the splatter of the dead bodies being finished yet again. At long last, the bombing ceased. They waited for hours to make sure everything was quiet before they went up to the surface. He went up first, carrying two loaded pistols and a Bowie knife in his back pocket.
Nothing could prepare him for what he saw when he poked his head above the soil for the first time. The entire town had been reduced to rubble. As far as he could see, there was nothing at all except smoking metal. No life of any kind remained for as far as he could see. Apparently several other families had done the exact same thing they had done. He could see people’s heads popping up out of the ground like moles. If he had not been so scared, he would have laughed at how comical they looked. He reached his hand down into the storm cellar and helped her up. She gasped when she saw all of the destruction, and cried into his shoulder. All of the survivors were meeting at a military camp and being washed and treated for all of their injuries. After being washed, they were all given homes from the military. They each got their own tent and cot so they had somewhere to sleep until the buildings could be rebuilt. The two of them both just chose one cot and tent, so the other survivors had enough.
Ten years later the couple married and had kids of their own. The population was nearly back to normal. One day, the boy, who was now a man, saw a new grill on television that he favored over the older one that he currently owned and decided to call the people who had it. They said it would take two or three weeks to arrive. He thanked them and hung up the phone. Three hours later, a delivery man arrived at their door and rang the doorbell. When the man answered it, the deliveryman smiled and said, “Package for you, I assume?”
