Chapter One – Waking up alive

It was the screams that bugged him the most.  No matter how well Ram closed the doors and windows the screams would jar him out of his wakeful sleep into the bleakness of the new day.

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Link M19-ChapterOne-ZombieNovel.mp3

He had taken to covering his ears with pillows as he struggled to rest in the shuttered darkness of his basement room.  Next he might try earplugs from the dome infirmary.  He doubted it would help.

In the back of his mind he suspected that the awful screams in his head were just that, in his head.

The noise and screams and cacophony and just plain gibberish was real enough outside the dome walls.  It had started in the days following the end of the world and had gotten progressively worse as the scared and desperate came to the dome walls to find some solution.

There was no solution for them.  This was precisely what the dome was designed for.  To keep them and the viral fragments that had led to the end of the world out.  Still they came.  Driven at first by fear and panic and then by something more primal as the virus took hold.

Initially, while there still was a coherence of thought and purpose in the mob there had been some attempt to break in.  Cars and trucks had crashed feebly into the steel and concrete shell.  Some construction equipment had been thrown into the breach.  But the dome held.  It had been designed for this and with the great irony of the unthinkable was serving its purpose grandly.

Now all that was left was the muted screams and thumping of the feeble minded driven by some partially remembered imperative.

Ram rolled over and stretched his log arms over his head, rapping his braided knuckles against the head board of his double bed.  His eyes were blurred from lack of sleep and stress.  The room was small with the left over accoutrements from his teenage years.  Posters of sports stars, rock bands, beautiful models and exotic locales vied for space on the walls around his wooden, student desk.

More irony.  He wasn’t even supposed to be here.  That weekend that the world had ended he came back from college for no particular reason.  Maybe to get a couple good home cooked meals from his Mom.  Maybe to get some laundry done.  Maybe to hit his Dad up for some more cash.

They weren’t even here – his Dad had been called away to some crisis in DC and his Mom went along.   That’s irony.  The great physicist was out there somewhere, dead or dying, and his barely capable son was here, in the Dome.

Introspection flared into anger.  Ram wrapped a pillow tightly around his face and sobbed into it.  How the hell did this happen?  Why did this happen?  What kind of God would do such a thing?  Why was he still here?  Why couldn’t he just be taken painlessly away like the rest on the outside?  Why was he forced to wake up again in a world that had ended?

The thoughts raced through his head like hot spears.  This was no life.  Maybe he should end it now, like so many others had in those first days.  Why should he bother waking up at all?  What was the point?  How could he have purpose now?  What was his life?  What was his being? Why? Why?  Why?

The tremors of sobs shaking his body passed and he sighed, spent from his morning ritual.   Now maybe he would drag himself out of bed and maybe he would shower and maybe he would hunt down that savory cup of his father’s aromatic coffee.

A twinge of guilt.  The world had ended.  His world had ended. Yet somehow he stumbled on, numb from the shock, taking solace in simple schedules and tasks.  Those were the only things he had left to hang his sanity on.  Those were the only thing left to buttress his humanity now that the world had ended.

He rolled out of bed and plunked his feet to the floor.  A worn orange carpet from the 1980’s swam into focus.  Another day after the end of the world.  How would he spend it?  How would he waste it? How would he survive?

It wasn’t a question of physical survival.  They were safe inside the dome.  That was the whole point.  Nothing remotely organic could penetrate the high level disruptive field of its energy.  Almost nothing could batter the concrete and steel of the protective base.

There was an ample supply of food and necessities for the near future.  The real questions was, were they protected here in this last bubble of humanity’s sanity or were they trapped in a world that had died?

There were about 50 of them protected in the humming cocoon of experimental radiation.  Although he could not be sure how many were still alive. There had been some suicides and people had been keeping mostly to themselves throughout the crisis of the past week.

The majorities of the residents were technical and research staff.   There was a small cadre of military security.  There were cleaning, janitorial and groundskeepers.  There were a few visiting family members.

Not many families lived inside the dome perimeter itself.  Most of them commuted from the nearby suburbs off of the newly extended highway 473.  Ram’s Dad was one of few with an onsite residence.  He was the director.  It was his project and he chose to live with and in his life’s work.

Ram thought about himself and his life to date.  He was in his second year at the University.  He was loosely following an organic sciences track, but not really sure what he wanted to commit to.  His Dad, who had always been a great man, and who had always known with black and white certainty what Ram should do, did not approve of this meandering course of study.  “When are you going to grow up?” he would shout.  “When are you going to be a man?”

Now Ram was that man.  Fate had chosen to spare him, or maybe to trap him, or maybe just to taunt him some more.  Here he was.  20 years old, and the world had ended.  The world had ended without him.