This current free story - "Under an Invisible Shadow" -
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Under an Invisible Shadow
By
David Bain
Know this: Humanity was still hanging on when I wrote this.
But that may not be the case for long.
***
Only a few dozen of us have made it this far. Most are Russian, Scandanavian, Canadian or Eskimo.
Me and Janie, we made it all the way from Florida.
Janie was my guide. I can’t see the zombie souls, but she can, and it was primarily her vision that led us here, somewhere deep in the wilds of northern Canada.
I used to say I didn’t believe in anything I couldn’t see, and that I’d seen nothing I couldn’t explain.
But these days I surely believe in ghosts – or rather, I believe in souls, or whatever the hell the spirits of the zombies and the thing we’ve dubbed The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror are.
Since I’ve been deemed the most accomplished scribe of the dozen or so English-speaking persons to arrive here at Ground Zero, it’s to be my words that are put to paper. See, I once thought of myself as something of a poet. Yes, once upon a time I thought I was above my culture, that I was an aloof observer, sort of floating over it all. Now I realize I was – and am – but a disposable product of it. The zombies have humbled me that much at least.
All of this is simply to say that I will write this document in my true, common voice – my human voice – rather than the elitist one to which I sometimes aspired.
Here goes:
***
The dead started rising from their graves about thirteen years ago.
Before we reached Ground Zero, we had our theories. God released his wrath. Scientists released a bug. Something passed by the Earth.
Whatever the cause, things went down quickly.
The dead arose en masse.
Zombies lurched, swarmed, reigned.
Humanity hid, fought or was eaten.
All too quickly: Political chaos. Military collapse. Anarchy. Mass hysteria. Total communications breakdown – even my beloved Internet was quickly useless.
I was a University of Florida grad student, majoring in biology and working in the field for the summer, deep within the Everglades. Until Z Day, I spent my spare time writing dippy nature poems and faithfully sending them off to the types of magazines that paid in contributor’s copies and were only read by other contributors, if that.
I saw it all go down on the satellite dish until every last station was either overrun or went off the air.
Antisocial bastard that I am, I decided to stay while everyone else in my group went back to help. They said they’d send someone for me when humanity won the battle against the zombie legions. Victory was inevitable, they said.
No one ever came back.
For me it was actually pretty idyllic. I knew how to get along in the ‘glades indefinitely, eating everything from gator to the indigenous breed of miniature deer that had been on the verge of extinction until the zombies cleared out its greatest enemy – man.
Plus, for all practical purposes, I was a million miles away from the zombies – I only ever saw three of them in the ‘glades, and one looked an awful lot like Jimmy Hoffa. (That’s a joke.)
After a while, I found a few stations back up, usually run by a staff of no more than two or three. The ones that seemed relatively serious about serving humanity were from Mexico City, Denver and Berlin. They would play reruns of whatever they felt like – the guys in Berlin were PBS types, the guys in Mexico City liked Mexican soaps and variety shows, and the guys in Denver showed mostly B movies from nearby video stores. Occasionally the people running these stations would do things like offer survival tips, food-gathering advice and updates on the zombie situation outside the station walls.
Long story short: zombies ruled the Earth for just over a dozen years, destroying and wandering and devouring the brains and guts of any living thing they could get their claws on.
Then a curious thing started happening.
The dead started dying.
Denver reported it first – the dead were suddenly dropping like flies, and the ones that didn’t die right off were no longer a threat. I remember one of the Denver guys finally ventured out live on the air and kicked a zombie in the butt just to see what would happen. It barely even paid him any attention. The creep just turned, then looked at its claw-like hand as if it knew it was supposed to rip the living guy’s head off and dig out the juicy filling, but it had forgotten how. These slow zombies reminded me of late autumn wasps in my native Michigan – drunkenly ambulatory but hardly dangerous.
I remember distinctly that I sighed when I heard the news. Then I held my head in my hands and cried. Then I swore a blue streak and gave in. It was time to cast myself out of Eden and search out the other survivors.
I went to the obvious meeting place. The victory had been gained by forfeit, but no matter. Humanity had won the Armageddon Super Bowl and we were going to Disneyworld.
***
It’s a Small World, the countries of Epcott and Main Street, U.S.A. were a shambles. The cleanup of the stinking dead zombies was still going on when I arrived. Most of the survivors were camped around Cinderella’s castle.
I’ll spare you the tedious, predictable details – the territorial squabbles, the bickering, the stealing, the fights over food, all the dumbass alpha males strutting around, campaigning and contending for leadership.
What matters is Janie, who arrived shortly after me. Janie, and what she saw.
The zombies were dying all right, she said. But souls – or spirits or whatever – were leaving their bodies. The souls were leaving the zombie bodies as they died, and they were flying off in a north by northwesterly direction.
Furthermore, she said, souls which were apparently from other zombie bodies which had dropped in parts of the world south of us were consistently flying by overhead.
Even after the world had been overrun and destroyed by the living dead, Janie had a hard time convincing people of what she was seeing.
Until, that is, this former supermodel who had done Tarot card infomercials back in the old days suddenly said she saw the souls too – interesting that she hadn’t said anything until then, despite the fact that she’d been among the first to arrive.
Then, and only then, it was decided something had to be done. We had to see where these things were going and why. The alpha males advised they were needed to lead the group, and Tarot woman said she had to remain as spiritual advisor.
I volunteered because I don’t like people anyway, and especially not this desperate, self-pitying and quarrelsome bunch. Janie went because, first of all, someone had to see the zombie souls, and second because she was as good as I was with a gun.
Although we hadn’t met prior to Cinderella’s castle, I think we saw something in each other from the start, an independent spirit we mutually admired. We have since become soul mates. The lady’s no supermodel, but she warms me body and soul, and that is all that matters.
Without many supplies, we left the next morning, given the precious gift of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
I don’t think anyone ever really expected to hear back from us. We recently dispatched a crew to try to reach the Denver station to tell the world about The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror, but, as I said, from here on in, we don’t know what will happen.
***
I’m going to skip a lot here.
We had several “adventures” between Florida and Ground Zero up here in the Canadian hinterlands. If there’s time, I’ll write them down in detail, but if there was ever a time for the Reader’s Digest version, this is it.
As we expected, we encountered occasional pockets of humanity. Some were mighty peculiar and some were mighty interesting, but we could never stay; Janie kept seeing zombie souls coursing by overhead.
In what was once known as The Deep South, we ran into a forlorn cult that had given up rattlesnakes and had turned to worshipping the very zombies that tried to eat them – I didn’t pay much attention, but it had something to do with the fact that the zombies could take a dozen rattler bites with no ill effects. Now a divided church, one offshoot was predicting a blissful Second Coming of the zombies as we left, while another was preaching Doomsday. The main group was ignoring the splinter factions, however, and was trying to make amends with the snakes.
In Missouri we met a former Food and Drug Administration scientist who was near to proving, he said, that some sort of virus had animated the corpses – a virus which was now dying off. “Damn lot of good your hypothesis does twelve years after the fact,” I told him as I kick-started the Harley. He muttered something about the scientific method and shuffled back to his makeshift lab.
In the Dakota badlands we met an old Native American who had managed to actually tame a few of the dead buggers. He’d taught them rudimentary skills, like farming his land, which he showed us videotapes of. Pretty resourceful, considering all the horses and cattle had been eaten – but now that all the zombies were dead or dying, the chief was back to scavenging like everyone else. The scientist had told us the zombies possessed a very limited sort of intelligence, but I think even he would have been surprised by how far the injun had come.
Somewhere in there we switched from motorbike to mountain bike and hooked up with a steadily growing number of crusaders, some of whom, like Janie, had The Sight.
Later we gave up the mountain bikes for snowshoes and found ourselves sitting on dogsleds.
***
We crested a rise, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly everyone who had The Sight gasped. Correction – one or two of the more sensitive ones actually screamed.
Several without The Sight gasped too, for there below, about two miles distant, were dark dots n the middle of all that white. Surrounded by a hundred miles of nowhere, we were approaching an encampment of a maybe a dozen tents.
***
Some people believe the crater by our encampment was the result of a meteor which must have carried the virus which caused the dead to rise.
But it hardly matters. What matters is the thing above the crater.
Janie and all the other visionaries say the zombie souls are flocking to the air there like homing pigeons. They are flying here from all directions, the visionaries say, zombie soul after zombie soul joining into a single giant being. The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror, floating about a few hundred feet above our heads. This being is said to have a huge, ever-growing amorphous central globe as its main body, with mile-long tentacles flailing out in all directions.
Those with The Sight say The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror appears to be in some sort of stasis, content to simply float and wait, collecting thousands upon thousands of zombie souls unto itself, growing slightly with each one.
***
If you wanted some exciting, dramatic conclusion, I’m sorry. As I’ve said twice before, we simply do not know what is going to happen.
The souls of the creatures that once threatened to destroy humanity – that once were, in fact, us – might morph into a solid creature and attack. Or the creature might simply rise off into the heavens. Or it might sink into the Earth and poison it forever.
We don’t know.
We only know that we’ve resolved to make a stand here in this cold valley, in the invisible shadow of this horrible presence.
We only know that we can, for now, keep trying to communicate this monstrosity to the rest of humanity.
We know only that we’ll continue to fight in the one way we know how – by living within this invisible shadow as human beings, as survivors, raging against it from deep within our hearts.
END
By
David Bain
Know this: Humanity was still hanging on when I wrote this.
But that may not be the case for long.
***
Only a few dozen of us have made it this far. Most are Russian, Scandanavian, Canadian or Eskimo.
Me and Janie, we made it all the way from Florida.
Janie was my guide. I can’t see the zombie souls, but she can, and it was primarily her vision that led us here, somewhere deep in the wilds of northern Canada.
I used to say I didn’t believe in anything I couldn’t see, and that I’d seen nothing I couldn’t explain.
But these days I surely believe in ghosts – or rather, I believe in souls, or whatever the hell the spirits of the zombies and the thing we’ve dubbed The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror are.
Since I’ve been deemed the most accomplished scribe of the dozen or so English-speaking persons to arrive here at Ground Zero, it’s to be my words that are put to paper. See, I once thought of myself as something of a poet. Yes, once upon a time I thought I was above my culture, that I was an aloof observer, sort of floating over it all. Now I realize I was – and am – but a disposable product of it. The zombies have humbled me that much at least.
All of this is simply to say that I will write this document in my true, common voice – my human voice – rather than the elitist one to which I sometimes aspired.
Here goes:
***
The dead started rising from their graves about thirteen years ago.
Before we reached Ground Zero, we had our theories. God released his wrath. Scientists released a bug. Something passed by the Earth.
Whatever the cause, things went down quickly.
The dead arose en masse.
Zombies lurched, swarmed, reigned.
Humanity hid, fought or was eaten.
All too quickly: Political chaos. Military collapse. Anarchy. Mass hysteria. Total communications breakdown – even my beloved Internet was quickly useless.
I was a University of Florida grad student, majoring in biology and working in the field for the summer, deep within the Everglades. Until Z Day, I spent my spare time writing dippy nature poems and faithfully sending them off to the types of magazines that paid in contributor’s copies and were only read by other contributors, if that.
I saw it all go down on the satellite dish until every last station was either overrun or went off the air.
Antisocial bastard that I am, I decided to stay while everyone else in my group went back to help. They said they’d send someone for me when humanity won the battle against the zombie legions. Victory was inevitable, they said.
No one ever came back.
For me it was actually pretty idyllic. I knew how to get along in the ‘glades indefinitely, eating everything from gator to the indigenous breed of miniature deer that had been on the verge of extinction until the zombies cleared out its greatest enemy – man.
Plus, for all practical purposes, I was a million miles away from the zombies – I only ever saw three of them in the ‘glades, and one looked an awful lot like Jimmy Hoffa. (That’s a joke.)
After a while, I found a few stations back up, usually run by a staff of no more than two or three. The ones that seemed relatively serious about serving humanity were from Mexico City, Denver and Berlin. They would play reruns of whatever they felt like – the guys in Berlin were PBS types, the guys in Mexico City liked Mexican soaps and variety shows, and the guys in Denver showed mostly B movies from nearby video stores. Occasionally the people running these stations would do things like offer survival tips, food-gathering advice and updates on the zombie situation outside the station walls.
Long story short: zombies ruled the Earth for just over a dozen years, destroying and wandering and devouring the brains and guts of any living thing they could get their claws on.
Then a curious thing started happening.
The dead started dying.
Denver reported it first – the dead were suddenly dropping like flies, and the ones that didn’t die right off were no longer a threat. I remember one of the Denver guys finally ventured out live on the air and kicked a zombie in the butt just to see what would happen. It barely even paid him any attention. The creep just turned, then looked at its claw-like hand as if it knew it was supposed to rip the living guy’s head off and dig out the juicy filling, but it had forgotten how. These slow zombies reminded me of late autumn wasps in my native Michigan – drunkenly ambulatory but hardly dangerous.
I remember distinctly that I sighed when I heard the news. Then I held my head in my hands and cried. Then I swore a blue streak and gave in. It was time to cast myself out of Eden and search out the other survivors.
I went to the obvious meeting place. The victory had been gained by forfeit, but no matter. Humanity had won the Armageddon Super Bowl and we were going to Disneyworld.
***
It’s a Small World, the countries of Epcott and Main Street, U.S.A. were a shambles. The cleanup of the stinking dead zombies was still going on when I arrived. Most of the survivors were camped around Cinderella’s castle.
I’ll spare you the tedious, predictable details – the territorial squabbles, the bickering, the stealing, the fights over food, all the dumbass alpha males strutting around, campaigning and contending for leadership.
What matters is Janie, who arrived shortly after me. Janie, and what she saw.
The zombies were dying all right, she said. But souls – or spirits or whatever – were leaving their bodies. The souls were leaving the zombie bodies as they died, and they were flying off in a north by northwesterly direction.
Furthermore, she said, souls which were apparently from other zombie bodies which had dropped in parts of the world south of us were consistently flying by overhead.
Even after the world had been overrun and destroyed by the living dead, Janie had a hard time convincing people of what she was seeing.
Until, that is, this former supermodel who had done Tarot card infomercials back in the old days suddenly said she saw the souls too – interesting that she hadn’t said anything until then, despite the fact that she’d been among the first to arrive.
Then, and only then, it was decided something had to be done. We had to see where these things were going and why. The alpha males advised they were needed to lead the group, and Tarot woman said she had to remain as spiritual advisor.
I volunteered because I don’t like people anyway, and especially not this desperate, self-pitying and quarrelsome bunch. Janie went because, first of all, someone had to see the zombie souls, and second because she was as good as I was with a gun.
Although we hadn’t met prior to Cinderella’s castle, I think we saw something in each other from the start, an independent spirit we mutually admired. We have since become soul mates. The lady’s no supermodel, but she warms me body and soul, and that is all that matters.
Without many supplies, we left the next morning, given the precious gift of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
I don’t think anyone ever really expected to hear back from us. We recently dispatched a crew to try to reach the Denver station to tell the world about The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror, but, as I said, from here on in, we don’t know what will happen.
***
I’m going to skip a lot here.
We had several “adventures” between Florida and Ground Zero up here in the Canadian hinterlands. If there’s time, I’ll write them down in detail, but if there was ever a time for the Reader’s Digest version, this is it.
As we expected, we encountered occasional pockets of humanity. Some were mighty peculiar and some were mighty interesting, but we could never stay; Janie kept seeing zombie souls coursing by overhead.
In what was once known as The Deep South, we ran into a forlorn cult that had given up rattlesnakes and had turned to worshipping the very zombies that tried to eat them – I didn’t pay much attention, but it had something to do with the fact that the zombies could take a dozen rattler bites with no ill effects. Now a divided church, one offshoot was predicting a blissful Second Coming of the zombies as we left, while another was preaching Doomsday. The main group was ignoring the splinter factions, however, and was trying to make amends with the snakes.
In Missouri we met a former Food and Drug Administration scientist who was near to proving, he said, that some sort of virus had animated the corpses – a virus which was now dying off. “Damn lot of good your hypothesis does twelve years after the fact,” I told him as I kick-started the Harley. He muttered something about the scientific method and shuffled back to his makeshift lab.
In the Dakota badlands we met an old Native American who had managed to actually tame a few of the dead buggers. He’d taught them rudimentary skills, like farming his land, which he showed us videotapes of. Pretty resourceful, considering all the horses and cattle had been eaten – but now that all the zombies were dead or dying, the chief was back to scavenging like everyone else. The scientist had told us the zombies possessed a very limited sort of intelligence, but I think even he would have been surprised by how far the injun had come.
Somewhere in there we switched from motorbike to mountain bike and hooked up with a steadily growing number of crusaders, some of whom, like Janie, had The Sight.
Later we gave up the mountain bikes for snowshoes and found ourselves sitting on dogsleds.
***
We crested a rise, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly everyone who had The Sight gasped. Correction – one or two of the more sensitive ones actually screamed.
Several without The Sight gasped too, for there below, about two miles distant, were dark dots n the middle of all that white. Surrounded by a hundred miles of nowhere, we were approaching an encampment of a maybe a dozen tents.
***
Some people believe the crater by our encampment was the result of a meteor which must have carried the virus which caused the dead to rise.
But it hardly matters. What matters is the thing above the crater.
Janie and all the other visionaries say the zombie souls are flocking to the air there like homing pigeons. They are flying here from all directions, the visionaries say, zombie soul after zombie soul joining into a single giant being. The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror, floating about a few hundred feet above our heads. This being is said to have a huge, ever-growing amorphous central globe as its main body, with mile-long tentacles flailing out in all directions.
Those with The Sight say The Invisible Lovecraftian Terror appears to be in some sort of stasis, content to simply float and wait, collecting thousands upon thousands of zombie souls unto itself, growing slightly with each one.
***
If you wanted some exciting, dramatic conclusion, I’m sorry. As I’ve said twice before, we simply do not know what is going to happen.
The souls of the creatures that once threatened to destroy humanity – that once were, in fact, us – might morph into a solid creature and attack. Or the creature might simply rise off into the heavens. Or it might sink into the Earth and poison it forever.
We don’t know.
We only know that we’ve resolved to make a stand here in this cold valley, in the invisible shadow of this horrible presence.
We only know that we can, for now, keep trying to communicate this monstrosity to the rest of humanity.
We know only that we’ll continue to fight in the one way we know how – by living within this invisible shadow as human beings, as survivors, raging against it from deep within our hearts.
END
"Under an Invisible Shadow" -
is from Worlds Come Undone -
available in audio, print and ebook.
The story is being expanded into a six-book series exclusive to The Bain Insiders Club.
----
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