The Cure Read online

  The Cure

  By Gary Chesla

  July 2016

  Winfield Junction was a town where nothing ever happened.

  It was a small isolated community out in the countryside northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a few miles off of Interstate Route 28. No one paid much attention to the small community and Winfield Junction paid little attention to what was going on in the outside world.

  When strange things started to occur around Winfield Junction, it took them all by surprise.

  The zombie apocalypse had begun, causing the power and all forms of communication to go out.

  The residents of Winfield Junction had no idea what was going on and they would never find out what had happened.

  A large horde of the dead hit the town in the middle of the night. By morning, except for two people, all the other residents of Winfield Junction were dead.

  Three days later, when the last two remaining Winfield Junction residents finally ventured out of their basement to look for help, they couldn’t believe what had happened to their town.

  They soon found themselves again running for their lives.

  A car load of survivors from the neighboring town of Freeport, fleeing the dead out on the interstate, arrived in Winfield Junction just in time to help them escape a gruesome fate.

  The Freeport survivors were on their way to Kittanning in a desperate attempt to find a safe haven from the dead. They took the Winfield Junction survivors with them.

  The last two Winfield Junction residents however had a secret, a secret that if the others found out, could make being with the Freeport survivors more dangerous than the zombies they had just escaped.

  Their lives had just been turned upside down, but that was only the start of what was to come.

  In Kittanning, Doctor Diane Wyatt struggled to make sense out of what had happened. She made a startling discovery that presented her with an opportunity that mankind might never see again.

  Diane’s father, former Navy Commander John Wyatt, was doing his best to keep their small group from being overrun by the dead.

  But against such overwhelming odds, one nagging question hung over their heads as they struggled against the dead. Was it even possible for anyone to survive?

  Chapter 1

  “I think I hear something outside the house,” Dot whispered as she sat up in bed.

  She reached out her right arm to feel for Mike in the darkness, when her hand found his shoulder she began to shake him.

  She glanced towards the clock on her bed stand.

  She always did this out of habit when she got up in the middle of the night so she would know what time it was.

  She had been getting awake frequently throughout the night during the past week, since things started to feel creepy.

  Her glance towards the clock returned the same results as it had done all week, nothing.

  The power had gone out a week ago and the electric clock was dark and silent.

  The clock had a battery backup which would have enabled the small clock to at least show the time, but Dot hadn’t put any batteries in the clock for over two years.

  “The power never goes out around here and there isn’t anything that important that won’t wait,” she had always said. “It’s a waste of a good battery but one of these days when I think about it, I’ll put a battery in the clock, just in case.”

  But of course she had never gotten around to doing it.

  “Just like everything else in life, the power never goes off when you are prepared for it to go out,” she thought.

  Things only happen when you don’t expect it.

  As Dot stared into the darkness, in the direction where she knew the clock had to be, she again promised herself that tomorrow she would try to remember to put a battery in the clock, if she could find one.

  “Mike wake up,” Dot whispered as she shook his arm.

  She heard Mike groan as the battery powered wall clock out in the hall began to chime. Mike had put batteries in the hall clock.

  Mike said the wall clock in the hall across from the bathroom door came in handy while he had to wait for his turn to get in the bathroom when their teenage daughter, Kimberly, beat him to the bathroom in the morning to get ready for school.

  Mike swore that after she had been in the bathroom for an hour, she didn’t look any different when she came out than when she had gone in to do her hair and makeup, but Dot made him promise not to say that to Kimmy.

  “Teenage girls have so much pressure on them now days,” she told Mike. “She is so self-conscious about how she looks, telling her that would make her a nervous wreck. She is growing up Mike.”

  “I can see that,” Mike had replied with a worried look on his face.

  Dot knew that this was what was really bothering Mike, he wasn’t ready for his little girl to grow up. If Kimmy had looked a lot different when she came out of the bathroom, Mike would then have something to worry about.

  Mike had agreed but used the wall clock to time her and to keep reminding her how long she had been in the bathroom.

  Since the power had gone out, Kimmy spent less time in the bathroom now because school had been cancelled until the power problem could be resolved.

  They didn’t have this problem with their son Bobby, they weren’t sure if he even knew where the bathroom was.

  The way his room smelled only added to that thought, but neither Mike nor Dot had the courage to go into his room to investigate.

  Mike had always laughed, “In another year when Bobby discovers girls they would have to add a bathroom to the master bedroom. Bobby and Kimmy will be fighting like cats and dogs over the old bathroom and if we want to use a bathroom we will have to build our own.”

  Dot laughed because she knew he was right about that.

  Dot counted the melodic dings coming from the hall wall clock.

  “One, two, three……It’s three in the morning,” Dot thought.

  “Wake up Mike,” Dot whispered more loudly this time as what sounded like scraping came from out near the front of the house.

  It was the second time tonight that she had heard strange sounds.

  A few nights ago, Dot had heard a similar sound.

  The next day they had found what looked like painted red streaks on their front grass. It was a strange sight but they had more to worry about than petty vandalism.

  The next night she had heard those sounds again. The following day one of the neighbor’s cats had been found dead.

  All that remained was a bloody pile of fur in their backyard. It was a grisly scene.

  Everyone wrote it off as some cruel kids from a neighboring town roaming around at night causing trouble since they didn’t have to go to school.

  Or maybe another animal had killed it.

  It had been bad, but quickly forgotten by everyone except the cat’s owners.

  Yesterday had been the worst thing to happen so far.

  Dot had been awakened sometime in the middle of the night by sounds coming from over in the neighbor’s yard.

  She had laid awake the rest of the night and listened.

  Dot just felt something wasn’t right.

  When the power went off almost a week ago, everything had just stopped working.

  She and Mike tried to call the power company to report the outage, but neither their phone nor the neighbor’s phones worked.

  For some reason the cell phones didn’t work either.

  Mike started the car hoping to hear something on the radio but all he could get on the car radio was static.

  Mike drove down to the local gas station on Route 356 about five miles down the road but the guy told him without power he couldn’t sell him any gas.

  The guy also told Mike that traffic had
come to a standstill since the power went out.

  The station owner said that since the power went out, traffic on Route 356 had stopped completely. He said he even drove down to Route 28 and had barely seen more than four or five cars out on the interstate. He recommended that Mike just go back home and wait it out.

  “We’re all in the same boat,” the station owner said. “No one can go very far. It’s better to stay home and wait than go out and be stranded somewhere. No one is driving around. You’re not the only one with this problem.”

  The station owner and the neighbors didn’t know any more than Dot and Mike about what had happened. They were all literally in the dark.

  No one in Winfield Junction ever paid much attention to the news, mostly because it never had anything to do with them. Even if there had been some kind of warning alert broadcast before the power went out, it was unlikely that anyone here would have heard it. So they all just waited for someone to fix the problem and turn their power back on.

  Mike and Dot had been just sitting around the house, the same as everyone else, waiting. Their little town of Winfield Junction, a quiet little town where nothing ever happened was now even quieter. It felt creepy to walk on the streets knowing that dozens of eyes were watching you from somewhere inside the buildings.

  So they did just like everyone else, stayed inside and watched the streets while they waited for the power to come back on. They played cards or Monopoly during the day and turned in early at night. It was sort of nice to have a break and just relax.

  But it was yesterday morning that had confirmed, at least for Dot, that the problem was more than just the power being out.

  She had a gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right but when the neighbor boy mysteriously disappeared, she knew what she was feeling was more than a hunch or a woman’s intuition.

  The neighbor boy had convinced his parents to let him camp out in the back yard.

  He had received a pup tent for his birthday and was anxious to try it out.

  Dot thought the kid’s parents were crazy to let him sleep outside at a time like this.

  Mike told her that other than her suspicion that something was wrong, there wasn’t anything to indicate it was too dangerous for the kid to sleep out in his own backyard.

  Mike’s opinion changed after they talked to the neighbors the next morning.

  Now he knew something was wrong too.

  The kid’s dad said that there appeared to be a set of bloody foot prints leading to their son’s tent.

  The tent was a bloody mess inside.

  What confused everyone was that there appeared to be two bloody sets of foot prints leading away from the tent.

  “With the amount of blood in the tent,” the father choked out the words, “it would have been impossible for the other set of bloody prints to be my son’s. Someone must have taken him!”

  They followed the bloody prints out to Route 356 where they lost the trail. The tracks from the tent were lost when they blended in with the other bloody tracks covering the highway.

  The sobbing couple came back to their house and drove their car back out to the highway to look for their son. They were convinced someone had taken him and he was still alive.

  Mike didn’t know what could have happened, but he was certain with the amount of blood he had seen in the tent, no one could survive that.

  That was the last anyone had seen of the couple.

  Someone said that the couple had followed the bloody trail out to Route 28 and then decided to follow Route 28 north in hopes of finding their son.

  The neighbors all decided that after the cat incident and now the boy’s disappearance, the problem had to be some wild animal had come down from the mountains and was prowling around because there weren’t any lights to scare it away. Everyone agreed the best thing to do was just stay inside at night until the power came back on and they would all be fine. They all lived out in the country and these sort of things just happened out in the country from time to time. No one needed to panic.

  Dot wanted to know why there were no animal tracks to be seen, but no one else thought that was important.

  Dot decided she needed to do more than just hide under her blanket tonight and hope the sounds would stop.

  She didn’t want the next unexplained incident to happen to any of her family members. Not if she had anything to say about it. She intended to keep her eyes open.

  “Mike, wake up,” Dot said louder this time. “Damn it Mike, I think you could sleep through a nuclear war!”

  Dot slid out from under her blanket and felt for the floor with her bare feet.

  The cold hardwood floor sent chills through her body but Dot knew the chills were caused by more than the cold wooden floor.

  Knowing that she intended to go look out the front door to see what was making that sound out front, when her feet touched the floor she would have felt the chills run through her even if the floor had been hot. She was scared.

  Dot stood and pulled the covers up over the bed to keep her spot warm for when she came back to bed.

  Then she felt around at the bottom of the bed to find her robe.

  It was bad enough that she was getting up in the middle of the night to investigate a noise.

  The only thing that Dot could think of that would be worse was investigating a noise in the middle of the night in her underwear.

  With or without her robe, at a hundred and four pounds she wasn’t going to intimidate anyone, even with how wild her hair looked whenever she got out of bed and she was sure she probably looked like a wild woman right now. But she would at least feel more confident in her red robe if she found herself confronted by someone than she would standing there in her little blue panties.

  She never even tried to give Kimmy a stern look unless she had her robe on or was fully dressed and Kimmy only weighed ninety-seven pounds.

  Dot pulled the strings together and tied her robe tight around herself.

  She moved slowly in her bare feet, careful not to ram her toes into one of the many things that either Mike or Bobby had left lying around on the floor.

  She moved out into the hall and passed the bathroom.

  The ticking of the wall clock was the only sound she could hear inside the house.

  The bathroom door was open. Kimmy’s door was shut tight as she was at the age where she wanted her privacy.

  With Bobby and his friends running in and out of his room, playing video games or whatever they did in Bobby’s room, Kimmy felt there were too many roaming eyes in the house to leave her door open for very long.

  “Teenage girls,” Dot smiled remembering way back when she had been a teenage girl.

  Of course teenage girls looked different now than when she was one. Maybe it was good that Kimmy kept her door closed. She and Mike were starting to worry about how to handle Kimmy with what was soon to happen, teenage boys.

  Kimmy had lost her tom boy appearance a year ago. If the boys hadn’t already noticed, it definitely wouldn’t be long.

  If Kimmy wasn’t so modest that problem would arrive before they were ready for it, that is if Mike would ever be ready to deal with boys and his little girl.

  Mike always complimented Kimmy when she came out of her room dressed like a nun for school. He hoped that would encourage her to keep dressing that way.

  Dot didn’t know what Mike would do if Kimmy ever started to dress like her friends.

  “The little hooker look,” Mike called it. “Don’t their parents see how they look before they leave to go to school? If I saw my daughter dressed like that, I’d…”

  Mike never finished that sentence because he really didn’t know what he would do.

  Dot sniffed the air in the hallway.

  “I must be near Bobby’s room,” Dot smiled. “Mike felt as long as Bobby’s room smelled like this they were safe.

  Kimmy said that Bobby’s room was disgusting.

  Mike felt that was a good sign. When the
room smelled like Old Spice then they would need to worry about what Bobby was up to.

  These things had never crossed hers and Mike’s mind when they first started talking about having kids.

  Then they just thought about having a couple little kids, daddy’s little girl and mommy’s little boy.

  Those days had come and then gone much too quickly.

  When the kids were born and even after they started to walk and talk, it felt like it would be that way forever.

  “But unfortunately, nothing lasts forever,” Dot thought and smiled sadly in the darkness.

  She knew that they were quickly approaching the point where everything would change.

  Soon their two little angels who felt that their parents couldn’t do any wrong would be replaced by two kids that couldn’t believe how stupid their parents were.

  “Maybe that time is now,” Dot thought, “or at least will be here by tomorrow or the day after. It won’t be long.”

  Dot tried to clear her thoughts. She was going to see what was causing the noise out in front of the house. Besides she had a bad feeling about things, thinking about losing her two little kids to the world was depressing. It would be here soon enough no matter how much she tried to stop it from happening. That was just how it was.

  Thinking about it wouldn’t do anything but make her miserable and depressed.

  The world had a way of constantly changing. Dot knew that change was not always for the better.

  Even tightening the straps on her red robe didn’t make her feel any better.

  Dot quickened her pace but slowed down again after stubbing her toe and thinking some four letter words as her foot banged into Mike’s tool box.

  It was sitting out in the middle of the living room floor, right where she should have expected it to be.