Manel Loureiro - Dark Days

At that point, our Spanish lawyer was as terrified as the rest of the world. Reports of the pandemic raged nonstop on newspapers, TV, radio, and the Internet. He watched helplessly as the virus slowly gained ground, day by day. Soon there was no news from Dagestan. Russia went dark a few days later. Then Poland, Finland, Turkey, Iran, and on and on throughout every country in the world. Most European countries sealed off their borders and declared martial law but the virus spread like an oil spill across the planet. In an unprecedented move, the European Union unanimously agreed to form a single office of crisis management that continued to keep a tight grip on information and doled out the news in dribs and drabs. But reports kept turning up on the Internet. There were almost as many theories and unsettling rumors of the walking dead as websites, claiming it was an alien invasion, the Antichrist, genetic experiments, or monsters from the Underworld.

But everyone agreed on one thing: Whatever it was, it was very contagious and deadly. Anyone who got infected spread the disease.

That crisis, which had been described briefly in the news just two weeks before, finally reached Spain. The point was driven home to our lawyer the day he saw King Juan Carlos on TV declaring martial law, dressed in his military uniform the way he did during the attempted coup d’état in 1981.

Then, of all the misguided plans those governments came up with, they picked the worst. In keeping with overriding medical logic—isolate the healthy from the sick—they decided to concentrate the healthy population into enclosures around the country called Safe Havens, huge sections of town, surrounded by security forces. By then everyone understood that contact with an infected person ended very badly.

What our lawyer chose to do next turned out to be the best move. He didn’t want to go to a Safe Haven; it sounded suspiciously like the Warsaw ghetto. When the army’s evacuation team swept through his neighborhood, he hid in his house. Everyone else left, but he chose to stay behind. Alone. But not for long.

In a matter of days, the world began to crumble. Electricity and communication systems began to fail as crews didn’t show up for work or simply disappeared. Soon TV channels worldwide emitted only pre-recorded shows interrupted by news briefs that hysterically ordered everyone to gather in the Safe Havens. By then, censorship was completely breaking down. Officials acknowledged that infected people somehow came back to life after they died and became extremely aggressive toward the living. It was like something out of a B-movie and would’ve been laughable, if it weren’t true. And if the entire world hadn’t fallen apart in a matter of days.

That little monster accidentally freed from its test tube twenty days before finally showed its true face.

What happened in forty-eight hours was hard to explain. Infrastructure was falling apart everywhere; the electrical grid was failing all over the world and no one had a global vision. Safe Havens proved to be death traps; the noise and activity of the humans congregated there drew the Undead like a magnet. When hordes of Undead besieged those Safe Havens, panic broke out and those centers fell, overrun by the monsters. Most of the refugees were changed into Undead. The official message on the few surviving TV channels changed dramatically: Stay away from the Safe Havens.

But once again, that message came too late. The situation was beyond anyone’s control.

Our lawyer, isolated at home, in a deserted neighborhood, with only his Persian cat named Lucullus for company, watched in amazement. When the Internet finally shut down, he braced for the worst.

And it came quickly. Less than forty-eight hours later, the first Undead wandered down his quiet, suburban street in northern Spain. He was trapped in his own home. Over the next few days, he watched the relentless parade of Undead in terror from his window.

A few days later he decided to head for the Safe Haven in Vigo, the closest major city. He was desperate to see other humans, plus he was running out of food and water. He had two choices: Try to dodge the Undead to get some place safe, or die of starvation at home. Despite the warnings, a Safe Haven became his only option.

So he headed off on a perilous journey and for several days his life was in constant jeopardy. He drove through destroyed villages to the Port of Pontevedra, veering around car wrecks no one had cleared away. From there, he sailed for Vigo in an abandoned sailboat. When he finally reached the Vigo Safe Haven, his last hope collapsed—it was in ruins. No one was alive there and thousands of Undead wandered aimlessly.

He was seriously considering suicide when he spotted a rusty old freighter, the Zaren Kibish, anchored in the harbor, with a ragtag crew of survivors huddled onboard. Its captain recounted the horrors of the last hours of the Vigo Safe Haven and how it fell, like so many places around the world, from hunger and disease and the assault by the Undead.

Once again, fortune smiled on our lawyer. Aboard the Zaren Kibish , he met one of the few survivors of the Vigo Safe Haven, a Ukrainian guy named Viktor “Prit” Pritchenko. He was a short guy in his forties, with a huge, blond mustache and ice-blue eyes. He turned out to be one of the Eastern European helicopter pilots the Spanish government had hired every summer to fight forest fires. Another solitary man trapped far from home and family. Pritchenko decided to befriend our lawyer.

After several terrifying weeks facing the Undead and the Zaren Kibish’ s despotic, mentally unstable captain, they finally devised a plan. They would try to reach the Ukrainian’s Sokol helicopter that was parked at the forest ranger base camp a few miles from the port. From there, they’d fly to the Canary Islands. Because those islands were so isolated, they were one of the few places in the world that had escaped the pandemic. According to the last news reports, remnants of the Spanish government and a few survivors had gathered there.

The only problem was they had to evade the deranged ship’s captain and his armed crew, who were obsessed with their plans to save their own hides, plans in which Prit and the lawyer were just pawns to be sacrificed. After a risky journey across the ravaged city of Vigo, they finally escaped with high hopes.

But one last test of their courage remained.

In an abandoned car dealership where they’d taken shelter for the night, Pritchenko suffered a freak accident while handling a small explosive device, causing second-degree burns and the loss of several fingers. In the past, that wouldn’t have been a life-threatening accident, but in those difficult days, it was. With his friend on the verge of dying, the lawyer scoured Vigo for a hospital. He knew he wouldn’t find a doctor and most likely any hospital would be infested with Undead, but he had to find the medicine his friend needed.

He didn’t figure on getting lost in the bowels of a huge, abandoned hospital, surrounded by Undead, its dark corridors, halls, and stairs a death trap.

Just when the situation seemed hopeless, Lucia came to their rescue. Seventeen, tall, slender, with long black hair and deep green eyes, she was the last person they’d expected to find in that cavernous building. Finding her in that grisly nightmare was so incongruous, our heroes thought they were hallucinating. When the girl told her story, they realized she was also a terrified survivor that fate had mercifully set down there.

During the migration to Safe Havens, Lucia had gotten separated from her family. She’d wandered around the area, trying to locate her missing parents, and had ended up there. Like thousands of people adrift in that confusion, she didn’t find her loved ones, but she stayed on as an aide to the exhausted doctors stubbornly trying to keep the hospital up and running.