A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

THREE, TWO, ONE

by Nate Southard

JANUARY 1^ST, LAST YEAR, 1:14 AM

Just made it home and got the door shut and barricaded. Whole lot of close calls on the way back, but I had my eyes open. Amazing how easy things can be when you’re one of the few who knows what’s going on.

Pretty loud out there right now, but I think it’s going to get a whole lot louder. Way it sounds this second, it could still be people partying. Well, maybe half. There’s plenty of screams. It’s a weird smash of noise, all of it just pushing together into this strange bunch of chaos. Makes me wonder how it’s all going to go, if it really will get louder or if this is the worst of it. Maybe it’ll start to ease off soon. What if Manhattan’s a ghost town by noon? I don’t think it could happen that fast, but what do I know? We didn’t exactly get a chance to rehearse this. It’s the night, yeah?

Exciting days.

Walking through Times Square before midnight…well, it erased any doubts I had, right? It was like a zoo. Even smelled like one. All those people crammed up against each other. They’re slapping hands and laughing, kissing. I walked past one couple kissing in the middle of the throng. He had his hand down the front of her pants, and his entire arm was working. The woman moaned into his mouth as she worked her hips against his hand. I looked around to see if anybody else had noticed this disgusting scene, and the only other man who had was laughing, cheering them on while he snapped a picture. Probably wanted to join in the fun.

So I moved through the crowd, acting like I was enjoying myself when I really just wanted to throw up. Part of it was disgust, yeah, but a lot of it was excitement. Everything had built to that moment, the new year—The Last Year—only a minute or so away. I even put on one of those pairs of cheap, ridiculous party glasses, the kind with the plastic bent into the shapes of stars. They hid my eyes, which was good, and they took attention away from the surgical mask I was wearing. I’d drawn a smiley face on it, so the few people that did seem to notice only pointed and laughed. Whenever they did that, I gave them a nod and shot them a thumbs up. They never even noticed the test tube in my other hand or The Complex falling out of it and sifting away on the soft breeze.

I dumped my last dose as the crowd started counting down from ten. The ball was dropping, and everybody was hopping up and down so that the crowd was throbbing around me. I got excited. Trailing the tube behind me, I smiled behind my mask, and I wanted to laugh. If I hadn’t been so scared of ruining my mask, I would have.

The crowd was chanting, “Three, Two,” as I shook out the last of the powder. I tossed away the tube as the crowd screamed, “One!” Then, I pushed my way out of there as the crowd burst into that New Year’s song that everybody sings. Maybe it would have been fun to stick around and watch things happen, but I agreed to document. That means I had to hurry my behind out of there and get home.

On my way back to the apartment, I heard more than saw the change starting. There was one woman tearing at her face with a broken bottle. She just stood there at the mouth of an alley, bent at the waist and crouching a bit on her knees as she worked and worked. Not once did I hear her cry out. It wasn’t until I made it another block that I heard the first screams, a man who could still form enough words to tell people to get off him. By the time I got within two blocks of home, the screams were springing up from every direction, some of them hard to distinguish from party noise and some impossible to mistake.

As I walked up the apartment steps, I heard a man grunting, a sound like stone colliding with stone ringing with each utterance. I don’t know what he was doing, but I think I can imagine. Maybe I should have gone and checked. I am supposed to be documenting, after all. Thing is, I don’t think I was ready to handle it. Dropping The Complex still had me all jittery.

Yeah. So, there’s the big reveal. Here I am, one of the few who was chosen to stay behind and document for future generations (if there are any), and I was too scared to do it. Why lie about it? I was scared. Not the best start, but I think I can do better.

I need some water. Back in a bit.

JANUARY 1^ST, LAST YEAR, 2:04 AM

NEWS REPORTS ARE REALLY coming in now. Not surprising, considering there were already camera crews in the city. What gets me is that reports are already coming in from pretty much everywhere. Just watched a story on riots in a small Indiana town just across the state border from Cincinnati. I wonder if somebody got infected in the city and then went home and spread it, or if it’s some kind of sympathetic riot. That would be an interesting twist, all right, and I don’t think it’s one anybody saw coming. I’ll have to keep an eye on this…

JANUARY 1^ST, 4:37 AM

IF THERE WERE DOUBTS before, they’re gone now. The news is showing coverage all the time now, calling it the New Year’s Riots. Ridiculous (I’m not supposed to editorialize, but I’m human). What I can hear from my place on the fifth floor is louder than any riot I’ve ever imagined. Screams and pounding and gunfire, roaring engines and the crackling of fires.

Hmm. I wonder if it will be the fire that gets me. That would be terrible. Not the dying part. That’s something I’ve been ready for this entire time. The record, though. Right now, I’m putting everything on the hard drive and printing copies up for binding. If and when the power goes out (because some things were kind of up in the air, as far as I can tell), I’ll need to switch over to pen and paper. What good’s the record if a fire sweeps through and destroys it, though? What’s more important, remaining passive or protecting the record?

If I knew who any of the other recorders were, I’d call and ask them. How stupid is that? At the end of the day, it’s just idiotic. Here I am, almost four hours into mankind’s last year on this planet, and I’m worrying about making phone calls. I promise you the switchboards are jammed up from here to San Diego.

Speaking of which, the West Coast should have started their last year by now. No coverage of it yet, but they’ve only had a little more than ninety minutes to relay.

Something just exploded! It was about half a block away. I checked out the window (part of my preparations involved boarding up the windows, but I left viewing ports like any good witness) and saw this van burning, just a big ball of flame. That was something I expected. The two people nearby weren’t.

One of them was on fire, but she either didn’t know or didn’t care. I think it was a woman, but it was hard to tell from a distance. She kept throwing fists at the other one, who appeared to be a man who was scared out of his mind. He kept trying to turn away, and she just kept hitting him. When he finally did get his back to her, she jumped on it, and then they were both on fire. She rode him to the ground and looked to be slamming his head against the street. I watched her do that for almost a minute, the man bucking beneath her, and then they both just collapsed to the pavement and lay there, burning.

Fascinating.

JANUARY 1^ST, 10:14 AM

CAN’T BELIEVE I MANAGED to squeeze in a little sleep. I guess the fact that there’s not a lot of light coming in the windows makes it easier. When I woke up, there wasn’t a lot of screaming going on, but there was quite a bit of gunfire. I peeked out a few of my ports, and I saw a single military Humvee cruising the street below. There was blood smeared along the sides, and one of the doors was missing. I couldn’t get a good enough look to see if there was actual military sitting inside or somebody who’d jacked it, though. I wonder which is the case.

There’s a lot of smoke in the city this morning. A gray haze kind of hangs around everything. Through the cameras I placed on the roof, I can see at least seven columns of thick, black smoke rising out of the city. There’s at least one fire burning about five blocks west of here. I’ll have to go up to the roof later and see if I can get a better look at the rest of the area. Probably some interesting things to see. Maybe after I grab a bite. I’ll have to be careful. Never know how much of the building might be infected.

JANUARY 1^ST, 11:56 AM

SOMEBODY JUST JUMPED FROM a window above me. Don’t know which floor, and I didn’t even hear them fall. Just the impact on the pavement. By the time I could get to the ports and look, two others had come out of the woodwork and were stomping on what was left of the body. They’re gone now, and the body is just a red smear on the pavement. When the two (they have to be infected) ran off, they’re pants were soaked up to the knee, covered in filth and blood. They’d probably spent close to five minutes just stomping on that corpse. I know I should have timed it for history’s sake, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. That could happen to me. Most likely, it will. Surgical masks aren’t going to stop it forever, right?

Well, that’s a sobering thought. Do I have any booze left?

JANUARY 1^ST, 4:17 PM

HERE WE ARE, THREE minutes until four-twenty, and I don’t have even a single bud. How’s that for failing to plan ahead?

The news networks are still going strong. I guess they warranted some kind of guard or something. Local stations are a bit spotty, though. While the CBS affiliate is still going strong, Fox and NBC are out. ABC has gone guerilla. There’s no anchor behind a desk. Instead, there are about half a dozen terrified people huddled in some kind of control room. A woman I don’t recognize, not pretty enough to be on-air talent, keeps reading updates from an iPhone. Her hands are shaking, and her face is dirty enough that I can see the tracks her tears have cut down her cheeks.

Every few seconds, something bangs nice and loud. I’m guessing it’s somebody trying to get into their room, because everybody jumps whenever it happens. Even the camera does a little up and down.

A part of me wants to laugh. It was people like this who got us into this mess, all the bullshit media putting out more noise than signal, never telling us how things really are. That’s one of the reasons we decided to make this The Last Year. Everybody needed to know things had turned awful. They needed their eyes opened.

The camera has turned to stare at a bald man wearing glasses. He looks old, maybe in his sixties. He’s shaking like he’s cold, and when he talks the first thing he says is, “I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore.” Then, he starts sobbing. It’s those big, body-wracking sobs you had when you were a kid. He spends a few seconds trying to say something else, but the first syllable keeps getting stuck in his throat. The woman who was reading the report tries to pat his shoulder, but he shoves her away, shouting. There are more shouts, a bunch of those bangs, and the camera starts moving around like its operator is panicking or searching for something. Images whip past the camera so fast I have to close my eyes to keep from getting sick (great observer, I know), and then there’s a scream and the camera whips back to the crying man.

He’s not crying anymore, or if he is he’s past the point of caring. A metal ballpoint pin juts from his throat, and he’s pushing it in deeper. Blood gouts from around the object, staining the others in the room. The woman’s screaming like some kind of hysterical basket case, now. Some of the others try to subdue the bleeding man, but he pushes them back. The camera backs against the wall. Trying to find a clear shot, I guess. It stays put until the man finally slumps to the floor and dies. Then, everybody else stands around crying for awhile while the banging gets quieter and then finally goes away.

I watch every second even though I know it’s all disgusting. If the world wasn’t ending, these people would probably have their own reality show by Friday. Lock them in a room, leave them a pen, and see who makes it out alive.

We did the right thing. I’m sure of it.

Hmm… CBS is gone now. That didn’t take long at all.

JANUARY 2^ND, 12:32 AM

THERE’S SOMEBODY IN THE hallway. It’s quiet now, but I know somebody was out there at least a minute ago. They were banging on the door, trying to get in. Lot of racket. Enough to wake me up, and I even took a sleeping pill beforehand.

A part of me wants to think it’s just somebody who’s either infected or running from infected slamming into random doors, trying to find a place to hide or a body to kill. I didn’t have any lights on, no radio or TV. Thing is, I haven’t heard a sound since I woke up. If it was random, they would have continued down the hall, right? Maybe I’m imagining things, or maybe the sound was out of a dream. No. That’s not right, either. This is…

There it was again!

Seriously, I am not making this up. Why the hell would I? Four loud, pounding hits against my apartment door. I looked through the peekhole, but the hallway’s empty, at least in front of my door. Shit, this doesn’t make sense. It’s been a day. Less than! Way too early for cabin fever to be setting in.

JANUARY 2^ND, 1:07 AM

PROBABLY A DUMB MOVE, but I had to leave the apartment and check things out. I was supposed to go out sooner or later and see how The Last Year is progressing, so it wasn’t like I could stay shut in. Things are different when I know there’s somebody out there and nearby, though.

So I went up and down the hall, and then I went up one floor and down one floor to do the same thing. Before I left the apartment, I grabbed a butcher knife. Not a bad little weapon if it comes down to it. I didn’t see anybody, though. At least not anybody who was still alive. The stairway between four and five looked like a slaughter house and smelled about the same. The bottom of my shoes are still tacky with drying blood. I think I counted five bodies scattered around the stairs. It was hard to tell, because not all of them were in one piece. One of them—a woman with hair that I think used to be blonde—was strung out from one landing to the next, bits and pieces ripped and stretched and held together by the tiniest morsels of tendon or intestine or skin. There was a smile on her face, so I know she was infected. I still don’t know who designed The Complex, but I read the info on it, and it’s dangerous stuff. Feelings of euphoria mixed with intense rage and paranoia. Who would have come up with something like that? If I didn’t know better, I’d say our government had done it. Sounds like the kind of sick weapon those bastards would love.

Would have loved? I don’t even know. No word on the box about what the federal government might be up to. That’s weird, isn’t it? Maybe they’re all dead. Or hiding.

So I searched, and I was quiet about it. Maybe the sound’s a little muffled in my apartment, but once I got out in the hallway I could tell there were infected alive in my building. I could hear them laughing and growling and at least one of them slamming their body against a wall or a door over and over again. Sounded like it was maybe on the seventh floor. Should leave me safe.

Long and short, I didn’t see anybody who could have been the culprit. Maybe I could knock on some doors, but I’m nowhere near that stupid.

Doubtful I’ll pull it off, but I should try to get more sleep.

JANUARY 2^ND, 8:42 AM

SOMEBODY’S BEEN IN MY apartment. I can tell.

It sounds paranoid, and I’m aware of that, but I know what I know. Somebody moved my furniture around when I was asleep. There’s not a lot of it, so I can tell when it’s been moved. My notebooks were by my bed last night, but they were in the middle of the living room floor this morning, opened and looked through. The one recliner I left facing the window was pushed up against the door. That means whoever did it found some other way out of here. I need to find out how. Where.

Scratches on my arm, too. Big, red, and savage. Maybe they did something to me while I slept. I’ve been spending so much time awake and documenting that I could have slept through anything.

I need to see how they got out. So I can keep them from getting back in.

JANUARY 2^ND, 10:03 AM

MEDICINE CABINET. IT TOOK me forever, but I remembered reading in some book or other that these places just jam the medicine cabinet of two adjacent units into a hole in the wall. Sure enough, once I got my cabinet out of the wall, I found myself looking at the back of another cabinet. I shoved that one out and listened to the mirror shatter against the sink.

Then, I waited. Whoever had been in my apartment might still be next door, and that meant they’d heard the mirror breaking. I stood there, my knife in my hand, trying to ignore the way those scratches on my arm were itching like mad. When I finally got tired of waiting, I crawled through. I won’t lie, either. When I was squirming through that hole, I felt sure somebody would come running into the bathroom to kill me. Maybe an infected with open sores all over their body and foam pouring out of their mouth, red eyes full of blood. Even with my knife hand free, I doubted I could keep one of them from stretching me out like that woman on the stairs. I wanted to try, though. Wanted to stab and stab until whoever it was became one giant, bleeding wound.

No one appeared, though. Even when I sprawled on the bathroom floor and wrapped a towel around my hand (like an idiot, I cut my palm on the broken mirror), I didn’t hear so much as a whisper or a squeaking floorboard. That scared me even more, because maybe it meant somebody was hiding. There was no way they couldn’t have heard me coming.

I checked the entire apartment though, and I didn’t find anything. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I did find a man crumpled on the floor. His face was a wet ruin, a bloody splatter decorating the wall with a smear beneath it. I figure he bashed his face in until he collapsed, but I don’t know where he got the energy. He’d already torn open his own belly. When I found him, he still had both hands in his guts. It amazes me what The Complex can do once it gets in your system.

Okay, so I don’t know who was in here. They’re not getting back in, though. I put my medicine cabinet back in place and then covered it with duct tape, securing it to the wall. No way is it budging now.

Back to work, I guess.

JANUARY 3^RD, 12:11 PM

THE NETWORKS ARE GONE. Fox News went out last. They probably had the most guns. The last person they had on camera was obviously infected with The Complex. She was crying blood, red tears following the scratches on her cheeks, and she had one hand beneath the desk, working like crazy on something. When she lifted her hand to run it over her face, it was slick with red. She sucked some off her fingers after smearing the rest across her face. Then she (I’m really not sure how this is possible) broke her own neck. All at once, she started shouting, “I’m in charge, here! You don’t exist!” Then, she grabbed the back of her head with one hand and her chin with the other and gave everything a hard jerk. I heard something pop, and she just slumped behind the desk.

So I guess Fox is still on, but it’s just a camera pointing at an empty desk. Not exactly thrilling news. Fair and balanced, though.

The roof cameras tell me about half the city is on fire now. I couldn’t see too many people still up and moving, but that might just be the way the cameras are positioned. Can’t see anybody out the ports either, though. Kind of shocking that it’s happening so fast. Yeah, I knew it would be fast, but this is almost superhuman in its speed.

Hand itches almost as bad as my arm. Trying not to scratch. Want to hit something.

JANUARY 3^RD, 4:52 PM

MY ARM IS BLEEDING, I’ve scratched it so much, and there are black trails running up to my shoulder. Not good. I know what these signs mean. They mean that, even with the mask and all the other precautions, I have it. I’m infected with The Complex. No, I never really believed I’d be immune, despite the things we did to build our immune systems. I thought it would take longer than this, though. Three days? What a waste. Document the end of the world, The Last Year…and only get three days of it.

It’s not right, and it’s not fair (or balanced!), and I hate it.

The Complex is taking longer than usual, but I don’t know how long I’ll really have. Usually, it’s a matter of minutes, maybe thirty or forty-five to take you from first exposure to homicidal maniac. I woke up with this thing on my arm, though. Can’t even convince myself it took cutting my hand to get it. So how long is this going to take? How much will it hurt?

I’m scared. So scared I want to scream.

Happy New Year.

JANUARY 3^rd, 6:22 PM

HEAD HURTS. NO, IT’S splitting. Feels like there are bees in there. Or razors slashing, slashing, slashing. My mouth is dry, and my guts are in knots. This is how it feels. It makes me wonder what the rest felt like. Maybe they went through all of this in those first thirty minutes after exposure. Or maybe it only took five. Maybe there’s so much more coming after this, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take or what’s going to happen.

The walls are cracking. It’s so slow, so tiny, that I can barely tell it’s happening, but that is what’s occurring. These tiny spider web cracks are working their way from floor to ceiling, and…

Okay, this is weird. I know how it will sound. It’s true, though. I swear, I’m not making this up.

There are shadows in the cracks, and they want to get out. If I stare at the cracks long enough, I can see the shadows reaching out like tendrils. They’re still small, but they’re getting bigger, reaching farther, trying to open the cracks wider and get through. Because they want me, I think. I’ve thought about it as I watch them, and it’s the only explanation that makes sense. The shadows want me.

Jesus, what did we do?

6:41 PM

VOICES NOW. THEY FILL my head. I can’t make out the words. They’re garbled and guttural, but I think they’re angry. There’s no shot at seduction, no attempt to put me at ease. Just syllables like crags. Every moment, they grow louder, angrier, and I’m beginning to wonder if they’re not in my head but maybe in the room with me. Maybe they’re coming from the shadows, which have now punched holes in the wall and whip through the air like they’re trying to snatch anything unlucky enough to get too close. At least now I know what the banging was. It was those things trying to punch through from somewhere else. They were knocking down my illusions, knocking them down so hard they’ll never rise again.

And there’s water on the floor. I don’t know when it showed up. I think maybe it’s been there for a while, and it just took me forever to notice it. There’s a few inches on the floor, brackish and brown and thick with terrible things that move. I can feel them squiggling their way past my feet, can hear them splashing as they cross my floor.

I tried to tell myself none of it’s there. Over and over again, I wanted to think it was my imagination, that The Complex had driven me mad, was driving me faster and faster. I can feel them, though. And I can hear them. And no matter how much I might wish I was just crazy, I think I know the truth. I don’t think The Complex is a drug or a virus anymore. I think it’s a doorway. I think it opens you up and lets you see things the way they really are.

Blood’s running down my face, welling up in my eyes and then spilling. I can taste raw meat in my mouth, and I want to taste more. My veins have turned black, and there are more shadows now. They’re reaching out from the scratches in my arm and the cut in my hand. A thick one like a jungle snake is in my throat, choking me as it fights to wrestle free of my belly.

7:01 PM

THEY WERE RIGHT. THEY were always right. The world is a horrible place. It’s just that no one can see it. But now The Complex has opened their eyes. It’s opened mine.

This is The Last Year. God help us all.