Alive Inside

By L.V. Dunn

When 17 year old Janey wakes up with a headache she knows that it's going to be a bad day, but nothing could prepare her for HOW bad...
Within 24 hours she has died and reanimated; one of the countless victims of a plague that is sweeping the globe and threatening the entire human race. The living are calling them "zombies" but Janey knows better. She is still alive, trapped within, but unable to control a body whose only desire is to feed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L.V. Dunn
• Release date: Sep 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9780991716913

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ALIVE INSIDE

L.V. Dunn

Smashwords Edition

Published by: Larissa Vogler at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 by Larissa Vogler

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Chapter One – Day 1, INFECTED

It started with a headache. I awoke the morning of September eighteenth with a dull thud at the back of my skull, a niggling pain that made me want to pull the covers up over my head and escape back into the soft and comfortable haze of sleep. I was not a morning person on the best of days, and I could easily sleep until noon when allowed, but this morning I found my alarm clock was especially hateful and I snarled at it as I smacked at the snooze bar. I opened one eye and scowled at the clock. 6:45am. I found the number offensive.

A tiny stream of sunlight squeezed through my tightly drawn curtains. It was far too bright and cheerful for my mood this morning and I groaned as my eyes were assaulted by its brilliance. Wake up, it seemed to say, and I flipped over, turning my back to it, and buried my head under my pillow in response. Ten more minutes, I thought dozily. Those ten minutes were more valuable to me in bed than they were being spent completing the mundane tasks necessary to prepare for the day. I won’t blow dry my hair, I bargained, and won, letting the irresistible temptation to languish in bed seduce me back to sleep. I fell fast and deep so that when the buzzer sounded again it took a long time for it to penetrate my consciousness. By the time I managed to pry my lids open the clock read 7:18am. I leapt from the bed, my heart pounding, delivering a throbbing in my temples with every thump. I was going to be late, as usual.

Dragging myself across the room I considered the luxury of taking a day off and staying home from school, but we were only in the first weeks of my senior year and I knew that I couldn’t afford any self indulgence. I needed a scholarship and this academic year was crucial. It wouldn’t give my teachers a very good impression of me if I started missing classes already.

I threw open the curtains. The sun blinded me for a moment and my vision swam with a shooting pain in my head. I tried to blink away the tiny spots it created as I pulled the curtains most of the way closed again. No, today was not going to be a good day.

I felt exhausted, my muscles ached and my entire body seemed to be complaining as I made my way across the hall to the bathroom. I spent my first few waking moments rubbing the sleep from my eyes and splashing water in my face. The tepid liquid hit me like a slap and the headache throbbed in my left temple, serving as a tolerable, but annoying, reminder that I had a long day ahead. I took a couple of aspirin before getting in the shower and I waited for the hot water and drugs take effect.

I hadn’t slept well the night before. I’d tossed and turned, lost in vivid and disturbing dreams unlike any I’d ever had before and I considered them now as I stood under the stinging jets. The details were beginning to blur, chased away by wakefulness, but the feelings were still strong and tangible. In one dream I’d been ravenous, deliriously searching for something to abate my hunger. I’d felt desperate and distressed until I found myself in the deli section of our local supermarket, ripping into chunks of ham and roast beef. I’d been insatiable, starving no matter how much I ate, and I watched as my stomach stretched and stretched until it seemed at the point of bursting. When the skin looked like it was beginning to split, I started awake and I could still taste the saltiness of the ham on my tongue. After a moment I realized that the taste was real, but it wasn’t ham, it was blood. I had bitten the inside of my cheek in my sleep.

In another dream I was a hunter, tracking a deer in the woods, following its scent and the sound of snapping twigs and branches as the buck tried to evade capture. I was not human, I was some kind of predator, a wolf or lion maybe, I wasn’t sure. My senses were sharp and my skills were honed and it wasn’t long before I pounced. I sensed the animal’s fear as I overpowered it, knocking it off of its feet and pinning it to the damp earth. Again, I’d been hungry, but in this dream my appetite had been both literal and figurative. As I tore into the deer’s flesh I felt an intense satisfaction, as if I had achieved a tremendous accomplishment. Again I awoke, confused and disoriented. The dream had been so realistic that it took me a moment to figure out where I was and I had a hard time falling back asleep afterwards.

As I began to work the fragrant lather of my lavender mint shampoo into my hair I considered how both of these dreams were particularly strange for me since I was a vegetarian. From the age where I was able to understand that meat came from animals, I’d refused to eat it. My parents had been at first amused, thinking it was a phase. My father was proud to see me taking a stand at such a young age and he encouraged me to explain to them how I felt and why I felt that way. If I could give them a compelling reason for my decision then they would accommodate me, he said. If not, then I would eat what was prepared for me and be grateful for it. The only thing that I could come up with was that killing was wrong. My father challenged my argument, What if the animal is in pain or has no quality of life? He asked.

I considered this, Still wrong, I determined.

What if it’s dangerous? he countered.

Pigs and cows and chickens aren’t dangerous, I’d replied.

Ok, he’d conceded and my mother began serving meaty sauces separately and using more vegetable based broths in cooking. Still it was understood in my home that if I didn’t like what had been prepared for the family, then I had to figure out my own dinner.

As time went on and I had more concrete reasons to follow a vegetarian diet, I’d tried to convince my parents that we should do so as a family, but my father had laughed, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hand.

If we weren’t meant to eat meat we wouldn’t have these teeth, he’d say, indicating his incisors, or if we weren’t meant to eat meat then God wouldn’t have made it taste so good.

This last argument always infuriated me. We don’t eat people but we’re probably delicious, I would argue, the cannibals obviously think so.

People eat dogs in a lot of countries, you know. Some people eat rats or crickets or even cockroaches. My 7 year old brother Eric loved it when my father shared information like this. When you’re hungry you can’t be picky. When it’s a matter of life and death people will choose life at whatever cost.

I started to argue but he cut me off, We’re lucky to live in a country where we can afford the luxury of picking and choosing what we eat, he said. "You don’t know what it feels like to be truly hungry, to be starving to death. Think about all those people dying in Africa, what would they think of you turning up your nose at your mother’s meatloaf or your brother refusing to eat whole wheat bread?" Eric wrinkled his nose. He hated anything even remotely healthy.

"If you go hungry, it’s by choice. Most of the world doesn’t have that option, he chastised me. It’s easy to talk about morality and the sanctity of life when your belly is full and your family is healthy. If the shit hit the fan in this country things would change, and quickly. Then we’d see how unconscionable it is to take a life… how many people would let their children starve before killing an animal."

My father liked to talk about the shit hitting the fan. He was a sergeant in the Marines and his nearly 20 years of service and numerous international deployments had shown him some of the worst of humanity. He had uncovered mass graves in communities torn apart by genocide. He had watched as a government gunned down their own people in the streets. He’d seen children with limbs blown off, women with faces eaten away by acid, thrown on them by family members in the name of honour. He had even witnessed boys and men turning themselves into human bombs and killing themselves and dozens of random, innocent civilians, calling themselves martyrs in God’s war. It was hard for my brother or me to win an argument with him, especially if we wanted or needed something trivial. He wouldn’t tolerate whining or begging and he hated the thought that his children might turn out to be spoiled or materialistic.

I stepped from the shower, the steam escaping behind me and enveloping the tiny room in a hot wet cloud. I wiped the moisture from the mirror and gazed at my reflection. I looked tired. There were dark bags under my eyes and I looked paler than usual, which was hard to do considering I was so fair. My hair hung in long blond tendrils around my shoulders and down my back, water dripping from the ends and sliding down my body to pool on the ceramic tile around my feet. I dropped my towel to the floor and stood on it, trying to sop up some of the puddle that, if left unattended, would infuriate my mother.

Thank goodness I didn’t have to waste time deciding what to wear. It was the one, and only as far as I was concerned, benefit to attending a school that required uniforms.

When I made my way downstairs for breakfast I felt a little bit better. The pain in my head was still there but it didn’t seem too bad and I imagined that it would pass after I consumed a little sugar. My mother was already downstairs pouring cereal into a bowl for my brother and as I came around the corner into the kitchen she caught my eye and gestured towards the cereal box with a raised eyebrow. I shook my head and opened the fridge to grab some orange juice.

We communicated mainly with gestures in my house. My mother was deaf and though she could read lips and the entire family was fluent in American Sign Language, we also had our own Johnson family language that we used at home.

According to the doctors my mother had been born deaf as a result of a congenital disorder, something that had existed in the womb. My grandparents didn’t notice a problem until she was more than a year old. They said that she had always been bright and responsive, but when she didn’t start to form the simple words that other babies were sounding out, they sought the help of specialists. At first they thought that she might be learning impaired or developmentally delayed, but the tests determined that neither of these things was true. They declared that my mother was an otherwise healthy happy baby, but that she was totally, irreversibly, deaf.

My mother often questioned whether she hadn’t actually been born with some hearing and then slowly lost it in that first year from some kind of trauma or disease. She believed that she could remember sound and she would sometimes cock her head as if she had caught a whisper of something. She said that sometimes sounds would slip into her thoughts, like a bird chirping or a clock ticking and while she had no spoken language, she thought that she might know what certain words sounded like.

When she was young my mother wanted to be a scientist. She wanted to find a cure for deafness, or if that wasn’t possible, then to find a way to prevent the disorder in the first place. She even studied biology in her first year of college but in the end she found it to be too great a challenge. Studying, and then working, in the land of the hearing where hands were occupied with test tubes and petri dishes, thus inhibiting communication, just seemed too daunting and she found it frustrating. She changed majors and became a teacher, working with deaf students at a state school close by. She also taught sign language at the local college a few nights a week, which was how she met my father.

My dad was a cadet, hoping to move up the ranks of the military after he turned 18 and figuring that sign language might give him an advantage over the other boys. My mother was still in high school but was already teaching ASL in the evenings in order to save money for college. He always said that it was love at first sight to which my mother’s consistent response was, How could it be anything else, he couldn’t understand a word I said.

The orange juice tasted sweeter than any I’d ever had before and I drank the entire glass in a few quick gulps. My mother frowned in disapproval as I twisted the lid off of the carton and drank the rest straight from it.

I’m finishing it, I said, crushing the carton to prove it. I grabbed my bag and headed for the door.

My mother stopped me, pushing a pack of poptarts into my hands. Eat something, she signed, and don’t forget I’m teaching tonight so you’ll have to pick up Eric.

I’ll see you after school, I said to my brother, as I passed. He barely looked up from his Cheerios, just grunted his acknowledgement. It hurt a little, how in the last year he had pretty much lost interest in me. He was 10 years younger than I was and I had always been so protective of him. My parents called me little mother when describing my relationship with my brother to other people, and it was true. By the time my mother announced that I was going to be a sister I was practically an adolescent. I was an only child who had always enjoyed my parent’s undivided attention and I wasn’t eager to share. I was also mortified at the thought of my mother being pregnant and how she came to be in that condition. Throughout her pregnancy I sulked. I refused to help with preparing the baby’s room or to go shopping if the purpose was to acquire anything for the nursery. As my mother’s belly grew, so did my resentment. I couldn’t believe that they were doing this to me! I’d never been allowed to have so much as a hamster for a pet and now they were having a baby! My parents tried to get me excited for his arrival, encouraging me to suggest names and dragging me to doctor’s appointments so I could look at the ultra sounds. I thought that he looked like an insect in there and it only contributed to my distaste. Then one night my father came into my room in the middle of the night, shaking me awake and dragging me out of the house. My mother was in labour and we had to get to the hospital.

It was too soon. I knew that he wasn’t due for at least another 2 months and I could tell that my parents were scared. When we got to the hospital everyone rushed around us. In the chaos I started to feel frightened as well. What if he died? I had hated the idea of the baby so much that I had wished he would never come and now I felt guilty, as if all of my bad thoughts had come true. I sat in the waiting room dreaming up all kinds of awful scenarios that would all be my fault, and I prayed to God that He would keep my mother and the baby safe.

When my father came out to get me an hour later he was grinning ear to ear.

It’s a boy! he cried and he lifted me off the ground and spun me around, planting a big kiss on the top of my head. I was so relieved that I burst out crying.

Hey JJ, my father dropped to his knee and looked into my eyes. Why the tears? Everything is ok.

My father led me down the corridor to a large window and I got my first glimpse my baby brother. He was so small. They had him in an incubator and he was hooked up to all kinds of tubes. He didn’t look like an insect now, he looked like an angel and it was love at first sight.

What should we name him? My father asked.

Eric, I said. Eric was the name of the lead character in my favourite book.

He looks like an Eric, doesn’t he? My father smoothed my hair and let his hand rest on my shoulder. From that day on I had vowed to protect my little brother. I was fiercely devoted to him and he had been in awe of me, until last year. What happened to little boys when they turned 7, I wondered? He had taken to cringing away when I tried to kiss him and my previously sweet baby brother now seemed to relish doing things that grossed me out. The other day he had brought a dead snake into the house and left it under my bed, just the head poking out, so that I’d see it and freak out. He got the reaction he was looking for.

I ripped open the packaging on the breakfast treats and took a bite. I’d never been much of a morning person and breakfast didn’t seem palatable until nearly lunch time but I was actually hungry today and I made quick work of the pastry. Had they always been this delicious? I wondered, as I devoured the second one. I might have to re-think the whole no breakfast thing.

I pulled into the school parking lot at the same time as my best friend Lara was being dropped off. I could see her father giving her some serious looking advice, but she just rolled her eyes and made a face in my direction as if to say he we go again. Lara’s father was a minister and he preached at home even more than he did on the pulpit. We had both been warned repeatedly about the dangers of leading an immoral life and the importance of keeping Jesus alive in our hearts. My father was an outspoken atheist and I think Lara’s dad felt personally responsible for ensuring my personal, spiritual salvation.

Hey, she called out in greeting as she made her way to meet me. God. You’d think he was dropping me off at a night club. What does he think goes on here? She bemoaned, tossing her hair over her shoulder. He just reminded me that ‘teenage boys are only after one thing’. Gross. How embarrassing.

I laughed, "This is his last year to brainwash you before