The Infestation

I woke up in the middle of one of the two helipads at a relatively small air-force base. To the left of the helipads, there was a large hangar with its back facing me. The whole base was enclosed by a tall stone wall. Outside of the base's walls were Victorian style houses all surrounding the exterior of the base with various heights and vibrant colors.

It was a bright and sunny day, but it was also eerily quiet. No birds chirped, no car tires hummed on the roads beyond the walls, there wasn't even a breeze. Not a sound could be heard in the whole area.

Until I heard a faint crackling in the distance. It sounded like the steady roll of thunder as a storm approaches. The ground started to shake and when I looked into the clear blue sky, I saw three sleek metallic planes flying high in the atmosphere in the distance, each with a large cloud of white smoke trailing behind them.

When I saw them, I began to cheer like I was at an air show. Two other people appeared in my peripheral. They began to cheer with me as the planes slowly came toward us. Though our cheers were drowned out by the loud rumble of their engines, they saw us standing in the middle of the air field. They reacted to our enthusiasm by doing impossible flips and stunts in the air. When they completed their acrobatics, they went back into formation and climbed up into the high atmosphere and into a dense cloud forming above us. Just before the three planes entered the cloud, they were close enough for me to make out what type of plane they were. They were all xb-70 Valkyries. These planes were failed prototypes for a supersonic strategic bomber design, but somehow they were flying.

As soon as they disappeared from sight, we heard a faint whistle above us. That's when we saw a small black dot falling from the cloud at incredible speeds. Then a fiery explosion vaporized the far wall of the base. The earth erupted and chunks of tarmac shot into the sky. A shock-wave tore through the still air and knocked us all to the ground. When the fire started to settle, black smoke started billowing upward. A second deafening blast behind us leveled the concrete wall. I decided that the hole in the wall was the only way to safety. My ears were ringing and my eyesight became blurred as a choked my way though toxic smoke. Bombs were being dropped all around us and we were surrounded by walls of fire and smoke.

After we made it through the disorienting smoke, me and the strangers found ourselves in front of one of the Victorian houses. It was three stories tall and it was painted dark-blue. I looked around to see if anyone knew what just happened at the air force base, but when I turned around to look at the base, it wasn't there. Instead of smoking ruins, there was instead a chain-link fence surrounding an empty stretch of land.

I decided that the best course of action would be to enter the still and ancient-looking building. The door was unlocked and when I entered I felt a cool rush of dusty air. There was a quiet buzz of electricity from the ancient bulbs that barely lit the room in front of me. At the end of the room I saw a door into a yellow-tinted hallway. A flickering light in the hallway beckoned me deeper into the forgotten house. When I climbed up the stairs into the second floor I saw yellow-stained wallpaper coated in a festering mold. There were spores floating through the air. Before I climbed the last step, I heard a wet clicking sound from a room to the left of the overgrown hallway. Before I explored the room where the sound was coming from, me and the others decided to explore two other interconnected rooms to look for supplies. When we all entered the room to our right, information on where we were rushed through me.

We were in a zombie apocalypse and the bombers from earlier were part of the infestation extermination squad. They bombed us because they thought we were zombies. The infestation had spread through the house we were in too. The clicking sound in the room across from us was a zombie.

So without hesitating I told the strangers I was with to barricade the door with furniture, but we were too loud and the zombie heard us. A horrifying scream rang through the rotting building for what felt like hours. Then when it stopped a tense silence filled the atmosphere. We all looked at each other wide-eyed in terror, and before we could react, the infested creature hurled itself against the barricaded door, slamming with brutal force as it unleashed agonized, inhuman screams.