The Rot

Chapter 1

I don't know how or why it happened. One day the dead just started to come back and attack the living. Driven by some unknown force, the undead creatures began ripping into people, tearing them apart, killing and eating them. Just one bite from the dead things is all it took. You got bit and you were beyond screwed. After the bite, it didn't take long for you to turn into one of the walking corpses.

There's one thing I learned in the seven months since all this shit happened is that everyone that's still alive has a story. Where they were when the first dead creatures arrived on their doorsteps, what they were doing, stuff like that. This story just happens to be mine.

How many tales start with the phrase, "It was just a regular day?" Probably too many to count, right? But it was just a regular, beautiful day out that day. I was sitting in my upstairs flat in a small building on Michigan Avenue, just outside of downtown Detroit. I did what any normal person would do on an early, bright, sunshiney Saturday afternoon; I closed all of my windows and played video games in the dark.

Out of nowhere, my tv screen went blank. I thought my television crapped out on me, but the power had gone out. Wonderful, just wonderful. Before I could launch my controller across the room in frustration, my building was shaken by a car wreck that sounded like it was right outside.

"What the hell is going on?" I wondered as I got up and ran to my bedroom window.

Living on Michigan Avenue, I had dealt with my fair share of car wrecks. I had become desensitized to it and normally, I wouldn't even look. But since I had no video games to play at the moment, I got off my ass to see what was happening out there.

The accident happened pretty much right outside my bedroom window. A white pickup truck had collided with a navy blue SUV. The SUV appeared to have veered into the oncoming lane, striking the pickup head on.

People on the other side of the avenue began to run towards the scene of the accident. Some bystanders had their phones out and they were trying to call 911, but it looked like their phones weren't working.

The driver's side door of the SUV opened and the driver stumbled out of his vehicle. It was an older bald guy. The top of the man's head had this deep cut on it, almost like someone had bitten down on top of the dude's skull and tore away a bit of flesh. I thought I could see some bone. Yeah, it was not pleasant.

The SUV driver walked around the back of his truck, and then he just collapsed.

"Holy shit!" Someone down below yelled out when they saw the condition of the driver.

I did hear the sounds of an ambulance siren wailing down the avenue, but when it got close to the crash, it just flew on by. The ambulance tore right through the intersection, missing a couple vehicles by mere inches.

As I looked in the direction the ambulance was heading, I saw this huge plume of dark gray smoke billowing above the horizon.

"Oh come on. What the hell is going on?" I asked out loud. I couldn't pay too much attention to the apparently burning building down the road as someone right outside my window began screaming.

I looked all around my little section of the avenue, but I couldn't tell where the screaming was coming from. It wasn't near the accident scene, which by now, a sizable crowd had formed around both wrecked vehicles. Some of the people were looking in the direction of the billowing smoke cloud. I looked in the same direction the people on the avenue were looking and saw two more buildings that looked to be set ablaze further along the horizon.

"Something's not right," I muttered to myself.

I kinda felt like a jackass sitting there in my window, looking down at everything, but what could I have done? I'm not a doctor or an EMT and I don't even play one on TV. I decided to close my curtains just enough so that nobody down below could see me popping my head out.