A Small Town Outbreak
Today I received an email detailing events that happened in a small town just south of Algonquin Park in Ontario Canada during the first few days of the Great Zombie Outbreak.
We didn’t really know what was going on. Every news channel was in a panic and it seemed like a lot of major cities were a complete mess, including Toronto just to the south of us. Combermere is a small town, the kind that if you blink you miss it when driving by. Everyone knows each other, I mean the population is less than 1000. We see a lot of city dwellers over the summer months who come up for the northern get away, but that would all soon change.
Obviously people were worried, it was the talk of the town, but we started getting really worried when our motels and cottages were booked solid and small parking lots were filling up with terrified folk from the cities south of us. Within a two day period the main road through the town became a parking lot, you couldn’t get anywhere and it became obvious very quickly that there wasn’t going to be enough food for all these people. We're just lucky that clean water is not an issue up here. Everyone's got a well and you can practically drink water right out of the lakes and I’m sure many people did.
Soon it was in our own backyard
These were all small problems though. The real nightmare started when we heard a horrible shriek in the night. I should also mention that the day before several people were looking very sick, and some of my friends even mentioned seeing wounds on their arms. The news was still a mess, and by now we all new that it was some kind of a plague that caused psychotic rage. Once someone was infected they would become insane and try to kill anyone around them. Just how the infection started was of great debate and many conflicting reports came out over the next 24 hours. We also still didn’t know that once infected the mortality rate was 100%. The military had been called into all the big cities, but for a small town like us, there was nothing yet other than our local authorities.
We were no longer observers
It happened on the third night of the massive influx of people. The shriek in the night of course was someone biting down into someone elses arm. Everyone around managed to beat the man responsible into submission, which meant he was dead, of course he was already dead in hind sight.
About 2 hours later there was another scream and this time it was a young girl doing the biting. People were less willing to beat the hell out of a 12 year old girl who was biting and clawing at her father. I actually saw this attack and although I saw many more after this day, this one was the one that sticks with me the most. Maybe it's because she was 12 years old and was killing her father, or maybe it’s the fact that it was the first attack I had ever witnessed that wasn't on the TV. Everyone just watched as her father begged and screamed for her to stop, I don’t know where the mother was, but the eyes in this girl were so enraged. Finally someone stepped in to grab her, but the little girl swung around and he was quickly bitten in the leg. This went on until someone finally pulled out a gun and shot her. She convulsed as he shot her three or four times, the final shot landing square in the head. I'm not sure if this was an intentional shot or if her violent movements led to a head shot. Soon we would learn that a gun was useless without a head shot. This poor guy had the weight of 100 eyes boring into him, but you know, he probably saved a lot of lives. In the 10 minutes people tried to hold her down she had bitten several people who all became infected. Her father was bleeding to death, and he quickly re-animated several minutes later and was shot by the same guy.
Everything in my life changed after this day. Everything changed for the worse, but I'll never forget that girl and her father.
