The Siren

Chapter 1 - The Beginning of the End

It was in the blanket of night when it started for me. It woke me from my sleep. Fear and adrenaline began sending overwhelming chemicals through my brain that set my head spinning. I knew what it was. Immediately. We had been taught, again and again, what it would sound like for those who would die from it.

Like the siren of an ambulance. With the screech of chalk on slate. The ring of your worst migraine.

The Grim Reaper's call.

They didn't know what the survivors would hear it as. But now I knew. Now I understood. I didn't hear it. I wished that I had.

If I could have heard that deafening sound... maybe I wouldn't have heard the screams.

I was stumbling out of bed, the sheets wrapping around me. They tugged at my legs, begging me to go back to sleep; dream and this would be gone. I couldn't. Though I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to. Yet my hope made me walk to my window. Everything was held behind there. The tortured cries and the pained shouts. Curtains were blocking the hell outside; I hoped that they would become a steel that I couldn't move.

But my curiosity, my hope, my utter stupidity... made me slide the material outwards.

Shock was not enough to describe how I felt. I wasn't shocked, nor surprised. We had been expecting this for five years. But I hadn't thought it would happen. Not ever, not in my whole life, not this year, not today. Outside, on that street that had once been alive with children and parents and animals, was a massacre.

Some were already dead; bodies that would never be buried. The majority were on the floor, hands covering their bloodied ears; horrific pain erupting from their mouths. It was awful. The madness in their eyes as they tried to tear down doors. They looked desperately for a chance at survival but they would not receive it.

People that had been so... human yesterday now resembled dogs. They would not live much longer, but the scientists and doctors in charge had guaranteed that the first hour or so of the Siren would be awful. They had assured us that the zombified humans would become so weak that they would be rendered harmless.

They did not look harmless. They looked dangerous.

I walked downstairs, in my pyjamas, tears streaming from my eyes. Trying not to let them become sobs, I checked all the locks. The door couldn't be opened and nor could the windows. Any other space was boarded shut.

I felt nauseous. Bile was creeping up my throat, threatening to choke me. Anxiety was reaching its cold fingers towards my spine and fear was pumping its toxicity through my veins. I covered my mouth only to race to the bathroom, prepared to be sick. Oh... but, how could I? How could I vomit when my stomach was empty? So, I wretched and I wretched until tears replaced my disgust. I was sitting on my bathroom floor in the middle of the night, sobbing into my bare legs. Crying so that maybe, just maybe, I could drown out the screams. I tried so hard to stop the screeches of my neighbours from reaching my ears. I curled into myself and pressed my hands against my head; I found blankets in my room and wrapped them around my shivering body.

Just as long as the tears didn't turn into gasps.

I felt like a child once more. Wanting only to be in my mother and father's arms. Wanting only for the pain to go away. I called many times for something, anything; God, though I didn't believe. My friends. My mother. My father. Even my neighbours. I pleaded with them to be quiet. I begged them to just... die. Please. But there was no response. No alarm woke me, no soothing parent, no laughing friend. My sense of loneliness was bone-shattering. I could be the only person left in the world. There were over seven billion people on the planet.