Chapter 1:
As he moved silently between the trees, a light breeze caressed his forehead and made a strand of brown hair fly over his eyes. Daryl raised his hand gently to put his hair on. His gesture was fluid but controlled. From now on, the slightest unnecessary noise had to be avoided; it could have fatal consequences. Daryl was far from the camp, being attacked now and death was assured.
When the wind fell, he set off again, and quickly, making his way through the dense jungle, reached his goal for the day. It had been several kilometers since he had started to hear the faint sound, spotted the day before, of water hitting the rock, but when he crossed the last plant barrier separating him from his objective, the noise became loud, violent, pure. The waterfall was about twenty meters high, which allowed it to be hidden by the cymes of most trees. A blinding light was striking the pure water, which descended like silver hair on the shiny stones, before crashing down below. The surrounding nature was lush, omnipresent, impenetrable. Millions of shades of green framed the natural spectacle. It was magnificent and Daryl could not take his eyes off. Thousands of small bright red dots were tied all over the rocks. Wild berries. The water hole below was crystal clear, and you could see fish as big as melons at the bottom.
The sound of the waterfall covered any noise that might have attracted the Others. Daryl took a break. It had been more than 3 hours that he was half crawling in this thick jungle. He slid down the slope, put his bag, gourds, weapons, clothes, and shoes padded with moss on the
wet stone, except the knife always attached to his calf, and entered naked in the water. It was cool but not freezing because the sun was warming it. He got under the waterfall and watched the water run down his muscular and full of scars body, marked by 5 years of survival. He suddenly realized. He had not taken a bath since the beginning of the apocalypse. No, even before, in his little pizza deliverer apartment, there was no bathtub.
Actually, there was not even enough place to put a bed for two. He often thought that it could have been a problem if he had to take a girl home after a party. But anyway, the question had never arisen. Daryl, who was then called David, had always lacked self-confidence. Shortly after his birth, the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis caused his parents’ jobs and their Atlanta home to be lost. Raised in extreme poverty, he had been undernourished for much of his childhood and had kept the stigmas. Even the end of the world had not changed his small size. At the age of 22, from his one meter sixty-five, perched on his delivery motorbike, he had watched the world collapse, slowly.
It had been so slow that almost no one noticed anything at first. But quickly, people like David, those who spent their time on the street, saw that something was wrong. People in suits, with their briefcases, going to work, stopped. They froze in the middle of the streets, everywhere in the cities, everywhere on the entire planet. They remained motionless, their eyes glassy, as if petrified, day and night. It was impossible to move them from their place, as if they were rooted on the ground, or if they weighed a ton. At first, people have enjoyed these “living” attractions. They drew shapes on their faces and the children climbed on their shoulders. But within a few days, the “motionless people” have begun to give off a pestilent odor. People started to bypass and call them “the Others”.
In a few weeks, their number had increased very quickly, too quickly. At the same time, strangely, there were fewer and fewer cars on the roads, which arranged David’s deliveries well.
But the economic activity had visibly slowed down. The economic experts on TV did not understand, the political powers wanted to be reassuring, the social and public services began to show signs of saturation.
For their part, the scientists who had succeeded in studying the Others could not explain the cause of this ailment, but were categorical: they were not biologically dead, but almost. Breathing, heartbeat, blood circulation and brain electrical activity were very weak, but existing. However, the nervous and eye systems were completely shut down, while the digestive system was extremely defective. Smell and taste also appeared to be severely damaged. Only the hearing remained intact because the inner ear is protected by the skull bone. Moreover, the lack of stimulation of the body by the nervous system had led to congestion around the vital organs, which had deprived fat and muscles of oxygen. Basically, they rotted from the inside, which produced those awful smells.
For the rest of the events, there are no longer many living people capable of telling the story. Anyway, a few of those who survived can explain them precisely. It went too fast.
What Daryl knew for sure is that on January 18, 2030, at 4:48 p.m., all the Others, who at that time numbered in millions, suddenly jumped at everything that was within their reach. Daryl knew this because he was driving on Arden Road, north of Buckhead, the chic residential district of Atlanta, his gaze fixed on the screen of the interactive map hanging on his motorbike handlebars.
When he saw a shapeless thing throwing itself under the wheels of his scout, he swerved, and, in a saving reflex, did not slow down. He would have been caught by another Other who came from the other side. Instead, he accelerated, narrowly avoiding the disarticulated bodies trying to catch him. He drove at full speed for several kilometers, but the noise of his engine invariably attracted them. On the way, the cries of pain from the dozens of people being
violently attacked was the only thing that seemed to distract the Others from him. There was blood everywhere.
Realizing that they were only attracted by the noise, he jumped from his scooter, and threw himself into Peachtree Creek, letting himself be carried by the stream. He did not understand it until later, but this act was the one that saved his life during the end of the world. In the middle of the cold river current, he noticed that the Others were not attacking him. It was mainly the sudden or articulated sounds that attracted them, those that could come from human beings on which they could feed. Not the continuous, natural sounds like flowing water or wind.
In the months that followed, David was renamed Daryl by the first group of survivors he had joined, referring the TV series “The Walking Dead” and because of his hair which had grown quickly. But the Others were not “walking dead”, they were not zombies.
First, there was no evidence that they were dead, although their decay had continued during the years that followed. 5 years after, their eyes had been completely eaten away by vermin, and they only had empty sockets left.
Second, being bitten did not transform you into an Other.
Third, they were completely immortal as long as they were not reduced to crumbs or ashes. Shooting them in the head was useless. The only way to stop them without charring them to the bones was to cut off all their limbs or to separate their heads from the rest of the body.
But even so, they remained aware. It was not uncommon to meet an entire head, alone, which at the slightest sound, was agitating. Not uncommon, because their number had exceeded hundreds of millions long before the date of their awakening. They just froze inside their apartments and their houses, where no one could see them, and not in the middle of the streets. So far, Daryl has not met anyone who knows what woke them up from their immobilism. It was his goal, his obsession, to understand.
