When it all started, people had fled
Staten Island, climbing over each other to escape the quarantines being rolled
in by the military. The country was in a state of panic and the people
scattered in search of some sanctuary. Some stayed behind, to tough it out in
their homes, remaining with loved ones or, like Milton, because they hated
people.
Milton Waters lived a quiet life. He
woke each morning, showered, brushed his teeth, put on the clothes he had
ironed the night before (when there had been power to iron) and walk down the 4
flights of stairs to the street. His office was two blocks away so he would
simply walk the distance with his thermos in one hand and his bag slung over
his right shoulder. After the diaspora from Staten Island he lived the same
way. The walk to work was simply quieter and less crowded, much to his liking.
Milton worked at the Essex County
Morgue. His peers had seen fit to leave, already being surrounded by the dead,
they were not keen on seeing people in similar stages of decay stalking the
streets. The general fear had been that the bodies being kept would reanimate
and consume them. This was not the case. The bodies in the morgue were quiet
and kept to themselves. They mostly lay in their beds interred in their drawers
while Milton read behind his desk. His drawers and desktop were littered with books
and prescription bottles for any sort of ailment. The murky orange bottles were
gathered around a diagnostic manual like revelers before a relic
Working in the refrigerated and preserved
environment had its benefits. The dead who wandered the streets saw Milton as
one of their own, ignoring him as they shambled from place to place. He could
also catch up on all of the culture and literature he had been deprived of when
people had previously died and become work instead of managing themselves.
Indeed he saw these new “people” as more responsible, they were also very clean
despite the haggard state many assumed. He still didn’t dare to near them.
The few living people who remained
on the island had already collected into small militarized camps. They viewed
Milton as an outsider, a strange aberration of humanity. Every time he wandered
past a camp the members would marvel at his clean dressed and oblivious nature.
They would remark that he must one day succumb and die.
Milton began to have difficulty
finding food. He searched through the grocers market for anything that had
survived but viewed each possible meal with a disgusted skepticism. “How sick will
I get if I eat this?” He would ask the food in question. If it silently
responded anything other than a firm negative, it would be replaced on the
shelf and mentally noted to have failed inspection.
Books also became increasingly scarce.
Other survivors saw them as a fuel source and began to stockpile them in their
camps in preparation for the winter. This is how Milton began to read books
that he would normally ignore. It is how 50
Shades of Grey and Twilight found
their way onto his desk. He read them in protest. Protest of the survivors and
their insistence on destroying culture and protest of things changing in this
new world order.
It was halfway through the third
book of Twilight when Milton had
enough. He flung the book across the room where it slapped loudly against the
vinyl floor. The sound made him wince and he at once regretted it. Noting that
he had little else to do, he fetched the book of the floor gingerly and brought
it back to his desk where he proceeded to wipe down the covers. This was what
drew that the first living corpse into his halls and ended Milton’s existence among
the living.
People continued to see
Milton after he turned. His brain was hardwired into that routine. Each day
that decaying body made its way down four flights of stairs and into that
office where it sat until the end of the day. It would eat the bodies of those in
his care, possibly preferring their preserved taste and always wiping his face
when he finished.
