Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Moans From the Factory

So here is a little something I wrote because I rolled and got "Zombies/Living Dead" in a game. Before I rolled this one I got "Presidents/Prime Ministers" which I had no idea how I would write. I then re-rolled and BAM, Zombies!


Hope you all enjoy it!


"Moans From the Factory"


A guy I once knew used to tell this really strange story about loud noises coming out from a supposedly abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. He always went on and on about how he one time went there at night to try and capture on film whatever it was making those noises. He said that he climbed through a hole in the chain-link fence surrounding the place and then somehow navigated his way up to an open window. After having a little trouble fitting through the small opening he was finally in the building, alone, at night.

He got out his camera and began to snap pictures of the room he crawled into. It seemed like the place was once a lab of some sort based on the old equipment left to rust. There were a few un-opened filling cabinets spread around the room so he decided to be a "detective" and bust open one to see what went on at that place. After looking over the 4 or 5 that were there, he chose the one which looked most beaten and began to pry it open with a piece of rebar he found in the hallway. After a little struggling he finally got it open and started to shift through the old and moldy papers which were left.

He actually showed us some pictures of the papers he found so we do know he wasn't completely full of shit. The papers seemed to be medical files on patients which were held at that location. This seemed really strange since whenever we hear someone talk about that place they always mention how it’s been always abandoned and in dire need of being torn down. No one ever said anything about it having patients of some kind at one time or another. The papers were relatively normal for patients that would be admitted to any other hospital, but each and every one had an extra piece of paper stapled onto it with the title "Subject (#) observation of unknown viral infection".

Then the paper went on to talk about various points in time after the person was infected with “something”. It was kind of unbelievable, but we did see the pictures and they did seem to be real. From what we gathered after looking at all the pictures he took was that after the subject was infected they would soon develop a strong fever which resembled a cold. This would worsen; all the while areas around the body would begin to develop an odd coloration of the veins, and that was they would turn black. After a random amount of time the patient (depending on the person) would fall into a coma and then soon after expire. At least, that's what the machines the doctors used said. Anywhere between 5 minutes after expiration to 5 hours the subject would "come back to life" as one of the doctors had said in almost illegible writing.

Zombies? Really? We didn't believe him, and he knew we wouldn't until he showed us the last set of pictures he had. They were attached to the back of the files and had the subject’s number located on the back. It was a time-lapse progression of the onset of whatever was infecting these people. Every single one of them had this terrified expression on their face which progressively got worse and worse. Each and every one on had a single picture which had the time of death written on the back and showed the now peaceful faces of the victims. The next picture... showed something that I still really don't believe.

On the back of each and every picture after the one which had the time of death on it had "Re-animation at ----". The peaceful face was now contorted into a hungry snarl with black fluids leaking from everywhere they could. It looked like they became extremely violent after they "re-animated" and luckily were still tied down from the time before they died. The last picture for each subject had them again lying peacefully on the table they were tied down on, except for the large spike which was then protruding each and every subject’s heads. We guessed that they killed them, like you would any zombie.

We still had doubts about what he was telling us so we wanted him to show us exactly where he found them. That night we all hiked out to the abandoned factory. It was a long hike, one which most of us didn't expect, so when we got there finally we took a quick breather. Our friend who told us about the place said he was going to go check the place out, just in case there was security or something lurking around. We watched as he crawled through the almost invisible hole in the fence and start to scale the wall to the still open window. He climbed in and then we lost sight of him.

Not wanting to go follow after him until we were sure it was safe, we decided to hang around until he got back. After about an hour of waiting we were starting to get worried. He was only supposed to climb in and check if it was safe or not then get back to us, but too much time had passed already. Just as we were about to go in to look for him the moaning started. It first began as something you could mistake for a strong wind, but then it started to increase in volume until it sounded like it was coming from everywhere. Needless to say, we were shitting our pants. While deciding on whether or not to just leave him there and run, we saw movement in the window.

We could barely make it out, but it was definitely him with his flashlight in hand. It seemed like something was wrong from the way he was slowly moving towards the window while holding his arm as if it was hurt. To put it simply, it looked like something had happened to him. Just before he got to the window we lost sight of him again. I guess he fell down or something, but we never did find out. Just before we were about to go see what had happened to him, army helicopters appeared overhead with search lights scanning the ground between the fence with the tree line and the side of the building. Sirens started going off and we could hear people running around the perimeter of the building.

And so we ran away with our tails between our legs. We're not proud of what we did, but what else do you expect from a bunch of teenagers? We ran back to town as fast as we could and reported what had happened to the police. We were afraid of what might have happened to our friend, but more importantly we were afraid of what might happen to us. The police held us there until our respective families came to pick us up. The next day we learned that the police had went to the factory and searched it, but didn't find our friend.

They told us they would continue the search for our friend for a while, and they did. They really did seem to want to find where we had disappeared to. It was around a week later that a fisherman found our friend floating down river, bloated and torn apart from what they tell us "animal bites". He was quickly cremated and buried and within a month of this happening the town went back to normal. We couldn't believe what had happened, especially since we were all right there when we saw him disappear from the window that one last time before we bolted.

We all decided to go back to the factory to see if we could find anything, or maybe we wanted some closure of some kind. Many of us felt like this was somehow our fault and wanted to remove the blame in some way. After hiking back to the place where the factory was we were met with a huge pile of rubble and signs placed on the newly put up fence saying "Construction Site. Keep Out". This place had been abandoned for close to 20 years, so why now did someone finally decide to buy it and tear down the old building?

It was all too weird for us to get our heads around. With the factory gone, most of us who felt some kind of guilt moved on and the others kind of just forgot. I occasionally head up to where the factory once stood and try to make sense of what happened. Something had happened in that factory that night which killed our friend. The only reason why I haven't moved on is because I can still hear the moans from the night, loud and numerous, all around me... closing in... Until they seem to be right on top of me.


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