Judgement Day

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all associated characters were created by Joss Whedon and are owned by Mutant Enemy. The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z were written by Max Brooks, a man who may just know something we don't.
The story is intentionally written in the format of the later book.

Hero
Part 1: Judgement Day

Cleveland, Ohio

[Of all the people I was asked to interview while compiling my report, none were harder to get to see than Alexander Harris. Like most people, I heard about the Cleveland Safe-Zone on Radio Free Earth, and I was more than a little surprised at how the students and staff of a private girls school were able to hold off a still unknown number of zombies and several attacks by marauders with at best minimal outside help. But seeing the school for the first time, with its high, well maintained stone walls and vast grounds, it's easy to see how they managed to not only survive, but to some extent thrive. I have to wait for almost an hour after I arrive to speak to Mr Harris himself, and I'm shocked to see that he looks at least twenty years older than his file says he is. We meet in his office, a small but well lit room at the back of the main building, high up in the attic.]

So, Mr Harris...

Please, call me Xander; the only person to ever call me Mr Harris was my high School Principle.

I'm sorry, Xander; how did you end up here during the Panic?

I wasn't intentional; I was visiting some friends who worked here, and got stranded when all the international flights were indefinitely suspended. You see, I was living over in Scotland at the time, working for the Travis Foundation. I was a carpenter before I lost my eye in a car accident.

[He gestures to the patch covering his left eye.]

With my depth perception shot to hell, I couldn't be trusted to hit a nail on the head, so I was kind of at a loose end until some friends who were working for the Foundation got me a job. I was supposed to be overseeing the renovation of a castle that the Foundation owned that they wanted to use as their new headquarters after their London office was destroyed in a gas main explosion a year or so before. But I needed a holiday, so Robin and Faith suggested I came over here.

That would be Robin Woods and Faith Lehane? The schools then Principle and Self Defence instructor?

Yeah, they'd been together for about a year, but I feel that the cracks were starting to show: Robin was just too straight-laced for Faith, and she found him a little too controlling. It's not my place to speak ill of the dead, he was a nice guy and all, but we were only really friends because of Faith. Anyway, they invited me over, and that's how I came to be here when the whole world seemed to fall apart around us. A lot of the girls back here were from other countries, and they were the first to take off. Every day there'd be fewer and fewer faces at breakfast. I'm not sure we could have held it together much longer if the families of those students who came from America and Canada started to show up, along with some other's who just happened to be in North America at the time. The school's an old hospital, built back in the day when lots of fresh air was thought to be a cure-all. That at least meant that overcrowding wasn't a problem, and we had plenty of outbuilding that we ended up converting. And being so far out of the city meant that this place had always been semi self-sustaining, with its own wells, septic system and a couple of well stocked and maintained backup generators. The records we found showed that back before the days of snowploughs, this place could be completely cut-off if it was a harsh winter. Guess in that respect we were lucky.

When did the first zombies show up?

That's hard to tell; like I said, we had some people arriving looking for daughters or sisters, and some of them had been bitten. This was back before anyone understood just what we were dealing with, so we just put them in the infirmary. That ended after the first one to die reanimated and attacked one of our candy-stripe's. But that happened about the same time they started to appear in Cleveland. Robin ordered a guard put on the gate, armed with bows from the archery club.

[He laughs]

Yeah, that probably sounds crazy to you, but the archery team here was already state-champions by that point, so they knew how to hit a small target at range. At first they aimed to miss, trying to scare the zombies off, but that didn't work. One got hit by accident, the arrow going through its chest, heart and out the back. That, well that was kind of a wake up call: we bared the gates, parking one of the buses up against it for added protection. I mean, those things were strong, but they were just bars, not the steel plates we have now. Faith organised a search team to check all the other gates, made sure that no other zombies had already gotten inside. Then we had to deal with the ones in the infirmary.

[The smile fades from his face]

That was hard; couple of people had been bitten, and by then we'd worked out what that meant, and had a good idea what we were dealing with. We gave them a choice: we'd mix up something that would let them die with a little peace and dignity, or we'd sedate them until it ran its course. Either way, they had to be tied to their beds so we could deal with them when they reanimated. Most took the quick way out, but a couple refused on religious grounds. We moved them to anther building and posted a guard. One by one they turned, and were dealt with.

[He walks over to the small window and looks out over the immaculately maintained cemetery, marked by row after row of headstones]

We had a few suicides that night; people who'd lost loved ones or saw the way things were going outside and just gave up. I hear it was the same elsewhere, but it felt worse. Then when the TV and radio stations started to go dark, and the main power lines died, it really sank it: the cavalry wasn't going to be ridding over the hill, not with the same thing playing out across the world. At lot of us, my self included at one point, thought that maybe it was the End, you know, Judgement Day? I don't know if you've ever read the Book of Revelations, but it's a very dark, scary thing to be looking at when you're besieged by thousands of zombies.

To Be Continued...