Chevlar Files Book 1 Chapter 2

Chapter Two:
The First Day is the Hardest

After he reassessed the past day's events, Kaolin first action was to try to shake the trainees awake. He went over to a blonde boy, and he shook him again over and over, but he still remained still and cold. Suddenly, he heard some movement behind him; he turned quickly, and saw one of the other recruits climb up, and stared at Kaolin with gray, blank eyes.

"Oh, hey there kid; are you okay? Did that gas stuff affect you any?"  The person just stared at him, without a word or motion to what Kaolin had said.

"Hmm? Hey guy, are you okay…" He motioned towards the recruit with his hand to shake him a bit on the shoulder. As Kaolin stretched his arm out, and as he extended his hand to him, the boy's stare gained a sudden flare of emotion; the kid growled in his throat, and lunged forward, and sunk his teeth into his forearm.

"O-Ow!! Hey, get off you crazy bastard!" He attempted to force the feral person off of him, but to no avail; he forced his teeth deeper into his arm, threatening to remove that whole section of his arm off. Mustering up his strength, Kaolin raised his other arm back, and delivered a straight punch, square in the side of his temple. His punch rattled the crazed boy's case, and he pulled his teeth out and winced back, his head twitching rapidly, and he kept grunting incoherently as if he had receded into a state of animalism. Taking advantage of this pause, Kaolin reached for his makeshift holster, and pulled out his personal 9mm pistol. As he did this, he began to try to persuade the kid from making another mistake.

"Kid, if you try that again, don't think I won't shoot you; I'm only going to warn you once, so if you like living, I suggest you stand down." Kaolin was half bluffing when he threatened his life. He thought that he didn't know what he was doing, that whatever that gas stuff was affected him to where he couldn't control himself; Kaolin was right in this aspect, but it didn't matter now, between him and this mindless psycho, only one of them would get the reward of living on.

The trainee licked his teeth clean of Kaolin's blood, his once gray eyes now being bloodshot to the point where they were all red. He stepped back before lashing out again, and then went into a dead sprint, his eyes set on his target, Kaolin's throat. Only when he was within arm's reach did the first shots ring out; six pops let their voices become heard in total, and all six of them were chiming all throughout the silent building, and into the ghostly streets beyond it.

The first three rounds were fired almost instantaneously, and each found their own spot in the runner's body; the third bullet was the most significant in that it was the one that actually had any effect on the beast, and made him stagger back in the painful experience of it making its way inside. Less than a second after the fourth bullet propelled itself out and found its mark, buried deep into his brain after going through his right eye, bursting it apart as it tore its way through. Only after he began to fall to his death did the last two rounds rang out, each joining a place into its body alongside their brothers and sisters that went in before them.

Standing on the opposite of this mass of lifeless flesh and bone was Kaolin, his eyes were ridden of all doubt and anxiety, these feelings were now replaced with cold, calculated killer instinct. Only when all had calmed itself did feelings come back into his eyes. He looked down and gazed upon the act of violence he had recently committed, he dropped to his knees from the shock of what he had seen.

"I…I just killed a kid…oh man, I can't believe this happened." Kaolin said to his reflection cast off by the weapon in his hand. To him, it didn't matter what this kid could've done, it didn't justify him shooting him in cold blood. He looked at his hands, and saw them trembling violently; he tried to still his mind and calm himself down, but combined the pain spike his right arm was now feeling from the bite wound, it was to no avail.

As he continued to feel this dread, he began to hear more grunts and growling all about him; the rest of the recruits were starting to wake up, and they all seemed to have the same affliction as the first one who awakened. Unable and unwilling to take on all of these new threats, Kaolin picked himself up first, and moved towards the firing range exit; once he reached it, he slammed the door shut behind him and locked it. As he turned around to look down the hall, he could see all the bodies of the other police officers; some were already lumbering around, unaware of his presence, while some were still lying on the ground, still not ready to be up and about. Kaolin looked for an opening to escape, but he couldn't go down the hall without those change-of-face cannibals noticing him; he scanned the doors down the hall for a possible escape route, and saw that the door to the locker room was open, and would obstruct their views if one walked in line with it.

After taking notice to the door, he hugged the wall on the respective side of it, and began easing his way to the open room. When he got to the room, he heard a voice from the office across from him; it was a woman's voice, and she was calling for help for someone else in the room with her. These screams attracted the attention of the beings down the hall, and after they realized where it came from, every one of them came rushing down the hall; in their haste, they tackled the locker room door, and slammed it shut behind Kaolin, making him invisible by their standards. Kaolin turned back, and listened in quietly on what was happening. He heard the door being banged on, the various roars and screeches from those down the hall, and the hinges of the door eventually giving in, but the worst noise had yet to come to his ears; he began to hear the woman screaming with her voice full of agony, he heard the sounds of flesh being ripped open, blood squirting out from the openings, and her bones being torn from their sockets. Before he could leave from hearing all he wanted to, he had to bear through the sounds of all kinds of the various noises of the beasts' vigorous eating and slurping of whatever remained of the poor woman's corpse. Kaolin grabbed his stomach, nauseous from merely hearing what had transpired from across the hall; he continued to walk to the locker room, on the verge of throwing up and guilt ridden at how he didn't do anything to save her. He tried to rationalize that there was nothing he could've done for her, that he would've just been killed as well; this thinking just made him wish he had died there along with her.

After he continued to walk the white stone hallway that seemed to go on for miles, he eventually made it to the locker area. Before he could rest himself, he checked every possible nook and cranny for anyone or anything; it was only when his search yielded nothing that he let his body give way to the hour's events. He let his body collapse onto a bench, and buried his face deep into his palms. As he sat there, he remembered that he was wounded; he looked at his forearm, and saw the bite mark the kid had made. Kaolin thought that it looked a lot worse than what it looked like now, but he assumed it must've been adrenaline playing its tricks on him. He pulled himself out of the long sleeved over-shirt he was wearing and, taking his knife out, cut the damaged sleeve off, and used it to seal the wound to prevent further bleeding. After the deed was done and the wound tied up, Kaolin leaned his head back on the lockers, and looked up the florescent lighting; as he was hypnotized by the brightness, he began to hear those…things footsteps. Kaolin listened in carefully, and made the assumption that they were leaving to go out on the streets to search for more of what they deemed to be "Food". He pulled his head back up, and began to think on how mere gas could change rational people into feral, flesh crazed beings.

"Hah….dammit, this doesn't make any sense at all! Who did this and why? Why did it hit here of all-," Kaolin cut himself off there with a sudden realization he just obtained.

"Wait, has whatever the hell this gas was hit other places too?" Kaolin pondered to himself. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out his cellphone in attempts to get some answers. When he went to dial a number, the only out of town number that came up to him was his parent's; after a minute of debating, he decided to go with theirs. He punched the numbers in, and lifted up the phone to his ear in a hope for an answer; the sound of ringing looped six or seven times, but eventually someone picked up.

"Hello? Hello? Who is this?" Was the first thing he heard, and Kaolin instantly recognized the voice; it was his 4-year old niece Sarah, and it was a bit unnerving to realize that she was the first to pick up the phone.

Kaolin replied back while trying to keep his voice calm, "Hey Sarah, it's me Kaolin, do you remember me? Listen, can you give the phone to your mom or dad? I need to talk to them."

Sarah said back in a playful tone, "Uncle Kaolin? Sorry, but even if I could, I wouldn't let you talk to my mommy or daddy. You're a bad person for what you did to your daddy." She was referring to what Kaolin had done in his past, when he had first become a vigilante. He stopped a local gang mob, and when he had jumped the whole of them during a meeting they were having, he successfully ended it, but this had ended up in his father's demise.

While he was taken aback from her last comment, Kaolin chose to focus on the peculiar one before it.

"Wait a minute Sarah, what do you mean 'if you could let me talk' to your parents?"
Sara replied with a bit of confusion in her voice, "Well, it's just that everyone here, including my mommy and daddy, are all asleep on the floor."

Kaolin's sense of dread went through him again; what has happened here happened all the way up in Michigan where his family resided. With this he could only assume that the entire nation of the U.S. was struck with this mysterious gaseous chemical.

Trying to hold back the fear in his voice, he instructed to Sarah, "Sarah, listen to me, get away from all the people still asleep. Find somewhere safe to hide, and stay hidden from them. Whatever you do, do not let them see you unless they talk back first, okay?"

Sarah replied back in a sassy voice, "Why should I do anything that you say? You're the one who ruined our whole family with your stupid choices; that's what my mommy told me."

At this, Kaolin raised his voice a bit, "Hey, listen to me Sarah! You have to find somewhere to hide! You have to-," He stopped talking, and began to listen in to the receiver. Besides his nieces breathing and waiting for him to finish his sentence, he heard someone getting up in the background. Another sound he heard, almost nearly inaudible, was what had struck him speechless; it was the sound of an unknown person, growling.

Sarah heard this as well, and replied back, "Sorry Uncle Kaolin, but my mommy's woke up now! I'm going to tell her how you've been trying to tell me what to do!" She dropped the phone and let it hit the floor with a cushioned thud, receiver up.

When he heard her walk away, he shouted through the phone, "Sarah wait! Don't walk towards your mommy! Get away from her, now!" These outbursts fell on silent ears, and Kaolin could do at that point was to listen in on what was to happen next.

What had happened after his last chance to save his kid niece could've broken any heart; the young girl walked up to her mother, and as she began to talk to her, she picked up by each arm. Just after her mother had done this, she began to pull both of his tiny arms apart from one another; Sara's pain-ridden cries meant nothing to her changed mother, and she kept pulling at them harder and harder. When she had pulled hard enough, she had managed to rip both of her daughter' arms from her body; she had fallen to the ground an armless body full of screaming, and tears of tortuous pain coursing throughout her body. As she kept screaming from her parental betrayal, her mother took each arm in her hand, and began to pick it clean of Sarah's flesh bite-by-bite; this part of the process took only two and a half minutes. After that timespan was up, the mother turned its attention to her amputated child; she was nearly dead from the blood loss, still screaming from the overwhelming pain and terror at the top of her lungs. The mother picked young Sarah up and finally ended the suffering; she sank her teeth into her throat, going through half her neck in one bite. The second chomp came, and her head was severed, and her life ended; her time of living came to a close, with her last thoughts being, "Why did mommy do this to me? What did I do wrong?"

Kaolin had the fortune to not have to see any of the gruesome scene with his eyes; he also had the misfortune to neglect to hang up the phone and end the call. After all the screaming was all over and done with, all he could hear was the rabid tearing of flesh coming off of bone. He hung up the phone finally, and let it drop the floor; his hands couldn't keep a decent grip on it because they trembled and shook with such intensity. Kaolin began to breathe erratically and in short, shaking gasps; he wanted to scream in misery from what he had heard, but he knew that he couldn't afford to do that.

Slowly, he stood up from where he was sitting, and dragged himself to the corner of the room, and slid down to the ground.

"D-Dammit….I couldn't do anything…I-I just let Sarah get-get….," Kaolin couldn't bear to tell himself what he had to go through; as he keep talking, tears of agony and silence began to roll down his cheeks.

He continued on as he keep crying and sniffing, "Uh… Shit. Wh-what the hell is going on? Why did this have to happen? Why…?

Kaolin threw his face into his arms as he kept wallowing in his grief and sorrow;  whatever it was that was the cause of this, it had taken away from him not only his family and friends, but everything that he had known; these were moral standards, order, civility, and the scales of right and wrong. He lied there for hours on end, and eventually he fell asleep again from the day's events; the timer on his watch hit midnight, and next day had begun. This was only the first day for Kaolin; the others ahead of it would hold more pain for him to endure, and countless trials, and trials...