Green Dawn
Copyright© 2025 by BluDraygn
Chapter 1
Ethan looked out over the town of Hartford as the sky in the east began to lighten. Nothing moved, no dogs barked, no cats yowled or hissed over territory, no raccoons dug through trashcans. Nobody was up watering their lawns, gardens, or the landscaping in front of their house. Nobody was kissing their loved one goodbye before driving to work or getting their kids ready to go off to school.
It had been months since he had seen another living human, and that hadn’t been pretty.
That day, he heard the roar of an engine and ran to the attic window facing the street, filled with both hope and horror. Hope that maybe someone might be able to rescue him from the hell he lived in and the horror of understanding the consequences of making too much noise. He saw the truck come squealing around a corner and barrel down the street in front of his safehouse, but the vehicle already had white smoke pouring from under the hood, its radiator damaged from Greenies throwing themselves in front of it in its mad dash toward freedom.
Greenies, the name seemed silly and childish, but that’s what Ethan called them. By any standard, they were zombies, just not the undead kind. He likened it to something like the cordyceps fungus that took control of ants and made them climb to a high place, then came bursting out of the insect’s head to spread its spores, except whatever this infection was, it affected humans. It also didn’t come popping out of a person’s head but was transmitted through contact with their mucus. If you got bitten, and the Greenies liked to bite, you got infected.
His former job as a paramedic didn’t give him any kind of expertise on strange, likely alien diseases, but he had made a few observations. He gave the Greenies their name because their skin turned green as the infection progressed. He guessed that it gave them the ability to photosynthesize since they were more active during the day and appeared to have a severe aversion to clothing. They could often be seen just standing in one place for hours, not moving except slowly turning to keep facing the sun, like a sunflower blossom or a motorized solar panel.
Their green tint was also the reason he suspected something alien. Ethan watched a video a long time ago that said that even if humans developed the ability to house chloroplasts in their cells, they wouldn’t have enough surface area to generate the energy needed to sustain their bodies. Greenies didn’t have this problem, as far as he could tell, so he expected the answer to be extraterrestrial. Not that he had any proof one way or the other. It just felt better to think that whatever this was hadn’t been lurking around on Earth somewhere, waiting for the opportunity to infect humans.
But their reliance on the sun was the reason he was still alive. The Greenies that soaked up sunlight for most of the day could keep going long into the night, but usually ran out of steam a few hours before dawn. This was Ethan’s chance to venture out and collect supplies.
The Greenies were also incredibly strong compared to humans. Ethan didn’t think that they were actually any stronger, but that they had lost the limiters in the human brain that kept us from damaging ourselves with our own strength. Even worse, they didn’t react to pain, which also may have explained their brutish strength. He watched one male decide he didn’t like a car parked on the side of the street and punched it until his arm broke. He looked at the bone protruding from the side of his arm like it was a minor inconvenience before meandering down the sidewalk as if nothing happened. But this led to a few discoveries. The Greenies didn’t have red blood anymore but oozed a green, syrupy goo instead. They also didn’t appear to have exceptional noses but instead relied more heavily on sound and sight. Lastly, the Greenies were cannibals.
Before he had gotten very far, other zombies started converging on him, probably drawn in by the noise from him pounding on the car. One took note of the drops of green blood on the ground and followed them to the injured Greenie. It then grabbed the broken arm and tried to pull it off, swinging the injured male into a storefront window that had shattered long ago. The remaining shards of glass sliced open the already wounded zombie, making him ooze more of the green blood as he got back to his feet. This triggered a feeding frenzy among the zombies approaching to investigate the sound. They broke into a sprint and piled into the bleeding Greenie, knocking him out of sight from Ethan’s vantage at the top of an old furniture store. Moments later, zombies poured out of the store, holding limbs, organs, and even the Greenie’s head as they came back out into the sun to feast.
The furniture store where he watched this happen became his safehouse. One of his nights out scrounging for supplies, he wandered into the old store and was immediately intrigued by the early 1900s hand-crank elevator in the back of the store. On the third floor of the building, he discovered what solidified the building as his choice for a new safehouse. A drop-down stair led up to the attic. If that hadn’t been enough, the attic had been remodeled into an apartment at one point but had been used for storage again in recent years. It even had a small balcony with some badly neglected outdoor furniture on it. But the added safety of having a stair that he could pull up and deny access to any zombies that wandered in was too good to pass up.
His new home also allowed him the opportunity to observe the behaviors and patterns of the Greenies in a way his place out in the suburbs did not. And some of what he saw was heartbreaking. Many of the zombies clung to tiny scraps of their former humanity. They continued to use sidewalks and crosswalks even though there was no traffic to be concerned about. He watched the same greenies go into the same abandoned coffee shops at the same time of day, following routines from before they were infected. But what killed him were the children. Tiny greenies that were just as dangerous as the others would walk beside one of the adults with their hand raised as if waiting for the larger zombie to take it, only to be ignored.
Even sex wasn’t sacred. Once or twice a week, he watched a male Greenie push down a female and climb on top of her, but it was a mockery of human sex more than anything as the male shook his hips up and down without ever touching genitals before losing interest, getting up, and walking away.
The only exception was a single instance where the male pushed the female over the hood of a car. The female actually reacted to the male’s initial thrust, and the male kept going longer than normal before losing interest and wandering off. The frustrating part was the female’s hands. He couldn’t see her face, but her hands kept opening and closing as the male worked his hips back and forth. Ethan had seen a few women do the same thing, grabbing the blankets or bedsheets as they moaned beneath him.
That Greenies didn’t feel pain but could still feel pleasure angered and frustrated him. It felt unfair that these zombies, who had probably killed most of the world’s population by this point, could feel sexual pleasure. But it also frustrated him because it had been a very long time since he had even seen a woman, much less slept with one.
It shamed him to admit for a brief few seconds that he wondered if he could trap one of the females for his use. The moment passed quickly. If the infection was transmitted through a bite, more specifically through saliva, then it could be transmitted through other fluids as well, including vaginal. A condom might stop sperm and STDs, but he didn’t trust it to stop some alien bacteria or virus.
The short respite before dawn was Ethan’s chance to clear out the old furniture store of any zombies that had wandered in during the day and go out and collect supplies before the sun came up. The surrounding streets were littered with the decapitated corpses of the Greenies he had killed in their sluggish, pre-dawn state. Thankfully, the Greenies weren’t much for scavenging. If they ran across the body of one he recently killed, they would eat it, but never seemed to go out of their way to seek out the corpses.
Life fell into a lonely but stable routine for a little while until the day the truck came flying through town. Ethan had dealt with death plenty of times as a paramedic and more than he cared to think about since the zombie apocalypse began. He watched far too many men and women get either ripped apart and eaten or bitten and left to slowly transform into a Greenie over the next few days. He never thought he’d seriously consider eating a bullet, but he had a 9mm on his hip in case he ever got bitten. A Greenie’s bite caused paralysis, but it took a minute to kick in. Just enough time to put a bullet in the bastard who killed him and one in his own head. Like hell was he going to become one of those monsters.
But the truck screaming through town shook things up, if only for a few seconds. Predictably, the Greenies swarmed toward the noise. But what frightened Ethan as he watched was that they didn’t just move blindly toward the sound of the engine. Many zombies instead moved to block their likely path out of town. But things got far worse as he watched Greenies throw themselves at the truck’s grille. There were few better ways to disable an engine than to deny it coolant. One ran directly at the oncoming vehicle and leapt over the hood, but instead of extending its arms reaching for its prey, the zombie curled into a ball and slammed into the windshield. The glass turned white as it shattered. Unable to see, the driver plowed into a huge collection of Greenies that brought it to a stop. The zombies punched through the side windows like they were paper and dragged the truck’s occupants out as Ethan looked away. He’d seen enough people getting ripped apart for one lifetime.
The man and woman’s screams were short-lived. Ethan hoped that meant they were dead, but he’d check to be sure tonight when he went scavenging. They may have been stupid to try this kind of stunt, but they didn’t deserve to be turned into zombies. If they were still alive, he could at least offer them a quick death. That night, he was spared the burden of ending their lives as he found their bones still bearing scraps of flesh littered around the truck.
That brief moment had been the last time he saw another human, and that was months ago. On the other hand, the last person before the truck was a guy who stumbled into his house in the suburbs looking for food. Ethan had thought he found an ally, right up until the man tried to put a knife between his ribs. He’d never killed anyone before, but that bullet had been worth it, even if he did spend the next two days in the house’s basement being deathly quiet until the Greenies finally drifted away. Maybe it was for the best that he hadn’t seen anyone since.
Living in a world like this messes with your head. He wondered a couple of times why he hadn’t just checked out. From where he stood atop the furniture store, he was the only person left in the world, or he might as well have been. What really was the point of living in this hell? Hope? He hated to admit it, but he hadn’t lost all hope for the world. He believed that someone somewhere was alive and looking for a cure, and in the back of his head, he hoped they would find it and come rescue his ass if he only held out long enough.
A bird flitted past him and landed on the balcony’s railing. An ex-girlfriend of his loved bird watching and taught him a little. He thought this one might be a grackle or maybe a cowbird. He couldn’t really remember which was which, but this one had the darker head of the two.
“You’re playing with fire,” he said to the bird. “Fly too low around here, and you’re likely to get eaten.”
The greenies ate indiscriminately. Anything that lived and they could get their hands on was fair game, and that included birds and bugs, assuming they could catch them. It was weird to think that he probably didn’t need to worry about bugs in his safehouse because the green-skinned zombies were eating them all.
Since they could photosynthesize, he didn’t get why they seemed so ravenous but guessed that it had to do with them being so hard to kill. Not every wounded Greenie ended up like the car-puncher, and he had seen them heal with startling speed from wounds that would have killed a human. It’s why he took to decapitating the ones he could on his supply runs. They never seemed to come back from that, even though the body continued to act like it had a mind of its own for a few seconds before collapsing. Few things were more terrifying than getting grabbed by a headless zombie and pulled close to its body as if it were trying to bite you with the head lying on the ground behind it.
Just another reason to think this was some alien disease.
Ethan sighed as the Greenies in the street below started to rouse. The birds flitted off as he pushed away from the balcony rail and pulled out his oversized machete. He found it in a garage not far from his parents’ house after the apocalypse started, and it had saved his life more times than he cared to think. With most of the weight toward the tip, it made short work of lopping off a Greenie’s head. It still took a bit of technique and power, cutting a head off cleanly wasn’t nearly as easy as they made it look in the movies, but in the months since he found the weapon, he had gotten it down to a science.
Ethan took a bottle of oil and a whetstone out of a pouch on his belt and began tending to the blade. One of his first stops had been at an army supply store in town. Unfortunately, plenty of other people had the same idea, and the shelves were nearly bare by the time he arrived, but he did get a pocketed vest and a web belt with some pouches for it. The same was true for Hartford’s gun stores, but they left most of the guns behind and took all the ammunition instead. Thankfully, by the time he arrived at the gun store, he had looted quite a few houses and had a fair amount of guns and ammo that joined the 9mm he already owned.
Considering what he now knew about the Greenies, Ethan guessed that the people who took all the ammo were either far away from Hartford or dead. Semi-automatic guns weren’t going to do much against a horde of zombies who didn’t know when they were supposed to die, and every shot only summoned a bigger horde. While still holed up in his parent’s house, he watched too many of their neighbors empty entire clips into a Greenie and still not stop the damn thing only to be overrun by the zombies attracted to the noise.
Guns would just get you killed faster. That’s why he took such meticulous care of his machete.
After sharpening and oiling the blade, it was time for bed. He started his routine by checking his cellphone, which sat on a windowsill beside a small solar panel. Still no signal. Not that it was a surprise, but he still hoped.
He had a tablet, too, that he picked up from the house of a guy who decided he and his family would go out on their own terms instead of getting eaten by zombies. He used the guy’s thumbprint to unlock it and put his own account on there before the internet went down completely. He felt guilty rummaging through a house whose family lay dead on the living room floor. But he chose to survive. They didn’t. Ethan felt bad for the kids, but it was still a better way to go than being turned into zombies and quicker than getting ripped limb from limb.
Next came his bath. The natural gas and water systems were miraculously still working nearly a year later after Greenie Day, or G-Day as he called it. Ethan assumed that somebody was keeping things up and running. He knew that a lot of this stuff was managed automatically and that Hartford got its power from the nearby hydroelectric dam, he just didn’t have any here, but had a hard time believing that all of it could stay up and running without supervision for that long.
Either way, he was happy to have hot water, even if the water pressure sucked, and a gas range to cook his food and boil his drinking water on. He imagined that very few survivors out there were so lucky.
After stripping, he stepped into the tub and drew a bowl of hot water from the faucet before adding a little soap and a wash rag to it. Ethan wiped away the day’s dirt and sweat, then turned the shower on just long enough to rinse off. Without the drop-down staircase, there was no way he could be this carefree.
But it wasn’t just the staircase. Since he came here, he immediately began working on the elevator, doing everything he could to lubricate and deaden the noise it made. Even after months of work, it still wasn’t silent, but it was quiet enough that it didn’t rouse the Greenies when he came down to go scrounging. Once he was satisfied it wouldn’t bring every zombie in town down on his head, Ethan blocked off the stairs from the first floor. It was a comforting added layer of protection and if something happened, like if the Greenies were chasing him, that he needed to get upstairs and didn’t have time to mess with the elevator, there was still the fire escape in the alley beside the building that he could easily parkour up to as long as he dropped his backpack first. When practicing, the added weight kept throwing him off.
Ethan toweled off and put on his clothes for tomorrow. He preferred sleeping in the nude before the Greenies came, but even with the security of the stairs and the elevator, he still felt he needed to be ready in case one of the zombies managed to get in. He lay down on the small bed he carried back from a furniture and appliance rental store, pulled the covers over himself, and fell fast asleep.
What Ethan really hated, besides the Greenies, was the interminable waiting. The short scavenging window meant a lot of waiting. A man could only sleep for so long in a day. Tonight, he wanted to find a radio. The difficult part was going to be finding a radio old enough to suit his needs. Years ago, all radio stations were mandated to switch over to digital signals. It flew under most people’s radar because today’s radios were already digital, and all of the major radio stations had switched over years ago, so it only affected a handful of classic car and old radio enthusiasts. Now, all the radio stations were dead. He had heard about something called short-wave radio but had no idea what it was or how to find one. His last resort was to find an old radio that used an analog signal and hope that maybe he could get some news from the outside world.
At this point, he’d be happy to just hear another human’s voice.
Early in his exploration, Ethan discovered that there had to be a certain level of noise to drag the Greenies out of their pre-dawn torpor. After he found the large machete, he tested his theory by making more and more noise while standing behind a lone zombie with the blade at the ready. He discovered that he could move among those who had ‘shut down’ for the night with relative impunity. It wasn’t until later, when the man tried to stab him, that he discovered a gunshot would bring Greenies running no matter what time of the day.
But this knowledge was a huge boon at the time. He immediately began searching for a bike to extend his exploring range. That led to his first safehouse, a two-story, cinder-block building with an apartment upstairs and a two-car garage below. For whatever reason, the tenants installed a heavy metal storm door instead of a screen door on their apartment, and he thought it was perfect given the situation. Ethan called the place home for a few months until he found the furniture store.
Moving to the furniture store put him in range of his next upgrade. A bike store. Specifically, E-bikes and the solar panels to charge them, along with his phone and tablet. The E-bike extended his range significantly, and the cargo rack over the back tire drastically improved his carrying capacity. By the time he started using the elevator to come and go from the building’s upper floors, he had built up a good stockpile of canned goods and other supplies. He even had an entire room on the second floor dedicated to the extra E-bikes he took from the store, as well as any parts and extra batteries he could find.
Ethan wheeled his bike onto the elevator and waited for the counterbalance to settle. It was another of those things that he didn’t understand how it worked, but it was amazing all the same. Then, he spun the crank wheel to get the elevator moving downward. Once it was moving, gravity did the rest of the work, and he only needed to pull the handbrake to stop. When the floor of the elevator passed below the ground floor’s ceiling, he pulled the brake and looked around the shop with his flashlight. Only a single Greenie this time, and it wasn’t moving. Releasing the brake, he spun the wheel again to take the elevator the rest of the way down. An automatic braking system slowed and stopped the elevator before it hit the ground, but Ethan had to crank the wheel a little bit further until he heard a click. He didn’t know what the click did but assumed it had something to do with the counterbalance since it was impossible to get the elevator to go back up without hearing it.
A quick swipe of his machete removed the zombie’s head, and he slapped an absorbent pad from a nearby mechanics shop over the neck wound before it fell to the ground. The sticky green blood held the pad in place as he kicked the head into a small garbage bag and put another absorbent pad over the stain on the floor it left behind. Ethan dragged the body out to the street by the arm and then returned for the head a minute later. Greenies seemed to be attracted to drops or puddles of their blood, so he tried not to leave any inside the store.
With the mess taken care of, he returned for the bike and walked it outside. His destination was an old electronics repair shop near the edge of town. He figured if anywhere had an analog radio, they would. Throwing a leg over the bike, he flicked on the headlight and engaged the pedal assist. In a few seconds, he was speeding quietly down the streets of Hartford, weaving between comatose Greenies with only the hum of the electric motor to accompany him.