"Okay Casey," Adam said, standing up and stretching.
"You sleep well?" he asked.
"Yeah, for the most part. Around three o'clock I got woke up because there was an infected lady scratching at the front door."
"What? What happened?" Casey asked nervously.
"Nothing. She scratched at the door for a little while and then stumbled away. Randy said he'd keep watch for the rest of the night."
"Okay, I'll go check on him," he replied. "I think we have some cereal if you guys are hungry?"
Adam nodded and turned to Jillian. "You hungry?"
She nodded.
"Let's go get breakfast."
He walked downstairs and heard Casey and Randy laughing from the living room. He walked in and saw Randy sleepily rubbing his eyes. "How did it go?" he asked.
Randy laughed. "I must have nodded off at some point."
He nodded. "We'll have to all be careful about that," he said.
"Yeah, if those are indeed zombies, falling asleep could get us all killed!" Casey said, laughing as he punched Randy in the arm.
"I'm telling you, Hollywood has all but debunked the zombie myth!" Randy said, laughing as he returned the punch.
Casey feigned pain. "That hurt man."
"What hurt?" Adam asked.
"He shot down my theory!"
Adam laughed. "Casey, for all of our sakes I hope those aren't zombies. I hope Randy's right."
"We'll find out," Casey said. "And I agree. I hope I'm wrong."
The group set out after breakfast and as they walked out of Casey's subdivision, Adam heard yelling down the road.
"Hey look! There's a lot of people down there!" Missy said.
He looked and saw police cars down near a college.
"You hear that?" Casey asked.
He nodded. The drone of a helicopter could be heard to the north, near all of the clamor.
"We probably shouldn't go that way," Randy said. "We don't know if those people are infected or not."
"Yeah, besides, we're all violating the quarantine rules," Adam said. "The police would arrest us or worse."
"How do we want to try to get to Chicago?" Casey asked.
"Well, the police are probably going to be out enforcing the quarantine and there are probably infected people on the roads too, so we should stay off the roads," Randy said. "We could retrace our steps on the railroad tracks we walked down yesterday and follow a line north. That way we'll stay off the roads but still be able to head north without walking through fields or anything."
"Agreed. Let's go, before the crowd heads our way," Jillian said nervously.
They walked back to the tracks and walked for hours. By noon the sun was high overhead, scorching them as they walked north on railroad tracks running parallel to Illinois Route 3. They had spent the morning retracing their steps along the Metro Link line and had followed a diverging set of railroad tracks north. They crossed a creek and Adam saw an oil refinery up ahead. Oil storage tanks sat off to the right of the tracks. He and the others had seen a few infected people as they had walked and had passed abandoned police roadblocks.
"Hey, did you guys hear that?" Missy asked.
"Hear what?" Casey replied.
"I don't know. It sounded like a scream off in the distance."
"I didn't hear it," Casey said.
"Either way, let's pick up the pace guys, I'd like to get away from populated areas as soon as possible," Randy said.
"Agreed," Adam said. "When are we going to stop for lunch?"
"I think I see a park up ahead. We'll stop there," Randy said.
They walked further ahead and stopped at the park off to the left of the tracks. To the right of the tracks a fallow field stretched toward oil storage tanks perhaps a quarter of a mile away. To the left, behind the park, lay a neighborhood of houses that all had red sheets hanging in their windows.
"What's with all the red sheets?" Jillian asked.
"I think they have something to do with the quarantine," Randy replied.
Casey handed them all peanut butter sandwiches they had made that morning and they chowed down.
"Hey look," Adam said, pointing. "That house's window is broken. See? That red sheet is flapping in the wind."
"Hey yeah, you're right," Randy said. "Be alert guys."
Suddenly Missy screamed.
Adam spun around and saw an infected man stumbling toward them. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin was gray. His face was stained brown with dried blood. His clothes were torn and he had large chunks of glass protruding from his forearm.
Without thinking Adam pulled out the pistol he had pilfered from the cop less than 48 hours before and aimed it at the man.
"Adam!" Jillian screamed. "What are you doing?"
"Stop where you are!" he yelled at the sick man.
The man growled at him and stumbled forward.
"I'm serious! Stop right there!"
"Adam! Put the gun down!" Randy yelled.
Adam placed his index finger on the trigger. The cool metal tab felt firm under his fingertip.
"Adam! Stop!" Jillian yelled as the infected man came within six feet of the table where they were all gathered.
"This is my final warning! Stop!" Adam yelled.
The man stretched his arms toward Missy.
Adam squeezed the trigger and the gun recoiled backwards with a loud bang. The man fell backwards as a red spray erupted from the back of his head.
Jillian screamed as Randy ran to the now dead man.
Adam dropped the gun and sat down on the table, stunned that he had just killed another man. Everything started spinning around him
"Adam!" Casey yelled. "Adam!"
Everything went black.
He had a headache when he came to. Jillian was kneeling by his side.
"What happened?" he asked.
"You killed an infected man," she replied quietly.
It all came back to him.
"I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry Jill."
She shook her head. "He was coming toward us. You made the best decision you knew to make."
He sat up and looked around. The others were sitting at the picnic table with somber expressions on their face.
Randy stood and walked toward him.
"Hey," Adam said.
He nodded. "Don't feel too bad. I don't think he would have survived much longer anyway. I followed the trail of blood he had back to the house with the broken window. He looked like he had lost a lot of blood and, honestly, given what I know about the human body, I'm really not sure how he possessed the strength to stumble toward us."
Adam shuddered, remembering the ghastly expression on the man's face.
"You okay?" Randy asked.
He shook his head. "I killed a man."
Randy patted him on the shoulder. "I think you did what needed to be done. Remember the other night on that train platform? That infected guy eviscerated another man in the stairwell. For all we know, that guy you shot could have ended up doing that to one of us. Plus, he was probably contagious."
Adam shrugged. "What about the legal ramifications? I just killed a man!"
"I don't know, but it looks like civilization has completely collapsed. I mean, where have the police been? Where has the military been? When we left the train station, there seemed to be no one left. Why haven't we seen anyone walking north? The only people we've seen have been infected."
Adam nodded.
"Guys, I hate to say this but we need to get going," Casey said, clearing his throat. "We've got a really long way to go yet and we don't know how many more infected people there are nearby."
Adam stood up slowly. "Yeah, we should get going." He looked and saw that the dead man had been covered with a sheet.
"You sure?" Jillian asked him. She looked worried.
He nodded, eager to put this episode behind him.
The group continued on, walking north. They passed several tanker cars stopped on the tracks. Gunshot
s rang out in the distance.
"Look alive guys, things could get serious real quick," Casey said as they continued on.
As they came around the end of the line of tanker cars, Adam looked toward the residential neighborhood they were passing and saw dozens of infected people walking down the street, going in the opposite direction. He nodded at the others and they hurriedly continued north, away from the crowd of blood-vomiting people.
"This is bad," Jillian said quietly as they walked down the tracks.
Adam nodded quietly and put his arm around her.
"Tell me this will be okay Adam, please," she implored him.
He nodded again. "Yeah, it will be okay."
"You don't sound confident."
"I'm not confident," he replied. "I think civilization might be collapsing."
"You know, following the Black Death in Europe, people thought it was the end of the world," she countered. "But humanity survived."
"Yeah, humanity did survive," he quipped back. "But society collapsed. That epidemic killed so many people that feudalism couldn't sustain itself. Historians estimated at one time that the plague killed a third of Europe's population in the Fourteenth Century. Just think, if this epidemic just kills a third of the Earth's population, think about how that would dramatically reshape civilization, probably in a negative way."
She frowned. "You're such a pessimist."
He chuckled. "I'm an accountant. I'm trained to see the world in terms of unlikely profit and probable loss."
She laughed and punched him in the arm. "That might be so, but you're still a human being!"
He chuckled and replied in a monotone voice, "No, I am not. Your boyfriend Adam Doss has been replaced by a calculator strongly resembling him."
She laughed again.
"Hey guys, what's going on over there?" Missy asked suddenly.
He looked up at her and saw her pointing toward a tank farm to the right that appeared to be several hundred yards away. He saw some people standing on top of one tank. Suddenly a huge fireball erupted from one of the tanks and a second later the ground shook with a loud boom.
"Oh my! Those people are on fire!" Jillian yelled, pointing.
Several dozen burning figures ran across the field away from the inferno for a few seconds before they fell to the ground and remained motionless.
Adam gasped.
Several more tanks exploded, sending enormous columns of black smoke skyward.
"Let's quicken our pace guys," Randy said.
"But what about those people?" Missy asked.
"Nothing can be done for them Missy," Casey said gently.
The group continued on, eager to distance themselves from the oil refinery.
Military helicopters flew over them toward the refinery as they walked on.
They walked for what seemed like hours through alternating patches of forest and field. After a while they approached a rail bridge that appeared to go over a major road. Adam heard weeping. He jogged ahead of the others and stopped when he reached the rail bridge.
Stretching away from the bridge in both directions along the road, hundreds of people were converging on a spot just ahead, past the northern terminus of the bridge. They were all walking slowly. Most had backpacks or were carrying bags.
"Look! There must be a train station up ahead!" Randy exclaimed.
Adam, Randy, Casey, Jillian and Missy walked across the bridge and saw that the throng of people had indeed converged on the railroad tracks and were continuing north on them.
"Where to now man?" Casey asked Randy.
He shrugged. "This is still probably safer than the streets."
"What if someone's infected?" Jillian asked.
Randy shrugged again. "I guess we'll have to run and put some distance between ourselves and them. Let's just try to walk faster than the crowd and get past them quickly."
The group walked on ahead and came alongside the crowd. The throng stretched ahead as far as the eye could see. All of the people looked tired, hungry and scared. There were a lot of families with little children. Adam grimaced when he realized that.
He thought about his own family. His dad's family had immigrated to the United States when his dad was a teenager to escape the totalitarian regime of East Germany. He would regale Adam with stories of their dramatic escape when he was a kid. His family settled in Valparaiso, Indiana where Grandpa got a job teaching mathematics at a community college. Dad had two siblings; an older brother named William and a younger sister named Deborah. Of course Aunt Debbie and Uncle William had kids too. So Adam had quite the extended family growing up.
He frowned as he reflected on the good times he had with them. Would he ever see any of them again? He was startled out of his thoughts by shouting up ahead.
"I told you to grab my gun!" a tall man yelled as he raged at another, shorter man beside him.
"I'm sorry Newton!" the accused man replied, throwing his hands up.
Newton grabbed the man by the collar of his shirt and dragged him out of the throng. Adam and the others passed them as Newton began beating the smaller man in a clearing on the side of the tracks.
They continued on around a bend in the tracks that changed their direction from northwest to what Adam judged to be roughly north-northeast.
"Where are you all from?" a woman asked him as he walked by her.
"Chicago, originally," he replied as he slowed down.
"Oh my! That's a long way from here. You trying to get home?"
He nodded.
"I'm from Saint Louis," she said.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"The National Guard told us to go northwest to a safe zone they set up just north of Jerseyville. They promised us freedom and safety if we could make it there."
"Wow. Good luck."
"Good luck to you too! Be careful out there, don't get bitten by any of them zombies."
He nodded. "You too."
They soon came to a split in the tracks; one track continued north-northeast and the other split off going northwest. The throng all followed the split to the northwest, while Adam and the others went in the other direction. They were alone on the tracks once again. Eventually they emerged from the trees into a large field the tracks cut across.
Randy cleared his throat. "See guys? I told you we'd be fine."
Adam laughed. "Yeah, did you hear where those people are all going?"
He shook his head.
"The National Guard apparently told them there was a safe camp set up in some town north of here called Jerseyville."
He frowned. "We must have passed a thousand people."
Adam nodded. "I'm not sure I buy it, but whatever."
He shrugged.
They walked for several more hours and passed through a desolate little town called Brighton. It appeared to have been evacuated as the streets were empty and quiet.
"This place gives me the creeps," Missy said.
"Me too," Jillian said.
Adam put his hand on the grip of the pistol instinctively. He had tucked it into his waistband after they had left the park earlier that afternoon.
"Just keep walking guys," Randy said quietly. "Be alert too. It will be getting dark soon. I want us to get out of the town before we settle down for the evening."
Gradually houses gave way to what appeared to be miles of barren fields stretching toward the eastern horizon. They walked on.
"Well, this place looks as good as any," Casey said as the sun began to near the western horizon.
"There's no shelter," Missy said plaintively. "You think we should just sleep on an open field?"
"It's that or break into someone's house," he replied. "I'd rather not break into a house and meet the business end of a shotgun being held by a frightened homeowner or worse, run into a family of infected people."
"Casey has a point," Randy said. "We can take turns sleeping. Plus, it's still warm out. So we won't have to worry about getting too cold to
night."
"I stuffed a couple of sleeping bags into my backpack, in case anyone is interested. No one has fleas or head lice, right?" Casey asked.
That made everyone laugh.
"That settles it," Randy said. “We’ll sleep out here.”
Chapter Ten
Jim Gibson
Day 1
“Hey! I have an idea!” Vik’s excited statement woke Jim the next day.
"Yeah?" Jim asked sleepily, opening his eyes and squinting them in the morning light.
"Yeah! You know, I have a toolbox full of hand tools. If the people up here are really zombies, we need to figure out how to defend ourselves against them, right?"
"I guess," Jim replied while rubbing his eyes. "If they're anything like they are in the zombie movies, it will take a blow to the head to kill them."
"Are you listening to yourself?" Giselle asked incredulously. "What if those people are just sick?"
"Giselle, we saw people try to kill them on our walk here! Remember the guy we passed who shot one of them dozens of times in the chest?" Connor replied.
"Connor, that doesn't mean anything. You know drug addicts can sometimes withstand horrific trauma."
"Okay, so why don't we find out?" Jim asked.
Vik ran to his room and Jim heard the clanking of metal on metal. His roommate returned holding a claw hammer in one hand and a small pry bar in the other hand. "Which one do you want Jim?"
Jim sat up. "I guess I'll take the pry bar. Now everyone get out. I'd like to get dressed!"
Everyone left the suddenly crowded bedroom. Jim closed the door and got dressed. He pulled on a pair of blue jeans from the floor then he put on a Yankees shirt and pulled a blue UB hoodie over it. He finished by putting his black Onitsuka Tigers on and walked out to the living room with the pry bar in his hand.
Vik stood in the living room wearing a pea coat and a ski mask.
Jim laughed. "I don't think the mask is going to do much to protect you from getting bitten."
His roommate narrowed his eyes to a slit. "Some face protection is better than none."
"True. You ready to do this?"
"Yes. The noises out there faded earlier, they might have congregated at the other end of the hall."
"Okay, let's do this!"
Jeff pulled the couch away from the door and Jim opened the door. He was hit immediately by the stench of rotting flesh.
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