The Contaminated: Where Were You When The Pandemic Hit?

by Kypers, Ryan

“The same way that I can trust you, well not really, but it sounded cool,” He laughed at his own joke. “I tracked his IP address, just like I did with yours. I searched it, and it checked out as a Kansas City based IP address, so at the very worst, he’s routing us through the Kansas City servers which are still running which means it has power,” Chelsea was about to speak, but Zach raised his hand to quiet her. “Before you ask, I could have gone directly there, but you guys were on the way anyways. Power in numbers, right?”

  “So you think that we should

  “Noise in numbers too, don’t forget that,” I added.

  “So we can trust you, Zach?” Chelsea asked.

  He reached under the table and pulled out a nine millimeter handgun, “I don’t know, can you?”

  Chapter 14

  Thirteen had always been my lucky number. I hated superstitions and the thought process behind them. To me, everything was chance. For example, the first guy to walk under a ladder was a dumbass. He was probably looking for an excuse for why he was so stupid as to walk under a ladder. If one makes the executive decision to walk under a ladder, they should be prepared for the potential consequence of the ladder falling on their dumb head. Throwing salt over your shoulder or knocking on wood to avoid a ‘jinx’ is just silly. All that it did was hurt your knuckles and make a mess of the floor.

  Call me crazy or whatnot, but I liked to tempt the fates. I was never one to fold under the pressure of another’s wishes. I think that is why I liked the number thirteen so much. It as something that people avoided and tried to counter, but it is just a number. How many hotel floors go from twelve to fourteen? That’s only the numerical representation. Just because they changed the thirteenth floor to a higher number, fourteen, does not make it any safer. Just like in supermarkets, the thirteenth aisle is now suddenly the fourteenth. This superstition or managerial inability to count was what fueled my feelings towards my favorite number, thirteen, and it was November the thirteenth.

  I was ready for this.

  “Put it down,” I said in a stern voice, condemning the gun wielding man in front of me.

  “Okay,” Zach said and placed the weapon on the kitchen table as if it was nothing more than a toy. He slid it across to my position, as if I was eating off of the gun. He then sat back with his hands folded behind his head. “Anything else I could do for you?” He asked smugly.

  I picked up the gun. I had only shot one once in my life, about three years ago when I was eighteen. My friends and I went up to East Bumblefuck, New York, to a glorified shack with a ton of open space. He brought a .22 and a .337 for us to shoot. Both were rifles and had nothing to them. This handgun was different, as if when my fingers slid around the grip and touched upon the trigger I gained an amount of power, a greater strength than before. I pointed it at Zach.

  He held his hands up defensively, “Woah, cool down there. Sorry if I scared you, but the moment was too precious to not try the joke. I just gave you my gun, doesn’t that say something?”

  I felt a hands nestle above my own. Chelsea was looking at me, giving me a light look of understanding but restraint. She lightly shook her head ‘no’ and pulled the weapon away from me.

  “Do that again and I will shoot you,” I said to Zach.

  He waved his hands in an apology, “Yes, yes you are right. It wasn’t my place. Don’t know you guys well enough. The safety was on anyways and I have the bullets, but I get it. Do you know how to use it?” he asked.

  I shook my head, “I’ve shot before, but only rifles, never a handgun. I’m sure I’ve played enough military games glorifying ‘merica to get the hang of it,” I said, grabbing the gun back and playing with its switches.

  “Well, I can show you. My father was a Buffalo hick before he became one of the contaminated,” his voice trailed off almost into a whisper. “I had to shoot him with that very gun. He charged me in the middle of the day, outside the front door. Right in plain view for the whole street to see. People saw and ran. One lady threw her makeup case at me. Kind of funny, actually. Everyone was so mad and afraid of me, that was until the other contaminated emerged, hissing and scourging the streets of Buffalo for anything that they could sink their teeth into. The sidewalk is still bloody.”

  Holy hell Batman! This is when I decided that Zach was no longer hiding things from us. You don’t shoot your father and just tell that to anyone, though I guess there weren’t a lot of people left to tell, but it’s just not something that comes up in casual conversation.

  “You know what the worst part is?” he continued. “I didn’t have the small balls needed to go and bury him, my own father. I was too afraid to go walk the ten feet in front of my house to drag his body into the backyard and dig a hole. Ha! I guess some sort of cruel irony decided to eat away at me, that’s what the contaminated did to him until there was absolutely nothing remaining.”

  Chelsea was giving him the look, the look of sorrow and pity. “My whole family is missing. My parents were gone a long time ago,” I think she shot me a look of contempt. I guess she still harbored a bit of disappointment for me withholding that bit of information on her parents. “And the rest of my family was on the west coast, and nobody has heard anything from them in a long while. I’m almost all alone. Just Daryl here,” a high pitched meow came from the back of Chelsea’s chair and Coal popped up and onto her lap. “And Coal, don’t forget about her. She gets testy.” The cat padded Chelsea’s legs for a minute before finally settling down onto her lap, a light purr erupting from Coal’s belly as it rumbled up and down with her light breathing.

  “What about you, Daryl?” Zach asked.

  I guess this was how people eying down the end of the world crisis of contaminated broke the ice, “Family’s fine, as far as I know, well mostly. My two younger brothers were at their respective schools when the emergency signal finally came here. The military went there first. My mother also taught at the schools so she was evacuated right along with them. My father was working right near a safe zone when the call hit. I convinced him just to go there since I had grandma at home. Chelsea came then to stay for a bit as we waited for the military to come and pick us up. Grandma got on the convoy as Chelsea and I decided to stay to let others get on, the military claiming to be back in three days. We’ve been waiting patiently for the last month.”

  “Wow, your family got pretty lucky,” he said.

  “Well, sort of. My father said that he would get my older brother who lived in Newark, but I don’t know if that ever happened,” I said. “I have a feeling that my brother is just living there barely noticing what’s going on around him. I doubt he’d even flinch at the sight of a contaminated. That’s just how he is.”

  “That’s Dan, right?” Chelsea asked.

  “Yeah. Dan probably doesn’t even know that something like this is going on right now and is just chilling at home wondering why he has no power. Needless to say, I am not worried about him.”

  “Sounds exciting,” Zach said. “Do you guys think you could spare a bite to eat? As I said, I’m half-starved from Buffalo, and I didn’t stop at a McDonalds on my way down here. Passing out probably wouldn’t be the best thing for my health.”

  I smiled though I don’t know why. He just held a gun up to me, albeit it was not loaded and the safety was on, but still, “You like hotdogs?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m just kidding. I’m not going to be picky during the end of the world. Hotdogs sound great.”

  It was good because all of this talking had started to make me hungry. I could use the excuse to break a few apart and have them myself, which I did. I threw three on the stovetop, not literally. They began to sizzle and cook in their own grease.

  “Ketchup?” Zach asked.

  Chelsea and I burst into laughter, probably more than we should have. Zach recoiled as if he had done something horribly wrong before I waived my hand. “No ketchup. Inside joke. Don’t worry about it,” I said through small fits of laughter.

&nb
sp; He sighed, obviously annoyed that he was left out of the loop, but he would stay that way. “So does this mean that I’m part of your group?” he asked bluntly.

  I stopped turning the hotdogs for a second. I had not thought about that in our short meeting with Zach. It was an interesting question at the least. If we included him in our ‘group,’ then that would mean that we would have to go through another person’s worth of food which in turn would force us to make more and more trips to the supermarkets and such. There would also be more noise, and quite frankly, we did not know Zach. He seemed like a decent guy but what was stopping him from shooting us in the night? On the plus side we would have another person to help fight against the contaminated and for when we made food runs to anywhere. But did that outweigh the negatives?

  “I don’t know yet, Zach,” I said, plopping the hotdogs down in front of us with a set of forks. He nodded in thanks and began to dig into his two.

  It took him a minute before he realized what I said, “Wait,” his voice was full of hotdog. “So I come here and bring you all of this information and a better weapon than you probably have but you won’t take me in?” he sounded desperate.

  “I didn’t say that, now did I?” I looked to Chelsea and took her hand. “We’ll have to discuss it, privately. But for the meantime, you can stay in my grandma’s side of the house, but I’ll have the bullets to the gun, just in case.”

  He looked from me to the hotdog to me again and pulled out the magazine filled to the brim with nine millimeter bullets. “Don’t use it until I show you how,” he said with a stern voice. “We don’t need an accident that will draw all of the contaminated in the area to this house.”

  “Well, your car almost did that-“

  “I cut the lights for a reason-“

  “Guys!” Chelsea said, standing. “Shut up. This is stupid. ‘What if’s’ won’t happen if you’re careful and you both have been so far. So just shut up, it’s annoying.” She sat back down, a flair of annoyance across her face.

  “Fair,” Zach said, finishing his second hotdog. “Well, I have a few more guns in the trunk of my car.”

  “Why didn’t you say that earlier?” I asked, tired of his lies.

  He shrugged his shoulders, “I figured you would have caught on. Who’s hick dad only has one gun? And a nine mil at that? C’mon man.”

  Fair enough. I settled down again, fingering with the trigger and safety of the handgun, the feeling of power and security there still.

  Chelsea yawned, “Okay, well I think the night is done for now. I’m going to bed,” she got up, leaving Zach and I at the table awkwardly.

  He looked to me, “You two are amazing, really.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  He raised his bushy eyebrows, “You’ve been together for a little over a month yet act like a married couple.” A coy smile crossed his lips, “You going to do anything about that?”

  It wasn’t an advance, merely an observation, “Watch yourself,” I said in a joking tone. “I’ll keep the hotdogs away from you.”

  We both laughed. “Alright, I’m exhausted, not to interrupt our wonderful conversation,” Zach said, standing up and stretching.

  “I’ll show you to your sleeping quarters,” I said standing up with him. We moved through the hallway and came upon my grandma’s addition apartment on the side of the house. I opened the sliding door which separated her section from ours and gestured inside. “This is your current room until we decide what to do with you.”

  “Thanks, Daryl. I appreciate everything you have done for me,” he said, extending his hand. I took it and we shook. It was an okay shake, somewhere between a strong grip and a flaky fish grip. I’ll take it. “Have a pleasant night,” he said, moving about the room as if it was his own.

  I made my way up the stairs and into the bedroom to see Chelsea slumped over. “What’s wrong, Chels?”

  She shook her head, “It’s all over, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “What’s over?”

  “Us. This. The house. The field. Our life here in this abandoned place. Everything that we’ve worked so hard for is going away now. We can’t just leave Zach, that would be horrible of us. He told us a way out, the way to Kansas City. You can’t tell me that you haven’t considered taking it.”

  I wrapped my arms around her. It was all that I could do, “I don’t know,” I said as the clock turned to November the fourteenth.

  Chapter 15

  I woke up with Chelsea’s head resting on my chest. Her back was moving up and down rhythmically with her breathing. I rubbed my eyes with my palms to remove the tired while trying not to wake Chelsea. Her head stirred and she looked up at me with tired eyes.

  “Did I wake you? Sorry.” I said before waiting for a response. My hand brushed some of the hair out of her eyes.

  “No. I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “Why not? Do you feel okay? I sit that time of the month?” I asked cautiously. I had spare chocolate stores in case such a situation arose.

  She let out a tired laugh, “No, you silly. I just couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking how nice things are here. Minus the contaminated, we’re in a type of paradise, you know. It’s quiet, safe enough, and there’s us. I mean I couldn’t ask for a better place to live, lest it be free of the contaminated, which is always a plus.”

  I rubbed her back and kissed her on the top of the head, “You really don’t want to leave?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” She replied in a quiet voice, resting her head on my chest again. “I’m just afraid that once we leave, we’ll be leaving each other too. Here things are working out nicely, and I know we haven’t been together for a very long time, but it feels like an eternity. And it’s a nice eternity.”

  I felt a strong pull towards Chelsea at her honesty, sort of like a gravitational pull, grabbing my chest and drawing me in. “I’ll tell you what, if you really don’t want to leave, we can stay. Zach can go if he wants to but we can stay here, living with each other and the cat.”

  She turned her head back to me with a red in her eyes, “I don’t mean to sound depressing, and it’s what kept me up the whole night, but we can’t.” She kissed my chest lightly, “Even if we do manage to live here for a while, and Zach makes it to Kansas, the military will eventually win this thing. There’s nothing that humans haven’t been able to conquer in the entire span of their existence. Eventually the world will get back to normal, and we’ll have to adapt to it. I love you, Daryl, but our love is doomed.”

  My chest felt as if it had been torn out. I knew what she was saying was the truth and not intended to hurt me, but it did. It was not Chelsea’s fault that it got to me though, but the fact is that if the humans win the fight, we go back to normal as Chelsea said. If the contaminated win the fight, we are just a couple condemned in our exile to death.

  “That is depressing,” I replied. “But you forgot one thing, I’m not going to give in to either. And so what if we are doomed? The entire human race is doomed every day that we live our lives. To be living means to be doomed, but that does not mean that people have to give in to their fate. I’m ready to take the fates head on and show them who really creates the future. This guy!” I ended, pointing my thumbs at myself.

  Chelsea laughed the sweetest laugh, “Thanks, Daryl.” She kissed me, smack on the lips. What a kiss. In our tired groggy and half depressed state, Chelsea managed to give me one of the best kisses that I could ever have. It was filled with hope and love and care and a future, no matter which path we were to take.

  “We should go though, I think,” she said, resting her head on my chest again. “Maybe Zach has actually found some form of civilization among the ruins. We can spend a week or two to prepare and follow his lead. I mean if we try hard enough we can probably make Kansas City in a day if we drive without stop.”

  I was a bit surprised at this, “So this means that you’re cool with Zach staying?” I asked.

  “Of course. He gave us
his gun and we’ve known him online for a while now. What does he have to gain by killing us?” She questioned.

  Nothing, of course. He seemed fine enough, everyone has their secrets and I could not expect him to be fully open about everything. It is not as if I was dating Zach. “Fair enough. Should we see if he’s ready for our morning exercises?”

  Chelsea smiled, “I think that would be an excellent idea. Besides, he has to learn how to kill the contaminated without making a noise, and needs to do it effectively.”

  “This should be fun,” I said, smiling.

  Chelsea and I got out of bed and did our morning routine of straightening up the room. We both went downstairs to start up breakfast, or the cake from the night before. I fed Coal to quiet her meowing and made some coffee. Shortly after the scent of coffee was flowing through the house, Zach found his way to the kitchen.

  “Morning,” he said. His eyes were still puffy from sleeping. His steps were heavy and forced. He slumped into the chair and looked as if he would pass out from the effort. “I’m definitely not used to getting up this early.”

  “It’s nine o’clock. Come on now, Zach. No need to be up so late on the computer,” Chelsea said in her best motherly tone.

  He looked at her, surprised, but was too tired to reply so he merely groaned in acknowledgement.

  I tossed a piece of cake onto a plate and placed it in front of him, “We’re going to take you out for a bit of exercise today. When was the last time you did that?” I asked, not trying to degrade him but out of curiosity.

  He took a bite of cake, swallowed and spoke, “Long enough ago to know that I’ll be out of breath pretty quickly. Since the contamination broke out, I was cooped up in my house and never left until I came here. Other than that I can’t remember.”

  “Good,” I replied. “You’re going to get a work out with us. Have you ever swung a baseball bat before?”

  It was obvious that he had not. I doubt he even so much as watched a baseball game. “Hell no, sports weren’t my thing, but I’m sure that you can tell that about me. I watched a bit of baseball here and there along with football, but that’s it.” So he surprised me that he had in fact seen some baseball, but I doubt that would have helped with his swing.