Surviving Rage | Book 1

by Arellano, J. D.

  “Dammit.” He reached for the shotgun and handed it to the teenager, who accepted it awkwardly.

  “I can’t…” The boy began.

  “Rack it.”

  Paul did so and handed it back to him. Daniel held it in his right hand while steering with his left , approaching the car and bikes. He’d be lucky to make it through before the things caught up to them.

  Spinning the steering wheel deftly, he maneuvered the car through the gap, turning to the right at the last second to avoid the front bumper of the SUV.

  At that moment the first woman hit the side of the car, hard, rocking the vehicle on its suspension. Paul screamed, recoiling at the sight of the woman. It was the taller woman, but Daniel could see the second one only about five yards behind her. The woman in the jog bra slammed her fist through the window, breaking it along with her hand and wrist. When it pulled back its arm, the hand flopped loosely at the end, useless. Daniel slammed on the gas a second too late, giving the woman a split-second to lunge forward and grasp the open window frame of the car with her left hand. She was pulled off her feet as Daniel pulled away, but her grip remained strong, even as she was dragged alongside the car. The woman was unable to do much more, with one arm holding onto the car and the other disabled, so Daniel wasn’t that worried about her at the moment.

  What he was worried about was the other woman, who had nearly caught up and was reaching forward with both hands, trying to grab onto the car. Daniel slightly turned the car to the left, bringing the first woman’s body, which was still dragging on the street, in closer to the vehicle and directly in the path of the second woman. At that moment, he turned hard to the left and accelerated, causing the woman’s arm to collide with the side of the car, making her lose her grip. She fell from the vehicle, rolling on the ground, taking the legs out from under the other woman. The second woman fell head-first onto the pavement, taking most of the impact with her outstretched arms. As Daniel watched, the black woman turned and charged back at the woman in the jog bra, falling on her, fists striking the woman as she lay on the street. Jog bra woman fought back with ferocity, rolling and kicking the woman in the pantsuit in the stomach, knocking her backwards. They both rose to their feet, snarling. The woman in the sports attire was bleeding profusely from head to toe from being dragged on the pavement, but she showed no sign of slowing. The two charged at each other, coming together in a flurry of fists, feet, and teeth.

  Stepping on the gas, he sped away, leaving the two women behind to fight it out. There was no doubt one or maybe both would be dead before it was over.

  Paul slumped in the passenger seat, exhausted from the burst of fear and adrenaline.

  Looking forward, Daniel offered the young man some advice. “Look, with those things, we either fight, or die. There is no in between. You want to live? Figure out how you’re going to fight. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The response seemed canned, and it irritated Daniel. “Stop with the ‘sir’ shit, alright? Now, tell me, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to fight.”

  “Really, how are you going to do that? You won’t touch the gun I gave you, and we cannot fight those things up close. They’re too strong and they seem oblivious to pain.” Looking over, he stared at the teenager, meeting his eyes. “So tell me, what are you going to do?”

  Paul thought about this for several long seconds before responding. “I wanna learn to shoot.”

  Daniel smiled, nodding. “Now that I can help you with. In the short term, make a decision right now to use the gun if you have to. Don’t hesitate. You may miss, but if you do, fire again. It’s better than nothing.”

  “Okay.”

  “I plan on teaching the entire family how to shoot those weapons” he gestured to the back seat with his right thumb, “when we get to Big Bear.”

  Continuing up the section of Pacific Highway that crossed over the San Diego River, he saw the California Highway Patrol office ahead and wondered how they were holding up. He slowed as he approached the building, looking for signs of life. Surely the police were equipped to deal with the threat, he thought, but when they drew parallel with the front of the building, the barbed wire-topped gate was closed. The building was dark, and only two cruisers were parked in the far end of the lot. The place looked as if it had been abandoned.

  ‘Really?’ Daniel thought, perplexed. ‘Things get rough and you guys just bail? What the fuck?’ Shaking his head, he hit the gas, driving away from the station towards the bay.

  Crossing the overpass above the 5 freeway, the bay came into view, the waters sparkling in the late afternoon sun. It was almost six-fifteen, and the sun was heading towards the horizon at a steady pace. As they approached the stoplight, Daniel saw something peculiar up ahead: a series of five kites, flying high above the park area next to the water. Looking to his right, towards the alternate route of side streets, he saw a number of cars backed up on the bridge, having been stopped from entering the freeway on ramps heading north or south. It looked like there may be room to squeeze through, but the way ahead offered little to no resistance, which made sense. More people would have been focused on getting out of town than spending time at the bay.

  Seeing no other approaching cars, Daniel proceeded through the intersection and onto Mission Bay Drive. Across the short waterway on the left, he saw several random vehicles, mostly trucks and RVs, parked on the sand near the water. Bonfires burned near them, sending smoke into the sky.

  Ahead, what he saw was difficult to comprehend.

  In a world that had gone insane, what was normal seemed out of place, and what he saw was decidedly normal.

  A cluster of kites flew high above the park. Driving slowly, he followed the road alternating between looking forward and looking for the owner of the kites. It was incredibly odd for someone to be flying kites with everything that was going on.

  When they were finally able to see the owner of the kites, Daniel stopped the car in disbelief.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Hurry the fuck up, man.”

  “I’m tryin’ man. Hold on a sec.” Terrence Cartwright was straining, trying to figure out a decent angle to cut the zip ties that bound his wrists. He and Javale had struggled for ten minutes, bumping into each other repeatedly as they tried to turn their bodies around in the small space between the dumpsters. When his hand finally touched the small knife, he’d cried out in relief.

  “Yes! I got it!”

  As it turned out, their maneuvering to reach the knife ended up being the easy part. Grabbing and holding the small blade and getting any sort of leverage against the heavy duty zip tie seemed, at times, hopeless. He’d dropped the knife three times in the few minutes he’d been working at it, but he kept trying, knowing that when dark came, things would get worse in a hurry.

  Finally feeling the blade digging into the plastic, he wedged it against the pavement to hold it in place and began gently rocking back and forth. Ever so slowly, the blade cut the tie, millimeter by millimeter. With one last press, the blade pressed through the plastic, breaking that bond free.

  “Got one!”

  “Aiight, man, keep going and get that shit done.”

  “I know. Give me a minute.”

  “Dude, it’s already been like ten. It’ll be dark soon, and my ass don’t wanna be out here in the dark with those things running around.”

  “Okay, man, chill. I’ll get it.” Inspired by his recent success, Terrence repeated the same process, wedging the knife and rocking against it. In short order, the second tie split apart, freeing his wrists.

  “Yes! I got you, mother fucker!” He raised his arms to the sky, relishing in the freedom of movement. His arms and shoulders ached from having been in such an awkward position for so long, and now he wished he could spend time stretching his and working the kinks out of the muscles, but there simply wasn’t any to spare.

  Leaning forward, he cut through one, then the other tie aroun
d his ankles. He rotated his ankles, helping the blood flow.

  “Man, hurry yo ass up!”

  “Alright man, chill! It’ll just take me a second.” He leaned over and cut through the bonds on Javale’s wrists, before handing him the knife so that he could cut the ties around his ankles. While he did so, Terrence stood up and looked around the parking lot.

  Their leader, Charles, aka C-four, laid on the ground about twenty feet away, the massive gaping hole in his chest now an ugly mess of a dark, dried blood, covered in flies. The smell emanating from him was disgusting, a god awful mixture of shit, piss, and blood.

  Still staring at the body, Terrence held out his hand to help Javale up. The man was heavy, but limber, and he popped up with ease. As far as Terrence could tell, the man showed no lingering effects from being tied up for the last forty five minutes.

  Javale followed his gaze. “That’s fucked up, right there.”

  “Yeah, man, for real. Now let’s get outta here.” Terrence thought about his girl, Samantha, a thick Mexican girl who loved her ‘skinny white boy.’ Getting home, getting cleaned up, and getting into bed with her sounded really nice.

  Javale had other plans. “Nah, man, fuck that.”

  “What? It’s almost dark, man.”

  “Man, that muthafucka disrespected us. We gotta find that piece of shit and show him who the fuck we is.”

  “Dude, it’s late, and they got like a twenty minute head start on us at least, about thirty by the time we get back to the car around front.”

  Javale turned to him, stepping closer, his superior size and strength intimidating. “Look, man, with C-four dead, I’m running this bitch, and I say we’re going after those fuckers. You gotta problem with that?” The man’s eyes, filled with anger, bore a hole into Terrence as he stared him into submission.

  Looking down and away, the smaller man replied, “Alright, man…”

  “That’s what I fucking thought!” Javale walked away, heading to where his gun had been left on the ground. Halfway there, he changed his mind, cutting to his right towards C-four’s body. That big, chrome plated gun would feel good in his hand.

  Shaking his head, Terrence began following his partner across the parking lot. With Javale taking C-four’s gun, he figured he’d take Javale’s old one, which was an upgrade from his. ‘Moving up, I guess’ he thought.

  Looking over at Javale, he saw movement coming from the street.

  “Bro….”

  Javale had picked up the gun and was holding it in his hand, turning it side to side as he admired it.

  “Javale!”

  The heavily muscled black man turned, looking at him. “Mother fucker, can a brother get a minute?”

  “Watch out, man!!”

  Turning around, Javale saw three creatures, two that had been men, one previously a woman, rushing towards him, an animalistic fury in their frantic motions. They charged, pushing each other aside as they did, focused only on their prey.

  Feeling confident, Javale lifted the gun up and aimed, holding it sideways as he did.

  The gun roared, sending a .50 caliber round into the nearest creature, blasting a hole through it’s upper chest, sending a mist of blood into the air.

  The thing didn’t even slow. It simply absorbed the impact, momentarily knocked off balance, before resuming its charge towards the man in the white tank top.

  Javale’s confidence left him.

  Firing rapidly, he put rounds in each of the three that rushed towards him, but succeeded in only stopping one, a thin man in a blood stained business suit that he’d managed to get a headshot on. The man’s head burst open like a watermelon and he’d still managed three steps before crumbling to the ground.

  As the other two converged on Javale, Terrence turned and ran for the backdoor. Taking off, he tripped on his jacket, of all things, landing face first on the concrete surface of the loading dock. His forehead, nose, and cheekbone took the brunt of the fall, capturing bits of gravel and dirt in the process.

  Scrambling to his feet, he looked back over his shoulder to where Javale was screaming as he tried to fight off the creatures. One of the things dug it’s fingers deep into the man’s eye socket, eliciting another scream, one of pain and fear. Terrence’s partner fell under the combined weight of the creatures, his body shuddering from the repeated blows they landed on him.

  Watching the scene in horror, Terrence found himself unable to look away. While the creatures may have been human at one point, they most definitely were not human now. With open wounds created by Javale’s shooting dripping blood, it was clear they were also very hard to stop.

  The thing that used to be a woman, dressed in what looked like a fast food restaurant uniform, looked up and around, sniffing the air. It’s eyes located him and widened at the sight of a new target. It screamed, loud and angry, before leaping over Javale’s now motionless body, slipping on the man’s blood as it landed. It fell to the ground, twisting its leg awkwardly, but immediately got up, resuming its charge towards Terrence.

  The second creature looked up and spotted him as well, snarling at the sight of him. This one kicked Javale in the head, hard, before following the woman. Rushing towards him, Terrence felt a moment of bewilderment as he took in the man’s clothing: a long t-shirt, shorts, and, of all things, socks and sandals with straps.

  Seeing the woman less than five yards away, Terrence finally broke out of his trance, turning and running for the door to the store again. He rushed to it, grabbed it, and threw it open, causing it to bang against the wall of the building and bounce back. He paused to grab the door, hoping he could close it before the creatures reached it, but the woman leapt forward, diving in an attempt to reach him before he got away. Terrence backed away, causing her to miss, but she fell across the threshold, blocking the door from closing.

  Panicking, he turned and ran through the swinging doors into the store, looking for somewhere to hide. The creatures burst through the doors, not far behind, their snarls and grunts echoing in the emptiness of the store.

  Terrence raced to the front of the store, hoping to escape, but when he got there, he found the doors locked. The man lunged at him and he spun away cleanly, slipping away as the man slammed into the glass door. He bounced off, landing on the ground as Terrence broke right. Seeing a door, he dodged around a clothing rack and between two others before reaching the door, which he pushed open with his shoulder. Spinning around, he slammed the door closed, pushing in the button to lock the door. He collapsed to the floor, resting his back against the door. Feeling a sense of relief, he closed his eyes, breathing deeply.

  At the sound of something growling behind him, his eyes popped open in surprise.

  Before he died, Terrence Cartwright closed his eyes and dreamed of being with Samantha one last time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, Virginia

  Andrew Chang paced back and forth in front of the dry erase board, racking his brain for answers.

  How could there be an infection without the presence of white blood cells?

  How could inflammation get to be so bad that it killed off parts of the brain?

  Fluid examinations had revealed little, giving them nothing to go off. The autopsy reports, even those that include brain autopsies, read basically the same. Normally, this would be a good thing, indicating that they were on the right track. In this case, however, each report seemed only to offer another dead end.

  “Doctor Chang? I mean, Andrew?” It was Sergeant Mason.

  Walking over to their table, he asked, “what’s up?”

  “I think Sheila may have found something.”

  “Great, what do you have, Sheila?”

  “Well, it was weird. I was looking at purchases made by the infected during the days leading up to their, well, deaths, and I found that Brandon Elliot had bought a bunch of alcohol at a supermarket in Pacific Beach in San Diego just over a week ago.”

  �
��Okay...”

  “I know. I didn’t think anything of it, either, until I noticed that Carol Matthews bought a bunch of stuff at the same store on the same day. We had Carol Matthews listed as having an address in Texas. Apparently she never changed her address after moving to San Diego to live with Brandon Elliot.”

  “Interesting. Do we know what she bought?”

  “It looks like a bunch of snacks, but when you look at the receipt,” Sheila pointed at the screen and used the mouse to zoom in on the image, “this item is interesting.”

  PRTY BALLNS 00704221909 $5.99

  Doctor Chang nodded. “So they were celebrating something.”

  “Exactly. And then DeAndre…”

  DeAndre Johnson took over. “When Corporal Rich - I mean, Sheila, told me what she’d found, it made me think back to something I’d seen.” He hit a few keystrokes on his laptop and pulled up an image. “This receipt belongs to Raymond Liguria, and it was from two days before he returned to Seattle after being in Los Angeles, where his mother Bertha lives.”

  “Benihana. Fun.”

  “Yes, Sir. And it looks like Raymond paid for the whole family, to the tune of two hundred bucks.”

  “So they were celebrating, too? Now that’s a coincidence. Anything else?”

  “Maybe, Doc.” Sergeant Mason shook his head, uncertain of his findings. He pointed at the screen. “Rebecca Simpson here went out and spent $700 on clothes a week before she died. Might not be anything.”

  Andrew considered it for a minute, then nodded. “We’ll take it.” He walked over to the dry erase board and wrote the word, ‘Celebrating Something’ in big letters and circled it.

  “Now, let’s figure out what it was that they were celebrating.”