Infected (Book 1): The First Ten Days

by Thomas, Jack

  I raced out into the middle of the street and jumped up and down, screamed at the top of my lungs and swung my arms over my head to be as obvious and visible as possible. Any infected not busy would get attracted. I convinced myself before I ran out there that some of the infected who attacked the people up the road were going to forget about the people they attacked and focus their attention on me, but they couldn’t have cared any less about my presence while they already had a meal in front of them. And I couldn’t race up the hill myself to save them either. There were too many infected. While my body was distracted on staying alive, my mind focused on the fact that Richard made it through this thick cluster of infected, maybe he did in fact lure them to the school.

  The walkers who saw me paced after me, while the runners started with their soft screams which intensified as they became more aware of my presence. Soon enough, the runners chased me too and it was time for me to run.

  My plan was to gather more infected with the use of the ones already after me. The bigger the group became, the more infected that would feel compelled to join the chase. The focus: To not get killed.

  One advantage that came from being a skateboarder for so long was the agility and stamina it afforded me. Mobility was always on my mind.

  The math went as follows: My energy needed to be wasted in three parts to make this work. The first part involved the chase to gather a large amount of infected. The second part involved the creation of a gap between them and me, and the third and final involved my race up the hill afterwards. All of which were to happen back to back.

  I raced past the road and through the nearby streets around the hill. I couldn’t see Jack but I was definitely going to hear him when the time was right.

  Focus on surviving

  I caught myself more interested in the sound of the gunshot from Jack’s rifle, but it didn’t show up.

  I ran a block and slowed down while the infected caught up, I didn’t have long before the runners would be on me but I needed a sure way to lose them and not get caught in between the runners and walkers on my way back. No fences, locked front doors, no reachable fire escapes, no open manholes, no anything! This was different. Every other time I had to run for my life and reach a safe spot, the location would present itself effortlessly. This town didn’t have such a convenient luxury.

  To outrun those infected freaks without the use of the environment to my advantage was to struggle. This was precisely how most of the deaths I witnessed after the spread of the infection took place. There wasn’t a way to outrun a person who felt no fear or loss of energy. There was no way to outrun the appropriately dubbed ‘Runners’.

  Tension - I panicked in my frantic search for environmental assistance. I ran out of breath and the infected persisted. Around one building, around the other, down every street that stood next to each other, mental images of rescuing my brother, a second one of Marcus and Richard fighting one another, my mind went haywire. I was being smothered by the infected collected behind me. I didn’t even bother to look back and see how many gathered trying to turn me into supper.

  The gun in my hand yet I couldn’t make a stand, there were too many infected for me to defend against. What was worse was what I thought of first, close quarter combat called for correct use of some collected equipment that I just wasn’t equipped with so it couldn’t be used.

  Bang!

  The air quaked with the weight of a rifle’s shot.

  From one second to the next, all of the infected, vexed by the gunshot, left in chase of the sound it brought with it. Behind me a suddenly vacant street, free of infected human meat. I could still hear them shuffle their feet chasing after the louder sound that came to greet them.

  I changed my direction, doubled back with the intention to come back into Jack’s sight and attempt then to travel up the road to the school.

  Bang!

  Another gunshot brought more sound, therefore, more infected. By now I was close to Jack again. He was no longer where I left him when I became the distraction. He moved. The question was, where to?

  I made it back to where the infected gathered to search for the gunshot. He managed to open one of the buildings up and hide inside it. But where was Jack? He couldn’t still be inside. The infected would break in and turn him into their next great meal with enough time. If I could find where he was shooting to I could find him. The road up to the hill cleared out.

  I could make a run for it!

  The hill looked safe enough for me to dodge around the infected who paid no mind to my attempts to attract and Jack’s gunshots.

  The people…

  Bodies covered the road. The people were beaten and eaten to death by the infected. A river of the combined blood of the dead rolled down the hill, it wound down with the road and met me at the bottom.

  My mind became a whore. “Screw everyone!” I took off up the hill, left Jack to deal with whatever he dealt with. I chased the river of blood up the road to the top where a peach colored monument of human made marvel stood.

  The Hills High School

  I managed to dodge around the infected which remained completely undetected. They focused on the bodies left from the massacre. Whether the bodies were seizing or not wasn’t a problem for them either. It was a zombie free for all. All of the infected ate all the people and all of the… infected? I’ve always wondered what emotion I was meant to feel in this moment. I felt nothing. A deep void of infinity now existed where my rational emotional reactions should have been. I was over the whole thing. The infected, the psychopathic murderers, the consistent bad luck, and death, all of it meant nothing. I walked through a perfect portrait of hell, sound effects and all.

  Two steel doors were at some point bolted shut over the school’s front doors but were somehow ripped off of their bolts and tossed aside.

  How did Richard manage to remove those doors? I doubt he’s so resourceful that he travels with Jaws of Life on him at all times.

  The windows were covered with the respective steel sheets bolted over them, but through the front doors I could still see inside, I could see that things weren’t as good as I thought they were. And I thought they were bad.

  The cannibalistic mess I saw outside was the same thing I saw inside. I arrived at the doors and it became clear the school was no longer safe for anything. The people outside, they tried to run away. It was possible the school is what they ran from. The entrance hallway from my line of sight was covered with infected over bodies as they ate and ate and ate without a pause between bites.

  Richard, responsible for every shit that happened and he went as far as to attack an entire quarantine zone for his own benefit.

  As if the school doors divided all sound between ‘Outside’ and ‘Inside’, my ears rang with the combined moans and screams from the infected, moans and screams from still-fully-conscious people, the cries of help from those none infected, and the collective stomp, drag, and squeak of shoes in every direction.

  Maybe they set off bombs…

  I figured bombs made sense since they could also explain the removed steel doors. Heavily armed with both guns and explosives, Richard was clearly out of his mind. I wouldn’t say I was entirely there myself, but Richard blew crap up now too. There was nothing else for him to escalate to. Explosives were pretty much the limit of efficient, long term destruction.

  Where would have been the best place for me to look for my family? I started everywhere at once.

  Five or six family-sized office cubicles filled most classrooms. The rest were set apart for storage. It caught my eye that two relatively close classrooms were both being used to store clothes. It was an unsettling thought to see more than one room used for the same kind of storage. It told me not enough of the evacuated caravans managed to make it to their destination; not enough people survived for room to be an issue. This spoke volumes about the true power of the infected and their ability to take with them everything in their path.

  The deeper in
to the school I traveled the thinner the number of survivors became. The one thing that didn’t change was the number of infected. At some point the number of distractions became too small for the infected to ignore me, and I was back to creeping around the ones who didn’t notice me and tried to outpace the ones who did.

  The goal was to save every bullet until I could locate Richard, and in the meantime I was to try to find Daviel and my mother somewhere in the massive Hills High School.

  Anyone I walked by ignored me in fear that I was with Richard. They would avoid me the way they would the infected which who roamed the halls. No one would stop to answer my questions, no one would talk, everyone would only run from me.

  Bodies rested all over the school halls and classrooms. Some of the deaths were caused by suicide, some overdosed, some hung, but most were killed by the infected and were either turned or turning. Hundreds upon hundreds of infected seized viciously during their transition into something more violent and dangerous. Soon enough the entire school would be overrun by runners and anyone still in the school’s radius was bound to be caught in the madness of it all.

  I was horrified, nervous, impatient, unsettled, annoyed, bothered, angry, disturbed, and any other emotion you’d hate to feel all at once. But even with these emotions ready to cloud my mind and my judgment, my focus remained intact, that void persisted and held all my emotions in a downward spiral to nothingness.

  I couldn’t find any pattern for the classrooms or who was inside of them. The bodies of the families inside were random as far as I could tell. I wasn’t going to find my family if I tried to zero in on any specific type of culture or ethnicity. I needed something more practical and direct. I needed to find the records for the quarantine zone.

  To know humans are creatures of habit is key when in large human based dilemmas. Human laws, human customs, and human traditions always roll over to whatever situation they are in. Religion gets practiced, politics are exercised, and best of all records are kept. There had to be records somewhere in the school. If I could figure out where they were kept then I could figure out what room my family was in and I’d find and escort them back to safety away from Richard and his men. I would come back afterwards to get Jason away from Richard.

  Because the quarantine zone was assembled inside of a High School it was likely the people in charge kept their records where the school staff kept its records pre-outbreak. The main office towards the front of the school, I headed back to the front.

  The school upped its intensity as I went back to the front of it. The number of infected who roamed increased, and the number of people alive dropped dramatically. Anyone who was successfully going to evacuate the school already did, everyone else was doomed to die in there if they weren’t armed. To simply dodge the infected was no longer helpful either. At first the low number of runners easily became trapped behind all the walkers who roamed and allowed me to step away through use of the speed difference. This wasn’t possible anymore.

  While I traveled down the main hall I took before I turned back, I was spotted by a large group of runners; fifteen or so, trapped behind a staircase door, they tried to get inside. One of them happened to look my way while I sneaked around another group, and once they saw me it let out one of its pained screams and set out to chase me. The rest followed immediately. I ran. They chased me and I reached for the first door I could get a hold of and took cover inside the classroom on the other side.

  I shut the door behind me and moved some desks in front of the door, in case the infected figured out the door handle, it would at least provide enough time to get out through one of the windows, which was the plan up until I actually looked out the window and noticed every other side of the school except the front was lined perfectly with the side of the mountain like hill it was on. It was a steep hundred or so foot drop.

  “Alright, I really need to find something else to defend myself or this handgun is the first line of defense,” I thought out loud. Voices, even if my own, helped soothe the eerie death style atmosphere of the school. The school of infected.

  Like every other place in this shitty world, the room was a complete mess. Every individual family cubical had crap thrown everywhere. I saw no food which could only mean the school supplied the food to everyone. They probably controlled the portions to spare it for as long as possible while they kept everyone fed well enough to not starve and dwindle away slowly.

  I rummaged through everything in search of anything useful. I wasn’t surprised at what I found. Over the course of ten days it was apparent everyone alive thought similarly to accomplish the act of living. I found a kitchen knife. Obviously I was pleased it was ammo efficient and lethal both at once, but I already had the more compact switch blade, whatever, the more the merrier.

  I pinned the handgun against my back with my jeans and kept the knife out. I went back to the door and peaked outside through the little glass window on the door. I saw more infected than I’d ever be able to handle. If I so much as tried to open the door, like pressurized water, the horde of infected would crash through and fill the room up until I drown, or in this case get eaten. It was time for Plan B.

  “What is Plan B?” I asked myself while I paced around the room in search of another way out. There was nothing. No other doors, no rooms which connected, no escape; windows lined the wall with a steep drop on the other side. On the inside of the classroom to the top and bottom of the window rested cabinets which extended the entire width of the windows. I went over and sat on top of them, looked towards the door, and watched the infected gather more densely on the other side.

  How anticlimactic could it be for me to starve to death in this room after having survived all the other crap I had to deal with on the way here?

  I turned my attention away from the door and the infected and gazed out the window. Massive mountains sat far in the distance, opposite to the direction I arrived to the town from. I could see their snow covered peaks. I pictured snowboarders at the top; they bombed down the snow covered mountain all the way down to the bottom and took the lift back up to the top again. I remember going to similar mountains during the high school years of my life. My friends and I would go on road trips during the holiday seasons and summer breaks of school. Sometimes we would even cut class to get a good session going. This wasn’t exclusive to snowboarding, in fact on most days we would skip to skateboard downtown or something. But there was something different about dropping down a mountain that felt endless right up until it ended. The speed, the rush, and the trees you pass by which look like smudges of brown because of the velocity you pass them at.

  My eyes followed the mountain from the top all the way to the bottom and off the mountain further down. My gaze continued to lower, followed a single noticeable trail, or at least something which looked like a trail. Eventually I made it to the deep drop next to the school and the extent of what I could see through the window arrived. A small ledge on the other side of the window obstructed the rest of my view to the bottom.

  What could be down there? I thought to myself.

  “Wait…” I did a double take. “A LEDGE!”

  A ledge approximately the width of a shoe hung on the other side of the window. I followed it with my eyes and it appeared to line the whole wall. If this was fact, I could use it to get to another classroom and get away from the infected. Of course once I exited whatever classroom I made it to I was going to have to run to the extent of my ability to get away from the infected who would notice me, but it would get me back into a more productive position, back to the front of the school and to the main office.

  Neither one was an ideal option, but to slowly starve versus a brief fall, both ended in death, made one sound significantly more pleasant than the other. Out the window it was.

  I focused on the tiny window on the door and covered it with two boxes I found, so the infected would not see where I went. If one of them turned out to have even the slightest bit of rational thought left and w
ent over to the next room I would be screwed more so than I was already.

  Back at my freedom attempt, the windows wouldn’t open. They were completely shut for the safety of the students who attended. I was going to have to break the window which would also take away my chance to analyze the ledge further because the noise would be so loud more infected would be attracted to the room and break through the door. I drew, with my eyes closed and hoped for a royal flush while I faced a straight. Not the best odds, but still better than nothing.

  Chairs were forced to the walls of the classrooms to allow for the cubical makeup the quarantine staff arranged. I picked one up and flung it out the window. The infected on the other side of the door became agitated and more aggressive. They beat on the door louder and more repeatedly, yelling in agony and screaming at the top of their lungs trying to get through the door. I watched the bits of door I could see around the boxes shake viciously the way walkers in transition to runners would. It shook every time they pounded on it. The classroom wasn’t going to be empty for long. I had to vanish.

  I climbed up onto the cabinets and kicked off the pieces of glass which remained around the window hole so I wouldn’t get cut on my way out. I gripped the side of the window and climbed out. One foot on the ledge and with my free hand the knife went into my belt hooks. My other foot reached the ledge but I still held onto the inside of the classroom with my arm wrapped around the inside of the window. Both my feet on the tiny ledge, it was time to let go.

  The repeated banging on the door by the infected was interrupted by wood breaking. They ripped through the door. My arm left the grip around the window and my back met the wall on the other side.

  No support, no ropes, no help; I stood on the tiny ledge, my back against the wall and my heels held up my entire weight. The gun scraped against the wall while I slid my way across the ledge. I refused to look down at all costs, but the view of the mountains remained as mesmerizing as they were before I came out.