by Robert Brown
The slow infected are the only kind that we have encountered so far. They are the only type anyone has seen anywhere in the world. I mean, we haven’t spoken with everyone out there of course, and haven’t heard much at all these last two months, but no one has mentioned the infected running.
The problem we have now is that they are changing. Either the parasite has mutated or the infected are adapting. The tables had turned against us humans that day when the infection was first spread. And right now in front of me, sitting on my stomach, I am seeing the latest evolutionary step of the infected kind. The knife sticking out of this infected man’s mouth would not be noticed by any other infected that I have encountered. I have seen them stuck or have stabbed them in many places, and unless there is blunt force trauma to the head or severing the spine at the neck, they just don’t acknowledge any injury.
This infected man knows the knife is in its mouth and can’t bite with it there. Like other infected, it didn’t flinch or blink when I shoved the knife in, but this infected has stopped its grasping of my face and head, is sitting back up from leaning over me, and is now pulling the knife out of its mouth. It understands what is wrong and knows how to fix it.
This is not supposed to happen. These things have never moved quickly once infected, and they’re not supposed to regain their reasoning skills once they have the fever. We have tested people to see what happens when they get infected, and the parasite causes severe body tremors and a fever that usually runs in the 108 to 109 °F degree range. It burns just long enough to fry most normal cognitive function and fine motor skills. So, manipulating your wrist, hand, and fingers to grab onto a knife and pull it out and away from your mouth should be impossible.
A loud crack sounds out above me as Simone bounces her baseball bat off the head of this infected bastard, causing him to collapse on top of me. “Did you just see that!” we both yell to each other. Our second lines are not identical but are each equally disturbing. While I am yelling, “It just pulled the knife out of its mouth!” She is yelling, “That thing just ran!” We both just blindly stare at each other for a second, absorbing this new information.
Finally, I start to lift my back off the sidewalk so I can drag the rest of my body out from under my avid admirer. He apparently has decided that he just doesn’t want to see me go without a goodbye kiss. In this case, a goodbye bite. So he clamps down on my left forearm right below the elbow, through the shirt sleeve, and into the meat. It hurts like a motherfucker, and the blood that is around his lips and on my sleeve shows that he is piercing my skin.
Two more successive cracks from Simone’s bat cave in my attackers head, but the damage is already done and plain to see. I pull up my sleeve. My arm has a distinctive bleeding bite mark and also some torn flesh where the teeth pulled back when the infected’s head was slammed with the bat. So I am bitten, and my kids are gathering behind my wife. Hannah and Olivia are standing with shocked wide eyes. William is on the verge, like Simone, with tears welling up. Benjamin says, “Uh-oh, owie.” And points to my bleeding arm. Only Amelia stands stoically, and says, “You’ll be all right, Daddy. You always are.”
“Simone! Kids! Check for more infected,” I say, realizing we were all out in front of the store now, and made quite a commotion with the fighting. “My being bitten doesn’t change a thing. You all have to keep watching out for more of them, okay?”
The infected female that I hit is paralyzed from the neck down, but her mouth is still snapping and her eyes are darting from person to person wishing to get a bite on one of us. Simone uses her bat to collapse the skull of the chomping head. You can see the fear and anger in Simone’s face as she repeatedly brings down the bat. It is a terrifying sight that I never want to be on the bad side of.
Getting out from under this idiot that bit me is difficult. Getting up is painful and not just because of the bite on my arm. My back is killing me from the fall, and I’m sure I have some friction burns on it from sliding a little when I impacted. Hannah is first to say that nothing else is out here, and Simone shortly agrees.
“Okay,” I tell them. “Everyone get back in the store. It has almost been a minute since my bite. I could change anytime. Just stay in there for five minutes and watch me.”
Five minutes come and go as I am sitting outside waiting for the change. I don’t turn, so I get up and head into the store to figure out our next step, and get my arm cleaned up.
I have a small medical kit with disinfectant, bandages, and stitching supplies. So while Simone is cleaning my wound and preparing to stitch up my arm, I am going over what we should do next with everybody. “I’ve been bitten, and we are about four hours away from our place at a slow walk. I didn’t become infected immediately, so we should have the six hours before the fever hits me. If nothing has changed, this will give us plenty of time to make it back home to the ranch. It also looks like it is just about noon, so we have plenty of light left in the day to get there without issue as well.”
“We could leave the bikes and trailers here and head back at a quicker pace. If we hurry, we might make it in two hours if we want,” Olivia offers.
“I’m not going to leave all of these archery supplies here. This is the future of your defense. Rushing home would be a good plan if my injury required getting help more quickly,” I reply. “But we have cleaned it as well as we could at home, and your mom is stitching it up right now. We have a good amount of time to make it there with everything we gathered. Also, I am concerned that increasing my activity level by rushing home may quicken the spread of the parasite, and I would rather just stay as calm as I can to make sure that you all make it home safely.”
“So we all make it home safely,” my wife adds.
“Let’s just get ourselves pulled together and ready to finish our trip home in one piece, okay?” I smile while saying it, but inside I am worried and you can see in Simone’s eyes that she is as well. To distract from the mood, I add, “We should remember where this shoe store is so on our next trip this way, we can get some extra shoes for everybody, and stock up on everything as a possible trade or barter item in the future.”
While I would normally suggest that we look through everything now and see what we can find, I can’t risk not getting them back to the house and other families before the fever hits. We also have our bikes and trailers loaded down to the extreme with the stuff we picked up, so shoe boxes will definitely not fit without leaving something else behind.
As we leave the store and the three lifeless infected bodies, my mind starts to wander through the happier thoughts in life. One big positive that has come from the apocalypse is a healthier eating lifestyle. I mean, I miss fast food and chocolate donuts, and my wife misses ice cream, but because we were already prepared for some type of disaster, we had food stockpiled and are doing quite well. We have buckets and buckets of sealed rice, beans, and dehydrated potatoes. Thousands of cans and jars of beef, chicken, fish and the same amount, if not more, of vegetables and fruits. Most importantly, we have an abundance of seasonings of various types to make sure we aren’t eating plain rice and bland chicken.
I know that thousands of people, if not millions right now, are not just trying to hide from the infected and survive this end of the world scenario, but they are starving while they are doing it. I feel for them. I do. And when good people have come our way, we helped them the best we could, and tried to get them started in the right direction if they were unable or unwilling to stay with us on our ranch. Even with my sympathy for those suffering out there, a less compassionate part of me always wanted things to fall apart from what they were. Not to this extent, but enough to remind people how precious life is, and to appreciate what they have.
Thinking of food makes me chuckle to myself, and say, “Simone, when we get back, after my fever is done, I would like a nice steak.”
“Cow I hope,” she replies. Insinuating I might want people steak after my fever.
We both have a good chuckle
over it, but the kids are still oblivious to many of the strange things we find funny.
The final length of the trip home was largely uneventful according to the current state of the world. We saw no other survivors and only had one more of the infected to put down. I was on point and managed the kill cleanly with Hannah’s spike. She has a long tire iron and the non-curved edge was sharpened into a point. That point went right through the face to the left of its nose and out the back of its skull. It was a female, only about 5’ 6” and 120 pounds, so I decided to keep our group moving and just end it when the thing was within reach. No search of the body was necessary, as this infected must have been attacked while she was relaxing at home, due to the tattered remains of pajama pants and top.
Over the four hour trip, my mind keeps replaying the events of the last five days away from the house, mainly repeating today’s events. We’ve lost a lot of people at the ranch already, and a huge portion of the human population has been infected or killed off by this thing. But no matter how bad it has gotten so far, there was always a hope of wiping this thing out, and rebuilding. I don’t know anymore what hope there is if the infected can run and use their hands for more than just basic grabbing. Will they know how to open gates and fences? Could they possibly use tools to smash or cut through defenses? How many runners are out there? Too many questions and not enough answers.
It took quite a while for Simone and me to come to terms with these things no longer being human. For us, there was and still is the remorseful thought that after the fever hits, these are technically just brain damaged people. Brain damage with extremely violent tendencies, but still the type of thing that in our former life would have been treated as a deadly disease or illness. The people who contracted it being afforded all the rights and protections as every other citizen of these former United States. Perhaps if it didn’t spread so fast and kill so many, that is exactly as it would have been. A bunch of brain fried violent individuals locked up in special medical facilities, and family members visiting them occasionally.
Coming to terms with things doesn’t seem to be the case for our kids. They are far more elastic since they are still learning about and processing the new information of life. Something seemed to click in our older kids and just made them deal with it. There should have been a great extent of screaming and crying, and while there was some, there wasn’t as much of it as even I would have suspected.
As a responsible father, before things fell apart, I had already exposed my children to scary movies. I told them about the zombie books I read, and they saw me play great video games with visually gory gun blasts and regular beheadings. I didn’t try to shelter them from violence the way some misguided people do. I exposed them to it and explained what they were seeing if explanation was needed. Knowledge truly is power, and not knowing truths about the world, such as how violent it can be, is a handicap to survival.
Once the world fell apart and we knew what we were dealing with, I didn’t lie and tell my family everything was going to be okay. I said we were going to have to fight to survive, and I directly explained to Hannah, Olivia, and William that if they yell or cry when they see an infected, the infected person will find us and kill us. From then on they made sure not to make noise when we told them to be quiet.
For Amelia and Benjamin, I’m mainly just concerned with keeping them alive. They watch and copy their older siblings like any young child does. These days, what they are copying is stealth and stillness rather than mimicking a phone call. This is the only world they will know, so they are being raised without the run free and yell when you feel like it mentality of the rest of our childhoods.
Chapter Two
Death and Goodbye
Now that we are near enough to see the fence line, there is another obstacle facing us.
We made it to our property in just ten minutes over the four hour mark. Before we bought the land, it was originally part of an equestrian ranch with riding stables. Our land is a 120 acre parcel that we chose as our retreat location in case things fell apart the way we feared it might. It is far enough away from the Medford area not only in distance but with winding roads and turns to make it hard to find by car. And the hills and woods make it difficult to reach without concerted effort on foot. But it is still close enough that we weren’t too far away from the town to make regular or daily trips impractical. Even though it would have worked for us as our main residence, it was more practical to have this as our retreat home. We also used the location as a training facility for people, to teach, and learn about outdoor living and survival.
The house where we actually lived before this disease started was right at the edge of Medford. I built a storefront on to it, so I could technically work from home, and have the kids nearby.
We had to abandon that house at the start of the outbreak because it was too close to the city. Looking back, I doubt that we could have made it out of Medford and to our retreat property safely if we had stayed for even a day longer than we did. Things fell apart incredibly quick that first day. I’m thankful we had another place to escape to, but especially that it was our own stocked survival training center.
There are multiple buildings and outbuildings on our property, but the main house now sits about one hundred yards from the fence. We chose to move the fence away from the buildings after a large attack by the infected hit us. We have a chain link fence surrounding about 30 acres of the property. This encloses the main house, the bunkhouse, two mobile homes, barn, stable, riding stable, storage buildings, and various smaller structures we put up to house extra survivors that came along.
Around that fence, and twenty yards out from it, is another hodge-podge of fencing and obstacles that we put together to funnel any persons or infected interested in entering our property toward the front gate area. There are fruit trees and gardens on both the inside and outside of the fences, but we cleared the larger trees to about twenty-five yards beyond the fence line to prevent an easily concealed approach. There are some trenches, trees, and large rock piles on the inside of the fence to allow for defensive positions, in case someone was attacking our home.
It is a decent setup as a prepper defending their homestead against a band of intruders or wandering infected. It is not so ideal when returning from a foraging outing to see someone you don’t recognize standing guard on the inside of the fence and no one you know in sight. And that is the obstacle and potential problem we are now faced with.
“Simone, I don’t see Arthur, Greg, or anyone else on the property. Hannah, do you see anyone through your binoculars?”
“No, Dad. I don’t see anyone but that man, and nothing is going on in the house either that I can see.”
I decide to huddle with everyone and discuss our options. “The situation obviously isn’t perfect, but it isn’t necessarily a disaster either. The man we don’t recognize is pacing back and forth more than guarding, and seems rather distracted. There aren’t any signs of a fight or battle on this side of the house, and this is the easiest approach, so here’s what I think we should do. One person in each direction will hug the woods and circle the property to see if there are any signs of bodies or a gunfight. That guy is definitely not infected by how he looks and acts, so we know the place wasn’t overrun by the diseased. If this was a hostile takeover, there should be some sign of a firefight from our people. So that’s what we’ll be looking for, signs of a fight. Sound good?” I watch as they respond. “You’re all nodding so who wants to go?”
Everyone offers to go except for Benjamin.
“Simone and Olivia, you two should go. Simone, take William with you. It will be good practice for his stealth and observation skills. Olivia, you go the opposite way and when you two meet on the other side, continue around to check if the other group might have missed anything.
“Hannah, you stay here with me. If there is any trouble from people on our property, I can hold off any advance. You will take Amelia and Benjamin east to our first fa
llback location, and everyone will meet there. And Hannah, if there are any problems with me, you protect your brother and sister and get them to the fallback location as well, does everyone understand?”
“There won’t be any problems, Eddie!” Simone offers a bit too anxiously.
“Simone, I am over four hours into a bite by an infected that had dexterity and could run. We don’t know if the six hour limit is certain or if there will definitely be a fever this time. I trust you to take care of the kids, and I trust Hannah to take care of me if she needs to, that's why she is staying here. Simone, I love you. I’m sure you are right, but we already don’t have much time. Let’s get moving.”
I can see the hurt and sadness in her eyes, but she knows the truth as much as I do. Our home means survival for our family. Even after we lost so many people when we were overrun, it has continued to be the place of safety for us.
We have little caches and fallback points around the extended property, but nothing beyond it. The odds of our family surviving intact were already slim and beyond the scope of odds in our favor. Without me in the picture, they won’t all survive without the house and its supplies, especially without the other families we have shared our survival experiences and supplies with. And to put it bluntly, I am already bitten and running on less than two hours’ time to get them in there before the fever hits. If a fever will still hit, that is.
Simone and William move off to the right, and Olivia to the left, disappearing into the trees from our view, within twenty yards. While they move off, Hannah steps back from me about ten feet and puts Benjamin and Amelia into a smaller pull cart that we have attached to the bike trailers. She unhooks the cart and sits down next to it, with her Ruger 10/22.
