by Robert Brown
The person walking up looks infected. It is a woman, and she is one street light away from the back of the truck now. She is heading toward me in an awkward drunken type stagger, and I am moving slowly toward her. If this was any day but today, I would think she was the victim of some kind of assault, and would run up and ask if she needs help. She is wearing a white top and khaki pants and looks like she would have been a manager or employee at any typical retail store. Her white shirt is ripped open at the shoulder, and blood is running down that arm making the whole sleeve look black in the darkness.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” I say out of habit. Of course she isn’t okay, you idiot, I think to myself. She doesn't respond to my question but just keeps coming toward me in her staggered walk.
She’s twenty feet away now. “It’s time to learn what I can.” I say quietly to myself as I lower the shotgun, draw my handgun out, and aim it at her. “Ma’am, you need to respond. Are you okay?” Fifteen feet and I still get no response. “If you keep approaching I will shoot you ma’am. Stay away.” She is now ten feet away and no response. “Ma’am, stop or I will shoot!” I yell loudly. A flash of light and mini explosion as I pull the trigger and my gun goes off. The first shot I aimed at the ground near her, but just to the side, so it wouldn’t ricochet and hit her. She doesn’t stop, run, or even flinch at the shot. With the second shot, I aim at her.
I hit the woman in the right shoulder, and I start backing up. She keeps advancing and has shown no hint that I shot her. Again, no facial flinch, no anger, or fear at being shot. Her face remains blank, emotionless, and she keeps walking toward me. There is a small spot of blood where my round hit, but not what should occur with a fresh bullet hole. I am keeping the ten foot distance between us, and I take my next shot. Flash—crack, another bullet shakes my hand as it leaves my gun. This round enters the woman’s left leg above the knee.
The woman still doesn’t respond to the bullet impact and it tearing through her skin and bone. She does fall down on the next step as the leg crumbles under her weight. She falls face down and disturbingly doesn’t try to block or slow her downward motion. Her face smacks onto the pavement. I cringe at the thought of the pain it would cause and can clearly hear the wet crack of impact, even though my ears are ringing slightly from the report of the gun. She lifts her head to look up at me and has broken her nose. As she starts to crawl toward me I put a final round in her head and end my first terrifying lesson in what we are facing.
Donald and Joshua are standing at the sidewalk staring at me, and I’m sure Karen is looking at me from the cab as well. My skin is cold and sweaty, and I realize I am shaking slightly. “I had to kill her. She was bitten and kept coming.”
“We saw it,” Donald says. “I didn’t want to believe it. I still don’t want to believe this is happening. How can someone just keep coming after they are shot like that?”
Now that I see how an infected person reacts I know we are in serious trouble. This was the perfect setting to find out with no other infected around to chase me. I look at Donald and Joshua still just standing there, and say, “You guys need to keep loading stuff, or we should get in the truck and leave.” The loading continues.
I didn’t notice it before, but I can distinctly hear the crackle of gun fire now. It is going off in the distance here and there in various places in the direction we came from, and sometimes off to either side. The side noise is what worries me. This section of town we are in is residential, but I believe there are some strip malls to the north. I know the downtown shopping area is to the south. People were told to stay at home and inside, but it is human nature to seek out news and information. Many people would head to the local markets and shops that still exist to find out what they can. This would make a great buffet for the infected as well as provide a way for us to be surrounded at this house. I assume the infected would head to where they see the most people or hear the most noise, although I’m not sure how well they hear or see. I know they use sight because that woman lifted her head and seemed to look right at me before I shot her.
“We’re almost finished,” Donald announces from behind me, making me jump slightly. I had tuned out the sounds of them moving the boxes and totes of supplies, and didn’t expect the human voice to call out.
She didn’t make any noise, I think to myself. The whole time she was approaching me, I didn’t hear anything but her footsteps. She didn’t yell or cry when I shot her. She didn’t growl or moan like they do in movies. Just silence, stealth. That must be how they can get people. She was moving slowly. I could keep away from her walking backward, so they must use silence to keep from being detected.
This thought makes my hair stand on end, and just in time to coincide with another stomach churning realization, I hear another uneven footfall in the distant darkness that sends a chill down my spine. Mingled into the night are the sounds of continuing sporadic gunfire and the occasional scream carried through the air.
The maker of the footsteps appears under a streetlight from a side street up ahead. He is limping very slowly but not staggering like the woman. He looks like he is just injured or freshly attacked and not yet turned.
“Help! Is there someone there? Help me,” the man yells as he starts toward me and the truck.
“Have you been bitten?” I yell, but the answer starts playing itself out in front of me. Another person runs out of the same side street and tries to help the man over to me, but the injured man collapses on the road about fifty yards away, right below the streetlight.
I hear the man that is trying to help say, “Dad, get back up. You’ve got to get up.”
But the man that was his father won’t be getting back up. His body starts twisting around on the ground and for a few seconds it looks like he is having a seizure. The twisting and shaking stops, and the man’s fallen father starts slowly getting back up.
I yell to him as I start advancing on the pair, “Get away from him. Your father’s infected, you need to move.”
He looks at me approaching with my gun raised, and says, “Hey, put the gun down. What are you doing? He’s okay. Look he’s getting back up.”
It’s too late at this point. The man is standing right next to his father. They are facing each other when the father grabs his son and bites him on the neck. I stop my advance but am already close enough to see a bloody wound appear, and thick pulses of blood spurt out as his father pulls his head away.
I want to pull my trigger and end the attack, but I can’t get a clean shot with the son standing between me and his father. I know he is already infected because of the bite, but I’m not ready to start shooting people that aren’t showing signs of infection yet. As I start backing up the two men collapse on the ground. The son falls on his own, probably passed out from the immense loss of blood, and the father drops down to him and continues his meal.
I return to the back of the truck keeping an eye on the scene of the attack as I retreat. It seems the infected people will continue assaulting their victim instead of moving on to a new one if the victim can’t get away. I don’t think the son will be getting back up. His father is just doing too much damage to his son’s neck. Unless this disease can cause the dead to rise, which it better not. I just have to keep an eye on the father and look out for any other infected people approaching.
The dad eventually gets up from his meal. I can only assume it is because his victim has finally died. This guy is moving much faster than the woman did. He’s moving at a walking pace but with a limp because of the wound on his leg. I don’t like the idea of them moving fast like that. The faster they move, the more dangerous it is for us.
With them moving at these speeds, we don’t have time to be doing any more loading tonight. I raise my shotgun and shoot the approaching man in the head when he is about twelve yards away from me. Another infected person soon appears from the same side street that father and son did, and heads in my direction immediately. I still don’t know how their hearing is. This
thing could have turned toward me because he just chose to or because of the sound of my shot. I don’t think I’ll bother to ask.
The horn on the truck blares, and I look to the front of it and see about four people run across the road, again north to south. These people were moving fast and didn’t care that we were here, so they aren’t infected, or at least aren’t turned. It does mean that the infection is in front of us as well, and moving toward us from the strip mall portion of town.
Donald and Joshua come out of the house with their guns. “We need to go now, Donald,” I say. “There is another one coming up slowly behind us, make that two. And some people were running up ahead so these things are almost here.”
“I think we’ve gotten everything anyway,” he says and heads to the trailer to close it.
I look at the progress of the two infected people coming from behind and go lock the house. A stupid habit, but there might be more supplies inside somewhere, and I don’t want to give up anything that may help us all survive. I walk around the back of the truck, shoot the two closest infected. Four more have come from around the same corner behind the other two, but I turn and jog up to the cab, and climb in.
Infected people are starting to walk out from the road in front of us. There are six spread out and moving in our direction, but the truck doesn’t move.
“You’re going to have to run them over,” I say, but Donald just sits there staring out at the people in front of us.
“Donald, there are more of them coming out from that street now,” I say, almost yelling. Being in this closed cab with infected people surrounding the truck is making me feel like I’m in a coffin, and if he doesn’t get the truck moving that’s exactly what it will end up being.
I yell at him, “We are either going to stay here or you will have to run them down! They aren’t going to move for us!”
Karen puts her hand over her mouth and gasps. I look out the windshield, and coming out of the side street, I see there is a young girl about the size of my five year-old dragging a doll by the leg. Karen begins to cry, and my stomach twists into a knot of fear. The infected people have reached the truck and are clawing at it attempting to get at us, their food prize locked in the cab. The collective sadness in the truck turns to a bone chilling fear when we hear our first moan. The sound is part scream and part gurgle, and the infected people outside seem frustrated that they can’t get to us.
So they do make a noise when they can’t get to their prey, I think.
The little girl with the doll finally makes it closer to the truck and walks into the light of the headlamps. The girl is missing a part of her face, it is just a bloody pulp, and we can see now that it isn’t a doll that she is dragging by the leg.
“Donald! We need to go!” Karen screams, and the truck starts moving forward. The feel and sound of crunching as the truck drives over these people is sickening. Joshua actually throws up in the back, and I know we will all feel like that at some point in our journey out of town.
So this is our immediate future. In order to survive, we need to turn against every civilized instinct we have tried to ingrain into modern society. We must revert back to our tribal roots and begin killing other groups of people in order to survive. No more caring for the sick among us to help spread humanities warmth.
We didn’t just run over a disease or infected monsters out there, they were people. No more caring for and protecting the smallest and weakest amongst us regardless of their situation in life. Every life, even a child’s life, will have to be weighed against our own survival. We will have to kill children just as we had to run over that little girl. That little girl and the dead baby she was dragging behind her.
The next few blocks I sort of tune out. I am here, of course, but just floating in the moment like a bad dream. Every person has their point, their button. Sometimes it is a breaking point, sometimes an epiphany, but there is a point for everyone in which something happens and nothing will ever be the same again. Seeing that little girl was my moment.
I always wanted to have a family. I wanted to be happily married and have kids and truly be with my family. I wanted to actually be in their lives not just a side-note of a man who shows up in-between his working hours to eat and sleep. That was my ultimate goal, and I achieved it. Every moment from the point that I got married and on was doing what I thought would first keep us safe, and second, allow us to spend as much time together as possible.
My own childhood was not bad. While I can call my upbringing indifferent and not particularly close or caring in an emotional way, I wasn’t abused or neglected. My experience growing up was like spending time with friends or acquaintances rather than a close bond of family. So because of the indifference I knew while maturing, I wanted to give to my wife and kids a loving family with a devoted husband and father, to which I believe I have been largely successful.
To keep us safe I actively pursued training in firearms for my wife, myself, and my kids, and got into the prepping side of life to ensure that no matter what happens in life, my family will stay safe, secure, and have enough food to eat.
Seeing that little girl in the road is a new moment for me. Even with all that I have done to make sure we had as much quality time together as possible, we aren’t together now. I know that I shouldn’t be out here alone. My wife and I should be here together with our kids, and I should not have left her at the ranch. As terrible as this moment is, it is something that we should be going through as a family, not as individuals in our own segment of the world’s destruction.
The visions of what is happening outside the windows of this compartment can be described, but must be experienced to wholly comprehend. I will tell her about this trip, but she will never be a part of this experience that I have shared with Donald, Joshua, Karen, and Katy. In this moment, I am an outsider in their shared family experience.
“I think we’re clear of the bad part,” Donald says as he points to the clear road ahead. “It looks like we were just seeing the leading edge of this thing where we were. We are only five blocks from that guy Matt’s house.”
“Five blocks?” I ask. In my mind it feels like we have been driving for hours. “Okay. Donald, I want to get out of town as fast as we can, but we need to make one more stop now that we are clear of the current infection zone.”
A chorus erupts at my statement, of, “What? What are you talking about?” and, “We aren’t going to stop anywhere else.”
“Look, I’m sorry but we have to search the truck. Donald, you need to get us to a good sized parking lot or area where you can pull over. Find someplace where we can see if anyone is approaching the truck from any side. I need to get out and check if any of the infected people are hanging on or stuck to the truck somewhere. All of the supplies in the world won’t help us if we give an infected person a ride to my ranch tonight.”
“That looks like a shopping center up ahead. They might have an area, but with so many cars driving in and out, I doubt it’s clear.”
Donald slows the truck because people are running around, and the people in cars are driving like idiots.
“Do you think these people are infected?” Karen asks, and we are all wondering as well.
“They aren’t walking like the people back at the street we came from. They look like people that are just panicked.”
There is a grocery store in this shopping center that is being rampaged. People are running out the front door with carts full of stuff. These look like regular people, and they are taking regular things. There are some people out there with your typical riot issue stolen TV or armful of clothes, but most of the carts look like they’re full of canned goods and food.
“It looks like people are finally in full panic mode. Is there anything different on the radio?” I ask and switch it on myself.
It’s just the same emergency broadcast warning to stay indoors and watch for people acting strangely. Joshua starts scanning through all of the stations and hits one of the sma
ller ones which is no longer issuing the emergency broadcast.
“Folks, I am getting reports of massive rioting going on here in the Medford area. Right now it seems to be centered in the northeast area but is spreading to the south and west quickly. I’m getting reports on my HAM radio that people are just attacking one another in the streets. It doesn’t seem to be any type of organized riot…”
“Does anyone know the phone number to this station?” I ask. “If we can call him and tell him what we know, we might be able to save some people.”
“I have a phone book in the glove compartment,” Donald says. I reach in and grab it but give Donald a strange look for having it there. “I haul stuff for people all over the southern area and don’t always trust the phone numbers on invoices when I’m making a delivery,” he explains.
“Damn it! I still have no service with my phone. Are any of yours connecting?” I ask in frustrated anger.
They all shake their heads no, and I scratch mine in thoughtful frustration. This morning, most people could have let anyone around the planet know exactly what they were doing and also provided an instant video of it as well. Right now, we can’t even call the local radio station to let them know what is going on.
“Hey, Dad? I think this station is on the side of town we’re heading to. Since we are already moving away from the infection, we could run in there, and tell the guy in person.”
“Tell me the address, son,” Donald says, and Karen puts an approving hand on Joshua’s shoulder. Katy is sitting on Karen’s lap.
The whole scene is touching, and the sentiment is just and noble. I agree that we should tell as many people as we can about what is really going on, but a selfish part of me doesn’t want to delay getting back to Simone and my kids any longer than I have to. This situation is easier for them to bear because they are all together. No matter what takes place tonight, whether we make it back home alive or not, they are already together, and won’t have to wonder what happened to the people they love. I don’t know what's occurring back at the ranch. I can only assume and speculate that everyone is okay.
