by Jones, Isla
The infected swarmed the lot like a rabid horde of rodents on scraps of food.
I watched, unable to unroot myself from the window, as the horror unfolded into strips of blood and flesh before me. Rage. That was what I saw. So much rage in the way they moved—flailing their arms, eyes wild and blood-red, vicious roars ripping through their throats before they pounced on their victims. But the horror didn’t end there. They all killed in different ways, all fuelled by that same rage of the virus. Cracking heads against the asphalt, tearing out throats with a snatch of the hand—
One stopped in its flying rage.
It stopped, blood running down its grimy arms, and turned its head slowly. It looked at me. He looked at me.
I didn’t have time to blink before he spurred forward and broke into a frenzied run; a run that finished with me on the other side of the window.
I stumbled over my feet, and snatched for my bag on the bed.
“Cleo, go—go!”
She was already leaping off the bed in a zip of black fur—a tainted gazelle springing for survival. We made for the bathroom, but I jerked back to the window when a horrid bang resounded through the cheap room.
The crazed man staggered back from the window. A crack zig-zagged across the glass, and I thought of poison spreading through veins. The man’s unfocused eyes blinked away his shock within a second. A second I couldn’t afford to give.
Before I could even turn back to the bathroom, he threw himself against the window again. The glass shattered this time.
Cleo yelped at the sound. I almost tripped over her in the doorway. I caught my balance and snatched her up from the mouldy floor.
He was already inside—gaining on us. The rapid pitter-patter sped nearer, closing in on my back. I barged through the door and slammed it shut—my head jerked back. A cry tore through me. He’d grabbed a chunk of my hair before the door smacked into him.
Tears stung my eyes. The door rattled against my throbbing skull—death knocking—and I tried to fade the pain away. That thing had ripped out a real chunk of my hair. But each time my scalp throbbed, the monster threw himself against the door with more and more force and ferocity. His gurgled cries grew louder. The warmth of blood that trickled down the nape of my neck wasn’t important. Survival was. Cleo was.
Trying to steady my breath, I swept my gaze around the scum-ridden bathroom until I locked onto the window above my shivering Cleo. Small. But large enough that I could squeeze through it with only a few skin-scrapes and bruises. The rusted latch that trapped the window to the pane meant I had to break it.
Back against the rattling door, I slid closer to the sink and reached for the scummy soap-dish. My fingertips slipped over its edge, a hair’s breadth from my grip. It was too slippery.
I cursed in a breathy grunt. My hand slapped to the sink in defeat. I couldn’t reach it without pulling away from the thin door…the door whose thin linoleum was caving in under the infected man’s assaults.
I didn’t have much time. Not a minute to spare—only seconds to act.
I shot away from the collapsing door. Dust was already invading the air, choking me, scratching my eyes. But I lunged for the soap-dish and hurled it at the window. Glass shattered into a rainfall of glitter.
Just as I reached for Cleo, the door collapsed completely. Behind me, cheap wood and a wild man blasted into the bathroom. He’d pummelled himself into a bloody, battered mess to reach me.
I clutched Cleo to my chest, bag looped over my shoulder, and scrambled to the window. But I wasn’t quick enough. He snatched me back before I could reach it.
Tangled, we all smacked to the floor. Glass crunched beneath us like nuts under a pestle. Cleo scampered to the toilet base, beside my fallen bag—but I still had my keys in hand. The ribbed edges still cut against my palms as the man straddled my back faster than I could blink away my stunned state.
Then it happened. His fist barrelled down on my back.
A hoarse wheeze sucked through my throat and choked the cries of pain that gathered. Raw fear surged through me—the kind that turns your heart and veins to ice, makes you feel like you’re falling forever.
That savage beat down on me. Each blow to my back was hard enough to seize my lungs and send cracks through my shoulder blades.
Eyelids fluttering, eyes ready to roll back into my skull, I fixed my grip on the keys and twisted my arm. With no way of knowing my aim, I stabbed backwards. Nothing happened. I did it again and again, flapping my aim around with the dwindling strength I had left—until a sludgy, sickening sound followed.
Whatever I’d hit was delicate enough that he jerked back and toppled to the floor. In shock. He was stunned, like I was when I hit the floor or when he’d first punched me…The reminder that he was human churned my stomach. That, and the sight of my keys sticking out of hit eye-socket.
Before he could collect himself, I grabbed a long shard of glass from the floor and kicked back to the wall. Not a moment too soon. He stirred. It stirred, I told myself. It had to be an ‘it’. No human could have that much bloodlust in his rabid eyes…or eye.
It swiped out at me.
I kicked out at its head just before its rotten fingernails could touch me. I’d heard on the radio that scratches could maybe transmit the virus. Maybes weren’t worth the risk. No matter what, I wouldn’t risk it. Not me, not Cleo. Not for anyone.
I held up the shard, the pointed tip glinting, and I paused.
“I’m sorry.”
It might’ve been a lie. Even now, doubts of my honesty linger. Was I sorry to take a stranger’s life? A stranger who was sick? Because really, in the end we’re all built for survival. And it was him or Cleo and me.
But maybe he can be cured—a fleeting thought I had before I lunged at him and drove the glass into his throat. I ripped it out of the gushing hole. An awful gurgle mixed in his throat with a cry of fury and he made to tackle me.
I met him halfway and plunged the shard back into him. And again. I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed—and I only stopped when he went limp and thumped to the floor.
Glass crunched beneath his weight.
Straddling the dead man, I slumped and caught my breath.
No swell of guilt of washed over me. Only nausea. I never liked blood much. And I was covered in. Warm and wet. Smeared across my chin, dribbling down my top, and oozing from my palm.
My palm. I dropped the shard of glass and stretched open my hand. I winced. A gash spread across my palm and bled like the warmth still stuck to the nape of my neck.
The sight of it jolted me back to reality. There was no time to dwell on injuries. If I was to tend to them, I had to survive this massacre first. And it was a massacre…
Cleo shivered behind the toilet. Screams came from all over. A dead body beneath me, an eye gouged out, neck slashed open so thickly that I could see shadows of bone.
My bloodied keys, bleeding hand.
Suddenly alert, I grabbed a cloth from the towel rack and bound my wound. A messy bandage, but it would have to do, at least if only to keep that thing’s blood from touching my open wound.
I coaxed Cleo into my bag. Shakily, she climbed in until only her head poked out from the half-done zipper. Just in case anything happened to me, she could jump out and run for her life.
With the bag held against my chest in one looped arm, I held my keys out like a weapon and crept out of the bathroom.
Across the crummy room, the curtains billowed around the empty window frame.
The carnage outside burned my throat with bile. But I couldn’t stay hidden behind broken doors and windows. I had to make it to the Jeep.
I wiped my keys on my jean-shorts and held Cleo closer to me. Then, packets of chips crinkled in the bag—I paused, waiting for one of the savages outside to hear it, to notice me. But the sounds of the screams were louder.
I climbed over the window frame, careful to avoid the jagged shards still stuck between the panes. I moved slowly. Each limb sli
nking like a cautious cat’s. It didn’t matter.
My sock caught on a shard. It tugged free and crashed to the concrete.
One noticed. One heard. One, paused a few parking spots ahead, drenched in blood, flesh dangling from her teeth and nails. And she looked right at me.
My breath hitched—but I gave it no second more than that. I pushed from the window frame and raced to my Jeep. She was fast. Faster than me. A middle-aged woman with blood-stained grey hair and vicious eyes.
I slammed into the side of my car; she smacked into the windowpane. Her stumble gave me enough time to wrench open the door and throw the bag with Cleo inside onto the passenger seat.
But I didn’t have enough time to get in myself.
I shoved from the Jeep, keys in hand, and raced around the trunk. The infected woman hit the ajar driver’s door, slowing her down a beat. By the time she swerved back onto my trail, I was skidding around the hood, the heat of the metal scraping over my bare thigh.
More of them noticed me. Three, at least. I didn’t stop to count.
I half-jumped, half-scrambled over the corner of the hood and wrenched back open the driver’s door. Just as I threw myself inside and slammed the door shut, the woman jumped onto the hood and glared at me through the windshield—the sort of glare that tingled my spine and curled my toes. A glare of pure evil.
I jammed my bloody keys into the ignition switch and—a strangled laugh caught in my throat as my Jeep choked to life.
I’d never sped so fast in my life—so fast that when I wrangled the gearstick out of reverse and spun around, the infected woman flew off the hood and hit the sun-scorched ground so hard that blood spattered onto my windows.
But I sped on out of there. I hit people on the way. Infected ones. Still, they were people. And I didn’t give a damn.
4.
Dawn had kissed and abandoned the earth long before I finally pulled over.
Cleo and I sought refuge outside the hot hunk of metal in the cool shade of an old, unrepaired bridge. If I hadn’t had a Jeep, there was no way I would’ve been able to make it across the rocky land we sat on. I would’ve been stuck back there, on the California side of the border—in the death state, with those things.
That’s when I started thinking of them as rotters.
Those who were infected. They were people … Shells of what humans should’ve been, but never were. Those infected people wore the truth of humanity freely, stripped from their masks, and showed the rotten core that lived within us all. They were ferocious, cruel, brutal.
Rotten.
And so were we.
Under the bridge, we stayed holed up for the rest of the evening. I’d picked out the pieces of glass from Cleo’s tail, cleaned and bandaged my own injuries, and we’d eaten some. Then after hours of trembling and whining, Cleo slipped into a fragile sleep. I didn’t wake her—I just held her in my arms and stared out of the windshield, hoping no rotters came.
Every howl of the wind, whisper of the breeze through the cracks in the bridge, stirred my gut. Alert, ready at the thrum of a heart, adrenaline slipped beneath my skin, swimming through my veins, prepared.
I didn’t sleep a wink. Not that night and not the night that followed. It was … different.
I’d tried to listen to the radio a few times. It had stopped playing. And when I kept on driving—sticking close to the barren roads, away from the highways—I spotted some blockades. Like the ones back at the main border. But the ones I saw were abandoned.
Still, they did their job. The blockades. They stopped me from driving through, they guided me down other roads—and I’d hoped, away from the rotters.
It wasn’t long before I realised, there was no away from the rotters.
Not anymore.
The fourth day on the road, I tried for the last time to call Summer. Like every time before it, the service was dead. Not a bar. Not a single slice of reception. Then, my cell died.
And it was just Cleo and me.
“We’ve been worse places,” I told her one night, one night after we both realised what had happened, and how far it stretched. “We just have to do whatever needs doing and get to DC. We’ll be all right.”
We huddled, that night, in the lonely car. I managed to sleep some. But not before my thoughts drifted to the road ahead. All I had to do was keep on driving. Drive ahead of the virus. Stay off the main roads to avoid the blockades and people.
Desperate people are the worst. I know that because I was once one of them. Maybe I still am…
I slept for about an hour that night. It wasn’t much, but it was an hour of ignorance. An hour of peace from the horrors that spread ahead, the horrors that reached across the country.
Looking back, I can’t tell if that was a blessing or a curse, to be ignorant, to not know what truly loomed ahead of me. Barely surviving each day. Five months of quarantines, failed blockades, destroyed towns, and being pushed into the heart of Santa Fe where the real horrors truly began. And worst of all, the people, the mission, the soldiers, and … the truth about the virus.
Looking back, I can tell you one thing that’s certain. It didn’t matter which road I took, which town I drove through, where I looted or where I abandoned my Jeep when it failed me. None of that mattered. Because it had begun.
The plague had been born.
And it was a dawn of a new world.
5.
Five months after the outbreak, five months of collapsed quarantines, overthrown barricades, I found myself on the shore of a lake. The car I’d driven over the state border had broken down an hour ago. I was stranded.
I watched the murky waters ripple closer. The water never quite reached me. Fleetingly, I thought of the virus; always nearing, drawing close, but never quite touching me. Was it a blessing that, despite the odds, I was still alive?
I only hoped the same could be said for Summer.
I gathered my grimy, peach-blonde hair and tied it into a pony-tail with an elastic band. It hurt, but it was all I had.
There was a time when I could wash my hair whenever I pleased, and tie it up with hairbands. Two simple chores that seemed had become luxuries. Dirt was streaked down my face and throat; dried blood caked into my fingernails; my clothes were torn and muddy.
Though, if I could have wished for one thing, it wouldn’t have been a shower or a bath. It would have been her. Summer.
I ached for the company of another. Five months was a long time to be alone. Well, I wasn’t completely alone.
Cleo kept me company in the lonely world.
I pushed herself up and brushed dirt from the bum of my worn-out jeans. The setting sun in the distance warned that it was time to find shelter for the night.
Rotters came out at night. They came out night or day, but mostly night. It was when they were most active, hungry for bloodshed. Violent.
“Cleo!” I shouted.
The small dog pranced out of the foamy water.
Together, we trudged off the pebbly shore and onto the abandoned street up the hill. The silent Chihuahua trotted beside me, wrapped in a torn dog-jacket to ward her from the chilly breeze.
We walked up the street—walked and walked and walked.
It’s all we ever did these days.
We veered off the main road at the first narrow street on the road—it meant residential areas were nearby, the sort that huddled together in quiet streets. After the better part of an hour, we found ourselves in a vacant cul-de-sac with five houses.
“Come on, Cleo.” My voice was a quiet hush, too quiet for a rotter-nest to hear.
At the nearest cottage, I pulled a kitchen knife from my belt.
I reached forward, hand shaking before it touched the door handle. The knife was raised in my other hand. A few days ago, I lost my gun—abandoned in the car, when we had to make a quick break away from the nearby rotter nest. Since then, I’d come by loads of guns. Most of them I didn’t know how to use. Others weren’t so handy without bullets.<
br />
Whoever thought the States would run out of bullets.
I swung the door open. Its creak was loud enough to groan down the street.
Both Cleo and I cringed. Waiting.
But nothing jumped out at us.
I tapped the blade of the knife against the panel and waited for familiar groans or bangs. Nothing happened. After a moment, I stepped inside, Cleo at my heels.
I checked all the rooms in the house before returning to the living room. A smile pulled at my chapped lips when I spotted Cleo on the stained, dust-covered sofa; she was curled up into a ball, sleeping.
I sighed and went back to the kitchen.
Someone had already raided the house. All that was left were two cans, smothered with so much grime that I couldn’t tell what was inside of them.
Snatching one of the heavy cans, I used the sleeve of my black sweater and wiped at the dust on the can. My chapped lips set into a thin line. It was a tin of beans. Not baked beans—at least baked beans had a little flavour—but kidney beans in murky grey water.
Then again, the apocalypse was no time to be picky.
I raided the rest of the kitchen. Whoever had gone through the house before had taken everything, even the dishes and cutlery. Though, I came across a set of car keys under the rusted stove.
I hoped that the car was still nearby. Another survivor could have hotwired it off the street and it could be long gone by now. I needed a vehicle. I needed food, water, a car, weapons and petrol.
When I went back to the small, damp living room, Cleo peered out of one eye. Then she sighed and dozed off again.
I placed both tins on the coffee table.
On the opposite armchair with frayed upholstery and moulded legs, there was a pile of woollen blankets. I almost smiled at them. This was the first steak of luck we’d had in a while. So far, we’d been stuck to sleeping under broken-down cars, and eating candy bars from beaten-down shops. Warmth wasn’t something we’d know in a long while.
I grabbed a nearby magazine from the floor, using it as a plate for Cleo’s serving, before I stabbed the tin to open it. When the apocalypse had first started, I hadn’t known how to use a knife without cutting myself. One time, I even nicked my finger buttering toast. Now, I was a master of knives. Maybe I would do well with a sword. They don’t run out of bullets.
