The Infected

by Gregg Cocking

  It has been awful getting to where we are Sammie – not really because of them, the unhumans, they are too slow anyways to pose much of a threat if we are in the cars, but the roads are just appalling. If it’s not wrecked cars, abandoned cars or burned out cars blocking the road, its them, in their hundreds, maybe thousands – I don’t know what they are doing Sammie – they are walking, maybe chasing after other cars or conveys in their really slow way? So when we come across a blockage, either of the car sort or the unhuman sort, we have to turn around and try find another route, and in these back country roads, that sometimes means a detour of a day or two. Not much fun when petrol is sacred (we turn off Derek’s Touareg and our bus and freewheel downhill whenever we can just to try and save as much petrol as we can).

  We have found that every petrol station that we stop at is drained and looted (doesn’t stop us from stopping and trying anyway – that’s when the coast is clear, that is) but we now know that the best way to go about refueling is to siphon fuel from the abandoned cars which can be found all over the place – again, most of the time they are empty, either already siphoned or maybe run out of petrol – but that doesn’t stop us looking just in case. This takes up a substantial chunk of our time. We have also managed to find clothes, blankets, reading material and sometimes food and drink which has yet to go bad in these cars. So it’s tiring Sammie – when we are not retracing our steps (or tracks for that matter) we are stopping every few hundred metres to check for petrol, diesel or supplies. It’s frustrating, tiring, boring, but we gotta do it I suppose. This is our life…

  Sorry Sammie – I broke down for a while there – I am just missing you so fucking much and I hate the way things have turned out, absolutely fucking hate it. It’s very sad Sammie, but I know that I will see you again and that is what I am clinging to and what gets me through each horrible day.

  Okay, girly cry over – sorry about that (and the swearing). It is early morning now as I type and I don’t want to wake anyone else up too early because I am having a hissy fit over the situation – it’s not fair, everyone is going through the same thing. It’s just… well Lourens, Sandra, Corne and the kids have each other and Derek is a loner and has been for years so he is okay, but me… oh crap, more tears... Sorry Sam – I want to be strong but I can’t always keep it up. Don’t you worry about me though, you have enough to worry about as it is. I am okay and will be okay until I see your beautiful face again! Then I’ll be complete.

  Let me carry on… We have come into contact with quite a few of the unhumans lately (mostly in contact with Derek’s bull bar though!) But we have had a few pretty near to us when we have stopped for supplies or fuel and had to shoot them, but apart from that horrible, hungry, demented look in their eyes, we are basically treating them the way we used to treat those pestering hyenas back at the game reserve – with disdain and contempt. They are just annoying – deadly – but annoying.

  We have also encountered a few other groups on the road, all corroborating our Bloemfontein story and all headed in the same direction – sometimes they warn us about obstacles up ahead and save us a few hours. It’s just a pity that the bus isn’t 4x4! That would be great – space, comfort and off-road ability!

  Okay baby – let me go get breakfast ready so that when the others wake up we can eat and get going (Derek is letting us travel a bit more during the day now – it really just depends on how everyone is feeling). What’s on the menu today you ask? Well, we have some breakfast bars that we found, a jar full of plums that we picked (which are nowhere near ripe enough yet but they will still be good) and some stale Marie biscuits, but you know what, I like them that way!

  I love you, I love you, I love you, Ilove you! You mean the world to me Mister Ward and when I see you I am going to (what Lil said there is for my ears, definitely not for yours, so, sorry for you).Be safe baby! You are amazing!

  I love you from the heart of my bottom (he he he!)

  Lily

  So that is it really – great that I’ll be hearing from her more often from now on – if anything interesting crops up I’ll let you know, especially if they get to Bloem and it is what everybody thinks it is.

  Have a good evening and sleep well. I am going to have a beer and watch the sunset (they are like gold to me these days! The beer, not the sunsets. But… the sunsets are like gold if I think about it – sometimes in colour and sometimes because I do not know how many more of them I will enjoy). Bye for now.

  Sam

  11:13am, September 8

  I just killed one of them. One of the infected, that is. He was downstairs and I really had no choice but to kill him. He was sniffing, literally, around the Audi R8 – I don’t know if it was one of the infected that I encountered the other day when I left the safety of the complex – I didn’t recognise him, but then again, he didn’t look like a stranger either…

  I was lying on the couch in the sun having forty winks – I had been reading, well in actual fact, re-reading an old copy of Q, the British music magazine which obviously wasn’t as interesting the second time around – when I was awoken by the unmistakable shrill of a car’s alarm. As soon as I gathered my thoughts and realised what was going on, I just knew that it was the R8. Anyways, surely the batteries of all the other cars in the complex would be dead by now… I went to the bedroom and leaned out the bedroom window which allowed be to see the sexy curves of the right rear end of the vehicle, and sure enough, it was the Audi’s indicator lights which were flashing on and off and it was my new car which was emitting the noise. I jogged to the kitchen, picked up the keys off the counter and went back to the window. I leaned out as far as I could without losing my balance, and pressed the button of the remote, instantly bringing the silence thundering back into the world. Except there was another sound. A moan.

  I stretched out further into the air, my left foot hooking under the bed for support. It was then that I saw him. He was facing me, but luckily he was looking down at the ground. I almost overbalanced and would have done some serious damage on the rock hard ground below if I had fallen, but luckily my left foot caught on the bed again and I was able to pull myself back into the relative safety of my bedroom.

  The quick glance that I had of the intruder could be summarised as such – he was naked except for a pair of threadbare jockey-style underpants, either black or navy blue (half naked like most of the infected are), he was unkempt with dirty long hair and quite a fuzzy beard and moustache (like many of the men) and he was seriously dirty and sun burnt (like many of them are). Had he followed me back? Had he recognised the car? Or was he just a random one of the infected who maybe originated from inside the complex? I really couldn’t tell. But I knew what had to be done…

  I chose a gun from the lounge and slowly and quietly headed out onto the balcony, which I hoped would give me a good, clear shot, but no dice… when he was visible his head was obstructed by the carport. So I had two options, neither of which really appealed to me. Number one would be to go out there, one-on-one and shoot him in the head. I wasn’t too keen on doing this because I wasn’t too sure what to expect from him – could I creep up on him, what would he do if he saw me, would there be others? The second option would be to lure him out into the open, and again I wasn’t keen on this option either. Would I be able to hit a moving target from my balcony? Would he be able to call others before I shot him? There of course was another option. The third and final choice was to just leave him to go about his business. But what if he had followed me? I wasn’t too keen on leaving him to see where his curiosity would take him. My mind was made up – I had to kill him and I had to do it from his level.

  I readied myself, fondled the gun and unlocked the front door. Not fun… I crept down the stairs, feeling the sun on the back of my neck and for a split second having a flashback to a beach holiday I had with my folks in Margate when I was probably about twelve years old. I remember that holiday for primarily one reason – I walked in on my parents shagging. An
awful memory and I didn’t know why I was thinking of this as I inched closer to one of the infected. I reached the bottom of the stairs and checked the area – nothing, although I could hear the bearded underpants man moaning that distinctive moan of the infected.

  I crept around the lower unit towards the carports and peeked around the corner – there he was, almost rubbing himself up against the car. I moved back out of sight around the corner and checked the gun – loaded, check – safety off, check. This was it. I glanced around the corner again and saw that it was his hairy back which was facing me. Perfect. I slinked around the corner and walked as quickly and as silently up to him as I could, all the while making sure that there were no other infected lurking around the corners or in the shadows.

  I got up to within about two and a half metres of him and stopped. Two things struck me – his back was so hairy that he may as well have been wearing a jersey, and secondly, he really stank, a mixture of shit, dirt, congealed blood… you name it. He was feeling the car, trying to get in maybe, trying to ‘feel’ what it was perhaps. Then he froze. “What?” I thought. Then I saw it. He was looking at me. My eyes had followed the curve of his hairy back and followed the grungy locks of hair, and there, to the left of this dark bush, was his face in the rear windscreen of the car looking back at me. Those eyes, those horrible eyes, fixed on mine in the reflection. I am sure that I saw drool escaping from the corner of his mouth. I raised the gun and shot him in the back of the head, a lot of which smeared across the back windscreen where his reflection had been just a moment before. The body swayed on its feet for a second before falling forwards and bouncing off the car with a dull thud.

  I spent the next hour, pistol at the ready, cleaning up the mess that bearded underpants man had caused – his body I dragged to the pool area and dumped in the now empty pool, while the car I had to spray down – I didn’t want the thing full of blood, it just seems wrong. I went through a gamut of emotions during all of this – relief for my survival, anxiousness because he was so close to my hideout, guilt for killing what was once a healthy and functional human being… it was a hard day today my friends and it is not even midday yet!

  I am just about to sit down with a cup of tea and relax, trying not to reflect on the fact that I just murdered another ‘person’. I know it was the right thing to do, don’t get me wrong, but it still sucks.

  Take care

  Sam

  5:48pm, September 10

  Heard from Lil and them again today – progress is slow but they are hoping to be in Bloemfontein by the end of the week! Will keep you updated.

  Me? Bugger all really. I could indulge you in my latest veggie escapades – what I have eaten, what is still growing, what I have replanted. But you wouldn’t really give a shit, would you? Didn’t think so.

  Sam

  7:23am, September 13

  It is raining, and raining hard it is. It has been since just after 5am this morning. I awoke in the overcast gloom with the sound of rain on the steel roofed carports – I shot up and put a jersey on although I took it off pretty quickly as it wasn’t as cold as I had expected it to be.

  I went straight to the kitchen to check on the infected in the street – it was deserted. And it has been all morning. The sky is grey as can be and, maybe, hopefully, it looks like this rain may have set in (I am crossing my fingers, my toes, and if I was blessed I would cross my willy too). It’s that slow, steady drizzle which I always associate with the UK, not your typical thunder and lightning, heavy downpour, over in five minutes and back to the sun South African rain.

  I’ll come back on later with a weather update…

  Hold thumbs for me.

  Sam

  10:51am, September 13

  Good news… still raining and showing no sign letting up.

  Fuck… this might be happening and I am not prepared… Let me go now – if this rain carries on into the night then I am outta here. Oh. My. God…

  Sam

  11:09pm, September 13

  Well. Here goes, I guess? For the last 12 hours I have been frantically trying to get my life into order so that I can throw it into upheaval again by leaving my safety behind and venturing out there – THERE! – into unchartered territory to a town/city/province which I never thought I would visit again, in all likelihood surrounded by hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of hungry infected people. Fun, fun, fun.

  So what have I been doing? Let me tell you:

  1 – I got all my food, everything that I have left in the house (surely enough to get me to Bloemfontein if I eat carefully, although I am hoping to find more food on the way – it is spring now so I am sort of counting on finding some fruit trees along the way as I suspect that most of the shops will have been looted by now). That is all packed into a big kit bag which I put onto the seriously small back seat of the R8 – the petrol balloons are on the floor behind the front seats in case you were wondering.

  2 – I have a smaller, much smaller bag of clothes too – my toiletries are in a small cooler bag (I am a guy – I don’t own such things as toiletry bags), alongside the clothes bag.

  3 – The petrol. It’s there, as mentioned above, as is my piece of hose for future siphoning if needed.

  4 – My computer. Obviously I am using it right now as I type, but I will definitely take it with me and it will have pride of place on the passenger seat (below my weapons of course).

  5a – That leads me on quite nicely to the fact that I have packed the pistols, ammunition and nail gun too – they are all in an ice cream container which won’t leave my sight.

  5b – Also nicely brought to me through point 4, but much more detailed, is my trials to get mobile solar power so that I can keep you, my loyal readers (he he he) updated while I am on the road (and also to be kept updated by Lil – which reminds me, I must let you know her latest news just now…).

  The solar power setup which I have been using for what, two months, three months, (it feels like years to be honest), has been a really reliable source of energy, and that was during the winter months. But now I had to make it a bit smaller so that it could fit it on top of the R8 (I know… it totally ruins the look of the car). So I measured the roof of the car, altered the whole connectivity thingy (I still don’t know exactly how I got the thing working…) and then went down to the car. I fixed the panel to the roof using a variety of cable ties, trailer clamps, bungee cord, and for extra measure, super glue. Then I did something which the blokes at Top Gear would have had me hunted down for – I made a hole in the roof of the R8.

  But I had to. Really. I needed a way for the cable from the solar panel to get to the battery, which would be on the floor in front of the passenger seat. So I took a screwdriver and a mallet, found my spot, positioned the screwdriver, raised the mallet and closed my eyes. Bloody hell, it went through that roof like a spray of water through tissue paper – a lot easier than I thought.

  So I hooked it all up, reversed the car into the open to test it out, and forgot… dammit, it’s raining. But hey, after I had spent a few minutes cursing the fact that I would have to venture out into the unknown without knowing if my hastily made plans would work or not, the charge light started to blink – awesome! I had again outdone myself without knowing what I was doing! So I parked the car again and brought the battery back inside, safe in the knowledge that I could carry on communicating with Lil while I was on the road (and keep a Bloem Blog going too).

  6 – Miscellaneous stuff… my cell phone (I told my mom I was leaving for Bloem and she cried more than I ever expected. Not nice). My cell phone charger (would have been pretty useless taking my cell phone if I had forgotten that), the GPS is integrated into the car anyways (definitely needed – I wouldn’t know where the hell to go without it, and the great thing is that it’s still working because it doesn’t rely on humans to run the satellites). Batteries of various sizes. Sunglasses and a cap (hadn’t needed those for a while…) My iPod – couldn’t do a ro
ad trip without that (and its charger of course). And then lots of bits and pieces which I just chucked into a plastic Checkers bag (just in case things like bottle openers, a screwdriver set, mini torches…) it’s hard packing to leave your house to never come back. Oh, and most important of all, I packed my favourite pillow. Hey, don’t you laugh – judging by Lil and the rest of them’s travails, it won’t be a quick seven hour trip and I’ll have to sleep regularly as I can’t take the driving in shifts like they can. The inside of the R8 is luxurious, don’t get me wrong, but not when you have to sleep in it. My pillow will make that small cockpit-like space – stuffed with everything I need to survive – just that little bit more comfortable.

  When I was sure that everything was done – and I had double checked, triple checked and whatever the hell the word for checking four times is, I went for a nap. Well I tried at least. What I ended up doing was laying down for an hour and a half, as the sun went down, and compiling a road trip themed playlist on my iPod. So without much further ado, this is what I came up with:

  1: Night Drive – The All American Rejects – Yip, that’s the way this trip will be starting.

  2: Drive My Car – The Beatles

  3: The Long and Winding Road – The Beatles – A back to back Beatles medley – both quite appropriate.