by Russ Watts
It is just dumb luck that my body position when I get hit causes my left arm to wedge at his neck under his chin. His impact into me dislodged my machete from the spine of my former ambush victim, but I can’t hold onto it when I hit the ground so it flies from my hand. I can barely breathe from the impact, with the ground, and from the weight of this guy on top of me.
He is already snapping his jaws, trying to bite at my face. “Wait what?” Looking at his face, I can see that this is no psycho or druggie. This guy is infected. But it can’t be. This guy was moving fast! I mean running full speed when he hit me. At least that’s what it felt like. He hit me hard, and I don’t think the impact was just from his size.
I start reaching wildly with my right arm trying to grab my smaller blade kept by my leg, while he is snapping above me, and grabbing at my face with his hands. I pull my knife out, and I stab it up through the center of this infected’s mouth. The handle of my blade wags obscenely out of his mouth like some kind of new designer metal tongue, and he keeps snapping his teeth at me, chomping down on the knife’s handle. I can only stare at him while I’m still trying to hold him off and catch my breath from the impact of landing.
The biggest problem with the infected so far, besides the fact that they exist, has been their numbers. We all learned early on that with this disease, it is either kill them, or they will eat you. Or they’ll infect you, and you will turn if you manage to escape after being bitten. Dealing with the infected has already been difficult for most, impossible for some. But a decent defense can be made against a slow moving group of the infected, even when dealing with hundreds or thousands if situated properly.
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 the infected man’s mouth would not be noticed by any other infected that I have encountered. I have seen them stuck or have stuck 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 in the neck 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 my back from sliding a little when I impacted. Hannah is first to say that nothing else is out here, and Simone shortly agrees.
“Okay,” I say. “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 stitching 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 t
railers 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 home 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.
The Last Blade Of Grass is available from Amazon here
