Trey climbed off, and we looked down at the dead man.
“That was close, man,” Trey said.
I nodded. “Yeah, but we got this,” I said with bravado I didn’t really feel.
“Let’s get home,” Trey said, looking around.
“Better get our rabbits back,” I said, starting to climb up the hill. We had pitched our catch when the Tripp victim started chasing us.
“Ugh,” Trey said. “I hate backtracking. Stupid Tripper.”
Chapter 2
We called them Trippers after the virus came. According to my dad, it was a little thing that suddenly became a big problem. It started with the street junkies, the homeless, and the runaways. No one really paid any attention to the spread because it was out of sight. The way things worked, if it wasn’t seen it wasn’t a problem. But according to the rumors, the virus came in with a load of marijuana. It was ingested, and from there it took off in its new host. It attacked the neural pathways in the brain, causing the victim to forget everything about themselves, turning them into mindless husks. After that, it went to work on the nervous system itself, eating away at the pain receptors. People with the virus could lose a limb and not feel a thing. Finally, the virus slowed down the body systems, with the heart beating only ten or twelve times a minute. But they could still move nearly as quickly as they could before they caught the disease. The weird thing was they seemed to just keep going even after they should have died from starvation, exposure, or dehydration.
We heard the virus transferred from host to host through bodily fluids, and could live for seventy-two hours in open air. That was how it spread. The virus turned the victims into mindless, rabid animals, attacking anything they saw as a threat. My dad explained, as we learned later, that they were territorial which was why they attacked everyone they saw on their turf. Trippers, being mindless, didn’t stay in one place but wandered about, which made their territory just about everywhere. They didn’t attack each other, and my dad said it was because they didn’t see other infected as threats. They lived in a constant state of high alert, ready to fly at anything. But all of this was just rumor; we really didn’t know anything.
I didn’t see any of this, because on the day I was born I saved my dad’s life. My father was a policeman, and just as my mom went into labor, his station was called up to help put down an outbreak of Trippers. Every single officer who answered the call that day died. My dad called me his luck, and I suppose for that one day I was.
Dad took Mom and me home the next day, and three days later the hospital we had been in was overrun. There were too many Trippers out there to deal with, and the police couldn’t handle them all. Eventually things just fell apart, and we’d been on our own ever since.
We managed better than most at first, and it was probably my dad that returned the favor by saving us all during the really bad times. Once the Trippers took over and the police were gone, people started banding together for survival. Problem was, desperate people put in desperate situations with death right around the corner tended to tear themselves apart from within. My dad told me stories about finding several groups of people all lying dead in a bunch, and it looked like they had just simply killed each other.
We probably also survived because we lived pretty far away from main population centers. We had a house on the far end of a small town with a forest in the backyard and a creek nearby. It was all I had ever known.
Trey lived across the street, and the creek that wound its way around the area went directly through his back yard. Water was never a problem for his family. Trey’s mom used to be an accountant, and for lack of anything else to do, she took it upon herself to educate Trey and myself in math. Since she didn’t have to follow any curriculum, we probably got a better education than we could have in the normal world. Trey’s dad was a pipefitter, and before the end of civilization he had owned a small but successful business. These days, he occupied himself with figuring out how to bring more water to larger areas of growing vegetables and fruits.
I threw a wave to Trey as he headed off around the front of my house and took off for his own. I hung the rabbits from a small branch, taking care they didn’t reach low enough for a scavenger to get them. I felt like I earned the jumpers today.
“Mom! I’m home!” I yelled as I entered into the garage through the side door. I took off my gear, putting everything in its proper place. Dad taught me that trick. If I ever had to leave in a hurry, and if it was dark or light, I always knew where my stuff was and could get it without delay. Dad taught me a lot of tricks. Some Mom knew about; some she was better off not knowing.
“How was the snare line?” Mom asked like she always did. I never knew if Mom actually cared about it or was just being polite. She didn’t go outside much, and usually went to bed right after dark. Dad said she took the end of the world pretty hard, but I couldn’t see the big deal.
“It was good; I got three decent rabbits,” I said, washing my hands in the sink.
“Good for you,” Mom said absently. “Are you going to clean them or let your father do it again?”
I ducked a little. “I’ll go do it right now,” I said, moving to the door.
“Josh?” Mom called out as I stepped into the garage.
“Yeah?”
“We can spare one of the rabbits for the Simpsons. I heard Lucy’s mom isn’t feeling well, and they haven’t had much luck with their traps,” Mom said.
“All right,” I said, closing the door. Under my breath I added, “That’s because they can’t bait worth a damn, and their traps are too big anyway. This ain’t Africa.”
I spent the next hour cleaning and washing the rabbits. I didn’t bring up the Tripper to my mom since she would have freaked out, and I don’t need that today. I was a little shaky the more I thought about it, since I had never actually killed a Tripper before. I had seen my dad do it a hundred times, and there was that big attack where I loaded guns for my dad while the Trippers attacked the house, but I hadn’t ever had to do it myself.
I didn’t know what to feel about it. On the one hand, I felt glad I was alive. On the other hand, I had killed someone. I guess it would be different if I had to kill someone I knew, but I don’t know. I guess it was just him or me, and I made it him.
I finished with the rabbits just in time to see my dad come back from his rounds. When everything went south, as he called it, he knew people would fall apart unless there was some kind of order being kept. So my dad, being a police officer, decided to keep his badge on and handle the normal, everyday problems that came up from people trying to survive. He didn’t call himself a police officer anymore; he just called himself the Law. He wore his badge and gun, and went around the homesteads checking on people, making sure things were okay, dealing with Trippers if they showed up, and generally keeping the peace. He told me at first he was a little freaked by the responsibility, since he was essentially judge, jury, and executioner, but people seemed to realize it was necessary and were glad someone was willing to step up and do it.
I walked into the house the same time my dad did after he put up and took care of his ride.
“Hey, pal! How’s things?” my dad asked me as he gave my mother a kiss. Mom’s worried faced looked calmer now, like the stress of being alone was gone now that Dad was home.
“I caught three rabbits today; they’re in the tank right now. Mom wants me to take one over to the Simpsons later,” I said, looking up at my dad. He was a big man, broad shouldered and strong. I must have sounded different because my dad looked at me sideways and squinted slightly.
“Good for you! Let’s go take a look at them and see which one we want to send to the Simpson’s.” My dad took me by the shoulder and led me into the garage where we kept the water tank for the cleaned kills.
We closed the door behind us and walked over to the tank. It was a small stock tank my dad picked up from somewhere, and we used it for cleaning game and keeping the flies off our kills.
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br /> I pulled out the jumpers, and dad’s mouth turned down as he nodded and looked appraisingly at the rabbits. I had the pelts hanging up, and I would cure them later.
“We can give them that middle one there; that should keep them for a day,” Dad said. As I put the rabbits back, Dad asked the question I worried about since this morning.
“Anything you need to tell me?” Dad asked, putting a hand on my shoulder. I was tall for my age and developing broad shoulders myself, but at the moment I felt like a three-year-old who just got caught stealing the cookies.
I looked down. “Trey and I killed a Tripper today.”
Born In The Apocalypse is available from Amazon here
The Rabid: Fall Page 20
