The Infected (Book 1): Jim's First Day

by Joseph Zuko

  “Oh no,” he grumbles. I know it is a big deal. He is almost blind. Sam needs these glasses. I remember I have duct tape in my glove box. I reach over his lap and pop the door open. I grab the tape and toss it to him.

  “Here, can you fix them?”

  “I’ll need another set of hands,” he says.

  “Pass them back here, we’ll do it,” Tracy speaks up from the back. Sam passes the glasses back with the tape. I am coming up to the Sandy intersection. There are shops on both sides of the street and people are looting. Why would they risk going out to steal a pack of socks, toilet paper or a six-pack of beer if it meant you could die? Humans act so weird when the shit hits the fan.

  “Where are we going, Dude?” asks Devon.

  “Home.”

  “My pad is in West Lynn,” he says slowly.

  “My kids are in Lake Oswego,” Tracy pleads.

  “I can stop here and let you out if that’s what you want,” I do not mean to sound like a dick, but my emotions are running hot. “You hopped in my car. I can’t drive to West Lynn right now!”

  The intersection looks clear so I gun it and hang a left onto Sandy heading east. The second I enter the crosswalk someone runs out in front of me. He slams hard onto my hood, rolls up and destroys my windshield. His bones snap, skull cracks, and joints fold backwards. He flies off the roof and lands face down in the street. This guy is all jacked up. I hit the brakes and come to a stop. We look out my back window at the body on the ground. He is really hurt but not infected.

  “FUCK!” I punch my deflated airbag. Seconds later a pack of infected are on him.

  “GO! GO!” Devon and Tracy yell from the backseat. Again I slam into first gear and gun it.

  My windshield is completely busted. I can’t see out of it. I roll down the window to stick my head out. Normally this would seem insanely dangerous, now it feels like suicide. We are getting close to the hospital. I know this because I have lived here my whole life. Besides being a native of Portland, I could tell we were close because of the amount of infected on the street. I swerve to miss them more than the parked cars that litter the road. I drive quickly, close to fifty in a thirty-five zone with my head out the window. My brain works overtime trying to process everything it sees.

  I am a lucky man, living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest; I have not gone to war, lived through a natural disaster or seen death up close before. The most exciting thing I have every done, where my life was slightly in danger, was a visit to Six Flags in California. I rode a coaster called the Goliath and I screamed until my voice went hoarse. I am sheltered, pampered and soft. I am not used to seeing skinless humans eating other near skinless humans.

  As I speed down the road I witness unbelievable violence and destruction. A blue sedan drives head on into a gas station and it explodes into a fireball. A nasty pack of infected humans tear the arm off an old woman. A pickup pops up onto the sidewalk and takes out a family trying to get into a clothing store. A torso crawls out into the street; its intestines and spine dangle from its severed waist. A man stands in the street with a rifle, opening fire on anything that moves. He must not hear anything because he is obliterated by a Portland City dump truck. A live human runs across the street while he is on fire. An infected digs into a baby stroller. The worst, the worst is the people falling. People are falling from the high-rise buildings on my left and right. It is raining bodies. I can’t tell if they are infected before they hit the ground. They could be committing suicide. Jumping to avoid changing into one of them. Jumping because they think they might make it. Jumping because they think this world is over. Who knows, all I know is a person should not have to see this kind of gore. One of the jumpers lands on the road right in front of us and my car goes over what is left of the body. It sounds and feels like I hit a speed bump at fifty miles an hour.

  “What the hell was that?!” Sam can’t see five feet in front of us.

  “It was a person! They’re jumping from the buildings!”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know!” I yell at him.

  I finally get past the high-rises. There are no more bodies falling to the ground.

  “Here,” Devon hands Sam’s glasses to him. They have a good amount of duct tape on them. Now Sam really looks like a nerd. I turn away from the road and look at Sam. The glasses should work and he even gives me a smile. I can’t imagine all of this and not being able to see on top of that. I would go nuts. My head is still out the window so I can see. I know I should not have looked at Sam. I don’t know why I needed to see how bad he would look now with half a roll of duct tape on his glasses, but I did. At the same time Sam’s giving me a smile for his fixed specs, a large van hits us on the passenger side. Everything goes black.

  I wake up to Devon screaming. My neck hurts like hell. I might be seriously injured. My head was still out the window when we got hit. Even louder than Devon, the van’s horn is blasting. The driver must be laying on it dead. I get my eyes open. My side of the car is smashed up against a brick wall. I think it is the post office, I can’t see from here. The passenger’s side is caved in. I look back to see what the hell Devon is carrying on about and my neck can barely turn to look. Devon has his back up against his window. His leg is up in the air with his boot against Tracy’s face. She has a large chunk of metal through her chest and is covered in blood. She must have bled out while I was knocked unconscious. She has turned and is trying her best to get a bite out of Devon. Sam’s glasses have been knocked off again and his eyes are closed. Blood pours out the back of his head.

  “Sam!” I yell.

  “Get me out of here!” Devon panics.

  Tracy pushes on his leg and his foot almost slips off her face but he readjusts and gives her cheek another good kick back against the grill of the van. I look back at Sam and his eyes are open. He bares his teeth. His eyes are black. He is gone. Before I say anything his arms reach out for me. His safety belt is the only thing that saves me; it is caught around his neck. When he lurches forward it stops his progress and gives me the second I need. I grab Sam by the throat. He is stronger now than before. I have a hard time keeping a grip on him.

  “Sam, stop it!” he is not listening. He has changed. This is not my friend anymore. I grip his throat. The horn on the van stops blaring. The driver is awake or he is turned. I squeeze his throat and readjust my hands. My fingers slip into the base of his skull. I can feel his brain.

  “Sam, please!” I know he is not there but I love this man. He was my best friend for the last ten years. He was the best man at my wedding. He got me the job and taught me sales. I squeeze, twist and push his head up and back. The bones snap in my hands. His body goes limp. He is gone.

  “I killed him.” I whisper. I can’t breathe. Why? No! No! My brain screams while I can only whisper.

  “Dude!” Devon’s voice pulls me out of my downward spiral. I have got to keep moving.

  I pop the trunk of my car and grab my keys out of the ignition. I remembered that I have my tool belt in there from when I helped my mother-in-law put up a fence in her backyard. It is a very tight fit between the roof of the car and the brick wall. I fight to get out of my window and up onto the roof of my car. The driver of the van has turned. It looks right at me while punching the windshield. I climb down the back of my car. The trunk is smashed in and jammed shut. I pull up on it but it is stuck. The driver has punched its way through the windshield, the glass ravages its hand, and flesh strips away and hangs off the bones. It crawls through the glass. I step back and give the trunk a hard kick right on the lock and it pops open. I dig and find my tool belt, grab the hammer and pull it out of the metal loop.

  My dad gave me this hammer when I got my first house. I am not super handy and do not build that much. The hammer looks new even though it is ten years old. I climb back on the trunk of my car and hit the back window with the hammer. I keep hitting the window until it smashes out.

  “Devon, push her over here!” He force
s her head towards me. Tracy was so pretty. Now she is a wreck. I swing down into the car, and my hammer gets her right in the forehead. I have to work the nose of the hammer back and forth to get it out of her skull. Behind me the van driver has pushed his head and shoulders through the window. The sharp glass has scalped him and exposed his collarbones. I get the hammer out of Tracy’s skull and turn fast and deliver a killshot to this motherfucker that killed my friends and wrecked my car. Its head caves in. I am sprayed with blood. Devon climbs out the back window and joins me on the roof.

  “That’s disgusting,” he rubs the tears from his eyes. “Now what?” All of my clothes are sopping wet and now my face is coated in blood. We climb down off the roof of my car. I have to kick the back of the trunk again to get it to open. There is not much in there. An old busted football, some dirty socks, a tire pump, one old dress shoe and a boom-box radio from the late eighties. It is all junk. Crap I should have thrown out years ago. Why the hell am I holding onto this stuff? The weirdest thing in there is a crinkled up Playboy from the nineties. I don’t remember who was on the cover because it was torn off years ago. I am not sure why I kept it. I have owned a smartphone for a couple years now and that is my main source of female nudity. I grab my tool belt and pull out the two largest screwdrivers. I tuck them both into my pants.

  “Dude, what the hell is going on? I think it’s a terrorist attack,” he nods his head at me.

  “I don’t know what it is. We need to get off the street,” I wipe some of the blood off my face. My eyebrows are soaked. There is so much blood; I wonder if it could make me sick. I snatch up the old dirty sock and rub it all over my face to get the blood off.

  “I read online, a couple weeks ago, about this monkey that came back from the dead. You think it’s that?” A car crashes into a telephone pole on the other side of the street.

  I duck down from the scare, “I don’t know. I doubt this is all from a monkey,” I scan the area from this crouched position. Cars crash into each other, bodies litter the street, a horde of infected is growing only blocks away. Dead monkeys or terrorists. These are my only two options for why the world went crazy today?

  In the building behind us a gun goes off. This building is a post office, I was right. The big front window of the building explodes after another gunshot. It sounds like there are a bunch of infected in there. I step closer to the window. I want to see if anyone needs help. The second I get close to the window an infected postal worker reaches out and grabs for me.

  Chapter 5

  It is my first up close look at a human that is missing its nose and an eyeball. Half of the digits are missing from its hands. His face looks like a muscle chart from seventh grade biology class. Its good eye has gone black with blood. He still has a full mailbag over its shoulder, throwing it off balance. It stumbles forward as it tries to grab me. I knock away its reaching arms with a forearm block. The hit knocks it even more off balance and it falls down onto the windowsill. I give it another good shove and the shards of glass sticking out of the busted window tear up its torso. The glass rips through its skin and opens up its guts. Its intestines spill out onto the tile floor. The smell hits me right away. I feel like I just got slapped in the face with a slaughterhouse. I grab my nose and pinch my nostrils closed. There is another gunshot from inside the building and the bullet rips in and out of this monster’s skull. The shot came from a normal looking housewife. I don’t know what kind of gun it was but it looks like a cannon in her little hands. She gives me a nod and then turns back into the building.

  “Hey, where are you going?” I yell after her, but she is gone.

  Devon grabs my arm and gives it a tug. He points across the street. There is a hand beckoning us. It is inside a sporting goods store. Whoever it is has the security cage door open wide enough for their arm to fit through. The arm waves us over.

  “Come on,” Devon urges me. I lead the way across the street. I am in a full sprint. I can feel Devon right on my heels. When we get to the door the gate slides open and we fly through the opening.

  The gate slams shut behind us. My eyes take a second to adjust. It was a sunny spring day outside and the lights are out in this store. I turn to see whom I need to thank for the rescue and he is a heavyset man in his late fifties. He sports a bad comb over and has blood on his clothes.

  “Thank you. We appreciate it.”

  “Yeah. I saw what happened.”

  “Is there a back way out of here bro?” Devon looks around.

  “Yeah, but you don’t want to go that way,” the guy pulls out a baseball bat and cracks Devon on the back of his head. He falls to the ground and is out cold.

  “What are you doing?” I demand as I rush to Devon’s side. The man pulls out a gun. It is a snub nose revolver. The kind you would see a cop carry in a seventies TV show. I see where he got the blood from, on the ground behind the counter there are four people laid out dead.

  “What the hell?” I am stunned.

  “Put your hammer down and give me your wallet!” he commands. The dead are obviously store employees.

  “You’re robbing us?” I put my old hammer down on the countertop.

  “Give me your wallets!” he moves closer.

  “You killed these people?! You have any goddamn idea what’s going on out there?!”

  “I don’t give a fuck what’s going on out there. I want your money!” he takes a step closer. My heart rate rises with every move he makes. I pull out my wallet and hold it up.

  “You’re gonna kill me for three dollars and a credit card with a five hundred dollar spending limit?”

  He takes another step. He is very close now. I toss the wallet right at his face. It hits him in the nose and he flinches. At the same time I reach out and grab his wrist. I twist, so that I am pushing the gun away from my body. I stomp on the top of his foot. I feel the bones break under my heel. He screams and pulls the trigger. The gunshot is deafening. The round sails across the showroom floor and a football on a shelf explodes. I have a good grip on his wrist so I hit him in the face with my elbow. His nose turns to pulp and blood cascades down his face. He tries to pull his hand back and away from me, I go with it and angle the gun right for his chest. The gun goes off again. The shot hits him right in the heart. We lock eyes. Smoke crawls up his chest from the bullet wound and the tip of the gun. I smell his burning flesh. The life drains from him. I step off his foot and let go. I take the gun away from him as he falls to the floor with a flat thud.

  I get a lot of compliments in my Krav Maga class about my speed. Fast punches and fast ducking skills. Not a world-class athlete, but against the “Average Joe” I am fast. It was nothing I worked at, I always had fast hands, but I have never moved this fast before. I have never done anything like this. It is not something you learn in a three-hour-a-week class.

  He is dead and I killed him. I had to. Right? I don’t feel bad about it. I felt worse when I ran over that guy ten minutes ago. What is happening to me? I cried once because I killed a bird that had landed on our back porch. It had a broken wing so I put it out of its misery. This asshole had it coming. I click open the cylinder on the gun. Each casing has a small puncture in it. That was his last shot. I drop the gun to the floor. I pick my wallet up, go to Devon’s side and try to wake him. I shake him by the shoulders and he wakes up. He looks at the dead man on the ground next to me.

  “What happened, Dude?”

  “He tried to mug us.”

  “And you killed him?”

  “Yeah.”

  I sit him up, now he can see the dead people behind the counter. I get Devon to stand and we look around the place. It is a BIG 5 sporting goods store. By the front desk there is a small refrigerator full of water and sport drinks. I never had lunch. I definitely have not had enough water. If I can’t find a car I am going to have to walk. I go to the fridge, pull out a water bottle and pour it over my head to clean off the blood. I grab another bottle and drink down all twelve ounces in one long gulp
.

  “You’re looting?” Devon accuses. I still have my wallet in my hand. I pull out a dollar and lay it on the counter. Devon takes a hard swallow. He is thirsty too. I lay down a second dollar, open the fridge again and toss him one. Seconds later we hear the sound of bodies moving. It is coming from behind the counter. The dead staff members have turned. I look over the counter and they are almost to their feet.

  “Shit!” I back away from the counter and pick up my hammer. One of them is up and turns for me. She was a young Hispanic girl, around eighteen, with black hair and braces. She was shot in the stomach by that asshole. She takes a step toward me and I swing the hammer. I catch her in the temple. The nose of the hammer sticks again and as she falls the handle slips from my grip. The other three are now standing. One is a mid forties manager type and the other two look like high school jocks. I reach for the screwdriver tucked in my belt. I pass one to Devon. The manager has his arms straight out and he tries to grab my shoulders. His teeth snap, his head twitches back and forth.

  I am used to fighting someone who has their hands up and in tight to protect their face and body. They move light on their toes. I usually have to watch out for either punches or kicks coming at my head and body. Fighting this guy is very different. His only weapon is that mouth. I quickly step up and between his outstretched arms and drive that screwdriver up through his chin and into his skull. I see the switch get flipped in his brain. His body drops right to the floor. This time I keep a better grip on the screwdriver and pull it from his jaw.

  One of the jocks has Devon on the ground and the second one already has his hands on me. I give it a hard shove to the chest and it stumbles backwards, slamming against the counter. Before it can regain its balance, I jam the screwdriver into its jaw and skull.