Outbreak: A Survival Thriller

by Richard Denoncourt

  OUTBREAK

  BY

  RICHARD DENONCOURT

  OUTBREAK

  RICHARD DENONCOURT

  Copyright © 2014 Richard Denoncourt

  Self Land Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  Copy Edit: Shelley Holloway, hollowayhouse.me

  Outbreak is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Join the author’s “New Release” mailing list by clicking here and get a free book! Subscribers will also be notified of discounts on new stories, like FERAL, the epic sequel to SAVANT.

  ALSO BY RICHARD DENONCOURT

  TRAINLAND

  ASCENDANT

  SAVANT

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Peltham Patch Excerpt (Prologue)

  Clean World Gazette Excerpt (Epilogue)

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Peltham Patch , Peltham Park, New Hampshire

  March 27, 2016

  CLOSING OUR DOORS

  An article published in our February edition, inaccurately titled, “The Virus is Just Another Bogeyman Meant to Keep Us Spending,” turned out to be a grievous mistake. Our humble editorial team failed to fully research the incident now known as the “Outbreak.” We can only hope our words did not result in the loss of life.

  We had planned a public apology, but in the face of what appears to be an unstoppable global threat—and because this will be our last edition of the Patch—we feel that a more fitting message to share with our readers is a warning:

  Hide, protect your loved ones, and pray for mankind.

  CHAPTER 1

  After the world fell apart, my father’s house became our prison.

  He and I were all that was left of my family—maybe all that was left of our town, Peltham Park. And who knew about the world at large? The radio had been dead for years. All we had were our walls, our guns, and each other.

  Which was why, when I found him in bed around lunchtime—T-shirt soaked through with sweat, his face the color of ash—I gave in to a crippling panic that froze me in the doorway. That awful word hissed through my mind.

  Virus.

  It’s the virus.

  “Dad?”

  When he opened his eyes, he flinched at the slats of light seeping through the boarded windows. The blankets were in a twisted pile on the floor, and I forced myself to walk over, pick them up, and drape them over his body. If he had tried to lash out at me, the blankets would have slowed him down while I went for my pistol. I was glad he didn’t try that.

  Instead, he spoke in a voice so thin it chilled me.

  “It’s not what you think, Kip. It’s sepsis. You remember how that works?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” I said, feeling his pulse. “Where’s the wound?”

  He lifted the blanket, uncovering his right leg, and I saw the dark stain on the lower part of his pant leg.

  “I was stupid. I’m sorry, son.”

  I gently lifted his pant leg as he explained what happened. He had fallen three days earlier while fixing a hole in the ceiling and had cut his calf on the stone hearth. Lucky it wasn’t a broken bone. He had kept his mouth shut because that’s what old, stubborn war veterans like him do. Plus, we had run out of antibiotics the year before, and he didn’t see the point in worrying me.

  The wound wasn’t deep, just a gash he had tried to stitch up on his own. He had done a good job of it, too, but curse bacteria for being so small. I found myself seething. Three days earlier, we could have made the trek to the pharmacy together, two guns instead of one.

  Now I would have to go alone.

  “Not happening,” he told me. “Don’t you dare put a foot outside this house. I mean it.”

  He was breathing fast, over twenty-five breaths per minute. I counted.

  “There’s no other choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” he said. “And I’m not going to let you go.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “God damn it, Kip.” He closed his eyes, took a halting breath, and opened them again. “Let’s think this through rationally. Going out there is a death sentence. You and I both know that. If you die, I’ll die. Let me take my chances. At least you’ll live.”

  I shook my head. “No way. Besides, if you die, I’ll have to go out there alone when the supplies run out. Or, I could save your life. Then we could go together.”

  “But the infected…”

  “No point in arguing, Dad. I’m going.”

  “To where?” His voice thickened with anger. “You really think the pharmacy is going to have medicine? After all these years, you think the raiders left it alone because, what, they’re doing us a favor? What’s the matter with you?”

  I looked away as he scolded me. I could never look him in the eyes when he got like this, not since I was a kid.

  “I’m going,” I said in a meek voice.

  “Speak up, Kip.”

  “I said I’m going.”

  “You understand what could happen to you out there? That those things you’ve only seen from the safety of our roof are the most dangerous predators mankind has ever known? That if you fire a single shot, they’ll surround whatever part of town you’re in so no matter what direction you run, you can’t get through?”

  I nodded and looked away again, reconsidering.

  “Then why would you go out there?” he asked.

  I fought back tears.

  “Because I can’t let you die, Dad.”

  Seeing that he was on the verge of protesting again, I got up and turned my back on him. But I couldn’t move. I was waiting for him to say the magic words that would keep me from going through with it. What those words might have been, I still don’t know.

  “You want this,” my father said, “don’t you.”

  It didn’t sound like a question, so I didn’t answer it.

  “How long do you have left?” I asked instead.

  “Sleep here tonight,” he said. “You have to. The dark—”

  “How long before it’s too late?”

  A smacking sound as he tried to swallow with a dry mouth.

  “Forty-eight hours,” he said. “Sixty, max.”

  The pharmacy was ten miles away. At a constant walking pace, I could make it there and back in under seven hours. And if I didn’t find antibiotics there, I could check houses on the way back.

  Plenty of time.

  CHAPTER 2

  I knelt in front of the open closet where we kept the outdoor survival gear and packed my bug-out bag with machine-like intensity. My father had taught me how to do it in the quickest, most efficient way possible. There was an art to it. A perfectly packed B.O.B. was a thing of beauty, except that, unlike a work of art, it could save your life.

  He was full of that kind of wisdom, my father—and stories like you wouldn’t believe. In the army, he had been a Ranger, and then a Green Beret, and eventually he became a decorated war hero, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart after a mission in Afghanistan in which he took a bullet saving a fellow soldier’s life. He had just carried the man out of a burning building when an enemy combatant shot him in the thigh. They both would have died had my father not kept running.

  When I trained, I always fantasized about a life in which the Outbreak had never happened, and I was a Green Beret like him.

  But on this day, all I could think about was my gear.

  Food and water came first. For hydration, I filled a CamelBak with water from our tanks, which were connected by plastic tubes to a disc
reet collection and filtration system we had built on the roof. Then I dropped a purification tablet into the water and strapped it to my back.

  For food, I packed five cans of diced peaches in syrup—sugary enough for a quick energy boost, tinned beans and tomatoes, four of each, and six PowerBars for protein.

  “Take three MREs,” my father shouted at me from the living room. Earlier, I had helped him move to the couch in front of the hearth.

  “MREs”–for the uninitiated—are “Meals-Ready-to-Eat,” also known as military rations. They’re what soldiers eat during missions, and what lucky survivors get to eat when restaurants and grocery stores have become extinct.

  “Not necessary,” I shouted back at him. “I’ve already packed enough calories.”

  We both knew the truth. Our supply was dwindling. Plus, it was the only food we had left that tasted halfway decent. I would enjoy a few with my father when I got back.

  If I got back.

  “Kip, God damn it, will you listen to me for once? Take three and don’t argue.”

  I let out a quiet sigh before raising my voice again.

  “Fine!”

  I made a rustling sound in the boxes where we kept them, but didn’t actually take any. The extra weight would only slow me down, anyway.

  Warmth and protection came next. I donned a fire-resistant Nomex FR Coverall that gloved my entire body, with a zipper in front and buttoned flaps for when nature called. I stuffed a poncho into the extra front pocket of my pack and set aside a rolled sleeping mat to secure to the top when I was done.

  I pulled out a pair of never-worn tactical boots—their fresh, leathery scent deliciously thick—and put them on over three pairs of socks. There would be a lot of walking involved. I’d have to avoid the roads entirely in case of raiders, which meant trudging through thick underbrush in wild, overgrown forests.

  The inner layer of my pant legs could be tucked into the boots, while the outer layer could slide over the tops to create a protective pocket. Even if I got caught in a heavy rainstorm, my socks wouldn’t get wet.

  Then came the weapons, my favorite part. I opened one of the shoeboxes containing our limited stock of grenades. There were multiple varieties, all with nicknames my father had picked up in the army: stingers, stunners, flashbangs, smokers, flamers, and of course, your standard-issue, anti-personnel fragmentation grenades. We called them “fraggers.”

  They had been incredibly difficult to come by. Three and a half years ago, before this part of the country was mobbed with infected, my father and I used to go out in search of “foot markets,” which were sort of like black markets but not illegal. These were mobile groups of survivalists like us who used radio communication, Morse code, and other means to gather in secret locations away from raiders and muggers. Most of these people had been in the army, which was how my father gained access to the network. In exchange for things like grenades and automatic weapons, we traded gasoline. It was useless to us since we didn’t rely on a generator and had traded our car for MREs.

  The grenades were for intimidation in the event someone broke in and posed a threat our guns couldn’t handle. My parents and I had decided we would rather blow the place up than let anyone else have it. Otherwise, they were pretty useless—unless you wanted to attract every enemy within a five-mile radius.

  I left the grenades where they were and moved on.

  My father was correct when he said leaving the house was a death sentence, though a more accurate term might have been “suicide.” But that only applied to those who went outside unarmed. The rest of us—armed with the proper skills, appropriate gear, and deadliest weapons—still had a fighting chance.

  That’s what I told myself as I strapped on my holsters and ammo belt.

  My father’s Glock 17 slid naturally into the holster on my chest, while his black-bladed combat knife went against my right thigh. The knife was for stealth attacks against raiders. Against infected it was useful for everything but combat. Getting their blood on your skin was a sure way to catch the virus yourself, so for that reason, I wore a pair of Blackhawk Hellstorm Assault Force gloves made of Kevlar. They were waterproof, couldn’t be sliced open, and made gripping and firing a gun seem like the moral thing to do.

  Sweating now from the coverall, heart pumping like a piston, I packed two boxes of 9mm ammunition, mostly into the pouches on my belt.

  Just two, though. I could have grabbed more, but I didn’t. Believe it or not, ammo was near the bottom of useful things to pack. It was heavy, and a gunshot would only attract unwanted attention. Plus, having an abundance of ammo made you feel invincible and less likely to be effective at stealth. To get through this, I would have to be as quick and quiet as possible—a “mouse instead of a lion,” my father liked to say (though I preferred a wolf).

  Finally, I dug out the list Dad made me promise to look at every time, no matter how well I had memorized it. It would serve to guide me through the next step, and also as a checklist I could use at the very end of the process.

  Because the following items were so precious, packing them had to happen at the end. They needed to be easily accessible, which meant inserting them above other items like food and using the pockets and pouches on my coverall and utility belt.

  The items on the list were as follows: four emergency bottles of water (one went into my belt), a Zippo lighter, a clamshell mirror (for scouting around corners), waterproof matches, a tactical LED flashlight, a set of lock picks that included a glass cutter the size of a pencil and suction cups for gripping glass, a Leatherman multi-tool, waterproof binoculars with 8.5x magnification and 45mm objective lens, a lightweight axe for chopping through boards (which also went on my belt), and a twelve-foot, twisted-fiber climbing rope with a grappling hook at one end, for climbing those hard-to-reach places. I strapped on a wrist compass and packed a navigation kit that included topographical maps of Peltham Park and its surrounding towns.

  I was forgetting something.

  I opened a desk drawer and took out the lucky rabbit’s foot my mother had given me before she died. I kissed it before slipping it into a pouch on my belt.

  A pop sounded in the living room. I almost ran to my father, convinced he had shot himself to make me stay. Then I heard another pop, followed by a dry crackle.

  The fireplace. He must have lit it for warmth.

  “You look good,” he said when I emerged carrying all my gear.

  He was just lowering himself back to the couch, panting from the exertion.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Any last-minute tips?”

  “Keep your ammunition dry. Strip your pistol and clean it before you—”

  “I already did. Yesterday.”

  “What? How the hell did you know—”

  “I clean it every day, Dad. You know that.”

  “Right, right. You and your hobbies.”

  He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. I picked up the water bottle I had left on the coffee table, unscrewed it, and made him take a few swallows.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said. “All the water and food you need is on the armchair.”

  I tilted my head in the direction of the small pile I had built on the cushion. Would he have the strength five hours from now to make his way over there and tear open an MRE or a PowerBar wrapper? If he could light the fire, then he could probably feed himself—but not for much longer.

  “You bringing the assault rifle?” he asked me.

  “I shouldn’t need it.”

  “Good,” he said. “Too loud. Plus, you and that Glock were meant for each other. But it won’t be like firing off the roof with a silenced rifle, all right? Once you’re down there and staring one of those bastards in the eye, it’s a whole different ballgame. You need to be sure. The noise…”

  A sudden coughing spell made him curl up and shake. I gave him more water. My muscles were tense. Time was running out.

  “I’m going,” I said. “I love you.”

 
“Love you, too, Kip. Be careful, and be fast. If you don’t find anything, come home. Don’t linger. Every minute that goes by is…”

  He didn’t finish. His strength had left him. He closed his eyes and drifted into sleep.

  I kissed his forehead before making my way to the door leading into the garage and quickly undid the complex system of locks and bolts. I put as much of it back together as I could on the other side. Of course, the locks wouldn’t hold against a few well-placed shots. But the real fortifications had been built into the outer layers of the house.

  It was dark inside the garage. I used the Zippo to cast a shivering glow over the workbench and the busted minivan. A moldy, musty smell hung in the air. There were tools and parts everywhere, lying all over the floor, covered in dust that seemed ancient.

  The garage doors had been reinforced with sheet metal and steel beams in case a group of infected came up with the idea of ramming into them. We had done such a good job of it that, in the dim light, the doors looked like gaping holes—tunnels leading God only knows where, full of lurking dangers.

  I made my way quickly to the hatch where a window used to be. Seconds later, I was outside.

  CHAPTER 3

  Trash speckled the high grass of the yard and covered the length of our street. I had seen it plenty of times from the roof, but from down here, it almost looked as if a giant party had been thrown across the entire neighborhood, and no one had bothered to clean up afterward.

  I picked up one of the rolled newspapers still in its plastic delivery shell and tried to check the date. The paper was little more than oatmeal now. I tossed it aside and chided myself for wasting time. Checking my wrist compass, I headed toward the trees.

  It had rained recently. The full, vibrant smell of wet forest caught me off guard with its delicious thickness. A smell I’d forgotten existed. As I breathed it in, I pulled out my navigation kit.