“Good questions, Zed. Our best data puts total immunity way below one percent, maybe a half, maybe a tenth.”
“And?”
“Of the infected, it looks like maybe one in a few thousand end up like you and me.”
“Is that genetic? Some kind of immunity?”
“We don’t know why,” Jerome answered. “This thing is moving so fast, it’s outpaced our ability to learn what we need to know.”
“So the others, the fast burners, what about them?” I asked.
“Over ninety percent of them end up with a total loss of higher brain function. They’re all over 104. The remaining ten percent or so mostly come in between 101 and 104, with the temperature determining how much human is left in them.”
“How much human?”
“Mostly, they’re just like a bunch of very violent, cannibalistic, chimpanzees. Most don’t think. They just want to eat and tend to their natural bodily functions. The ones that can think tend to lose any sense of empathy or morality. They’re dangerous. They’re vicious.”
“Like the crazy guy from earlier?” I asked
Jerome nodded. “Yes, like him.”
“He’s dangerous?” I asked.
“Very.”
“Great. So, what’s the deal, then? All of these people are hungry and crazy? Are we in danger?”
Jerome shrugged. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“One of the things about people that is usually underrated is the importance of the sense of smell.”
“Go on.”
“Well this is my opinion, my theory, not the CDC’s position…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
“I think that in the absence of the higher brain functions, the lower brain functions are no longer overlooked, even with all the confusion in a damaged brain.”
“So far this means nothing to me,” I said.
“When these guys start eating people, they prefer not to eat each other. I don’t think they like the way they smell. Maybe they smell the disease on each other.”
“Oh,” I interjected, “like those dogs that sometimes smell when their owners get sick. Yeah, I saw something about that on TV once.”
“Yes, I guess so,” Jerome agreed. “But, that doesn’t mean they won’t eat each other. They just aren’t their first choice.”
“So, are you telling me that they only eat people, and that they prefer healthy people?”
“No, they’re still human, just diseased humans. They’re still omnivorous. But, back in the refugee camp, where—and I hate to say it this way—the most plentiful food source was other people, that’s what they ate.”
I reluctantly pointed to the bloody spots on the floor. “Is that what happened here?”
Jerome got a distant look in his eyes and nodded. “Doctors and nurses.”
“But they ignored you,” I said.
“Yes and no.”
“Okay, what does that mean?” I asked.
Jerome said, “They ignored me for now, because I have the infection. I smell like them. But you and me, Zed, we’re slow burners, we’re mild cases. We smell more like healthy humans than they do.”
“Wait, what?”
“Zed, this gym they have us locked up in. This isn’t an original idea. This is pretty much the same thing we did in Kenya. We couldn’t keep them all in the hospital tents, so someone had the great idea to start corralling them all, just to get them under control. Because, I mean, what do you do with them?”
I shrugged.
“Well, when they got hungry, they didn’t go after each other first. I mean, not really. They went after the slow burners, because they smelled the most normal. Then they went after the crazy ones. The weak and injured ones, the ones that were easy prey and couldn’t defend themselves.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“They broke out of the corral and the refugee camp fell apart. It was a nightmare, and somewhere in that mess, the army just started shooting the infected down. That became government policy…maybe it already was, I don’t know. Maybe they thought it was the only way to contain the virus.”
“But it didn’t work,” I said.
“It was already too late when they started.”
“So,” I said, “by extrapolation, the longer we stay here, the more likely it is that we’re either going to be eaten by everybody else in here, or the soldiers outside are going to come inside and just shoot us.”
“Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“Great.” I looked down at Murphy and tried to assimilate all that I’d just been told.
Jerome asked, “When did your friend get bitten?”
“Twelve, eighteen hours ago, I guess. So, he’s got a chance, right?”
“Zed, they’re going to start getting hungry soon. If we go find some place out of the way, maybe up at the top of the bleachers by the windows, maybe they’ll ignore us for a while, especially with your friend lying here helpless.”
“That’s fucked up,” I told Jerome.
“It is what it is,” Jerome said. “Once they start feeding again, they’re going to eat your friend. You won’t be able to do anything about it except get eaten too.”
I shook my head. “I have an idea for a way to get out of here. If you want, you can help me with Murphy and come along. If not, you can fuck off and we’ll give it a go without you.”
“If you have an idea of a way to get out, Zed, you and I should just do that now. Murphy might come out of this, like us, or he might not.”
I nodded. “I don’t care. Murphy is coming with me. Are you?”
Jerome looked around. He wasn’t pleased. “What’s your idea?”
“Do you have a quarter?”
Chapter 13
Murphy was half-delirious, but Jerome and I managed to stand him up between us with one of his arms over each of our shoulders. Together, we shambled around behind the bleachers. Working Murphy through the monkey-bar framework of bleacher supports was not easy. He bumped his head and grumbled, but he kept his feet under himself.
I kept hitting my shins on horizontal supports that ran along at twelve inches above the floor. Jerome ran into everything.
“I’m not getting a warm fuzzy about this,” Jerome told me. “Hiding under the bleachers isn’t going to solve our problem.”
“Be cool, man. I know what I’m doing.”
A shriek ripped the air, followed quickly by others. There was scuffling on the basketball courts.
I looked questioningly at Jerome.
“The same thing happened earlier. They’re feeding.”
“It sounds like…”
“I know. We need to get out of here,” Jerome urged.
We came to a stop at a square metal panel nearly half the size of a door on the wall.
“What’s this?” Jerome asked.
“Give me the quarter. I need to get these screws out.”
“Okay,” Jerome said, tentatively. He pulled some change out of his pocket, passed me a quarter, and knelt down beside the panel.
“Help me with the screws,” I told him. “I went to college here. When I was a freshman, we were out goofing around one night and we came across these utility tunnels. This access panel leads down to the tunnels. This is how we used to sneak in to see the volleyball games and stuff. One guy with a sports pass could come in and open up the panel and let the rest of us in.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow,” I confirmed. “If we get into the tunnel system, we can go nearly anywhere on campus. All of the buildings have access panels or doors into the basements.”
Jerome went to work. There were eight screws. It would have gone faster with a screwdriver but you work with what you have.
With a few screws out, I heard the noise of somebody clumsily coming through the tangle of metal supports under the bleachers.
Jerome and I both looked. It was the crazy guy with the hippie sandals.
“Shit,” said Jerome.
My fingers were getting sweaty and it was hard to hold on to the little quarter.
Another screw dropped to the ground followed quickly by the one Jerome was working on.
The crazy guy hollered, “They’re gonna eat me! They’re gonna eat me!”
Jerome stood and fished around in his pocket. He pulled out a folding knife with a four-inch blade, opened it and handed it to me. “Zed, I’ve got this. You need to take care of him before he draws the rest of them back here.”
There was no time to argue. I begrudgingly took the knife. “Get that panel off.”
I made my way through the supports toward the crazy guy.
“They’re gonna eat me!” he yelled again.
“Be quiet,” I told him, trying to keep my voice down.
He jumped up on a lower support, grabbed two vertical supports and used the weight of his body to shake them. The bleachers above rumbled with the vibration. He probably got the attention of every infected freak in the gym with that.
I hurried toward him to push him off, but when I got close, he leapt at me with his hands grasping and his mouth screaming.
It reminded me of my encounter with Dan. I stepped back to avoid his grasp and tripped over a support. The crazy guy came down on top of me.
In the struggle, I pummeled him in the head with the handle of the knife but it had no effect. He just kept yelling, and kept trying to pull my face closer to his mouth.
I lost my temper. I turned the pointed end of the knife at the crazy guy’s skull and drove the blade deep through the bone. He went limp on top of me but his blood poured out onto me from the wound.
I pulled myself free and looked to the ends of the bleachers as I stood up. At least a dozen infected were trying to make their way underneath.
“Damn it!” I turned to Jerome. “They’re coming.”
By the time I got back down beside Jerome, there were two screws left. He was working on one. I went to work on the other.
Both ends of the bleachers were packed with the infected and they were coming our way. Whether to feed on the crazy guy or make a meal of us all, I had no intention of finding out.
Jerome’s screw plinked to the floor. “We need to get out of here!”
My screw dropped out and the panel fell free.
I spun around and shook Murphy. “Murphy, you need to wake back up. We need to go, man.” No response.
“Murphy!” I slapped him across the face, once, then twice. His eyes opened. Good.
I dragged him up off of his butt.
The first few of the infected reached the crazy guy’s body and fell on him with their mouths open and their hands tearing at his clothes.
Jerome was already in the tunnel, climbing down the ladder.
I pushed Murphy’s bulk toward the tunnel opening. It was hard. It was slow. The infected from the other direction were getting close. They started yelling and howling. They were excited.
“Murphy, turn around. It’s a ladder!” I yelled. “Murphy, we gotta go!”
Murphy complied and we got his feet into the hole. He started down the ladder but halfway in, he stopped and stared at me in a daze.
“Damn it, Murphy! Move!”
There were eight or nine of the infected gorging themselves on the crazy guy. Other infected were flowing around the scrum and were eyeing me.
I leaned forward, put my hands on Murphy’s shoulders, and pushed. “Move, Murphy!”
I felt his bulk move and then slide into the darkness. I knew it was about eight feet down to the floor of the tunnel, far enough to chance an injury but the alternative was to stay and die.
I felt fingers on my back, grasping at my shirt. All choices were gone save one. I dove into the hole.
Chapter 14
Through pure luck, the pursuing infected fell over one another coming through the hatch into the tunnel. In a tangle of bodies, with more piling in on top, none of them were able to pursue us until we were out of sight around a corner, and a few hundred yards down another long, straight tunnel.
When we were spotted, we made a quick turn down another tunnel that brought us expeditiously to an alcove with an unlocked door. That door led up to my old freshman dormitory. We hustled through and bolted it behind us.
The dormitory building was at least as old as Gregory Gym, but its last renovation was forty years behind, so it had no air conditioning. That meant that it was empty for the summer session of classes.
With keys pilfered from the administrative office, I led Murphy and Jerome up to the fifth floor, thinking for whatever reason that height equated to safety.
It was well past midnight when I unlocked the door and quickly piled into the room’s hot, stagnant air. Once inside, closing and locking the door was top priority.
The dorm held four bunks and four empty desks. Jerome and I wrestled Murphy into one of the lower bunks and he passed out immediately on hitting the prone position.
“Pillow?” Jerome asked.
I looked around the room and didn’t immediately see one. I shrugged. Just as well.
Two five-foot tall dormer windows faced south. The room was dark but I stood to the side and carefully opened each by about six inches, enough to let some air flow into the room, but not enough as to be noticed from the ground.
Below us, across a lawn the size of a football field and across an empty professor’s parking lot, the gym from which we’d just escaped was alive with activity.
Jerome came up beside me to see what I was watching.
Soldiers were nervously walking in the parking lot, facing the building, talking, smoking, and keeping a ready hand near the triggers of their weapons. A group of police officers stood together, talking and gesturing at the gym.
What was going on? What was there to do about it? Those were the questions on everyone’s mind, and no doubt, the topic of discussion below.
Still staring out the window, I said, “I need to go back down to the office on the first floor and see if the phone is working. There’s a nurse I need to call.”
“About what?” Jerome asked.
“She’s one of the nurses from the hospital. She thinks I may have antibodies in my blood that might be helpful. She asked me to call her when I could.”
Jerome shook his head vigorously. “That’s a bad idea.”
“Is she wrong?”
“Um…no. I mean…what’s she going to do? She’s busy caring for patients and shuttling them off to the gym over there. She won’t be able to do anything with the antibodies in your blood.”
“I didn’t say that she was going to do anything herself,” I argued.
A crashing sound pulled our attention back to the plaza below.
Several panes in the enormous gym windows had broken out and fallen to the concrete twenty feet below. Through the windows, I saw the full silhouettes of the infected standing along the top row of seats, pressing on the glass panes in the old metal frames.
A loud pop caught the attention of every ear in the plaza. One of the windows’ frames flexed across its entire width— roughly ten feet. More panes popped out and fell to the sidewalk. Before anyone below could react, a huge section of one of the window frames busted away from the wall and fell to the ground. Like water from a spigot turned fully on, the infected flowed out through the window.
There were cries of surprise from the soldiers. There were shouts for assistance.
The infected that landed on the ground first were soon covered by the bodies of others falling out on top of them. The bodies piled into a pyramidal mound up to the height of the window and became a squirming, screaming ramp that more of the infected stumbled down as they poured out of the gym.
Soldiers in the parking lot started shooting tentatively over the heads of the advancing wave of infected.
What I didn’t think of until that moment—and what I’m sure the soldiers didn’t realize until it was too late—was that they just weren’t dealing with rational humans beings. The hoard wasn
’t frightened by the popping noise of the rifles.
In moments, the soldiers were in danger of being engulfed by the mass running at them.
The soldiers backpedaled and started shooting into the crowd.
Bodies erupted in bloody explosions where the bullets found their marks. Some of the infected fell, and some continued forward in spite of their wounds.
Many soldiers fell as the hoard overwhelmed them. Some retreated, but kept firing, and others broke and ran.
“Holy crap,” I muttered.
“You can say that again.”
More soldiers and police hurried around the corner from the front of the building to support the retreating men, but it was too late. The situation was beyond control. Their line collapsed under the onslaught of the infected.
Screams followed. Not the wild screams of the infected, but the terrorized screams of the dying. Gunfire died away or faded into the distance.
In the first battle I’d ever seen, the infected rolled over the soldiers without slowing down. As a reward for their victory, many of them feasted on the fallen bodies of the soldiers and policemen, who had been either too brave to flee or too slow to get away.
“God, that’s horrible,” I said.
Jerome backed into the darkness away from the window. “We don’t want them to see us up here.”
“The police?” I asked.
“The infected,” he answered. “If they do, they may come after us.”
“Can they?” I asked, “Figure it out, I mean. With their frontal lobes fried, is getting up here too complex of a problem?”
“I don’t know, Zed. But I don’t want to find out.”
I stepped back from the window. “I don’t either.”
The battle wound down. The gunshots became less frequent. Most of the infected dispersed from the plaza.
I asked Jerome, “What next?”
“What next?” Jerome asked me, anger putting an edge in his voice. “You led us here. I figured you had a plan.”
“Don’t get pissed at me, Jerome. You’re the guy from the CDC, who’s supposed to know everything about this…this plague or whatever it is.”
Jerome’s anger disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. “Plagues are bacterial. This is almost certainly viral.”
This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection) Page 7
