“Pete! Drop flat!” Jake shouted as loudly as he could and, as soon as Pete did so, he began to fire his Glock into the crowd of infected. Tom's AR barked in a quick tempo and the drones dropped one by one, never getting close enough to Pete to be an imminent danger. It was over almost as quickly as it had begun.
Pete rose up cautiously on his elbows, looking around and Tom went forward to give him a hand up.
“Thanks,” Pete offered shakily. “I was a fool to run off after them in the dark like that! You hear that? Someone's running off deeper into the field! It must be those alphas that lured me out here!”
“Jake! Do you hear them? ...Jake?”
Tom spun around but didn't see Jake anywhere. He and Pete retraced their steps and came across him, crumpled to the ground, unconscious.
“Help me get him up,” Tom said, and he and Pete hoisted him to his feet and half carried, half dragged him toward the house.
Vickie was the first to spot them, two men supporting a limp form between them, and she ran across the road, ignoring Carolyn's call to wait.
“Jake! Oh, God, Jake! What happened?”
“He collapsed,” Pete answered. “It must have been too much for him.”
Under Carolyn's direction, they got him into the house and onto the sofa bed. Pete went back to the porch to stand guard while she bent over Jake.
“I told him it was too soon, that he needed more time to recuperate! All the trauma, the blood loss over the last few weeks, it's a wonder he can walk around at all!” she harangued. “Is that- is that whiskey I smell?”
“When I went out on the porch, he had a bottle of whiskey,” Vickie answered.
“Good God, is he trying to kill himself? I didn't say anything when I saw him with that beer because I know how obstinate he can be and one beer wasn't enough to argue over-” she stopped as she saw Tom turn his head guiltily away. “How many beers was it, Tom?”
“It was three,” he replied in a sheepish voice.
“Three beers? You gave him three beers? And how much fucking whiskey did he drink?”
“From the looks of this bottle,” Pete called from the porch, “I'd say at least three shots.”
Carolyn stood up and walked away a few steps and stopped, arms folded, her back to the rest of the group.
“I gather they had a private talk amongst themselves,” Vickie said, “about something they don't want the rest of us to know about and he needed a stiff drink to deal with it.”
“Tom?” Liz said, touching his arm. “What were you talking about?
“Uh, we were talking about Warfield.”
“Dr. Warfield? But, I was there with you. I know what he said.
“Yeah, well, Jake wasn't sure if everybody else knew how widespread the infection was,” Tom lied. He'd had a more private conversation with Dr. Warfield later in the evening, after Liz and Eve had gone to bed. Neither of them knew anything about his calling it an extinction event.
“How widespread is it, then?” Vickie asked in a small voice.
“Maybe 80 percent of the population was dead or infected as of a month or so ago, probably more by now. The healthier the person, the better physical shape they were in the better their chances of not becoming infected, but that wasn’t a hard and fast rule. During the initial gestation period, the thought was that it was airborne, that you could become infected simply by breathing the air an already infected person exhaled. After that, it mutated so that there had to be an exchange of bodily fluids. A bite could transfer it or even something as innocent as a wet kiss.”
The room was quiet for long moments, then Carolyn came back by the sofa.
“Okay, from now on, Jake gets no liquids except from me or from Vickie; water, juice, soup but absolutely no alcohol! Is that clear?” she said, pointedly looking at Tom who nodded meekly. “Anything that needs done around here is going to get done without his taking part in it. All he’s to do is to rest and recuperate until I decide he’s well enough.” She looked Vickie in the eye. “And from now on, you're staying down here with him at night to keep an eye on him, keep him from doing anything else stupid.”
Vickie nodded, but she couldn't help notice the look that passed between Carolyn and Pete and the shadow of a smile that crossed his face.
Chapter 26: Nightmare
“Jake? Wake up, Jake. It's time to get ready for work, baby.”
“Hmmph, what?” Jake sat up slowly, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Becky was smiling down at him, a cup of coffee in her hand.
“Oh, I hate these night shifts,” he told her, taking the cup from her. “McGovern is retiring next month and I'm next in line for his day slot.”
“You mean I'll actually be able to sleep with my husband every night? That will take some getting used to!”
“Who says we're going to sleep?” he said as he playfully caressed her hip through her negligee.
“Don't start anything you don't have time to properly finish. Mikey's in bed already. He fell asleep about an hour ago.”
“I'll look in on him before I leave.”
Jake dressed and went into the bathroom while Becky filled his thermos with hot coffee and put a sandwich an apple and a few cookies in his cooler. He looked in on their son, sleeping peacefully, not a care in the world, and kissed him lightly on the side of his head.
“Coming straight home in the morning?” Becky asked, letting her negligee fall open just enough to tease him.
“Oh, that's just mean!” he told her, laughing. He kissed her and headed out to his car and drove to the plant.
He clocked in and met Jed Murphy in the locker room.
“You been following the news about that disease?” Jed asked. Jake nodded and he continued. “Both coasts and, I heard on the radio on the way here that they finally sealed the Mexican border, a lot of good that will do now. There was an outbreak in St. Louis, of all places!”
“That's getting a little close to home,” Jake said, worried.
There was more gossip and more rumors during shift change, but once on the factory floor, it was too noisy and too busy for a lot of conversation. About three hours before his shift ended, one of the rollers on his machine jammed and he was using a four-foot pry bar to try to free it when he noticed that Jed seemed to be having a very animated argument with another worker. The man kept advancing on him and Jed kept backing away, holding his hands out to try to ward him off. Suddenly, the man seized Jed's arm and, incredibly, sank his teeth into it and tore away a bloody chunk of flesh.
Jed screamed and the man went for his neck, Jed turning aside so that the teeth sank into his shoulder.
Jake ran to them, jamming the blunt end of the pry bar into the man's midsection, driving him away. The force of the blow should have dropped him, but he snarled and leapt at Jake, who swung the bar in an arc that slammed it into the side of his head, cracking his skull. The man finally went down and Jake bent over his friend.
“Hold on, buddy, I'll get you to medical!” Jake said, helping him to his feet. It was then he noticed several other violent confrontations across the shop. Several people were on the floor, pools of blood spreading as others were feeding on them. He had to let Jed go to fight off another attacker and, when he turned back, yet another had torn open Jed's throat and was greedily devouring him.
Jake had to fight his way out of the plant, wielding an 18-inch pipe wrench, to get to his car in the parking lot. A security guard attacked him and Jake smashed his skull with the wrench before reaching his car. On the drive home, everything was chaotic. People were fighting in the streets, police barriers had been set up and overrun and the dead were everywhere, most being fed upon by crazed men and women, the whole scene illuminated by the flickering lights of burning homes and cars. He searched his pockets for his cell phone, then realized he'd left it on the kitchen counter at home.
It took him twice as long to get home as normal and he screeched to a halt halfway onto the front lawn and ran into the house shouting for Becky
and Mikey. He ran upstairs to find their own bedroom empty and turned down the hall to Mikey's room. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Becky leaning over Mikey's bed. He called her name and she turned around quickly and let out a snarl. Jake flipped on the light switch and froze at the sight of her bared teeth, the blood streaming from her mouth and staining the whole front of her negligee. He looked past her and saw what remained of their son, dead eyes open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Then she came for him. He had just enough presence of mind to shove her away, causing her to stumble and fall.
Jake ran from the room in shock, down the stairs and into the kitchen to grab the phone. Becky charged through the doorway as he picked it up and he threw it at her face, slowing her just a little, and he grabbed a kitchen chair, using it to ward her off, but she took hold of the chair and ripped it from his hands, tossing it aside and lunged for his throat. He managed to get one hand on her neck, holding her back while his other hand went to the counter to brace himself. His hand brushed up against the knife block and his fingers, of their own volition, closed around the handle of a butcher knife.
“Becky!” he screamed. “Oh, God, Becky, I'm sorry!”
“Jake! Wake up, Jake!” Vickie's voice roused him. “You were having a nightmare!”
He opened his eyes to see her gazing down at him, her face worried, a tear starting down one cheek. Looking around, he saw most of the others in the room or on the stairs, also looking worried.
“Everything okay?” Tom called from the porch where he was standing watch.
“It's okay,” Vickie called back. “He was just having a bad dream.”
The others slowly drifted away, Carolyn lingering to feel his forehead and take his pulse before deciding he was all right and heading back upstairs after giving Vickie a consoling hug.
“That must have been one hell of a dream,” Vickie said, sitting next to him.
“'Hell' is a good description,” Jake muttered.
Vickie went into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a glass of water, which she handed to him. He drank it down and smiled a thanks to her.
“Who's Becky,” she asked him softly.
Jake's face darkened and he seemed to deflate as he sank back onto the bed.
“She was my wife,” he said in a barely audible voice.
“And Mikey?”
“Our son,” he answered, voice breaking. He turned on his side, facing away from her and she laid her hand on his shoulder.
“I'm so sorry, Jake. I had no idea you were married.”
“I've forced myself not to think about that night, the last night we were together. I don't want to remember them that way.” He suddenly turned back toward her and took her in his arms, holding her tightly, trying, not entirely successfully, to suppress his sobbing. Vickie held him, lay on the bed with him until they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Chapter 27: Supply Run
The next morning Pete and Tom piled as many bodies into the back of the 350 as it would hold and drove three and a half miles to a bridge over a ravine. There, they dropped them over the side to fall thirty feet to the rocky bottom. It took three trips to dispose of all the corpses and they couldn’t help but notice they were being watched both on the way out and on the way back.
Later, after the grisly task was done, the group assembled on the front porch to hold a council of war.
“They're not just wandering aimlessly anymore,” Jake told the gathering. “They're organizing under the leadership of the alphas. The majority are still slow and clumsy, though from what we saw last night, not quite as slow and awkward as they had been. The alphas seem to have taken a leadership role and actually seem to be forming some sort of organized movement. They always were faster and more nimble than the majority, but they're getting even smarter now.”
“Dr. Warfield never mentioned anything about that,” Tom put in.
“It probably wasn't apparent right away. Warfield died only a month after the outbreak hit this area.”
“What we're seeing,” Carolyn opined, “is the evolution of a new social structure, a sort of zombie hierarchy. Yeah, I know you hate the term 'zombie', but that's the way they behave.”
“I guess what we call them isn't that important. We'll let the historians of the future decide what they should be called.”
“If there is a future,” Liz whispered.
“What we have to do now,” Jake continued, “obviously we have to continue keeping someone on guard twenty-four seven and anytime we run into a group of these things from now on, we have to look for the leaders and try to take them out fast. I suspect that will keep getting harder and harder as time passes and, presumably, they keep getting smarter; you saw how they held back last night and used the others as cannon fodder. We used up several hundred rounds of ammo taking them all down. We still have a pretty large reserve, but if they keep hitting us like that, we're going to run short before long, so we need to make a major supply run in the near future.”
“If they're as smart as you think,” said Tom, “won't they figure the time to attack the house is when some of us are gone? Maybe we should all go together, for safety.”
“If we leave the house empty, what's to prevent them from moving in and wrecking it, destroying our supplies, our defenses?” asked Eve.
“They're after us, after fresh meat,” Pete answered. “There's nothing in the house they want if we're gone. They'll probably get inside and search for us, and we may have to clear some of them out when we get back, but it seems to me that they're not capable of putting up any organized defense.”
“Maybe so,” Jake offered. “I still don't like the thought of leaving the house empty. If nothing else, they'll stink the place up, maybe leave enough filth behind to make it uninhabitable. No, I think we need to send probably three people out after more ammo. There's a huge gun outlet just outside of Bonneventure, and at least two or three small shops within a few miles of it. That’s a lot closer than Camp Bravo, so I think we should hit that first. With the roads the way they are it'll take most of a day to get there, and most of another to get back here, but we should try the big outlet first and, depending on how much opposition there is and whether or not it's already been looted, hit the smaller ones, too.”
He looked around at the others and they were all nodding.
“Okay,” said Tom, “who goes?”
“Not Jake,” Carolyn said firmly. “I don't want any arguments! You're not out of the woods yet. You haven't recovered enough to be relied on for backup out there in case of trouble, so you're staying here!”
“Okay,” Jake grudgingly agreed. “Then I say it has to be Vickie, for one, since she's so good with the bow and you might need to make some quiet kills; Carolyn, for another in case of injury, and Pete for the third, because you managed to slip up behind me in that TSC even though I was fully on guard and ready for anything.”
“I always was a sneaky bastard,” Pete chuckled.
“Why not me?” asked Tom.
“Because you've got a wife and a daughter here, and we need your mind on the job and not on worrying about what might be happening with them back here.”
“Okay. Point taken.”
“Take the Hummer and the 350. Besides Vickie's bow and all her arrows, I want you each to take an AR with six spare magazines and two Glocks with three mags for each. Take a couple hundred extra rounds for each besides and at least one of the shotguns with two boxes of shells. I know you prefer your .38, Vickie, so pack it too with a couple boxes of ammo.”
“Isn't that going to leave you short if they attack in mass?” Vickie worried.
“We should still have more than enough. We’ve got the .22 rifles and pistols besides and three thousand rounds for them. A .22 hollow point can cause a lot of damage in the right spot and we’ve got plenty to go around. Don't worry about us, just get the ammo and get back here safely. Pete? You know what to look for, right?”
“Yeah,” Pete nodd
ed. “Rifle ammo, shotgun shells, let’s see, 9mms, .38s, .357s, .45s... Anything else?”
“Don’t forget my .44,” Tom sang out.
“I’ll look for a backup bow and grab all the arrows I can find,” Vickie said.
“Magazines, extra rifles, pistols, whatever you can carry,” Jake added. “Just remember, your first priority is that everyone makes it back here alive, even if you come back empty-handed.”
They spent the rest of the day preparing for the next day’s run and checking and rechecking the defenses against another attack. Vickie slept on the sofa bed next to Jake, understanding his reluctance to consummate their relationship after what happened to his wife and child, but wishing all the same. Early the following morning they said their goodbyes and Vickie climbed into the Hummer with Carolyn while Pete drove the 350. Two pairs of eyes watched their departure from the field across from the house. One alpha stayed to keep watch and the other faded deeper into the field.
. . .
“So, you and Pete?” Vickie asked after a few miles.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Carolyn smiled.
“Oh, come on! There's obviously something going on between the two of you!”
“I told you I'd been with men before,” Carolyn answered after a short hesitation. “We’ve gotten together already and might make some sort of arrangement once we get back.”
“I see... Where does that leave us?”
Carolyn took her time answering.
“I... still need to discuss that with Pete. I’m sure he has at least some idea about us, but I need to have a better idea of my feelings toward him before we get any deeper into our own relationship.”
“Maybe it’s selfish of me to want the best of both worlds.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Carolyn laughed. “Seriously, though, I’d like that too, but I just don’t know yet how this is all going to play out. Besides, we both know that you and Jake are eventually going to be together, and he doesn’t strike me as the kind who’d want to share you with anyone.”
The Complete Lethal Infection Trilogy Page 20
