The Complete Lethal Infection Trilogy

by Tony Battista

  Fred Lane saw them moving along the road near the substation where he and his family were living. The substation sat on a concrete pad at the end of an access lane a hundred feet off the road and surrounded by a high chain link fence topped with barbed wire, which was one of the reasons it was so attractive to him. The sturdy brick maintenance and storage building inside the fence made a comfortable abode for Fred, his wife and their daughters as well as Mrs. Torres and her three young children. The other men generally slept in tents set up among the big transformers and switching gear outside the building to relieve the overcrowding when weather permitted.

  They had a motley collection of shotguns, hunting rifles, pistols and one AR-15 and mounds of canned and boxed food and bottled water looted from various businesses and convenience stores. Logs and concrete blocks lined the interior of the fence with sandbags stacked against them to hold them firmly in place. Timber braces angled up from the ground inside the perimeter to reinforce each of the metal fence posts. Miscellaneous parts and equipment from the building were distributed farther out to act as obstacles to disrupt a massed attack. All in all, though cramped for space, the site had served them well. Now he spotted the first large group of infected they’d seen this year.

  Earlier that day, he’d watched as Gabe’s little convoy passed, apparently without even noticing the substation and they’d all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Even before that, he’d seen the two big olive-drab trucks and the other vehicles of the convoy led by Pete pass late one afternoon, also without paying them any attention. The field between them and the road, overgrown with tall grass and weeds, did a lot to screen them from traffic on the main road, but the infected were on foot when they passed and much more likely to notice. Consequently, he had most of his party remain inside the building while he, his son and his two sons-in-law concealed themselves near the fence and watched.

  One of Tad’s fellow alphas noticed the substation and approached it. He lifted his head and sniffed the air, but the stench of spilled oil from a number of broken transformer casings helped to mask the smell of the survivors. As he moved closer to the fence his foot slipped on an insulator lying on the ground and he barely managed to keep his balance. On that note, he turned away to head back toward the rest of the group.

  Fred closed his eyes and let the tension drain from his neck and shoulders, relieved that his family would not have to fight for survival today. He ran his fingers through his short-cropped, graying hair to the back of his neck, kneading them in to ease the tightness. As he turned to look back toward the building, his son, Darnell, raised his hand to wave at him and cut it deeply on the sharp corner of the sheet-metal panel box behind which he was hiding as he brought it back down. He clamped his other hand over the wound and blood began to ooze out between his fingers.

  Not half a minute later, the alpha stopped and cocked his head to one side, a puzzled expression on his face. The light wind carried the scent of blood in his direction and he turned back toward the fence and stared for a few moments, sniffing the air again, trying to pinpoint the source. A few drones had spilled over into the field from the group on the road and they too stopped to investigate the odor. Soon, a dozen or more drones were making their way toward the substation and attracting the attention of the main group.

  Cursing under his breath, Fred watched as the infected swarmed across the field, the odor of blood strong enough now to arouse them, stir them to push their way through the obstacles to the fence. Fred fired his shotgun when the first of them grabbed at the fence, the heavy shot taking him full in the chest, dropping him like a brick. His sons-in-law opened up with their weapons and Diego, Jayden and Marius emerged from the building and took up positions, firing into the growing crowd of infected. For a while, it seemed that the attack was doomed to failure by the steady fire of the defenders, but a sudden burst of automatic fire toppled Jayden. The shock of infected firing weapons momentarily stunned the defenders and the sight of Jayden’s twisted body lying in a spreading pool of blood made his mother, who was watching from the doorway, scream in anguish and run toward him, only to be felled by a round from another burst of full auto. Fred’s daughters rushed to half drag, half carry her back to the building and the men began to fire back again, searching for the unexpected shooter.

  More than a dozen infected had already gone down when Fred saw an object smash against the logs in front of the fence. Flames exploded and spread rapidly there and he had to withdraw from his position. A second bottle shattered against a fencepost and flaming liquid sailed through the air into the compound. Fred had to drop to the ground and roll as some of the gasoline reached him, setting his sleeve and the back of his shirt aflame. A third bottle sailed over the fence and exploded on the concrete a few yards away from Jayden’s now lifeless corpse. Thoroughly demoralized by now, the men retreated into the building, firing from the doorway and the one window that faced the direction of attack, unwilling to expose themselves to the flaming missiles or to the terrifying reality of infected actually firing guns at them.

  “Jesus God, how did they learn how to use guns?” Fred screamed aloud, voice filled with despair. “And fire bottles? They never done nothin’ like that before! What the hell is going on?”

  No one had an answer and another bottle shattered against the wall of the building, spreading burning gas over brick and concrete.

  Tad only had three bottles left, though the five-gallon can he found at the dealership was still nearly half-full. He was just outside the fence now, crouched behind a mound of dirt and stones. Poking the barrel of the rifle through the fence, he fired three short bursts at the doorway, then rose up and threw one of the remaining bottles. It shattered on the metal roof, flaming fluid rolling down into the gutter, ending up in the barrel at the bottom of the downspout, causing no appreciable damage. He realized that, like the brick wall of the jewelry store where he first figured out the usefulness of fire, this particular building wasn’t vulnerable to his firebombs. The building in front of him just wouldn’t burn so the bottles were useless to him. Or maybe they weren’t.

  He put a fresh magazine in the rifle and fired short bursts at the doorway again then hurled another bottle. This one shattered against the wall just above and to the right of the doorway and the flames kept the occupants back, unable to bring their weapons to bear. He lit the wick on the last bottle and threw it, taking his time to aim for the doorway. His aim was good and the bottle flew through the opening five feet into the building before shattering on the floor. Screams began to issue from within the building and soon the defenders emerged, dashing for cover, firing at the mob of infected clustered near the fence. Tad fired his rifle again but Fred and both his sons-in-law quickly pinpointed his position and responded with a fusillade of return fire, fierce enough to make him retreat, crawling and rolling away from the substation. He tried to call off the attack when he realized that none of his drones were able to get through or over the fence, but the smell of fresh blood was overwhelming to the mass of drones and they mindlessly clawed and pulled at the fence while, one by one, they were shot down by Fred and his family.

  When all was said and done, Tad walked away with one other alpha, the female and seven drones. The rest of his band died only yards away from the feast they so recklessly craved. For Tad it was a terrible miscalculation, a debilitating failure, one from which he felt he could never recover.

  Fred hugged his daughters tightly. One of their number was dead, another had a deep gash on one hand. Two others suffered some burns and his wife had a bullet lodged in her shoulder. They’d used a great deal of ammunition, several crates of food were ruined and most of three cases of bottled water destroyed, but they’d survived. It would take a long time to bury Jayden, drag away the corpses and clean up the building and longer still to replenish their lost supplies, but they lived. Fred got to his knees on the hard concrete and began to pray, thanking God for their salvation and asking His mercy for the soul of Jayden. The rest of
his family joined him, raising their voices in turn in asking the Lord for His indulgence, praying for better days ahead.

  Chapter 20: Settling In

  Work on the new farm was advancing much faster than anyone anticipated. Even Jake was suitably impressed with the progress when he finally convinced Vickie to drive him out there nearly two weeks after his surgery. Wire was strung, vehicular barriers emplaced, steel grates covered the first floor windows and railroad ties were stacked two deep up to four feet high against the outside walls on the wrap-around porch, proof against small arms fire

  “How in the world did you manage to get all this done in less than two weeks?” Jake asked Pete.

  “It sure wasn’t easy,” Pete laughed. “We got a lot of help from Hollington. They loaned us nine of their people to help with the heavy work. Some of them brought in the barbed wire and railroad ties and they have a front-end loader that helped a lot too. There’s still a lot of work to be done in setting up anti-personnel obstacles and there are a few places where I’d like to put in some ditches, but it’s coming along nicely.”

  “Well, just looking around, I don’t see much I could improve on,” Jake admitted. “Looks like you didn’t need my help at all.”

  “Well, if you look around a little more, you’ll see the setup is based pretty much on what you drew up for the last house with only minor changes to allow for the landscape. “This is still mostly your doing.”

  “Yeah, maybe, except for all the hard work. I can’t say I particularly missed that. Where did you site the machine gun?”

  “It’s up in a second floor window in front behind a double layer of railroad ties.”

  “Good.” Looking around, he added, “I don’t see any vehicles. Where are they?”

  “The flatbed and the big trucks are in the big barn and the rest are in the garage, the small barn and the big shed. Eventually we’ll need some of that space for storage, but for now, I wanted to keep them all under cover and out of sight. I was never able to get the tractor running again, though. The engine seized up for some reason and we had to leave it behind.”

  “That’s too bad. Do you think it’s worth it to look for another?”

  “Not really,” Tom answered him. “We have those four big power tillers; they should do the job for the amount of acreage we really need. I think we were too ambitious at the other farm.”

  “So, how is the food situation?”

  “We’re actually okay there,” Pete said. “We hit a few more stores, some houses. A couple other farms we searched had a lot of food in mason jars in the basements. Phil’s people have a big surplus, too. We’re good for another year at least, according to Hannah, as long as we’re careful. We have noticed a lot more places have been looted, though, mostly groceries and gun shops. Some of them must have been hit by some real ass-holes; what they didn’t carry away they smashed or ripped apart and scattered all over the place.

  “Our biggest problem is going to be gasoline. A lot of people don’t realize that gasoline does go stale after a while, starts to gum up the engines. We’ve filled a number of drums and added stabilizer so we should be good for the immediate future though. Hollington has plenty of stabilized gas to last them a good while, but there’s definitely a finite supply. They’ve been adding solar panels whenever they can find them and, as you’ve seen, they’re putting up another windmill.”

  “The lack of fuel is going to make it harder to till the larger fields, but I’ve talked to an old Amish blacksmith at Hollington,” Tom added. “He’s already fashioned a couple of plows from scrap iron and somehow came up with a handful of mules to pull them.”

  “Looks like you’ve got everything well in hand,” Jake smiled. “Have you run into any other survivors?”

  “Other than the people at that substation, we should try to make contact with them sometime, and the guys that tried to sneak up on us, not a one. I’m not counting them out yet.”

  “Yeah, it sounds like we’ll be getting another visit from them some time. I don’t want to second-guess Kate and Brooke, but I think they should have taken them all down when they had the chance.”

  “Kim has brought that up more than once. It’s about all Kate can do to keep her from going out alone to hunt them down.”

  “Jake! It’s good to see you,” Hannah called as she emerged from the house. “I thought that was your voice.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Hannah,” Jake hugged her, awkwardly because of the sling in which his left arm rested. “Say, I don’t suppose you’ve got a pot of coffee on?”

  “It’s ready to pour as soon as you get to the kitchen,” she smiled. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Getting better every day. Doc says I have to keep the sling for another week, but I can start using my arm again after that.”

  “You can start off with a few small things,” Vickie reminded him. “Dr. Vargas still wants him to take it easy for at least two more weeks after that.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” he smiled at her. “Thanks for reminding me.”

  Vickie stuck her tongue out and kicked him lightly on the shin.

  Once in the kitchen, Jake sat at the table and accepted the steaming mug Hannah handed to him. He took a sip and sighed in obvious contentment.

  “Now that’s the real stuff. They mostly have instant coffee at Hollington. Just another reason to be glad to be back.”

  He drank the coffee with a freshly baked biscuit and pushed all the cares and worries of their twisted new world to the back burners for a brief, happy moment, content to be back among the people with whom he’d shared so many good times as well as bad.

  Hannah refilled his cup and Jake thanked her and took it out to the back porch, lighting a smoke. Carolyn was not happy when she saw him with the cigarette but remarkably enough, refrained from saying anything about it, though she shot him an obviously disapproving glare.

  “I met this committee they have at Hollington,” Jake said casually. “Got along with most of them right off.” “He took another sip. “A couple of them don’t seem to be very happy about us setting up here independently. They think we should all be under one jurisdiction.”

  “No!” Kim said emphatically. “If they insist on that, I say we pick up and leave; go back to our old place!”

  “I agree!” added Kate. “We don’t need them if they’re going to impose conditions on us!”

  “Take it easy, you two! They haven’t insisted on anything yet, just suggested it. We’ll cooperate with Hollington on defense and on any future supply runs, but I don’t believe they’re planning to try to exercise any authority over us.”

  “You mean for the time being,” Kim stated harshly.

  “Who knows what the future holds,” Jake shrugged, wincing as the gesture reminded him of his bad shoulder. “If anyone last spring would have tried to tell me how much the world was going to change almost overnight, I’d have figured them for being drunk or crazy or more than a little of both. The way things are now, I think that’s the least of our worries.”

  “I have to go along with the Kays on this,” Hannah put in. “We all know you, Jake. We know you and trust you. You know all our stories and we know yours. We’re happy with the way things are right now, and I don’t want that to change.”

  “I think it’s safe to say she speaks for all of us,” Pete agreed. “We need to make that clear to the people on the committee.”

  “They only have as much authority over us as we’re willing to grant them,” Jake assured the group. “I think I made it clear to them that we didn’t survive on our own for this long to become someone else’s subjects. We’ll have an alliance with Hollington, but we’re both still independent entities. We’ll cooperate on matters of defense and supplies, but no one is being absorbed.”

  “Well, okay then,” Carolyn said. “For the time being, that’s settled then. We’ve set one of the bedrooms aside for you and Vickie and lunch is nearly ready, so why don’t we just enjoy our reunion f
or now?”

  After lunch, Vickie asked a still-sullen Kim if she’d been keeping up with the bow and Kim, plainly excited, was anxious to show off the results of her long practice sessions, so they took some target arrows out behind the big barn. Tom and Pete showed Jake around the rest of the buildings and the grounds, and Kate and Carolyn wheeled a cart full of empty water jugs to the well to refill them.

  “Kim mentioned that little talk you had with her that night on the way over here,” Kate remarked. “It meant a lot to her, knowing she’s part of a family again after losing hers. It means a lot to me, too.”

  “I only told her the truth,” Carolyn shrugged. “All of us need one another. We actually are a family, if not by blood, then by the commitment we have toward each other.”

  Kate nodded and gave a melancholy smile.

  “Kim is the only one I’ve ever talked with about any of this,” she began, hesitantly, “but she encouraged me to open up to you after that talk.” Carolyn waited patiently until she could bring herself to continue. “I was married before all this happened. It hadn’t been a year yet, so we were still almost like newlyweds. My Donald was forty-six, quite a lot older than I was, but I loved him with all my heart and he treated me like a queen. He owned a plumbing business, mostly working on condos and apartment buildings. We were at a job site together when the madness hit,” she again had to stop for a moment.

  “He turned spontaneously. There was no warning, no obvious transitioning. One moment he was perfectly normal, if a little tired, and the next moment he was tearing out his foreman’s throat.”

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Kate.”

  “One of his other employees took him down with a shovel. The man he bit bled out right there in the dirt. There were fourteen of us there; me, some workers, the architect and a couple of curious passers-by. By nightfall, there were three of us left.

  “We managed to stay together, stay alive, for weeks by constantly moving, scavenging for food and weapons whenever we could. One night, there were two gunshots and something hit me hard on the back of my head. When I woke up, one of them was on top of me and others were waiting their turn. You can imagine what kind of hell that was.