“We could spend the night here,” Ethan said, glancing toward the sun lowering on the horizon.
“Not hardly!” Karen objected. “You can’t be serious about spending the night in a building filled with those things!”
“They can’t get out,” he countered, “and it’ll be dark in less than two hours now.”
“Sorry, not happening. There has to be someplace better.”
“I’ve slept in a lot worse places, but okay. We’ll need to find something soon, though. I don’t like the idea of driving around in pitch dark if we have to get off the main road.”
“We already found out they don’t see well in the dark.”
“That doesn’t really matter if we happen to drive right into a herd the size of the one back at the substation. And driving with lights on after dark would be like setting off a homing beacon. Let’s just try to find a suitable place before the sun goes down.”
Karen led the way, following the main road until a massive jam of abandoned cars forced them to backtrack to a side road leading more north than west. The sky was darkening when they found a half-completed housing development that was being built around a small man-made lake. A marina/clubhouse building was complete as far as the outside walls and roof and, after checking that it was clear and, as there was plenty of lumber and concrete blocks readily available to barricade the entrances, they decided to stay there for the night. As none of the homes had been finished yet, there were no people and, more importantly, no infected in or around the development and the night passed peacefully.
Karen woke the next morning to find that Ethan, as usual, was already awake and had coffee ready. She gladly accepted the cup he offered her.
“How long have you been awake?” she asked as she sipped.
“Two hours or so,” he shrugged. “I did a quick sweep. We seem to be all alone here.”
“It’s been weeks since we’ve seen another human being,” she sighed, “at least one that’s not infected. There have to be other survivors somewhere!”
“While it lasted, the radio reports were none too optimistic about survival rates. The last report I heard before it went dark was that some areas had fewer than fifty percent uninfected survivors. I don’t know if that was a worst-case scenario or if they were being optimistic. I’m thinking, based on what we’ve seen so far, that they were wildly optimistic. Every town I’ve passed through has been teeming with infected and only isolated areas have had any normal people living there and they’ve been few and far between.”
“I wish I could say different,” Karen acknowledged. “It all just happened so fast. I could maybe understand it more if people started getting sick a few at a time, then it began to spread and infect larger numbers, but it was like it all happened at once.”
“That’s why they thought it was some kind of bio-weapon. A natural disease has a natural progression. This went from a relatively isolated incident in Africa to a worldwide disaster in just a matter of weeks. I just hope whoever invented this thing burns in hell for eternity.”
“You mean this isn’t hell we’re living in now?”
“We haven’t had it bad yet. We still have food and water, medical supplies, clothing, shelter and many other things that will become scarce as more time passes. What’s the longest you’ve gone without eating since this began? Has it been more than a day?”
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t think it’s been more than overnight.”
“Then the worst privation you’ve suffered personally has been going without a bath for a couple of weeks. We’ve been very lucky. Don’t expect that kind of luck to last forever.”
“Well, you’re certainly Mr. Doom-and-Gloom today.”
“I’m just trying to be a realist.”
“I’d prefer you were an optimist,”
“The optimists are all dead now. Dead or infected.”
“Well I’m neither,” Karen said with defiance in her voice. “I expect to survive and eventually to find other survivors and start rebuilding.”
“Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Right now, we need to grab a quick bite and get moving again. If the infected are going to be traveling in herds the size we saw at the substation, we’ll need to replenish our ammunition supply soon.”
Once they’d distributed the supplies more evenly between the two vehicles, Karen led the way, following the road as it gradually curved more to the north, then slightly east. From a hilltop hours later they surveyed a wide spot in the road ahead that aspired to be a town. There were perhaps two dozen buildings occupying an area of about five acres, mostly houses but also a gas station and what looked to be a small store. Ethan counted five infected roaming the street and a couple of alleys and at least ten times that number of corpses in various stages of decay.
“I think we can handle this,” he told Karen. “Just follow my lead. Stay behind me and don’t use a gun unless you don’t have a choice. I should be able to take them all down alone, but if it comes down to it, don’t try to stab. Swing the machete with both hands. Go for the neck or for a slice across the belly. If they’re reaching for you, a quick, hard slash should take off their hands or at least their fingers.”
“Oh, God,” Karen groaned.
“It’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to be pretty, but it’s something that has to be done. Like I said, I should be able to handle it all myself, but I need to know that you’ll be there to watch my back.”
“I will. Let’s just get it over with.”
They parked their vehicles in the street in front of the first house. Three infected noticed their approach and began to advance on them. Ethan swung his machete at the first, chopping deeply into its neck, a fountain of blood gushing with every heartbeat. The blade severed fingers from the second infected with the first swing, hacked nearly clear through one arm at the elbow with the next and dropped it with a chop to the side of the neck. He felled the third one with a blow to the side of the head followed by another neck wound. All this activity attracted the attention of the other two infected, plus three more who’d previously been hidden from sight. He took down the first with a slash across the throat but the next one moved unexpectedly and the machete blade lodged in its skull and slipped from Ethan’s blood slicked hands as the body dropped. There wasn’t time to recover the weapon before the next one closed on him and Ethan got one hand around the man’s throat, holding him back while he reached for his combat knife. Karen swung her machete at the next one in line, the blade landing between his second and third fingers as he reached for her, splitting his hand down to the wrist. Another blow slashed the infected’s cheek open and broke his jaw before a final slash at the side of his neck felled him. By this time, Ethan managed to drive his knife up under the ribcage of his assailant and turn his attention to the last one, a young girl, barely a teenager, with long, blond hair and an ugly bite mark on her forearm. He hesitated, his arm raising the knife and wavering, unable to bring himself to strike her down. Her face and her clothing were still clean and free of blood so she’d been only recently infected and she looked so innocent and helpless until her eyes locked with his and she bared her teeth, snarling and reaching for him. Karen split the back of her skull with her machete and the girl dropped at Ethan’s feet with a whimper.
It was too much for Ethan. He stood, wide-eyed, in shock, staring down at the girl who’d been someone’s child, someone’s sister maybe, the pride of her parents’ marriage, and he remembered another young, innocent girl thousands of miles and a lifetime away. He could not tear his eyes away, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, almost forgot to breathe.
“Ethan? Ethan! Look at me, Ethan!”
He heard the voice but the words didn’t register, didn’t make any sense. Karen continued to call to him, voice becoming louder, shriller until she grabbed him by the shirtfront and shook him, screaming his name into his face. Suddenly, he looked her in the eyes and she breathed a sigh of relief that he was back in the here
and now.
“Three more on your six,” he said in a curiously subdued voice. She stared at him without comprehending until he gestured with his head. Turning around, she saw three infected shambling toward them, the nearest not ten feet away. She raised the machete but Ethan caught hold of her wrist and took it from her hand. In only a few seconds he dispatched each of them in a coldly methodical manner, then turned to look at her again
“House to house, “he told her. “Stick close and be ready,” and he put his foot on the skull of the one corpse and wrested his machete free.
“Ethan? Are you all right?” But he was already headed for the first house.
They took canned and boxed food from nearly every house in town including mason jars filled with garden vegetables, sauces and preserves. There was a good deal of bottled water, nearly six cases, and they stacked them in the truck beds. They rifled through every bathroom, taking paper products, any drugs, salves, ointments or other medical or personal hygiene supplies they could find. Altogether, they also found one double-barreled, two single and one semi-auto shotgun with about three hundred shells, five rifles; one a .30 caliber and the rest .22s, and six pistols ranging from .22s to .45s, along with a modest amount of ammunition for each. The small store yielded flour, salt, sugar, coffee and a few other household items that couldn’t be grown in a home garden as well as a small cache of snack foods. Once the trucks were loaded and gassed up again, they got in and drove away, neither of them having spoken a word in more than two hours.
Twilight was approaching as they passed a tiny, stone chapel adjoining a small cemetery, all surrounded by a wrought-iron fence set into a low stone wall. Ethan pulled ahead and motioned for her to turn down the gravel lane that led to the church and she did so reluctantly.
“This might be a good place to stop for the night,” he said once they’d exited the vehicles. “We have a clear view all around and it doesn’t look like there are any homes or other buildings anywhere near.”
“Do we really have to stop at a graveyard?”
“The dead aren’t going to rise,” he said simply. “We only have to worry about the living.”
They backed the trucks up into the churchyard close to the door, both pointed down the lane and ready for a speedy getaway. After clearing the building, they brought in sleeping bags and enough food and water for the night and a quick breakfast in the morning and began settling in.
“Ethan, look, I wanted to-“
“This place is ideal,” he talked right over her. “The stone walls are almost a foot thick, the windows are too small to climb in and the door is solid wood with metal strapping. There’s a back door if we need it and a little anteroom where we can set up a bucket. We might be able to stay here for a few days and get-“
“Ethan! I think we need to talk about what happened.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. You did what was… necessary. I froze. I might have gotten us both killed. She wasn’t really a person anymore. You did what had to be done, what I should have done in the first place. I don’t want to say or hear any more about it.”
He was too wound-up to sleep so he took the first watch. Karen woke up nearly seven hours later to find him standing in the doorway, rifle cradled in his arms, just staring out into the night. She called his name softly, then again while walking up to him. She laid her hand gently on his shoulder and, after a moment, he covered it with his own.
“You were supposed to wake me up in four hours,” she murmured.
“I’ve been wide awake. I couldn’t have slept anyway and there was no sense in both of us staying up.”
Karen wrapped her arms around his waist, cheek pressed to his shoulder blade.
“We will get through this,” she said. “We’re bound to find other survivors eventually, people we can link up with. Until then, we still have each other.”
“I have to believe you’re right. There’s no point in going on otherwise.”
“Try to get a few hours of sleep. I’ll wake you if I need to.”
Ethan turned to her and gathered her in his arms, kissing her gently on the lips.
“Three hours,” he told her. “I’ve had to go for weeks on three hours a night. Promise me.”
“Okay. I’ll wake you in three hours.”
. . .
She couldn’t have been more than twelve; dirty face, filthy, ragged clothing, sandals that were still footwear in name only. Her face was badly bruised, one eye swollen almost shut, lower lip split, one arm wrapped in dirty, bloody bandages. She was crying, weeping as she approached the sentry line, arms extended, pleading asking for help with the few words of English she knew.
“Halt!” Ethan called to her when she reached the thirty-yard marker. He yelled for her to stop again in English and then in the local dialect. He held up his hand, palm outward, making a pushing motion, warning her back. The girl kept coming, saying “Help me” over and over again. “Please! Please stop! Don’t come any closer!” he shouted, but she didn’t even waver, she just kept coming. She reached the twenty-yard marker and Ethan raised his rifle, pointing it at her and shouting for her to stop, to go back, but she kept coming.
Her frail body twitched and jerked as a burst of automatic weapons fire tore through her. Ethan spun at the sound and saw one of the other guards had not hesitated. Then the bomb went off. He felt the searing hot fragments bite into his side, his back and his legs and found himself on the ground, his squad-mates rushing forward, taking up defensive positions. Two of them hoisted him onto a stretcher and began carrying him back to the compound while others stood watch. He looked back to where the little girl had been, where she’d died, but all he saw was charred ground and blotches of red and black gore.
“The little bitch was really loaded, wasn’t she?” one of the stretcher-bearers said and Ethan heard a scream, a loud howl of primal anguish and realized it was his own voice.
“Ethan! Wake up! Oh, God, Ethan, wake up!”
His eyes snapped open and he rolled away, coming to a crouch near the wall, knife in hand, tense as a compressed spring. He looked into Karen’s face, her features twisted with terror and he recognized that it had only been a nightmare.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m all right now.”
“Oh, God, Ethan, that was the worst one yet! You were screaming and thrashing, pounding your fists on the floor! I thought you were going to hurt yourself!”
He looked down at his hands and saw the skin had been barked away in places from both knuckles and they were sore and bleeding. His whole body was bathed in sweat and his heart was pounding in his chest. He’d tried to forget that day, made a conscious effort to put it out of his mind. Until seeing the young blond girl today, he’d kept it hidden away in the dark recesses of his mind. “It wasn’t my fault!” he’d told himself over and over while recovering in the hospital, but he could never be convinced of it, that there wasn’t anything he could have done differently.
“How long?” he asked Karen.
“You slept almost three and a half hours. I know you told me to wake you, but I thought you needed it.”
“Never mind. Let’s get a bite to eat and get some of our supplies unloaded.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. I don’t ever want to talk about it and trust me; you don’t ever want to know.”
Chapter 8: Bailey
Bailey cursed his luck yet again as he lay flat on his stomach on the roof of the grocery store watching the herd of infected slowly weave their way through the small town. He’d been lying in the hot sun for nearly three hours now and it didn’t look like they were in any hurry to leave. He could still hear them in the store below him, bumping into shelves, knocking over displays, sometimes fighting amongst themselves. Only three weeks earlier, he’d just flown back from a spectacular run of luck in Vegas. His total payoff had been well in excess of two hundred thousand dollars, about twenty grand of which he’d spent during a weeklong binge at one of th
e legal brothels outside of the city. At fifty-six years of age, there were times during that week that he thought he wouldn’t survive the experience. Now he almost wished he hadn’t. At least he would have died happy.
A number of passengers became deathly ill on the flight back and the pilots made an emergency landing at the nearest airport. The aircrew was still waiting for the ambulances to arrive when the first of the sick passengers turned. In no time at all, it seemed, there were nothing but screaming, terrified people desperately trying to get out of the plane, pushing and striking anyone in their way, trampling any who fell. Everything was blood and bared teeth, panicked, running people. The first responders were quickly overwhelmed as they rushed in to offer aid. Airport security couldn’t contain the situation and local law-enforcement arrived some twenty minutes after the first attacks. Police were reluctant to shoot at first, unwilling to inflict casualties on unarmed civilians and the earliest arrivals fell to the growing horde. Reinforcements arrived in full riot gear and had to force their way into the concourse, firing tear gas and rubber bullets at first then, seeing these had a negligible effect on the infected, opened up with pistols and riot shotguns. Less than an hour later, the airport was completely overrun. The infected numbered well over three hundred by this time and their victims were uncountable. Hundreds more turned, either spontaneously or from bite wounds and the National Guard was finally notified. It was already too late. Outbreaks erupted all over the city and the Guard barracks were not immune to the infection. By nightfall, the entire city was thoroughly infested.
Bailey (his full name was Gordon Alexander Bailey, Jr. but he always introduced himself as simply ’Bailey’) fought his way clear of the turbulent crowd by the simple expedient of taking off perpendicular to the flow of travel. While everyone else ran for the imagined safety of the airport terminal, he ran toward the perimeter fence. Fear and an excess of adrenaline allowed him to scale the fence and drop to the ground outside, a little harder than he planned for he hurt his ankle and took off in a limping run away from the scene.
The Complete Lethal Infection Trilogy Page 52
