“Toss all your weapons out the front door and come out the back, one at a time, hands high and empty!” Ethan commanded.
Not knowing how many foes were outside the building and scared nearly witless, it didn’t take long for the men to decide. Karen watched as rifles and pistols started sailing out the front door, clattering to rest on the ground. A few moments later, the first of the men hesitantly stuck his head out the door, saw Ethan holding the reloaded shotgun, gulped and walked out into the yard. A second man followed then a third and a fourth.
“Is this all of you? Ethan demanded.
“Mike and Reb are still in there,” the first man hastily offered. “Neither one of them can walk; you tore them up pretty bad with that shotgun. Everybody else is dead.”
Keeping his distance and covering the men with the shotgun, Ethan called for Karen to join him. He gave her the shotgun and left her to watch the men while he checked the inside of the cabin. Once he was inside, one of the men grinned, leering at Karen, and lowered his hands, taking a step toward her. A blast from the shotgun took off the front of his foot and he yelped and fell, holding his injured member and tossing curses at her.
“Karen?” Ethan called from inside.
“I’m okay! One of them wasn’t convinced I was serious,” she called back. “I think they’re all believers now.”
There were three dead men inside and two wounded, one of whom breathed his last as Ethan looked him over. After a quick evaluation, he called for Karen to bring the rest in. Two of them had to help the man with the mangled foot, but all were back inside shortly.
“Look what they’ve got over there,” Ethan told her, voice sick with disgust. Karen looked and saw three women and a teenaged boy, all infected. All were naked and all were bent over chairs or benches, hands tied, mouths gagged, their bare bottoms jutting out prominently.
“Oh, dear God. This is sick!”
“We ain’t hurt nobody!” one of the men hastily volunteered. “They’d eat any one of us if they got the chance! They don’t know what’s going on! They ain’t people no more! They’re just monsters now!”
“You can call them monsters after doing this, after what you did to that family on the road? They don’t know what they’re doing! They can’t help themselves!” Karen shouted. “What kind of excuse do you have?”
“They ain’t people!” the man insisted. “There’s nothing else they’re any good for!”
“How many people have you used this way,” Ethan asked quietly.
“There ain’t been that many! Real women don’t last too long-“
“Will you shut the fuck up!” the wounded man cut him off.
Ethan stared at the struggling infected for a minute, then looked back at the four men.
“Outside,” he told them before turning to Karen. “I can’t shoot another kid, Karen, even if he is infected. I hate to ask you, but can you take care of this in here?”
“No,” she said simply, drawing her pistol and shooting all four men in both knees. As they lay howling on the floor, she closed and latched the back door and went over to the infected prisoners, drawing her knife. She cut off their gags and sawed most of the way through the ropes holding their legs and the bindings that held their hands. Ethan stared at her, jaw dropped open and she had to lead him out the front door, closing it behind them. The men’s screams rose rapidly and slowly faded as they walked back to the truck.
. . .
Ethan didn’t utter a word the whole drive back despite Karen’s efforts to talk to him. When they reached home, he let Karen inform the others about what had happened while he carried the confiscated weapons into the house, dropping them on the living room sofa. Still silent, he gathered his few possessions from the bedroom he shared with Karen and carried them into the garage. There he set up a cot, stowed his duffel bag underneath it and sat down on it to clean his rifle. He was angry and disgusted by the men who’d perpetrated such horrific deeds and he knew they couldn’t simply be let go to prey on others; he knew that they couldn’t be allowed to live in the same world as decent people. He understood that they had to die for the greater good and that it should have been his job, but the way Karen had so casually and cold-bloodedly crippled them and then turned the infected loose on them jolted him to his very core. He’d been in a trancelike state when they left the cabin, gathering up the weapons mechanically, driven by sheer instinct, then opening the passenger door and letting his mind drift back to his last few months of deployment while he sat there staring off into the distance.
“Are you all right?” Karen’s voice was quiet and tentative.
Ethan looked at her but instead of seeing her face, he saw the faces of civilians who’d approached his guard post, ignoring the warnings and orders to turn back. He remembered clearly the faces of the nine people he’d shot. Seven of them had been suicide bombers but, he found out after the fact, two of them had been innocent civilians who were simply seeking refuge, sanctuary from the violence and death that had become part of their everyday lives. He saw them all; the dirty, ragged orphan and the pretty, young small-town blonde girl, the people tied to the fence posts at the farm and the family in the clearing; and the prisoners in the log cabin.
He felt the sag of the cot as Karen sat next to him, was dimly aware of her arm around him and heard her voice but none of the words. He was vaguely conscious of her trembling, her sobbing but, after some indeterminate amount of time, he found himself alone again.
All heads turned toward him as he walked into the kitchen the next morning. He smiled and nodded to the group and sat down in front of a plate of pancakes and canned ham slices. When he finished, he commented that it was a very good breakfast and took a cup of coffee out to the front porch. Karen came out and sat down quietly on one of the chairs and watched him as he sipped his drink, leaning against one of the posts.
“I think winter’s coming early this year,” Ethan said, for all the world as if nothing was wrong. “The bright colors are already fading to brown, leaves are falling heavier every day. The infected won’t like the cold weather. Maybe that’s why so many of them seem to be moving off to the south; some kind of instinct.”
“I’ll be glad when they’re gone,” Karen cautiously replied.
“I hope it’s a really cold winter with lots of snow. I used to really love snow. We built the most fantastic snow forts when I was a kid. We had towers and battlements, walls sometimes as tall as we were. Kids from other neighborhoods would come over and pelt it with snowballs, trying to knock it down.”
“Ethan, I think we need to talk about what happened.”
“But no one ever died. No one ever got killed. Tommy Laughlin got a split lip and lost a tooth from a snowball. He had to have three stitches. We all got bawled out pretty bad over that, but he was back out there with us the next day like nothing ever happened.”
“Ethan…”
“I never wanted anybody to die, but that happens in the real world.”
“Ethan, look at me please.”
“War is supposed to be simple; a guy in a different colored uniform comes at you with a gun and you shoot at each other, but you’re supposed to be able to tell the difference between a soldier and a civilian.
“I don’t blame you for those men back at the cabin,” he said, finally turning to her. “I understand that they deserved to die, I just don’t understand why it had to be that way.”
“Those men were evil, Ethan. You know the things they did as well as I.”
“I know the things I’ve done,” he muttered softly. “I’ve done things that can’t ever be forgiven.”
“I don’t believe that, Ethan. You’re a good man.”
“That’s what Lauren said. She was wrong, and so are you. You can’t begin to know the things I’ve done.”
“Every one of us has had to do things since this outbreak started,” Karen began.
“You don’t know,” Ethan’s voice trailed off.
“Tell me, Et
han. You need to talk about this, get it out.”
“Maybe one day, just not now. I don’t want to think about it now. I don’t want to think about anything now.”
Karen stood and walked over to him, putting her arms around him. He stiffened at her touch but didn’t try to draw away.
“It hurts me that you moved out of our bedroom,” she told him, voice quavering.
“It’s for the best. You won’t have to put up with my nightmares anymore.”
“I want to be there for you! I want to try to help you get through this.”
“I’m afraid I might hurt you,” he told her, turning around to face her. “I wouldn’t want to; I wouldn’t mean to, but I might not be able to help it.”
She was about to tell him that she didn’t believe he could ever hurt her, but the look on his face stopped her.
“I think it’s best if we slept apart, for a while at least.”
“All right, Ethan, if that’s the way you want it.”
“I didn’t say that’s the way I want it. That’s just the way it has to be.”
“You will open up to me one day, won’t you?”
“I really don’t know, Karen.”
He kissed her lightly on the lips and walked back into the house.
Chapter 19: Abandonment
The winter was mostly quiet and full of tedium, which, while not the most desirable condition, was much preferred over the prospect of fighting off the infected or doing battle with another armed group. Spring arrived at long last and the sun beating down on the pavement cleared the roads of their winter blanket. The warmer weather brought with it some trepidation over a possible return of the infected, but it was weeks before the first appeared.
Jerry and Alan were on a reconnaissance run when they found a loose grouping of eight infected a few miles to the southwest. Five of them were mired in knee-deep mud as the other three circled them uncertainly. One of the three almost seemed to be in charge of the pack, keeping the other two from getting too close to their immobilized brethren and becoming trapped themselves. With a machete in hand and backed by Alan with an aluminum baseball bat, Jerry called out to the three loose infected, who all turned his way. Two of the infected started for them immediately, but the other seemed to take the time to appraise the situation and tried to get them to turn back. Jerry’s machete cleaved the skull of the first infected and Alan swung like a major-leaguer, cracking the second’s skull with a sickening crunch. To their surprise, the third one turned and ran away, disappearing into an overgrown field before either of them could react.
After dispatching the ones trapped in the mud hole, the two men returned to their vehicle and headed back to the house, where they informed the rest of their band.
“He ran away?” asked an incredulous Garth.
“He looked at us, sized up the situation and made a decision,” Jerry said. “You should have seen his eyes. There was intelligence there, not just the mindless predatory look most of them have. This one was capable of thinking, at least on some level.”
“Oh, this is all we need,” Martin complained. “If these things start thinking, we’ll have a hell of a time stopping them!”
“Don’t jump to any conclusions just yet,” Garth advised. “The other two seemed to be just normal infected, is that right?”
“Yeah, all they wanted to do was rush us,” Alan answered. “The ones who’d got themselves trapped just kept reaching for us, trying to grab on; they didn’t seem to have anything else on their minds.”
“So it’s not all of them then. Still, we’ve never seen this before,” said Martin.
“We’ve always avoided them when they were in any kind of numbers,” Garth put in. It might only happen when they’re in groups.”
“Let’s not assume this is something that’s common,” advised Jerry. “This one guy might be an aberration. I saw lots of infected before I got out of the city and none of them gave any indication of any kind of intelligence.”
“Maybe it’s something that developed later; some kind of mutation,” offered Alan.
“I don’t think it matters how it came about,” Garth interjected. “We need to be aware that it’s a possibility from here on out and be prepared for it. We’ve been damned lucky so far. Apparently, we happened to have settled in some kind of sweet spot where they’ve been few and far between. The terrain, the road network, the low population density in this area all combined made this a safe haven. Ten or fifteen miles east or west the infected are a lot thicker on the ground; north of us there’s hills and sharp drop-offs; south there’s water and soft, marshy ground. I don’t think we could have picked a better place to hole up.”
“So, what do we do now?” asked Martin. “Is this going to be our permanent home now?”
“No, it’s not. For the immediate future, this place can give us shelter, food and water, security and a good base of operations, but we need to find out if any kind of actual civilization survived. We can’t stay here forever and I don’t think we should just wait and see if that civilization eventually finds us. I believe the winter probably killed off nearly all the infected in this area and what we’re starting so see now is some of them migrating north from the warmer climate down south. It remains to be seen how many of those survived the winter.”
“What makes you think cold weather has anything to do with it?” asked Jessie.
“Their minds are obviously gone and they’re almost insensitive to pain,” Garth explained, “but, other than that, they’re really not much different from us. I mean, you don’t have to shoot them in the head to stop them; they aren’t zombies; they’re still people subject to the same vulnerabilities we all are.”
“People,” Larissa mused. “Above everything else, they’re still people. I wonder if there’s any chance they can be cured.”
“People or not, they still want to kill us and eat us; and not necessarily in that order,” Martin stated.
“Unfortunately, you’re right,” Garth agreed. “We can’t get sentimental about this. We have to survive first.”
Chloe was the only one who didn’t speak, who never spoke, but she watched. She looked from face to face as each of the others expressed their opinions and tried to absorb it all. She’d been two weeks away from her sweet sixteen-birthday party when the world as she knew it ended. Her parents turned two days after what should have been the happiest event of her young life and she watched them try to claw their way into the van for nearly thirty hours before Martin and Alan rescued her. She hadn’t been able to tear her eyes away as they killed her mother and father and remembered trying desperately to fight them off when they pulled her from the van. She only calmed down when she was handed over to Jessie. From that point on, she lived her life in a haze, just going along with the others, doing whatever, mostly simple chores they assigned her. Jerry was the only one she felt any kind of connection with because he was the only one who didn’t treat her like a mental incompetent; he talked to her as an adult would talk to any other adult.
So she watched them all, heard them all, but Jerry was the only one she cared about.
. . .
Garth took Larissa with him a few days later to check out the area where Jerry and Alan ran into the infected. They couldn’t find the exact spot, but scouted out the general vicinity, finding several more infected trapped in mud sinks. Continuing on to the southwest, they came across a gasoline tanker truck that had run off the road and was leaning at a precipitous angle. Stopping a few yards away, they both got out of their truck and approached the vehicle carefully.
“Can you tell if it’s full?” she asked him
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them. There’s a lot of valves here, but I have no idea which one does what. Why don’t you back the truck up another fifty feet or so before I try any of them, just to be on the safe side?”
Larissa did as he asked, then walked back to the tanker. Garth took hold of one of the valves and twisted as hard as he
could. It wouldn’t budge. He tried another with the same result.
“I don’t know if there’s a trick to this or if the valves are just stuck,” he told her. “I guess they don’t want just anyone to be able to come up and open a valve. Let’s mark the location and see if anyone back at the house knows anything about tankers.”
They started for their truck but after only a few steps, heard a sharp yelp and infected appeared from the overgrowth on either side of the road. There were too many between them and their truck so they turned in the opposite direction. Another yelp and another group began to close in on them from beyond the tanker. Larissa pulled her pistol but Garth grabbed her arm and pulled her along, down the steep embankment upon which the tanker was perched. They stumbled, fell and rolled for ten or twelve yards before regaining their feet and running away from the road and the danger. Behind them, infected rushed headlong over the broken guardrail, tripping over each other as they tumbled down the steep bank. Some of them broke legs or arms, some of them broke their necks, but too many of them were still up to the chase.
Directly in front of them, a handful of infected charged at them and it was a tense few minutes while they fought their way through with firepower and heavy blades. They ran in blind panic with the sounds of pursuit behind them. The ground they covered was low and soggy, broken and thick with weeds and the going was slow and arduous but eventually they outdistanced the herd and stopped to catch their breaths when they found a derelict old barn near a fallen silo and a burnt-out farmhouse.
“Can you see them?” Larissa asked breathlessly.
“We left them far behind. I don’t think they’ll find us now.”
He turned from the doorway and Larissa stared into his eyes. She grabbed his face in both hands and pressed her lips hard against his. They kissed hungrily, longingly and impatiently began to pull at each other’s clothes. Larissa pulled him down on top of her on a straw-covered floor. The straw was old and dried and it pricked and pinched as he moved atop her but she didn’t care.
The Complete Lethal Infection Trilogy Page 61
