by Bobby Adair
Oh, and what was that abomination shit about?
A couple of the infected were rummaging through the remains of a policeman who lay in the shadow of the gym—one chewed on a bone, the other was starting to gnaw on the officer’s gun belt. I decided I wanted the belt. In my darkening mood, I didn’t see the infected man as an obstacle. I reached down and grabbed the belt.
The infected made a snarling sound, then clamped his teeth on the belt. I yanked it hard, pulling it away.
The infected’s eyes went wide with rage. He howled and lunged for the belt.
“All right,” I mumbled, “if that’s the way you want it.”
Both of the infected by the body stopped what they were doing and stared up at me. The words must have triggered something in their rotted brains that told them I might be lunch. One sniffed at my leg while the one with the gun belt slinked a few steps away and started to gnaw on the belt again.
My anger and disgust blossomed. I pulled the M-4 off of my shoulder. I turned its flimsy-looking stock downward, stepped over to the infected with my black leather gun belt grinding between his teeth, and smashed the butt of my gun down between his malevolent eyes.
A jolt went through his body, and he rolled over on his back, arms and legs moving in a random swimming fashion. I smashed his skull again, then again, then again—until it was deformed and bleeding heavily. He went still.
I stood over the infected man with the butt of my gun dripping with blood, breathing heavily from my exertion. I felt no cathartic release. If anything, I was more angry than before I’d beaten him to death.
What was going to happen to me? What was happening to me? Was I going to be like them? A mindless raging cannibal?
The infected who’d been gnawing on the bone dropped it and slunk over to sniff at the corpse of the one I’d just murdered.
“Fuck you too,” I shouted and smashed his head in a similar fashion—again and again—until he lay limp at my feet.
I stared down at the bloody mess, lost in the darkness of my anger.
I felt a tug at my shoulder and I turned, ready for more violence, but it was Murphy, wide-eyed and worried.
Without a word, he held my gaze, and then made a show of looking around us.
I followed his lead and looked over the quad, across the street, and into the gaps between the buildings. Every infected—standing, squatting, kneeling in the remains of some dead human—all stared at me, frozen in indecision. In their little rotted brains they couldn’t tell whether I was one of them, whether I was food, or whether I was the alpha zombie.
I wanted to kill them all.
Murphy emphatically nodded his head toward the dorm a couple of times and took a tentative step in that direction.
I understood what he wanted. It was the smart thing to do. Our situation out among the infected was on the verge of getting bad in a hurry.
I snatched up my gun belt and followed Murphy back to the dorm. The infected didn’t take their eyes off of us.
One of the ROTC guys opened the door for us when we arrived. He stared at me as wide-eyed as Murphy had just moments before.
He feared me.
In that moment, I reveled in it.
The door closed on our uncomfortable silence.
I looked out through the glass at the infected, going back about their business.
In a post-tantrum rationalization, I tried to reconcile my emotions with my actions. They didn’t make sense. I tried to blame my behavior on my anger at Jerome, Wilkins, Tom, the stress, anybody, anything but me.
Murphy said, “Hey man, we need to rinse this stuff off.”
“Okay,” I answered.
Murphy said to the ROTC guy, “We won’t need you on the door anymore today. We’re not going back out. You can go do whatever you do.”
The ROTC guy looked at me and asked, “What was that all about?”
I shook my head to brush him off.
Murphy stepped in to cover for me, and in his big gruff voice he said, “That infected dude was coming after him, man.”
The ROTC guy said nothing for a moment then asked, “He was coming after you?”
I nodded, “Sure.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes.” I said it like a fuck-you dare for him to ask me again. He didn’t bite.
“Let’s take this stuff to the shower, man, and get started,” said Murphy.
The ROTC guy said, “When you guys get done, you should get upstairs. It’s close to three, and Major Wilkins wants you at the meeting.”
Chapter 30
Murphy stood in the shower stall, scrubbing the MOLLE vest with soap and hot water. I stood outside the stall, taking the ammunition magazines out of the vest before passing them in. The helmets were all cleaned and drying, as were the guns.
“Besides rinsing these guns off, what else do we need to do?” I asked.
“I’ll show you later,” Murphy said.
“Do you know much about guns?” I asked.
“I was in the Army for four years,” he replied.
“What?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Hard to believe, right?”
Yes, it was hard to believe. “So you know all about this gear, then.”
“Yeah, I can show you whatever you need to know,” Murphy told me.
“Good, because I don’t know much of anything besides shooting and reloading.”
“I’ll set you straight, man, but it’ll have to be when I get back.”
“Back?” I asked.
Murphy’s face lost its smile. “I’ve got to go find my mom and my sister.”
I asked, “Did you try borrowing a cell phone and calling them?”
“No answer.” Worry flashed over his face. “Both numbers went straight to voicemail.”
“You think their batteries are dead?” I asked.
Murphy nodded and handed me the wet vest. I handed him an empty one and hung the wet one over a shower stall divider to drip dry.
“Murphy,” I said, “you know how things are out there, right?”
“Yeah, man.”
“So, you know the odds aren’t in their favor, right?”
Nodding, Murphy said, “I know.”
“What’s your plan then?” I asked.
“Based on your experience with driving yesterday, I think that driving to my mom’s house isn’t the best way to go.”
“Where do they live?” I asked
“Over off of Loyola, near 183,” he told me while he pointed vaguely northeast.
“How far is that, like, five miles?” I asked. “Ten miles?”
“Man, I don’t know. When you’re driving you don’t know how far things are—you only know how long it’s going to take to get there. ”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I guess you’re walking, right?”
“It’s kind of the only option. I could steal a bike, but that might send the infected into a frenzy, too. I don’t want to be the guy who gets to figure that one out.”
I asked, “What are you going to do after you find you mom and sister?”
“There’s this crazy dude that Earl talked about.” Murphy looked away from the vest he was rinsing off. He nodded as he spoke. “You remember right?”
I did.
Murphy said, “The dude used to live in our neighborhood. He was one of those doomsday-prepper guys and five or six years ago, the city found out that he’d built this three-story bunker under his house.”
“Three stories under his house?” I was amazed.
“Yeah, like he had more square footage in his bunker than in his house. But like, when the city found out, they condemned his house.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Murphy shrugged. “He never got a permit or it wasn’t built to code. Maybe they just thought his house might cave in on top of it.”
“So what happened, then?”
Murphy said, “So the dude fights with the city for years and finally just keels
over and dies one day.”
“That sucks.”
“For him, yeah.” Murphy stepped out of the shower and handed me the vest. “The house has been sitting empty ever since. The city never did anything with it. They never tore it down or anything. It’s just got a chain link fence around it and the crackheads go in there at night.”
“Do you think it’s still there then?” I asked.
“Man, it’s gotta still be there,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of shape it’s in. The house looks like a crack house. But there are solar panels on the roof and what looks like a solar water heater. There are a couple of little wind turbine things in the back yard. I mean, I don’t know what the guy’s setup was down there, but from the outside, it looked like he had all the right pieces in place.”
“I know this sounds like a stupid question,” I prefaced, “but how do you know somebody isn’t already there?”
Murphy shook his head, “I can’t know that, but it’s the best thing I can think to try right now.”
“This place isn’t so bad,” I said as I looked around.
“It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Man, did you notice how they were fortifying downstairs?”
I shook my head.
“Man,” Murphy waved an arm expansively, “they were just taking desks and furniture and piling them in front of the windows. Once the infected figure out there are people in here, it’s gonna take them like five minutes to break the windows and tear through that junk. Then it’s gonna be all over for Major Wilkins and those girls you saved.”
“I’m sure that’s only temporary,” I said.
“Yeah, man, I’m sure you’re right.” Murphy shook his head. He didn’t really believe I was right. “Until they get those barricades right, they’re all in danger, and if the infected break in here all worked into a frenzy, you’re gonna get killed whether you taste good or not.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
Chapter 31
When Murphy and I got to the common area on the fifth floor, Wilkins was already talking. I immediately noticed that Tom, Mark, and the other ROTC guys were all wearing MOLLE vests and had their M-4s with them. It made sense, but it made me uncomfortable. Wilkins had a sidearm, as did Marcy. Felicity, Amber, and Jerome were unarmed.
I had a Glock in a holster. Murphy however, was planning on announcing his departure and leaving directly after the meeting. He had a pistol, his M4, and carried twelve thirty-round magazines in his MOLLE vest, along with whatever else a real soldier would stuff in there.
The couches in the common area were arranged in a U-shape facing the hall. Jerome and the girls were on the couches. Wilkins stood in the hall, in front of everyone with Mark at his side. The other ROTC guys sat on stools behind the leather couches.
Murphy and I sat beside one another on one of the couches.
Wilkins acknowledged us as we sat. “As I was telling everyone, Marcy and I spent a good deal of the morning on the internet, trying to find what news we could of what’s going on.
“What we found isn’t hopeful. The infection is still spreading. San Antonio is in the same shape as Austin. It’s lost. Houston and Dallas are both a mess, with the infection spreading and the police trying to get a handle on the situation. The refugee center set up at Fort Hood fell apart overnight.
“The infection has shown up in nearly every major city in the country now and there’s hardly a place in the world that’s free. Most of Asia has followed China’s path. India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Korea are all in chaos or are silent. Nothing is coming out of Africa. Europe and Russia are in trouble. The infection has shown up in Brazil and Columbia.
“All over the country, the military has set up road blocks. All flights are grounded. All trains have stopped. Any travel between states and even cities is forbidden. The military has orders to shoot to kill anything or anyone that comes near the roadblocks.
“We’re effectively isolated here for the time being, at least until the military can get the situation stabilized.”
Amber asked, “How long will we be isolated?”
Wilkins answered, “It’s anybody’s guess, but it’s best that we plan for the long haul. We need to be prepared to take care of ourselves for at weeks or even months. It might be longer before we get help.”
“Longer?” Amber asked.
“It might be years,” Wilkins answered.
Felicity spoke up next, with heavy emotion in her voice, “Is this really the end of the world?”
Wilkins didn’t answer. Nobody spoke. The silent consensus was yes.
Wilkins said, “Human civilization is going to be very different going forward.”
Felicity looked down at the floor. I’m sure she already knew. Her question was little more than a desperate expression of hope.
I spoke up next, “Look, like I was telling Jerome yesterday, I’m not sure how we’re going to get through the next few weeks or months, but we need to get somebody online right now. I don’t know when or if we’re going to lose electricity. I don’t know when or if the internet is going to go out.”
I stood up to look at everybody, “Everything humans have ever learned or knew can be downloaded from the internet right now, for free, while the network is still up. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t know anything about farming and growing my own food. If what Wilkins is saying is right, we need to figure it out. It’ll be better for us if we figure it out with a book than by trial and error. There’s going to come a time when we run out of food to scavenge, and when that time comes, we’d better know how to grow something. We won’t be able to live through too many crop failures. And if we want to live anything remotely like the life we used to have, we’d better learn how to hook up some solar panels to an electrical grid. We need to learn how to manufacture gunpowder if we run out. There are a million little things that make life possible, and none of us knows much about any of them.”
I looked around the room for acknowledgment—for confirmation—but they just looked at me like I’d changed color again.
“Thoughts, anyone?” I asked.
“Well,” Wilkins started, “this is as good a time as any to talk about how you fit into that, Zed.”
“I don’t even have a computer,” I replied.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Wilkins asked.
What? That seemed odd to me. I looked around at the blank faces. Something wasn’t right.
As I stepped back toward the couch to take my place beside Murphy, I saw a very slight shake of his head. He was reading something that I’d missed.
As I turned to sit down, I noticed Murphy’s hand move discreetly toward the trigger on his M-4. He flicked the safety off.
“Zed,” Wilkins started, “we all appreciate what you‘ve done for us. Some of us definitely owe you our lives, and the rest of us probably do.”
I nodded, curious as to where this was going.
He said, “Because you and Murphy and Jerome are infected, you can move among the other infected with ease. You’re in no danger.”
“Mostly no danger,” I corrected him.
“Zed, please don’t take this the wrong way,” Wilkins gulped down a pause, “but you three are infected and that makes some of us pretty nervous. Not me, mind you. I’m not worried, but I have to speak for the group.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He said, “Again, as much as you’ve done for all of us, many here are afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me?” This was starting to sound like bullshit.
Wilkins went on, “We don’t know if we can catch the infection from you or how. We don’t know when we’re going to wake up and find you standing over our beds and attacking us. We don’t know what you are, and we need to do something about that.”
I heard shuffling behind me, and then Murphy’s big voice stopped everything. “I don’t know where this conversation is goin
g, but just so you all know one thing, I’m leaving when this is done. Actually,” he continued, very deliberately standing and stepping toward the hallway, “I’m leaving right now. I need to go find my sister and my mom.”
Mark butted in and said, very pointedly, “We need that ammunition you’re carrying.”
Murphy, beside Wilkins now, turned so that he’d have no one at his back. He was holding the M-4 with one hand over the trigger and one under the barrel, in a way that made it clear that he was fully prepared to operate the weapon if necessary. “Zed and I picked up all of this ammunition. Zed and I picked up all of the guns that you bunch of pussies have right now. If it wasn’t for Zed, you wouldn’t have shit. You’d be sitting in that building next door like a bunch of zombie bait, waiting to get eaten.
“All of you people piss me off. After everything that Zed has done for you, you’re going to tell him to hit the bricks, aren’t you? Oh, and you want to take our guns and our ammo while you’re at it. Well, fuck you. I’m leaving here with this gun and this vest and the twelve magazines I’ve got. Just so you know.”
Everybody was surprised into motionless.
I spoke first, “Is that what’s happening here, Wilkins? You’re kicking me out?”
“Of course we are,” Mark muttered. “You’re possessed by demons. All three of you are.”
Wilkins ignored Mark and continued, “No, no. Let me finish, Zed. Clearly some of us don’t feel comfortable being so close to you. We can continue to work together but we’d feel more comfortable if maybe you guys moved into the building next door.”
“Without our guns,” I said, shaking my head.
“No,” Wilkins said, “That’s not what we’re saying.”
“That’s what Mark just told Murphy,” I argued.
Wilkins pointed out the window toward the quad. “You guys can walk outside and get all of the ammunition you need. You have to admit, it’s more dangerous for us.”
Murphy interrupted, “Zed, you want to come with me? Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
