Infected (Book 1): The First Ten Days (3 page)

The further we made it the faster the mob of infected behind us would walk, but they never did more than just walk. Groans and growls came from the infected, alongside the stampede sound of their march toward us. Ahead of us, more of the infected came out of buildings and from out of alleyways. Melissa and I increased our pace to avoid the mob behind us but the quick movement and noise we made to get away attracted more of them. Before we knew it, there was a crowd almost as large as the one behind us coming from the front and the sides. We were surrounded.

“Look!” Melissa yelled out. She pointed at a nearby building with the front door open but no infected coming out. I nodded at her and we ran towards the entrance. The crowd from the front was closer to the door than we were, but they walked which was the only thing going for us at the time. If we didn’t make it, we would be stuck between all the infected and die. They came from every direction around us except from where the buildings we ran alongside were. We reached the door almost at the same time the crowd from the front did. I pushed Melissa into the building the moment one of the infected tried to swing at her but missed and fell over to the ground. I stepped over the infected man and followed Melissa up the stairs. We didn’t have time to close the building’s front door and that allowed the whole group of infected behind us to chase us inside. Moans, groans and footsteps from the mob behind us echoed through the building’s stairwell and all of the infected inside of the building were stepping out of apartments and out of dark corners they blended into. Melissa and I noticed an open apartment and ran inside; we slammed the door behind us. As soon as the door was shut, Melissa turned all locks on and I walked around the apartment carefully to be sure there was nothing harmful inside. Melissa, now leaned against the door to catch her breath, slid down and put her hands to her face and began to cry.

It didn’t take long before all of the infected outside gathered behind the door. A few of them tried to scratch at the door and others tried to hit it, but by the sound of it, most of them had no clue where we went. I came back to the hallway where Melissa cried against the door and I sat next to her.

“I don’t want to die here. I want to leave and see my family and know they’re okay…” Melissa whispered. She wiped tears away from her cheeks and from under her eyes. She could have been reading my mind as far as I knew. I was worried of the same thing, but there was no way we were going to survive against another crowd of infected. We needed to arm ourselves.

I stood off of the wall and took a knee in front of Melissa. I put my hands on both her cheeks and looked her in the eyes.

“Look, we are going to get out of this. Let’s search the house for anything sharp or blunt with some range. As long as it could be used as a weapon, get it and bring it back to this hall. I’ll start in the living room.” It was the best plan I could come up with at the moment to get her mind off of the nightmare going on outside. I tried to reassure her with a fake smile, but I had no idea what was going to happen to us. I was as lost and confused as she was.

Melissa relaxed a bit, smiled, nodded in agreement and stood up. She left to the kitchen, a good sign. I went into the living room.

By the looks of things, the residents of the apartment took off in a hurry. The place was a mess. Clothes rested all over the floor, furniture knocked down, family photos and frames broken. The light in the living room came entirely from the windows but didn’t make the search for a weapon any easier with the mess still in the apartment. I looked under some furniture and through the random things thrown on the floor but could not find a single thing I’d call useful in the living room. I walked over to the only door in the living room which was open and I looked inside to be sure it was safe. It was a bedroom, and it was just as much a mess as the living room. I walked inside and looked around, scanned the room and kicked over things on the floor, moved things on the dressers and the bed, but the bedroom was just as useless as the living room. Mostly clothes were thrown around the apartment. If I wanted a new outfit, I now had the perfect location to find it. But my Need-A-Weapon problem found no resolution any sooner just because I had a wide selection of sweaters in all sizes and colors. The best this apartment offered was a fashionable death. On my way out of the bedroom, I noticed the closet. I didn’t even notice the closet in the bedroom at first. The closet was invisible behind the mess.

I walked over to the closet to dig through it, moved things around, but still I found nothing good. I turned my attention to the shelf at the top of the closet, and surprisingly my day became a little better. A wooden, full sized baseball bat awaited my warm and comforting grip. I picked it up and swung it around with my left hand for a few seconds and continued to search the shelf. I didn’t find anything else, but I didn’t plan on complaining. The baseball bat was a million times better than ‘nothing’ will ever be.

I left the bedroom and made my way back through the living room and into the kitchen. I spotted a fire escape through one of the living room windows before I went back to Melissa in the kitchen. She took all the knives, a crow bar, a broom stick and a large steel frying pan, and laid them out on the dinner table. She sat on the kitchen counter; she ate some cereal she prepared for herself in a bowl she found. This is approximately the time I’d normally assume she was crazy, but with all the mind-blowing, unbelievable crap we witnessed, she had the most composed reaction by comparison to everyone else thus far. She looked my way and smiled at me. “The hallway was too small to put it all.” She said with a smirk on her face when I presented my one lame find.

“I didn’t believe this place was going to have anything else that we could use, aside from this bat. What do you think we should take?” I made sure I spoke only when she watched me so I wouldn’t talk to myself.

“I’d do well with the broom stick, it has a long reach! I’m sure I’d feel safer if I kept them at a distance.” She said and put another spoonful of cereal in her mouth.

“Let me know when you’re ready to leave. I saw a fire escape we can use to get out of here.” I walked over to Melissa and sat by the counter, next to her and rested my head against the counter. The whole time I held the baseball bat I picked out of the room. I pictured the fire escape in my head and walked my imagination through an escape route. Most of the buildings on the block we were on were connected, but connected only by their roofs. “Like most of the buildings in the area.” I told myself. If this information turned out to be accurate, we’d be able to use the fire escape to reach the top of the building and work our way to the furthest building from that point. We’d get the distance we needed from the infected, go down through whatever building it was that we ended on, and finish when we made a clean get away from the large crowd outside. Maybe we could finally get to our families and find out what the police and military planned to do to contain all the attacks that took place.

Melissa finished her cereal and put the spoon and bowl in the sink and came over to sit next to me. She rested her head against the wall behind us. “Okay, we can leave now.” She said with an innocent smile on her face. She stood and grabbed the broom stick and moved it around a little to test the weight and range by swinging it around similar to how I did with the bat. She grabbed one of the kitchen knives and put it in between her belt hooks on her jeans. I couldn’t help but find amusement in that she was so much more prepared for a fight with one of the infected than I was, and it took her less than half an hour to build up the courage to suck it all up. I still was processing so much of what happened outside that a backup knife didn’t even cross my mind till Melissa took one. 

I stood from the chair and took a knife, put it between the belt hooks on my jeans; the girl was onto something and the idea was not going to be wasted.

“Alright, follow me.” I laid the baseball bat over my shoulder and led the way out of the kitchen to the living room window. The fire escape we planned to use waited patiently for us to be ready and use it. I opened both the locks on the window,being extra careful just in case there was already someone on the fire escape ready to jump out at us, I peeked out, checking both the fire escapes over us and below us and made sure it was safe. I glanced back at Melissa and gave her a nod to assure her it was safe and I went ahead. I climbed out of the window and went up the stairs on the fire escape. Melissa was close behind. At the top of the fire escape there was a ladder that led to the roof of the building, I climbed to the top but didn’t immediately get on the roof. I looked over the edge first; there was nothing up there so I climbed the rest of the way to the roof. Once up there, I helped Melissa climb up. Just like that, we were ready to move again.

During the winter, the sun would usually set around five-thirty in the afternoon, but because of what took place, we forgot it would get dark eventually, and eventually was no more than twenty or thirty minutes away. The darkness tried to slowly swallow the light and we still had to get off of the roofs and make our way to both Melissa’s home and mine. We wasted no time building up our momentum once again. She and I headed towards the roof of the next building which was the same height as the one we came off of. We walked from roof to roof until we reached a building with one more floor than the other ones. This wasn’t going to stop us though. Melissa gave me a boost onto the roof and I pulled her up once I had a firm grip on top. We weren’t going to let anything stop us.

We made it to the last of the buildings connected by the roofs and looked over the edge to be sure it was clear. A few of the infected were in front of the building but it wasn’t anything worth worrying about. Two or three infected, nothing big compared to the entire mob that swarmed towards us. The one concern I had (and I was sure Melissa did too) was the crowd a few buildings over, where we came from. After the infected in front of the building knew we were there they would move our way and those that didn’t would follow those that did. We would need to be silent and invisible; speed meant more movement and sound, which is what put us into the jam we were in to begin with.

“Let’s take the fire escape off of this building so that they don’t see the front door open,” Melissa said.

She pulling my shoulder to take my focus away from the infected below and onto the fire escape behind us. We went to the fire escape and made sure nothing was on it like I did before; we had to check everything from this point forward to be safe. Although there wasn’t anyone on the fire escape, directly below it, one of the infected stood, it stared into the vast nothingness of a wall. We went down the ladder and down all the stairs to the last level of the fire escape but we didn’t go down the ladder that would put us on the ground below. We didn’t know what to do about the infected below us. If we dropped down, whichever one of us made it down there first would be left alone with the infected, but if we backtracked and made our exit through the building’s front door, we risk being seen or heard and this meant there was a possibility of attracting the mob of infected all over again.

“I’ve got it,” Melissa whispered so the infected below wouldn’t hear. She lowered the ladder on the fire escape. She lowered it slowly to avoid making a sound too loud. The slow pace she lowered the ladder at made the metal the fire escape was made out of screech while the ladder rubbed against its support. The infected below us reacted but aside from that it was clear.

The man walked into the wall in front of him in chase of the sound that came from over his head. At that moment Melissa took the knife she pinned in her jeans and she flung it at a trashcan below us, instantly the infected man was alerted. As he moved towards the sounds of the knife impacting against the trashcan, she climbed down the ladder and jumped off at the bottom. The fall was some six or seven feet to the concrete below. Melissa looked up at me and smirked, then signaled me down with her hand. I followed her lead and jumped off after I climbed down the ladder. Once at the bottom I hit the wall lightly a couple of times with the baseball bat to make some noise so the infected would walk towards the noise and give some room for Melissa to get her knife back. It was like we were in perfect sync; I didn’t need to tell her the noise was for her to pick the knife up. She just knew instinctively to grab it as soon as it was clear and we worked our way out of the alleyway the fire escape left us in.

The distant sound of dragging feet across pavement and gravel resonated in the alleyway and bounced off of the walls as we made our exit. To the right, a flood of infected awaited it’s next meal, to the left, a burning gas station emptied of infected with a wreck of cars to walk around to continue on our way home. This short walk home became the longest trip of my life. We turned left and walked away slowly; we attempted to make as little noise as possible. The sun was almost gone and there was no power in the town, darkness was on its way. The infected began to blend into the darkness and vanish entirely from our view. I became paranoid as to what things were the infected and what things were just objects in the dark that looked like the infected. Melissa let me know on the walk that we were not too far from her home. We took the next left and walked a bit further down a block that looked like it jumped out of some fifties neighborhood and Melissa pointed her house out of the bunch at the end of the block.
“I’m sure my family is waiting for me. They wouldn’t leave me,” she said in relief now that we were so close to her home.

Springfield: The Neighborhood

A
lthough we made it to Melissa’s street, we couldn’t just walk up to her house and lead the infected that chased us straight to her family. The street itself wasn’t empty of infected either but we side stepped them and took advantage of the fact that they wouldn’t run. “We need to lead them away before we go to the house.” Melissa cautioned me. I stopped to think. The front door was outside of the question. If we were seen by the infected when we entered the house, they would followed us and attack the house the way the infected attacked the door back at the building.