Infected (Book 1): The First Ten Days (32 page)

“My name is Marcus. I came across two guys who tried to kill me before I killed them first. I was forced to do it; I’m not the bad guy. But on the other hand, I am wounded and could use some help. Although this only applies to you if you yourself don’t intend to kill me. If you do, you have the best timing in the world, because I am defenseless.” That kid’s sarcastic tone rubbed off quick. I almost annoyed myself.

“I don’t intend on killing you, but I wouldn’t mind being a little more sure that you are telling the truth before I get any closer.” She had the perfect amount of risk to walk up to me and the perfect amount of cautious to not believe a word I said.

“What should I do?”

“Lift your clothing over your head and spin around once so that I can see if you have any other weapons stashed around your waist,” she said. That was a smart request on her part.

I didn’t hesitate and did just as she asked. Shirt and jacket went over my head and I turned slowly so she could scan me accurately.

“What’s with the notebook and the belt?” Her accent was so rare, I heard it somewhere before, I just didn’t know where.

“The notebook covers an area larger than my injury and it’s tough enough to stop too much movement in that spot. It is used for pain reduction. The belt is just wrapped around the notebook to increase the amount of pressure in the area.” I tried to rush through the dialogue and get to something more meaningful like her helping me stay alive.

“Put both of your hand in the air and do not bring them down for any reason.” Another request, but she had to be sure I wasn’t a madman.

Again I did as I was told and put my hands in the air. She proceeded to walk over to me and pat me down with her left hand while she held the gun up at me with her right. Once she was sure I held nothing on me she relaxed a bit and stashed my gun against her waist.

“How bad is the wound?”

“It’s a gunshot, but I was shot a couple of hours ago, so I doubt it is too fatal, otherwise I would have already bled out. But of course it’s still a gunshot so I do have some sense of pain and urgency. I’ve lost a lot of blood and I’m far from fully functional. I need help.”

The eyeliner she wore smeared against her face and created a thicker less dense line around her eyes. It almost looked intentional.

I noticed her focus on my lips. She did it every time I spoke. She had an accent. It made sense, she was deaf.

“I can patch you up. I hid some of my supplies further back in the highway when I noticed you. I didn’t want to get them taken if you turned out to be like the others,” she said. I could only assume she thought of everything. “I have some medical supplies there. If you stay here, I can go back and get them. I can try to fix you up.”

Maybe her medical supplies contained something more useful than the first aid kit, the notebook and the belt. It was worth a try. “The bullet is still in there,” I said.

“I’m sure I have something to fish it out with and I know for a fact I have something to close you up with afterwards. I have drinking alcohol too.” She did think of everything. “It’ll numb you a little while I dig in, if that helps.”

She opened the door to one of the many cars which surrounded us and helped me sit down in it. “I’ll be back. Stay here.” She said and backed away from the car.

I grabbed her by the arm to get her attention and she looked at me again. “What’s your name?” I asked before I let her arm go.

She paused a moment to question whether to tell me her name or not. “It’s Melissa,” she said before she turned around and backtracked through the highway, out of range, and towards her thoughtfully hidden supplies.

Now I wait. I closed the car door and took a deep breath of the frozen air inside. “And wait I shall.”

Day 10

The Arrival

Jack. That’s what he said his name was before I fell asleep.

We barricaded the doors and windows of the apartment we camped out in.

Marcus gave Smarty, now known as Jack, a note with directions which led straight to the apartment we were in. He wanted Jack and me to wait for him to catch up with us before we proceeded to stop Richard.

The only reasons I agreed to stay and wait was because of two things Jack told me: First, Richard scouted every inch he walked for supplies. He would take his time and sometimes leave men behind to secure the supplies and find more for the overall collection; he was in no rush to get to the school. Second, Richard was a madman with the will to take anyone’s life in the name of his own survival. This information was identical to what Marcus said about Richard, so I accepted this as the truth and decided to wait for the expert on Richardology to arrive.

I woke up about an hour or so before the sun came up. I still held the handgun Jack gave me the night before. Marcus specifically told him to give me either the handgun or the rifle. Jack was most comfortable with the rifle and forked over the handgun. I didn’t care either way, as long as I held a weapon with more than one suicide declared round in it I would be fine. It would also be safer to have a weapon to help me react in case Jack betrayed Marcus and me for Richard. Based on how Marcus talked about Richard, I wouldn’t put it past him to attempt something like this. Everyone was a potential threat in my world.

I didn’t immediately get up after I awoke. I laid there for some time and relived every moment from the last nine days. I started from the outbreak and landed right where I lay. I witnessed so many varieties of death, so much murder, so much hate and fear, all in those same nine days. It was hard to imagine where the world was headed when the outbreak began. Where would we be a year into the future? Would there even be anyone alive in a year?

I laid there till long after the sun came up and shined through small gaps left between the furniture piled up in front of the windows. Random rays of light blinded when they crossed paths with my pupils. I no longer squinted to see with this much light in my face, my eyes were at ease.

Jack was still asleep in the bedroom which connected to the living room. He possibly dreamt about an endless river of sarcasm, if I guessed. Maybe even an invasion of extremely sarcastic aliens who only came for the purpose of annoying the world with their sarcasm.

I would have begged for the same dream if it helped get my mind off of everything else. But nothing would take my mind off of anything else; nothing.

The mission was as clear as ever, make it to the school, stop Richard, save Jason, and finally, get to my mother and Daviel. This was the mission all along. I continued to get sidetracked by the excessive number of deaths around me.

Regardless of whether Marcus would reach us in time or not, this mission was going to be completed this day; this tenth day of the zombie apocalypse in which no one says the word zombie; this tenth day filled with random movie clichés which only I was able to notice for some reason.

On the bright side, the fact I was the only person I knew who referred to the infected as zombies was pretty funny. It made things significantly more surreal. Like I could wake up any minute and everything would turn out to be a construct of my own psychological analysis of the world. Of course I would never be fortunate enough for this to actually be how it turned out, but it didn’t hurt to hope, it didn’t hurt to wish for it to happen. Maybe one day I’d wake up and all of this would be an amazingly detailed and epic dream. I could turn the dream into a book and become rich in a world where money still held value.

Somewhere in the middle of my dazed thoughts Jack walked out of the bedroom and snapped me back into this most unpleasant version of reality. He sat on the living chair across from the couch I laid on and watched me bring myself out of my somewhat amusing thoughts.

“Your friend still hasn’t arrived,” he said, fully aware I knew this.

“I didn’t notice,” I replied. I didn’t take him as one to state the obvious. My mood wasn’t particularly cheery either. The lack of Marcus’s presence meant one of two things for me. On one hand, Marcus was dead and the time wasted in wait of him could have been put to better use to stop Richard. On the other hand, Marcus could have been perfectly fine, which meant we would wait even longer. In return, the amount of time wasted was still too much for my taste and allowed Richard more time to execute his plan to take the school’s supplies by any means necessary.

One way or another, he would get his way, not another’s.

Richard was unstoppable. Anything he tried worked out nicely for him and terrible for everyone else. I wondered if I would amount to being such a monster to stop one.

“I’m sure today will be filled with some horrific junk I’ll never be able to unsee, and I am also sure I knew this yesterday. But my body allowed me to sleep better than I have this entire week,” Jack continued.

After he said it out loud I realized that I managed to sleep pretty well too. In fact, I could describe it as the best sleep from the week as well. It was relaxing, it was quiet, and it was peaceful.

“I manage to sleep nicely too now that I think about it,” I replied.

“So how much longer do you think your friend will take to reach us?” He asked as a courtesy. His mind was distracted with other thoughts, his eyes wondered.

“There is no way to know. I’d say he likes to take his time, but he always tries to be a million kinds of different superheroes all at once.” If he was dead then whatever, all we could do is keep going. But if he was alive, all the help we could get would be good. I couldn’t balance the odds because I didn’t have an exact time for when anything would happen. If Richard was already at the school then there was no choice but to head after him to try to keep his damage to a minimum. But if Richard wasn’t yet at the school, and Marcus could make it to us with enough time to reach the school together, then the wait for him would make more sense. Since I didn’t know when any of this would happen, the only things we knew for sure were that Richard planned to massacre an entire quarantine zone and that Marcus was not yet with us to help stop him.

“I think we could handle this on our own,” Jack began, “We have the element of surprise. Richard doesn’t know we are going after him. If we get him at the right time…”

“We can take him and his men out alone!” I finished Jack’s sentence when I realized he was right. Richard couldn’t know Jack and I planned to take him out. Regardless of the number of men with him, if we could take them out quietly no one would hear it happen.

“Now you see things my way. There is one other thing that’ll give us a bit of an advantage,” Jack tried to persuade me, but he already succeeded in doing so, “Even if the rifle doesn’t have a scope it is still an incredibly accurate gun, and I can make my own makeshift scope to have more range with it.” He thought it all out. He wasn’tasleep when he was in the room. He planned out how to persuade me to leave Marcus behind and go after Richard ourselves. I couldn’t say I blamed him either. I had my own reason to leave Marcus behind and go after Richard without him. The idea wasn’t bad after all.

“The gun might be accurate, but are you?” All this talk meant nothing if he failed to pick out someone who tried to kill me. “That rifle only has six rounds. What’s to stop seven guys from coming after me?”

“As clever as you think all these questions are, there is still one thing I know that you do not,” a smug smile crawled over his face in victory. “One of Richard’s men has a sniper rifle of his own, and if we can take him out and use his rounds and gun…” There was more to be said but he expected me to piece the rest of it together.

“If he’s a sniper he’ll be at a vantage point. We find it; we take him out and take his gun.” I remembered Jack said Richard left men behind to scavenge for supplies. “How can you be sure this sniper is even with him instead of somewhere else searching for supplies?” I wondered how much of this plan was already figured out.

“Because he only had two snipers, and he always has one to watch his back. One of the guys I was with was the other sniper, so we can be sure that he isn’t going to leave the other one anywhere. He will always be in visual range of Richard to cover him,” Jack explained. He thought of everything.

“All we need to do if find the spot with the best view…” I said.

“And we will find Richard’s sneaky support.”

I couldn’t say no. There was a loaded sniper, someone we could see from everywhere, and the person who used it kept an eye on Richard. If we found the sniper we would also find Richard, Richard’s men, more ammo, a vantage point to have control of the situation and we could save the people in the school.

“This means we have to leave now in case he isn’t there yet so we could still warn the authorities at the school,” the volume in my voice hit an all time low when I realized I validated a reason to leave Marcus behind.

Chin up and a smile, he was confident we could do this. I questioned whether or not the short amount of time he spent with Richard was enough for all this information to be on point, but it was the only information and some information was significantly better than none.

It was our obligation to go through with it. Marcus would find us eventually. He knew where to go better than Jack and I could ever.

“Let’s get this over with before one of us thinks of a reason why this is an incredibly stupid idea,” I said and stood off of the couch to walk over to the backpack. I never let the gun go. As redundant as it is, I was even paranoid of Jack. It was safe to assume everyone was a danger to my well being. This mentality was going to get me far if I managed to keep it up.

Half an hour or so went by with us both getting ready to head out. We found Jack a backpack to carry extra weight in without being slowed down or held back. Pink would go down in history as the color which suited him best. Joy came purely from the pink bag being the only one we could find. We tried to locate other ones with no avail, we did nothing but fail. It was a pleasant kind of failure though. Jack pled and begged us to look longer but eventually he settled. He realized how much time was wasted.

We attacked the kitchen like a pack of wild starved jackals.

Atornado flew around the room before you came…

The food, a mess it made. Emptied out cereal boxes, empty soda bottles, cans of tuna and a million other kinds of empty food containers rested on the floor by the time we were done. We came up with odd food mixtures made up of these unspoiled foods.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t miss being able to have a more reasonable meal than dry cereal with a side of hot soda, but I weighed the other more current options and being able to eat anything was a privilege only those of us still alive could enjoy. I was thankful there was a meal at all.

We cleaned ourselves and suited up. Thin sweats underneath jeans with two shirts on and a jacket was our definition of suiting up. Mobility was on our minds at all times. If we couldn’t outrun and outmaneuver the infected we would also not survive them.

Back at the couch, we sat and enjoyed the silence. Our backpacks on, our clothes wrapped comfortably around us in layers, the handgun against my waist and the rifle stashed in Jack’s pink backpack; I was ready for one more stand against the infected and Richard before my family would be together and safe again.

We eventually dragged ourselves out of the apartment and down to the building’s front door.

My hand rested on the handle before I opened it. Jack and I took our last breaths of peace, appreciating the calm and quiet atmosphere the building provided for the last time.

The door opened and the sunlight filled the hallway into the building. The cold rushed at me and scratched at my face with full intent to harm, like an angry cat.

All in the name of survival.

Of all the craptastic seasons the apocalypse could have taken place in, it chose to happen during winter. What a douche.

The building Marcus wanted us stationed at was quite literally across the street from the ‘Welcome to the Hills’ sign. We were in the town. All that was left was to locate the school.

The Hills

Car wrecks were still the main attraction in the major cities and towns. Everywhere we went it was either a ghost town or a full blown scene of chaos and destruction. What made this particular town look so much different from the rest was its overall shape. The town was literally made up of hills. Everywhere there was either a hill going up from where Jack and I stood, or a hill going down. But there was one hill which stood taller than all the others. It stood in the distance and overlooked the town and everything in it. The hill was more like a standalone mountain and at its peak rested a large structure. From where Jack and I stood the structure looked miniscule, but this specific hill was quite a distance from us.

“Do you think that’s the school?” Jack asked me, he pointed at the structure on the hill.

“Maybe, I guess. Doesn’t hurt to find out, it’s not like we have any other leads.”

Everyday alive in the apocalypse was another training day for the things we could encounter, more preparation of sorts meant to better equip those still alive to survive even longer. The more adapted we became to the worst case scenarios the less stressful the more common horrors became. This applied specifically to the walkers, having dealt with so many runners in such a short period of time made all the walkers boring, ineffective and easy to avoid. Of course in large enough quantities we would be blocked off, pinned in, and ultimately screwed. But this wasn’t the case. We would come across one or two at a time, we’d move around them and stay on track. After enough of them gathered behind us, we would turn onto a different street and lose them; rinse, repeat.