Infected (Book 2): The Flight (10 page)

Part 3

Lost Hills, California

Friday Morning

Connor slept fitfully.  All night he tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable.  No matter how he lay, an injured portion of his body was bearing his weight.   During the brief moments he was able to contort his body to avoid putting pressure on broken ribs or bruised organs, his head ached so badly that he couldn't settle into the repose he sought.  As dawn approached, he finally drifted off into a reprieve from his pain. 

The sound of a gunshot brutally pulled Connor from his slumber.  Rays from the morning sun poured into the room through the windows, illuminating it with a soft light as he opened his eyes.  Connor looked around in confusion, trying to remember where he was and why his body hurt.  Images from the previous days flooded through his memory.  Additional gunshots drove daggers into his throbbing head as he swung his feet to the floor and searched the room for his pants. 

He saw them folded in a chair in the corner, his duty belt coiled on top.  Gunshots continued to sporadically
pop
.  He pulled the curtain back, trying to glimpse the action, but the gunfire was on the other side of the house.  In a rush to join the fracas, he buckled his gun belt around his waist and ran out of the room wearing nothing but his white briefs and gun belt, his pants still folded neatly on the chair.

His body brutally punished him with every stride as he dashed through the open front door and sprinted down the wraparound porch. A rifle boomed again.  As he rounded the corner, gun in hand, he stopped and stared in dismay.  He tried to scurry back around the corner before he was seen, but it was too late.

"I think you forgot your pants, Connor.  How hard did Curtis hit you last night?" Matt asked, doubling over in laughter as Toby leaned his rifle against the rail and Luke removed his earmuffs.  The boys looked wide-eyed at Connor as he stood before them in a pair of sparkling white briefs.  "With all the shooting you've done in the last couple days, I wouldn't have figured you needed any range time," Matt added, wiping tears from his eyes.  

"What's all the laughing about?" Katie's voice burst out from around the far corner of the house.  She followed Eve as the two walked into view.  Both stopped short, seeing Connor standing dumbfounded and embarrassed.  Katie put her hand to her mouth as she tried to hide the smirk that threatened to explode into laughter.  She quickly crossed the distance between herself and her husband.

"I thought they were shooting at infected..." he trailed off, realizing there was nothing he could say that was going to make the situation any better.

Katie gently wrapped her arm around his waist and turned him back to the front door.  As they walked up the stairs, Katie managed to stifle her laughter, but couldn't wipe the grin from her face.

“Pretty stinking funny, isn’t it?”  Connor asked, obviously still smarting from embarrassment. “A guy tries to protect his family and this is what he gets.”

“Come on, Connor.  If you could have seen yourself standing on the porch in your tighty whities with your gun strapped to your hip, you would be laughing, too.”  She lifted his folded pants from the chair as they walked into the room and handed them to him.  “How are you feeling?”

“I feel like I was run over by one of those pavement grinders and then somebody else drove over me with a steam roller,” he said while gingerly rubbing a broken rib.  As he bent over to pull his pants on, he groaned in discomfort.

“Why don’t you finish getting dressed,” she said, running her fingers through his hair, “and I’ll fix you some breakfast.” 

After painfully getting into his clothes, Connor limped down the stairs.  When he entered the kitchen, Merv and Frank, with steaming cups of coffee in front of them, were sitting at the table talking to Zack. 

Zack looked up as Connor entered the room.  In spite of everything that had happened, he was still wearing his jovial smile.  “Well, look at you,” he quipped.  “It looks like you got run over by a herd of elephants.  At least you had the decency to put some pants on before making your grand appearance in the kitchen.”

Connor shot a dirty look at Katie who sheepishly raised her gaze from the pan of eggs she was scrambling at the stove.  She shrugged her shoulders innocently, trying to give the impression she wasn’t the one who ratted him out. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Zack said lightheartedly. “Sometimes I dream that I’m back in high school and I when look down, I realize I’m naked.  I know exactly how it feels to have everybody looking at you, thinking you’ve lost it.  Now that I think about it, though, my experience with walking around naked is limited to the realm of dreams.  Maybe doing it in real life is a sign that you really have lost it.” 

Turning from Connor to Frank, Zack asked, “What do you think Frank?  Has Connor lost it?”

Frank, who was still reeling from the loss of his brother, wasn’t ready to join Zack in needling Connor.  He self- consciously stood up from the table and, with a weak smile, said, “I think I need to go change the oil in my ATV or something,” and quickly walked out of the kitchen.

Matt entered the room as Frank was walking out.  Looking around, he sensed he had walked in on the tail end of an awkward situation.  Unsure of what he had stumbled upon and not wanting to sit in the uncomfortable silence that was palpably clinging to the room, he stated his business.  “I’ve been calling Wim Cummings all morning to see if he’s going to finish drilling the well at the high school today.  He hasn’t answered any of my calls, so  I’m heading into town to check the well site and see if he started working.  I can’t imagine he’d start without us being there to provide cover for them after yesterday’s attack, but who knows.”

“I’ll come with you,” Zack said, eager to escape the tension he had created with his joking around. 

“Me, too,” Connor said.

“No,” Matt objected, shaking his head.  “You’re going to stay here and recuperate. Right now, you would be more of a hindrance than a help.  If we’re faced with a mob of infected like we were yesterday, we may have to run and you’re in no shape for that.”

Connor started to argue, but he knew Matt was right.  He was still suffering from a concussion and his whole body ached.  As much as he wanted to go and help, he knew he wasn’t fit to fight in his current condition.  

“Go get Frank,” Merv said.  “He and I both need something to get our minds off Jeb.  I’ll go get my rifle and meet you out front in a minute.”

Ten minutes later, the four heavily armed men were making their way back into Lost Hills in a Hummer.  The vehicle looked like a porcupine with rifles barrels bristling out all four windows.  

Merv had flatly rejected the AR-15 Matt offered him before they left.  He said he wouldn’t go into battle with a plastic gun.  Instead, he took his bolt action Winchester .270 and a Ruger .44 magnum pistol. 

The county roads into town were completely deserted.  They passed a caravan of two heavily loaded cars on the outskirts of town.   The driver of the lead car offered a rigid wave of greeting.  Matt slowed the Hummer and both approaching cars slowed in response.

Matt’s window was down, his rifle barrel sticking out, ready for whatever threat may appear.  He pointed the rifle up as the car drew alongside the stopped Hummer.

“Are you going to turn us back?” the driver asked, his nervousness apparent by the shaky timber of his voice.

“No.  Far be it from me to tell a man how to take care of his family,” Matt said, looking at two scared young faces peering out from around a pile of stuff crammed into the back seat.  He doubted they would be able to get out of the car without the cargo being unloaded first.  “Where are you headed?” he asked with genuine interest.

“We’re going to Idaho,” came the brief reply. 

Realizing no more conversation was forthcoming, Matt nodded, wished him good luck, and resumed the trek to the well site. 

Four blocks from the school, Zack, who was sitting in the front seat, told Matt to stop.  Before he had a chance to explain, Merv loosed a thundering shot from his rifle.  A high pitched ringing erupted in Zack’s ears in response to the gunshot.  One of the three infected standing two hundred yards out slumped to the ground as if somebody had turned its power switch off.  Two seconds later, Merv eased the trigger rearward sending another bullet hurtling down the twenty six inch steel barrel.  A second infected was knocked head over heels, landing beside the first.  Without taking his eye away from the scope, he worked the bolt in a smooth, rapid motion. In a continuous movement, his hand moved from the bolt to the trigger where he fired his third shot.  The last infected, now running toward them, stumbled and fell to the ground, legs still twitching in response to expected signals that were no longer being transmitted to the large muscles. 

The clash had lasted five seconds from start to finish.  Even Zack grinned in approval and admiration at Merv’s shooting exhibition.  Like a professional, Merv calmly placed three more rounds in the rifle.

Zack took his calmness as a sign he had previously been in combat. “This isn’t your first rodeo, is it?” Zack asked.

“No,” Merv answered without emotion.  “I did a tour in Vietnam at the start of the war.”

“I guess that explains why you didn’t want to take a plastic gun into battle.”

“I’ve used ’em a little and I didn’t much care for ’em.  Back in ‘Nam, I mostly carried a .300 Winchester.”

“The way you shoot the rifle you’re carrying, I don’t figure there’s any need to try to talk you into trying the semi auto with a larger magazine capacity,” Zack ceded.  “That was an impressive display of marksmanship.”

Merv silently acknowledged the compliment with a slight nod of his head as Matt resumed driving.

Four blocks later, the Hummer pulled to a stop at the baseball field.  All four doors swung open in unison as if it had been a practiced event.  The men exited the vehicle and approached the drilling rig.  Everything was as it had been the previous day, with no signs that any additional work had been performed since the attack.

The mass of dead infected bodies surrounding the flatbed truck was untouched.  A buzz filled the air as flies moved from one corpse to the next.  Matt was thankful his gas mask cut out the noxious smell of death he knew had settled into the area and was increasing as the bodies decomposed under the heat of the midmorning sun. 

Frank stared with empty eyes as the events that led to his brother’s infection replayed in his memory.  In his mind, he saw an infected man bound up the backside of the flatbed, drag his brother off the other side, and then struggle with him on the ground.  He saw Jeb’s gas mask knocked askew in the fight and then saw it fall to the ground as Frank rushed to his brother’s aid, shooting the attacking beast.  He hadn’t had time to dwell on the horror of seeing Jeb lying face down on a dead, bloody body without the protection of his gas mask because more infected had boiled around both ends of the truck and he had been forced to engage the onslaught as it threatened to sweep over them.  He recalled the sound of Jeb’s rifle pounding away at infected coming around the front of the truck even as he was engaging those coming around the back end.  He had looked over his shoulder to check on Jeb when he had a brief respite in the attack. Jeb was smashing the butt of his rifle into the bridge of an infected’s nose as he ejected an empty magazine and slammed a fresh one into his rifle and resumed his barrage of fire. 

Frank had turned back to resume his own desperate battle, trusting his brother to protect his back.  He remembered the relief when the rush ended and he saw Jeb was still standing.  The relief was short lived.  It had only taken a second to realize Jeb’s face was covered in blood and gore.  His gas mask was buried somewhere deep in the pile of bodies at his feet. 

There was no possible way he could have avoided exposure to the virus.  The probability that he was immune to the disease was so slight that it wasn’t worth mentioning, yet he had clung to it.  Hours later, his fears had been confirmed when Matt, Connor, and Zack had pulled up to the Black family home without Jeb.

As Frank thought back over the past eighteen hours, the emotion returned with its raw biting pain.  His vision clouded as tears began to accumulate in his eyes.  He slung his rifle over his shoulder and walked back to the Hummer several steps ahead of the others. 

As the Hummer pulled to a stop in front of the Cummings’ home, fears of Cummings’ demise were reinforced by the broken windows in the front of the house.  The siding beneath two broken out windows had been stained by blood which had dried to a dark red, bordering on brown. Several dead infected lay below the windows.  Homes up and down the street bore similar damage. 

They had seen the same thing the afternoon before, prior to the attack on the well drilling crew.  Infected trapped within their homes had escaped by breaking through windows. 

The foursome approached the broken out window at the front of the house, rifles raised, safeties off, and ready for action.  Matt yelled, “Anybody home?” as his boot ground a petunia into the soft dirt of the flower bed.  He didn’t expect an answer.  He yelled because he knew any infected inside the house would more than likely be drawn to the sound of his muffled voice.  He waited patiently.  Getting no response, he yelled again.  Still with no response, he was finally convinced the house was empty. 

“Hold up,” Zack said, stopping Matt just before he climbed over the casement into the living room.  “Look at that,” he said, pointing at the ground beneath the window.  “There isn’t a single piece of glass outside.  It’s all on the inside.  This window was broken from the outside, not the inside.” 

Frank, who had taken a position to cover the other broken window when Matt yelled into the house, spoke up.  “This one was broken from the outside, too.” 

Matt raked the butt of his rifle across the bottom of the window frame, knocking loose shards of glass free before climbing into the living room.  The others followed, guns in the ready position as they entered the interior of the house.  The living room had been ransacked.  The wall opposite the end of the hallway had taken an apparent shotgun blast.  A three inch hole had been blown out of the sheet rock.  Moving outward from the center hole, dozens of small holes dotted the wall, decreasing in number and density further out.  Two infected lay side by side in a pool of sticky, half coagulated blood. 

As they started down the hall, Merv slung his deer rifle over his shoulder and drew his pistol from its holster as he stepped over two more infected that lay in the hallway, their faces unrecognizable as a result of close range shotgun blasts.  At the end of the hall, Matt and Zack burst around the corner into the master bedroom.

It was obvious from the carnage in the room that Wim had put up a vicious fight.  Pictures and broken frames lay on the floor, keepsakes had been strewn from the dresser top, and the bodies of seven infected lay around the room.  As valiant as his fight had been, though, Wim had come up short in the end.  He, and what Matt assumed were the remains of his wife, lay in the corner of the room.  There wasn’t much left of either of them. 

Stricken with grief, Matt punched the wall, caving in a hole beneath his fist.  Without another word, the group walked out of the room, down the hall, and out the front door.

Nobody spoke as they returned to the farm.  There was nothing to say.  The infected had ratcheted up their aggression.  Previously they had been content to prey on those in the open.  Now, they appeared to be forcing their way into homes to slaughter those taking refuge within.  Virtually every house they passed showed signs of infected either breaking out of the home or into it. 

Each time they saw infected, they stopped and killed them.  Several died in futile attempts to attack the vehicle.  Others fell under the long range assault of Merv’s rifle.  They estimated his farthest shot at nearly five hundred yards. 

As they drove through town, they spotted a handful of people coming out of stores.  They were well armed, but were still moving with a haste borne of fear.  They weren’t looting so much as they were procuring the necessities for survival, and nobody faulted them for leaving the store with carts full of food.

“What do we do now?” Frank asked dejectedly. 

“We band together and fortify for a fight,” Merv answered, his voice full of determination and resolve.  “We aren’t going to end up like the rest of those people.”