Land of Dust and Bones: The Secret Apocalypse Book 7 (11 page)

And I don’t know if Kenji is hurt. I don’t know if he’s been bitten. He was
covered in so much goddamn blood. Was it his blood? Was it the monster’s blood?
I just don’t know.

I don’t know and it’s killing me.

I continue running, sprinting for the
house. Behind me, the horde of infected chase hard. There’s an old van, a
Volkswagen, parked out the front of the house. All the windows have been
smashed in. Next to the van is a work truck that has been turned over on to its
roof.

The ground is covered in broken glass and
dried blood.

I hear a voice. A man. He is calling out to
me. He is calling out and yet whispering at the same time.

He says, “Hey.” He is standing in the front
doorway of the house. A huge double door. He waves me forward. “Hurry.”

I run up the steps on to the front porch
and step inside. I almost collapse through the large doorway.

“Who… who are you?” I ask, completely out
of breath.

The man ignores me. He quickly and quietly
shuts the doors. Bolting them locked at the top and bottom of the doorframe.
There’s also a large and heavy bolt that slides across both doors. The whole
thing is medieval in its design.

If this can’t keep the infected out,
nothing will.

The man is still not satisfied with the
security. He nails three wooden boards across the door. He uses thick wooden
boards and large industrial nails. He then pushes a massive and heavy book case
up against it, and a large wooden table. Once he is satisfied the front door is
secure, he moves away from the entrance, moving into a different room.

And not knowing what else to do, I follow
him as quietly as I possibly can. I try and slow my breathing. I tread lightly
on the wooden floorboards.

All the windows in the house have been
boarded up. They have been boarded up with all kinds of materials.

Bedroom doors.

Pantry doors.

Scrap wood.

Even floorboards.

The house is dark.

“Come on,” he whispers. “In here.”

I follow him into a large living room. He
moves over to one of the windows and peers through a small gap in one of the
boards. “We heard the shots,” he whispers. “Saw you running.”

“We?”

Two other people enter the room, a man and
a woman. They look pale and sick. Malnourished and exhausted.

They are barely surviving physically. I
wonder if they have survived mentally.

“Thanks for saving me,” I whisper. “I don’t
know what I would’ve done.”

“Hopefully you would’ve run,” the man says.
“Or you know, you could’ve used that rifle.”

I shake my head. “There’s too many. I don’t
have enough bullets.”

I take the magazine out of my rifle,
checking how many rounds I have left.

“John,” the man says.

“Huh?”

“My name is John. This is Helen. And this
is Nathan.”

“Rebecca,” I answer.

“What’s going on?” Helen asks.

“We’ve got company,” John tells her.

“The bad kind,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Nathan moves up to the window next to John.
He has a quick look. “We better get back down into the basement.”

“Basement?” I ask. “How long have you guys
been here?”

“Months,” Nathan answers. “Feels longer.
Feels like years.”

“Since the beginning of the outbreak,” John
says.

“We were travelling around,” Helen adds.
“Nathan and I. Road trip, you know? We were in the middle of nowhere when we
first heard the news. Then the airways went dead. We found this place.
Initially we just wanted to use a radio or a phone. But then we quickly
realized this place was deserted. Well, most of it was. We were lucky enough to
run into John first. Who knows what would’ve happened if we hadn’t. Anyway, we
fortified this place. Locked it up. We kept quiet. We pretended to be
invisible. This place, this house, or whatever it is, it’s huge. It’s got a
massive basement. Lots of food stores. A huge kitchen. I actually think this
place was more of a hotel than a house.”

“We’ve been hiding down in the basement,”
John says. “We hardly ever come up. Today is the first day I’ve been outside
in…” he trails off. He can’t remember.

“We heard the gunshots,” Nathan says.
“Thought maybe the military were coming through to clear out the sick people.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again, genuinely
apologetic, genuinely sorry that we might have put these people in harm’s way.
“We were passing by. We were just looking for supplies. We didn’t realize the
place was overrun. And we didn’t know you guys were here.”

“How many people were you with?” Helen
asks.

“Four others,” I answer.

“We’ve talked about putting up signs,
warning people not to come here,” John says. “But it’s too damn dangerous to be
outside for any length of time.”

I wonder why Marko said this place was
safe. He said he’d been here before. Maybe he’d gotten lucky, like Nathan and
Helen. After all, it is a big mine sit. The village is at least two miles away
from the maintenance sheds. And miles away from the actual mine pit.

A loud bang on the front door brings my
mind back to my present surroundings. The infected begin smashing into the
walls, the doors, and the windows. They smash what little glass remains, the
last remaining windows.

“Good thing we reinforced all the windows,”
John says, thinking out loud. “One of the only things to do around here. Stops
the boredom.”

“We should really get back down into the
basement,” Helen whispers. “It’s not safe up here.”

I shake my head. “No. We have to get out.
We have to go.”

“Go where?”

“I’m travelling with
some people. They have a place. It’s far away from the infected.”

At least, I think it
is.

“Infected?” Nathan
asks.

“The sick people,” I
explain. “They’re infected with a virus. It’s just what we’ve been calling
them.”

Wow, these people
really have been cut off.

“This place has been
good to us,” Nathan says. “We’ve still got plenty of supplies. We should stay
here.”

“I can’t do that,” I
say. “And I’m not sure you people should do it either. It’s really not safe
here.”

“What the hell do you
know? You’ve been here for five minutes. You’re not in charge. You’re not in
charge of making the decisions. You’re not in charge of our survival.”

The infected continue
banging into the walls and the doors and the barricades.

I hear the distinct
sound of wood crunching and straining.

I snap my head towards
the front door…

“Don’t worry,” John
says. “It will hold.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. It’s held
before. It’s held for months.”

“We should get down
into the basement,” Nathan repeats.

John agrees. He
actually starts pushing me towards the basement.

“No,” I say,
resisting. “My friends are outside. I need to get back to them.”

“Your friends are
dead,” John says.

There’s another loud
crunch coming from the direction of the front door.

“You hear that?”
Nathan says. “There’s too many of them. Unless your friends somehow managed to
get away, they’re dead. I’m sorry. Now, you can stay here if you want. But
we’re in charge. This is our place. You do as we say.”

I suddenly realize I’m
holding a gun. An instrument of power. And that these people are unarmed. I
think about this. I think long and hard.

I don’t raise my
rifle. Not yet. But I could. I could if I wanted to.

I could take this
place by force.

I could kill these
people.

This is how I think
now.

“We’ve been living
here for months,” John says. “Trust me. If we go down into the basement, if we
stay quiet, they’ll leave us alone. Eventually.”

He’s right. Eventually
something or someone else will get their attention. And they’ll run off. The
question is, how long would that take? Days? Weeks? I wonder what the hell the
infected were doing in that maintenance shed.

How did they get
there?

It’s almost like they
had been rounded up, herded, like cattle.

More glass shatters.
The infected are relentless. It might take them another few months, but
eventually they will break through these barricades.

“Maybe we should go with her,” Helen says.

“And how do you propose we do that?” Nathan
asks. “We’re surrounded. Our only hope is to go back down into the basement and
wait this thing out.”

And maybe he’s right. It seems to have
worked so far.

“We started with six people here,” he says
quietly. “Outside is death.”

“You should stay here with us,” John says.
“You’ll be safe here. Well,
safer
.”

I ignore him. I move towards one of the
windows. I peer through a gap in the boards. Most of the infected are
concentrated near the front door. The front porch. “My friends are still out
there,” I whisper. “They are still alive.”

“Great,” Nathan says. “If they make it,
they can stay here as well. There’s plenty of food. And it be good for us to
have some new people around.”

“It’s been so quiet lately,” Helen adds,
thinking out loud. “Why now? Why? I thought they’d moved on.”

I move back away from the window. “I’m
sorry that I brought this on you. It was our fault. They, the sick people, they
were in the maintenance sheds. We woke them up. We set them free.”

Helen puts her hand on my shoulder. “It’s OK.
It’s not your fault. There’s no way you could’ve known.”

But Marko and Billy should’ve known, I
think to myself.

“We should hide now,” Nathan says. “They’ll
move on. They’ll go away if we hide.”

“They won’t leave,” I say. “Not for a long
time.”

The Oz virus is designed to find life. And
they’ve found it. They’ve found the only life for hundreds of miles. They won’t
leave. Our only option is to get as far away from this mine site as possible.
But I don’t think I’m going to be able to convince these people to do that.

And why would they believe me? Why would
they trust me? They have no reason to. No reason whatsoever.

“Can I get out the back?” I ask.

“You don’t want to do that,” John says.

“I do. I have to go.”

“If you go outside, if you get in trouble,
we won’t help you. We won’t save you.”

“I understand. You guys should keep doing
what you’ve been doing.”

I say this only half believing the words I
speak. Because the truth is, I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know how to survive.

I don’t even know how I’ve managed to
survived this long.

We’ve been running for… for months. Since
the beginning.

Maybe we should’ve been hiding.

These people live in a basement. They live
in the dark, only venturing outside in rare and extreme circumstances.

Is this any way to live?

Is it the only way?

How
are we supposed to live?

“I’m travelling with someone,” I say. “A
girl. She’s from a town. A safe haven. The military built walls. These walls
keep out the infected. They keep the people safe. If you come with me…”

I trail off because I’m not even sure if I
can get them inside and I’m not even sure if Sarah can get us inside. Will she
even be allowed back in? I don’t know the answers to these questions. And the
scary part is, we were pinning all our hopes on the fact that we would be
allowed inside this town. That we would be granted asylum. That they would
welcome us with open arms. That whoever is in charge would give us a car so we
could get our friends.

“We don’t want to hear it,” John says. “I
know all about the military safe zones. We know just how well that grand plan
turned out.”

“This is different,” I say, even though I’m
not sure that it is.

I just don’t know.

And I don’t know if Kenji is dead. I don’t
know if he is infected. I don’t know if I’ve killed him.

Did I kill him?

I need to know. I need to find him. Because
if he’s infected I want to hold him. If he’s infected…
 
I don’t know what I’m going to do. The only
thing I know is that I have to get out of here. I need to make a move.

“You guys should hide,” I say. “But I can’t
stay. I have to go.”

“Are you sure about this?” Helen asks.
“What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”

“I’m going to find my friends. And then,
we’re getting the hell out of here.”