No Easy Hope - 01 (13 page)

As the outbreak consumed Charlotte, I tried at least a hundred times to call Gabe and Vanessa. The cell phone network in our area was completely non-functional, but the internet still worked. Gabe’s computer connected to the web via a 3G card, and when the cell phone networks went down, so did his internet access. Vanessa should have been able to answer my emails, but for some reason she didn’t. I began to fear the worst.

During the fall of my hometown, I spent my nights in the underground shelter, and my days in the house, in spite of Gabe’s warning to stay underground. I monitored the spread of the Phage on television until the President declared martial law. After the power went off, so did my contact with the outside world. I was limited to keeping up with events by listening to the wind-up emergency radio I had bought almost a year ago. Thankfully, I had my solar panels and wind turbines, but I used electricity as sparingly as possible. The bank of batteries in my basement could store enough power to keep my appliances running for a day or so, but I turned off everything except my security system. I thought about using my gas- powered generator to keep the refrigerator in the bunker running, but decided against it. I took all of the perishables out of the bunker and had myself a hell of a cookout, then buried the rest.

I felt sure I was a good safe distance from the hordes of infected. My house was over ten miles northwest of Interstate 85, which cut straight across the northern boundary of the city. I lived in a sparsely populated area with over a mile of dense woodland separating me from my nearest neighbor. The road leading to my house was one of the multitudes of winding two lane routes that snaked across the Carolina piedmont. If you didn’t know what to look for, you would never find where I lived without a GPS. My driveway was half a mile long and mostly hidden by surrounding foliage. I figured that the infected probably wouldn’t find me in the middle of all that undeveloped forest.

I figured wrong.

One morning, eight days after the power went out, I was in my front yard using some water from a rain barrel to shave with, when I heard a loud metallic crunch. I had been in a couple of minor automobile accidents before, and I recognized the crunch as the sound of a car running into something. I rinsed the foam off my half-shaven face, grabbed my pistol, and got on my bicycle. I pedaled down my driveway out to the road. About two-hundred yards away, a blue Camry had run off the side of the road and hit a tree. The front end of the car was crushed in and partially wrapped around the tree’s thick trunk. Steam hissed from the broken radiator, and green fluid poured out onto the ground beneath. I rode over to the car and looked into the driver’s side window.  I nearly fell off my bike when I saw who was inside.

It was Vanessa.

She was slumped over the steering wheel, and appeared unconscious. I pounded on the windshield, shouting for her to wake up as I pulled at the door handle. It was either locked or jammed shut from the impact, and I couldn’t get it to open. I pulled my pistol from its holster, squatted down to make sure the shot would not hit Vanessa, and pulled the trigger. The window shattered inward as the bullet went through it.

I took my shirt off and used it to clear away broken glass from the driver’s side window, then I reached in and unbuckled Vanessa’s seat belt. She was completely limp as I pulled her out of the car and laid her down on the pavement. Her eyes were closed, and her clothes were soaked with blood.

“Holy shit, Vanessa, wake up.”

I gently slapped her cheek trying to rouse her. No response. I leaned down and put my ear over her mouth and nose, listened for breathing. Nothing. My heart hammered in my chest as I checked her pulse. No pulse. Her heart was still. I was about to start CPR when I noticed the wound on her right shoulder. There was a patch of flesh torn away, revealing muscle and the white gleam of bone beneath. It was oval shaped.

Like a bite wound.

I stopped and stared for a moment, debating what to do. I remembered that the Phage spread by fluid transfer. Would I get infected if I gave her mouth to mouth?

“What if it wasn’t an infected that bit her?” I said aloud to no one.

That didn’t make any sense, who else would bite a chunk of flesh off someone? After another moment’s hesitation, I remembered something from Gabriel’s manual.

Reanimation occurs one hundred percent of the time, unless the victim’s brain is destroyed.

I eased back until I was sitting down on the pavement. For a moment, my senses sharpened, and I was acutely aware of my surroundings. The wrecked radiator continued to hiss. Birds sang, small animals skittered through the undergrowth, and the wind gently rustled the limbs of the surrounding trees. A single strand of blood soaked hair lay limp and tangled against Vanessa’s pale cheek. I felt an urge to reach out and brush it aside.  Everything that had occurred up to that point, I watched from afar. Detached, and disconnected. It all seemed unreal, like a bad dream.

Vanessa’s corpse was not a dream. Vanessa’s corpse was real, and it was lying on the ground in front of me. The Phage killed her.

I stood up and got back on my bike. I rode back up to my house, grabbed a sheet from the linen closet, and started up my pickup truck. After driving to the spot where I left Vanessa’s body, I covered her with the sheet and gently placed her in the back of the truck. I drove the truck to my garage, got a shovel from the shed, and lifted Vanessa from the truck and set her on the ground. I pulled the sheet below her shoulders so that I could see her face clearly, then walked a few feet away and began to dig. After about two hours of work, I had dug a hole long enough to suffice and about three feet deep. I stuck the end of the shovel in the pile of dirt beside the hole, grabbed a folding chair from the shed, and sat down by Vanessa’s body to wait. Just as the sun was beginning to descend behind the trees on the western side of my yard, Vanessa opened her eyes. Slowly, she began to sit up. The sheet slipped off her as she got to her feet.

 I thought I was prepared. I thought that after everything I had seen on television, and everything I read in Gabriel’s manual, that I would be able to deal with it.

I was wrong. Nothing prepares you for your first encounter with the undead.

I stared in horrid fascination as she got to her feet, and began to stagger toward me. Without realizing I was doing it, I stood up and leveled my pistol at her. Her face twisted into a mask of hunger and rage, and a gurgling, keening, predatory moan burst from her throat. Her fingers curved into claws as she reached toward me.

I backed away from her for a few steps, and then stopped. I felt something inside of my chest begin to burn. The thing that was once Vanessa continued to stalk me. I dropped into a shooting stance and took aim.

“I’m so sorry Vanessa.”

I pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit her between the eyes, just above the bridge of her nose, and a red spray erupted from the back of her head. She shuddered for a moment, then collapsed, limp and lifeless. I lowered the gun, and placed it back in its holster. After wrapping Vanessa’s body in the sheet, I put her in the grave and spent the next half hour shoveling dirt over top of her. After burying Vanessa, I got two buckets of water from the upstairs bathtub, a bar of soap and my shaving kit, and went out into my back yard. I shaved off the rest of my beard, then I stripped naked and used the water to wash the sweat and dirt from my tired body. I needed the cleansing ritual to keep my mind off what I had just done.

I put my filthy clothes in the laundry bin and put on clean ones, then went down to my shelter to sleep. I was hungry, but I was too exhausted to eat. I sank down onto the bed and didn’t get out of it for nearly twelve hours. The next morning, my shock wore off enough for me to begin thinking clearly about the previous day’s events. The fact that Vanessa had wrecked near my driveway meant that she was coming to my house. After I thought about it, I remembered that the blue Camry was her father’s car. She must have been with them when she was attacked. Or maybe she was attacked
by
them. I rode my bike out to the Camry to see if I could find anything to explain what happened to Vanessa.

Pools of radiator fluid and oil stained the ground beneath the engine. I brought my crowbar with me, and used it to pry the passenger’s side door open. The interior of the car was clean, except for the blood, and I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The glove box had an owner’s manual and a street map, but nothing else. I reached over to the driver’s side and popped the trunk. Inside the trunk was the backpack that I had bought Vanessa four months prior, and a twelve-gauge shotgun. I got the pack for her so that we could go hiking together. Vanessa was never one for the outdoors, and had never actually used it. Now, she never would.

The bag contained a change of clothes, toiletries, some canned food, and two boxes of deer slugs for the shotgun. I found her cell phone in one of the side pockets. I checked her call history, and my number was the last one she had called. My guess was that she had gone to her parent’s house, something attacked her, and she fled in her father’s car. Who attacked her, and what happened to her parents, would have to remain a mystery. I took the backpack and the shotgun back the house with me, figuring I could never have too many guns.

The next few weeks passed slowly. I never realized how much I relied on TV and computers for entertainment. I had enough electricity from my solar panels to run the laptop, and watched every DVD I owned twice. I practiced with some of the different swords in my collection, trying to decide which one would be best for dealing with any revenants that wandered onto my property. The broadswords and katanas were elegant, but were built to inflict trauma, not split skulls. I had a functional replica of a medieval war hammer that looked promising. It was big and heavy, and had good range, but was tiring to wield. I would be fine if I only had to deal with three or four undead, but any more than that, and I would need a lighter option.

Although Gabriel taught me a great deal about knife fighting, I knew little about using a sword in combat. I competed in fencing for a couple of years in junior high, but that was using foils. A full sized battle sword is a completely different weapon. I was sitting on my bed in the bunker one night, reading Gabriel’s manual for the fiftieth time, when I got an idea. The next day I climbed into the attic and opened up a dusty chest with my old fencing gear in it. I pushed aside the gear and took out the small sword that my father gave me when I was thirteen. It was his idea of a reward for winning a small fencing tournament. I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d ever pulled it from its sheath.

I drew the sword out and took it outside for a few practice lunges. It was light and well balanced. I remembered that my father said it was made of 9260 high carbon spring steel, meaning that it was an alloy of silicon, carbon, iron, and a few other metals. The silicon makes the steel extremely tough and flexible, and is normally used to make heavy-duty springs.

I took a piece of cardboard out of the garage, drew a hundred or so quarter sized circles on it with a marker, and propped it up against the hedgerow in my front yard. I tried stabbing the little targets with lunges from a few feet away, but missed them by a mile. I thought about different ways to try to hit them, and realized that lunging was the problem. After all, the undead are not going to be using fancy footwork to dodge my sword. Why rush it? I stood sideways in a slight crouch, held the tip of the sword a few inches from the target, and quickly thrust it though the cardboard. After about fifteen minutes of practice, I was consistently hitting the small targets in rapid succession. I put the sword back in its sheath, and resolved to keep it with me, just in case. I used some old nylon water line to rig a sling so that I could carry the sword on my back.

Life went on for another few weeks, and I saw no sign of the walking dead. The broadcasts on my little radio ceased, but they lasted long enough for me to learn that the Phage had overrun the entire country. The President and a few other members of the Federal Government evacuated to a safe location. The military struggled valiantly, but there were just too many of the infected. Reports of military units retreating from overrun cities became more and more common. Just before the broadcasts ceased, the guys at NORAD were saying that the military had established a few safe zones in the rocky mountains, and that any survivors should try to make their way out to them. The rest of the country was left to fend for themselves. I didn’t know for sure if the Phage had spread beyond North America, but I suspected that it had.

When I reached the point that I had about two weeks of food left, I decided that I needed to do some exploring. To do that, I would need to bring some gear with me. For weapons, I decided on the Kel-Tec .22 magnum, and one of the H&K assault rifles. I loaded some spare magazines onto a load bearing harness, then put the guns and a couple of days worth of food and water in my truck. I cranked the engine and sat in the driveway staring into the distance, trying to decide where to go. After a few minutes, I decided to drive to a housing development about ten miles south of my house. It was a straight shot, and I would easily be able to find my way home if anything happened to the truck. I loaded my bicycle into the bed of the truck as a precaution.