Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (2 page)

Finally, I dug out the list Dad
made me promise to look at every time, no matter how well I had memorized it.
It would serve to guide me through the next step, and also as a checklist I
could use at the very end of the process.

Because the following items were
so precious, packing them had to happen at the end. They needed to be easily
accessible, which meant inserting them above other items like food and using
the pockets and pouches on my coverall and utility belt.

The items on the list were as
follows: four emergency bottles of water (one went into my belt), a Zippo
lighter, a clamshell mirror (for scouting around corners), waterproof matches,
a tactical LED flashlight, a set of lock picks that included a glass cutter the
size of a pencil and suction cups for gripping glass, a Leatherman multi-tool,
waterproof binoculars with 8.5x magnification and 45mm objective lens, a
lightweight axe for chopping through boards (which also went on my belt), and a
twelve-foot, twisted-fiber climbing rope with a grappling hook at one end, for
climbing those hard-to-reach places. I strapped on a wrist compass and packed a
navigation kit that included topographical maps of Peltham Park and its
surrounding towns.

I was forgetting something.

I opened a desk drawer and took
out the lucky rabbit’s foot my mother had given me before she died. I kissed it
before slipping it into a pouch on my belt.

A pop sounded in the living room.
I almost ran to my father, convinced he had shot himself to make me stay. Then
I heard another pop, followed by a dry crackle.

The fireplace. He must have lit
it for warmth.

“You look good,” he said when I
emerged carrying all my gear.

He was just lowering himself back
to the couch, panting from the exertion.

“Thanks,” I said. “Any
last-minute tips?”

“Keep your ammunition dry. Strip
your pistol and clean it before you—”

“I already did. Yesterday.”

“What? How the hell did you know—
”

“I clean it every day, Dad. You
know that.”

“Right, right. You and your
hobbies.”

He tried to swallow, but his
mouth was too dry. I picked up the water bottle I had left on the coffee table,
unscrewed it, and made him take a few swallows.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “All
the water and food you need is on the armchair.”

I tilted my head in the direction
of the small pile I had built on the cushion. Would he have the strength five
hours from now to make his way over there and tear open an MRE or a
PowerBar
wrapper?
If he could light the
fire, then he could probably feed himself—but not for much longer.

“You bringing the assault rifle?”
he asked me.

“I shouldn’t need it.”

“Good,” he said. “Too loud. Plus,
you and that Glock were meant for each other. But it won’t be like firing off
the roof with a silenced rifle, all right? Once you’re down there and staring
one of those bastards in the eye, it’s a whole different ballgame. You need to
be sure. The noise…”

A sudden coughing spell made him
curl up and shake. I gave him more water. My muscles were tense. Time was running
out.

“I’m going,” I said. “I love
you.”

“Love you, too, Kip. Be careful,
and be fast. If you don’t find anything, come home. Don’t linger. Every minute
that goes by is…”

He didn’t finish. His strength
had left him. He closed his eyes and drifted into sleep.

I kissed his forehead before
making my way to the door leading into the garage and quickly undid the complex
system of locks and bolts. I put as much of it back together as I could on the
other side. Of course, the locks wouldn’t hold against a few well-placed shots.
But the real fortifications had been built into the outer layers of the house.

It was dark inside the garage. I
used the Zippo to cast a shivering glow over the workbench and the busted
minivan. A moldy, musty smell hung in the air. There were tools and parts
everywhere, lying all over the floor, covered in dust that seemed ancient.

The garage doors had been
reinforced with sheet metal and steel beams in case a group of infected came up
with the idea of ramming into them. We had done such a good job of it that, in
the dim light, the doors looked like gaping holes—tunnels leading God
only knows where, full of lurking dangers.

I made my way quickly to the
hatch where a window used to be. Seconds later, I was outside.

Trash speckled the high grass of
the yard and covered the length of our street. I had seen it plenty of times
from the roof, but from down here, it almost looked as if a giant party had
been thrown across the entire neighborhood, and no one had bothered to clean up
afterward.

I picked up one of the rolled
newspapers still in its plastic delivery shell and tried to check the date. The
paper was little more than oatmeal now. I tossed it aside and chided myself for
wasting time. Checking my wrist compass, I headed toward the trees.

It had rained recently. The full,
vibrant smell of wet forest caught me off guard with its delicious thickness. A
smell I’d forgotten existed. As I breathed it in, I pulled out my navigation
kit.

One of the survival techniques my
father had drilled into me over the years was how to shoot an azimuth. That’s
when you determine the line between you and an object in the landscape you want
to reach—in my case, the drugstore on Route 1—using a topographical
map and a compass. I was twelve years old the first time he taught me, and I’ll
never forget it.

That was before the Outbreak, so
I never actually thought I’d use it. But my father had been adamant and made me
practice every weekend for a whole summer, and then again the summer after
that. Either he wanted me to join Special Forces, or he knew the world was
doomed. I became as familiar with a compass as the jocks in my school had been
with throwing a baseball. Not that it got me any attention from girls,
unfortunately.

I became so good with it that on
a camping trip near the mountains one summer, my father decided to give me the
ultimate test.

“When I did this in the army,” he
said, passing me a
nav
kit, “we called it ‘the
Star.’”

The wonder in his voice made it
seem like a mythical test originally given to a Greek hero. I went along
without complaint, eager to please, not even asking for details.

He took off alone at dawn the
following morning and set up a tent somewhere in the forest. When he returned
hours later, he marked the tent’s location on my map and made me walk to it
alone, through miles of wooded terrain, counting every step to gauge the
distance according to my measurements on paper.

I had failed that time, and I
failed this time, too. I got lost.

After shooting a couple more
azimuths to get myself on track, I made it through the forest and onto a road I
recognized. What should have taken two hours ended up taking
four.
Stinging pain on the pads of my feet told me I’d have blisters pretty soon,
despite my three layers of socks. I cursed myself for not having broken in my boots
sooner. Rookie mistake.

Plenty of time
, I kept telling myself.
I have plenty of time.

Unless the pharmacy is empty.

A quick dinner of canned peaches
and a
PowerBar
silenced my churning stomach. I
followed a familiar road for the next hour, using my binoculars to see ahead.
It was a desperate shortcut, but I needed to make up for lost time. I would
have been amazed if raiders had set up a trap in such a quiet area. Nothing I
had seen so far indicated those evil bastards even came up this way.

I arrived into town five and a
half hours into my journey, at around six thirty. Thankfully, it was early
spring, which meant the daylight would keep for another hour. Darkness in a
land full of mindless, deliriously hungry cannibals was a scary thing. Scarier
still was the knowledge that I would have to make camp at some point. There was
no way I would try and brave the darkness.

Plenty of time.
I’ve got plenty of time.

“Finally,” I said, looking into
my binoculars at a sight I hadn’t laid eyes on in three years.

The commercial part of Peltham
Park, located along Route 1, had once been a bustling strip of outlet malls,
restaurants, and banks. Not the sort of gaudy and colorful McDonald’s-and-KFC-infested
mess you might find closer to Boston, but a neat arrangement of New
England-style buildings that held mid-sized supermarkets, lobster joints, and
the occasional Home Depot. Even the sprawling outlet malls had tasteful facades
that complemented the flavor of the town.

Now, however, it was a cluster of
dilapidated shells riddled with broken windows and crude graffiti, the parking
lots empty except for the trash. The graffiti is what bothered me most. With
the rest of mankind facing a grim and bloody fate, the thought of a bunch of assholes
spray-painting the walls of my town was enough to make my trigger finger
restless.

The closer I got, the more
unsettled I became. I had expected this kind of desolation—broken windows
and all—but not the spray-painted messages. Some of them said things like
“WE DESERVED IT” and “GOD FUCKED US FINALLY.”
Worthless,
defeatist crap.

I also didn’t expect the naked
body, now little more than a skeleton, hanging from a streetlamp near the
intersection, or the charred remains of a dentist’s office someone had
obviously torched. It made the prospect of finding medication at the town
pharmacy feel like the naïve fantasy of a kid who still believes in treasure
maps.

But at least I wasn’t sitting
home doing nothing, just watching my father die like I did with Mom.

I came to the parking lot of an
outlet mall shaped like an L. There had been six stores here once. Now there
were only six ruined facades guarding empty spaces. If I
was
going to set up camp somewhere for the night, probably one of those buildings
would be best. But with a steely gray light still in the sky, and the pharmacy
so close, I pressed forward, keeping south in the hope of making up for lost time.

Some of the buildings I passed
triggered memories so pleasant I knew savoring them would only hurt afterward.
One of them was Tommy’s Bike Shack. In my early teens, I had been obsessed with
bicycles. I would go to Tommy’s every weekend to top off the air in my tires
and listen to the repair guys talk about gear and upcoming biking trips. My
best friends at the time, Tom Brand and Mike
Culliver
,
would ride there on the weekends to meet me, and together the three of us would
take off to parts as yet unexplored, where we could lay down our special brand
of harmless mischief (mostly petty vandalism and drinking booze stolen from our
parents’ liquor cabinets).

I snuck around the building. A
quick glance through a back window told me there wasn’t much inside. I saw what
looked like bicycle chains, two or three, spilled across the floor, and other
supplies I didn’t need.

Twenty minutes later, I passed
the back deck of a small restaurant—The Brass Lantern—where I had
bussed tables my freshman year of high school. The former restaurant was
falling apart, but I stopped for a moment to visualize its quaint appearance back
when I had been a fifteen-year-old kid making five bucks an hour, plus ten
percent of the tips earned by the waitresses. One of them, a stooped old lady
named Hilda, had once tried to explain the rules of Bridge to me on an
unusually slow Saturday night. Half-listening, I had devoted most of my
attention to one of the other waitresses—Joanna
Rushforth
—and
what she must have looked like without clothes.

I still wonder, though I’m sure
Joanna is dead.

A group of them had gathered in
the parking lot of a Citizens’ Bank.

By then, I had seen enough
infected—usually of the lone-wolf variety—from the roof of my house
that I was able to ignore the group for a moment and study the area around
them. I noticed several things, like how the drive-up ATM machine had been
utterly destroyed, and how the bank’s front door no longer existed. So far, it
seemed all the buildings along Route 1 had either been looted, destroyed by
infected, or both. This didn’t bode well for my mission.

The group was mostly made up of
men, but there were a few women with ragged hair that hung past their shoulders
in filthy strips. I counted twelve altogether. They shuffled around with their
heads lolling to one side. Now and then, one would trip and fall, or bump into
another, inciting a groan of protest. A couple of the more gray-skinned ones,
clearly in the late stages of infection, had gone blind and swung their arms
around as if swatting at imaginary wasps.

They looked harmless, but I knew
the truth. Groups were dangerous and to be avoided at all times. If the wind
turned, and they caught a whiff of my scent, I’d end up in a really unfortunate
situation.

I was about to get going when the
dull roar of an engine rose nearby. I tightened my grip on the Glock and
listened. The infected also heard the noise—no surprise there,
considering how loud the damned thing was—and tilted their heads like
dogs. A bunch snarled and bared their teeth. A few of the stronger ones fell
into attack postures, ready to pounce on any healthy human that entered their
field of vision.

The vehicle appeared, and I was
stunned by what I saw. It was a muddy Jeep Wrangler with four men inside. It
tore into the parking lot as if on a mission to attract the most infected
possible.

The driver was a skinny guy with
the wild appearance of a mountain man. Next to him, another guy stood in the
passenger seat. He leaned against the open frame, wearing a red bandanna that was
now almost pink with age. The Jeep came to a sudden stop. Bandanna aimed an
automatic rifle at the infected but didn’t shoot as they shuffled toward the
vehicle. He was waiting.