Outbreak (Book 1): Emerald City (2 page)

“Yes,” she said. “As long as we keep the lights off in here, that bastard never knows when we are watching.”

Clark looked at the infected on the other side of the glass.
It resembled something which had not taken care of itself for quite a while. It was unshaven, long haired, and filthy. The infected bared its teeth and Clark could see it had not cared to brush its teeth or practice any form of oral hygiene. What was left of its clothes was soiled and stained. It had blisters and sores. Somewhere it had lost a shoe and one of the feet had been worn down to a bloody stump.
The infected was oblivious to their presence, but still pulled at the straps and glared at a light above the table.

“Where did you get it?” Clark asked.

“A tug boat drifted into us a couple days ago,” she said. “It was caught down in the hold.”

“Why hasn’t it been exterminated?” he asked.

“For samples and experiments mostly,” she replied.

Clark had mixed feelings about her answer. He had never been a big fan of the idea of anything being a guinea pig and this was still a human being, even if a horribly infected one.
We are in the middle of a war,
he remembered.
A war that could wipe out humanity
.
Some rules need to be broken.

“Have you ever seen one of these monsters in action?” Nagashima asked.

Clark shrugged, still trying to be nonchalant. “Not lately,” he said. “Why?”

“They go from calm to crazy all the time. No one really knows why.” She looked at Clark. “Want to see what I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Clark replied.

Nagashima
reached forward and flipped a light switch. Fluorescent bulbs came on over their heads. The infected did not react to their presence and did not turn their way. “Over here,” Nagashima sang and tapped lightly on the glass. Suddenly the infected raised its head and looked at them. A moment later it went completely ballistic, gnashing its teeth, slamming its head back onto the table, and convulsing as if it were having a seizure.

Clark took an involuntary step away from the glass. “Damn,” he said. “It’s really pissed.”

“Oh it’s not pissed,” she said, grinning. “It’s hungry. Want to take a closer look?”

Clark did not feel sorry for it any more. “No thanks,” he replied.

TASHA

Alone and cold in the dark, Tasha sat in her sleeping bag and held herself with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs. She knew it was late in the day, possibly even night outside, but she could not find the motivation to get up. Letting out a long sigh, she held herself tighter. She had hardly gotten out of her sleeping bag the entire day, yet she felt exhausted.
What if I just laid back down again?
she wondered.
No one would know. No one would care.
The isolation was beginning to haunt her. It had been a long few months and even though she knew spring was coming soon, at least she hoped it would be soon, it felt like it would never arrive. Every time she crept outside, saw a little sunlight and got excited about the weather turning warm, thinking the last big storm was done and gone for the year, the weather would turn dark and it would begin to rain ... again. Rain was hardly even the right word for it. In the Pacific Northwest, it did not just rain, it stormed.

At least I am dry and fed
, she reminded herself. The only positive thing in her life was her storage locker, her sanctuary. It was a good location. Hidden. Somewhere the creepers had never stumbled across and the other survivors in the city had never found. The locker was on the third floor of a large cannery and distribution center, and as far as Tasha was concerned, it was home. The space was battleship gray, and the locker was long, narrow and lined with cases of canned food. There were no windows and only one entrance. Her only real fear in the locker was that someone would come along, close the door, and trap her inside. So, she had spent her first two days at the cannery making it so the door could not be completely shut. That did not help with keeping it warm inside, but luckily over the winter, Seattle had never dropped below freezing and the locker’s walls were insulated enough that the temperature was tolerable. Plus, there was plenty of food. She had hardly made a dent in her supply. Her only real problem was all of the trash she made. Looking at the piles now, she knew she should move it out of the locker and into the cannery, but, like most days lately, she felt like doing as little as possible. She sighed again.
What’s the point?
she asked herself.
Nobody is here to care.
Putting her head on her knees, she let out a sob. Wisps of her long dark hair hung in her face and tickled her nose. Irritated, she quickly braided it and let it hang down the middle of her back. Her hair was oily and felt gross to her touch.
God, I am so sick of this. What am I going to do?

Feeling depressed, Tasha huddled in the back of the locker, her sleeping bag around her, and reflected on her situation. She knew she should be thankful to have found the locker at all. On the run from a group of creepers, she had fled into the building over some rubble where a tank had crashed through a wall and knocked down the ground floor set of stairs. Searching desperately for a place to hide, Tasha had come across an aluminum ladder and used it to get off of the ground floor. Climbing as high as she could, she had found the locker and ducked inside. That had been months ago. She looked at the shelves of canned goods and remembered her elation at finding so much food. Now she wished she still felt as lucky as she had then.

At the start of the outbreak, when masses of people were fleeing the city to escape the virus and the creepers, Tasha had abandoned her apartment. With nowhere to go, she had spent part of the fall hiding in the woods, trying to survive on berries and roots. She learned quickly she would have to choose between starving to death or returning to the city. She chose to return, but life there was also hard. Most of the food had been scavenged. To make matters worse, every other building in the area seemed to be filled with corpses or creepers or both. She was out looking for a place to hole up when she ran into a group of creepers and found her way to the cannery with the sign out front that read
Gourmet Entree
. It was not until she was tearing eagerly into one of the cases that she realized the only thing to eat were cans of wet cat food. She had contemplated looking for somewhere else to go but by then it was late in the year and already very wet and very cold. It did not take long for her to find out that once you are hungry enough, everything tastes good, even
Chicken and Liver in a Soft Loaf
.

The outbreak had begun when Tasha was just starting her senior year in high school. Back then, she had always wished she were thin. She was active in sports year round and had always considered herself fit, but she was never one of those girls who was always able to wear whatever she wanted. A steady diet of cat food and rainwater had taken care of that. Tasha’s clothes hung from her frame now. She had to carve notch holes in her belt to keep it tight enough so her pants did not fall down. She had taken off her layers of clothing once during the winter and was amazed at how her ribs and the bones of her hips showed under her skin. Looking down at her hands, she hardly recognized them.
I have got to eat
, she thought even though the idea did not seem appetizing. She shook her head. It was eat or lay down and die.
Get up!
she demanded herself. Slowly, she pushed back her sleeping bag and got up to have dinner. As she lit a candle, she heard a helicopter fly over the building. She was not terribly surprised to hear one, military aircraft came and went over the city, but it still was not good. The noise would rile up the creepers and now she would have to be extra careful if she got around to going outside of her locker.
Probably more propaganda
, she thought. The military base on the other side of the city liked to send out a chopper every week or so to drop leaflets all over town. The leaflets were little, the size of the paper in a fortune cookie, and asked for survivors to go to the base. The papers always said something about how the government was working on a cure and promised that the zombies would soon starve themselves out. Tasha had no interest in going to the base. She had stopped trusting the establishment a long time ago. They had started this outbreak and done nothing to contain the creepers. Plus, there had been no evidence of progress on a cure and after all this time, the creepers sure as hell had not starved themselves out.

Tasha was curious about the messages though. She craved human contact, no matter how small. She decided to go outside and see if there was any new information before the creepers got too worked up. She blew out her candle and picked up her pistol from off the floor beside her sleeping bag. The weapon was an old fashioned nickel plated six shot revolver she had found in a holster on a corpse in the forest to the east of the city. She had never shot the pistol because she did not have any extra bullets to practice with but she carried the weapon in a holster on her leg like a cowboy whenever she left the safety of her locker. Stepping outside and into the cannery warehouse, she scanned the rows of stainless steel manufacturing equipment for any signs of movement. Tasha had guessed the machinery was all part of the canning process but she had no real idea. She had been through all of the equipment a dozen times and never found anything really useful, so for the most part, she ignored it all.

As quietly as she could, Tasha went to a wall of filthy warehouse windows and looked outside. There were leaflets drifting down from the sky like confetti. It was cloudy overhead and already getting dark, making it hard to guess the time. Tasha went to one corner of the floor where there was a simple steel ladder to a hatch in the roof and climbed up and out onto the gravel strewn rooftop. She was lucky, a few of the leaflets had landed on her building. She had no desire to go down to the streets to find a leaflet, especially with creepers running around chasing the helicopter. While she was up there, she took a look around at the remains of the city. Seattle, Washington. The jewel of the Pacific Northwest and at one time was known as the Emerald City. A year ago it had over six hundred thousand people, a thriving economy thanks to one of the busiest ports on the west coast, and a pretty good football team. All of that was gone now and it broke Tasha’s heart to think of the loss of life.

A stiff wind blew from over Puget Sound and Tasha’s hair fell loose again and whipped in her face. Frustrated, she thought she should have worn her cap. She was beginning to hate her hair. Holding it in one of her fists, she chased after one of the leaflets. The paper tumbled along in the wind until she stomped down and caught it under her boot. Carefully, so as not to lose it again in the wind, she picked it up and read:

26APR - ATTENTION CITIZENS:

CURE IS IMMINENT. ALL PERSONNEL RETURN TO NEAREST MILITARY FACILITY. BLOOD TYPE B-NEG IS DESPERATELY NEEDED FOR RESEARCH. FOOD REWARD FOR BLOOD DONATION.

April 26th. Two days past her eighteenth birthday. A year ago, all she had wanted to do was focus on graduating high school and going off to college.
All I ever wanted
, she reminisced. Now she just wanted something to eat that did not come out of a can with a picture of a cat on the label.
Times have certainly changed.
Tasha considered letting the leaflet go and watch it drift off in the wind. Most of the message was information she had seen before, but the note on the blood type was interesting to her. Tasha knew she had B-negative blood. She remembered this because it was rare. She had been in a serious car accident when she was younger and since only two percent of the general population had her blood type, the hospital had to bring in additional supplies of blood to keep her alive. She absently reached up under her coat and touched the six inch scar on her abdomen while she thought about the leaflet. The military had never mentioned anything about blood before and it led her to believe that just maybe someone was actually working on a cure.
A chance to return everything to normal?
she wondered.
That doesn’t sound so bad.
She tucked the paper into her pocket and looked out across the city. From on top of the cannery she could see clear to downtown. The skyscrapers, the sports stadiums, the Space Needle, and far off in the distance was Mount Rainier. She thought about how beautiful the city had once been. But now it was falling to ruin with broken down cars, dead bodies, trash, and burned out buildings. Turning to face the wind, she looked to the south, along the coast of the Sound, and saw Broken Top in Alki Park. Broken Top was the only significant land mass that rose above what remained of the city. With nothing much to do, she had gotten in the habit of using her binoculars to watch the activity over there. There was only one road up to the peak and she could usually just make out a team of soldiers stationed in the old World War II bunkers. Sometimes she wondered why they were there. It was not like the place had anything left to protect.

Thinking of the leaflet and the request for her blood type, Tasha reconsidered the bunker at Broken Top. As far as she knew, it was the closest military presence to her. It was where she would go if she was going to go anywhere. It was not terribly far from her cannery, maybe just over a mile to the base of the mountain, but traveling any distance in the city had its share of dangers. The creepers were just one problem and if she was careful and quiet, they were easy enough to avoid. The other survivors in the city were another problem altogether. Most were evil and she had seen all kinds of brutality and cannibalism in just the few months since the outbreak.
The whole idea is risky, but if my blood could help save people ...

Unsure of what to do, Tasha went to the edge of the roof and looked down to the street. There were a lot of creepers milling around because of the helicopter. The same thing which had drawn her to the roof had also drawn the creepers out in the open. Plus, it was the time of day that for reasons Tasha could not figure out, the creepers tended to come outside. They always came out in the evening.
It’s like they’re looking for dinner or something
, Tasha thought. But she also knew it was nothing compared to when it rained. Rain stirred up the creepers more than anything else. Tasha did not know why and wondered if anyone really did.

Still considering if the trip to Broken Top would be worth the risk, she went back down the ladder and into the cannery. She walked past the rows of machinery and stood in the doorway of her locker. If it really was late April then she had been hiding in the locker for over five months.
How long am I willing to live like this?
she wondered.
I can’t do this forever, but those creepers can’t go on like they do forever either.
Tasha looked at her gear, her belongings.
I’m doing okay,
she thought. She had her pistol, a sleeping bag, a mirror, candles and a lot of food left.
It’s a lot better existence than most people.
Especially the creepers, standing around, starving, chasing helicopters and anything else that made any noise.
I don’t have to decide today,
she thought. She knew Broken Top was not going anywhere anytime soon, so she decided the best thing to do would be to sleep on it. She climbed into her sleeping bag and for her dinner, she opened a can of cat food,
Beef Feast in Gravy
.