Resurrection (Apocalypse Chronicles Part II) (13 page)

Shame, or possibly fear, was already visible in her expression. “I need your help,” she blurted. “
We
need your help. Food is running out, water has been gone for days. If it wasn’t for the snow-”

“This is why you asked if we were a commando unit,” Mei stated crossly.

And why she was worried about Harrison being alert this morning…

“Yes,” she admitted, freely and then cowered slightly, readying for a tirade. When it didn’t come, she relaxed and unclenched her shoulders from her ears.

“Is there even someone with a medical or scientific background in there?” Beverly asked, doubtfully.

“Does it matter?” Christina retorted.

And there it was. Christina put it all on the line, so elegantly delivering it to us on a pretty silver platter. In fact, she was really shoveling it into our mouths with a big silver spoon, her subliminal message so plainly obvious to us…Did we have the humanity left in us to risk our own lives for others?

Until this point, we had fought to save ourselves, but here were people who needed our help, who couldn’t fend for themselves, and we were the only ones with the power and ability to change it.
Would we willingly give our life for them?

As our team fell into silence, my mind called on a few ideologies from living with my dad, who had faced war more times than he had wished. One of them was that at some point during our life we determine who we are. Not what we show to others, not what others think of us, but who we truly have grown to become inherent in our own soul. At some point, we must face our own compassion, and determine to what level we will grant it service to others in the sacrifice of ourselves.

This was our moment.
Could we die for complete strangers?

As my gaze moved to Harrison, I realized we had already made our decision.

“Isn’t this what we are doing here?” I mumbled. When my head snapped up, I repeated it, yet I received only vacant stares.
Elucidate, Kennedy
, I told myself. Lives are on the line. “Isn’t this why we trained ourselves in defense? Isn’t this why we are walking across the state, possibly the rest of the country, to find someone to develop a cure? So that no one else has to squat in the snow outside a store debating whether they should save the lives of strangers from a pod of people infected with a cannibalistic virus?”

The corner of Harrison’s lips turned up but no one spoke.

“We’re trying to save the human race, and yet we’re going to pass these people by?”

There was a flicker of understanding behind their glazed stares.

I have them
, I thought. Then Beverly replied…

“Okay…,” she said slowly. “How does saving these people, cure the world?”

A valid question. Our mission was solely to deliver the antibodies so a cure could be developed. She was making the argument to do just that and let others commit to search and rescue efforts.

“Don’t say it’s so we don’t lose our sense of humanity,” Beverly added, rolling her eyes.

“It’s not,” I replied calmly. It was all so clear to me now. “It’s far simpler than that. It’s to save humankind before it becomes extinct.”

My logic was sound.
Why make the effort to deliver a cure when there would be no one left to inject it with?
These could possibly be the last people left alive on earth. The probability of it was chilling to me. It was something I didn’t want to contemplate. But we no longer had the luxury of turning a blind eye to notions that worried us. We had to act, now, before it was too late.

Harrison, who hadn’t said a word, was staring at me, a look full of deep admiration. He approved of what I was doing.

Christina, who also had watched us with intense silence, spoke now, asking for help with a solitary plea. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

We took a few seconds to assess our team’s expressions, determining each other’s decisions. Doc and Mei took the other’s hand in support. Harrison gave an easy nod. Finally, it was left to Beverly, who after a good amount of concentration, snapped, “Oh, all right!”

With everyone on board, we turned to strategy.

Recalling the Infected had collected around the front of the store, I asked, “Christina, are they around the back too?”

“And the sides,” Christina said with a nod.

“So how did you get out?”

Christina stared blankly at her. “I opened the back door and ran.”

There was a fine line between bravery and stupidity, and I couldn’t determine which side this little girl stood on.

“All right, that’s not going to work for us,” I stated.

Shifting the rifle in my hands, I suggested, “We have a weapon. Let’s use it.”

Everyone agreed, except Harrison. I didn’t pay attention to it at the time, but he was concentrating on something else in the distance.

I crept to the peak and determined the distance. It was two hundred yards, making my target—their heads—that much smaller. Lying in prone, I planted my elbows in the snow and rested the barrel on top. Peering through the scope was like looking at a kaleidoscope of colors and movement. Despite the magnification, their movement left me nothing but challenging shots.

I breathed in and exhaled, focused, aimed, and selected my target. My muzzle followed him, slowly, patiently. I breathed in, exhaled, counted to three, and squeezed the trigger.

The Infected’s head exploded into red mist.

Someone behind me gasped.

I aimed at another and squeezed.

Beverly began chuckling to my right.

I aimed at another, breathed in, exhaled, and pulled the trigger.

Another Infected fell.

A curse word came next, which was delivered with enough fear to make me pull my head away and look up.

A flood of Infected had started to appear, wandering in their bent, disheveled amble from behind the store.

“Are they coming from the back?” I asked.

“No,” Christina groaned. “The wash.”

She pointed to a long, narrow ditch beyond the store, deep enough to hide the Infected now coming forward. As she did this, the wave of Infected grew, all of them drifting toward the sound of my gunfire. One swung around, focusing in on us. I aimed, squeezed, and took him down.

This drew the others’ noses into the air, sniffing for a direction to take.

“Oh no…,” Christina exhaled in terror.

“We don’t have enough ammo for them all,” I announced, pulling my rifle back.

“Okay, any other ideas?” Christina asked, her voice rising as she saw the Infected moving in our direction.

We slipped down the hill and out of sight to buy us time, dragging Christina with us. Once in position, squatting to remain out of sight, Harrison’s face tightened.

“They’re heading our way.”

“You know that?” Christina uttered, her eyes widening. “How do you know that?”

“Any other ideas?” I asked, trying to get us back on track.

“Yes,” Harrison replied firmly, and I knew by his tone that he’d been planning our entry while we’d been executing our own strategy. “We create a distraction and draw the Infected away from the store.”

“That’s sound,” Mei said, contemplating. “What distraction?”

Harrison heaved a sigh and gave me a fleeting look, one that said I wasn’t going to like what he was about to propose.

I braced myself.

“Me,” he said. “I’m the distraction. I’ll pull them away from the door and when they’re gone, you can enter.”

I didn’t waste time disagreeing. “That’s not a good plan.”

“It worked in Chicago, Kennedy.”

“Barely,” I argued.

“You know, I never in my life thought I’d say this,” Beverly whispered furiously, “but I agree with Kennedy.”

“Yeah,” Doc added. “Not a good way to go, buddy.”

“I’m in consensus,” Mei said with a sharp nod.

This made the decision final, so I thought.

Harrison’s focus landed over my shoulder off into the distance. His lips pinched suddenly and his nostrils flared in determination before he said to himself, “They’re not alone.” He did this just before moving back up the hill.

It seemed like he was going to check on our situation again, formulate a new plan that we all would agree to, but when he reached the top he didn’t stop and his body slipped over and out of sight.

He knew our time was short, that the Infected would reach us before we could get our act together and agree on a uniform strategy. So he took the matter into his own hands.

I cursed and began plowing my fingers and toes into the snow, clawing my way up the hill. Vaguely, I became aware of the others coming from behind me but their location took a distant second to Harrison’s.

He was at the base of the other side by the time he came back into my view, and without thinking I slid over the edge in a chase after him. When I breached the peak, my body came to a halt, despite my efforts to scrape at the snow and propel myself downward. It felt like the hill had reached out and grabbed me. But it wasn’t the hill. Doc’s hand had latched on to me, tightening around my ankle as I struggled. In a blur, I turned back and kicked with my free leg, but he was ready for me and leaned out of the way. Beverly and Mei took hold of that ankle too.

My mouth opened to scream for Harrison but I stopped myself short and it came out a moan, knowing even in my frenzy that any noise would only cause the Infected to find Harrison, ignite them, and help Harrison’s plan along that much quicker.

I looked up.

He was halfway across the parking lot, a lonely soul advancing on a slithering crowd in the distance. The space between us grew wider as he walked and my team hauled me up and over the hill, fear squeezing my chest every inch of the way. They pinned me down on the opposite side, but still I did my best to fight them off. Six limbs and Doc’s body weight was what it took to end my thrashing.

In the middle of it I heard Christina scoff, “He’s crazy, that guy is crazy.” I assumed she was watching Harrison, which gave me hope. By her words, I knew he hadn’t reached the Infected yet. A few seconds later, she looked back at us and witnessed our struggle and she added under her breath, “You’re all crazy…”

The Infected grew louder, their hisses and growls growing into a roar that rattled my chest, and I knew Harrison had reached them.

Fear consumed me as I stared across the countryside, a barren, white field stretching into the horizon, when just over the hill the man I loved was facing death. Then I saw what he had sensed just before he climbed up the hill and disappeared. His words ‘they’re not alone’ returned to me as I caught sight of the second group of Infected coming up behind us, their heads bobbing unevenly over the peak of a distant hill as they stumbled through the snow in our direction.

We were being flanked on two sides, but worse, we were gravely outnumbered.

Harrison knew this and rather than waste precious time explaining it, he had launched into doing the only thing he could for us, carve a path to safety.

Seconds later, his low, rumbling bellow came, and it chilled me deeper than any blistery morning could, cutting into my bones and scoring my lungs with a sharpness that stung worse than any knife.

“GOOOOOOOOOOO!”

On that mark, Doc, Mei, and Beverly released me with Doc hauling me to my feet. We raced up the hill together, my body taking me far faster than any of them.

At the top, I didn’t stop, hurling myself over the edge as my eyes swept the landscape for Harrison.

He wasn’t there.

The stabbing pain in my chest returned.

I found no one dressed in pure white carrying a camouflaged backpack across his shoulders, and there was no heap of Infected where he could have been piled under. This was because he wasn’t on the ground.

The only way I could differentiate him, or the direction he went, was by the Infected, who were streaming after him like a hive of bees aiming for a single target. They encircled him at the base of a light post at the corner of the building, where he was ascending rapidly to the top. A rope had been anchored between it and the store, allowing for access between where he was and where we were headed. A promotional sign hung from it, dirty, shredded and with a single word remaining visible: Hurry!

The irony made me both giddy at his chance and nauseous at the danger of it.

This was the reason the rest of the team kept me back, I thought. They saw what Harrison was doing long before me. I was so consumed by his separation from our team I hadn’t kept my head on straight or remembered to look ahead. I was now…straight at the store’s entrance.

“Get over it, Christina,” I overheard her telling herself, muttering in an almost inaudible, trembling voice. “Get over your issues. Get over it.”

That was all I heard while we ran. The idea of trampling the snow, and the noise that could threaten our furtive efforts, never occurred to me. As we snuck behind the rear of the Infected grouped beneath Harrison all we relied on was hope that none of them would turn and find us to be more easily available. We came that close to them, to becoming their version of fast food—easily obtainable and designed to satisfy a craving. Knowing this, I divided my focus between the store’s entrance and Harrison.