Slow Burn (Book 2): Infected (12 page)

I said, “I’m sure you can. Just don’t be too polite to stay alive.”

“And who are you, Zed? What part of yourself did you give up to be tough enough for
today’s world
?” Mandi said it as derisively as her excessive manners would allow, which made it all the more harsh.

Murphy said, “Now kids. We don’t need to argue.”

In a calm voice I said, “It’s cool, Murphy. Mandi, I’m not trying to offend you. I’m really not. You seem like a really, really nice person. I wish I’d known you before all of this went down. But to answer your question, I came into this world hardwired for success, and I think Murphy did, too.”

Mandi laughed out loud. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Murphy scoffed, “This one might be good enough to listen to. Heh, heh, heh.”

I said, “It’s like you said this morning, Murphy, when you were talking to Mandi. You put a smile on your face and take the world as it comes. You don’t attach your happiness to any false expectations of reality. You don’t expect the world to give you a big house and an expensive car and fat wife
—”

“
—Hey!” Murphy cut in, “Who said anything about a fat wife?”

I continued, “
—you’re not going to be unhappy without those things. You’re happy with what you have, not with what you think you should have. More importantly, you don’t wallow in the tears over what you’ve lost. Not many people are like that, Murphy.”

I took a big gulp of soda and continued. “As for me, I’m kind of the opposite of Murphy, but with a similar benefit. I had a pair of sub-optimal parents.”

Mandi giggled, “Sub-optimal?”

Murphy said, “He has a philosophy degree. He makes things more complicated than they need to be.”

I ignored them both. “I don’t get attached to things and people, like most folks. That’s to say that in yesterday’s world, I could probably have been considered emotionally unhealthy. I was too detached. In today’s world, that works well for me. All the despair and horror drift by without affecting me.”

Murphy disagreed, “Dude, I’m not sure that’s true.”

“It’s true enough,” I argued.

Mandi said, “I like Murphy’s approach better.”

I said, “You don’t have to pick one or the other, just find a way within who you are to suck it up and deal with today. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Then why didn’t you just say that?” asked Mandi.

“Like Murphy said, I’m a philosophy graduate.”

Murphy laughed.

It was after four o’clock. I was in the upstairs office since it had a window that opened to the front of the house and one that opened to the back. I sat at the desk, which, unfortunately looked out the back window and onto the grotesque heap of the dead. Russell squatted on the floor beside me. His inexplicable need to stay by me was starting to creep me out.

Murphy was leaning on the window sill in the office, staring at the vastness of the fire’s destruction. Mandi was in the bathroom downstairs, using the water out of the toilet’s tank to wash all of the crap off of her skin from her time in the bottom of the bunker.

Murphy said, “I think we should stay here tonight.”

“It’s as good a place as any, I guess,” I answered.

“But before it gets dark, let’s go through some of these other houses and see if there are any goodies.”

“Like what?”

Murphy asked, “What do you mean, like what? I don’t know. You got a hatchet and a machete earlier. That’s good stuff.”

“Murphy, we’ve got everything we need for the moment. There’s plenty of food downstairs to last us for three or four days. We’ve got nearly as much ammo as we can carry.”

“You’re not thinking ahead, Zed.”

That rubbed me the wrong way, but I put a thin veneer on my irritation and said, “Murphy, I’m fuckin’ tired. My head is still pounding from when I got blown up by the grenade.”

Murphy laughed, “Don’t be such a drama queen, Zed. If you’re a pussy with a headache, just say, ‘I’m a pussy with a headache,’ and we’ll leave it at that.”

“Fine. Let me check my phone, and then I’ll go with you. But just a few houses, okay? I want to be back before it gets dark.”

“Fine by me. I’ll go check on Mandi.” Murphy left the office and tromped down the stairs.

I turned on my phone and saw that I had messages. I checked Steph first.

Steph:
Zed, are you there?

Steph:
Zed, are you there?

Steph:
Zed, I hope you’re alive to read this. But I know the truth of it. If you’re not answering this then it’s because you’re dead. Everybody is. So I’m just writing this to myself. Dear Diary, I can’t stop crying.

Steph:
The first two groups all turned. Forty people infected and shot. We killed them. I feel like my heart is dying. We just infected twenty more.

Steph:
It feels like suicide now. Nobody is talking here. Everyone stares at the walls or out the windows. There’s no hope. No hope, only prayers and tears.

Steph:
If by some miracle you’re still alive and you read this, you need to know that I’m in the next group to get infected. I’m volunteering. Goodbye, Zed. Thank you for being a friend. I wish I’d gotten to know you better. I know I’ll die soon and I’m okay with that. I don’t want to be in this world anymore.

“Shit,” I blinked away my tears and looked around. I wanted to do something, anything, but I knew there was nothing. The messages were hours old. Steph had lost hope. She was likely infected. She was likely dying or dead.

That thought left me with a hollow, black feeling that stuck in my throat. Life had been so much easier without emotional attachments.

I texted Steph back several times. I stared at the pile of holocaust corpses as I waited for a response.

God, the world was so fucked up.

With hopes that felt unrealistic as soon as they bubbled up, I tried calling Amber.

No answer.

After the last ring, my text message icon indicated that a message had arrived.

Amber:
Zed, is that you?

Me:
Yes.

Amber:
I can’t talk right now. Text me back.

Me:
Why can’t you talk? What’s going on?

Amber:
I’m trying to stay as quiet as I can.

Me:
Why? What happened?

Amber:
Things got really crazy then it got real quiet.

Me:
Tell me what happened, exactly.

Amber:
I don’t know exactly. I’ve been afraid to leave the room. What I know is that Felicity and Wilkins turned. They’re locked in a room down the hall. Another of the guys got the fever and they locked him up. Afterwards, there was a lot of shouting in the hall. Mark and Marcy were yelling at the other guys. There were shots then and I only heard Mark and Marcy’s voices. Mark started to run up and down the hall yelling and talking crazy with Marcy egging him on. It was insane for a while, Zed.

Me:
For a while?

Amber:
Not now. Everything is quiet.

Me:
I’m coming to get you out. Right now.

Amber:
No! Please don’t come here, Zed.

Me:
Why not?

Amber:
Zed, please don’t. Mark is crazy. He’ll kill you.

Me:
No he won’t.

Amber:
If you rush over here and risk your life you might not make it this time. If you keep risking your life, you’re going to get killed. And for what?

Me:
To help.

Amber:
Zed, we don’t even know yet that I need help. Mark and Marcy are probably infected. They’ve probably got the fever. That’s why they’re quiet. If I’m patient then they’ll wander off like all the other crazy infected do. If I sit tight for a few days, I’ll probably be fine.

Me:
Fine. That makes sense. I hate doing nothing.

Amber:
Besides, I might be infected, Zed. I might turn into one of them.

Me:
Let’s hope not.

Amber:
Hope is all I have, Zed.

Me:
Hope is important. Hang in there. I’ll check in later, okay?

Amber:
Okay.

Me:
If anything changes, call. I have a full charge on my phone.

The house next door yielded nothing. The neighbors had taken everything of post-apocalyptic value with them when they made their escape. There was, of course, a nice flat panel television, decent furniture, and plenty of clothing, none of which was of any value to me.

Would I eventually need a winter coat? Sure. But the world was my closet. I’d find a coat in the nearest house when it got cold. Not that it made any difference, but it was finally a tick on the pro side of my pros and cons list for the post-virus world
—free clothes.

I smiled.

Murphy gave me a questioning look.

We moved on to the next house. That one left us all in a dark mood.

Prior to kicking in the back door, I beat on it with my fist, followed, of course, by Russell beating on the door as soon as I finished. It seemed like a good way to wake any infected before we made the mistake of letting ourselves in and letting them out. A man, a woman, and three children, all infected, came to the back windows of the house and pressed themselves against the glass as they howled their frustration at not being able to get their hands on us.

We hopped a fence and repeated the process at the third house. I beat on the door, expecting more infected. Russell beat on the door, too, but we got no response. So Murphy broke the door down.

Inside, the house’s floor plan looked to be the mirror image of Russell’s house. With Murphy in the lead, we searched the house, guns out. No infected were there to be found.

With the house clear, Murphy and Mandi started searching downstairs. Russell followed me toward the upstairs to look for goodies.

Almost immediately, Mandi cried, “Jackpot!” She liked that word.

She stood in front of the pantry, the first place she checked.

I shushed her and went over. I understood her glee when I saw the water. The water was a blessing that we all needed, and the bottles would make great little canteens for refill later. I tossed some in my bag and Russell and I went upstairs.

We started in a kid's room, because I'd spied a school backpack there when we’d cleared the house. It lay on a bed covered with crumpled sheets.

With Russell observing, I removed some textbooks and notebooks from the backpack and stacked them neatly on the dresser. I don’t know why a tidy stack of schoolbooks was important to me. The back pocket on the pack held pens, keys, some change, a few markers, and a student ID.

I took a moment to examine the ID. Patrick Henry Dubois was a good-looking kid with a big grin. He must have been thrilled when they photographed him on his first day of ninth grade at the Science and Math Academy. The green polo shirt that Patrick wore in that picture was rumpled on the carpet along with a pair of kaki shorts, beneath Russell’s feet. A band instrument case stood against the wall. Posters of favorite bands and a college football team decorated the wall. A dormant computer sat on a desk. A kid had lived in this room, a kid who I’d taken for granted as dead.

I felt hollow.

I lay the ID on the dresser beside the book. I didn't need to see his face. I didn't need to know what school he went to. I didn't need to know what grade he was in. It was all personal, humanizing information that made everything in the room real. It changed my activity from a scavenger hunt to a painful rummage through the possessions of a dead child.

I drew a deep breath and tried stifle what I was suddenly feeling.

Empathy for the dead and infected was an emotional luxury I knew I couldn't afford. I had to find a way past it. I was having trouble enough paying for the empathy I felt for the living.

Russell complied when I asked him to stand still. Like a parent getting his child ready for school, I put the empty backpack on him and adjusted the straps. Russell wasn't proving to be useful for much of anything, but he could at least carry his share of the load, a burden we were all going to have to get used to.

I searched the closet and found a twenty-seven-inch aluminum baseball bat, probably left over from the kid's little league days. I picked it up and hefted it in one hand. It was long enough to be lethal, but light enough to be wielded in one hand.

I spent a moment debating whether I'd be better off with the machete or the baseball bat, for times when bullets weren't the right answer.

The primary advantage of the baseball bat was that there was no risk of it getting stuck in the skull of an infected, which could happen with the machete. A skull-stuck machete could be a life-ending dilemma.

In the end, I slipped the bat into Russell's backpack, with the handle sticking out of the top. Nothing else in the room appeared to be of any real value.

The master bedroom held a big bed, a television mounted on the wall, and a closet full of the kind of clothes that were well-suited to the modern world.

A small pair of hiking boots found its way into Russell's backpack. They might fit Mandi.

In the nightstand, I found a drawer full of medicine. Murphy's insistence that we search suddenly seemed well worth it when I came across a half-full bottle of amoxicillin. I opened the bottle and swallowed two of the antibiotic capsules immediately. I looked at the crusty bite scabs on my arm. I was probably out of the woods on infection, but the antibiotics were good insurance.

The antibiotics, a big bottle of hydrocodone, some aspirin, and ibuprofen all went into Russell's backpack. The prescription medicines I wasn't familiar with, I left at first. On reflection, I went back and picked them up. Medicines could be of great value to the people who needed them, and the supply would eventually run low. At that point, expiration dates be damned. People on the maintenance drugs would trade away anything to get them.

I heard Murphy
’s and Mandi’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

Murphy said, “You need to see this shit.”

He took me over to the window that faced the street.

“What the fuck?”

Murphy said, “Uh-huh.”

Mandi asked, “What is it?”

Murphy answered, “I don’t know. Some kind of crazy follow-the-leader bullshit?”

Several blocks up a street that came to a t-intersection with our unburned street, a line of about thirty infected were jogging in single file, following a serpentine path that was visible only to them.

“What the fuck?” I reiterated.

Mandi asked, “Are those infected? What are they doing?”

Murphy said, “Man that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. When I was looking out the front window downstairs, I thought I saw movement way down the street. Then I saw those Whites coming along, playing follow-the-leader up the street all lined up. Just like that. Man, they do weird stuff, but this is really creepy.”

Mandi scooted away from the window. “It gives me the heebie jeebies.”

Murphy, Russell and I continued to stare. When the line of infected got to within half a block of our street, they all looked to their right in near unison. The group split in the middle and they jogged in their lines across a burned front yard, systematically around the remains of a house and a burned car, peeking through each gap and into each hole.

“What do you make of that?” Murphy asked.

I said, “They’re searching. Maybe they heard something.”

“Yeah, but look, they’re acting like a group.”

“I see that, but it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, they’re all brain damaged. They aren’t that smart.”

With Russell standing silently beside me, I watched as the group of infected finished going around the house’s remains and jogged back into the street where the relative disorder of the two groups resolved quickly into a single line of infected. They resumed jogging a serpentine path toward our street.

When the group arrived at the t-intersection a few houses over, the line made a right turn and jogged off to the north.

After a few minutes, Mandi asked, “Are they gone yet?”

“Yeah,” I answered, watching the empty street.

“What were they doing?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Are they learning how to work together?”

“I don’t know. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Murphy said, “Creepy, huh?”

Both Mandi and I nodded.

“Snack?” Murphy asked.

“Yes!” Mandi said enthusiastically. She probably had several days’ worth of calories to catch up on.

Mandi sat on the bed and Murphy dropped down beside her. Russell and I sat on the floor. We shared a big box of kid’s cereal that we ate by the handful and washed down with warm soda or water.

Mandi and Murphy rattled on about the infected while I thought about the behavior and tried to squeeze it into the context of all the things I’d learned. When inspiration hit, I said, “Have you guys ever heard of emergent behavior?”

Mandi said, “I don’t even know what that means.”

I told her, “I have an idea about what we just saw.”

Murphy said, “Hey
, Mandi, pass that cereal over here. This sounds like it’s going to be a long answer, and I don’t want go hungry while I’m pretending to listen.”

Mandi giggled.

I said, “Emergent behavior is something you see in birds, for instance. Let’s say you have one bird and you want to understand everything there is to know about bird behavior. You can watch that bird all day long for years and years, from the moment it hatches until the moment it dies, and if all you ever have is that one bird, you’d never know anything about flocks of birds.”

Murphy was focused on his cereal, and making no effort to listen or pretend to.

Mandi though, was politely intent. “Okay, professor.”

I rolled my eyes. “When you see a flock of birds, they all seem to fly together. They move like one giant organism changing direction as one, going up and down, choosing to land and to take off.”

Murphy, who apparently
was
listening, asked through a mouthful, “Aren’t they just following the head bird or something?”

“No, that’s just it. They’ve done studies on bird behavior, and they don’t follow one bird. They all seem to turn at pretty much the same time. Nobody knows exactly how they decide that. It’s the same with fish. They school, and when they’re in a school, it’s like they stop being individuals and start being one organism. Again, without a leader that can be identified. It’s like they’re operating by consensus, but nobody knows how they come to their consensus decisions.”

Murphy said, “C’mon, man, there’s got to be one in charge.”

“Nope, they’ve studied the movement with video at multiple angles with computers. There doesn’t seem to be a leader.”

Mandi asked, “So the short version is?”

I rolled my eyes again. “The behavior of the group, that is, the behavior that can’t be predicted from observing the behavior of the individual, is called emergent behavior. There’s this interesting study this guy did with ants…”

Mandi cut me off. “That’s okay, Zed. I don’t need to know about the ants. Is there a shorter version?”

“But it’s really interesting stuff,” I protested.

“No, Zed. I’m good. You make my brain hurt when you start talking all of your mumbo jumbo.”

I huffed and stuffed some cereal into my mouth.

Murphy said, “I don’t want to hear about the ants, but let’s say that you’re right about this emergent behavior thing. Zed, what does it mean for us in a practical sense? Do we need to be worried? Are the infected learning how to work in teams, like packs of wolves? Are they going to become more dangerous to us?”

I said, “I don’t know. I guess that you could classify pack behavior in dogs and wolves as emergent behavior. I’m not an expert in this stuff. So I’m kinda guessing. Wolves evolved to hunt together successfully, and they’re able to learn how to hunt certain animals in certain ways. I don’t know if the infected are learning to work together, or if what we saw was just a manifestation of some kind of herding instinct that’s hardwired into the human brain. I’m going to guess that it doesn’t present any added threat to us, but I think we should keep an eye on them and see what happens. We are all in new territory.”

Mandi rolled her eyes and smiled, “Yeah, today’s world, not yesterday’s world. We’ve heard that speech already, Dad.”

Murphy laughed, “I think they’re all just a bunch of Russells.”

I said, “You guys can be a pain in the ass.”

That's when Murphy spotted another line of the infected jogging out of the distance. There were more in that group.

A lot more.

As we watched, the group separated into a pair of lines that intertwined like a living double helix as they came up the street.

"There are hundreds in that bunch," Murphy said.

I nodded.

"Are we safe in here?" Mandi asked. "Is there somewhere we should go?"

I heard the sounds of the infected from somewhere behind us. I ran to the back window to look.

The group of thirty that had gone up the street had come around the unburned houses and found their way to the decaying corpses. I don't know if the sounds were jubilant, but they were loud. They fell on the pile of the dead and started to gorge themselves on the flesh.