The Infected: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (26 page)

"I know all about the infected," Sam said.

"Yes," David continued, "it yielded both dead and undead results but also it produced something else."

Sam gripped the barrel of the gun tighter. "Which was?"

"It produced an outlier group on the opposite side of the spectrum. It produced you. You're not immune from the virus, Samantha. The virus has fused with your DNA. It changed you. It made you stronger."

"I've heard this story," Sam said. "I know the how. Tell me they why."

"We discovered these results during the quarantine protocol, and a new program was initiated. The virus had caused a new subspecies of the human race to blossom. You were initially thought to be valuable because you served as a resource for creating an antivirus, but later we discovered that your group could serve different purposes. You were trained to fight the undead with hopes of someday exterminating them from our planet. When your training was complete, you were cryogenically frozen until the time was deemed appropriate to bring you back. According to your test results, Samantha, you were one of the most highly decorated students."

"Why freeze us?" Sam asked.

"The Bilderberg Group's primary initiative was survival. You were frozen until the antivirus was created. And we altered the plan due to Concordia's declining population rates. They once again tasked the Flowers Corporation with…how do I put this…fixing the world again.

"We unthawed a select group of you to run trials throughout the country. Each subgroup is given a different amount of variables with the focus on answering the most basic of questions. What makes you happy? What makes you sad? What makes you want to reproduce? Then that data is used to construct living plans for the citizens of Concordia. That is all of your purposes. To serve the citizens of our great city. And you all do it well."

"We're science experiments?" Sam asked.

"Yes."

"And your role in all this?"

"I'm the lead scientist of the Flowers Corporation."

Sam's blood boiled. "And why shouldn't I end you right here and right now, lead scientist?"

David, who had remained still until that point, stretched out his arm and signaled to the center copter. Sam tightened her grip on the gun as two men emerged from the rear: a soldier and a prisoner. A black hood veiled the prisoner's face and thick metal shackles bound his hands and feet together. Sam's heartbeat quickened. There was no one left for her in this world. No one that she cared enough about to let David go free. No one that she remembered.

"Bring him here," David commanded. The soldier shoved the prisoner with the butt of his rifle and the man shuffled forward.

"You've already taken everyone I love and care about away from me," Sam said. "No one can save you. No one will serve as a bargaining chip—"

The soldier snatched the hood from the prisoner's head and Sam's heart exploded. Underneath the black hood was her best friend, her soul mate, Jordan Riggs. His face was battered and bruised and he sported a thick, unkempt beard. He had lost weight and his bushy face was gaunt. But it was Jordan none the same.

Her grip on the pistol loosened and tears stung at her eyes. "Jordan?" Silver tape wrapped all the way around his head, and covered his mouth.

"Lower your weapon," David said. "Or I'll have him executed in front of you." His voice was cold. Emotionless.

"But…but Jordan's dead."

"It's the 24
th
Century, Samantha. Hearts can be healed, wounds can be patched. Now please, lower your weapon."

Sam did as he asked and David stepped away from her. The soldiers lifted their weapons in unison; a dozen automatic rifles aimed right at her. She stared into Jordan's eyes. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to lift the barrel of the Remington and kill everyone here and then make a run for it. There were 15 bullets. It was possible. Sam eyed the crowd.

"Don't even think about it, Samantha." David turned and extended his hand out. "I promise either you or him will die if you try to escape." He offered her a ghoulish grin and the image of his face on the body of midnight runner flashed through her mind. Her skin crawled at the memory.

"Why did you appear as a midnight runner in my dreams?" Sam asked.

"Hand me the gun, Samantha."

"If memories of you were just Easter eggs, then why would you—"

"Samantha, I don't have time to get into the intricacies of my program, and even if I did I believe the details would bore you. It doesn't matter why I appeared the way I did. The reasons don't concern you. All that matters is that you hand me the gun."

"Let us go," Sam said. "If you let us go, we'll stay away from here. We'll never come back."

"Now why would I do that? I want you to come back. Haven't you figured it out yet? Every time you make this journey, you place us one step closer to building the perfect human. To creating the perfect society. This is your fourth journey from New Hope and by far the most impressive one yet. You staying away from here? That's the last thing that I want."

"Please," Sam pleaded.

David shushed her. "My darling, don't be afraid. You'll wake up tomorrow and it will be like none of this ever happened. And then you'll see your sister again and Jordan. You'll see Cole again. My team has already ascertained the location of his body and is in the process of recovering him. Tomorrow he'll be good as new. "

"And then the next day you'll rip him away from me again?" Tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked to Jordan. He was so close to her. "How many times have I suffered through Jordan dying, or Rebecca? When is enough truly enough?"

"It will never be enough. It's the loss of those things that makes you fight so hard," David said. "That's why I take them away. Jordan, Rebecca, Cole, Nick, Alex. All of their deaths give you strength."

"I don't want to be strong anymore," Sam said.

"Samantha, you are perfect. You will always be strong—"

Sam lifted the barrel of the gun to her temple. David's eyes widened and his lips screwed into a frown. "I can end this right now. If I pull the trigger it all goes away. You. Troy. Concordia. All of it. Then what will you do?"

"I'll use a clone of you to run my experiments," David said. "It won't be the first time we've used them."

"But it won't be me," Sam said. "It will just be a copy. How will that affect your data? Will it be special like me? Will it fight as hard as I do? Will it be
strong
?"

David sighed. "Fine. New proposal. You put the gun down and we return you to New Hope." He shook his head and his face grew red as he continued. "Or you shoot yourself and I subject your boyfriend to the most torturous death imaginable." His voice rose until he was beet red and screaming. "I'll peel the flesh from his bones and make him eat it. I'll cut off his dick and shove it down his throat. Do you understand me, bitch? I fucking own you. I created you!"

"And if I shoot him first?" Sam asked, her voice steady. "I can shoot him and turn the gun on myself before your soldiers get off their first round and you know I can…
bitch
."

David chuckled and then his laugh grew into a fit of hysteria. There was a wild look in his eyes and Sam kept her finger firmly on the trigger. She was ready to sacrifice both Jordan and herself. They would be dead but they would be dead together. No more torture. No more journeys.

"Fine!" David yelled. He kicked the metal cart and sent the monitor flying. He took a deep breath and then another. When he spoke again his words were even and measured. "You win. You and Jordan leave here today, right now. But know that I will find you again. And when I do, I'll kill everyone you love and make you watch as I do."

"Haven't you already done that?" Sam asked.

"Leave this place," David said and turned his back toward them. "And don't come back. Daniels, release the prisoner."

"Dr. Kidwell—" Daniels started, but David interrupted.

"I said release him."

The guard's face twisted in disbelief, but he did as David commanded and unlocked the Jordan's manacles. The chains fell to the ground and Jordan pulled down the tape from around his mouth. Sam took a cautious step forward and then the two embraced each other.

She looked up at him and he bent down and kissed her. His face was sticky from the tape, but she didn't mind. She savored every second of the warm, wet perfect kiss. "You're alive," she whispered as she pulled away.

The men in white coats gathered up the gear as a couple of soldiers escorted David back toward the helicopter. A pair of ravens cawed overhead as they dipped through the morning sky together. Sam smiled. She had won. Maybe not the war, but she had won this battle.

"Sam," Jordan said, "we need to leave before it's too—"

"Sir," one of the scientists said from near the copters, "the memory suppression device just came back online."

David spun and his dark eyes gleamed in the sunlight. Sam remembered the nightmare of David turning into the midnight runner. The boy from her dreams was pure evil. She hadn't won. "Set memory suppression to 100 percent," David said at once.

Sam pulled away, her eyes wide with terror. Her mind raced with all the things she wanted to say. "Jordan, I love you."

"Charge is ready. Waiting on your signal, David."

"Remember the flowers, Sam," Jordan said. "Remember the—"

Alarms blared overhead. Sam and Rebecca huddled against the wall at the forefront of the crowd. Rebecca's wide eyes gleamed as tears spilled down her cheeks. Sam knelt down, so she was eye-level with the little girl and grasped her by the shoulders.

"What's happening?" Rebecca asked.

The vaguest of memories slipped past Sam's mind. She had been standing outside some enormous city and Jordan had been with her. She tried to hold on to it, but it disappeared into the ether of her mind. She took a deep breath. "You know what's happening," Sam said. "They've breached the walls."

"It's not a drill?"

"No. It's not a drill."

"Will everything be okay?"

"Yes…everything will be okay."

The End

Read on for a free sample of Coalition: A Zombie Novel

1

Looking down at the streets, he thought about the things all of those old end-of-the-world movies got wrong.

More than anything, it was the vegetation. None of those crazy old movies ever got that part right or even mentioned it. It had only been eighteen months since the various arms of the government had stopped working, and he doubted that there was more than a hundred yards of road anywhere in the state that a wheeled vehicle could navigate. Within days of the last maintenance crew, becoming either dead or  chow for the Deaders, most of the streets were impassable. He swatted at a deerfly that had landed on his neck to take a bite. His neck was just about the only exposed surface showing through his clothes, despite the almost 90-degree heat. He glanced at the thermometer he had erected under an overhanging ledge just outside his safe house and grunted. Ten o’clock in the morning and it was 85 degrees already. Shit, it was going to be a scorcher.

He scanned the parts of the city that he could see from his perch six floors above the streets. The sun was up, unfiltered by clouds of any sort, and the deads were out in force. Within a two-block area, he did a quick head-count of fifty, and those were just the ones he could see. If he went down, he would have to be exceedingly careful. Of course, it was hard to be any more careful than he was at any other time of the day or night. Sometimes, he was surprised that his heart didn’t burst or his head split fucking wide open just from the stress.

The deads were doing their usual thing; just standing around or merely staggering absently from point A to point B. They rarely did anything that made any sense at all. Unless, of course, you thought that standing around doing nothing at all was logical. Hell. Maybe it was.

Maybe they were the only things that really made sense anymore. Sometimes, he wondered what good it was just staying alive.

“Shit!”

He swatted at another deerfly that had located the patch of unprotected skin around his collar. Cutter hadn’t really been thinking of going down into the streets and so hadn’t pulled on his full rig. One of the first things he had learned when the big shit had hit the giant fan was that you needed to make yourself as hard to bite as possible. Sometimes that meant just adding a couple of layers of durable cloth. These days, that was a definite, even if it was going to be 90 degrees and up. Cutter squinted, scanning the local area, trying to see if any of his living neighbors were out and about, or if indeed they were still among the living. Despite everything, despite knowing that too much compassion could get you really dead, really fast, he still worried about some of the people he’d come to know as his very strange neighbors.  Of course, that made him think of the final days of what had once been normal.

**

When things finally went all to Hell, Cutter was at work. There were some tiny details during the insanity that came before that crazy stuff, which he could not now recall, but that particular day was burned into his mind like a brand.

Looking back, it was surprising how many people had actually shown up for work that final day. At first, they’d had a full crew; a person at every desk. The government all the way from the White House down to the local commissioners had been encouraging everyone to try to continue to live as if things were going to get better. When he thought about it now, it almost made his blood boil. The folk who were supposed to look out for society had been more concerned with keeping the economy chugging along than with ensuring a citizen’s safety. Protect yourself, they had been told. But don’t panic. Don’t shut yourselves away. Go to work. Go shopping. Spend money.

Right. Spend some money.

On that final day, he had left his apartment after his boss had called him to make sure he was coming in. “I’m calling everyone,” Linden had told him, the New York accent coming over the phone. “I’m not picking on you, but I just want to make sure you’ll be in. That is why I’m calling everybody,” the man said, and he was probably telling the truth. In fact, Linden was a physical ox of a man, liked to think of himself as the alpha male, and seemed to relish lording his power over his subordinates. One of his specialties was threatening employees with their jobs.

“I’ll be there,” Cutter had said, parting the blinds of his bedroom window and peeking out at the driveway, looking to see if any of those shambling wrecks was staggering around, looking for someone to kill and eat. Even at that point, everyone was aware of what was going on. Something that had happened started to making the recently dead come back to life. Not actual life, but nearly so. They weren’t very smart—not even by American standards—something about a lack of oxygen while the brain was waiting to reactivate. However, there were two things about them that almost made up for that lack of smarts; they were freaking mean and they all seemed to wake up very damned hungry for one thing—human flesh.

Almost from the beginning, it got out of hand. At first people thought these newly, risen folk were just sick. They weren’t really dead, but in a walking coma of some kind. Families locked up their relatives and friends in rooms and figured they would come to their senses in time. All that resulted in was ensuring that more people were attacked, bitten, and some of them eaten up. If everyone who was bitten ended up as a meal, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, the bitten got very sick and in short order they died, and then rose like the undead folk who had bitten them. Cutter had seen some guy on TV doing the math, trying to warn about how bad things were getting, and how bad they were going to get. Nobody listened to that guy, and the story was that he’d been arrested and locked up.

Nevertheless, the government kept assuring everyone that things were going to be all right just as soon as they could get a handle on the nature of the situation. However, that had been the problem. How could you pin down the nature of something that wasn’t at all natural?

During those last days, they had all been pretty much ordered to keep doing things the way everyone was supposed to. “Keep living your lives,” the authorities had told them. He remembered the President and Vice-President making appearances telling one and all to just go about their ways—within reason. “Go to your jobs. Go on your vacations. Go shopping.”

Jesus.

After taking that call from his boss, he had called his ex-wife Patsy to tell her one more time to watch out for their daughter Amelia. He had been after Patsy for more than a month at that point, trying to get her to let him move back in with her just for the sake of safety. “I’ll take the downstairs bedroom,” he’d offered. “Just let me come home and that way, I can keep an eye out for you and Amelia.” He had all but begged her. Now, he wished he had begged.

When it was too late to do anything, but regret everything that came before, it was at work that he had realized that things had broken completely down. He should have bolted and made a run for his old place, and Patsy’s complaints be damned. It would probably have already been too late, but who knows? He might have been able to save them. Likely not, though. These days, he kept himself sane by repeating that last bit of argument. He didn’t like to think of Amelia. She had only been eight years old. Whenever her blue eyes, light brown hair, and smiling face came to mind, he would shake his head, blink his eyes, and banish the image as quickly as he could. The world as it turned out was no place for regrets or self-sympathy.

On the way to work that final day, he had seen no fewer than a dozen of the dead going about their mindless ways. Well, not quite mindless. When they had the living to target, they seemed to concentrate just fine. It was when they didn’t see anyone to hurt that, they appeared to be less than the killing machines that they were. Before those days of bloody insanity, he had never much given any thought at all to the power of human jaws. He had never thought of a person’s teeth as weapons. Now he knew that they were quite effective. It was especially bad when the thing working those jaws and teeth was infused with any number of infective pathogens ready to invade a victim’s body and send it into septic shock.

Cutter had read the reports and listened to the news bits on what the CDC had been able to discover as society was plummeting into destruction. The cause of the rise of the dead wasn’t ever pinpointed, except that a virus was suspected. They figured something like AIDS, or maybe some kind of flu. A mad genius terrorist was also another option he had heard about, but when the cops started descending on workplaces to warn people about spreading lies that could create more panic, that story had soon been put to rest in a way the dead could not be.

One report he had watched on CNN had conjectured that this had happened before, on a smaller scale around the planet down through history, and that is where our legends of vampires and ghouls had arisen.  However, the outbreaks had been very limited in those days and either faded out or brought quickly under control.

He often mused that maybe if people were more savage, then things would not have ended up the way they did. Perhaps a man from the Dark Ages was far more likely to cave in the heads of his parents when they became raving fiends instead of loving relatives. Never having faced putting down the reanimated corpse of a loved one, he couldn’t say now what he might have done in those early days. Initially the practice of treating them had been as sick people and it had enabled the situation to get completely out of hand. He was convinced of that.

By the time he had arrived that last day at his place of employment, he had already seen two people attacked and bloodied. The first one had been a man coming out of a convenience store with a bag of food. Before the man could react, a shambler had lunged out of the autos parked between the street and the shop. Cutter would have gotten out of his car to help, but a police officer arrived and started shooting, so he had given his Toyota the gas and fled as quickly as he could. Less than five minutes later, sitting at a red light, another shambler loomed out of a yard to his right. At first, he thought that it was coming for his car, but it suddenly veered left and latched on to a woman who’d been standing, waiting for the bus. He shook his head, just thinking of that. Waiting for a bus. Christ! Two men standing near her leaped to her aid, but it was too late. The thing had already taken a hunk of meat out of her neck. Blood was everywhere and once more Cutter just floored it, steering around the car in front of him and running the light. That hadn’t been very courageous of him, but the fact that he’d rarely put himself at risk over the intervening months had ensured his survival.

When he had finally pulled into the lot and was parking his car, he had peered around to see if there was any sign of danger. Quickly, he had opened his door and sprinted for the brick façade of Briggs Stationers, his employer for most of his adult life; three floors of rooms attached to an enormous warehouse stacked to the ceilings with all manner of supplies important to the running of any office. Someone inside unlocked and opened it for him as soon as he got to the door. That was the way they had been admitting people for the better part of a week. Someone watched and opened up. The door was quickly latched behind anyone entering. On that day, Vickie Penland was the one who had been standing, waiting for him with the key in hand, and peeking out from behind one of the thick curtains that kept out the bright sunlight.

Cutter had actually leaned against the wall, feeling the cool air on him, keeping the heat and humidity of the outside at bay. Back then, he hadn’t known that one day soon air conditioning would just be a memory in the worst parts of summer. As with so many things from before, he missed that cool, dry air. When the weather was oppressive there was now no way to cut it.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Vickie was a pretty girl with red hair, and a kind of short, nice figure. Thinking of her, he recalled that she liked to wear tight dresses with bright primary colors. That day, though, she had been wearing some bland color—a pair of slacks and a long-sleeved shirt. At the time, he thought it was a bad choice for such a hot day, but maybe she already knew what a person needed to do. Cover that soft, vulnerable flesh. Of course, she probably didn’t make it, no more than anyone else at Briggs Stationers had made it. He knew of no one there who had. At least he had never met one of them in the days since.

Maybe, I’m the only one out of there who did make it, Cutter thought.

“I’m okay,” he told her. “Just saw some crazy shit on the way over here. Now there are more of them than ever. They need to lock things down,” he whispered. Cutter was afraid of what might happen to anyone who spoke out too much about the way things were being handled. Maybe the cops would come and haul your ass away for spreading panic, the way they had when the terrorist rumors had been making the rounds. Some panic might have done some good, but by then it was already much too late.