The Infected (10 page)

Take care,

Sam W

1:13pm, June 6

My Dad’s gone.

I just got a frantic call from my mother. He freaked out this morning and ran out of the house. The others in the house tried to stop him. But he fought them off. My mother says that the streets are filled with the infected

2:37pm, June 6

Sorry, I couldn’t carry on earlier. Why the fuck, Dad!? He’s… he is, more than likely… dead.

That was hard to type.

Spoke to my Mom again and she is, quite understandably, beside herself. We both broke down. I couldn’t get any more details from her. Maybe later.

Sam

8:03pm, June 6

Okay, we have both calmed down, and even though I couldn’t speak for too long because of a dwindling cell battery, I now know a bit more about what happened earlier.

My Dad had been becoming increasingly anxious and nervous according to my Mom. For the last three days he had spent most of the time in bed, not sleeping, but just staring into the distance. If anyone knows my Dad, they know that he cannot sit still. When I was at school he would be up at 4:30am every day for work, and on the weekends, he would still be up at 4:30am, tinkering at something, fixing a broken light or cleaning the cars, even in the middle of winter. In the summer months, he would wait with bated breath for the clock to strike 8am, an indication that it was now socially acceptable to make a bit of noise, and thus, in my elder years, a night out late on the piss and the subsequent drunken sleep was usually interrupted, like clockwork at 8:01am, by the chugging sound of our petrol lawnmower (beneath my bedroom window, may I add), spluttering into life. Even now, well, before now, when everything was alright, I would wake up in the morning feeling like death, the taste of uncountable Jack Daniels and lime in my mouth, and at least feel a bit better because there was no mad man mowing his perfectly manicured lawn below me! So yeah, him staying in bed for a couple days was certainly out of character.

Then yesterday afternoon, my Mom reports, he was particularly ratty, and when everyone in their enclave got together for their daily ‘meeting’ (where they rationed out the food, updated the lookout roster and discussed the next day’s course of action), my Dad snapped at his fellow housemates, calling them “naive” for believing that they would one day be saved and calling the notion that they would all survive “ludicrous”. I suppose that they all must have thought this at some point, but none of them had voiced it to each other. And not as ferociously and vehemently as my Dad had. On his way out of the meeting, my Dad tossed a coffee cup into the group, catching one of his friends above the eye and splitting the skin quite badly. The rest of the people were understandably quite enraged and, if it hadn’t been for my mother, might have taken retribution right there and then. Luckily she managed to talk them out of it and they decided to let him sleep it off and confront him in the morning.

So once the household was awake, they summoned everyone into the kitchen where they, again according to my Mom, “ganged up” on my Dad. I suppose, in his state, it was no surprise that he responded and retaliated. Again, if you knew him, you would know that he wouldn’t harm a fly – he was… is… such a gentle soul. It’s quite surprising that he didn’t actually move into a field such as the hospital environment or maybe working as a social worker, because he cared so much for everybody. Don’t know how he ended up in metallurgy, and come to think of it, I don’t have a clue what metallurgy is. I lived with the man for so long and was brought up by him but I don’t even know what he did on a day-to-day basis. You know what? That makes me feel even more like shit than I already do.

So my Dad absorbed all the allegations meted out to him and then lashed back at everyone there, including my mother. He swore at them, swung at them and spat at them. “He was mad,” my mother said. He then ran from the kitchen, grabbed one of the guns that they left by the front door for protection, and opened the door, the first time that it had been opened in nigh on a month. As you can imagine, pandemonium ensued, with half the people, my mother included obviously, trying to grab at him to pull him back in so that they could close the door, and the other half trying to push him out so that they could do the same – close the door. Thinking about it now, opening up the door and possibly alerting the infected to the presence of the other people in the house was a very selfish thing to do for a person who was very selfless…

But he did, and although the tug-of-war to get him back/push him out continued for a while, my Dad’s dogged determination to leave the place that he had called home for the past few weeks eventually got the better of everyone and he was out of their grasp. My Mom says she didn’t actually see him leaving as all she recalls was curling up into the fetal position and crying, but the others recounted to her how he had run for the gate with his arms and the gun aloft, and as he scaled the wall to leave the protection of the house, he looked back at the door and gave them a cheery wave. The next second he slipped over the wall and was gone. The last memory my mother will have of my father will be of hearing a cacophony of gun shots and then deadly silence.

I wish I could be there with her, to console her. Or do I wish I was with her so she could console me?

That’s enough.

Sam

5:45, June 7

The hangover has finally worn off. So it’s about time to start drinking again then. I’m still alive though, missing my Dad like you can only miss someone once they have passed. I’ve been thinking about him all day – like the time when he bust me smoking (hey, I’ve just made a mid-year’s resolution to start smoking. Fuck, if the world is going to come to an end, I may as well enjoy it). Remember that carton of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes that I found in the flat next door? Well I found it under the couch, searched high and wide for some matches before eventually finding some at the bottom of the spare room cupboard, and lit a smoke. I coughed into a pillow to limit the noise. It was horrible. But I persevered through it, and by the third cigarette I could remember why I liked it so much when I was younger. (Even though calling me a ‘smoker’ would have been a stretch).

Anyway, I was fourteen and obviously wanted to be cool – well cooler than I already thought I was. It was school holidays and my folks where both at work. I was home alone and my Mom had left me money to go up to the corner café, a ten minute walk away, and get some lunch. For some reason, and I still don’t know why, I bought a pack of cigarettes instead of a toasted cheese, bacon and onion sandwich and chips. And for some other reason, and I don’t know why again, they allowed a fourteen year old to buy a box of smokes. I was quite short for my age so I certainly didn’t look old enough – maybe they just thought that I was too young to be buying them for myself and that I must have been buying them for someone else. Whatever the reason, I walked home staring at this little square cardboard box of Benson & Hedges (they had the best magazine adverts at the time – never let anyone tell you that advertising doesn’t work).

So I got home, sat on the porch outside, made sure that all the doors and windows on that side of the house were closed, and lit a match. I put the cigarette between my lips and dragged. It was awful. Like I had just stuck my head inside a braai and breathed in the smoke. I stood up to cough but sat back down immediately as the head rush kicked in. The nausea took a few minutes to subside as I sat there watching the cigarette burn down to its end. I chucked the butt over the wall, brushed my teeth over and over again, scrubbed my hands and ate a few pickled onions to try and get rid of the smell. Why the hell was this smoking thing supposed to be so good? And I gave up a great sandwich and ‘slap’ chips for that!

But the next day, sure enough, I soon got bored of TV, kicking a soccer ball against the wall and searching all over for my Dad’s stash of porn magazines that my thoughts turned to that little white box that I had hidden in a pair of old school shoes at the back of my cupboard. I dug them out and tried again. It tasted a bit better the second time around, but the head rush and nausea were still there. But, as the days went on and I had my daily puff, I eventually started to enjoy it, followed by my de-smoking routine of scrubbing, brushing and ridding myself of lingering cigarette smells. Eventually, even though that box lasted me for a good two weeks, I was going out twice a day, even though it was the winter break and it was freezing outside.

Smoking was an awesome habit. A short-lived one but awesome nonetheless. The rush of that first puff, the warm sensation as the smoke filtered down my throat, the relaxed, neutralizing exhale – a huge sigh of pleasure – and the contemplation of life over that five or six minutes of smoking. Thinking about it, it’s a pretty stupid and pointless habit – you take some leaves and paper and a whole lot of stuff that is no good for you, neatly presented in a pencil-thin white and yellow package, light it, suck on it, breathe out smoke and put it out. What a waste. But it’s sooooooooo damn good, and anyone who hasn’t developed the habit will never understand the pleasure it can give you.

I developed my habit over 13 glorious days until my Dad caught me, after which I have only thought now about taking it up again. It was a Wednesday, I remember that clearly because Pugwall’s Summer, a seriously bad Aussie kid’s programme about some dorky looking Australian teens with dodgy hair and an even dodgier rock band, was just about to start and I wanted my second hit of the day before settling in to watch some more mind-numbing holiday television. I went outside onto the porch, double checked that the windows were closed and lit my B&H. I puffed away, enjoying every second and feeling as cool as cool could be (even though not a single soul knew about my newfound habit – all my friends, whose families were all considerably richer, were away on holiday). I checked my watch and saw that it was time for Pugwall and the gang to sing another shockingly bad song about young love, so I dragged hard, exhaled a huge cloud of smoke and flicked the smouldering butt over the wall and into the street. I went inside, went through my de-smoking routine and flopped into the couch just as the intro started playing.

Now rewind two minutes. We were not rich enough to own two cars in those days so my Dad caught a lift to work with one of his colleagues, a guy named Phil, who lived about 15 minutes walk away from us. Now on that day, Phil happened to be struck down with a bug, and instead of coming home at 5:30pm like they usually did, Phil got excused at 3:30pm, and as my Dad had no other way of getting home, he left early too. Usually I could hear Phil’s clapped out silver Mazda 323 coming from a mile off, but he was feeling so sick that day that he asked my Dad if he wouldn’t mind walking home from his place. My Dad, being my Dad, said of course not. So while I was lighting my second cigarette for the day my Dad was halfway home from Phil’s. When I was done and was flicking it over the wall, my Dad was right outside our house admiring the roses that he had planted on the pavement the previous weekend. The stompie buzzed past his head and landed a few feet away from him, still ablaze, sending a twirl of smoke towards his beige trousers.

I was so engrossed in my programme that I didn’t even hear him come in – usually the Mazda 323 spluttering to a stop outside would be my cue to gargle with a glass of Oros – but today, absentmindedly twirling my lighter between my fingers and digging a finger in my nose, I was not ready for him.

Just as the floppy haired Pugwall launched into another cheesy guitar solo (clearly choreography and sticking to reality were not the show’s producers strong points), a hand came down and slapped me over the cheek – the one and only time that my Dad laid a hand on me. The finger dug deeper into my nose, the lighter flew through the air and I didn’t know what had hit me, literally. I certainly would not have guessed my Dad. I fell off the couch and spun around, only to see my Dad towering over me, red in the face, glaring at the stompie in his hand. I rubbed my cheek and could feel that it was glowing red and spreading. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Neither did my Dad, it seems, as we just looked at each other, me with a sad puppy dog face and him with rage.

Eventually he let out an “aaarghhhh!” and flopped into his favourite chair, tossing the stompie onto the coffee table. I stayed on the ground for a minute, wondering what he wanted me to do. Slowly I got to my feet and walked past him to my bedroom. I went into my cupboard and retrieved the box of cigarettes from my shoe. I opened it and saw three tempting yellow and white tubes. I took it through to the lounge, picked up the stompie from the coffee table, got the lighter from the side of the couch, put that in the box too and crunched it with all my might. I took it outside and threw it in the bin, making sure that it wouldn’t be visible to my Mom. When I went back inside my Dad had vacated his chair and I could hear him in the kitchen. I went through and sat at the table. He turned around and asked me how my day had been. We didn’t talk about what had happened earlier in the day that evening, or ever come to think of it, and I don’t think he even ever told my Mom. That’s the kind of guy he was. I love you Dad. And I’ll miss you forever.