The Infected (27 page)

Oh shit, the infected, I thought… I composed myself and leaned towards the gap between the two doors, my whole face throbbing like a second heart. And what I saw were five sets of eyes staring back at me.

I raised the first pistol, aimed at the closest face, a grizzled old lady’s face with a look of both wonder and puzzlement. The bullet went right between her horrid, empty eyes and I heard her fall to the ground with a thump. Another one groaned, a man this time, his age hard to tell because his face was caked with mud or blood or shit. Or all three. Whatever it was though, the bullet had no trouble going through it and he was soon on top of the old lady. Only after I had shot the third and fourth one did the fifth realise what was going on and started to turn around to ‘run’. This time the bullet entered the side of her head, almost taking the whole thing off in a flash and splash of gunfire, blood, brain and skull. Job done, I thought. Then my eyes adjusted again to the darkness outside after the brightness of the gun flashes. They were coming – lots of them. The groans grew and grew, and in no time, as I just stood there staring at the ones I could see through the three or four centimetre gap between the barn doors, it sounded like they were coming from all around – a sickening sound which I never, ever want to hear again.

I snapped out of my trance and headed for the car, only remembering when I was halfway there that I would need to open the doors if I wanted to get out. I sprinted back to the barn doors and flung them open, only for them to rebound off the dead bodies just outside. I muttered some unprintable expletives, dragged the bodies hurriedly aside without wanting or daring to look at the approaching masses of the infected (the groaning was almost deafening) and headed back to the car again. I jumped in, inexplicably battled for a few seconds to get my seatbelt on, and was overjoyed when the engine roared into life. I flicked on the lights, going straight for the brights, and the infected who fell under the beams as the lights shone out of the open doors and into the dark, froze in their footsteps. I counted eighteen in the beams.

As I pressed hard on the accelerator, the infected started to slowly spring back into action, albeit in their slow, methodical way. The closest to me was a naked boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, and as I drove out the doors, he stumbled, maybe in shock or maybe because he lost his footing on the hard ground, but whatever happened, he ended up on the floor directly in the car’s path. I didn’t have time to act, but even if I did, I am not too sure what I would have done. What did end up happening was rather gruesome, and I still shudder when I think of the sound his head made as the large tires of the Audi rode over it.

But I didn’t have time to even think of that, as the infected bounced off the car like bugs flying into the spotlight on one of Lil’s night game drives. They were everywhere, and like the bugs again, it was impossible to count them all. I screeched onto the driveway of the house where I had taken up refuge, glancing back one last time to see a mob of them changing direction and heading my way. I put foot again, hitting another one of the infected who had emerged unseen from the dark with the front left of the car – I shat myself, but after the car connected with another two of them as I made my way onto the road, I hardly even noticed.

After a night of tiring driving, what kept on going through my mind as I tried to negotiate the roads in the dark, was where the flipping hell they had all come from? I was in the middle of the sticks! I hadn’t seen any on my way into the place and there had been none around when I had been scouring the town for supplies. It freaked me out if I am to be honest. But then I realised and relief swept over me the way virus attacks a network without a firewall (sorry, that’s the inner geek coming out). I passed an unused mine just on the outskirts of the ‘town’ – it looked like it had been closed for ages, but, I guess, with all the recent rain, the inhabitants of the little town – probably enough to make up the gang that tried to attack me – must have descended into the mine for complete safety and security. I guess hearing my car and me walking about the town must have got them to come out and investigate. Phew. That helped my heart rate a bit!

Will update you all again soon.

Take care

Sam W

6:02pm, September 24

Hi! I am settling down with a beer and a cigarette as the sun starts slipping over the horizon (the benefits of raiding a little bottle store in a little town due to a not so little detour). I had a bit more rain yesterday which makes my travelling a little bit more, I don’t know, care-free maybe? It just really alleviated all the infected-related anxiety brought on when you just don’t know what is lurking around the corner or the next bend. I am in an almost completed townhouse project just on the outskirts of some other random town with a random name which I would never have visited ever in my life if the shit didn’t hit the fan the way that it did. Oh well, they are quite nice townhouses anyways, with a great view towards the horizon – a nice vantage point too.

At least I now feel as if I am getting somewhere, and even though I am veering off rather close to Kimberley because of the state of the roads, I can see the proverbial light at the end of this very long tunnel. I hate making prediction because I always seem to be wrong (especially when guessing the football scores), but I reckon that I should be there in Bloemfontein in a couple of days – three or four. Maybe five at the most.

Be safe wherever you are people.

Take care

Sam W

11:30am, September 25

Shit. I’ve been bit! Fuck me, it hurts… I was stupid, stupid, STUPID! I had been driving since just after sunrise – the price I paid for picking a stopover without any curtains – because as soon as the sun woke up, so did I. After about four hours of hard driving (not too far, about 160km, but lots of turning around, searching for new roads and trying to figure out which ways I had been before), I was pretty buggered to say the least. So I found a secluded and isolated spot away from the infected – I hadn’t encountered many this morning anyways, apart from a couple, a guy with just one arm and a woman with what looked like the end of a broom stick protruding from her one thigh. I feel horrible saying this, but I killed them… just because I could, really. I didn’t want to waste any bullets, so I drove up as close as I dared and killed them with the nail gun. One Arm was quick enough – the first shot went through his eye, and from the low angle of my seat in the car probably straight into his brain, but the lady was a different story – it took five nails to get her downnnnnnnnnnnnn Sorry, it’s my right hand that was bitten and typing is killing me. I guess that’s my curse – a blogger loves to type…

So, yeah, I think it was a combination of two nails, one in the nose and one in the ear that saw to her. So anyways, I was pretty content that the area was safe. So I lay back and tried to get a quick recharge sleep. It wasn’t long before I was out, but I did wake up a few minutes later because I was parked in the sun – it was an open road, no shade, no trees, just maize fields to the left and to the right – and inside the car it was boiling. In my half asleep state I started the car and pushed the button which rolled down the window. I only opened it a tad and the relief was immediate as a gentle spring breeze blew in and cooled me down. I settled down in the luxurious interiors of my sports car and fell asleep again.

I dreamt about Lil – we were getting married. Funnily enough though it was only us and a voice – I think it might have been Mphethi’s booming baritone that was marrying us – but it was perfect. She looked stunning in a long off-white dress with a long meandering train (if that what it’s called?) Her hair was also up, which she usually hates doing even though I have told her plenty of times that I love it that way. Her smile… man, she is beautiful. I cannot wait to get to her.

Anyways, I said my vows to her, a tear falling from my left eye, and I raised her hand and slid a beautiful white gold ring with what seemed like hundreds of diamonds on it onto her finger. The dream was so vivid that I could almost feel the cold metal and blinked away from the glare as the sun hit the diamonds on her ring. Next, she leaned forward and softly pulled my right hand closer to her. “No Lil – the wedding ring goes on the left hand,” I tried to say but she couldn’t quite hear me. “Lil. Lil!” but nothing, she just carried on holding my right hand. Next thing, she smiled at me – her teeth whiter than I had ever noticed – then pulled my hand even closer to her… and dug her crazily white teeth into my flesh. It hurt. It seriously hurt – this dream was turning ugly.

It was then that I awoke. I was in my car, not on an idyllic beach with warm water lapping the snow white sand of the beaches. No, I was in my stolen/borrowed Audi R8 on a deserted road somewhere pretty close to Kimberley. But something was still biting me. I tried to pull my hand away, but couldn’t. Eventually, still in a sleepy daze, I turned my head towards the door and saw exactly what was going on – one of the infected, a young weathered guy with a thick beard, was biting into my hand. The road wasn’t as deserted as I had thought. Blood was dripping from my thumb, and his hands, both squeezed through the gap and pulling my arm out the window, were covered in dirt, as if he had dipped his arms into a bucket of super glue and then proceeded to drag his arms through an oil spill, a cat’s litter box and a fast food outlet’s skip. In that order. But still I didn’t pull my arm away. The pain was excruciating, but I did nothing except stare…

He must have come up on me while I was sleeping, stuck his arms through my slightly open window to try and get at me and managed to grab my arm. Finally I acted as he, for lack of a better term, came up for air between bites. I yanked my arm back through the window, his head following with the momentum of the pull and cracking against the top of the door. He let out what could only be described as a roar, and tightened his grip on my arm which was still in the clutches of both his hands. His arms looked like two bloated bits of burnt boerewors as he squeezed them through the gap between the window and the door. My hand was throbbing with pain and the blood was flowing quicker now, probably due to the movement of yanking it away. I needed to act quickly, so I felt around on the passenger seat with my left hand, never taking my gaze away from the infected bloke at the window.

I felt it. The cold, hard steel of one of the guns. I wrapped my fingers around the handle, lifted it up and pointed it out the window. The guy let out another roar as his grip tightened, something I thought wasn’t possible as I could already see his jagged fingernails, which were in dire need of a good manicure I tell you, piercing the skin and drawing yet more blood. I gripped the gun hard having never shot with my weaker left hand before, and pulled the trigger. The noise of the shot reverberated around the car, leaving my ears ringing, and the recoil caused the gun to smash into the roof of the car (do you still call it a ceiling if you are in a car?), leaving a semicircular burn mark in the cream leather. The guy dropped, but in death he was still adamant to cling on to me, so he pulled my arm with him as he went. I had to actually pry each of his fingers off my arm which was as painful as removing a fishing hook which I once got caught in the webbing of my left hand during the one and only fishing trip that I went on with my dad.

I reclaimed my arm and looked at the damage – the punctures made by his fingernails would be okay, they just needed a good clean, but my hand… that’s a different story. He had bitten out three chunks from the top of my hand, and in the process, biting through some veins which were now squirting blood quite vigorously. I think shock started to set in then as the pain seemed to slowly drain away (only to come back with a vengeance later on – Panado’s are useless for infected bite wounds, I can assure you). I checked the surroundings to make sure that the infected guy lying headless next to my car hadn’t invited any of his friends to come and snack on me too.

When I was satisfied that it was safe, I got out and went around to the boot to get the first aid kit to try and patch up my hand. It was hard with just one functional hand, but I managed to clean the wounds with some of my drinking water and bandage my hand up. The bleeding had slowed, and although it was agonising when I clenched my fist, such as to grab the steering wheel, I was able to carry on driving after cleaning up all the blood (mine inside the car and his on the outside). So I drove for a few more kilometres before deciding to take it easy for the rest of the day. So I am now in the third storey of some or other three storey building, safely locked in and ready for a good, long sleep. My hand is hurting real bad, but I guess it could be worse.

Take better care of yourself than I did today.

Sam W

3:57pm, September 26

Hi. Let me first tell you that my hand is still awfully painful, but I do have more mobility in it and it doesn’t feel like someone is jabbing my hand with a broken beer bottle every time I flex it. I am trying to keep it clean and replace the bandage twice a day – it is still bleeding a lot as it is basically an open wound, but I think I have it all under control. I managed to find some Myprodol’s (and some more cigarettes as I had run out) in a handbag in an empty Opel Corsa. They are helping a bit more with the pain as they are quite a bit stronger than Panado’s, but not as strong as I would have hoped!