Torn Apart (26 page)

But I have no weapons.

The infected man, the one that was reaching
through the gap in the door, the one that had brushed his hand
against my hair, my pixie cut, the one with the arm that was surely
broken, a man who was a soldier in a former life, runs at me,
sprints at me. It wants to eat me. He wants to eat me. The Oz virus
wants to spread. It has this primordial, primeval need to spread,
to consume and eat.

And I have no weapons.

There is broken glass. Mirrored
glass.

I see a large triangle of sharp jagged glass,
and as I am running for the next room, I bend down and pick it up,
cutting the palm of my right hand in the process. The glass is so
sharp, it slices my skin easily and effortlessly and instantly. I
don’t feel any pain. If I didn’t see the blood, I would never have
known I’d been cut.

As I raise the piece of glass up, blood drips
down the length of my forearm.

The infected man is almost on top of
me.

Everything is happening in super slow motion,
like my mind has realized I’m about to die a horrible death and
it’s soaking up these last few seconds of existence, not taking
this moment or anything for granted.

The infected man’s hands are now on me. That’s
how close he is.

His jaw is wide, wide open. It’s so wide open,
I think to myself, that his jaw has to be dislocated. It has to be
broken.

But it’s not. His jaw clamps shut. Snaps shut.
Inches from my face.

The clack of teeth makes me flinch and the hair
on the back of my neck stands up and I have goose bumps. I think to
myself that maybe the only worse sound in the world is fingernails
on a chalkboard. But then again, maybe not.

The infected man is still coming forward. Still
charging. All of his weight and all of his strength and energy is
directed at my body.

The virus is so pure. Pure death. And this is
perhaps its greatest advantage. It is not complicated. And it is
never distracted. It wants and needs one thing.

Food.

Hosts.

It needs to spread.

It causes aggression. Single-minded
aggression.

The Oz virus is simple and pure and
deadly.

And this infected man is almost on top of
me.

He wants to feed on me.

He wants to eat me.

He is running and moving faster than humanly
possible.

Doctor Hunter, or was it Doctor West? One of
those guys said that the Oz virus stimulates the adrenal glands. I
don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sure as hell looks like
it.

Anyway, the speed, the weight, the
force.

This actually works in my favor.

The shard of glass in my hand is a knife. And
his force, his weight, his speed, allows the glass shard to slide
into his eyeball, right into his brain.

It also slices the hell out of my palm in the
process, and I finally feel pain.

And the pain lets me know that I am alive and
that I am not infected.

Not yet.

I let go of the piece of glass because I can no
longer physically hold it. It is stuck into the infected man’s eye
socket, into his skull and brain. The infected man goes limp but
his weight and the force of the collision carries us into the next
room. We flip up and over the window sill where the mirror used to
be.

I land on broken glass.

The infected man is on top of me and I am cut
up and bleeding and I can feel pain.

It is excruciating.

But I keep moving.

If I stop for a second, to catch my breath, to
check my injuries, to stop the bleeding, I am dead. I roll the
infected man off me, and I jump to my feet. I cut my hand up even
more on the glass on the floor.

I ignore the pain and the blood.

I keep moving.

More infected pour into the interrogation room,
they jump through the window where the one way mirror used to be.
One of them jumps through and falls over. They thrash around on the
floor, around on the glass, like a shark out of water. One of them
gets jagged on a large piece of glass as they jump through the
window. The piece of glass was protruding from the window sill. The
shard of glass pierces his abdomen, slicing his stomach open. He is
stuck in the window sill, guts falling out onto the
floor.

And I keep moving.

I get to the door and I try and open it with my
right hand because I always open doors with my right hand. I have
never had to think about this before. But I can’t open the door
because my hand is covered in blood. I can’t grip the
handle.

I use my left hand and I finally open
it.

The door opens up into a corridor.

To my left the corridor is empty. It is a long,
long corridor. I can’t see the end of it. A long line of
fluorescent lights flicker on and off. The corridor is so massively
long that I can’t see the end of it and it eventually disappears
into darkness.

I look to my right. To my right is a crowd of
infected people. A horde. A swarm. I can feel their energy. It is
simply incredible.

The horde is a mix of soldiers and research
scientists and civilians. I tell myself in that instant I need to
stop thinking about what these people used to be. I can’t think of
them as soldiers or civilians or people. Because they are not
people. Not anymore. They are infected. They are zombies. They are
the living dead.

I can’t afford to give them my sympathy, but I
am only human and I can’t help it.

The former soldiers and scientists and
civilians are all trying to squeeze through the door into the
interrogation room at once. The door that I was just barricading
with a table and my body weight. The sheer number of infected
people and the narrow area of the corridor and the doorway have
created a bottleneck.

But then they see me.

And I turn and run into the next room. And
we’re going to rinse and repeat. We are going to do this all over
again.

For a second, a split second, a nano-second, I
think, what’s the point?

There’s too many of them.

There is nowhere to run.

Nowhere to hide.

No escape.

I am underground. I am trapped.

I am trapped in a prison within a
prison.

I am surrounded by the infected.

For a split second, I think about giving up,
leaving the door open, letting them in, giving myself to them, to
the Oz virus. But then I walk through the door. I enter the room.
The doorway leads to an office. The room looks like it belonged to
someone important. There is a desk. It has paper strewn all over
it. A computer. A bookshelf full of files and folders. Two chairs
in front of the desk.

And crouching behind the desk, is a
man.

He sort of looks like a businessman. He is
wearing a white, long sleeved shirt. A black tie.

He looks middle aged.

Why the hell is he wearing a
tie?

The top button of his shirt is undone, his tie
is loose, like he’s had a rough day at the office.

“
Shut the door!” he says. “Lock
it!”

I do as he says. I do it quickly. I shut the
door. I lock the door.

“
Did they see you?” he
asks.

I nod my head.

“
How many?”

“
Too many,” I answer.

“
The door has a dead lock. It should
hold them for a minute or two.”

“
Maybe less,” I say.

I push my weight into the door.

And I know it won’t hold for long.

Enjoyed the sample for Salvation?

For more info visit
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The following is an excerpt from the Lost Journal
Part 2. The story takes place between The Secret Apocalypse and
Extinction Level (Book 2 in the Secret Apocalypse series.)

3 WEEKS AGO - An
outbreak of a deadly new virus is reported within an immigration
center in the Australian outback town of Woomera.
The virus is 100% lethal.

2 WEEKS AGO - The town
of Woomera is placed under an unofficial quarantine. The residents
are tested for infection.

A military force led by
the U.S. Marines enforces the quarantine.

1 WEEK AGO - The virus
continues to spread. The military lose control of operations in
Woomera.

Airstrikes are ordered
to contain the infection.

SIX DAYS AGO - The
Australian press first report the outbreak at Woomera.
American scientists confirm virus is multi-resistant. They have
named it the ‘Oz virus’.

The World Health
Organization has declared a phase 4 Pandemic alert. Phase 4 =
multiple cases reported and human to human transmission of virus
has been confirmed.

FIVE DAYS AGO -
Nationwide quarantine is ordered.

All flights in and out
of Australia are grounded.

Australian
communication networks are shut down.

ONE DAY AGO – Military
containment protocol is initiated.

Firebombing of Sydney
and Melbourne commences.

A nuclear warhead is
dropped on Melbourne.

SYDNEY IS NEXT...

Private Kenji Yoshida
is running for his life.

He is trapped in the
middle of Sydney.

He is surrounded by the
infected and the military who want him dead.

He must use all his
training and survival skills to stay alive.

This
is his story.

Feb 10th - Fate and the choices we make.

I read this book a few years ago that I found in my dad’s study. It
was about a man chained to a wall in a prison. He was being
tortured. Pretty gruesome stuff. The skin on his back and his arms
and his torso and his legs, every part of his body had been flayed
off with a splintered bamboo cane. His eyes were sealed shut with
his own blood. And yet through all the pain and the screaming in
his mind he realized he was a free man.

He had choices.

Hate.

Forgive.

Love.

Accept.

He talked about fate. And he talked about the choices
people make in their lives. In an instant he understood that even
though he was chained to a wall, he was still free. He was free to
hate the people torturing him or free to forgive them. This book
had a profound effect on me. Mostly because I did not believe
someone could be that strong. And that understanding.

To forgive the people torturing you?

To accept it?

To love them?

I don’t know, man. I don’t think anyone could be that
strong.

I can’t remember who wrote the book. I think it was
an autobiography. I think it was based on a true story but I can’t
remember.

I’m trying hard to remember who wrote it, like
somehow if I remembered who wrote that book it would give me
strength or courage.

I’m trying to think but I can’t.

I’m too exhausted.

Too damn scared.

We’ve been running for our lives for the past week
now. I’ve been running for longer. Much longer. I’m starting to
feel like a drifter. A homeless person. No fixed address. No name.
No belongings.

I think it’s important to write down what I’ve been
doing and who I am. I do not want to just disappear and fade away
into nothingness.

So who am I?

My name is Kenji Yoshida.

I’m a soldier.

I’m a trained sniper.

And I’m slowly but surely starting to lose my
mind.

When I was on tour in Afghanistan, I had a little
freak out. Wow. Afghanistan. That seems like a dream. A lifetime
ago. It happened when we returned to base after a patrol in the
Hindu Kush mountain range. We had received a distress call from a
small village. We went to investigate. We saw a boy. He was sick.
They said he’d been poisoned with a neurotoxin. But seeing this
boy. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like he represented
everything that was going wrong in my life. I don’t know. It sounds
kind of selfish when I think about it like that. But I can’t help
it. It messed me up.

I saw the psychologist on base and she told me to
keep a journal. She said I needed to get my thoughts out of my head
and my heart. She said if I kept them bottled up, they would
eventually kill me. From the inside. Infect me. Like a virus.

Now that I look back it’s weird that she’d used the
word virus. Flash forward one month and here I am, trying to
survive an actual killer virus. Something more destructive than any
gun, rifle, missile or bomb. In a matter of days it has brought the
major city of Sydney to its knees. This virus has caused untold
damage and chaos. I don’t know how many people have died. I don’t
want to think about it.

I don’t even want to think about why I’m still
alive.

Why me?

I should be dead.

And yet here I am. Still breathing. Still writing in
this journal. Still running.

I served in Afghanistan. I survived fire fights in
the isolated Hindu Kush mountain range. I was part of an emergency
quarantine force sent to the Australian outback. I survived the
outbreak there in the town of Woomera. And the surrounding
Immigration camps. I survived when in all honesty, I probably
should’ve died. I survived when other soldiers, men that I consider
to be my brothers, died around me.