WorldLost- Week 1: An Infected Novel (11 page)

A smile and a wink were Butch’s reply.

“You’re going to have to kill them at some point, dude. Our lives
could depend on it.” He said as he laid his head back on the couch.

“When I have to, I will,” I replied. I walked into the
kitchen and got a bottle of water. I grabbed out supply bags and found some
aspirin. “Here. Take these.” I handed him the water and the aspirin.

Amy handed me a two-way radio we had found during our
scavenger hunt yesterday and turned them on. “Channel two.” She said.

I turned mine on and turned it to channel two.

“Test. Test.” Amy said as she was walking away.

After confirming the two-way radio’s worked, Amy said, “Why
don’t you go upstairs and see what’s up through the sliding glass doors? If
it’s clear, Butch and I can head up.”

“OK,
”
I said as I headed out to the balcony.

“Butch, you ready?” Amy was asking Butch.

Butch got up off the couch and grabbed his knife and pistol,
grabbing extra ammo.

“I may need this,” I said as I grabbed a pistol and a machete
off the coffee table. I grabbed a broom handle with a couple of knives duct
taped to the end that was leaning against the wall by the door. I moved through
the door and out to the balcony. Setting the spear against rail outside, I climbed
up on the railing and held onto the balcony above me. “Hand me the spear,” I said
to Amy who was on the balcony watching me.

Amy handed me the spear and I pushed it through the railing
slats on the balcony above me. “Butch, give me a lift up will you, just enough
so I can see if anything is waiting at the sliding glass door.”

Butch grabbed my foot and lifted me so I was raised high
enough to peek over the upstairs balcony floor. I didn’t notice anything so I
said, “OK. I’m going over, give me a push-up.”

Amy grabbed my other foot and helped Butch lift me further up
so I could grab ahold of the railing above me. I used my upper arm strength to
pull myself up and over the railing, landing on the balcony floor.

I stood on the balcony looking around. I grabbed the spear on
the ground and moved to the sliding glass door to take a look in the apartment.
I couldn’t see anything moving inside and didn’t really see any furniture. It
looked empty like no one lived there. “Hey, did anyone live up here?” I asked
Amy waiting below.

“A guy and his kid used to live there. I haven’t seen them in
a while, but I figured they were on vacation or something. He could have moved
out, it’s been pretty quiet up there the last couple of weeks.” Amy tells me
from below.

I tried the handle on the sliding glass door, but it was
locked. “Doors locked,” I informed them.

“Wait there and we’ll head up the stairs. Once we are in
place, we’ll let you know. You can smash the sliding glass door then. Might get
any infected headed your way.” Amy said back to me.

I move to the edge of the balcony and looked over. “What do you
think if we try to get them into the apartment, basically blocking them in?” I
asked. “I could get down to your place, keep making noise and you guys could sneak
up to the front door and get it closed, locking them in the apartment.”

“Let’s see what happens once you get their attention. We can make
a decision then.” Butch said from below. “If anything, we can always try to
lock them up once we’re done.” He added.

Both Amy and Butch moved off the balcony and headed out. A few
minutes later Amy used the radio as they were making their way up the
stairwell.

“Test?” She said.

I replied so she knew the two-way radio’s worked. I stood on
the balcony waiting for a longer then expect amount of time. I took, this time,
to look out at the city. On the second floor, the view wasn’t much, but it gave
me enough of a view to see that the city was gone.

I had moved back to Charleston when I was twenty-one which I
turned just a few months after my dad was killed. I was all alone at our place
up north and the thought of living by myself in the middle of nowhere was going
to drive me nuts.

The move was a lot of things all at once; traumatic,
exciting, scary and enlightening. I had dreamt about this move for many years.
It wasn’t exactly how I wanted to end up moving back to Charleston, what with
my father passing away, but Charleston was part of my long-term plan when I was
growing up.

I’d used it to threaten my dad when we were at each other’s
throats. I would tell him that I was going to run off and find a place to live
in the city, away from him. If we had any kind of fight, I would tell him I was
leaving.

In my mind, Charleston was the place to be. It had everything
a kid could ever want; theaters, museums, parks, video arcades, skate parks,
everything I always wanted.

I remember as a very small boy living in this city, close to
the college campus, spending time at the city park with my mother and father.
Back then, my dad was around a lot and we got along great. I didn’t know then
that he really did hate living in the city.

He was a country boy at heart and he longed to be in the
woods away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

I have a few memories when I was very young; they were very vivid.
My earliest memory was lying on the ground, in what had to be the park since we
didn’t have a yard. My mother was next to me while my dad was lying beside her and
reaching over her to tickle my stomach. They were laughing at me giggling with
the sun shining on us; it was a memory that I longed to relive. A time when I
felt really loved, warm and safe.

I have this other memory when I was about seven, of sitting in
a rundown theater in downtown Charleston. The smell of the popcorn, the other
kids talking to their parents and then the music started. The first time you
see Star Wars is so memorable. My mom was totally into it.

It was the only theater that was playing it in Charleston and
even though it was ways from our apartment, my mother took me anyway. I
remember sitting there with my mom, a big bucket of popcorn, smothered in
butter with a huge drink of soda between us. My mother was telling me to not
drink too much because she didn’t want to have to leave once the movie started.
Being at a movie was special, but this was super special, I could feel it and
the last thing I wanted to do was have to ask my mom to take me to the bathroom
during a pivotal scene.

After the movie, my mom and I went for ice cream and talked
about the movie for over an hour. Those were special times with my mom; seeing
a show, having ice cream and discussing it among ourselves.

At the same time, I remember a time with my
father, sitting with him at the college library while he wrote the many papers
for classes. My mother would be working and I would be with my dad for the day.
He would always find me some books that I was interested in, tell me to sit at
the table and be quiet while he worked.

This happened a lot since my mother was working as a professor's
assistant while my dad was getting his Masters in Forestry. My birth derailed a
few things.

I know it pained my father to be stuck with a newborn and
then a toddler, but he never let it be known to others. I only knew how he felt
because, later in life, we talked about it. I overheard him once arguing with
my mother when I was young, and some of the things they discussed were about
having me when they did. He didn’t want children this early in their marriage,
but my mother did. She wanted to make sure she was young when she had children
so she could be involved with her children.

I found out later in my young life that my mother was the
city girl, always interested in the city life, the vibe of the city making her
happy every time we walked out the front door. My father, on the other hand, was
the country boy.

He liked being out in the wilderness, out in the forest;
living off the land for all of his needs, providing for his family with only
the things that nature could provide. They were two opposites and yet their
worlds collided which resulted in me. I knew they loved each other, I knew they
loved me and I knew they wanted nothing but the best of both of their worlds
for me.

While my mom would take me to the shows, the restaurants, the
parks, museums and everything the city had to offer, my dad would take me camping
out in the forest, to teach me how to survival and what it meant to be one with
nature. He taught me how to tell what was safe to eat in the wild, which of the
plants were safe for medical uses, what animals to stay away from and how to
provide for myself.

I remember a time with my father, when I was only 8, hiking
through the woods looking for squirrels. He would stop all of a sudden and
squat down to speak to me at my level, eye to eye. He would whisper in my ear
and point out a squirrel on a branch, lifting his rifle up to his shoulder and
pulling the trigger. He was always taking me hunting, explaining how the
animals traveled, how to tell where they were, how to track them.

He taught me animal calls to attack the right animals. He
taught me how to kill an animal, so it was difficult for me to fully understand
why killing an infected had been such a problem for me. Killing an animal was
always done with the animal's sacrifice in mind, never for sport. I killed my
first deer when I was nine, my first moose when I was twelve and a bobcat when
I was sixteen. Each time, my dad would show me how to field dress it to get the
most from the animal. We’d return home with meat to be dried, salted and hung
in our pantry.

I was still asking myself why I would hesitate to kill an
infected, the only reason that I could come up with, was that this was still a
person, a human being, and everything else I killed in the past was for food or
clothing. I never had an experience where my life was in danger and I had to
protect myself or a situation where I killed something just for the sport. We
ate everything, used the fur to sell, trade or wear. Killing a person or
someone who once was a person didn’t fit what I knew. Maybe this was a drawback
for my dad’s lessons. 

My mom didn’t come with us into the woods very often. When
she decided to join us, it was hard to tell who was most happy, my dad or I.  My
dad would go with us to the places in the city more times than my mom would go
to the woods. He was OK with the parks or a play because they were things he
could believe in, touch them and they helped you to understand people. Things
that weren’t real, that were make believe were avoided by him.

At the time, I resented both of them for splitting up like
that, but now I understand what they were trying to do. They were trying to
give me the best of both worlds, letting me see both worlds so I could choose
which one I wanted.

My father was the one to teach me how to live on my own,
without depending on others, to work with nature and the knowledge I had about
mother earth. My mother taught me how to enjoy other people, live life, enjoy
the small things and to deal with the human race.

When I was sixteen, just after killing the bobcat, my mother
was killed in a train accident on her way to work. She had just gotten a
different job that was located on the outside of the city. This was only her
second week of the new job when the train derailed and killed all 152 people on
board. A faulty stop signal was to blame and there were all kinds of sympathy
for the families impacted.

My dad and I were out hiking that day, planning to camp till
Sunday, fishing, and tracking. We had just bought some land around the lake and
he was working on how he was going to set up his camp. The plan was to build a
getaway that even my mother would enjoy. We got back on Sunday afternoon and
found our neighbor waiting for us at our house.

She told my dad what happened and we went to the coroner's to
identify my mother. That was the first and last time I had seen my dad cry.

A funeral followed a week later with friends and some family
paying their condolences to my father and I. Speaking about my mother in the
past tense, about all of the fun times they had with her. All the times my
mother went out of her way to help someone, the times that my father and mother
had spent together as young kids, first meeting in college. I’m sure it’s
common that people hold back the bad things about a person at a funeral, but my
mother truly only provided good memories for everyone. Even the tough times
that my parents spent with each other were better than most people's good
times.

We left the city for good a month after my mother’s death.
Just enough time for my father to sell everything we owned, buy what he needed
for his land and get out of dodge. He promised a better life, a life where we
controlled what happened to us, not someone else telling us what to do.

The first year was hard for me, but each year after got
easier. I missed the city, the bustle, and hustle of life in the city. We’d
travel into Charleston once or twice a year for some basic supplies or to visit
a friend, but we rarely stayed longer than one night. Dad just didn’t like it
and he couldn’t wait to get back to the woods.

My father died from a falling out of a tree he was trying to
climb. We were trying to build another tree house as a secondary place that
would allow us to travel longer distances while hunting and act as a second
home should we need our own space.

During the winter you could travel further than a day's
distance, looking for something to hunt. You didn’t want to get caught out in
the open during the winter once the sun went down. That was a death sentence,
so that meant we had to stay within walking distance to the main cabin which
limited the area we could hunt in.

My father was up one of the trees we were interested in, trying
to secure the main support beam when his tie off failed and he fell to the
ground. I was out getting another support beam, moving it from the clearing we
had used to cut and trim the boards.

When I got back with the new board, I found him under the
main support beam dead. There wasn’t any chance of reviving him. I went and got
help from some ranchers that lived in the area and together we took his body to
our cabin where we laid him to rest.

I was now alone; my family was gone, my old friends from the
city had moved on with their own lives and there was nothing holding me to the
woods. So I decided to secure the cabin in the trees and move to the city since
I had always wanted to go back. If that didn’t work out, I could always come
back to the woods and live the life of a hermit.

Maybe we should think of heading to my cabin in the trees
after we found out what was going on at Butch’s parents’ house. Porters Lake
was close by and we could set it up as the final step in our security with a
house boat. Something to think about.