WorldLost- Week 1: An Infected Novel (2 page)

I rushed out onto my balcony and looked over the railing to
see where she ended up. Carrie was on the sidewalk below but was slowly
standing up. She looked from side to side, lifted her nose like she smelled the
air and then started to walk, with a slight lean to the left, away from the
apartment building. As she moved into the street, a car swerved to miss her and
sped down the road with the horn blaring instead of stopping to see why this
person was on the street. She stopped and looked around again, raised her arms at
the car and started walking to the car, a slow motion car chase scene was
happening right in front of me. How she had survived the fall from her 3rd
story balcony was hard to believe. This had to be a bad dream, I must have been
asleep, this couldn’t really be happening.

Another loud sound that must have been a gunshot
made me turn to the other direction and I saw a guy walking towards a car stopped
in the road holding a gun out, pointed at the driver of the car. A woman was in
the car trying to climb out her opened window which had just been destroyed by
the guy’s gunshot. The guy started yelling at the women, “Die you God forsaken
demon, DIE!!!” He continued to point the gun, point blank at the woman's head
and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter went all over the inside of the
car and the passenger side window exploded as the bulleted exited the woman's
head. The guy yanks open the door and violently pulls the body of the women
from the car, leaving her lying on the street. He jumps into the car and peels
out as he shoots down the street with the stolen car.  I’ve seen some gory
things in movies and pretty weird things in my time in the city, but this was a
new level.

“Holy shit! Do you believe that?” my hippy next door neighbor
says to me from the side of his balcony. “Holy Shit, that’s like totally wrong,
totally like in the movies.” I turn and look at Brad standing on his balcony
smoking a joint and pointing at the disturbing screen we both just witnessed.
“Dude, that’s a problem. You should totally call the police. Did you get the
license plate number of the car he stole?”

“Why should I call the police, you saw it too,” I said back
to him, in shock from what was happening around me.

“I can’t talk to the cops right now dude. I’m totally high
and that would be way too much for my fragile mind to handle.” Brad replies
laughing and handing the joint across the railing to me.  

Ignoring the joint, I turned around and walked into my
apartment to grab my phone. I noticed that the charge was about half done, as I
get back to the balcony and look at Brad who was still holding the joint out
towards me. I dialed 911 and put the phone on speaker so we both could listen,
but all we hear is a busy signal. What the hell was going on; how was it
possible that 911 would be busy?

Brad looked at me and laughed as he turned around and headed
back into his apartment. Our apartments were right next to each other and you could
easily jump the rail to get to the apartment next to mine. My other neighbor was
a stewardess that was always gone and rarely home, which is nice as it mad so I
didn’t have to worry about the noise I made or running into her when I was out
on the balcony hanging out. I wondered if she was home.

I walked over to the other side of my balcony and leaned over
to look through her sliding glass door, but I couldn’t tell if she was home or
not, so I climbed over the rail, onto her side of the balcony and took a closer
through her sliding glass window. I knocked on the sliding glass door, but
nothing happened, so I was pretty sure she was gone.

“Hey dude, what are you doing?” Brad asked from across my balcony.

“Just checking to see if Wendy was home” I replied.

“She’s in Denmark, left yesterday and said she wouldn’t be
back home for a week or so,” he replied back. I climbed back over to my balcony
and asked Brad, “You and Wendy talk, dude?”

“Wendy and I talk all the time dude. She buys weed from me every
few months and we get high together sometimes when she is home when she isn’t working,”
he says as he takes a drag off his joint, holding it out to me again. “Did you
know that I slept with her once?” he chuckled.

“No way. That did not happen.” I said back to him with my
eyes and mouth wide open.

“Yes, sir. My one night of bliss with Miss Wendy. We got so
high that one time and she got a little frisky and I said hell yea and jumped
right in. What could it hurt? And it worked. She let me fly with her one
night.” He sighed back as he watched a police call speed down the street with
its siren whaling and the lights on the cruiser flashing.

I turned to look at the police car just as it ran into a
light pole at the end of the block. The front end of the cruiser folded around
the pole and the policeman flew out the broken front window, just barely
missing the pole and landed a good 25 feet further down the street. He laid
there for a minute as Brad and I did a double take not believing what we had
just witnessed. “We are in the shit now, dude,” I said.

I needed to get dressed and try to find Amy and Butch, at
least, that’s what my mind was telling me.I looked at my phone to see if either
of them had replied to my texts.

Amy had sent me two texts.

The first one was a reply to my original text. She wrote,
“Please help me. Something's going on with my neighbor and he’s trying to break
into my apartment. Please help.”

The second one was sent five minutes later and it stated,
“Hurry.Please!!”

I looked at Brad and told him I had to go. I turned around
and headed into my apartment. I found my cleanest clothes and quickly pulled them.
They were the jeans and shirt I had been wearing the night before and stunk
just like a brewery. They were a little stiff in the pant leg; wonder why that
was.

SuddenlyI heard Brad outside.

“I wouldn’t leave dude. The news says to stay in your home and
not to go out. You’re just asking for trouble if you leave dude.” He said as he
continued to watch the chaos down below.

“Amy’s in trouble. I’ve got to try to help her.” I say to him
as I poke my head out the door and look at him. “I could already be too late.”
I ran back inside and grabbed my wallet. I put on a baseball cap and grabbed my
keys from the bedside table. I yelled out the door, “Watch my place man and
lock up after me. If I don’t come back, you can have everything.”

Before leaving the apartment, I got out my phone and tried to
call Butch without any luck, so I sent him a new text letting him know I am
heading to Amy’s place and that she needed our help.

I opened my front door and walked into the hallway. I headed
towards the elevators and pressed the down button. I could hear an emergency
ringing from the elevators going off like someone pushed the buttons to stop
the cars in between floors.

“The elevators aren’t working today dude,” Brad said from his
open front door. “I tried to use them earlier today, but they wouldn’t work. I
called Tony and left a message. Chances are he’s working on them now.”

Tony was our building superintendent. He was a big hairy
macho type guy with a small squeaky girlfriend that always hung around him when
he was working. It was like she didn’t trust him to be alone in an apartment
with another person like Tony was going to have a fling or something. Her name
was Linda, but I just called her bitch behind her back. What Tony saw in the
Bitch, was beyond me.

As I pass Brad, heading to the stairs, I said, “Thanks for
the heads up dude. Be safe and get back inside and lock up.”

What was I going to find as I made my way to Amy’s? What
horrific scenes of hell would I be a witness to?

I pushed the door to the stairs open and stepped inside the
empty stairwell, stopping to close the door as quietly as possible. I really
didn’t want to let anyone know I was there. I stood in the stairwell and listened
for any noise of someone else using the stairwell to enter or exit the
building.

After a few minutes and not hearing anything, I made my way
down the stairs stopping at each floor to look through the small window in the stairwell
door, looking out into the apartment hallways. All of the floors were deserted,
no activity from people moving around or standing around talking, just empty
hallways.

It was kind or eerie. Where were all my fellow apartment
dwellers? 

People must have locked their apartment doors to hide or had
already left to go where ever they thought would be the safest place to go.
Most were probably going to try and wait for this nightmare out and hope that
the authorities would put everything back together.

I had a different feeling, one that told me that we were
screwed. The human race was on a collision course to extinction and there
wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it. The best we could hope for was to
make it somewhere safe and just survive.

I finally made it to the main floor, stopping at the stairwell
door and listened for any sign that someone or something was waiting on the
other side. The door didn’t have a window to look through, but I could hear faint
screaming coming from the lobby area.

“Please don’t! Please, someone, help me! Plea…” Then there
was silence, except for a low grumbling sound that sounded like someone was
stuffing food in their mouth, just chowing down, trying to eat way too fast. The
woman wasn’t screaming anymore which made a chill go through me.

I pushed the door handle down just a bit and opened the stairwell
door just enough for me to peek out into the apartment lobby area. I saw the
usual lobby environment, the security desk straight across from the stairwell
door, which hadn’t seen a security guard or doorman for as long as I had lived
there.

Tony’s apartment door was to the left of the front desk and
it was currently closed.

To the right of the front desk, I saw three your teenagers
that I knew lived in the building. I’d seen them off and on since I moved in
and they were always very polite and said hello. They were constantly together
in the hallways or lobby.

Right now they were hunched over what looked to be an older
women lying on the lobby couch. There was a red puddle under the couch, which
had to be blood. From my point of view, the teenagers were also covered in
blood since they were ripping the woman’s flesh off of her body, shredding her
to the bone.

The woman wasn’t moving or trying to stop the boys, she
wasn’t even screaming anymore, she was just lying there and letting them do
this to her.

I couldn’t stand to watch anymore and I was too terrified to
go out into the lobby to stop it. I closed the door without an ounce of noise
and then immediately puked all of the remaining contents of my stomach all over
the stairs and tiled floor. Thankfully there wasn’t much left, but the slight smell
of tequila and beer made me continue to dry heave for a few minutes. I was very
scared that puking might expose me to the teenagers in the lobby.

I wasn’t sure what I had just seen, so I
opened the door again and peeked out once more. The teenagers were still hunched
over the woman, but then I noticed Tony charge out of his apartment, holding a
bat in his hand and in just six large steps Tony was on the teenagers and
raised the bat over his head and hit the teenager closest to him, yelling, “Get
the fuck off of her, you fucking assholes!!”

The teenagers head explodes and his brains and black tar-like
blood sprays all over the woman and the other two teenagers. 

Tony was surprised by how the teenagers head had exploded and
staggered a little. He stepped back as the two teenagers slowly turn their heads
towards him. One of the teenagers growled at Tony, a primal growl, like the
alpha wolf giving a warning to the rest of the pack to back off. It was deep
from within his body, rumbling up his throat, but so deep and low that you could
feel the vibration on your skin.

Tony was awestruck at the devastation his head strike caused
and failed to notice the reaction of the other two teenagers, but the growl got
him focused again on the teenagers, but he was too slow to lift his bat and
wasn’t ready to strike again.

The two teenagers moved with lightning speed, charging Tony
and forcing him to the floor with their weight and momentum. He hit the floor
hard with his head banging on the floor and losing his bat. A slight murmur
came out of Tony, but he went immediately silent once his head hit.

The teenagers started to rip chunks of flesh out of Tony’s
large arms that were exposed. They tore off his shirt and once his chest was
exposed, they started to tear open his stomach.

Tony laid there without moving and based on the blood and
missing flesh he had to be dead. There was a tremendous amount of blood and it
was pooling around him very quickly. Tony’s face was facing towards the stairwell
door and was looking right at me. I knew he was dead, but it was weird the way
he is just looking at me, almost like he knew I was there and thought I was
going to do something to stop what was happening to him.

I just could not bring myself to walk into the lobby and try
to stop what was happening. Something deep inside said to stay put and don’t
draw attention. I was trying to not make a sound;there was no way I wanted to
attract the teenager's attention. I wasn’t ready to have to defend myself. Hell,
I didn’t have anything to defend myself with.

I’m not against defending myself against an attack and quite
honestly, I am generally a tough person and can handle pain, but the way these
two teenagers just took down Tony, someone twice my size, told me that I didn’t
want to mess with them.

Without a weapon, I was screwed. I knew this, I could feel
it. Stealth and silence were the keys in this situation and I needed to fight
every urge to move to ensure I was not noticed.

During all of this, I noted that Tony’s full throttle swing
to the head of the teenager immediately dropped the kid to the floor, as if
whatever life he had was released from his body.

I then remembered that the car thief had shot the woman in
the car multiple times in her body and it didn’t stop her from trying to get
out of the car and to him, but the single shot to her head immediately stopped
her.

Was a head shot the answer to stopping whatever was driving
these people to act this way? I decided then to pay attention to every situation
that involved anyone that is acting in this way. It was almost like they were
infected. I also decided that this is what I would start to call them; the
infected.

I let out a slow low breath to help calm my stomach which was
still rumbling from last night and stop my head from spinning. I was slightly
dizzy and had a hard time focusing on things. If I moved too quickly I was
holding onto the wall to keep myself from falling down.

I noticed that one of the teenagers had stopped feeding on Tony
and was standing there looking around the lobby. He moved his eye around the
room like he was searching for something, his kept his head stationary, but his
eyes were checking out the room moving around rapidly. He must have heard me
breathe out and he was looking for his next target.

All of a sudden the other teenager lifted his head from
Tony’s stomach, pulling out a mouthful of intestines and started to smell the
air like a dog. He kept chewing on the intestines, but he was very interested
in the smells around him. It looked like they were sharing their senses, one
smelling and one looking around and they knew what the other was seeing and smelling.

They continued to look and smell around for
their next meal, but it seemed that they couldn’t pinpoint my location just
yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they found me. I needed to
close the door and hide till they lost my scent.

I moved as slow as I could, closing the door
as quietly as possible and backed away from the stairwell door opening. Could this
be the end for me? Did the two remaining teenagers know I was there or did I
get away with them not seeing, hearing or smelling me?