Decimation Series (Book 1): Contagion

by Lorch, Jeff

  As we made our way cautiously turning off Circle Drive turning west onto Taylor Street, we saw smashed cars in a few places, as well as some signs of housefires, but again not as bad as what we had seen in other places.

  We drove slowly past a high school on our left, and Jamie pointed out that’s where he and Alex had graduated from earlier that summer.

  I looked at the school as we drove by; the windows had all been smashed, and there was blood on some of the doors.

  A couple blocks past the school, and Jamie slowed as he turned north onto Morgan Avenue. It was a pretty neighbourhood made up of bungalows and wide front yards.

  “End of the block on the right,” Jamie said quietly. I could see his jaw tense, fingers tight on the steering wheel. I reached out and grabbed his hand, giving it a squeeze.

  As pretty as the street was, it had not been spared.

  We saw signs of violence and destruction as we drove slowly along. Doors were smashed in, some hanging from hinges, windows were shattered. Blood stains spattered one of the driveways across the street; a lot of blood.

  We came to a stop in front of a small grey and while bungalow on a corner lot, an apple tree to the right side of the driveway, still covered with red leaves, and a large elm to the left, mostly bare, its leaves scattered across the lawn and driveway at its feet. The house had a two-car garage off the north side, connected to the house by a covered breezeway.

  One of the garage doors was open; there was a late model blue Honda sedan in the stall, it’s driver’s door open. The car’s back window was destroyed.

  Jamie sat behind the wheel, staring at the road ahead of him, both hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. Tom’s truck pulled up behind us and came to an abrupt stop and Alex charged out of the truck towards the house.

  “Wait here,” I shouted to Jamie as I jumped out of the vehicle; I grabbed Alex as he went to rush past me.

  “Wait,” I said, pulling him back. I gave him a shake to get his attention. “Stay here with your brother. Let me do this.” I gave him another shake, and he stopped pulling. He looked at Jamie, still sitting in the SUV, shaking

  “Let me do this for you.”

  He looked at me again, tears in his eyes, and finally nodded. He gave me a hug, then went and climbed into the SUV beside his brother.

  Tom climbed out of the truck, and I motioned him to stay behind with Pauline and my kids.

  I grabbed a flashlight from my bag and made sure I could reach my pistol in case I needed it. I asked the boys if they had a house key, or if there was one hidden somewhere. Alex quietly told me where to find the key for the front door under a planter by the door.

  In the quiet of the late afternoon, I walked into the garage, careful to look around the door and into the corners first. Tiny squares of broken glass covered the grey concrete floor. Other than the broken back window, the rest of the scene looked normal.

  I walked back out and climbed the few steps to the front door. I tried the handle, and found the door was locked. Hesitantly, thinking of checking the apartments in Taylor’s building on our first day away from the airport, I knocked three times on the door, and listened.

  After a moment, I knocked again, just to be sure. I heard nothing.

  I stepped back and bent down, finding the key under the planter where Alex had said it would be. I unlocked the door, steeled myself, and stepped inside the Walters family home.

  ♦♦♦

  The stench of death was like a cocoon that enshrouded me the second I opened the door, and I had to cough before catching my breath and continuing. The sickly-sweet smell of decomposition was everywhere in the house. I couldn’t place ever having smelled it before, but there was no mistaking it. It triggered some primitive, instinctive response in me; I wanted to turn and run from this place.

  Instead, I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose, clicked on the flashlight, and continued inside.

  To the immediate left was a small but tidy kitchen with a table in one corner and a wrap-around counter in the other. The sink looked out a window to the driveway and the street beyond. Through the kitchen was a doorway to a dining room, and to the left again a stairway leading into the darkness of the basement, as well as out to the garage. I stepped back from the kitchen and stepped ahead into a hallway. To the left was a large living room furnished with a tasteful couch and loveseat combination facing a large television hanging from the wall.

  I turned to the right, facing a hallway with four doors, two on each side.

  The first door on the right was open, and I peeked inside and saw a bathroom.

  The door opposite, to my left, was closed. I knocked on the door, not expecting an answer, and opened it.

  The colour scheme was predominantly blue, with a large bookcase on one wall filled with paperback novels. Two posters were on another wall, Deadpool on one somehow managing to look snarky even though you couldn’t see his face, and Dave Grohl on the other, looking badass and cool even though he was just standing with his arms crossed, staring without emotion at the camera.

  I backed out into the hall and closed the door behind me.

  At the end of the hall were two doors, both closed. I gambled on the left door next to the first bedroom, and knocked again just to be safe. I opened the door and had guessed right.

  Although they were twins, in some ways they were studies in contrast. Where the other room had been fairly tidy, this room was a work of modern art. Sports teams motif dominated the decorating theme, highlighting the ‘modern slob’ look many teenagers loved. I could imagine their mother walking in here, throwing her hands up in disgust, and stepping back, closing the door behind her, telling herself, ‘he’s an adult, he can clean it up himself when he gets home’. I did the same and closed the door behind me.

  I braced myself against what I would find when I opened the door; I took a deep breath, trying not to gag on the stench, and knocked. Hearing nothing, afraid of what I would find, I opened the door...

  … into a scene from hell. Blood had soaked through the sheets and mattress, dried almost black in gathering shadows of the fading day. Huge gouts of gore had splattered the painted wall behind the bed and sprayed the curtains by the window.

  Bloody handprints covered most of the walls, as well as the glass of the windows looking out into the yard.

  On the bed was an unrecognizable mass that once had been human but had been beaten and torn at until there was nothing human left of it.

  On the floor beside the bed was another corpse, this one also covered in blood and filth and gore but didn’t appear to be injured.

  The boys’ mother had been infected. My guess was her husband had been sleeping beside her, maybe holding her hand while they slept to give her some comfort in her sickness, when she had awakened into madness. She had beaten him to death in their shared bed, and when, in her demented state had been unable to figure out how to leave the bedroom, had taken her fury out on his corpse. Finally, after however many days trapped in here without water, it looked like she had succumbed; falling to the floor, too weak to move, finally dying in a pool of her husband’s congealed drying blood.

  Crying, my hands to my mouth, sick from the smell and what I had seen, I stepped back into the hallway, ran to the bathroom, and was sick in the toilet.

  After several minutes, when I was finally able, I stepped back into the hall. I had found a linen closet in the bathroom and grabbed some clean sheets to throw over the bodies before I let the boys come in here. I didn’t want them to come into this house, into this stench, but I knew they would want to; there were things they’d want to take with them when we left. At least I could cover their parents and keep them from opening that one door.

  I walked back to the bedroom, unfolding the sheet, and walked right into their mother’s corpse where it stood, tottering in the doorway, her desiccated arms reaching for me, her dry, raspy voice still trying to howl in fury.

  I screamed in terror and pushed out, throwing her b
ackwards into the room. She hit the bed and fell forward to the ground to the same spot I had found her in moments before, before she had awakened and crawled across the floor, before she had pulled herself up using the dresser for support, before whatever it was in her that was keeping her alive had driven her to try to attack me.

  She lay on the floor, her body spent, exhausted, unable to move, but still trying to kill me. Her eyes were a sick yellow and radiated pure hatred and fury as she tried to lift her head from the ground to spit at me, nothing but dry skin flying from her torn lips. Her system was so dehydrated, so destroyed, that even the mucus from the sickness in her mouth and nose had dried to a filmy green crust.

  And still she twisted on the floor, still she wanted nothing but to spend her last dying breath trying to kill me, just as she would try to kill each of her sons if they were here.

  I couldn’t let the boys see this, I thought to myself in a panic. Sobbing, knowing I had no other choice, I stepped into the room. I stepped over her body where she lay covered in blood, stepped over her as she twisted and writhed, her strengthless fingers reaching for me, her dried and torn lips peeled back from her teeth where she chewed at the air, and grabbed a pillow from the bed.

  ♦♦♦

  In the end, the boys hadn’t wanted to go inside.

  I came out and told them their parents were in there, but they were both dead from the sickness; I told them that neither had turned, that they had died together.

  I held them both as they sobbed. I held them both as I told them that their parents hadn’t suffered, that they had gone peacefully in their sleep. In this, they may have known I was lying, but they let it go.

  We stood in the street, the darkness falling around us, and knew that we needed to get somewhere for the night.

  “I think I know where we can go,” said Jamie, wiping his face on his sleeve.

  His brother did the same and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “You’re thinking Roxy’s place?” asked Alex. Jamie nodded.

  “My ex-girlfriend's parents’ house isn’t far from here,” Jamie explained, “and I know where they keep the spare key. Before Alex and I left for France, she had told me her folks were going on a cruise somewhere, so the house will likely be empty. Roxanne will be at school in Montreal.” He paused, suddenly realizing that in all likelihood, she was dead. He shook his head, putting it aside for now.

  We agreed it sounded like a good plan. Jamie drove the SUV and Alex followed in Tom’s truck, and a few blocks later we had the vehicles pulled into the driveway of a modern bungalow overlooking a small park. After knocking on the door first, Jamie went into the back yard and came back with a key, unlocking the front door and letting us inside.

  Once inside, Alex and Jamie gave the place a quick sweep to make sure it was safe. I immediately found a linen closet and grabbed handfuls of towels and blankets to hang over the windows; I didn’t want any lights we might have being seen from the street.

  Pauline went about setting up the camping stove Kevin had grabbed for us back in Barrie and started getting some food heated up. Jamie and Alex sat together, talking quietly, and everyone gave them their space. I assigned Karen and David the task of looking through the kitchen cupboards to see if there was any food that we could take with us when we left tomorrow.

  Tom grabbed our empty plastic fuel jugs and the siphon hose and started filling them from the cars in the garage. I followed him into the garage to look for a couple empty pails; I wanted to go to the basement to collect water from the water heater. If we got lucky, they would have a gas water heater and might have some hot water, and if not, then it would be cold but at least we could wash up without using our supply of fresh drinking water.

  After being in the boys’ parents’ house, I needed to wash up.

  As I rooted around shelving in the garage looking for a clean pail or two, and Tom set up his gear ready to practice his siphoning skills, he asked me what I had actually found back there.

  In a quiet voice, in as few words as possible, I told him.

  He stood and came to stand behind me in the darkness of the garage, and simply hugged me.

  I turned and buried my face in his big chest, and I cried.

  ♦♦♦

  It turns out we had scored big on two counts; first, Roxy’s parents had a natural gas water heater that was chock full to the brim with steaming hot water, and second, they had a hot tub out on the back deck. With no electricity to run it, the hot tub was long-since cold of course, but it was full of water and hadn’t yet gone skunky. It required several trips with a couple pails, but by mixing the two we managed to get enough warm water in the tub for the boys and I to take turns and have a good washing before supper, and we still had enough hot water leftover to clean up from supper.

  Pauline, Tom and the kids had been lucky enough to wash regularly at the cabin by warming lake water by the fire throughout the day, so other than washing their hands and faces, they left the water to us.

  We sat at the dining table in Jamie’s ex-girlfriend’s house, blankets over the windows and candles on the table, and we talked about their parents. Not the end, not that… maybe never that. But we talked about them; who they had been, and what they had been like.

  The boys recalled memories of family trips, Christmases, hunting trips with their dad and weekend camping trips as a family. Laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes, Alex asked Jamie if he remembered the time their dad had gotten too drunk sitting by the campfire and burned his hand; he had been convinced that if you poured rubbing alcohol on your hand and lit it, your hand wouldn’t burn and just the alcohol would burn off leaving your hand untouched. Jamie started laughing and told us how seriously unimpressed mom had been to be awakened at one o’clock in the morning and pulled out of her sleeping bag to administer to second-degree burns on her drunk husband’s hand.

  “And the look on Dad’s face,” Jamie gasped for air, laughing, “when Mom asked where the rubbing alcohol was so she could wash the area around the burn!"

  We let the silence that followed hang for a while. It was a good silence.

  “I’m going to go sit out on the back deck for some fresh air,” said Pauline.

  Tom smiled and shook his head in exasperation.

  Pauline had been a pack-a-day smoker for decades until all of us had finally ganged up on her enough to convince her to quit. But in Pauline’s case, ‘quit’ turned out to be a relative term.

  Over a period of six months she had gone from a pack-a-day down to only one or two cigarettes a week, and that’s where she called it good. “I still enjoy the taste of a cigarette,” she always said, “especially after a meal or after, well, you know.”

  “I’ll join you,” I said, only in my case I really did just want some fresh air.

  We sat on the back deck in the darkness while the kids helped Tom clean up from supper. It was funny, we were comfortable with breaking into this home and taking what we needed, but none of us wanted to leave a sink of dirty dishes behind us.

  David had found a cupboard with some board games, so right now the discussion was raging whether it would be Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit. I silently cringed; I hated Trivial Pursuit. That game always made me feel stupid; I had a university degree and I read constantly, but somehow that game made me feel like an illiterate moron.

  Pauline sat in the darkness and dragged on her smoke, relishing the experience.

  Together we listened to the noise of the city.

  In the absence of the normal noises we all became used to living in a larger city, like the sounds of traffic, car horns and stereos, ambulance sirens and the like, we were left with a vacuum that let the other sounds carry further.

  We could hear screams of the infected, thankfully off in the distance, almost like the sound of the coyotes calling to each other across the valley and in the fields up behind the cabin in the summer.

  Only this sounded like tens of thousands of them, off in the night, their
cries ebbing and swelling, cresting like waves on a distant shore.

  I wondered what it was that made them seek out each other’s company; maybe some innate tribe or pack mentality we all carried with us, or some strength in numbers instinct. Humans were innately social creatures, we weren’t loners by nature, we needed other people. I guess the infected, no matter how devolved and devoid of human thought and reasoning they had become, were still human once you drilled down to it.

  Maybe they were even more human than us, I thought. Anger, fury, hatred: these were all pure emotions; pure passion at its basest level, in its rawest form, before it got complicated by other feelings and questions of morality, or social acceptance, before political correctness got in the way.

  So many of us had forgotten how to feel. We went through our day to day lives, and we laughed, we loved, we cried, we hated, but we did it all weakly; it was all watered down. In today’s civilized society, it was as if we did all of this through a layer of gauze, like watching television but through a layer of cellophane.

  I know I did, and I had let it ruin my marriage. I had become so inured to the life I lived every day, so used to the hundrumness of the daily routine, that I had forgotten how it felt to be passionate about something; and so, I had sought out something else, something that would make me feel that spark, that passion. It had been sex, and nothing more, but I had let it seduce me the way I had seduced him, I guess.

  But this, here, now, this was raw. This was primal. This was real.

  The gauze had been ripped away, the cellophane stripped off, and I felt like I was seeing the world, and seeing myself, clearly for the first time in as long as I could remember.

  And the infected; I knew they saw it, they felt it, too.

  I wiped a tear from my face, at the sadness of everything we had lost, everything I had taken for granted. I swore to myself I would never take anything for granted again. The gauze had been stripped off my reality, and I meant to feel everything, the good and the bad.