Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland

by Michael J. Totten

  “Have a seat,” Freddy the barista said. “I’ll bring a glass out to you.”

  There was only one empty table, but there were two couches running parallel to each other that shared a big coffee table. It was the kind of place a large group of friends could colonize, like it was some kind of living room within the coffee shop. Every seat on one of the couches was taken, but there was a spot available on the other next to a pretty young woman.

  Kyle didn’t want to sit next to her. Mostly he didn’t want to ask if he could sit next to her. He didn’t want her introducing herself to him like Freddy the barista just had. He wanted to sit alone and figure out a way to unfuck himself.

  So he sat in an uncomfortable straight-back chair at the last dainty table available. Freddy brought him a glass of water with three square ice cubes in it.

  Kyle surprised himself. He actually sympathized with Parker. The man was a championship asshole, but he’d paid the price three times, not once. First by being strapped to that chair and infected, second with post-traumatic stress that for all Kyle knew would haunt him for the rest of his days and now again by being yanked out of the motel by Lander’s security and sent who-the-fuck knows where.

  Hughes thought Kyle was a shit. Annie would think so, too, when she found out.

  Kyle was condemned to being alone in a strange town at the end of the world where nobody knew him and nobody cared. He could see this as a new beginning, but he didn't want to. Not yet. He had no idea what was beginning, no idea where he’d go, no idea what he would do or how he would live. He didn’t even how to live anymore. All he knew was that he wanted to stay in Lander with Annie and patch things up with Hughes and convince him to stay too.

  What about Parker? He wasn’t sure, partly because he didn’t even know where Parker was. Did Steele just take him in for a little rough questioning? Would he be back at the motel in the evening? If Kyle could get Parker back, would he? He and Hughes had assumed Parker wouldn’t be back, but they didn’t know that.

  He sipped from his glass of water and realized that Freddy hadn’t asked him for money. It was just a glass of water, but still. The coffee shop had no coffee and accepted no money, yet it was still there, functioning more or less as it had before. On the one hand, it seemed like a fake coffee shop, like a house of cards that a fat person could blow down with a sigh. On the other hand, these people were resilient. Kyle had driven past coffee shops for a thousand miles between Seattle and Lander, and the defining characteristics of every single one of them were broken glass, silence and death.

  His water tasted good. It was cold and clean and sweet like the water he was used to in Oregon. Even though the world had basically ended, water was still water. It tasted exactly the same. Kyle wasn’t sure why, but he found that extraordinary.

  A young man emerged from the men’s room at the far end of the café. His face was pale, like he’d seen a ghost or a dead body in there. His hands were shaking and he looked like he might throw up or already had a couple of times.

  He walked past Kyle and took the seat on the couch next to the pretty young woman. The seat that Kyle had considered taking.

  “God,” he said to the young woman next to him on the couch. “I’ve never been so sick.”

  She put her arm around him. His girlfriend then. “Let’s get you to a doctor.”

  He was really shaking. Almost convulsing a little. And he was sweating like crazy.

  Everyone in the café looked at him now.

  Freddy came around from behind the counter with a towel in his hand. “Is he okay?”

  A young man on the other couch backed up as far as he could into the pillows like he was trying to get as far away from the sick guy as he could without getting up. “Is he infected?”

  The sick guy’s girlfriend shot him an angry look. “You think we’d be hanging out in a coffee shop if he was infected? He was fine twenty minutes ago.”

  “I think I’m gonna pass out,” the sick guy said.

  “Dude, your blood pressure’s probably low,” Freddy the barista said. “You should lay down. Get a rush of blood to your head.”

  The sick guy’s girlfriend scooted to the end of the couch. “Lay down, Jake,” she said and lifted his feet up. Jake didn’t lay down, exactly. He just leaned over sideways.

  “Somebody get me a doctor,” Jake said. And then he passed out.

  “Jake,” his girlfriend said and shook him.

  No response.

  “Shit,” his girlfriend said.

  “You sure he’s not infected?” said the young man on the other couch.

  “How could he be infected?” Jake’s girlfriend said. “He hasn’t been bit. You think he’d hide something like that and just hang out here as if everything’s peachy?”

  The sick guy named Jake groaned. But it didn’t sound like a regular groan. It sounded more primal somehow.

  The café got very quiet. Everyone was sitting up straight now.

  Kyle felt a chill. A small pang of anxiety. A heightening of awareness.

  Jake made that noise again. His girlfriend recoiled from him, as if he was a little bit radioactive. As if she’d never heard that sound before. Or, as if she had heard that sound before, just not coming from her boyfriend Jake.

  “Get away from him,” Kyle said.

  He expected her to snap at him, but instead she moved all the way down to the other end of the couch.

  She shook her head. “He can’t be infected. It isn’t possible.”

  “Somebody should go and get him a doctor,” Freddy the barista said.

  At first, nobody moved. Nobody said anything.

  Kyle could go and fetch a doctor from the hospital. He was pretty sure he knew where it was. Lander was not a big city. All he’d have to do is walk a few minutes toward the entrance to town and head south.

  “I’ll go,” a young man who looked like a college student said. He sounded nervous, as if what he really wanted was to get a half-mile between himself and the sick guy.

  Kyle considered going with him. He wanted to go to the hospital anyway to see Annie. But he still hadn’t figured out what on earth he would tell her about Parker. He didn’t have to tell her anything today, but he didn’t want to lie to her either. One way or another, she’d find out eventually what happened. He’d rather she heard it from him than from somebody else, but he had no idea what to say.

  So Kyle stayed where he was.

  The volunteer kid stood up and put his coat and hat on. He scooped up his water glass and placed it in a gray plastic tub next to the newspaper rack so Freddy the barista wouldn’t have to clean up after him. Kyle smiled a bit to himself. Lander was just pretending to be normal in some ways, but in other ways it really was normal. No survivors out in the wasteland were bussing their tables if they drank a glass of water in an abandoned café. They were more likely to throw the glass against the wall just to hear the sound or to make one final mark in this world.

  “Hey,” Freddy said as the volunteer kid headed toward the door. “Bring some security too.”

  The kid nodded and headed outside.

  Kyle looked around the room for a weapon. Jake’s girlfriend said he hadn’t been bit, and Kyle believed her, but he showed all the symptoms. What else could he possibly have? The flu didn’t take people down that hard in just 20 minutes. Not ever.

  Jake’s eyes opened. He lay on his back and looked straight up at the ceiling without blinking.

  “Jake?” his girlfriend said quietly.

  No response.

  The café was so quiet it could have been closed and dark and abandoned.

  All eyes were on Jake.

  Kyle realized he was holding his breath. Everyone in that café was probably holding their breath.

  “Jake?” she said again quietly and shook his feet to get his attention.

  Jake slowly sat up and looked at her. He wasn’t shaking anymore. He didn’t even seem to be sick anymore. He didn’t say anything either. Even though he
looked straight at his girlfriend, his face registered no recognition. He didn’t seem to know where he was or who he was looking at.

  “Get away from him,” Kyle said.

  Time seemed to slow. Jake’s girlfriend turned her head and her eyes toward Kyle. It seemed to take her two or three seconds to get there. Jake placed his palms down on the couch. That took at least a second and a half. He hunched his shoulders. That by itself seemed to take another full second, and it took him two or three more to curl his feet underneath him and prepare himself to lunge forward.

  The three young people on the couch leapt to their feet as if in slow-motion. It seemed to take them a couple of seconds, as if they were in a zero-gravity environment. Everyone knew what was happening except Jake’s girlfriend, who’d spent at most one second—though it felt more like twenty—turning her attention toward the sound of Kyle’s voice.

  She did not see her boyfriend baring his teeth. She did not see him lunge at her throat like a predatory cat. She must have heard the scream, though, and she surely felt Jake’s teeth in her neck.

  Kyle turned away, but he couldn’t tune out her screams of shock and horror and utter disbelief at what was happening to her.

  Kyle leapt to his feet and picked up the chair he’d been sitting on. Everyone in the café was on their feet now and scrambling to get away from the gruesome scene on the couch.

  Freddy the barista ran to the back of the café and pulled the fire extinguisher off the wall as his customers stampeded over each other on their way out the door. He ran back to the seating area and stopped in his tracks.

  He and Kyle looked at each other. Kyle held a chair in his hands, which could work as both an offensive or defensive weapon, but Freddy had only the fire extinguisher.

  There should be a gun under the counter, Kyle thought. This was Wyoming after a civilizational collapse, and all Freddy had was a fire extinguisher?

  These people still didn’t understand what they were dealing with. They were clinging obliviously to a rock while a tsunami of blood and mayhem swept the entire country away.

  Kyle had faced the infected before, and in much greater numbers than one. He wanted to tell Freddy to lock himself in the bathroom, that Kyle could take out Jake with the chair by himself, but a chair was an awkward weapon. It wouldn’t drop one of those things as reliably as a crowbar or hammer.

  Jake was still mauling his girlfriend with his teeth. There was blood everywhere. She wasn’t struggling anymore. She hadn’t struggled for long. Her eyes stared blankly at the ceiling like those of a corpse being consumed by a cougar.

  A cougar that five minutes earlier was her boyfriend.

  Kyle and Freddy looked at each other and nodded. It was time, and they could do this in tandem. The diseased version of Jake wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to either of them.

  Kyle decided to strike first with the chair. Then Freddy could bash Jake with the fire extinguisher.

  The front door chimed. Kyle felt a blast of cold air on his back.

  The sound of a woman’s scream pierced the café.

  The thing that used to be Jake raised his head from the gory mess that used to be his girlfriend and snapped his attention toward the door. Blood covered his snarling face.

  Kyle braced himself. He did not look behind him. He did not look at the woman who’d stepped into the café unawares, but Freddy did and shouted, “Go get security!”

  The woman screamed again and the door chimed when it shut behind her. Kyle heard her boots on the sidewalk, running away fast and hard.

  The thing that used to be Jake growled at Freddy.

  Kyle heard the screeching sound of car brakes outside and a heavy thump like a truck slammed into a punching bag.

  The woman who’d just ran outside had been hit by a car.

  The thing that used to be Jake stared at Freddy. Freddy held the fire extinguisher off to the side like he was stepping up to the plate with a baseball bat. He should have held it in front of him or dived behind the counter, but he was brave and gearing up to go on the offensive.

  “You have some knives behind the counter?” Kyle said.

  Freddy shook his head. It was too late anyway. The muscles between Jake’s eyes pinched and he launched himself off the couch.

  Freddy swung the fire extinguisher and connected with Jake’s left shoulder, but Jake had almost 200 pounds of momentum behind him and they both went onto the floor, Freddy on his back, a now-screaming Jake on top of him. The fire extinguisher rolled away.

  It’s amazing how many thoughts can go through a person’s mind in a split second of danger. Fear narrows the focus, but it also heightens sensory awareness and it seems to stretch time.

  Kyle felt the dead weight of the wooden chair as he raised it over his head. The room smelled of blood, iron and fear. He tasted salt on his lips from his own sweat.

  He was dimly aware that a crowd was gathering outside the café where the woman had been hit by a car. Men and women spoke to each other in urgent tones. He heard the high-pitched rev of an engine as a large vehicle accelerated down Main. Somebody outside mentioned a hospital.

  Kyle’s mind should have shut all that out as irrelevant noise, but somebody from outside might choose to come inside. They might see what was happening. Kyle and Freddy might have some backup any second.

  Freddy had his right arm free. He was using it to protect his face and throat from the thing that used to be Jake.

  Kyle swung the chair downward. It moved slowly at first at the top of its arc. It took a certain amount of strength to get it going. Gravity wasn’t assisting just yet. Kyle was strong enough to crash it down on Jake’s head, no doubt, but it wasn’t like swinging a golf club. Wooden chairs weren’t designed to be whipped around in a hurry in any kind of a fight.

  Gravity started working with Kyle rather than against him after a moment. It was pulling the chair down toward the earth, toward Jake’s head. Kyle could see—and feel—that it would get the job done.

  But he was a fraction of a second too slow.

  Jake’s teeth clamped onto Freddy’s forearm as one of the chair legs split the top of his scalp.

  Blood spattered the counter wall.

  Jake was moaning and Freddy was screaming as Kyle raised the chair over his head again and brought it down again with a tremendous assist from gravity and split Jake’s head like a watermelon.

  The amount of blood was incredible. Kyle felt a shuddering rush like lava and closed his eyes.

  Freddy was still screaming.

  Shouts outside on the sidewalk.

  The front door chimed.

  Kyle turned around and opened his eyes.

  Two men and a woman stepped inside with real fright on their faces.

  Freddy was moaning and crying and clutching his bleeding arm. There was blood everywhere, on Freddy, on Jake’s body, on the low counter wall, all over the floor and even on Kyle.

  “Stay back,” Kyle said. “He’s been bit and the blood’s infected.”

  “Oh God!” the woman said and gasped. “Oh God!” She gasped again and again. One of the men with her took her arm. She was hyperventilating now. She’d gone from nervous to panicked in seconds.

  “Get her out of here!” Kyle said.

  The two men led her back out and onto the sidewalk.

  Kyle sat in one of the chairs at one of the dainty tables in the ruined café and tried to focus, to slow down his breathing, to just sit still for a couple of moments and let the adrenaline wash out of his system.

  An SUV slammed to a halt in the middle of the intersection outside.

  “You’re going to be alright, Freddy,” Kyle said. He knew it wasn’t true, but it was a thing to say.

  “Fuck, man!” Freddy cried. “I’ve been bit! The fucker bit me!”

  Kyle heard vehicle doors slamming and boots on the sidewalk.

  He took a deep breath.

  Two of Steele’s security men burst inside and swept the room with assault rif
les. The guy on the right stepped toward Freddy while the guy on the left came straight at Kyle with his weapon out front.

  The adrenaline wouldn’t be washing out of Kyle’s system any time soon. He flung his hands toward the ceiling and kept them there. “I’m not bit!”

  But he was as soaked in blood as if he’d committed a massacre.

  “This guy’s been bit,” said the guy on the right.

  “Wait,” Freddy said and raised his hands in front of him as if they’d stop a bullet.

  The guy on the right shot Freddy in the face.

  Kyle’s ears rang like a grenade went off near his head.

  “You sure you’re not bit?” the guy on the left shouted. Kyle could barely hear him beneath the stunned ringing in his ears. The guy had his finger inside the trigger guard and was a half-second away from doing to Kyle what his partner had just done to Freddy.

  Kyle vigorously shook his head. “I’m not bit!”

  “Check him,” the guy said and yanked Kyle up by the front of his shirt.

  Kyle heard more gunshots outside. First one. Followed by a pause. Then two more.

  21

  Dr. Frank Nash walked from the hospital to the mayor’s house. The security guards on the front porch seemed to be expecting him. They opened the door and let him in without a word.

  “Doctor Nash here to see you, sir,” one of them said and stepped back outside.

  Steele rose from the couch with a hardback book in his hand. Nash couldn’t see the title. “What the fuck is going on in my town?”

  “Were you expecting me, sir?”

  Steele just looked at him.

  “I stopped by because I need to tell you about one of my patients,” Nash said.

  “I know all about your damn patient,” Steele said. “And the others too. That’s why I sent for you.”

  Nash had no idea Steele had sent for him. And what “others” was he talking about? “Can we sit?” Nash said.

  The mayor stared at him. He was angry. Furious. That was clear. Had Nash done something wrong?

  “Yeah, sit down,” Steele said and waved toward a leather recliner near the fireplace with his hardback. Nash was no longer interested in what the mayor was reading.