The Infected, a PODs Novel

by Michelle K. Pickett

  The snow started coming down quickly, swirling in the wind. Within minutes, there was a light dusting of powder covering the icy highway.

  “Hold my hand,” David said, reaching out and wrapping his gloved hand around mine.

  I looked at him and smiled. Then realized he couldn’t see it behind the handkerchief I wore to protect my face. Only my eyes were uncovered. So I squeezed his hand lightly.

  Within an hour, the snow had completely covered the ground. It crunched under our feet, our boots leaving perfect footprints. The wind whistled as it blew around us, the gusts so strong they made us stumble and slip.

  This isn’t just a little snow.

  Two hours into the storm, it was white-out conditions. We couldn’t see anything in front of us except the swirling, white snow. David walked beside me, holding my hand. But I couldn't see him. He was completely engulfed in a curtain of white. I could barely see my hand. We had no way of knowing if we were passing houses we could use for shelter, or if we were out in the middle of nowhere.

  I don’t like this. It feels like I’m alone in a tiny white room. I can’t see anything.

  Pain ricocheted through me when something hit me hard against the face. The force of the blow knocked me backward, and I fell on my butt against the pavement, hitting so hard my teeth snapped together.

  “Eva!”

  “David watch out!” I screamed.

  As if the snow storm wasn’t enough, we’d run into a group of Infected. Lying on the ground, my eyes were shielded enough that I could see their feet shuffling around us.

  David fell hard next to me. He grabbed for his rifle.

  “You can’t shoot. You can’t see where the others are!” I screamed over the wind.

  A baseball bat swung through the air narrowly missing David’s head. He reached into the side pocket of his pack and pulled out his hunting knife. Scooting on his belly across the ground he stabbed the knife into the foot of the Infected, grabbing the bat. He swung hard at the person’s knees, knocking him to the pavement.

  “Give me your gun,” He shouted.

  I ripped off my glove, pulling my gun from my pocket. David grabbed it and placed the muzzle against the infected man’s temple. He turned his face and pulled the trigger.

  David pulled his knife out of the man’s foot, washing the blood away in the snow. I grabbed my small pocket knife out of the same pocket that held my gun and waited. I couldn’t see anything. The feet that had been walking around me were gone. I couldn’t hear anything. The normal groans and grunts of the Infected were masked by the sound of the whipping wind.

  A gun shot rang out, and I jumped. I saw a vague outline of a body sprawled on the ground, a few feet away. Blood seeped across the white snow toward me. I scrambled away.

  David held the sleeve of my coat. “Stay close!”

  Feet wearing toeless shoes came into view. I stayed very still hoping it would pass by. It didn’t. The Infected raised a foot and kicked me in the shoulder. I bit my lip, squeezed my eyes shut, and sliced the back of the person’s ankle with my knife. They fell to the ground in front of me. David reached out and shot them in the head. A clean kill.

  It used to bother me—killing a person. The first time I encountered someone who was infected, I couldn’t separate the person they’d been from the monster they’d become. I’d long since made peace with the fact they had to be killed. It was a blessing, really. At least I liked to think so. No one wanted to become a monster.

  I felt something touch my ankle. Just a slight bump. Then a hand grabbed it, and yanked me across the ground. I screamed for David. He whirled around, knife in hand, but he couldn’t see, or reach, the person. So, he held onto my arm, pulling me toward him, while the other person jerked me in the opposite direction.

  David gave one good tug, and I screamed in pain. The infected man holding my ankle lost his footing, falling on top of me, and knocking my chin against the pavement.

  “Eva, hold still!” David yelled just before a shot rang out. I felt the person sag against me. I rolled to my back and kicked him off.

  We waited, and watched, for more feet to scurry by. I’m not sure how long we lay there, the three dead Infected around us. Their thick blood gelatinous on the snowy surface. It seemed like an eternity. Finally, Devlin hobbled over. Had we not seen his walking stick before we saw his shoes, he would’ve likely had a knife stuck through his foot.

  “We think they’re gone,” he yelled. The others made their way over to us. David and I tried to stand. I slipped on the icy pavement and fell on top of the dead man in front of me.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the man’s face. His eyes open, staring. The pale skin, crisscrossed with blue veins. I tried to push myself off, but my feet kept slipping on the icy surface. Roy reached down and hauled me up by my arm.

  “Thanks.”

  “Ain’t a problem,” Roy answered.

  “We need a tether.” David shouted. “Something we can all hold on to so we don’t get separated.”

  Roy pulled a rope out of his pack and passed it around. We each threaded it through a belt loop on our jeans. We walked like that for twenty minutes before I felt a tug on the rope just before I fell hard, tumbling into the ditch lining the road. Juan and Rebecca, who were leading us, had stepped off the shoulder of the highway and fallen into the ditch, pulling the rest of us with them. The conditions were deteriorating so rapidly, we couldn’t see to stay on the highway.

  David landed next to me in the ditch. He grabbed my arm and pulled my head close to his.

  “Are you alright?” He yelled.

  “Yes.”

  He yanked on both sides of the rope, until we were all hudled together. “We need to stop,” David shouted. “We can’t tell if we’re even on course.”

  “Should we even try to look for housing?” Seth asked.

  “We can make a sharp right and walk for a bit. See what we find. But we don’t know what’s there. Could be houses, could be a bunch of nothing. If we get ourselves all turned around and disoriented, we’ll be in deep shit come morning.” Roy adjusted his pack on his shoulders.

  Seth nodded. “Then we just find a spot and set-up camp.”

  We pitched our four tents close to one another to help shield each other from the gusts of wind. We paired up to use each other’s body heat for warmth. Roy and Judy and Rebecca and Juan paired with each other. Seth and Devlin were walking together so it was assumed they would share a tent. That left me and David.

  Great. I get to sleep with my ex- fiancé. The fun never stops.

  Once the tent was up, David ushered me inside, following close behind. He zipped the door closed behind him and we hurried to unroll our bedding. We climbed into one sleeping bag, and pulled the other and the two quilts over us.

  “This could almost be romantic if I wasn’t so damn cold,” David said against my ear.

  I nodded. My teeth were chattering too hard to talk.

  And if we were still a couple. You dumped me. Let’s not forget that little detail, Casanova.

  The night seemed to drag on forever. I recited some of my favorite poetry in my head, like Where The Sidewalk Ends and Messy Room by Shel Silverstein and Love and Friendship by Emily Bronte. It helped pass the time and kept my mind off where I was, and the brutal cold. When I stopped reciting poetry and started solving random math equations, I began to seriously question my stability, because as calming as poetry was to me normally, math was like a jackhammer in my brain.

  The wind whipped against the tent, bending and pushing it like a schoolyard bully. The vinyl flapped and fluttered under the gusts. It whistled so loudly it was nearly impossible to talk, and it was so cold my body convulsed with violent shivers. The tent did little to insulate us from the frigid temperature. I could feel the icy fingers of the wind slip through the walls, trailing over my skin like an unwanted lover’s touch. The ground was hard and cold beneath us, like lying on a large ice cube.

  Sometime during the night th
e wind blew itself out. The roaring stopped, and a silence blanketed the night.

  “Try to sleep,” David murmured so close to my ear I felt his lips moving. His hand cupped my jaw and tilted my face to him. His lips grazed over mine before I could look away. Just an innocent kiss. Chaste. Nothing more than something two children would sneak in the playground at school. So why did it send shivers down my spine that had nothing to do with the frigid temperature?

  The next morning, David unzipped the tent’s door and snow fell through. It was piled more than two feet high against the tent. He pushed his way out, and turned to help me. I stood and looked around. The sun was shining, and the sky clear. I had to shield my eyes from the bright sunlight reflecting off the snow. The ground sparkled like tiny mirrors covered it, making it the world’s biggest disco ball.

  “Wow,” I whispered, “There’s so much.” In some areas, the snow drifts were as tall as me. It was an awesome sight—it was too dang cold.

  “We’d better get moving. We need to find a house or something where we can warm up and get something to eat.”

  “A car would be good.” I rubbed my hands up and down my arms to keep warm.

  David nodded. “Yeah, but our car riding days are over. There’s no way a car will get through all this shit.”

  We broke down the camp, packed up our gear, and started walking. It was a bitch walking through snow up to our knees in some places. We tried to get our bearings in the new, white world. The snow covered all our landmarks. We walked in the general direction we thought the highway was. Roy walked ahead of us. He found the ditch running next to the highway. He stepped out, slipped, and skidded down the side of the ditch on his butt, laughing the entire way.

  “Sledding, Roy?” Devlin called with a laugh.

  “Yee-haw,” he laughed.

  “Geez, get off your ass, Roy. We ain’t got time for you playin’ around,” Judy snapped, and then laughed at her husband sitting in the middle of a snow bank.

  Roy picked up a handful of snow and lobbed it a Judy, hitting her in the shoulder. She looked down at the snow stuck to her coat. I cringed. She was either going to blow and give Roy a taste of her tongue or he was going to get a face full of snow. Either way, I was staying out of the way.

  Judy smiled and scooped up an armful of snow and tossed it at Roy. It hit him square in the face. He leaned back and cackled, causing the snow bank to fall over him. That only made him laugh harder. I started to laugh with him.

  “Ever had a snowball fight, Eva?” David asked quietly beside me.

  “No, I—” I turned to him and got a face full of cold, wet snow. He grinned at me.

  “Oh, you are so gonna pay for that,” I said, laughing.

  And that started it. Snowballs flew, laughter filled the air, and, for a short time, we forgot where we were, that we had no homes to go back to, and that the Infected wandered the wilderness waiting to attack. We forgot it all and had something we hadn’t had in a long time—fun.

  “Okay, okay, I surrender,” David said, shaking the snow out of his hair, mini snowballs flew through the air, showering over me. I giggled. He smiled at me, and a tingling started in my chest and quickly moved down my body, my eyes roaming over him, soaking him in. His dark hair wet from the snow. His cheeks rosy, kissed by the cold air. His lips red and just a little chapped… and the freckle under his bottom lip, on the left. That freckle. That was my freckle.

  No, Eva. That freckle isn’t yours anymore. David isn’t yours. He walked away. He made it seem so easy, too. Like everything we had could be pushed aside, and left behind.

  I blinked and gave David a quick smile, turning away.

  He'd made me choose. I asked—no, I begged—for him not to. He pushed. And then he walked away. I can’t get caught up in him again. Because if I let myself trust him, and he walks away, I won’t survive it. Not a second time.

  “Okay, playtime’s over,” Devlin said, “We need to get moving.”

  We’d walked about twenty minutes before we saw a sign. Juan used a sweatshirt from his pack to swat as much snow off the green metal sign as he could reach. When we could read the sign, all four men swore, echoed by me, Judy and Rebecca. We’d been walking west. The village was east.

  “Dammit!” David pushed his hood off and jammed his hand through his hair. “Twenty minutes walking in the wrong freakin’ direction. Twenty minutes back to where we started and we’ve just wasted forty minutes we couldn’t afford to lose.”

  Gray clouds covered the bright yellow sun from earlier in the day. They swirled above our heads like black crows, squawking their warning of another brutal snow storm.

  We hiked nonstop for the next three days—starting with first light, and continuing until darkness fell.

  We looked for small towns to make camp. The military were more likely to miss them when sweeping for supplies—they went to the big cities first and worked their way down. We tried to eat what we found in the houses we squatted in each night, and packed up whatever was left to take with us.

  My body throbbed. Pain sizzled like grease in a frying pan through my muscles. We tromped through snow up to our knees each day. There was too much snow on the ground to use a car. Not even an SUV could make it through the huge drifts, hiking around them was a problem for us. It cost time when we had to make adjustments, and each time we veered off the highway—which we followed using mile markers and signs—we risked falling into a gulley and injuring ourselves. We already had one injured hiker, we didn’t need two.

  And it wasn’t just the snow drifts that kept us from making a straight hike down the middle of the highway, it was debris too. It’d been two years since the virus hit. Since then, the world had returned to its wild nature. There was no one left to trim trees, clean-up wreckage after a storm, no one to keep the world neat and tidy like it was when we all lived our happy little lives before death swarmed down on us. So we had to climb over— or go around and risk falling into a ditch—trees and electrical poles. Sometimes it was worse than that.

  “What is that?” Seth looked ahead.

  Devlin grunted in answer. The hike was particularly grueling on him with his injured legs.

  “Are you even going to be able to make the hike?” I’d asked him the night before. “We can gather enough supplies for you to camp here until we get the immunization. We’ll pick you up on the way back.”

  “Hell no! I’m not staying behind. Besides, it’s just my left knee that’s screwed up. Everything else is fine.”

  Juan squinted to get a better look at what blocked the road ahead, then shook his head. “No idea, but it’s huge.”

  The closer we came to the mystery thing in the middle of the road, the bigger the butterflies grew in my stomach. I knew what it was before Roy said it. I think everyone did. And none of us wanted to go through it to get to the other side.

  “That there’s a house!” Roy drawled, looking up at the tan single wide mobile home with burgundy shutters.

  It sat upright across the highway, like someone picked it up and put it down in front of us. It had minor damage on the outside, some dents and scrapes, but nothing serious. It was just a mobile home. In the middle of the highway.

  I grabbed the straps of my pack and tilted my head to rub my cheek against my hand. “We’re going to have to walk through that thing, aren’t we?”

  “Probably.” David looked straight ahead. “It’s too much of a risk to walk around. We don’t know what’s under the snow on the side of the road.”

  “Devlin! Check the side of the highway.” I called.

  Every night when we'd stop, we’d use Devlin’s walking stick to check the side of the highway. If the stick hit ground, we'd hiked to the town or houses we were passing. If the stick sank, there was a gulley and we kept moving until we found solid ground.

  My heart sank when I watched Devlin’s walking stick sink almost to the top. No walking around. We were going through the house. I really hoped no one was home.

  W
e approached the mobile home, stopping in front of the door. We just stood there, staring. Finally Seth sucked in a deep breath, saying, “Should I knock?”

  We laughed, but it sounded forced, nervous.

  Seth turned the knob, pushing the door open. He stepped in and made a funny sound before calling to us, “Not very pretty in here, but there’s a clear path to the backdoor.”

  I saw it the second I was in the trailer. The body slumped to the side on the couch. The gray bones held together by the thread bare clothing it wore, and patches of leathery skin still visible.

  I expected a putrid smell, maggots, or something, but there was nothing. Just the skeleton of a person sitting on the couch. The person the trailer probably belonged to. A shiver ran through my body and I looked away, hurrying to the back door and outside.

  Aberdeen, otherwise known as Area-One. It was the farthest village north. The president was housed there and it was the military’s base of operation. But most importantly to us, it was the village with the best medical doctors and scientists. The village where most medical research was done. The village where vaccine was developed.

  The village that had what we needed.

  “I thought it’d be bigger. I mean, they had any city they wanted to choose from and they set up camp in this tiny podunk town? Weird.” I chewed on my chapped lips, wishing I had a tube of ChapStick.

  “Easier to defend.” Devlin stood next to me on a hill overlooking Area-One. “The big cities have too much area to patrol. They don’t have enough manpower to do it. It’s easier to keep control of a smaller area.”

  A large fence surrounded the village. Barbed wire curled around the slanted top. It looked like a military compound—I guess it was in a lot of ways. People milled around from building to building, doing whatever jobs they were assigned. Some carried animals killed while hunting, which I found odd since hunting was banned in Rosewood. Street vendors bought and sold the hunters’ kills. A heavy military presence roamed the streets, keeping watch over the residents.