The Contaminated: Where Were You When The Pandemic Hit?

by Kypers, Ryan

  I reached out and grabbed hold of the wrench, standing up. Though my legs felt like warm jelly, they held well enough for me to trot forward. I reached the edge of the baseball field and planted my feet in a ready stance. Chelsea was about one hundred feet away, the contaminated only twenty feet behind her.

  “To me!” I said in a yell, but not so loud to echo across the field. The trees were far away, and sound travelled very easily in this area. I had to be sure that contaminated were not attracted to the noise, or at least not in large numbers.

  Chelsea had seemed to catch on to this. She was not yelling, but she was motioning for me to get out of the way. I held my hands up, questioning why she would want me to move, the heavy wrench weighing down my right arm. She ferociously pointed behind me.

  I turned to meet a contaminated face to face, its yellow eyes staring into my own. This was the first time that I had a chance to get a good, full view of the eyes of the contaminated. They were yellow, not black and yellow, but yellow. The whites on the sides were even a darker shade of yellow, but the center was bright, almost a golden color. The most interesting part was that there were no veins to the eyes. It was solid.

  The contaminated began to hiss at me, as expected. I gripped the wrench at the end of the handle. I had about a foot and a half of swinging room with the extension that the wrench size gave me. I put my back into the first swing, but missed horribly. The contaminated stepped back slightly, and then hissed again as if waiting for me to try a second time.

  I gripped higher up on the wrench this time, more towards the head of the weapon, giving me a faster swing but less reach.

  “MOVE!” I heard come from behind me. I whipped around in time to see Chelsea run by me, putting her shoulder into the contaminated which approached me.

  The one that followed her was not far behind. It was hissing as it ran, sort of funny to be honest. The hiss sounded as if it was pissing itself, propelling it forward. Call me crazy, but that is exactly what it sounded like: a great mobile pissing machine. Now that is a title for a fantasy book.

  I almost laughed myself into a fit at the thought, but took control of myself before it hit the baseball field. I readied the wrench, my right hand placed right under the head of the weapon, left hand farther back. The contaminated kept running full speed at me, fearless to its future demise. I whipped the wrench forward as fast as my hips and shoulder would allow me, the iron weapon flying through the air faster than I would have imagined.

  The torque of the wrench landed itself into the gut of the contaminated, pushing it back from its run. I pulled the wrench up from my swing and readied another, noticing that it had taken a significant chunk out of the contaminated stomach, though the creature was still moving as if it was merely pushed back.

  It came at me again, but I was better prepared this time. I loosed the wrench again, its iron ringing through the chill October air. It collided with the skull of the contaminated with a definitive crunch and squish. The monster fell almost instantly to the ground, dark blood seeping into the dry sand.

  Suddenly I remembered Chelsea behind me. I whirled around to see my bat flying through the air, colliding with the skull of the second contaminated. Chelsea stood before it as the contaminated fell to the ground. She struck it one, twice, three more times in the head before throwing the bat to her side. I gave my contaminated one more hit on the top of its head for good measure.

  “You okay?” I asked, slowly walking over to Chelsea. Her arms were covered in blood and some was lodged into her sweatshirt and stained her legs. “Chels?”

  “Fuck these shits,” she said. I do not want to say that Chelsea had never cursed before, but she rarely used expletives, and I had never heard her curse like that before. “These things think they can come and mess with us, I’ll fuck each and every one of them! These bitches will rue the day that they decided to mess with me!” She ended with what appeared to be her best he-man impression, raising the bat over her head and letting out a very masculine roar.

  This was hot.

  She picked up the bat and smacked the contaminated once more in the spine this time, blood splashing out through its head like a geyser.

  “We should bury them,” I said.

  “Why do they deserve a burial?” Chelsea said, angrier than I think she meant to.

  I walked over to her, wrapping her in my arms and kissing her on the top of the head. “They were people, once. It is only right,” I said. The digging and burial would also be good exercise for our arms and upper body. I could not let this opportunity pass. “We should start doing this more, for the people they once were.” I meant it.

  “That’s a nice idea,” She said.

  We buried the bodies at the edge of the field that day. Since the bodies were far away from the house, I figured that their rotting corpses would not attract any extra unwanted attention. Each of the contaminated had a wallet on it, and after digging through it, we learned their names and place of residence. We held a mini funeral service for them as best we could, “To Jeffery Watson, and Jayson Wineman. Though we knew nothing about you, I hope that you are in a decent place now,” I said over their freshly dug graves.

  “Don’t joke,” Chelsea said to me.

  I looked up to her with an honest expression, “I’m not. It’s just that I wanted to say something for them, but I really don’t know anything about them. It’s what I would want if this was my fate-“

  “It won’t be!” Chelsea said. She had her arms around me now. “We can both do this together. Neither of us is alone, nor do we have to be.”

  “Oh? No: live together, die alone,” I

  “No,” she said. “Live together, die together.”

  “I like that better.”

  Chapter 10

  We began to train our bodies day in and out. The changes in our features and physical appearance became apparent almost immediately.

  My body was fully toned, shoulders broad and defined. My biceps and triceps became solid and more reliable than ever before. Even my abs began to show through, all eight of them.

  Chelsea had the greatest improvement out of the two of us. When we started, she could run three laps around the field, but would be very winded afterwards. Now, she was practically able to sprint the entire field four times around without an issue. Her swing with the bat was also greatly improved and was more ferocious.

  We risked the noise when practicing with the bats. One of us would field and the other would swing at baseballs. This way one of us was running around the field, trying to catch the hit balls while the other was improving their timing and accuracy with their swings. Our accuracy with the bats improved so much that they quickly became our contaminated killing tool of choice.

  Due to our training, my body was able to wield the wrench with little trouble, and the results were devastating. Heads would smash and splatter into pieces. The wrench would split skulls with relative ease and became a personal favorite weapon when slaying contaminated. In one instance, the wrench literally tore the entire face off of a contaminated, blood and gore launching out of its freshly formed orifice.

  I quickly learned that the kitchen knife was useless. The cuts were too shallow for it to do any real damage, and I nearly died testing the weapon.

  The contaminated charged me one sunny day in the field. Its arms were flailing as it hissed with a wild ferocity. I put all of my force behind my free arm, pushing it back. As it stumbled in an attempt to regain its balance, I thrust the knife forward, lodging it into the contaminated’s yellow eye. The blade penetrated the soft tissue easily, but only went in for about two inches and nearly got stuck in the eye socket. I stabbed again, but was off the mark. The kitchen knife collided with the top of the skull. The blade snapped like a twig from the force, a shard of the blade flying off and lodging into my arm.

  The pain was immediate, a flaring heat rushing through my entire arm and up my shoulder, the blade protruding out of my bicep. I ripped it out, blood flying throu
gh the air from the initial tug followed by the rhythmical gushing of blood pouring out of my arm in conjunction with my heartbeat. I could feel the weakness in my arm, the sluggish movements due to the injured muscle. My arm was dead and useless at that point. It would be suicide to try to fight off the contaminated in my condition.

  The hissing roared in front of me, and it was then that I realized that I was injured and fighting an extremely pissed off contaminated with our weapons about one hundred feet away. Those are not my ideal conditions for fighting against such ferocious creatures. It was as if I was thrown into a lion’s den with nothing but a tissue, well in this case skin tissue.

  I gave the contaminated a kick to the chest as hard as my weakened body would allow. It stumbled backwards but not nearly as far as I would have hoped. It moved back about a yard or two before giving me an angry hiss and throwing its hand into my chest. I was knocked backwards by about two feet, stumbling to regain my balance while making an attempt to force air into my lungs again.

  Once I managed to regain my composure, I decided that my best option at life was to make a b-line for the weapons, which I proceeded to do. There was a problem with putting forth extra energy in my weakened condition: it was cold and I was losing blood, not fast but effectively. My body was not as fast as it could have been. I was breathing heavy and taking hard steps against the cold ground, each one bringing me closer.

  “Chelsea,” I called out, more as a death notice than a cry for help. I managed to make it to the weapons with the contaminated at my heels. I grasped the bat and turned but became extremely light headed and fell down, collapsing against the chain link fencing. I tried to get up again, but the feeling of life was being forced out of my lungs by the pressure of the contamianted’s hand pressed against my chest. Its body was leaning over me, blocking out the sun.

  Right before I gave up fighting, the contaminated’s head exploded in an array of red and purple gore, one of its yellow eyes flying directly overhead. I sat against the fence, laughing to myself uncontrollably. I had literally just stared down death and somehow escaped. My weak body somehow felt more alive than ever before.

  Fortunately, we were able to patch me up though Chelsea’s stitching left something to be desired, and hurt like a bitch. I was able to recover quickly though I could not wield the wrench but the baseball bat would still work well enough. Whenever I swung an object, I was able to feel the stitches digging into my skin, trying to break free. I really did not want to risk breaking the bond of stitches to skin if at all possible.

  We had run through a whole bag and a half of hotdogs, leaving us with one and a half left. Two of the rolls of bread also went bad when we took them out of the freezer, being solid blocks even after defrosted. Even our canned food was running thin in the basement, and the cat food had been empty for about a week. It was a good thing that Coal ate tuna from a can and that Chelsea and I hated it.

  “Chelsea,” I said over our eighth hotdog dinner in a row. “We need to do something. I don’t think that we can hold out in our position forever. I mean our food supplies are running short and we don’t know how long the power will hold up for. Besides, you beat the contamination, maybe you could have something to do with a possible cure. Maybe you are the cure.”

  She looked up from her dog, “I’ve been thinking about that myself, but what could we do? It’s not like we can just go to a police station and say ‘hey, we’re still alive and able’. It’s not that easy anymore. And we can’t call anyone for assistance and I doubt they’re monitoring the internet for living people, otherwise they would have been here already.”

  “You think that the government is isolated and gave up on people?” I asked.

  She nodded her head, “Well, yeah. Why else wouldn’t they be here by now? The convoy that took your grandma was supposed to come back over four weeks ago and we’ve been surviving here for longer than that. Either the government is dead or they’ve stopped caring.”

  “It’s probably because we’re not paying taxes,” we both laughed. It was good that we could always find a way to keep the mood up, even in bad situations.

  “Either way, we need to find a way out, a way to civilization or what’s left of it,” she said.

  “Well, we need provisions first, and there’s a supermarket not too far up the highway, maybe three miles at most. I think that we should try there.”

  She looked at me, thinking, “Maybe, but how would that work out? Walking there would be super risky if we were caught by a contaminated.”

  “I think that we could handle that. We’ve been practicing in the field for over a week now, improving our bodies against the contaminated, and we aren’t usually quiet about it either,” I took a drink of water to moisten my throat. “We have never gotten jumped by more than three at once, and we have always come out on top, though I really don’t want to test that.”

  “Then what are you planning?”

  “Take the cars, well one car. Taking both would be a waste,” I said as I jingled the keys on the key ring. “There are two of them, so realistically if we only use one, we’re not wasting gas from the other one. As long as we have one usable vehicle, we will have an escape plan.”

  “Okay then we should go with that, and tonight.”

  “Tonight?” I was taken aback.

  “Yeah. Why wait? Besides, we’ll be raiding the store under cover of darkness. It’ll be easier to get back to the house undetected,” Chelsea said, finishing her hotdog.

  It was a good plan. The only problem was that we did not know how the contaminated acted during the night and had to account for that. I ringed the keys around my index finger, “What are we waiting for?”

  “Oh well just let me go to the bathroom and then-“

  “You ruined the moment…”

  Chapter 11

  After Chelsea went to the bathroom, we got in the car and started it up. It was a little tan sedan, the quieter of the two vehicles we had access to. It was around six o’clock and November, so it was dark outside. I was afraid of using lights as it would attract the contaminated to us. A train of contaminated making its way to the local superstore was never a good thing though management was sure to be pleased by the extra store traffic.

  Regardless, I was forced into putting the car lights on. Chelsea kept insisting that I do, as we did not want to crash into a contaminated, deer, or anything for that matter. The street was still alight due to us being in a powered zone, so I was able to keep them on low or off whenever we got to a fully lit street. The only issue was that once we got to the highway, everything was a perfect dark.

  It had never occurred to me where our powered zone would end, but now I knew. With the car lights on, we would glow like a firefly in the dead of night while driving down the highway. Contaminated from all over would be able to see us, and the clouds above prevented any moonlight from passing through, making the darkness ever more present.

  “This isn’t ideal,” I said to Chelsea, the car idling in front of the highway, which resembled nothing similar to post-apocalyptic highways in the movies. You know, the highway is littered with abandoned cars and debris and dead bodies all in oddly compact lanes. Yeah it was not like that here, but it was much more eerie. Literally nothing was there, no working traffic lights, no working lights in general, no cars (especially abandoned ones), no signs of life. There was one bottle that was rolling across the roadway. One measly bottle was the current highway traffic. If you have ever seen a street that has had its power cut out, it is almost a blinding darkness but there are almost always lights at either end. That is how the highway looked, but with no lights at any end.

  “Things nowadays are never ideal, Daryl,” Chelsea replied. “All that we can do is stick to the plan and keep moving forward. We’ll be okay, I’ll be sure of it,” she said sliding a hand up and down the barrel of her bat, petting it like a dog.

  So I put my foot to the gas, lightly, and we began to move forward. I still had the instincts to look
both ways before crossing the highway even though the traffic lights were out and my competition for driving space was a bottle. Needless to say, we safely crossed the abandoned motorway and were on our way to the superstore.

  I noticed that I was driving the speed limit, then realizing that it did not matter, I moved faster.

  “Hey!” Chelsea said. “Forty-five is the limit. You don’t want to get pulled over, do you?”

  “By who?” I asked, raising my hands off the wheel then replacing them quickly. “It’s not like the contaminated police are coming after us.”

  “Officer Chelsea will beat the shit out of you.”

  “Woah tough guy, I mean officer! I’ll slow down, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to arrest me later,” I gave her a nudge on the arm.

  She threw up her eyebrows, “Are you making obscene suggestions to an officer of the law? Oh you’ll get your just rewards.”

  We laughed down the highway as we pulled into the abandoned parking lot of the superstore. The lot’s lights were out and the car lights were the only thing illuminating the night. Shopping carts were littered throughout the parking spaces, forcing me to loop and dodge lest I make a ton of noise by colliding with them. Little bits of debris littered the lot next to the carts. Boxes and flyers from a month ago that were constantly being pushed around by the wind remained in the parking lot as the only decorations. No signs of any contaminated.

  I pulled into a handicapped spot, backing the car into it just in case we needed a quick escape, and it was way cooler to back a car into a parking spot. Chicks dig that. I figured the handicap parking spot was okay to park in as the contaminated greatly outnumbered us, we needed the handicap. After pulling the emergency break out of habit, I flicked the key and the engine sputtered out and shut off the lights.