THE INFECTION
Craig DiLouie
Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.
Copyright 2011 Craig DiLouie
www.PermutedPress.com
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Randy Heller for all his editing support over the years and to Chris Arnone for his superior knowledge of all things mechanical.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, ©1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
For Christine and Mieka.
PROLOGUE: FALLING DOWN
Ethan was at the end of his patience trying to explain using factoring to solve equations to his high school algebra class when everybody started falling down.
Hacking at the blackboard with a piece of chalk to guide his students through a third example, he heard the first distant scream. The chalk broke in his hand and he accidentally scratched the board with his fingernails, sending a shiver of revulsion through his body.
“Let’s try that again,” he said, peering at his class over his rims of his glasses.
Some of the kids smiled back, suddenly engaged by his personal tone, while the rest slouched at their desks and continued to stare out the window—some longingly, some vacantly—at the green lawn washed in spring sunshine.
Finishing the example, he slapped chalk dust from his hands and said, “Okay, who wants to take a crack at this one? Where would you begin to solve for x?”
“Wow,” several of the students shouted at once, sitting up straight in their desks. Two of the boys stood up, looking out the window.
“Come on, guys,” Ethan frowned. “Butts in seats. We’ve only got fifteen minutes left.”
“But there was an accident,” one of the kids told him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. “A bunch of people are lying on the ground.”
A second scream rang out in a classroom down the hall. Ethan wondered what was going on and took a few steps towards the window. Following his cue, all of the kids got out of their desks and stood to get a better look outside.
Another scream. Shouting in the distance. Footsteps pounded the hallway outside. Ethan turned just in time to see two teachers jog by his classroom. A door slammed.
He took several steps towards the hallway, wondering if there was some type of emergency, if he should be doing something special to protect his kids.
“What is that sound, Mr. Bell?” one of them kept saying.
“I don’t know,” Ethan murmured.
“It’s horrible!”
Another shiver ran through his body. He knew the sound. Why did he deny it? It was screaming. Screaming that would not stop. Screaming that just kept going on and on and on. Whoever was screaming was in extreme, unending pain—strong enough to make them howl at the top of their lungs for minutes. And there seemed to be a lot of people doing the screaming—some outside and some inside the school, in the classrooms down the hall.
He suddenly wondered if he should be here at all. His wife was at work. Their toddler, Mary, at daycare. He took another step towards the door. Would he get fired if he left the school?
Trevor Jackson’s face contorted and he fell down screaming, cracking his nose on the floor, blood spurting. The other students jumped back with yelps of surprise, transfixed by the real drama unfolding in front of them. Ethan took several steps back into the classroom and watched helplessly. Trevor was lying on his side, his back arched, his arms outstretched with his hands splayed into claws. His eyes were bulging, leaking tears, while his mouth screamed at a volume Ethan had not thought possible. The sound assaulted him with an almost physical force, pushing him away. He felt the urge to run as fast as his legs would take him. The other students felt it, too, wavering, suddenly aware of the choice of fight or flight.
“Do something!” Lucy Gall shouted at him.
“I’m going to call 911—”
Lucy fell to the ground, her body jerking in little spasms and the crotch of her jeans flooding with piss. Moments later she started to scream loud and shrill enough to damage eardrums. The students shouted at each other to do something. One of the boys got down on his knees and tried to shake her, but then he fell over as well, his eyes rolling back into his skull.
It’s in the ventilation system, Ethan thought. Something is in the air all around us.
Five more kids fell down within seconds of each other, spilling desks and scattering their notebooks.
They began to scream.
Ethan was suddenly outside of his body, watching himself push his way along with the remaining students in a blind stampede to get out of the school. In the hallway, they raced over the trembling, screaming bodies of teachers and students as if they were parts of an intricate obstacle course, and then bolted out of the school’s steel doors and into sunshine and relative quiet.
He froze in his tracks, amazed. The street beyond the lawn was a tangled mess of crashed vehicles. Plumes of smoke rose above the city in the distance. Now new waves of sound assaulted his ears: car alarms, horns, sirens and, rising up above it all, the distant sound of thousands upon thousands of mouths screaming in unison like an auditory glimpse of hell.
This is everywhere, he realized.
He ran as fast as his legs would go, oblivious to the students toppling around him as if cut down by an invisible scythe. The screaming filled him with blind panic now, an irrational fear of the supernatural, as if actual demons were at his heels. A motorcycle roared by, its rider spilling and cartwheeling through the air. In the distance, planes were falling out of the sky. These things barely registered in his consciousness. All he could think about was Mary’s safety. He had to get to her. Please God, spare her, he thought. Take these kids. Take Carol. Take me. If anything happens to my little girl, I will have nothing.
He got into his car and started the engine. The radio began sobbing hysterically at him. He turned it off and that was when he noticed the screaming had stopped. Looking out his window, he saw the lawn covered with bodies, jerking and quivering, while those who escaped Infection walked among them mindlessly, trembling and hugging their ribs and moaning in shock.
So rapid was the transmission of the mysterious virus that swept the world over a period of just forty-eight hours, so sudden the onset of disease, that scientists would later claim that it must somehow be linked to human-engineered nanotechnology. Some kind of weapon that escaped the lab. The government traced the origin of the pandemic to a village near secret facilities in China, but they would never find out the truth. And Ethan would never teach again.
After three days, the screamers woke up.
THE SURVIVORS
They are refugees forced from everything they consider home, searching for a safe place. They have become nomads, living on whatever they can find. But mostly they are survivors. They are good at surviving because they are on the road and they are still alive. They have done the things one had to do to survive. They have all killed people or they would not be here.
They have not lost anybody since Wednesday, when they lost Philip in Wilkinsburg. There are five of them now sitting ramrod straight in the loud, hot, dim passenger compartment of the armored personnel carrier, passing around a bottle of water, their rifles between their knees. They sit in a tense silence, their mouths slack, sweating in air that is twenty degrees hotter than the unseasonably warm May weather outside, air that stinks of sweat and grime and diesel combustion. Between the engine, the squeal of the treads and a steady drumming sound, they have to shout to make themselves heard, and nobody has the energy to do that. The drumming grows louder, punctuated by sharp metallic taps, until it drowns out the Bradley’s five-hundred-horsepower engine. The survivors are
perpetually one second away from screaming.
The tapping sound is from jewelry. Bracelets and watches and wedding rings.
The survivors wonder if they have killed everything for which they want to live. Wonder if it might grow back again, given enough time, if only they can find sanctuary.
♦
The survivors are adaptive. People who will do whatever it takes to survive naturally do not trust other people. But to travel the road one must be with a gang, and to survive the experience day after day, as they have, that gang must function as a single protective organism. Each of them has been tested by violence and if they failed, they all would have died. They know this. At this point, after what they have seen and done, this sense of responsibility to each other is what keeps them from collapsing into hysteria or catatonia. Fear, sorrow, guilt, rage: These and other emotions are just as dangerous as the Infected outside, and must likewise be killed.
They are going to the Children’s Hospital based on a theory. They have the Bradley, weapons, and the illusion of safety as long as the rig’s engine keeps humming and its treads keep moving. They need supplies, though, especially water and diesel. They need to find a place unspoiled by Infection, where they can rest. The simple fact is they cannot keep fighting like this. You can only win so many fights before it starts to feel like you are losing.
They sense a subtle shift in the atmosphere, a sudden drop in temperature. Outside, it begins to rain. The drumming gradually fades as the Infected lose interest in pounding on the vehicle with their fists. They fill the air with their plaintive cries as they melt away into the rain.
♦
Anne alone does not appear to be stripped to a single, bare electric wire. She sits in the back near the exit ramp, across from the cop, a place of respect among the survivors as whoever sits there is the first to leave the vehicle and the last to reenter. The others admire and try to imitate her cool. Sarge may be the commander of the Bradley, but they consider Anne to be their leader because without her example and unfaltering aim with the scoped rifle, they would all be dead.
She has two long scars on her left cheek and a short one on her right, still fresh. The survivors assume that she is ex-military, imagining a romantic and violent past. Anne does not tell them that she has an overwhelming feeling that once they finally stop moving and find a place of rest where they can be truly safe, she is going to burst inside out with one long, deafening scream of guilt, terror and anguish.
♦
Hours earlier, they found Sarge’s infantry squad in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, mangled like road kill around a large, strange device and surrounded by a carpet of dead Infected tangled up in a line of concertina wire. The dead stared wide-eyed into oblivion. Many of the bodies were badly burned and emitted a sickening sweet barbecue odor. Bits of charred clothing, stuck to the concertina wire, trembled in the light breeze. A few Infected stumbled blindly among the remains, gnawing on human meat from a dismembered arm or leg. Crows shrieked in protest as the Bradley approached at forty miles an hour. At the last moment, an enormous flock of the birds exploded into the air, dribbling morsels of flesh from bloody beaks as they filled the sky.
Sarge cut down the few Infected in the area with several bursts from the Bradley’s coaxial machine gun. Outside, he warned the survivors not to step on any of the bodies.
Of course we won’t, they told him. We will respect your dead.
“It’s not a matter of respect,” he said. “These people are rotting. Gases are building up inside their bodies. See how bloated they are? They can burst and spray fluids. You could get sick.”
Six days ago, the Bradley dropped off the squad of six soldiers—who were supposed to operate on their own in the field for three hours—and then withdrew for badly needed repair of a steering problem. The soldiers were testing a non-lethal weapon against the Infected that used active denial technology. They deployed a line of concertina wire, set up their device and blasted a klaxon to attract the attention of any Infected within hearing range.
The device, shaped like a large hoe attached to the face of a basketball backboard, is a transmitter that beams energy waves which penetrate the skin and produce an intense burning sensation. The idea is whoever is subjected to this reflexively tries to avoid the beam and submits. It did not work on the Infected. The Infected only became enraged and attacked until their flesh began to sizzle and even then they still attacked until they fell down.
Another Bradley was going to pick up the soldiers, but it never came because by the time it left on its mission to recover the squad, the soldiers were already dead and the vehicle became reassigned. Sarge knew this but he had to see for himself that it was true. These dead boys were his people. They had served together in Afghanistan. He placed his hand over his heart, a gesture of respect he picked up from the Afghans, and collected their dog tags.
“The device is supposed to be angled to trigger a burning feeling from the neck down,” he told the others. “See how it’s angled up? That’s not an accident. They were desperate. At the end, they tried to burn out the corneas in the eyes of the Infected. They tried to blind them.”
Is it okay to take these guns? they asked him. Will you teach us how to shoot them?
“I heard about another test of long-range acoustic weapons, over in Philadelphia, that also failed,” Sarge went on. “The device was supposed to cause intense pain in the ear using a certain frequency of sound, but it actually attracted the Infected. They came in hundreds, destroyed the device and killed the unit that deployed it. Pointless.”
A pack of dogs yelped in the distance. Somebody, far away, fired an automatic weapon, setting off a brief, crisp flurry of gunfire that sounded like the crackle of firecrackers.
“None of the non-lethals worked,” Sarge added. “The only thing that can stop these motherfuckers is a rifle and the will to use it.”
♦
The armored personnel carrier smashes into the abandoned traffic jam on squealing treads, its twenty-five tons shouldering aside a minivan and crushing the front of a sports car into metal pancake in seconds. The words boom stick are neatly stenciled in white paint on the side of the turret, near the gun barrel. The rig plows into a pair of Infected and flings them down the street in a fine red mist. The machine emerges from the intersection and grinds to a halt, its engine idling. The Bradley fills the street, flanked by stores topped by low-rise apartments. Using the vehicle’s periscopes, its three-man crew scans the bleak, shattered landscape visible through a smoky haze. The rain has stopped and the sun is shining again.
In the back, the survivors cringe and blink. Stopping is bad. They finger their weapons, paling, as Sarge wedges his way into the back and squats, sweating in his ACUs and helmet. The commander is a large man and makes the cramped passenger compartment appear even smaller. As always, he looks at Anne when he wants the civilians to do something. They appear to have some sort of unspoken agreement about the sharing of authority.
“Drugstore,” he says. “Once you’re out, it’s on the left.”
“Locked up?” says Anne.
“Not that we can see.”
“Any signs of forced entry?”
“The door looks fine and the windows are all intact.”
“No damage, then?”
“I saw no vandalism, no fire or water damage.”
“Cleaned out already?”
“No, that’s the thing. From what I could tell, there’s still some stuff on the shelves.”
Some of the survivors allow themselves to smile. The store has not been looted or damaged. They will be able to get supplies. Not everything they need, but something. Every useful item they can find is a puzzle piece that must be fitted with everything else.
“How many Infected on the street?”
“None living.”
“It’s worth the risk,” Anne says, and Sarge nods.
“Show time,” he says.
♦
Ethan takes a deep breath
to steel his nerves, fidgeting with his M4 carbine and trying to remember what Sarge told him to do if the weapon jams: slap the magazine, pull the bolt back, observe the firing chamber, release the bolt, tap it and squeeze off the next round. If a double-feed, detach the mag and drop the rounds. Assuming he has time to do all this while a swarm of Infected are racing hell for leather at him, shrieking their inhuman cries of recognition and rage.
He is certain that he is living on borrowed time and that one day he is going to be killed or Infected. He was a math teacher; he understands probabilities. Every day, just to live, he has to give it everything he has. If just once he is a little slow or takes a wrong turn or is in the wrong place at the wrong time, they will catch him. How many days can a man go on like that? Never be a little slow, never take a wrong turn, never be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
It is true that his body and mind are rising to the challenge. But while his body is dropping fat and becoming more toned, he often feels stabbing pains in his neck and back, especially after sitting in the Bradley for hours. The truth is he is a middle-aged man and not in very good shape. His mind similarly has sharpened, constantly vigilant for threats, completely purged of the pop culture nonsense and old petty worries that plagued the middle class in the Time Before. But the stress is slowly damaging his mind and steadily shaving time off of his lifespan. Ethan is rising to the challenge, but he does not know how long he can keep this up before he will finally break down.
In the end, he knows, the odds are stacked against survival. The Infected spread disease through violence. Possessed by their aggressive virus, they are meat puppets, totally expendable and intent only on finding new hosts. They drink from gutters and toilets. If they get hungry, they eat the dead. They have nothing to lose. They run through fire and bullets to reach their prey. If you are standing, they punch you. If you are down, they stomp you. When you stop fighting back, they bite you and infect you. The virus penetrates the blood through saliva in the bite, enters the central nervous system, and from there is mainlined into the brain, where it proliferates in the limbic system, producing rage. The virus is so strong, so virulent, it paralyzes you in seconds and takes total control in minutes.
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