Infected (Book 1): The First Ten Days

by Thomas, Jack

  “Hurry up!” Edwin said. He struggled to keep the door closed.

  Mara pulled herself up but she was too petite and fragile to rush deliver that ladder to us. We ran out of time. On my way back to the door to help Edwin, the infected overpowered him and push the door open. It slammed Edwin into the ground. I couldn’t make it back in time to keep the door closed but I managed to pull Edwin up quick enough to still run.

  “KEEP GOING UP! WE’LL MEET YOU ON THE ROOF!” I yelled out to Mara.

  We ran till we caught up with Lizbeth who picked up the lantern.

  The runners were right behind us and they didn’t plan to get tired anytime soon. We were going to need some way to slow them down. To make things worse, the alleyway was a dead end up ahead, a brick wall too tall to climb. The reason for the wall was no more than to inconvenience people in this situation, I would guess, and we were well aware that it was pointless to be there since the end of the block wasn’t behind it. It was there just to screw us over when we needed somewhere to go.

  We caught up to the dead end but fortunately Edwin spotted an open door in time to save us. One of the buildings that connected to the same alleyway had the door open and Edwin’s perfect vision caught sight of it through the dimly lit alley. The light of the lantern didn’t even reach that far for it to have helped him see any better. But the light of day was near and it did continue to make things brighter, buildings stood out, street signs reappeared, streets were no longer black voids, thankfully.

  A left through the door and we closed it behind us. It was an apartment building from top to bottom and we came in through the back door which landed us directly in front of some stairs to the other floors and to the roof, a lucky break. Lizbeth, Edwin and I ran upstairs to the roof. We weren’t sure how tall the building was but by the time we made it to the second floor, the infected ran through the door downstairs. Although two or three runners couldn’t figure out a door, a large enough group of them was unstoppable by pretty much anything. The strength in numbers they possessed made them the unstoppable force they were. They ran up the stairs, trampling and shoving each other to continue their hunt.

  We made it to the top floor and ran down the hallway at the top to find the door to the roof bolted shut by a special security system to prevent people from going out there. We tried to get the door to budge but it wouldn’t even shake. It was solidly closed. We needed to go back to the other side of the hallway and make it into one of the apartments and use that apartment’s fire escape to work our way to the roof. This was easier said than done with the infected being one floor below us, ready to close the rest of the gap between us. There was no time left to think before the infected would be face to face with us.

  “Come on!” I said. We checked the apartments for open doors, Edwin on one side and I tried on the other. None of the doors were open. Our luck ran short again.

  “If we three run full force into the door for the last apartment in the back we can take it down and make it through!” Lizbeth said, no questions asked, we all lined up. The footsteps of the infected on the edge of the stairs on our floor reminded us we weren’t brave enough to look back and make sure they were there; instead we made a run for the door together and slammed into it breaking it down falling to the floor on the other side. We scrambled to get up.

  “Find the fire escape!” I told Edwin and Lizbeth. They ran through the apartment looking out through each window while I grabbed the broken door off of the ground, putting it across the door frame and leaned my body against it for support.

  Because the door wasn’t perfectly aligned, there were gaps through which the infected could fit their hands though, but not so big they could squeeze their bodies in. The infected were already on the other side reaching my ankles through the bottom gap. They pushed the door and attempted to get in, soon enough they would.

  “IT’S HERE!” Edwin yelled from somewhere in the kitchen. I kicked off the infected that grabbed at me from beneath the door and sprinted into the kitchen. Now there was no door to keep the infected away.

  Edwin broken through the window but the moans, screams and footsteps on the other side of the door I held up made it impossible for me to have heard it.

  Edwin and Lizbeth both made it to the other side of the window and I went last. I crawled out and my ankle was once again grabbed by one of the infected but I flipped over and kicked my feet repeatedly till I managed to push it into the infected behind it. I stood back on my feet. I dashed up the stairs on the fire escape to the roof and met up with Lizbeth and Edwin. Mara was further ahead, she probably thought we kept going but slowed down once she looked back so we could catch up. All the buildings were the same height and connected through their roofs which made it easy for us to get back to Mara and made it easier to locate Strobe and Marcus that also kept up with Mara in hopes the rest of us would be wherever she led them, but the family reunion was far from close. Although they struggled to make their way up the fire escape, the infected killed any chance there was to catch our breaths, the chase was on again. We weren’t going to have many buildings left to run on if we kept going, and there wasn’t much other than runners in the city. They chased us to make things worse.

  Regardless of what was obviously going to happen, we decided to not go out without giving it our “all”. We reached a point where the building didn’t connect with any other roof; we were at a dead end. It was either we take our chances with a ten foot jump to the next building (which none of us would make) or stand our ground and hope for the best. No one jumped. Lizbeth, Mara, Edwin and I all lined up with our backs to the edge of the building and came close to each other as we waited for the infected to push us off, to kill us before we would give them a chance to infect us and turn us into more of them.

  “BEHIND YOU!” a voice shot out from the distance, Marcus’s. We all turned around, an older man stood on the other building with a long wooden plank much longer than ten feet and a foot and a half wide (Where does one even find such a plank of wood? The plot convenience store is where!). He lined it up with the edge of the building he was on and told us to move to the sides. When we did he dropped the plank and it fell perfectly across the gap between the buildings, it was transportation to the other building, a way away from the infected.

  “Hurry!” the old man cried out. He rushed us over to the next building. Mara went first, she made sure to not lose her balance then Lizbeth went, followed by Edwin, all the while the infected closed in on us. They were too close for comfort. The moment Edwin made it off to the other side I jumped on and raced my way across.

  I tried my best to not look down, the risk of getting dizzy as a way to introduce a plummet to my death now that there was hope for survival didn’t sit well with me. What an ironic death that would have been. Not to look at the ground below the plank while l looked at the wooden plank itself, harder task than you’d think. The temptation to change my line of sight even the slightest was immense but I tolerated to the best of my ability, which apparently wasn’t good enough so I looked up for a moment as I came closer to the other side and when I did, the infected made it to the edge of the building I was leaving and ran right off, some tripped over the edge of the building and landed on top of the plank before they lost their balance and flipped off of it, down to their death, for the second time.

  Every impact from the infected on the plank jiggled it, I’d freeze in place till I got my balance back and I could move again. The wooden plank was not strong enough to hold too much weight at once which is why we took turns going across, but the infected weren’t the smartest of things, they weren’t concerned with the weight minimum. Then again, to walk off the building wasn’t the brightest thing they’ve done either so there should have been no surprise. The number of infected behind us thinned as they continued right off of the roof. I took my first foot off of the plank and onto the next roof; in that moment one of the infected successfully made it half way across the plank and fell right in the middle. The pl
ank snapped and made me lose my balance in the wrong direction. I fell back off of the building but the older man grabbed my hand in time and pulled me back over to the building.

  I took a moment to breathe after I nearly lost my life which turned out to be a regular occurrence.

  Me and my impossible mission to not undergo an anticlimactic death, during a zombie apocalypse! If only I knew it was going to be this difficult.

  I’m not sure if anyone knew what happened but at some point the quiet dead city became a city of the dead. The difference is that not all of the infected were dead as far as we knew. Instead, they were just crazed, cannibals which was less desirable than just a good old fashioned slow flesh eater. To make things worse, we just came across another survivor which although saved my life meant we had someone else to keep alive since there was no way we were going to leave the man behind.

  The infected didn’t have the particular intellectual characteristics it took to get them right back down the building and up the other one, so they just continued to thin out their numbers when they ran off of the building like if it was some sort of cartoon where they didn’t realize there was no more ground to run on. But they didn’t have that pause that occurred in cartoon midair; rather, they just plunged straight down. The sound of the impact their bodies made with the ground below was one of the most disgusting things I’ve heard in my life. It was almost bad enough to help me forget the horrible things we witnessed moments before getting chased by the infected. Too bad it wasn’t.

  The man that saved us led us to the door that would take us back into the building. “Wait for us there!” Lizbeth yelled out to Marcus on the building across the street, without much option, Marcus nodded and took the moment to relax.

  The man led us down the staircase and waited for us behind the door. We weren’t sure where he was going to take us but we were willing to trust him. He didn’t seem too dangerous; in fact, he looked more like he would have kicked the bucket long ago with the things that were going on. The man was either in his late fifties or early sixties, somewhere in between, and his age showed.

  How he managed to stay alive with possibly no agility and the funny slow movements his body made while he walked was a mystery to everyone. You know what they say; mind over matter. Maybe this old guy lived by that belief and managed to stay alive simply through the use of his mind to control all the situations he came across, while we on the other hand, with a whole group of young, agile, physically fit people would still manage to see ourselves in constant peril. How pathetic.

  Just an apartment… That’s where he took us. I’m sure you are just as disappointed as I was when I found out he wasn’t some sort of zombie apocalypse super hero that lived in his bat cave. He was apparently just a lucky old man. The apartment he walked us into was the least protected thing we came across in days and it was virtually untouched. There was no way to know how many other survivors were still in the city alive, the same way this man was, but it was entirely possible there were more. The infected we came across in the city were no more than strays gathered in the city from other areas, presumably. It was possible that some survivors decided to stick it out and were still in the city like the old timer.

  Old Timer’s Apartment

  To our luck, the apartment the man walked us into had a window that faced the building Marcus was on. Lizbeth and Mara ignored the rest of the apartment and went straight for the window. They spotted Marcus on the roof of the building across the street and waved at him to get him to see which apartment we were in. At first Marcus didn’t notice the girls but Lizbeth lost her patience. “HEY!” she yelled. Marcus locked onto the location of the sound and knew they were safe which for all intents and purposes meant we were too.

  “Make yourselves at home. Don’t be shy,” the old man said as he took a seat on one of the couches in his living room. “It’s been a few days since I’ve seen a single person that hasn’t acted so monstrously towards the people around them. It’s a breath of fresh air to know I’m not alone.” The old man rested his back against the couch’s backrest and he took a deep breath before he looked around the room.

  Edwin and I sat on the couch across from the old man.

  “Thanks for the help, mister. We were pretty jammed up back there. Not sure what we would have done if you didn’t show up to our rescue, the way you did,” Edwin said, his holiday picture perfect smile hung up on his face.

  I scanned the room; everything looked age appropriate for the old man. Figurines his wife probably put up, pictures of family such as children and grandchildren. The home also looked spotless clean; four and a half days indoors could drive someone to madness and boredom. He most likely cleaned the place to keep himself busy. At least that is what I would have done.

  “How did you know when to go to the roof and save us?” I asked.

  The question arose from the old man’s precise timing when he saved us. Did he watched us the whole time before he decided to come to our aid? He did mention other people that behaved monstrously. Maybe he first waited to see if we were hostile too before he decided to help.

  “Son, I had no clue I was going to run into so much youth when I went out,” the old man began. “I was going to feed the birds that stop by every day. That’s when I saw you were in trouble and I did what I could.” So our whole survival was due to a mere coincidence, but I won’t argue. I take what I can get.

  “I think I left the bread up there too. An hour…” He rambled on. “I have enough time to feed them.” This man managed to keep his cool to the point that he still kept the birds he wanted to feed in mind. “Oh, before I forget, my name is Trevor.”

  The condition of things: I believe that things were looking up around this point. Although we were separated, we managed to cover some time and stay alive all the way into another day. To make things brighter, daylight was right around the corner. See what I did there? Make things brighter? Clever me right?

  “Is it possible to get inside this building through the front door?” Lizbeth asked Trevor when she walked in the living room.

  “Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’ll be impossible. Before the building was abandoned, it was barricaded from the inside, doors and windows, both. It would take us the whole day to take everything from behind that door.”

  “Then what can be done?” I asked.

  “The tenants left this building through the next building. Not the one you kids came through, but the one on the opposite side.” Trevor took his time off of the couch and walked to the kitchen. “I‘ll be there shortly! Give me one moment.” He was doing something. The sound of running water and pots being put down on counters brought food to mind. Was he going to cook?

  None of us moved, we were in awe that this man left mid way through an explanation, to cook it would sound like.

  After a few moments, he returned to the couch and took a seat again.

  “What if they could make it to the same building we came through? Would it be possible to recreate our way over?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why not,” Trevor responded. “I had an idea but I don’t know how it’d turn out.”

  Mara’s was taken by the subject; she walked into the living room after Trevor confirmed that he came up with a plan to get Marcus and Strobe inside.

  “If we could find something that could support our weight and get us across, like the plank we used it would be a matter of getting Marcus and Strobe to the roof,” I made it up as went. “I could go across and clear the path up to the fire escape on the building Mara came up through, Marcus and Strobe would proceed to sneak by the infected, and they could make their way up and back here to the rest of us.” I moved to the front of the door and finished my explanation. “Either way, Marcus saved us so the least we can do is the same for him.”

  “I know what we could use,” Trevor said. “Go to the roof and wait for me. I’m going to the basement for a few things, I’ll catch up.” Trevor finished and went back to the kitchen to mess
around with something else.

  I did as Trevor asked and went on my way to the roof. Going up the stairs, I could faintly hear Lizbeth tell Edwin and Mara to stay in the apartment.

  Are they her children?

  The door shut behind her. She wanted to help me.

  I made it to the roof first having also been the first to head out, and I searched for anything to get me across to the next building with no luck.

  Lizbeth reached the roof and yelled across at Marcus and Strobe to tell them the plan so far.

  I gave up the search when I found nothing and decided to wait for Trevor to join us.

  “I think this’ll work,” he said while he dragged a ladder made of some tough aluminum through the door. It was long enough to make it across the buildings, exactly what we needed. I’m sure Marcus and Strobe were balanced enough to walk the ladder without much trouble.

  I helped Trevor lay out the ladder from one building to the other and we placed smaller wooden planks across to build a bridge.

  I went over. Trevor and Lizbeth exchanged words before she came across and met me at the other side.

  Trevor waited until Lizbeth made it across safely and went back into the building.

  It was a good thing he did, we didn’t want to risk his life either, and it looked like he knew how to stay alive so maybe him being with Mara and Edwin was a good idea in case something went wrong.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Lizbeth said.

  “Yes ma’am,” I responded.

  Marcus and Strobe kept up with our pace and made their way over to where we were first separated.

  Although the walk was short, it gave me enough time to think and retrace the events up to that point. Several days of near death experiences, random encounters with people I didn’t know, which would just end up having to save my life, and those were just some of the terrible things that occurred.