Infected (Book 1): The First Ten Days

by Thomas, Jack

  “Richard!” Marcus yelled out after Richard walked halfway down the hall.

  Richard stopped in place and stood there. “Yes?” He asked.

  “Let us have the kid!” Marcus demanded. He referred to Jason.

  “What kid? I have no children. I have warriors! I have the men willing to do what it takes to survive. I have an army of the truly free, the truly worthy. There are no ‘kids’ in my presence,” he said, now turned around to face Marcus again.

  “Jason!” Richard summoned Jason.

  A few seconds went by and Jason came around the corner, walked up to Richard, and stood by his side.

  I desperately left from where I hid and stood by Marcus to better see Jason. He wasn’t hurt and he wasn’t scared. He was even armed.

  “These people want you to join their band of four and go save every undeserving person left in the world, everyone who will die in the next week. They look to feed those people, to clothe those people, to die for those people. Go with them if you want.” Richard turned around again and continued to walk away. He left Jason there alone to make his choice. “Marcus!” Richard yelled out, “Leave or I will keep my promise and kill them all. I’ll even save you for last so you can see them suffer, so you can see those you wish to save undergo death caused by your stubbornness.” He vanished around the corner and an entire group of his men ran out from around the corner and lined up down the hall, their weapons fixed on Marcus and me. Melissa and Jack came out too and stood by us.

  I disregarded the guns aimed at us and ran over to Jason.

  “Are you okay?!” I asked as soon as I was in front of him.

  “Yes. Listen to me…” Jason’s face was serious; he had urgency in his eyes, and a sorrow unheard of and guilt.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “He said you can come with us. Let’s get out of here!” I told him, but I could tell there was something off about him.

  “He will kill us all if I go with you. But you can come with us. You can join us and we can live. I can talk to him and convince him to let you stay with us,” he said without a crack in his voice, a blink of an eye or a single flinch. He was serious. “Mom and Daviel… When we got here they were…”

  “I know...” I cut him off and realized he said it already happened when they arrived.

  “Richard isn’t responsible?” I asked. I didn’t understand what really happened.

  “The school was unsafe from the start. We found it like this when we got here. They were attacked by someone else,” Jason said. Something about what he told me came to me as strange like he was lying to me, but I knew he didn’t. Like he felt guilty for what happened but didn’t want me to blame him for it, like it was directly their fault. “Mom always said that the point of life was for us to find our own purpose, but live at all costs. And that is true now more than ever. Join us and he will help us survive. There isn’t enough left to support large groups and Marcus will only find more people to feed. We will remain small. Please join us!”

  I couldn’t believe what he said. Our mother did tell us to survive regardless of what happened in our lives, never to give up and always to find a reason to fight, but never this way. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked. Behind Jason I could see Richard’s men advance towards us.

  Jason didn’t respond. He stood there and watched me. I noticed darkness in him I’ve never seen before.

  “It’s time,” Marcus said from behind me. He wanted me to take the chance Richard gave us and go.

  My options were as follow: Go with Marcus, the guy who helped me stay alive through the entire apocalypse, or gowith my brother who decided to side with a murderous madman. Blood is thicker than what?

  I backed away from Jason. “Is this it? This is really what you’re doing?” I asked.

  “We survive. That’s all there is.” As if Jason turned into Richard that moment, he turned around and walked away. “Leave,” he said like Richard, before he vanished behind Richard’s wall of excessive manpower.

  “We have to leave. He’s made his choice and we can’t win this fight. Not while they’re all together like this,” Marcus said.

  It was checkmate. He outgunned us and brainwashed Jason. We couldn’t win.

  “Come on!” Jack said. Melissa helped Marcus move faster, Jack and I kept our eyes on Richard’s men while we took our leave.

  “Ten minutes to change the tire and leave the property before these kind men open fire. I recommend you use those ten minutes wisely.” Richard’s last words echoed through the hall and reached all our ears before we made it to the doors.

  “Quick, fix the tire!” Marcus had Melissa help him into the pickup and I changed the tire with help from Jack.

  A few minutes in, Jack and I finished. We started the pickup, Melissa at the wheel. Richard and Jason stood outside the school watching us leave. Richard’s men spilled out into the school grounds to join them. Jack and I sat in the flatbed of the pickup truck and kept our eyes on them.

  “Don’t let him get to you,” Marcus told me through the window between the pickup’s inside and its flatbed. “He has a way of getting into people’s heads and making them act how he wants. The fact that Jason still stands tells us that Richard has plans for him. As disturbing as it might be, for the time being, he is safe with Richard. He’s made his choice. You’ve made yours.”

  “What now?” Jack asked.

  “Creed City is next,” Marcus answered.

  I wasn’t giving up on Jason. Even if now wasn’t the time to save him, I was not going to let him become a monster like Richard. One day I would find a way to split them up and break whatever spell he had on my brother.

  I promise.

  The Next Day

  The beginning of a New Life

  We found a bed we laid out on the pickup truck’s flatbed. There, Marcus was passed out to recover from the wound he somehow ignored in order to save me. Jack had the passenger side window, I drove and Melissa sat between us both. Melisa told us how she lost her family during their trip to the school and how Richard was possibly responsible for that too. There was a mutual hate for that man which existed in the car.

  We planned to start our lives over in Creed. In the company of each other and anyone else we could save and rebuild a community with.

  “What… the…” Jack said with the volume in his voice having dropped as he said it. He looked out through the window on his side, into some field we drove by. “Pull over.”

  I stopped in the middle of the highway to Creed City and we came out of the pickup. I had to wake Marcus up for this. This was more than we knew what to do with.

  Out in the field, behind a large patch of dirt, where there should have been snow, rested an even larger patch of blue; blue grass, blue tree leaves, and a thick mist which surrounded all of it. It was winter, there shouldn’t have been any grass or leaves.

  Marcus woke up somewhere in the middle of our awe and stood next to us to watch the fields of blue. “The plants… They’re infected…”