The Infected

by Gregg Cocking

  But it wasn’t just the chocolates that I filled my bag with – there were tons of biscuits, pasta and rice (I can’t cook these on the stove, but I found that leaving it in water in the sun for a few hours actually softens it up enough, and with spices it makes a nice change from the usual food I eat). I actually got so much from number 33 that I had to go back to my place to empty the bags for the rest of my excursion. It was quite a hot day, and doing my foraging at midday got me worrying that I may end up with a bag full of melted chocolate. Hey, that’s got me thinking – maybe I should try find myself an exercise bike as I’m not exactly eating the healthiest. But that may change – but I’ll tell you about that a bit later.

  On the way back out, again after making sure that I was alone, I took the opportunity to check out my new ride. Man, what a car! It’s so low, like a crouching leopard, basically touching the road – it’s a sexy thing. And inside it’s so damn sleek, like every single bit of it was designed specifically to fit. I’m sounding a bit like Jeremy Clarkson, aren’t I? Oh well. Maybe he’s gone the way of most of the world and they will be looking for a new Top Gear presenter? But I mean, that gearbox is a thing of beauty (from the Audi website – Managed without a clutch pedal, the R tronic sequential gearbox delivers superior road performance and faster gear shifts. As well as using the automatic mode, gears can be changed via a gearshift specially developed for the Audi R8 and mounted on the centre console or by means of shift paddles on the steering wheel, as is customary in motor racing). That all sounds slightly technical to me but I am sure I’ll get the hang of it. And then there’s the speedometer. It looks like it’s just begging for you to floor it. The integrated GPS is also pretty damn cool – 760km to Bloem – I checked.

  I stopped myself just short of starting it and taking it for a spin… I can’t wait. But I left after spending some time in the car just admiring it and slowly made my way to the next unit. From the moment I opened the door of number 34 I knew that something was wrong. I was now on the upper level, basically across from my flat. There was a horrible, pungent smell that made me gag. I turned to leave, but decided that I couldn’t – what if there was something here I would one day desperately need, but wouldn’t know of because of a bad smell? But it wasn’t just a ‘bad’ smell, it was awful, really terrible. I readied my nail gun and went in, my other hand covering my nose.

  I expected to find bodies littered everywhere, but all I saw was an immaculately kept unit, polar opposites from mine even though the layout was identical. I slowly lowered my hand from my nose, but yip, it was still there, stronger now and a smell that made my eyes water. Okay, I thought, let me get through this and get out – I’d rather take my chances with the infected than stay in this apartment for any longer than I needed to. The one difference between this unit and mine was that the kitchen had been redone in a nice dark wood – what they had done, and which remedied one of my major complaints about the kitchens, was that it added more cupboard space (why they don’t take kitchen cupboards up all the way to the roof, I don’t know. What are you supposed to do with that tiny bit of space above them?), and they added a pantry cupboard. That’s where I went first, and after sifting through a host of rotten potatoes, gem squashes and a seriously horrible looking watermelon, I was able to find plenty varieties of tinned food and things like jelly, sugar, Milo (yum…), Marmite, peanut butter, cheese spread and, how cool is this, an unopened jar of Nutella! For those who don’t know, Nutella is a chocolate spread, though I don’t know of anyone who has ever put it on bread. The only way to eat it is by dipping your finger into the bottle. I remember going to Shaun’s house every weekend, my best friend in primary school, and digging into his Nutella – my folks considered it “an unnecessary luxury”. Man, I’m going to make that last as long as I can.

  Only when I closed the pantry door did I get a whiff of the smell again. What the hell was it? I had to find out before I left. So I scouted the rest of the flat for the smell and for any other bits and pieces which I may have been able to use. The main bedroom was uneventful apart from another gun under the pillow – so now there were two – my neighbours and this one. Mental note…

  I did get some painkillers and toothpaste (I was running out) from the bathroom though. Then I got to the spare room. And the smell. Inconspicuously in the far corner of the room, on top of a whitewashed set of drawers, was the offending origin of the smell. It was, horrible, and I still get a whiff every now and again and have to stop myself from throwing up. A hamster cage. Its two previous occupants, now hardly recognisable apart from a few tufts of hair sticking out here and there from the pulp, were the offenders. I threw up. A lot. I’ve gone off Flakes…

  Units 35 and 36, both also upstairs, offered up much more of the usual – tinned food, beers, tinned cold drinks, a couple of mixes – lime cordial, Oros, Game powder – batteries, some torches, some music magazines that will help me pass the day, and just as I was about to leave 36, poking out from a small wooden box on the kitchen counter, some seeds. Yay, I hear you say totally unenthusiastically. Seeds. Whoohoo. But listen, they’re seeds for tomatoes. And cucumber. And lettuce. And spring onions. And red peppers. I can grow my own food! How cool is that?

  I was so excited (how sad is that?) that I immediately went back to my place and started to create my own veggie garden (can you still call it a veggie garden if all the stuff you are growing is salad stuff?) I measured out half my patio (making sure that I will still have space to enjoy the winter sun, went back downstairs and stole some bricks from the driveway in a spot where the pavers had started lifting, and made a wall three bricks high to block off my ‘garden’. I then went and grabbed one of those shells – those plastic ones used for kid’s sand pits – that I had seen while I was looking for solar panels, emptied the sea sand and found a nice garden bed in one of the units near mine. I filled the shell to as heavy as I could manage, and did five trips until I was happy that I had enough soil. Even though it was just after 4pm and the sun was starting to make its way towards the horizon for the night, I was working up quite a sweat. I got back in, locked up and cleaned up, and set about planting and watering my seeds. I can’t believe it – in a few weeks (or maybe months, I don’t know), I’ll be eating food that I have planted – awesome!

  So, all in all, liquidized hamsters apart, it was a good day out. Hope that you had a good day too…

  Take care,

  Sam W

  11:09am, June 16

  I have lost contact with Owen and Johan – both their phones are ringing, but no answer. I am starting to feel like I am losing everyone – first Lil… though I still hold out hope. Then Melanie – I still try her number every day but no luck. Then my Dad. Now Johan and Owen. The last time I spoke to them though – it was probably four days ago – things were not sounding good.

  Eastgate seemed to have become a microcosm for Apartheid South Africa – they said that the people had split up into groups, along racial lines, and each group was only looking after their own interests. Johan had said that he wasn’t sure where he would have felt safer – outside with the infected or in the food court of Eastgate – the centre point of the shopping centre and smack bang in the middle of all the ‘groups’. There had been a few skirmishes, and, believe it or not, someone had been killed in these ‘gang wars’. According to Owen, the white group had sent three men out to try and get some blankets from somewhere as they had not gotten any when the racial split had occurred. Apparently, and this may be becoming a bit too much like that game you used to play at primary school, broken telephone, they came across an Indian guy who was on his way back from the bathroom… the rest of the story was quite horrific, and even scared Owen and Johan. In Owen’s words, he said that, “This is all becoming a bit too much like Lord of the Flies.”

  Looting had been occurring back and forth between the groups, but this cold blooded murder just upped the stakes. Owen and Johan’s group was holed up in the lower level Pick n’ Pay in the east of the centr
e, and although they had plenty of food – which the other groups were after – they had little in the way of clothes and blankets, access to bathrooms and ways of keeping themselves busy – it was all bound to come to a head. And it did.

  The last time I spoke to them – it was Johan, and he had no idea where Owen was – there had been a showdown in the food court. I could hear the utter panic and horrified indignation in Johan’s voice as he told me that something was seriously wrong. His speech was very quick and unfocussed – often he would lose his train of thought or just stop talking abruptly mid-sentence. From what I could understand from all of his jibbering and jabbering, things had come to a head when the Indian group kidnapped and tortured a white lady in retribution for what had happened to one of their own. While the Indian and white groups clashed, the black group, out of necessity, looted and stole from the other two, which, when reported to the two groups in the food court, got them even further agitated and they both turned on the black group. Johan, not afraid to admit it, told me that he had run away and hidden. He said that he could not take the violence anymore – grown men were throwing punches at teenage boys just because they were the wrong colour, and he explained that when he saw two men dragging a woman by her hair, that was enough for him.

  He lost Owen in the chaos, but headed back to the Pick n’ Pay alone. But, unfortunately, he came across two people from another racial group – he didn’t say which – on his way away from the pandemonium. They challenged him, and before he could say anything they dropped their bag of food which they had stolen and ran straight for him. Johan grabbed the nearest object at hand, a fire extinguisher, and swung it as the first of the two assailants reached him. Johan said that it connected with a sickening sound and sent the man – Johan reckons he was not even twenty yet – sprawling across the floor, leaving a thick trail of blood on the grey ceramic tiles. He said he felt sick. He was sure that the guy was dead, but what could he have done, “It was either me or them,” he said before launching into a sorrowful weep. What could I say? Luckily the other guy, maybe frightened, maybe sickened, deviated his path around Johan and carried on running. “I don’t think I would have been able to have swung at him too if he had come for me,” said Johan when he regained some of his composure.

  He got back to where his group had set up ‘camp’ and crawled up into his makeshift bed – two wooden pallets modified and filled with toilet paper and plastic packets as a less than comfortable mattress. That’s when he phoned me and that’s the last time I spoke to him.

  My thoughts are with both Owen and Johan’s families. I will let you know if I hear from them, but, and I hope that this doesn’t sound too pessimistic, given the way that things have tended to go of late, I’m going to light a candle each for the both of them tonight. I’ll miss you guys. We had some good times.

  Sam

  8:43am, June 17

  Hi. Didn’t sleep too well last night, unsurprisingly I suppose. I spent most of the night tossing and turning thinking about the people that I had lost. I got thinking about my school days with Owen and Johan, and I was in fits of laughter at 2am remembering some of the things we got up to (even though it was the early hours of the morning I had to stifle my laughs – I didn’t want to alert the infected to my whereabouts in that way. It is really quiet at night). I only realised that last night. Since this whole infection thing happened, the white noise which usually characterised the night has gone – no distant rumbling of long distance trucks on their nightly journeys from the relatively nearby NI highway, no cacophony of dogs communicating from garden to garden, suburb to suburb, no Boeing 747’s flying across the dark night sky, transporting hundreds of people from one continent to another, no distant bass riff from a crappy song played too loud on a dodgy hi-fi at an underage party. No nothing.

  It’s eerie. Just your thoughts for company, and occasionally, just occasionally, the thick, dark quiet is pierced by the monotonous groan of one of the infected. Or the distinctive slow shuffling sound of one of them walking, stumbling in the street a mere seventy or eighty metres away.

  Okay, well. It’s almost 9am and I have to get ready for a busy, busy day. Yes, that’s sarcasm dripping from my keyboard. I am slowly getting into a new book, Cujo by Steven King – it’s supposed be about a dog that turns into a monster, but one hundred and thirty odd pages in, there’s not been anything really scary or distinctively Steven King about it. But I’m getting there and I am enjoying it, even without the usual horror storyline. Maybe in these t

  imes the less horror in my life, the better.

  And, feel free to come over and help me, I’m actually going to do a bit of a clean today. I can’t tell you when last I did any major cleaning. Maybe weeks. Maybe a month or two. But, and I must be getting sick because I actually want to do this, I need to give the bathrooms, the kitchen counter and the fridge a really good scrub. Spring is still pretty far away – and the frost outside on the grass is testament to that – but today is the day that my small bit of the world gets a spring clean.

  See ya,

  Sam W

  Okay, here’s what’s been going on:

  From: Sam Ward [mailto:iamsamward@gmail.com]

  Sent: 19 June 2009 19:34 PM

  To: chriscross@mweb.co.za

  Subject: Re: Dude, I’m fucked

  Shit Chris, you okay man? I would ask if there was something I could do to help, but we both know that there is nothing that I can do…

  Have they managed to gain access into the complex yet? And when did they start coming. Do they know that you are in there?

  Thinking about you dude. You can get through this.

  Take care,

  Sam

  From: Chris

  Sent: 19 June 2009 19:44 PM

  To: Sam Ward

  Subject: Re: Re: Dude, I’m fucked

  Dude, don’t worry – my aim is getting better, so worst case scenario I’ll at least be able to take a few of the fuckers out with me! And hey, if you want to do that Bloem trip, then hey, get the fuck over here ASAP!

  But seriously, and I don’t know if it was stupid of me to do it… Okay, well I do know – I was fucking stupid. I disconnected the electric fence as I figured that it was chewing too much of my precious power. So to answer your question, yes. They are in. They are tenacious fuckers when they want to be. I watched them trying to climb the fence for ages – there’s a palisade fence between the complex and the golf course, the area where they all seem to be coming from – and I kinda helped them get over…

  Let me tell you how. When the first one started trying to climb the fence, first I laughed as I watched the fucker – a guy in a blue overall and big, chunky work boots – struggle to get a grip and make any headway. But after about twenty minutes of struggling, the stupid fuck was getting somewhere. As he stretched his right arm out to pull himself up, and possibly over the now useless electric fence at the top of the palisade, I put a bullet through his right ear. He dropped like a dead zombie to the ground at the bottom of the fence. But then, before I knew what was happening, another one of them, a guy in a smart, checkered work shirt, no pants, was standing on top of the dead guy in the overalls, and reaching for the top of the fence. I panicked and shot wildly, missing him by at least a metre. The dickhead looked up at me, or at least in the direction where the noise had come from, and I froze. Shit. Then I tried again and blew his fucking brains out. Then there were two of them there, a man and a woman who actually looked pretty similar with shoulder length dark brown hair. Before they could climb on to the two bodies, I stopped them. But then more came and I just couldn’t stop them all. While I was aiming at others, more of the fuckers started climbing. I’d then try shoot those ones, missing sometimes, while others would then start climbing over. And each time a shot went off, they looked up at my flat.

  A tall guy with one eye and filthy jeans and a brown T-shirt was the first one to actually get over. I killed him. But then one of his friends jumped over and ran (well as
fast as they can run) around a wall while I had my sights on a hot blonde zombie chick with big boobs – didn’t stop me shooting her though. This was at about 5pm. And they’ve been steadily streaming over ever since, using the ones that I killed as a sort of staircase to get over the fence.

  I don’t know if they are getting cleverer. I haven’t seen any other signs of it, but fuck, when they looked up in my direction it was like they were marking me.

  I’ve now barricaded myself upstairs with all my ammunition and food. If they’re gonna get me, they’re fucking gonna have to work for it.

  Chris

  From: Sam Ward [mailto:iamsamward@gmail.com]

  Sent: 19 June 2009 19:56 PM

  To: chriscross@mweb.co.za

  Subject: Re: Re: Re: Dude, I’m fucked

  Damn Chris, that sounds a lot worse that I first thought. Don’t talk like that though. I’m sure you’ll be okay. I’ve seen the way they are and doubt they’ll be able to get inside your place – they can hardly pick things up, never mind figure out how to open a door, especially if it is locked. I’m sure climbing over the fence was just lucky. Like you said, you accidentally gave them a helping hand. They’re brainless these things…