Z Strain

by SJ Morris

  Yeah, that would surely get me thrown in a dark cell somewhere, if not outright killed.

  “Hey, Abby…Oh God, what the hell are you doing?”Dana said as she pulled her shirt over her nose.

  “Oh, hey sorry. I was using the opportunity to study them a little. I’m done, so I’m going to do another sweep around the building and come back in.”

  “Ugh. As long as you don’t cut any more of them open like that, I don’t care what you do. Kamil wanted me to tell you he found your bag, with your gun, and my pack, with food, so we can get something to eat before we get back on the road.”

  “Okay, good. I’ll be right in.”

  “Maybe use the hose over there to wash up as best you can before you come inside, please.”

  “Will do, Dana,”I said with a smile.

  I did another sweep around the building and found no more infected. I hoped I was right to believe we had already attracted all the ones that were left in the area.

  I cleaned up with the cold hose water and took the chance while alone to take my shirt off and have a look under the bandage on my ribs.

  The black cut was still there, but it looked like it had started healing, which was amazing and odd all at the same time.

  All of the other infected I saw, with bullet wounds or cuts, never seemed to heal. This was starting to scab over, albeit the scab was black, but it was a scab nonetheless.

  I left the bandage off, rinsed the wound again to make sure nothing else got in the cut and put my shirt back on. My ribs were still tender, so I needed to make sure to wrap them again.

  Maybe I could have Kamil do it and show him that I looked like I was healing. Perhaps that would put his mind at ease a little.

  We blocked the front door again, just in case, so I climbed the bucket loader and made my way to the roof.

  I looked out over the trees, toward the north. I saw nothing out of the ordinary. I closed my eyes and listened as hard as I could. I heard nothing but the birds and a light breeze, moving the leaves. It was nice to hear nothing. I was downwind from the area we were going to be heading in, so with the next breeze, I took in a deep breath.

  I smelled nothing other than…myself.

  Ugh, I stink!

  However, I took it as a good sign I was able to smell myself, regardless of howrank the scent was. This meant there wasn’t a herd of infected coming at us like yesterday. Things seemed to be looking up.

  I went downstairs and everyone was eating. Dana started one of the propane burners she had and was cooking some MREs.

  Yum…Not!

  I was going to stick to granola bars.

  Kamil was sitting, virtually on top of Dana. I didn’t think he was going to leave her side for more than a few minutes to go to the bathroom after what we had been through this afternoon. Chuck pulled a chair up to the counter Dana was cooking at and was smiling at her widely. If we weren’t careful, the next issue for our little band of merry men was going to be a love triangle.

  “So, Chuck, how did you end up here in the feed store?”I asked to try and pull him away from staring at Dana before Kamil noticed.

  “Well, my dear, this here store has proudly been in my family for three generations. After the news started telling everyone to stock up and stay inside, I decided to close up the store the best I could, so it didn’t get looted and destroyed. Plus, I had the big bottles of water for the water cooler here and I was going to bring them home. My wife, Emma, refused to come with me. She didn’t want to leave the house, just in case our daughter, Jessica tried to call. Jessica took a job up in New York as a newspaper journalist a few months ago and we hadn’t heard from her since this mess started. We hadn’t seen anything in our area yet, but we watched people eating each other on TV so we knew it was bad. I figured Jessica was lost to us, since she was up in the city, which I imagine is the worst place to be in a situation like this. So, I left my wife at the house and came here. I loaded up my truck with the water and locked up the store. I headed home and when I got there, the front door was wide open and the porch was covered in blood. I followed the blood trail to the backyard where we have a pen with pigs and sheep. I found my wife and neighbor trying to get into the pen at the animals. They were both…ugh, infected as you say. I started to cry and my Emma turned towards me. She had a chunk ripped out of her neck and she was coming right at me, moaning. I knew from what I saw on TV that she was beyond help. I ran to the shed and grabbed a shovel. When I turned, she was practically on top of me, biting at the air. I pushed her back, hard, and swung the shovel blade at her head. The blow knocked her over but she was still trying to get up. So I…I…I smashed her head in. I didn’t have time to think before my neighbor, who I had known since I was a boy, came at me. He was covered in my wife’s blood and who knows who else’s, but I did the same to him. I smashed his head in, too. I couldn’t stay at the house without my Emma, so I grabbed all of the canned goods and came back here.”

  The whole room was silent. Chuck wasn’t crying, though. He just stared out the window. I presumed he had plenty of time to mourn while he was here by himself.

  He turned to me after a few moments and pulled a picture from his pocket.

  “Here, this is my Emma and Jessie. It was taken last year, at the annual County Fair. We had so much fun that day.”Chuck handed me the worn picture. Chuck, his wife, and daughter were smiling in front of the Ferris wheel. Chuck looked 20 years younger in the picture than he did now and his daughter looked a lot like Dana, which explained his ogling her.

  “They’re beautiful, Chuck. You’re a lucky guy.”I said handing him back the picture.

  “I was. I was a lucky guy.”

  “Hey, why don’t we spend the night here and rest up? I think we could all use some rest after last night and today. Then, head out to the cabin first thing in the morning.”I said trying to change the subject.

  “Sounds good to me, I could definitely use some rest on something other than the ground,”Kamil said.

  Dana just nodded in agreement.

  I could tell she was hiding tears from Chuck’s story. She might have been hard and cruel today, agreeing to feed Samson and Scotty to the infected, but she was still a sensitive and caring person.

  I hadn’t known much about her or Kamil, other than what they told me about the group they were with before running into me, but we had already been through so much together, that I felt safe with them. At the very least, I knew they had my back in a bind.

  Hell, they proved it a few times over in the last few days.

  The problem, however, was still inherent inside me. I wasn’t exactly sure what’s happening with me and I knew my best bet was to get everyone to the cabin, where everyone could be safe, and Troy could run some tests to get me some answers. At least, that was the plan.

  “So, Chuck, you’re planning on coming with us when we leave, right?”I said with a small smile.

  “I don’t know. This feed store is all I have left and even though it’s pretty much destroyed, it feels wrong to think about leaving.”Chuck said, with his eyes drawn to the floor, sadly.

  “You have to, Chuck. Abby said she has a cabin and from what she’s told us, it’s pretty much a working farm. You would be incredibly useful to everyone there since you know everything about farming. You own a feed store for goodness sakes! Plus, I couldn’t leave without you, Chuck. We’re all in this together now, whether you like it or not.”Dana said while she gently grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into a hug.

  “I don’t know how I could say no to that, I guess,”Chuck said with a tear running down his whiskered, weathered face.

  We all got some much-needed rest and I had Kamil wrap my ribs again.

  I showed him that I was starting to heal and it seemed to put him at ease.

  He was still worried because I had no idea what was going on, but he seemed okay with it.

  I guess he was just happy to be alive after yesterday and our terrible encounter with those horrible men.
>
  I anticipated yesterday’s events were going to take a toll on Kamil’s frame of mind for a long time to come, and rightfully so.

  I knew the feeling intimately myself and I was going to let Kamil feel however he needed to, for as long as he needed.

  Chuck gathered as much food and water as he could fit in a pack and we tossed all of our gear, as well our bikes, in the back of his pick-up truck.

  All four of us crammed into the truck tightly and we were on the road about an hour after sunrise.

  I wanted to make sure we had as much sunlight as possible to get us as close to the cabin as we could get before having to stop again.

  Who knew what kind of wreckage we were going to come across on our way?

  Hopefully, the wreckage only consisted of vehicles, instead of other groups of awful people.

  I didn’t think I could take another run in with shitty people.

  At this point, I’d much rather deal with the infected.

  Chapter 25

  It was a smooth ride out of town.

  We were on the back roads and there weren’t too many car accidents blocking the path for Chuck’s big, red pickup. The ones that were there, we either drove off road a little to get around or pushed our way through, slowly.

  This was the advantage of driving in a solid old Ford from before the era of plastic-based cars.

  There were a few infected around, but definitely not as many as there had been just days before. It made me start to think about why the infected grouped together in such large numbers the other night and all headed in the same direction; south.

  I hadn’t seen any smoke from a fire that might have been drawing them. I didn’t hear any explosions or loud noises in the distance that might have attracted them.

  Then, I remembered when my group drove out to try and save Jake. The infected seemed to always know where we were going to be before we got there.

  My guess was, something big happened down south and the moaning telephone game the infected seemed to play, in order to locate food, must have been being played on a massive scale. I just hoped the game was over, for now, and that we weren’t driving into another herd of them, or even worse.

  I hoped a herd hadn’t found its path crossing with the cabin up north. The concrete wall and chain-link fence were great protections, but I wasn’t sure it could stand up to thousands of the infected, fighting to get in. With the numbers we saw the other night, if they thought there was food inside the walls, I couldn’t be sure that at some point, they wouldn’t end up stomping over one another, and just walking over the wall.

  This created a terrible picture in my mind and a pit in my stomach.

  The need to get home was even greater, now.

  Thanks, brain, for driving me even more insane.

  “So, Chuck, can’t this thing go any faster?”I said with a small panic in my voice that made Kamil look around for the threat I seemed to be referencing.

  “Well, sweetie, this ain’t no‘old thing’. This here is Betsy. She’s been the most reliable truck I’ve ever owned and I want to keep her that way. With all the crap we’ve driven over, including bodies, I’d rather keep it under forty. I don’t want to get body parts sucked up into the engine if I can help it, and if something or someone runs out in front of us, I want to be prepared to stop quickly.”He said with a sour face.

  “I understand, Chuck, but we really need to get to the cabin and from the map here, it looks like were at least three and a half hours away, but that would have been my estimate before the zombie apocalypse, using highways and driving 60 miles an hour. If we could step up the pace, when we have a clear road, that would shave off some time.”I said, with my mind running a million miles an hour, thinking about the cabin being overrun with infected and my kids, scared inside.

  “I will try, sweetheart, but like I said, we need to make sure we keep the truck in good, running condition. If we didn’t have Betsy, we’d be walking. Or I’d be walking and you’d be riding your bikes ahead of me.”

  “We would never leave you, Chuck! How could you even say that?”Dana snapped, sounding irritated that he would even think such a thing.

  “Sorry, I know you guys are good people, but I wouldn’t want you to be held up for me. I’m an old man, I couldn’t ride a bike like I used to, even if I had one.”

  “We could just stick you and the gear in the kid’s buggy, attached to Kamil’s bike,”Dana said with a smile from ear-to-ear.

  The thought of Chuck crammed in the buggy, being towed by Kamil in his overalls and too-tight shirt, made me laugh out loud.

  It was quite a comical sight, at least in my head, but Kamil didn’t seem to find it too funny. He only sneered at Dana and I, as we giggled.

  Keeping to the backroads that were pretty much parallel with Route 206, we slowly entered a community of fairly large houses with nicely manicured lawns.

  Well, at least the landscaping looked that way before everything became overgrown, over the last few months, since this all started.

  The sights were what we came to expect. The windows were broken out of most of the houses, there was dry red and black blood on the doors and splattered over the once pristine, white, concrete driveways and sidewalks. There were expensive wrecked cars and SUVs in the street and one, even sticking out from what used to be a bay window of one of the houses.

  I didn’t even want to begin to imagine the things that happened here, but of course, with the way my mind worked, there was no way it would allow me to escape visions of the horrors that likely transpired, judging by the aftermath that we were witnessing.

  I immediately started thinking of kids playing on the street happily, neighbors mowing lawns and waving hello to one another, right up until the infected marched through the community and devoured every man, woman, and child, without another thought.

  “Oh my God, Chuck, stop the truck right now!”I yelled as my eyes focused on a big house at the corner of the block we just turned onto.

  The house was a good deal down the road, but it was swarmed with infected, at least ten deep, packed all around, from what I could tell.

  Chuck stopped, as I instructed and I rolled the window down all the way.

  They were clawing at the house and the moaning was very loudly.

  “What the hell is that?”Said Dana excitedly.

  “That, Dana, is what looks like another herdforming and I assume there are people inside that house, otherwise the infected wouldn’t be trying to get in so excitedly,”I responded.

  “No, not that, that!”She pointed to the sky outside Chuck’s window.

  There was something small and black hovering in the air, above the houses to our left.

  “Oh, good lord…First zombies and now Aliens. I’m not sure how much more of this crap I can take.”Said Chuck, rubbing his eyes, while trying to get a better look at the thing Dana pointed out to all of us.

  “It’s not Aliens, Chuck,”Kamil said shaking his head.

  “If not Aliens, then what the hell is it because it’s coming closer to us, and now it’s flashing red.”Replied Chuck.

  This comment drew my attention away from the herd forming in front of the house down the block. I looked, and sure enough, whatever it was, was flying closer to us, and there was a little white and red light on the bottom, flashing quickly.

  As it got closer, I could see more of what it was.

  “It’s a drone. One of those quadcopter things that people put cameras on and fly around for fun.”I said.

  “What the hell is it doing here and who the heck is flying it?”Asked Dana.

  “I don’t know, maybe the people in that house are looking for help,”I replied.

  The drone was now hovering right in front of the truck, about ten feet away and the light stopped flashing.

  The drone dipped up and down as if it was saying hello. I stuck my head out of the window to get a better look and the drone immediately flew over to my window. When it arrived, it started bouncing
and blinking wildly.

  “I think it likes you, Abby.”Said Dana smiling.

  Then, it clicked.

  “Holy shit! Is that you Dan?”I yelled, a little louder than I wanted to, looking over at the house the infected were attacking, to make sure I didn’t draw any unwanted attention our way, just yet.

  The drone stood still, about five-feet away from my window and blinked it’s light twice.

  “Oh my God! It is, you guys. Once for no, twice for yes, right?”I excitedly asked the drone, as if it was a person and it blinked two more times.

  “Oh, wow! You have no idea how happy I am to know you guys are okay. You are okay, aren’t you?”I asked.

  The drone flashed another two times.

  “Did everyone make it back to the cabin after I was kidnapped, like Jake and his family? Did you rescue them? Are my kids okay? Did Chris and Tom make it out of that house?”I blurted out.

  “You might want to ask one question at a time, Abby.”Said Kamil

  The drone blinked another two times and then turned towards the house down the street. I was so relieved it blinked twice for yes, that everyone seemed to be okay. I knew not everyone made it out of that house with Liam and his group, but the drone saying yes overall made me feel a little better, that at least most of the people I cared about seemed to be okay. It was what I had to cling to at the moment, and I was not letting it go for anything.

  The drone came back quickly and blinked once for no.

  “What do you mean, no? The only reason that house is swarmed like that is because there are people inside. We have to make an effort to save them if we can.”I demanded.

  The drone blinked once again for no.

  “I’m sorry, this isn’t up for debate. Now that we have the drone, you can fly it over there to get the attention of the infected and draw them away. Do you have any noises you can make with that thing? It’s pretty quiet, so without some noises, you might have to get pretty close to the infected to draw them away, but I don’t want to lose you…Um it…I don’t want to lose the drone.”