She pats my arm impatiently and thrusts her chin at the darkness behind me. Terrified, I swing around, pulling the Glock out of my chest holster to aim at what I’m certain is someone sneaking up on us. But all I see is an empty room.
Well, not exactly empty. The room is full of supplies. I set down my pack and approach the piles lying all over the floor, growing more amazed with each passing second.
There’s very little of what my father calls “bulk valuables” down here, items like gasoline, medicine, water, food, and ammo that are prized in large amounts. But there’s a whole lot of what he calls “godly trinkets.” These are items that possess high value on a purely individual level, like a topographical map, a compass, lock picks, or a functioning rifle.
With the exception of guns, I see all of those items and more. They’ve been gathered into small, unorganized piles scattered throughout the room, as if the person who brought them down here was hoarding treasure with no end goal in mind.
“The I.V. stuff is in that garbage bag against the wall,” Melanie tells me, pointing.
“Thanks. I’ll get it after I help you find that chain.”
“Just take it. I trust you.”
I kneel in front of the garbage bag and dig through it. The bags and tubes are still in their original seals, though of course, I’m still going to disinfect the hell out of them when I get back, just in case. I leave the bottles of saline solution behind. Too much weight. Plus, I can make that stuff from scratch back home.
With the extra gear, my pack is now several pounds heavier than it was this morning. Hopefully it won’t slow me down. I lay it against the wall and turn to Melanie.
“Did you scavenge all this stuff?” I ask her, throwing the beam of light at her as she moves across the room. She stops at a metal table and lights a candle next to a box full of them—yet another precious item, a luxury to some.
“My father found this place during a supply run,” she says absently. “He made a map for us—my mother and my little sister and me—in case we ever had to leave the house. It’s more of a temporary shelter. You couldn’t live down here.”
“No, probably not,” I say.
She suggested earlier that her father took his own life, a terrible thing I can’t imagine having to live with. I keep my mouth shut so as not to remind her of it. But I’m curious as to why a man with a wife and two daughters, who was brave enough to go out on supply runs, would abandon his family like that.
She lights a few more candles, creating a warm glow that reminds me of my father sprawled across the couch in front of the blazing hearth in our living room. I click off the flashlight, slip it into my pocket, and approach her. She turns to me. The candlelight shivers along one side of her face, exposing an eye agleam with moisture.
“He left us,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
A tear breaks away and runs down her cheek. “More than a year ago. The sun was coming up. I never woke up early, but that day I did. I don’t know why I looked outside. My window was boarded up, but I looked through the crack into our backyard, and I saw him.”
“What was he doing?”
I place my hands on her elbows and feel the way she’s shivering, not from cold but from the memory of whatever it is she saw her father do.
“He was carrying his pack and a laundry bag full of stuff. It was food. He took some of our food and left, and I watched him run to a van that was waiting at the other end of our yard. When the door opened, I saw people inside. Men and women with bags of stuff. He got in and sat down on the floor. He didn’t even look at our house, Kip. Not once. He just kept his eyes on the floor. Then a man stuck his head out and looked around. He closed the door really slowly, like he didn’t want to wake us up. And then they left.”
A list of possible explanations runs through my mind, but only one makes any sense at all.
“Melanie, what did your father do before the Outbreak?”
She blinks at me. “He was a doctor. A surgeon.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry.”
She nods. I don’t have to explain it to her. She already knows.
A surgeon. I’ve heard of this sort of thing before—people with valuable skills being recruited by bands of survivors hoping to create their own isolated communities, usually up in the mountains where the infected, raiders, and, to a lesser degree, slavers, aren’t as likely to travel.
If it was a man being recruited, like Melanie’s father, the leader of the community might promise to set him up with a beautiful young wife. Maybe even two or three. Any sort of doctor would be a godsend in a community like that. Her miserable prick of a father was probably waking up right now to a pair of teenage wives asleep on either side of him.
“Was he the one who taught you how to use that bow and set up those traps?” I ask her.
She shakes her head, looking down at the floor.
“I taught myself,” she says. “I practiced every day after he left. We were running out of food. I knew I’d have to go out on a supply run someday, but I never expected it to be like this, Kip. Not this bad.”
She turns away from me, sniffles, and wipes her eyes dry.
“Melanie, how long have you been out here?”
“Almost two weeks. Oh God, Kip, I need to go home. I need to see my mom and my sister. They’re probably freaking out. Sarah’s only twelve. She has nightmares that make her scream at night. I can’t imagine…”
Her voice trails off as she shakes her head at the thought.
“You could hike back to them, couldn’t you?” I ask her.
She gives me an incredulous look. “Without a gun? Are you crazy? And I only have twenty-two arrows left. What if that’s not enough?”
I nod. “I see what you mean. Where’s the bicycle?”
“It’s hidden in the trees, beneath a tarp with a dead viral on it.”
Viral. That’s one I haven’t heard in a while.
“All this stuff,” she says in a voice thick with rage, “and not a single fucking bicycle chain. I’ve looked through all of it. Every single bag and box. But the one thing I need isn’t here.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “We’ll get that chain. But first, we need to figure out where to look.”
“What about the drugstore? Could we go back?”
An idea hits me, accompanied by a memory of looking into a building and seeing what looked to be chains scattered across the floor. It’s so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner.
“They don’t sell them at drugstores,” I tell her. “But that’s okay. I know a place.”
“Where?”
I smile at her. “Ever heard of Tommy’s Bike Shack?”
CHAPTER 7
We’re about two miles away from Tommy’s when our empty stomachs just can’t hold out any longer.
Melanie and I talk about our old lives as we break out PowerBars, powdered milk and sugar that we mix with water, and tinned peaches and pears. It’s a good meal, and I hide my burp afterward.
“Don’t,” Melanie says.
“What?”
“Hide it. It doesn’t bother me.”
A low burp grumbles out of her throat. I respond with one of my own. We smile at each other, though my smile quickly fades away. This won’t last. The more I enjoy her company, the more painful it’ll be when we have to say good-bye.
We pack our garbage so as not to leave a trail, then make our way behind the buildings along Route 1 toward the bike shop.
“Did you ever date anyone at school?” she asks me. “I mean, other than Hailey.”
I slow down, almost stopping completely. “You know about that?”
“Everyone did. She slept with, like, five guys that summer.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“So,” she says, “was there anyone else?”
“Why do you care?” My tone is playful, but I’m curious.
“Geez, Kip. I’m just making conversation.”
We make our way
through thick underbrush in silence. Thorns snag my coverall. It’s a crappy path, but safer than using the road or crossing the lots.
I can’t stand the silence and wish she would keep talking. But Melanie wants an answer. She’s even pouting.
“There was this one girl,” I say. “Nancy Kim.”
“Ninja Nancy?” she says in utter shock.
I’m even more appalled.
“She was Korean,” I say. “Ninjas are Chinese. I can’t believe you of all people would call her that.”
“Everyone called her that. Did you live under a rock or something? Nancy used to climb all over the buildings. She almost got suspended one time for scaling the atrium. You mean to tell me you two dated and you never knew about this?”
Of course I knew about Nancy’s weird climbing addiction. It was the reason I broke up with her after only three weeks of “officially” dating. She spent every weekend out with her climbing buddies scaling granite cliff sides, something my fear of heights never allowed me to do. We had zero chemistry.
“We didn’t go out very long,” I say.
“You know she kicked a boy in the nuts once?”
A long howl takes us by surprise. It sounds human—though whether it’s a man, woman, or child, I can’t tell. It’s coming from inside the outlet mall we happen to be passing by, the one I considered making shelter in the evening before.
“Hide over here,” I say, pulling her to a Dumpster.
We crouch behind it and wait.
The high-pitched howling begins again. It’s the sound of a person in pain. I take out the Glock and snick the safety to OFF. Melanie already has an arrow nocked against her bow.
“Sounds like a fox or a wounded dog,” she says.
“You think?” I can’t get the image of a wounded old lady out of my head. “I thought it sounded more like a person.”
“Definitely not infected,” she says.
“Definitely not.”
We both know infected don’t howl. They don’t scream, either. They huff and hiss and growl, but that’s about it. I’m still not sure why that is.
We listen for a third howl. The first two were definitely coming from inside the building in front of us, which stands about a dozen feet away from the tree line. But all we hear now is wind tussling the tree leaves.
It comes a third time—long and pitiful.
Above us, in a window without glass, an old man suddenly appears. He’s shirtless, his hair and beard long, scraggly, and gray-yellow from malnourishment. He’s definitely infected—I can tell by the red-veined eyes, the unnaturally pale skin—but he’s in the early stages, probably not too far gone to speak. Like my mother when we first locked her in the bedroom.
At this stage, an infected person is still considered to be a viable meal for other, more infected individuals. This old man should have been eaten a long time ago.
“What is he doing?” Melanie says.
I watch as the old man sticks his head and his bony white shoulders through the window. He looks around until he sees us, then his eyes go wide. I can’t tell if he’s afraid or relieved to see a non-infected person.
He speaks to us, and when he does, his voice sounds like the howl from before.
“You kids need to runnn... Runnnnn away.”
I want to stand beneath the window and talk to the man, find out what happened, how he has managed to survive this long. But before I can do anything, the man reaches back, grabs something, and sticks it out the window. It’s a canvas bag attached to a rope. Small, about the size of a human head. He lowers it with jerking movements.
“He’s giving it to us,” I say.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ll grab it.”
I drop my pack and crouch-walk over to the building to receive the canvas bag. It’s light, airy, filled with what at first feels like twigs, or maybe hay.
I don’t have much time to identify it. The old man releases a moan and slips through the window. He falls toward me. I drop the bag and extend my arms. It’s only a two-story drop, but the man is old. I forget he’s infected as I catch him and fall back, cushioning his fall with my entire body.
“Kip,” Melanie says, running to me.
She does the considerate thing and rolls him off of me before he can touch my face or neck. I scramble back and stare at him, at the long sores covering his back, the bruises everywhere. He’s shivering now and howling like before.
Melanie grabs the canvas bag and steps away.
I look at the old man. “What about—”
“He’s infected,” she says. “Nothing we can do. Let’s go.”
“But—”
“Kip, let’s go!”
I follow her away from the old man. He’ll attract every infected in a mile radius with the noise he’s making. Already I can hear them shuffling toward the back of the outlet mall from the parking lot in front.
“Jesus,” I say without breath. “Jesus Christ.”
“Shh...”
Behind us, the infected make choking, ripping, and gagging noises as they tear the old man apart. I look back only once to see a group of them hunched in a circle around him, biting and tearing and slurping. It reminds me of the guy who had been tossed out of the Jeep earlier.
I resolve to get back home as soon as possible, and never to leave my house again.
We hide next to a broken-down ATM machine behind a bank, one of those outdoor ones with the overhanging roof to protect customers from rain as they make their transactions. A different bank from the one I stopped at the day before, though I don’t see any signs with a name for this one.
“Let’s see what’s inside,” Melanie says, passing me the canvas bag.
“What? You don’t want to do it?”
She shakes her head. “He gave it to you.”
“He gave it to both of us.”
I open the bag anyway and look inside.
“Holy crap,” I say. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“What is it?” She cranes her neck to peer inside.
We’re both stunned, and a little confused, at the discovery. It’s not twigs or hay, which is how it had felt earlier, but fireworks. Specifically, firecrackers, the ones that are strung together and sound like a machine gun when they go off.
But why would anyone have fireworks in a place where a single gunshot is enough to attract a horde of flesh-eating maniacs? Anyone dumb enough to set off even a handful of these things would be instantly surrounded.
“What do you think they’re for?” Melanie says.
“I don’t know. I guess we can’t ask the old man anymore, can we?”
She frowns. “You know, you could say thank you. He was infected. If he had touched you—”
“I know,” I say. “I know. Thank you. But we need to hurry. We have to get to that bicycle shop before dark.”
“I agree. But promise me one thing, Kip.”
“I’m listening.”
“We’re in this together. So let’s make decisions together. Going after that old man was risky, and I don’t plan on dying because you want to be a hero.”
“I wasn’t trying to be a hero.”
“Okay, so you were curious about the bag. What if it had been a trap? Like a grenade or something?”
“Who would lower a live grenade? You’d call every infected person in the county with a stunt like that.”
“I’m just saying!”
“Hey.” I place a hand on her arm. “I promise. We’ll decide things together from now on.”
She gives me a hard look—still a wall between us—and follows it with a nod. I wave her in the direction of the bike shop.
“Let’s go.”
“Wait.”
She grabs my pack and yanks me around to face her.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
“Nothing.” She gives me a somber look. “It’s just that—you’re a good man, Kip. Your dad must be proud.”
“He is proud,�
� I say, “but he won’t be for much longer if I don’t help him.”
She nods to show she understands. I stuff the firecrackers into my pack and head toward our destination.
Though the bicycle shop has obviously been ransacked, the front door is closed.
That’s my first indication that something is off. In most ransacked buildings, the front door is wide open, either because the looter left it that way, confident that he had scavenged everything of value, or because the infected have barged their way inside. Normally, with the doors closed, I wouldn’t be able to tell if the place has already been hit, but it’s pretty obvious here considering how badly the windows have been smashed, and all the useless debris littering the parking lot that could only have come from inside. Among the debris are bicycle helmets in bright colors for young girls, little round reflectors, cycling shorts, and a brass bell.
But no chains. Those are hopefully still inside.
“Why do you think the doors are closed?” Melanie says.
I smile. “We’re on the same wavelength. I was wondering the same thing.”
“Yeah, right,” she says.
“I was.”
“Okay. Then what’s your theory?”
I lift my eyebrows as if to say, Isn’t it obvious?
“Someone’s inside,” I tell her, taking out my gun and checking it. “But not raiders, since I don’t see a getaway vehicle. And it’s not a looter since obviously the place has already been cleaned out. My guess is someone is hiding out in there. Maybe the person’s wounded.”
Melanie gives a ponderous nod, as if to admit she hadn’t considered this.
“That’s what I was thinking, too,” she says.
“Yeah, right.”
She grins at me, then casts her eyes down at the gun.
“That’ll be too noisy,” she says. “If it’s a survivor, we won’t need weapons.”
“Unless it’s a trap,” I say.
We agree to go in with weapons bared, though not with the express intention of using them unless the shit really hits the fan. Melanie offers to take the lead. I resist, but her logic makes sense. She’s wielding a compound bow, which is a silent weapon. If someone does leap out of the shadows to attack us, her bow will take them out without alerting the infected.
Outbreak: A Survival Thriller Page 5