Infected (Book 2): The Flight

by Cleek, Caleb

  © 2015 by Caleb Cleek

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photos and design by Caleb Cleek.

  ISBN 978-1511605458

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, events, and places are a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to a real person, location or business is purely coincidental.

  Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  For

  Eli, Kyle, Ellie, Abby,

  and, of course, Heather

  Recap of Infected: The Fall

  A bus carrying Japanese tourists stopped in the small, remote town of Lost Hills for lunch. Connor, a local sheriff deputy, was finishing his meal when the tourists entered Mary’s Diner. It quickly became apparent that the tourists were infected with an unknown sickness. Shortly after entering the diner, a woman passed out and quickly succumbed to the illness. Additional tourists soon expired from the mysterious sickness. Fearing the epidemic may spread to the rest of the town, Connor quarantined the diner and contacted Doc Baker, a local physician.

  Thirty minutes after falling to the illness, the first victim revived from her apparent death in a fury, attacking Connor. Unable to match her new strength and invulnerability to pain, Connor shot her. The woman stubbornly refused to die until he placed his third shot between her eyes.

  Doc Baker contacted a medical school roommate, Dr. Clark, seeking guidance with handling the disease. Dr. Clark, who worked at the CDC, revealed classified information to Doc Baker informing him that the illness was the result of a Chinese bio-weapon. Investigation revealed the Chinese had infected a private flight carrying the Japanese tourists with the weapon prior to their landing in America. The airborne infection resulted in a death-like coma, during which the body underwent massive metabolic changes. When the infected person awoke from the coma, he had superhuman strength and very aggressive, cannibalistic tendencies.

  While Connor was battling the infection in Mary’s Diner, a local woman, Claire Mantel, was exposed to the disease by a tourist who decided to buy souvenirs rather than eat lunch with the rest of the group. Fearing the outbreak of an epidemic, Claire and her two boys fled Lost Hills and Vista County.

  Already on alert to the possibility of the Chinese releasing the bio-weapon, the government dispatched two teams of Homeland Security agents to act as an early cleanup crew. The government also sent a small Army Reserve unit to set up the first stages of quarantine for the area.

  When Connor was unable to maintain his quarantine at the diner, he went home to spend his last hours with his wife Katie and son Toby, who had also been exposed. When the three failed to come down with symptoms of the disease, it was discovered that they shared a genetic immunity. Dr. Clark related that in order for a child to be immune, both parents had to have immunity. All of the offspring of two immune parents would be immune.

  Realizing he was immune, Connor returned to town to assist his friend and fellow deputy, Matt. In Connor’s absence, Matt discovered the Homeland Security team had been sent to kill anybody exposed to the infection in an effort to stop the spread.

  Connor and Matt found out that the Homeland Security team had been dispatched to Connor’s home after discovering the family had been exposed. The two deputies returned to Connor’s home to confront the team which had been indiscriminately killing in town. The confrontation ended in a shootout that left all the agents dead and Katie wounded.

  A retired surgeon tended to Katie’s injury and sent Connor to the local pharmacy for medication. The pharmacy had been ransacked, all the narcotics stolen, and the pharmacist murdered.

  Realizing that society was falling apart, the deputies moved Matt’s wife, Eve, and his son, Luke, out of town to Connor and Katie’s home in the country.

  The next day, as they tried to maintain order in town and prepare the community for the inevitable loss of power, Connor and Matt met the Army unit that had been sent to set up the initial quarantine around town. The unit was undermanned and poorly equipped for the job they were sent to perform; however, they indicated they would do whatever they could to assist the deputies. The senior officer, Captain Tuttle, and a former Delta Force medic, Zachariah (Zack) Glenn, befriended the deputies. They also delivered a handful of vaccines for Connor to dispense to key people in the community.

  As community leaders rapidly died from the infection or were killed by the infected, Connor decided to administer vaccines to Matt’s wife and son, as well as to Doctor Kemp.

  As the day progressed, the deputies discovered that the perpetrator of the previous night’s murder and several other assaults was a local drug dealer, Curtis White. Curtis used the chaos of the spreading infection to run rampant in the community, kidnapping, robbing, and killing, and finally attacking Connor and Matt prior to escaping to a secluded, abandoned farm in the hills out of town. Realizing Curtis was going to continue killing and robbing the vulnerable survivors, the deputies decided he had to be dealt with. With the company of Zack and a local friend, Jeb Black, a former Marine and son of a local farmer, they made a night time cross country scouting trip to Curtis’s hideout.

  Upon their arrival, they discovered Curtis wasn’t there. He had left earlier to attempt to procure the highly armed Humvees from the Army Reservists. In a sneak attack, Curtis and his followers overcame the undermanned unit and took their equipment, including the heavy guns. In the process of searching for Curtis, Jeb, who had been exposed to the infection, sacrificed himself to save Connor, Matt and Zack.

  Upon returning to an area with cell phone coverage, Connor received a one word text message from Katie, “Help!”

  Zack stayed at the sight of the ambush with the injured Sgt. Martinez, the sole survivor from the army unit, while Connor and Matt rushed to Connor’s home, fearing the worst for their families.

  Prologue

  From Infected: The Fall

  I fell to my knees and wept in front of the charred remains of my home, my head bowed forward in anguish.

  When I had pulled into the driveway five minutes earlier, I was shocked by the smoking rubble that had been my house. Earlier in the afternoon, everything was fine. There had been no problems.

  The sight of my smoldering home added to the steady stream of adrenaline my body had been releasing throughout the previous day and a half. I bolted from the open body Jeep, my legs wobbly from the latest adrenaline dump, and sprinted to the still smoking pile of scorched wood and heat-twisted metal, Matt on my heels. Our flashlights threw separate beams of light that ended in egg shaped spheres of illumination. The two spheres danced randomly across the charred remains of my house as we ran forward. The overwhelming stench of smoke erased every other odor. Together, we combed through the rubble and located five adult corpses.

  Heat from the fire had burned the bodies beyond recognition. There was no way of telling whether they were male or female. All that remained were charred masses that roughly resembled the forms of human bodies. Three were congregated in what had been one of the bathrooms. The fourth and fifth were laying close to where the back door had been.

  When Matt and I had left the house in the afternoon, five adults, including Katie and Eve, had been there. Toby and Luke were there, too. We searched frantically, looking for the boys’ bodies. Protruding from the edge of a collapsed pile of rock and brick, which formed the last remembrance of the fire place, Matt located what appeared to be the barrel and action of one of the rifles the boys had been carrying when we last saw them. The fire had reduced the stock of the rifle to ashes. I reached down to pull the barrel free and burned my hands on the sweltering metal.

 
Looking around, I found one of Toby’s shoes at the edge of the mountain of rubble. It was mostly burned. Somehow, enough remained that it was recognizable. Through bleary eyes, I started trying to move the remnants of the collapsed fireplace, searching for Toby and Luke. The intact pieces were too big to move and besides that, they were still too hot. Matt finally pulled me away, trying to console me. He had lost just as much as I had. His voice was too broken to be understood. His unintelligible consolations did little more than stoke the pain of our loss.

  I slowly dragged myself from the house and headed back toward the jeep, leaving Matt alone in the grey and black nightmare. Halfway to the Jeep, I turned back and took in the sight of complete destruction.

  That was when I fell to my knees and begged God to let me wake. But I didn’t. You don’t wake up from reality. All I could do was kneel in the dry, powdery dirt, and sob uncontrollably.

  I don’t know how long I knelt in front of my house. My thoughts were dominated by a single idea: there was no point in continuing. My family was gone. The world was destroyed. I had done everything in my power to alter the outcome. Nothing I had done in the last day and a half had mattered. There was nothing left to keep me here. The more I dwelt on it, the closer I came to self-destruction.

  It was an end that had never seemed possible in the past. Now it was the only end that made sense. My subconscious was fighting against it, trying to convince me it wasn’t the solution. My conscious mind said it was the only solution. I pulled my pistol from the holster. Holding it in my hand, I looked at the contours in the moonlight. My decision was made.

  Matt’s voice called in the distance and brought me back from my internal struggle, back to the world of raw and brutal pain. “Connor?” Only one word, nothing else followed. His inflection made it more of a question than a statement.

  I didn’t answer. I wanted to be left alone in my pain. I wanted to allow my thoughts to run to completion, to reach the point that led to the action I knew was inevitable, an end to the agony.

  “Connor.” This time it wasn’t a question. It was a statement. I ignored him.

  “Connor!” This time it was urgent, a demand for a response. “Connor! Come here!”

  I forced myself to stand and edged away from the abysmal pit of despair I was wallowing through. “What?” I screamed, bitter at being forced out of my pit of self-destruction. “What is it?” I yelled again, lashing out in fury when he didn’t answer.

  “Hurry up. Come here.”

  I obeyed his request in that I started walking toward him. However, there was no hurry. Each methodical step sent a puff of dry dust into the air around my feet where it danced in the beam of my flashlight. Matt was standing next to the two bodies at the back door.

  “Look at this,” he said, pointing his light toward the corpses on the ground.

  “I don’t want to look at them,” I said bitterly. “That’s why I was over there,” I said, pointing back to where I fallen to my knees in desperation.

  “No, not the bodies, look at what’s next to the bodies. Look at the guns.” I hadn’t seen them earlier. There were two rifles lying next to the bodies. They would have been obvious in daylight. In the darkness, the flashlights cast too many shadows. The blackened metal had blended into the dark voids when we examined the area earlier. All that was left were the receivers and barrels. Like Toby’s rifle, the stocks had been reduced to ashes from the heat.

  “There are two guns. So what?” I asked harshly.

  “Katie had an AR-15 and a shotgun. This is some type of AK-47,” Matt explained patiently.

  I knelt down to examine the remnants of the rifle more closely and rubbed the distorting tears from my eyes to clear my vision. He was right. The remains of the rifles in front of me were clearly constructed from folded sheet metal. The metal was in the rectangular shape of an AK-47. This wasn’t Katie’s gun. I had never owned an AK-47.

  As I shone the flashlight around, it picked up a shiny glint a few feet to the right of the bodies. I bent over and picked up a spent shell casing. With the exception of the radius of the case neck, which had reflected my flashlight beam, it was covered with black soot. The case was short and stubby. I turned it over and rubbed my thumb across the end to clean the soot off the marking. The end of the case was stamped 7.62x39, ammo for an AK-47. It was the same caliber and type of weapon Curtis had fired at us earlier in the day. It was the same caliber he had used to kill the baby.

  I looked closer at the burned body at my feet. The heat from the fire had shrunk the ligaments in the body, which drew the arms tightly to the chest. The guns beside the bodies didn’t belong in my house. If the guns belonged to the bodies beside them, the bodies didn’t belong in my house, either. There were now four bodies that were unaccounted for: two adults and the two boys. A spark of hope ignited within me.

  I shined my light at the head of one body, searching for a clue to its identity. I methodically examined the body as I slowly moved the halo of light from the head until I had illuminated the entire body down to both feet. The fire had consumed the clothes. Small appendages, including the fingers and toes, were missing, presumably devoured by the fire. With no indication of who the corpse had been, I moved to the second body and repeated the process.

  Closer investigation of the second body fanned the spark of hope into a small flame. The examination immediately revealed a small hole in the front of the head. Rolling the body over exposed a much larger hole in the back of the head. The body didn’t die in the fire. I wasn’t a forensic pathologist or medical examiner, but whoever this person had been showed every indication of having died from a gunshot wound to the head. Although, I hadn’t located evidence to support it, the first body had probably met the same end, a fatal gunshot wound.

  I withdrew my phone from my pocket and dialed Katie’s number again. With the phone to my ear, I heard the electronic ring in the earpiece. It rang again. Just before the third ring, I heard another electronic ring. This one was faint and in the distance.

  Matt immediately turned his head toward the sound.

  “That’s Katie’s phone,” I whispered. We spread apart and advanced on the sound. After four rings from Katie’s phone, the sound died away. I ended the call and redialed the number. Several seconds later, the ringing started again. It was coming from the base of a tree thirty feet ahead. As soon as I discerned the origin of the sound, I sprinted toward it, across the uneven dirt and weeds.

  The ringing quit before I reached the tree. Light from the still illuminated screen affirmed that my ears had been leading me to the correct spot. I bent down and picked up the black plastic device. It was Katie’s. The ground around the tree was bare. Shading branches above had kept any vegetation from growing in their suffocating shadows. My flashlight beam danced back and forth, searching for a clue to Katie’s whereabouts. There was nothing.

  The initial adrenaline rush from hearing Katie’s phone died away. I began my flashlight search anew, this time systematically moving the sphere of light from right to left and then moving back to the right again, revealing unsearched areas with each sweep of the beam. Three feet to the right of the trunk, the light was reflected by several shiny objects scattered over a foot or two. They were shell casings. I picked one up. The reflected light was too bright, and the glare obscured the details. I held down the power button on the back of my flashlight. A couple seconds later, the beam intensity was cut in half. A second later, the intensity of the already dimmed beam was cut in half again. At a quarter of its original brightness, the light exposed the head stamp. Winchester was emblazed around the top edge of the end of the case. .223 Rem was stamped below it. It was the brand I used for my reloads. It was the brand that was loaded in Katie’s rifle when I left the house.

  Returning my flashlight to full intensity, I continued my search beneath the tree. I found a second group containing three shell casings. These casings were much smaller. They were .22 long rifle cases. I picked one up. It had a C stamped where
the primer would have been on a center fire case. It was the same mark that was on the CCI Mini Mags Toby shot.

  My new-found hope was no longer a small flame that needed to be kindled. It suddenly erupted into a blaze that renewed my will to live.

  Part 1

  Lost Hills, California

  Thursday Night

  Chapter 1

  Matt and Connor continued a systematic search around the tree, looking for some clue to the whereabouts of their families. Minutes before, they had assumed their wives and boys had died in the fire that had reduced Connor’s home to a smoldering pile of rubble. Then they found evidence showing, almost without a doubt, that they had not been in the inferno as it raged out of control.

  Connor turned toward Matt, his flashlight illuminating white streaks of skin from the corners of Matt’s eyes, running down his soot covered face. Connor knew his face bore the same signs of anguish, anguish that had nearly pushed him past the brink of what he could handle.

  Finally Connor spoke. “They aren’t here anymore. Katie’s car is still over there and so is your truck. They didn’t drive away. They either left on foot or they were taken.”

  “Okay,” Matt answered, his voice still broken. “Let’s assume they left on foot. Where would they have gone?”

  “There are two bodies in the house that don’t belong there,” Connor said, referring to the two charred corpses they had found in the remains of his house minutes before. One of them had what looked like a bullet hole in his head. Both had the burned remains of AK-47 rifles next to their bodies.

  “Assuming the bodies belong to Curtis’s crew, there must have been others. There is no way the two of them walked here. There aren’t any other vehicles, so somebody drove away after the fire. Katie and Eve wouldn’t have left toward the road with whoever started the fire having gone in that direction. The only place they could have gone is there,” Connor said, pointing to the rugged hills rising up behind his property. “That’s assuming Curtis didn’t take them with him.”