by Calen, Tom
“After the situation with Jenni, I ran some tests on the body,” Marena began, holding his hand up to forestall Mike’s recriminations for such an action.
“What’s done is done, so spare me your disdain. That’s not the important part. After analyzing the samples I noticed some irregularities.”
“You mean other than being infected with the virus for the past six months?” Mike cut in.
“You can be sarcastic or you can listen to what I am telling you,” the man replied.
“Go ahead.”
Taking a second to enjoy his scolding of Mike, the doctor continued with his explanation. “The irregularities were with the virus itself. We know the virus attacks the frontal lobe—the rational, decision making part of the brain—and concurrently boosts activity in the hindbrain, or reptilian brain. But with Jenni, that part of the frontal lobe was in far better condition than any of the previous subjects.”
Mike could not find the cause for any alarm in the doctor’s words.
“So…what? You’re saying she had a weaker strain of the virus?” he asked.
“I thought that at first, too. But then I went into the woods to collect samples from the Tils that attacked you that day. Though you didn’t leave me much to work with, I was able to find three other subjects with the same decreased frontal lobe damage.” Dr. Marena paused to allow Mike to mentally sift through the information.
“And you’re thinking it’s unlikely that all four had weaker strains of the virus?” Mike asked.
“Highly unlikely. Add to that the fact that each of the four had varying degrees of frontal lobe damage. Jenni’s samples showed moderate to severe impairment. Two of the other subjects had even less impairment.”
“What are you suggesting, Doc?”
The doctor shifted, gently placing his weight from one leg to the other. In his eyes, Mike could see the look of a man who relied on facts and evidence, evidence that now caused him to present true anxiety.
“It certainly isn’t conclusive,” he stammered. “But, even though the hindbrain in all four still exhibited severe functional increases, I think the frontal lobe may be healing itself.”
For six years, Mike had heard people talk of a possible cure. They had shared an improbable hope that sometime in the future someone somewhere would be able to create a medicine to reverse the effects of the Tilian Virus. Those expressions of hope and faith had steadily dwindled over time, but still Mike knew that unlike him, there existed in people a resilient loyalty to the idea that one day the world would be made right again. For the first time, he heard the word “heal” removed from its previously abstract existence, and replaced as the drum beat of reality.
“If the brain is healing, then won’t the Tils eventually stop being…well, Tils?”
“But it’s not the entire brain healing, just the frontal lobe.”
“Which means what?” Mike asked, becoming frustrated with the doctor’s reticence.
“I don’t know what it means, Mike,” Marena replied with his head shaking in concern. “I don’t know what it means, and that’s what has me worried.”
The doctor’s words weighed heavily on Mike as the dark of the night slowly ticked along towards dawn. His seat upon the bus’s hood grew uncomfortable and he spent the next few hours slowly pacing the improvised camp. With his mind restless from thoughts of the coming days and the doctor’s discontent, Mike barely noticed the dull throb emanating from his various healing bones.
Just as the faintest bit of light broke over the eastern mountains, Mike’s attention was drawn to the hustling form of one of the camp’s scouts. In a quick flurry, Lisa, Paul, and the scout made their way over to Mike’s position. During their approach, he saw Lisa’s eyes furtively glancing westward down the main road into the city.
“What’s wrong?” Mike asked, bracing himself for further bad news. He wondered to himself if a day would come when there would be any other type of news delivered.
“The Tils, sir. They’ve gained a lot of ground. They’re about one klik from our position,” the scout reported as he tried to regain his breath from his rush back to the refugees.
“Are they frenzied?” Mike asked.
“No, sir. They’re just walking.”
Looking to Lisa, he gave the command to get the refugees mobilized. With luck the camp would be out of range of the Tils’ sight before the horde descended on their location.
Members of the security team moved about the survivors, rousing them from their sleep. Even in the dim light of the early morning, Mike could see the look of panic on the faces of those around him.
Turning back to Paul he asked, “How did they get that close? What’s the point of the damned scouts if we only get a warning minutes before an attack?”
“Our guys only ranged out two miles. It’s not like the Tils carry torches or lights, Mike. There’s no way he would have seen them until they were close enough to actually see them,” Paul replied with a tone of defense.
The two men stared at each other for a moment, before Mike turned away in abating anger. He knew the nervous tension of the mission was getting to him. He likewise knew that any continued conversation with his second in command would have only served as an outlet for his aggression. Bottling his frustrations and sparing Paul his misplaced anger, Mike gathered his pack from the front of the bus. The weight of it caused his injuries to voice their pain, but he welcomed it as a distraction from his mental irritation.
The daylight he had longed for hours before now came far too quickly. Within minutes the refugees had loaded into the convoy vehicles and were beginning to move southward down the highway. From the passenger seat of a large SUV, Mike craned his neck to the west. Though too far to be individually distinct, he could see the large mass of figures making their way down the city’s access road. A shudder passed through him. He had never seen such a large number of Tils gathered as they were now.
Once the engines had sprung to life, the sound filling the quiet dawn, the horde increased its pace. Still a half mile off, the mass of Tils had identified a prey and entered into their frenzied state of attack. Though the vehicles could only move at half the posted speed limit due to the congestion of abandoned cars and debris, the refugees were well on their way as the infected spilled into the area in which the refugees had been sleeping only fifteen minutes before.
Chapter Nineteen
Pain seared through his right shoulder as it collided with the floor’s hard, stone surface. Ignoring the jarring effect of the impact, Mike brought himself up into a crouch and retrieved his handguns from the leather holster slung across the back of one of the wooden chairs. Bullets echoed off the stone walls of the exterior, while others found entrance through the small glassless window.
With a commanding shout, Mike told Sarah to stay down as she rushed into the living space from one of the bedrooms. He could see maternal anxiety in her eyes, and determination as she realized that Andrew was not within the relative safety of the house. Derrick and Jake, were inside and quickly joined Mike by the window as he sporadically shot towards the figures of the armed intruders. From his vantage point, he could see three of the men hunkering down behind trees and boulders, while the remaining two hid somewhere beyond his vision.
Returning a volley of bullets, Mike hurriedly tried to assess the survivors’ position. With four inside the home and a large supply of ammunition, he knew they would be able to hold the attackers at bay for quite some time. His main concern was the location and safety of the other members of their group. Over the din of the gun battle, he could hear the high-pitched barking of Gazelle from behind the house. With her he knew, were Andrew and the two teenage girls, all three were most likely unarmed.
As he reloaded, Mike asked Jake, “Where’s Erik?”
“He was collecting firewood with Blaine,” the young man replied as he fired two shots of his rifle.
As he glanced to the hand of the dead boy that was visible through the doorway, Mike
feared that Erik may have met the same fate if the attackers had come upon him during their approach. Mike knew that the armed men would offer no quarter, they were here to settle a score and kill the remaining survivors. Even with the adrenaline that now coursed through his veins, he felt uneasy about a full-scale shoot out with human opponents. Since the outbreak, he had allowed himself to view the infected as some sort of “other.” He was able to justify those killings because he placed the infected outside of the human race. Now he was defending his life, and the lives of those with him, against an all too human enemy. As the months wore on, he suspected that the previous encounter with these men was but a precursor to a struggle for survival that would define the new world. But, faced with that reality, he began to question his own resilience.
A brief lull in the sound of gunfire stirred him back to focus. Indicating that Jake and Derrick should cease fire, Mike cautiously peered through the window. One of the attackers was standing several yards down the path leading to the house. With a high-powered rifle cradled in his right arm, the man began to speak.
“You’re pinned down,” he shouted. “Give up and no one else needs to get hurt.”
Mike could hear the lie, but responded in order to give him more time to think.
“What do you want from us?”
“We need food and supplies. The Tils are all over the towns,” the man said, as he continued his attempts to convince the survivors to surrender.
It took a moment to understand that Tils referred to those infected with the Tilian Virus. It seemed he was not the only one trying to distance himself from the previous humanity of the sick. The “other” he had divided them into now had a name.
As Mike opened his mouth to reply, a soft shuffle of rocks and dust cascaded down in front of the window. At first assuming the cause to be bullet-loosened debris from the home’s roof, Mike saw a glint of deceit in the man’s eyes as they drifted upward.
“They’re on the roof!” he shouted. The brief pause in the fighting had not been an attempt to coerce them out of the home, but rather to allow the two unaccounted-for attackers time to scramble above the dwelling.
Without sparing a second for Jake and Derrick to understand his words, Mike quickly raised his weapon and fired three shots at the man standing on the path. The bullets found the target and brought him crumbling to the ground. Derrick raced to the door and veered left towards the rear grotto. Rising from the wall’s protection, Jake aimed his rifle out the window and joined Mike in providing cover fire for Derrick.
The battle regained its former intensity as both sides aimed, fired, and reloaded in rapid succession. In the distance Mike could see a shadowed outline slipping from tree to tree behind the attackers. Erik, he thought with relief.
The tall, young man used the cover from the sound of the shots to quickly close the distance. As he neared one of the attackers, Mike could see Erik raise a handgun and expel several shots into the man’s back. With surprise, the remaining man on the path spun quickly to address the assault from the second front. Before he was able to complete his turn, Jake delivered a killing shot to the man’s head. The body had not yet hit the ground before Mike raced to join Derrick behind the house.
“I got one, but the other is still on the roof,” Derrick informed him. The teen stood with his shotgun trained on the roof, while the body of an attacker lay prone at his feet. Mike could see the two girls, Andrew, and the dog huddled safely behind a stone outcropping.
“You’re friends are dead,” Mike yelled into the air. “Throw down your weapons and surrender!”
A second later, first a gun, then a man slipped off the rooftop. Erik and Jake reached the rear grotto and kept their weapons raised, the wariness of the last attacker evident in their pose. With a streak of fabric, Sarah rushed past them and quickly embraced her son.
Mike approached the man, who stood with his arms raised.
“Why did you come here?”
“We didn’t mean no harm. We was just hungry,” the man stammered.
“You killed a teenage boy. Is that no harm?” Mike asked the man as an icy coolness replaced the adrenaline-fused heat in his body.
“I didn’t shoot nobody. Jimmy had us come here. Said we was gonna pay you back for leavin’ us with nothin’ that day,” the man’s tone grew increasingly panicked as he spoke.
Mike studied the man. Of an average height, the man was clearly once muscular but months of malnutrition had stripped a great deal of bulk from his body. The sandy blonde hair of his head was greasy and dirt filled from lack of washing. His calloused hands were equally caked with filth. A t-shirt and jeans hung loosely over his form, the articles either his own from days of plenty or looted sometime after the outbreak. The man’s age was difficult to discern, but Mike guessed that he was approaching his thirties.
“What’s your name?” he asked him.
“Mike. Mike Stevenson.”
The shared given name struck Mike strangely. Though a common name, Mike Allard could feel the anger towards this man rising in him for having the same name. It was an irrational response, he knew, but he began to see himself in the man before him. The infected—the Tils—had no choice in what they became. But this man had been the master of his own fate. He had, at some point in time, chosen the path of brutality and ruthlessness. To Mike, it made this haggard person a far darker enemy than the infected would ever be.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Mike Stevenson,” he said with a lifeless tone.
As the man looked into Mike’s eyes, searching for mercy, Mike slowly raised his gun and ended the man’s life with a bullet through the skull. In the years to come, he would acknowledge that day as the death of two Mikes. One that had chosen violence and murder and met his end with a bullet. The other, a kind and hopeful man that had been thrust into a world beyond his control, thrust into a struggle for survival, who met his end by delivering that bullet.
* * *
There was little conversation as the survivors set about clearing the area of evidence of the horrific battle, their movements determined and coordinated. The security the stone home had enveloped them in over the preceding months was irrevocably shattered. The bodies of the attackers were dragged to the cliff’s edge and unceremoniously cast over into the deep canyon below. A wordless agreement had been made among the survivors that the men would not receive the same type of burial Mike now presided over for Blaine.
The teen boys had dug a shallow grave into which the body of their friend was placed. The excavated dirt had been returned to the hole and several large rocks now covered the site. Arrayed in a horseshoe around the grave, the others stood with bowed heads as Mike struggled to find the proper words for the primitive ceremony. As he spoke the half-prayer, half-eulogy, his tear-filled eyes looked over those gathered. Michelle unsuccessfully fought back tears as he spoke, she and Blaine had grown close during their time in the wild. Sarah, her hands still tinted red from her scrubbing of the blood in the home’s threshold, clung tightly to her son. The boy pressed his face into his mother’s side. Jenni and Derrick held hands, while Jake and Erik clenched their jaws against the emotion of sorrow.
As he stood before them now, Mike could not shake the image of their disbelieving eyes as he had lowered the weapon that took an unarmed man’s life. Hours later, he still could not bring himself to feel remorse for his actions, but he knew the faces of his companions would haunt him in the days to come.
“Amen,” he said in conclusion, which prompted the others to repeat the word. He had not been overly religious before the disease laid waste to the world, and he had struggled since to find any claim to faith. If pressed, he would have admitted an unorganized belief in God prior to the outbreak. Perhaps from the way he was raised, or just from the ease of accepting a higher power, Mike had never considered himself to hold any atheistic beliefs. In the long, quiet nights at the campsite, he struggled with his current view of God. He questioned, as he was sure others that survived did,
how any god could allow such devastation to exist in the world. His theological musings, however, always came to the same conclusion. He could not relinquish an acceptance of God because the current world would be too dim without it.
After the youngest of the survivors had taken to their beds early that night, Mike found himself sitting alone at the table in the front room. Sarah had relentlessly swept the floor clear of any shell casings and bullets. Mike wished such a method could cleanse his mind of the day’s events. His hands, rougher now than when he had been a teacher, warmed themselves around a mug of coffee. Though the nights were still warm, he could not shake the chill that had clung to him since pulling the trigger.
Sarah quietly emerged from the room she shared with her son. As she gently pulled the door closed behind her, Mike asked, “How is he doing?”
“Still shaken up, but no worse than the rest of us,” she replied as she poured herself some coffee and eased gratefully into a chair at the table.
“How are you doing?” she asked, after sipping from the steaming mug.
“My shoulder’s going to be pretty bruised for a while,” he answered.
Both took a long drink from their respective mugs and sat in silence for several moments.
“You did what you had to do,” Sarah whispered, breaking the tension.
“I could have let him go,” Mike said. The words seemed appropriate, though he said them without conviction.
“You did that once already. They had a second chance that you gave them, which was more than what they were going to give us. What happened today wasn’t your fault. If things had gone differently, they would have gladly killed us all, or worse.”
Mike knew Michelle had confided in Sarah how terrified she had been months earlier when the men had tried to take her.