The one thing Butsko and his team learned was that the nanites made their hosts’ bodies burn at a high metabolic rate. The nanites technology fused with a host’s biological systems, and that required a lot of energy to function. If the infected didn't eat constantly, the nanites inside would put the host into a state of hibernation until more food could be found.
The irony wasn’t lost on Butsko. Hibernation was what started this whole mess, and now the damned bio-nanites were using it as a survival tactic. Everything went pear shaped once the nanites mutated into self-preservation mode. They weren’t happy just riding along in a host’s body. They evolved and wanted to take over the host and control it. Being bitten by another infected human, or even by an infected mosquito, would cause the body to die within minutes. The nanites then reactivated the host’s central nervous system and assumed control.
Everyone winced whenever Butsko dropped the “Z” word, but if those infected bastards didn’t fit the description of a zombie, he didn’t know what did. Butsko jumped back to reality when the static from his walkie-talkie hissed.
“Butsko,” Wilder panted into the headset, “I’m about thirty feet away from the barn.”
“I got you, Wilder,” Butsko said. “Is the cargo still following you?”
“If you mean ‘are the zombies still trying to bite my ass,’ then yes!” Wilder exclaimed.
This was the plan that Wilder had come up with about a half a year ago. The infection might make the hosts smart, but the hunger made them predictable. Wilder knew from studying them that the infected would never turn down a hot meal.
The barn quickly approached as Wilder had a final burst of adrenaline and ran through the open doors. Hidden behind the doors stood two quiet and scared volunteers. As Wilder ran into the barn, the men waited until the zombies followed him in, then slammed the doors shut and secured them with battery-powered nail guns. In the far corner of the barn was a small trapdoor cut into the side of the barn. After Wilder safely exited the hidden door, another volunteer secured it and then everyone had seconds to run like hell.
“Now now now!” Wilder yelled into his headset at Butsko.
Butsko didn’t hesitate. With the press of a button, the barn imploded as the thermite bombs detonated, trapping the infected inside and instantly raising the heat. Small streams of molten iron jettisoned from the bombs, searing through infected flesh and melting through metal containers of gasoline and propane tanks found all over the barn. The tanks created a secondary explosion, ensuring there wouldn’t be any infected survivors.
Wilder lay on the ground and caught his breath while the volunteers kept their eyes on the barn. The barn might’ve been burning hotter than Hell in August, but they’d seen infected people escape infernos like this before. The first few times they’d tested this strategy, they didn’t think to implode the building in on itself. The results ended with flying, flaming infected people landing hundreds of feet away from the blast zone.
“Come in, Wilder!” Butsko barked into his headset. “Is everyone safe? Is the bread toasted?”
“We got ‘em all, Colonel,” Wilder responded as he caught his breath.
“Good job, soldier,” Butsko said, like a proud father.
“Seems we’re getting less and less of the bastards each time we do this,” Wilder reported.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Butsko said. “They keep getting smarter.”
“And faster,” Wilder said as he rubbed out a cramp in his calf muscle. “I think we need a new trick.”
“Come on in and I’ll buy you a drink,” Butsko said.
“You’re on.”
Wilder called out to the volunteers and asked them if everything was clear. All three of them gave him the thumbs up and he knew it would be safe to leave. The barn was in an open field, and they could let it burn to ashes without having to worry about setting a secondary fire.
Besides—there was no way any of the infected would walk out of that inferno. Fire had proven to be the best method of killing the bastards. Butsko called it the “complete destruction of the organism” approach. The only way to ensure that those things were destroyed, really destroyed, was to reduce them to little piles of ash. The original approach was to destroy the brain, but some hard lessons were learned. Shooting a zombie in the head would definitely stop them, but given enough time, the nanites repaired the brain enough to restore motor functions. Thousands of soldiers over the last two years were killed and infected as seemingly dead zombies attacked them after coming back to... what... life? Decapitation and fire were the only ways to ensure true death.
After the barn burned for a few more hours, more volunteers would head into the barn with armed soldiers to ensure there was nothing left. If anything in the barn resembled more than a heap of ashes, the volunteers would hit it with a flamethrower. The idea was to create remains that even a fly wouldn’t buzz around.
4
Will to Heal Center
Spicewood, Texas
Walton “Walt” Moses sat back in his office chair with a long sigh as he rubbed his eyes. He had been at it for a long time now, and just couldn’t make the pieces fit together.
“What I wouldn’t give for the internet,” Walt said out loud as he took a gulp of the bitter, cold coffee.
The internet had gone dark about a year ago. Walt hadn’t been surprised, especially not in the area he was in. Spicewood, Texas wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. The internet had been sketchy at best even before the end of the world. But the research he was trying to conduct would benefit greatly from some outside information.
Walt let out a groan as he sat straight up in his chair. His large hand wrapped around the coffee mug as he remembered a time when there would’ve been more than just coffee in that mug. Walt was only forty years old, but had been through a lot in his years. His knees ached as he stood to get more coffee. As he poured the black liquid, he wondered how many more pots of Colombian gold he had left. As much as he drank, he knew it wouldn’t last long.
Walt had been the director at the Will to Heal rehab center for the last five years and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. He had traveled a tough road to get where he was and knew that anyone could make the same journey if they only got the right kind of help.
He’d been twelve years old the first time he snuck down to the kitchen the morning after his parents had one of their epic parties and sampled various liquids from the scattered cups. He wasn’t crazy about the taste, but couldn’t deny the effect the liquids had on his body. They made his body tingle while his head swam in a numbing swirl. Cigarettes had been next, and he’d loved to inhale the smoke deep into his lungs to feel the rush it gave his body.
As Walt looked back on those early days of experimenting with alcohol and cigarettes, he understood what was happening to his body. It was like a switch had turned on in his brain, and if he tried to stop his experimentation, his body responded with pain and uncontrollable craving. He hadn’t experimented with marijuana for too long. It’d never given his brain the kind of stimulation he craved. But the pills...oh, those pills. That was when addiction had grabbed him.
Uppers, speed, bennies, black beauties, kibbles and bits, r-ball, vitamin-R...you name it and Walt was all over it. His friend’s older brother, Devin, had introduced him to amphetamines and Walt had never looked back. Devin had said that the great thing about them was that they were found in a lot of people’s medicine cabinets. He’d even told Walt what to look for.
Adderall, Dexedrine, Procentra, Zenzedi…you see any of these, you grab ‘em, bro, Devin had told him.
Soon he’d been raiding both his parent’s and his friend’s bathrooms looking for a score. It hadn’t taken long for him to start breaking into houses. The first time Walt had gone to juvie was when he’d tried to break into his neighborhood Walgreens pharmacy. Juvie had been the first place he’d had contact with a drug counselor. At the time, he’d laughed it off. He remembered thinking that there was
no way he was an addict. Like many before him, he thought he could quit at any time.
You’re on a very dangerous road, Walt, his counselor had lectured. The decisions you make here will affect you the rest of your life.
The counselor had been absolutely right, but Walt hadn’t wanted any of it. He did his time, and when he’d been released, picked right up where he’d left off.
Walt had just been shy of turning fourteen.
From pills, Walt slid into cocaine and heroin, and the era of his heavy using began. His life had revolved around drugs, and his only thoughts had been about when and where his next score would come from. His ‘downs’ had eventually progressed to the point where using wouldn’t even make him high anymore. He’d been using just to get ‘normal.’
He’d been lucky, though, and he laughed at using the term ‘lucky.’ He’d been young, and there’d always been an older guy willing to support his habit in return for favors. By the time he turned seventeen years old, Walt had seen and done things that no teenager should’ve ever been exposed to.
Ironically, a life-threatening drug overdose was what saved his life. An icy-cold shudder ran up and down his spine as he thought about how close he’d come to dying. It’d happened when he was eighteen. His usual dealer had been busted, so he’d had to buy from a new one who had recently relocated from Canada. Walt had been told that this dealer had the purest heroin around, and that he wouldn’t have to use as much in order to get high. This had been the perfect opportunity to actually feel high again instead of just using to get back to ‘normal.’
The next thing he remembered was waking up in the emergency room. He’d looked and felt like a walking corpse, and that had been his rock-bottom moment. He’d been nineteen years old and had been living on the streets, selling his body since he was fifteen. He had nothing. No family came to visit, and he’d always known he didn’t have any friends. He’d been on his own, and at the time, faced the biggest crossroads of his life. He would either sober up, or he could die.
A pounding sound outside his office snapped Walt back to reality. He stood and slowly approached the window. In the last two years, something as simple as looking out the window could end your life.
Get a grip on yourself old man, Walt thought as he expected to see an errant branch banging against the building.
Without having to look where it was, Walt grabbed his trusty baseball bat. Good old Stevie. Stevie wasn’t just any kind of baseball bat—Stevie was studded with nails. Just holding it made him feel safe. That baseball bat had gone through hell with him, and there was nothing in this world he valued more. It gave him safety, provided him clarity, and assured him that his past was just that—in the past. But in the last two years, his old baseball bat had also provided him with protection, and that was something that didn’t come easy in the world nowadays.
He slowly approached the window and gripped Stevie with two hands. Being his only connection to the outside world, Walt refused to board up the window. He’d lived in darkness for so long that he needed to see the light of the sun every day. Seeing that light energized him and gave him hope. He knew many of his co-workers called him foolish, but anything that got you through the days was something worth holding onto.
Walt looked cautiously out the window as he tried to find the source of the noise, but was met with only darkness. He lowered his bat and slowly released the breath he’d been holding. A crooked smile formed across his mouth before a pale, gray arm crashed through the window and grabbed Walt by his shirt collar. The shock as the glass sprayed in his face made Walt drop Stevie.
Walt looked into the eyes of the infected woman outside the window. Most of her hair was missing, and she had only a clump off to the side. Her head was full of deep lacerations, and Walt could see parts of her skull where the scalp had been torn away. Her left eye bulged out of its socket, and the skin was completely gone from the right side of her face.
“Son of a bitch!” was all Walt managed to say as the thing pulled him closer to the window.
Walt was always shocked by the sheer strength of the infected. Walt put his hands against the window frame and tried pulling away, but her grip was too strong. Time stood still as Walt looked into her eyes and her broken-toothed mouth began to open. He closed his eyes, hoping it would be over quickly, but instead heard a gunshot crack in the night.
Walt opened his eyes just in time to see her forehead explode. With reflexes he thought he’d lost long ago, Walt ducked to avoid being hit by the infected’s brains and gore. Defying all logic, the infected still had a death grip on his shirt.
“Are you okay, Walt?” he heard a voice asking. “Have you been bitten?”
Struggling to release himself from her grip, Walt managed to yell back, “I’m okay! I’m okay! I can’t get her off my collar, though.”
The outside lights flashed on, and Walt saw Dennis running over to him. Walt closed his eyes, and the next thing he heard was the wet sound of a blade cutting through rotten flesh. Walt knew the infected was now headless. Walt moved away from the window and was careful not to touch any of the blood. Rumors had circulated that one could be infected without even being bitten; that the blood of the infected was somehow alive.
“Thanks, Dennis!” Walt yelled over, his heart still pounding in his chest.
Walt had implemented hourly walks around the center’s grounds a few weeks ago after people in the center had reported hearing more and more activity outside at night. It appeared as though the infected were becoming more active.
“Think you’ll board up your window now?” Dennis asked with a smirk on his face.
“Yeah, I think it’s about time,” Walt said. Deep down, Walt felt like boarding up his window was the same as giving up hope.
Dennis kicked the disembodied head towards the fire pit as Cheryl and Jonas—who were also on the nightly patrol—carefully dragged the body away. The ‘fire pit’ was actually the pool drained of water and repurposed as the location where infected bodies could be reduced to ashes. The pool was the perfect location. Even though the Will to Heal center was surrounded by dense woods, the area around the pool had been cleared of shrubbery long ago in order to prevent leaves and such from falling into the water. There was no chance of the flames catching the nearby woods on fire.
From his smashed window, Walt could see and hear the “whoosh” as the flame from the match hit the gasoline-soaked body and head.
“I could really use a drink,” he whispered to himself as he tried to smile. He found it funny that as long as he’d been clean and sober, the first thought to cross his mind after a near-death experience was to have a drink.
“All good in here?” Cheryl asked as she poked her head through Walt’s window carefully to avoid any drops of blood.
“I’m good, Cheryl,” Walt replied, even managing to smile. “Just some rattled nerves and a pounding heartbeat is all.”
“We’ll get some planks to board up your window,” Cheryl said as she sized up the damage. “I’m assuming you are ready for wood now?” Cheryl said jokingly as she winked at Walt. Walt’s love of his window was known by everyone at the center.
“Make it really thick wood,” he said back to Cheryl.
“Will do,” she shot back at him. “We’re also going to do another sweep of the grounds. These things usually travel in packs.”
“Good idea,” Walt said. “Be careful, and let me know when you complete your second sweep.”
Cheryl just winked at him before turning and disappearing into the darkness.
Within the hour, Walt’s window was boarded up tight. As he looked around his office, it somehow felt smaller, more enclosed. Walt knew he’d gotten lucky. The zombies were getting stronger, and if he hadn’t observed it with his own eyes, smarter. He also worried that there were more of them walking around the grounds.
Zombies are like cockroaches, he remembered telling the group last year. Where there’s one, there are many.
So why had th
e infected changed their hunting patterns?
Walt suddenly felt very tired and decided to lay down on his couch. He had way too much caffeine coursing through his system to fall asleep, but he closed his eyes anyway and remembered.
5
Cedar Park, Texas
Twenty-One Years Ago
Walt remembered waking up in that hospital room bed after he OD’d. He remembered he wanted to die. He’d had nothing and couldn’t see himself even two years into the future. The last four to five years of his life had been a haze and a waste. Walt remembered looking around the room, trying to find something with which to end his miserable life. Even if he would’ve found something, he’d been too weak to even swing his legs around, let alone stand up and walk.
Rock bottom.
A smile slowly crept across his face as Walt remembered the first time Steven “Stevie” Spalatucci walked into his hospital room. Stevie had been a young-looking fifty-two-year-old who had deep lines on his face, heavily callused skin on his hands, and a soulful look in his eyes. Walt had immediately been drawn to Stevie. He’d known Stevie had been through the shit-grinder and had lived to talk about it.
Stevie had taught Walt about self-esteem and the value he had as a human being. He’d taught Walt that he wasn’t a lost cause who would never amount to anything. Stevie had been an addiction counselor who worked for the state and had taken Walt on as a patient.
That had been Walt’s turning point and the beginning of his slow climb up from ‘rock bottom.’
It hadn’t been easy, but Stevie never abandoned Walt. He’d taken Walt to all his meetings, all his drug tests, and his court dates. The road to living clean and sober wasn’t easy. When Walt would stumble and fall off the wagon--which had been a frequent occurrence in the beginning--Stevie had been there to pick him up every time without judgement or anger.
Outbreak (Book 2): The Mutation Page 2