The Infected Dead (Book 7): Scream For Now

by Howard, Bob

  It got its balance under control and took aim at Jed. Two steps forward and then a third, and it was practically on top of him for a second time. Jed was horrified when he saw the infected making another pass at him, but this time Jed also saw that he wouldn’t be able to defend himself without getting into close quarters with the infected, and that meant getting those spiders on his arms.

  Jed fell over on his back as the infected leaned with all of its forward momentum following Jed to the ground. If Jed hadn’t acted fast enough and pulled his feet up in front of his own chest, he would have wound up on his back with the infected on top of him in an embrace. If he didn’t get bitten by the infected, he would definitely get bitten by the spiders that were desperately trying to crawl away from the intruders.

  He was also screaming, and if he didn’t really scream like a little girl when the wolf spider was on his pillow, he was doing it now. With his feet planted on the chest of the infected, he pushed with every ounce of strength he had and sent it flying backward. Its feet were off the ground when it hit the safety railing below its waist, and its body flipped in a somersault several feet into the web. Just as Jed had expected, the fall was stopped only a few yards below the railing, and he felt sick at the thought that it could have been him. Even as he watched, hundreds of small spindly bodies were climbing toward the infected dead.

  Jed was pulled back to reality when he realized he wasn’t alone. Almost a dozen infected had him blocked from getting out of the corner he had so stupidly let himself be forced into, and they were steadily making the corner smaller. He backed toward the railing again, but another glance toward the gap in the web where the infected had gone through was enough for him to know he would rather go down fighting than squirming while insects searched for the openings in his face. He could see they were doing just that to the infected, finding its nose and mouth to be easy targets.

  Jed only had his long bush knife with him, but he had managed to stay alive with less on a few occasions. He also knew better than to attack a line of the infected dead by going toward the middle of the line, so he wrapped his shirt around his left arm and went toward the last one on the right. That way he was able to throw up his left forearm as he went around it. He felt the grip of the infected on his shirt and for the first time in the last hour, he also felt like things were going his way. As the infected pulled on the shirt, he pushed while letting his arm spin over and under the shirt allowing it to unwrap from his arm.

  “Keep the shirt,” he yelled as the infected fell backward into the path of the others.

  Jed used the opportunity to break into a full run. He was surprised when he ran straight into six of his best friends as they came around the corner of the nearest building. He was elated to have come close to dying only to break away from the spiders and the dead, and he quickly described what he had seen. His friends all wanted to see what he was talking about, but he didn’t want any part of it yet. In the end they won, but only because it made sense for everyone to know just how bad it was.

  Seven of them could handle a dozen of the infected on a bad day, and they made short work of the fragile bodies of the infected. With them out of the way Jed led the way and pointed at the top of the lock gates from a safe distance. It didn’t take long for them all to be cautiously peering over the edge and shouting about what they could see from the top to the bottom.

  “What are we going to do about this?” asked Jed.

  “What’s that mean? Why do we have to do anything about it?”

  The questions were asked by so many of them at the same time that it was hard to tell who actually said it, but Jed turned his attention to Ben Kinlock, someone he had known since before the first grade.

  “We need that walkway to get to the other side of the lock, especially if we’re being chased by something.”

  Ben wasn’t totally convinced that they needed the escape route, but even if they did, he was having issues with what they could do about it.

  “What you gonna do, Jed. Take a stick and go mess up that web?” asked Ben. He wasn’t trying to make fun of Jed, but his question got plenty of laughs.

  “Here you go. Here’s a big stick.”

  One of the guys was quick to get a branch and start stripping off the small twigs along its length.

  Jed had been panicked earlier, but listening to the good natured teasing from his friends made him relax a bit, and along with the break in the tension came clearer thinking. He smiled and held up his hands in mock surrender.

  “Okay, y’all. I get it. You think it’s funny because it didn’t happen to you, but I’m serious. Do you guys actually want to let this thing keep getting bigger?”

  The group of men all took turns getting close to the edge and getting a good view of the infected dead below, but once they had seen the scope of the problem, they asked Jed the one question that put the issue to rest.

  “How do you plan to knock down a web that size?”

  Jed ran every possible way of destroying a spider web through his head. He even considered a version of using a big stick. He pictured how much web they could get rid of by dropping tree branches into it, but he couldn’t picture doing enough damage.

  “We could throw in some branches but set them on fire first,” said Ben hesitantly.

  Ben seemed like he thought everyone would make fun of the suggestion, but Jed thought it was a great idea. He slapped his friend on the back as he passed him, and everyone else got into the spirit of the project. Within a few minutes they had a large pile of branches near the web. It would be easier if they had some gasoline with them, but a little bit of quick planning showed they could do a reasonably good job without it.

  After the pile of branches was big enough, they brought some of the heaviest branches over to the web. Jed explained that they could throw the branches in that would sink the farthest through the web and then set fire to the branches with the most leaves on them. Hopefully, they would fall far enough into the web that they would set fire to the heavy branches.

  It worked like a charm. One of the heaviest branches made it at least half way to the bottom, and they tried to land more branches right on top of it. When they threw a burning branch through the hole they had punched in the web, it was the web itself that acted like gasoline. The fire raced through the thin strands in all directions, but the important thing was that it set fire to the heavy branches. The smoke also did its job. One sure way to get rid of spiders was to smoke them out, and there was an incredible amount of smoke.

  Jed wasn’t sure what he was going to do about the spiders on the walkway to the other side of the lock, but the smoke took care of that problem. He had worried that the spiders would cling to the underside of the walkway when they destroyed the web, but the plumes of smoke were so huge that the spiders could only try to get out of it as fast as possible. Of course that was enough to scare all of the men as the spiders tried to swarm over the edge and run past them on the ground. The men hastily set up a narrow firebreak a few feet back from the edge that worked quite well as thousands of spiders ran through it and ignited.

  By sunset they had cleared their passageway to the other side of the lock, and it was time to get back to their camp. The women would be wondering where they were. Before leaving Jed told them all that they needed to check the walkway every day to see if the spiders were rebuilding the web, and if they were, they could destroy it before it covered the whole area.

  Jed studied the bodies at the bottom of the lock and for the first time he was able to go further out onto the walkway to inspect the railings for spiders. It was a good day as far as he was concerned, but he was still uneasy about this new development. He couldn’t get it out of his mind how unusual the behavior of the spiders had been to start with.

  “Do you hear something funny?”

  He faced Ben when he said it, but he asked the question loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “I wasn’t going to mention it,” said Ben, “but I’ve had th
is awful ringing in my ears all day. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. It’s been driving me crazy, and at first I thought I’d hit my head or something, but it’s too loud to be just inside my head.”

  Some of the men were covering one ear and listening, and everyone was quiet for a few seconds. One by one they all agreed that it was something in the air, and one of them said he thought that it was bothering their dogs back at the camp.

  “Do you think that sound is what has the spiders acting so strange?” asked Jed.

  ******

  The small church outside of Cross, South Carolina had been their gathering place since the infection began. And it was crowded tonight. There was good visibility in all directions even at night, so they were able to bring together the leaders of small bands of survivors to make plans. They had some growing problems that couldn’t be ignored any longer.

  There were ten different groups represented at the meeting, and the apocalypse had broken down barriers that had existed for centuries. People who were almost enemies before it began were now doing their best to keep each other alive. They were still living in their own territories, but they were coming together to share information.

  “That’s crazy,” yelled one of the men from Jamestown. “The spiders may bite people, but they don’t eat them.”

  “I never claimed that they eat the infected,” said Jed. He didn’t let his voice get as loud as the guy who yelled at him because their relationship was too fragile. “I said they had them trapped in their web, and they had built the web all the way to the bodies at the bottom of the lock.”

  “Why is it crazy?”

  The question came from a woman who lived closer to the coast in McClellanville. Jed knew she had been a retired teacher who had a small place on Bulls Bay. She had received word of this meeting and traveled two days to be here. She needed to let the others know that the infected were all flowing south toward Charleston as if something was calling to them.

  “I’ve seen spiders eating road kill before. If given the opportunity, they’ll eat anything that gets stuck in their webs, and I’ve been seeing some big webs between trees.”

  Jed appreciated her coming to his defense. Some of the groups were still a threat to turn on the others and take their supplies, and alliances were only good as long as people weren’t desperate.

  He continued, “The web across the lock at Pinopolis is the biggest one I’ve ever seen. It covered the entire gate. We burned it down, but we’ve gone back every day since just to keep it from getting built as high as the walkway over the top. If we can’t cross there, we have to go around the lake, and that ain’t easy with all them infected doing the same thing.”

  “Does anyone have any decent food they would trade?” asked an elderly man who was very pale. He made everyone nervous because his group had been living off of crab meat and oysters, and no one was going to trade for those.

  “We’re all low on food, Jack. That’s why we’re having this meeting. We’re trying to figure out what to do. With all them dead things walking through the area like it was at the beginning, we can’t get near any of the places where food might be, and everywhere else is picked clean.”

  Jed was careful not to let himself sound like he was talking down to the old man. He had become a bit too sensitive when everyone had ganged up on him about eating crabs.

  “I heard there’s people in Fort Sumter and on that aircraft carrier in Mt. Pleasant,” said Mrs. Wortham. “The word around McClellanville is that some of the survivors down there were locals. Maybe they would help us if they knew we were here.”

  “And just how do you propose to contact them?” asked Jack.

  Mrs. Wortham was not to be easily pushed around by the cranky old crab-eater.

  “Use your imagination, Jack. We’ve seen their helicopters and the seaplane too many times for it to be a coincidence. They must have some kind of setup near Murrell’s Inlet.”

  The meeting went on for another hour with the entire discussion revolving around where to find supplies, but it was becoming obvious that everyone felt like the best place to search was not at any of the old Wal-Mart stores that had been picked clean years ago. As unlikely as some of them thought it was, they had to find out why the helicopters kept coming back to the barrier islands. They decided that they couldn’t send everyone or they might seem like a threat. At the same time, there was so much distrust between the ten groups that they didn’t believe someone would share what they found. They put it to a vote and selected one person from each group to go on an expedition. If they found the hidden supply base used by the people at Fort Sumter, they would try to make contact with them peacefully. If they wouldn’t share what they had, the survivors would vote on how to make them share.

  The meeting broke up just before midnight when the sentries reported the infected were passing through. It was no surprise that they were headed south. What was always a surprise was the numbers in the small hordes. It seemed like there was an endless supply of the infected. Just when they thought they had killed them all, more arrived. Jed guessed it was because there were survivors in small pockets everywhere, just like his group. They managed to stay hidden long enough to make it through the first days, and they managed to find food and uncontaminated water for the six years since, but they gradually ran out of food and luck.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Preparations

  Six Years After the Decline

  While the largest of the hordes had marched with relative ease down I-26 from Columbia, a massive horde had been decimated on I-95 by the natural barrier of Lake Marion. The sprawling body of water claimed thousands of the infected that didn’t successfully walk onto the interstate bridge that crossed the lake. They were bumped to the left and right as the horde advanced on the four lanes and kept walking forward until they were forced into the water. What remained of that horde was still an unholy parade. For every one infected dead that walked into the water, a hundred crossed the bridge. They followed I-95 and picked up speed when the leaders of the horde heard the sound of the dead marching down I-26. The two hordes merged about fifty miles from Charleston and became one family.

  The horde grew in size and then dwindled again when smaller natural barriers caused logjams. As expected by those who knew about the horde, the dead became mired in the swamps on both sides of the interstate. The horde was so immense that it even acted as a barrier to the infected dead that were pushing from behind. As they became stuck in the mud and brackish shallow water, others walked across their backs, and then they took their turns to become stuck.

  Eventually, the unthinking, uncaring forces of the infected filled in the swamps, and the thousands of dead in the back of the horde spread to the sides and walked over them onto the solid ground of the Lowcountry. The vanguard of the horde had outdistanced its slower members by staying on the centerline of the interstate. They had marched onward without slowing until they came to obstructions caused by long ago collisions of cars and trucks, but the sheer size of the undead horde caused them to push through the vehicles as if they were cardboard and paper. Even the concrete barriers that had been placed across the interstate in the early days of the infection were pushed aside as if they were nothing more than a nuisance.

  At a rural overpass the advance scouts from a group of survivors near Charleston had traveled up the interstate to get as much information about the oncoming horde as they could. Unlike other overpasses where scouts had crouched behind concrete walls for too long, only to be encircled by the infected, this group of scouts was surprised to feel the road move under their feet. The wall of infected was so dense that it pushed against the concrete supports that were worn with age and vehicle damage. As it pushed, the concrete groaned along with the infected. It groaned and even screamed as metal bars were pulled free of their rusty holes. Metal began to twist and pull apart in protest as cracks appeared in the asphalt.

  Of the twelve men in the scouting
party, three escaped because the collapse of the overpass crushed the infected that would have killed them. A temporary setback for the horde would be too strong of a description for the survivors. As the road fell away under their feet, they surfed huge chunks of concrete as it slipped sideways, and then they ran for their lives. They ran through the infected that had moved ahead from the sides of the horde, overtaking and then leaving them behind. If they made it home, they collectively planned to tell their enclave of survivors on the other side of the Ravenel Bridge it was time to leave. Nowhere was safe against this many of the infected.

  After more than five years since the beginning of the infection, there were very few people alive who had not seen a horde, but this time there were very few people left to talk about this horde after it had passed through. In the narrow strip of land that sits between Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie, no one was left to describe what they had seen. Most of the people who still lived along the canal connecting the two lakes had run across the bridge on Highway 45 and didn’t look back. Even those who had planned to blow up the bridge were too disorganized to get it done before the infected arrived. When they saw the shambling mass of infected all along the opposite banks of the canal, they knew there were too many to stop. All they could do was run. Thousands more of the infected fell into the canal and were carried by the current toward Lake Moultrie, but it was once again only a fraction of the number that crossed successfully. The Pee Dee horde, as it was called by those who saw it and carried the word to others, took advantage of a dry season and used the stretches of solid ground between country roads to cross large distances in less time. As they moved, they converged with the horde on I-26, and the numbers swelled again.