The Complete Lethal Infection Trilogy

by Tony Battista

  It was obvious there was nothing they could do for the people there and they had no interest in looting their home, so they drove by in silence that lasted long after they left the sad tableau behind.

  Chapter 4: Emerald City

  “So, are you pissed about what they did or about what I did?” Karen finally demanded after more than an hour of silence.

  “I don’t like what you did, but I guess I can understand it. I just wonder how much of our own humanity we can hold on to.”

  “You can’t hold on to anything if you’re dead. You were a soldier, weren’t you? You shot those men who tried to ambush me on the road without any warning. How much thought did you give to your humanity then?”

  “I saw what they did to the people in the other car and knew they were planning to kill you, or worse. They were armed and they were bent on attacking you. I had to do what I did. That man back there… He was no threat. He was wounded and couldn’t have done anything even if he wanted to. The other guy was unarmed, couldn’t even stand up and he had no way of- He was defenseless, helpless!”

  “You saw what happened to that family,” Karen came back softly. “What kind of a threat were they? What did they do to deserve that?”

  “You didn’t know what they did to them, not until we drove up to the house!”

  She turned to look him directly in the eye, voice rising with every sentence. “They raped that woman and her daughter and the son, too! They probably made the husband watch while they did it! Then they tied them to posts for the infected to feed on them! You can’t tell me they deserved any better than what they got!”

  “I guess not,” Ethan meekly allowed.

  “I’m sure we could find another car,” she said after a while. “We could divvy up our supplies and you could go your own way, if you want.”

  “No, that’s not what I want. It’s just… it seems like every time I’ve run into any other people since this all started there’s been violence and killing. I saw more than enough of that to last a lifetime overseas. I was sick of it and I thought it was all over. It’s peculiar, isn’t it?”

  Karen raised her eyebrows.

  “I mean, here we are, a bartender and an ex-soldier. You mixed drinks and I went on combat patrols but you’re the hawk and I’m the dove.”

  “It’s a bitch, ain’t it? The first time I got deep into it, I froze. I froze and I cried and I wet my pants. A young kid, sixteen, maybe seventeen, came around a corner and screamed at me to run. He turned the next corner and they took him down. If he hadn’t yelled at me, snapped me out of it, I’d be dead, too. I’d probably be dead if you hadn’t come along when you did back at the crossroads. I don’t want to be alone again.”

  Ethan gave her a sad, half smile and nodded.

  . . .

  They continued south, putting the miles behind them as quickly as they could using secondary roads, often making long detours when the roads were clogged with hordes of infected, obstructed by wreckage or, occasionally, roadblocks. At none of the few roadblocks were they made to feel welcome, twice being persuaded to move on by a few well-placed warning shots. By the time they stopped at dark they were utterly and absolutely lost, having taken so many back roads, dirt roads, tracks and cross country treks. They spent the night atop a hill, having hidden the truck as best they could behind a clump of tall bushes. After a quick bite, Karen slept in the truck for three hours while Ethan stood guard and then they switched places.

  Just after dawn Karen opened her eyes to find she’d fallen asleep leaning against an old stump and Ethan had laid a blanket over her. She sat up quickly and looked around to find him heating a pot of water over a low fire.

  “I’ll have coffee ready in a few minutes,” he told her. “It’ll have to be instant. Got some sugar packets and powdered creamer if you want.”

  “You should have woken me,” she scolded, halfheartedly. “How long have you been up?”

  “Couple hours,” he answered with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter. I got used to going without a lot of sleep overseas. There’s some instant oatmeal here, too. Let’s see, we’ve got plain, cinnamon, maple and brown sugar and something called ‘honey and blueberry delight’, all made with real artificial flavorings.”

  “Cinnamon sounds good to me. Thanks for covering me up and letting me sleep in.”

  He stood up to stretch and Karen noted that he was wearing a holstered .45 automatic on his hip and a .357 in a shoulder rig.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” he said when he saw her looking him over. “I just assumed we were past the point of your not trusting me with a gun.”

  “I guess if I didn’t wake up when you put the blanket on me and built a fire to make breakfast, you could have done about anything you wanted while I slept. I think we’re past the trust issue now.”

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking,” he began as he handed her a cup of coffee. “We’re driving around more or less aimlessly. I think we need to look for a place to stay, not just overnight, but a place to stay long-term.”

  “You want to give up on finding other people, a community?”

  “What kind of people have we run into so far? Maybe it would be better to hole up somewhere for a few weeks or more and let things settle down a bit. The cities are obviously gone along with the bigger towns, if what we’ve seen is any indication. And the smaller towns? The ones that haven’t been overrun have been barricaded and the inhabitants are taking a dim view of outsiders. Not that I blame them if they’ve had the same kind of luck with strangers that we’ve had.”

  ‘Having a home again, even if it’s temporary, does sound appealing. What do we look for?”

  “Something sturdy, something defendable. Ideally, a building sitting by itself made of brick or stone. A fence would be nice, too.”

  “How about a moat and a drawbridge while we’re wishing?”

  “Have you ever noticed driving by an electrical substation? They generally have high, chain-link fences topped with barbed wire surrounding them. A lot of them have a switching and maintenance building inside the fence, too. The only drawback is that there’s likely to be only one gate, so there’s only one way out if we have to leave in a hurry.”

  “You’ve been giving this some thought,” Karen said admiringly. “How do we find one of these substations?”

  Ethan pointed off to the west at a string of towers with high-tension wires strung between them.

  “We just follow the yellow-brick road.”

  Karen smiled and took a sip of coffee, then made a face and looked at him accusingly.

  “I just hope you know more about substations than you do about making coffee. Let me make it from now on, okay?”

  “Hey, at least it’s free. No need to tip the barista.”

  After breakfast, such as it was, he poured the contents of one of the larger gas cans into the tank and drove toward the line of towers while Karen rode shotgun- literally, cradling the weapon in her lap with the barrels pointed out the side window. Keeping the transmission lines in sight while they traversed the various roads, they finally came to the outskirts of a town and found what they were looking for. A dozen or more huge transformers sat on concrete pads on either side of a brick building about the size of a rental cabin, the whole works surrounded by chain-link fencing topped with strands of barbed wire. The padlock on the gate yielded to a few moments work with a crowbar and they opened an entrance that was wide enough to drive the truck through.

  The padlock on the building itself also yielded to the crowbar and the inside would be roomy enough for the both of them to sleep comfortably after they’d cleared out the parts cabinets and spare equipment. Ethan started to throw switches in the building to the ‘off’ position, then pulled the outside disconnects.

  “I’d rather not have any nasty surprises if someone happens to get the power back on,” he explained at Karen’s questioning look. “I left one transformer connected that I think feeds the grounds lighting so we should know it if that
happens, but we won’t have to worry about getting electrocuted.”

  “How do you know to do all this?” she wondered.

  “My dad started out as a lineman and went back to school to become an engineer for the power company. He liked to talk about his job and I liked to listen.”

  “It sounds like he must have been quite a guy. Where are your folks now?”

  “Mom died after a stroke when I was a freshman. Heart attack took dad while I was in boot camp.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Better that way. They didn’t have to watch the whole world go to hell. What about you? Do you have anyone besides this cousin from Tennessee?”

  “No, I was an only child and my parents were both killed by a drunk driver my first year of college.”

  “And you became a bartender?”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of messed up, isn’t it? I just kind of fell into that job. After my parents died, I dropped out of college and started dancing. Not ballet or anything nice like that, I danced in a ‘Gentleman’s Club’. Really, I was a stripper and lap-dancer. I made a lot of money, but I found myself doing a lot of drinking to get through the night. I eventually moved on to coke and some other nasty shit and started turning tricks to feed my habit. One of my tricks beat the crap out of me and I ended up in the hospital and had some time to re-evaluate my life. The guy who owned the strip joint had a couple of legitimate bars, too, and he took me on as a bartender. At first, I mostly served beer and shots, but I learned to make mixes on the job and got to be pretty good. I needed some physical therapy after getting out of the hospital and decided that that’s what I eventually wanted to do.”

  “Damn. We’ll I can’t accuse you of holding anything back.”

  “So, that’s pretty much my life story. What about you? Son of an engineer, joined the Army, traveled to exotic lands to meet new people and kill them?

  “Something like that,” he muttered.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so glib about it.”

  “You’re not far wrong. I always wanted to be in the military. I joined up the week I graduated from high school. I spent my whole first hitch stateside and it wasn’t a bad life at all, so not having any family left, I signed on for another. It was just about then the Middle East started heating up again and my unit shipped out. During my first deployment, I decided I loved army life, loved the action, the danger, all the noise and excitement. I re-upped and volunteered for a second deployment, but, if you kept up on the news, you know how things started to go sour over there. Women and innocent-looking little kids turned out to be suicide bombers. It got so there were so many of them, you just couldn’t take a chance. They’d be coming at you and you’d order them to halt, plead with them to stop. Then either you’d shoot them down or they’d get close and set off their bomb. After a while, some of our guys quit issuing warnings and just started shooting as soon as they saw them coming. You’ve heard all the stories about us baby-killers, I’m sure. I guess there was a grain of truth in that. I eventually took some shrapnel and got sent home. My enlistment was up a few weeks after I left the hospital and I didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. So that’s my life story. I ended up working in a warehouse.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like,” Karen meekly replied.

  “Yeah, well, I guess we’ve both gone through some shit we’d like to forget. Screw the past; it’s gone forever! We’ve got a whole new kind of hell to go through now. Time we get used to it.”

  “Okay. We’ve got a place to stay, what’s next?”

  “We head over toward town and see what the infected situation is like there. If it’s doable, we’ll hit some stores for food and water and other supplies. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a mall or a cluster of small stores. If we’re really lucky, maybe we’ll find a gun shop.”

  “We have guns. I have three and you were carrying at least three when we met up. Then there’s the rifles and handguns we took from those people on the road.”

  “Guns can break down, especially automatics, even with regular maintenance. The rifles we took back at the crossroads are too big and too heavy to carry along with us on foot. They’re better suited to a static defense position. The pistols those other fellows had are cheap crap. I wouldn’t trust them if we got into a really hot situation.”

  “Okay. You know more about guns than I do, obviously. When do we start?”

  “I figure we have a good six or seven hours of daylight left. We should start as soon as possible. I’m thinking that having a second vehicle would come in handy, too. We can leave most of our stuff here, in the substation shed. All we really need to take with us is two pistols apiece, that shotgun and my M-4, plus a couple of knives and maybe that crowbar.”

  Karen agreed and they were on their way again within the hour. The hordes that were the rule in larger cities were absent, but scatterings of infected still wandered the streets of the small town. The bodies of their victims, or rather their remains, along with those of the infected who’d been killed before the town fell still littered the lawns and sidewalks and the stench was already imposing.

  The first place of interest they found was a chain supermarket. A handful of infected wandered about the parking lot and Karen drove by slowly enough to lure them away, out of sight, then sped around a block and returned to the store. They had to eliminate five infected who remained in the building, using knife and crowbar to complete the task, but soon had the truck bed filled with supplies. Back in the parking lot, they searched the cars there, finally finding one with a spare key in a magnetic holder in the rear wheel well. By that time, the infected had begun making their back way into the area and the two new partners drove off, Ethan following in the car.

  Then followed a drug store, gas station, hardware store and a small sporting goods store. The sporting goods store was woefully ill stocked and carried no handguns at all, but they took away a pair of semi-automatic shotguns and a small amount of ammunition for them and their other weapons. They rounded up a few other things such as a camping stove, Coleman lanterns and a pair of sturdy machetes, ones made for hard usage rather than the cheap, mass-produced crap the once-a-year campers bought.

  Judging they’d done enough for one day, the two drove back to the substation, pulled both vehicles inside and Ethan set a heavy padlock he’d gotten at the hardware store to the gate. The last couple of hours of daylight were spent in hauling anything out of the building that wasn’t attached to the walls or floors and stowing their supplies. By the time they were done, both were fairly exhausted and Ethan volunteered to take the first watch. Karen spelled him four hours later and, following his advice stayed close in the shadow of the building and avoided any unnecessary movement or noise. Once the sun rose, she smiled at the sign he’d hung over the door of their new abode: Emerald City.

  Chapter 5: Jerry

  Jerry Moran was having a steak dinner at Tomasino’s with his agent, Teddy. For months, Teddy had been promising him that his big break was just over the horizon and he only had to be patient a little while longer. Jerry wasn’t exactly dissatisfied with the way his career was going so far; Teddy kept him busy working small venues, nightclubs in smaller cities, even a few gigs as a filler for bigger acts. Still, after six years of working the circuit, he was ready to move up into the big time. He was tall and handsome, if a little on the heavy side, and had a voice that some critics compared to a young Sinatra. His two biggest faults were that he wasn’t the easiest person to get along with and, in all the time he’d been singing, he’d never really developed a style of his own. When he sang a Sinatra song, he sang it just the way Sinatra did and sang every other song just the way the person who made that song a hit sang it. He’d honestly tried to develop his own style, but his efforts always seemed artificial; he was never comfortable with improvisation and his career stagnated as a result.

  He’d just ordered his third drink (he always drank Jack Daniels because that was what Si
natra drank) when a man sitting with a larger group at a nearby table collapsed, falling off his chair to end up face down on the floor. Three of his dinner companions sprang to their feet to go to his aid, but one of them staggered and reeled and he, too collapsed. Paramedics were summoned and the management was reluctant to try to move the men lest they inadvertently injure them and tried to make them as comfortable as possible where they lay. Nearly fifteen minutes had passed with no sign of help appearing when the first man opened his eyes and sat up. One of his friends, relief obvious on his face, knelt by his side and told him not to try to get up until the paramedics arrived when the stricken man suddenly lunged for his throat, one hand pushing his head to the side while his teeth bit deeply, tearing open his jugular.

  Screams and yells immediately erupted as blood spurted and another man tried to separate the two, only to be rewarded with a piece of flesh being ripped from his arm as the infected man turned on him. A man from another table smashed a heavy plate over the infected’s head, which stunned him only momentarily. While this struggle was going on, the second afflicted man awoke and attacked the nearest person, a waiter who was trying to help subdue the first man. Seconds later a middle-aged woman pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot both men through the head, ending the altercation.