The Complete Lethal Infection Trilogy

by Tony Battista

  They spent the night in a little stone chapel, taking turns standing watch. There was already a chill to the night air and both men hoped for an early winter.

  Chapter 16: Nightmares

  Bailey carried the last box in from the big Ford truck he’d acquired and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Ethan and Karen had finally found an ideal spot to stay the winter. Some miles off the main road stood a sprawling, five-bedroom, brick split-level with a metal roof and a large, fenced-in yard. It was an older building, but well maintained and someone had taken the trouble not only to add three bedrooms, but to install Franklin stoves in the dining room, living room and a small eating area just off the kitchen along with the added bedrooms, each with its own stack. An old-fashioned, hand-worked pump in a glass-walled patio addition provided an unlimited supply of fresh water and there seemed to be mountains of cut and split firewood neatly stacked in the backyard. Shelves in the three-car garage held cases of MREs and, after a lot of effort with crowbars and axes, they broke into a room with a dozen rifles and sixteen pistols along with several thousand rounds of ammunition. Despite such preparedness, there was an undisturbed coating of dust on every surface indicating no one had been here since the outbreak.

  “All that effort,” Ethan sighed, “and they never had a chance to make use any of it.”

  “They’re not the only ones whose plans and dreams were cut short,” Karen held his hand.

  “I think we can make this place defensible. That hardware store a few miles up the road had some heavy wire fencing we could put up over the windows and I already have a few other ideas.”

  “Great, even more work,” Bailey moaned.

  “Once winter comes, we’ll be able to take it a little easier,” Ethan consoled him. “Since you’re the bookkeeper, why don’t you inventory and itemize our supplies?”

  “Oh, wonderful, thank you so much.”

  “It won’t be so bad,” Lauren told him. “I’ll help you.”

  The pair walked off toward the garage as Eric watched.

  “That Bailey sure likes to gripe,” he said to Ethan.

  “Yeah, he does complain a lot, but he always does his share.”

  “I’m not sure I like the way he and Lauren always seem to be together.”

  “Hey, Eric, it’s your sister who always tags along after him, not the other way around,” Karen offered.

  “I know. But you have to have noticed that she’s… a little different. She’s not quite…”

  “I’ve noticed,” Ethan acknowledged. “I’ve talked to Bailey about her. I really don’t think he’ll try to take advantage of her. He’s actually not a bad guy.”

  “The trouble is, she’s easily infatuated,” Eric explained, “and Bailey’s the only available guy around.”

  “I think you’re worried over nothing,” Ethan told him. “It’s been over three weeks now and nothing’s happened between them. Forget about it. You want to make the run to the hardware store with me tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I do! I’m glad you finally trust me enough.”

  “It was never about trust. Your leg’s not giving you any trouble anymore and you’ve learned how to handle yourself with a gun or a knife and crowbar. It’s time to get you some real world experience. Just keep your head on straight if we run into any real trouble and you’ll do fine.”

  . . .

  Ethan drove the Dodge while Eric followed in the Ford and they pulled into the hardware store parking lot around nine the next morning. A few infected milled about the outside of the building and started toward them as they got out of the trucks.

  “Stay close and don’t use your gun unless I do,” Ethan cautioned as he gripped a 16 oz. ball peen hammer. “If we can take them down without making too much noise, all the better.”

  Eric swallowed and nodded and they moved toward the building. Ethan brought down the first infected with a sharp hammer blow to the forehead while Eric swung his crowbar with both hands against the side of a second man’s skull, crushing it and dropping him like a brick. In less than two minutes, five infected corpses behind them, they were walking through an open garage door. . Stepping around shards of glass from a broken overhead light fixture, they found one thoroughly ravaged corpse lying near an overturned display rack of batteries and another nearby. Ethan grabbed a shopping basket and filled it with batteries, setting it on the checkout counter before they moved deeper into the store. After hoisting a 5Kw generator into the Ford, they filled orange buckets with nails, screws and other fasteners and made their way through the store, each loading up a shopping cart with anything they thought might be useful.

  Outside again, they both lifted a roll of fencing into the bed of the Dodge and more tools and equipment into the Ford.

  “You see that cardboard cutout?” Eric asked.

  “Yeah, it looks like he had a really bad day. I wonder what made them attack him.”

  “Well, none of them seem particularly bright.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  They spotted dozens of infected on their way back to the house but, despite having to slow down a few times to occasionally bump one aside with a fender, they had no problems getting home. Once there they saw Karen helping Bailey load a corpse into the bed of his truck on top of two others already in place.

  “Did you have any trouble?” Karen asked as she came up to greet the two men.

  “No, it was a pretty quiet run,” Ethan answered. “What happened here?”

  “A small group came by,” she answered, trying to lead him away. “Bailey and I handled them without any gunfire. He’s actually pretty handy with a machete.”

  “Never in my wildest dreams,” Bailey pronounced, “would I ever have imagined this being a routine day.”

  “You need any help?” Eric asked him.

  “Nah, just a couple small ones left; I can handle them if you guys want to start unloading.”

  Ethan stood motionless as he watched Bailey lift the bodies of a pre-teen boy and a ten-year-old girl, flopping each over the side of the pickup into the bed. He didn’t move until after Bailey slammed the tailgate closed and he felt Karen’s hand gently shaking his shoulder.

  “Are you all right, Ethan?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay,” he said, but the glazed look in his eyes told a different story. Before she could say anything else, he turned and began helping Eric unload.

  . . .

  The entire household awoke with a start in the middle of the night to Ethan’s voice screaming out warnings to stop, to go back, to hold fire. Karen shook him awake and he sprang up in bed, looking around the room, not recognizing his surroundings. She took his face in her hands and looked straight at him, calmly calling his name until the light of comprehension appeared in his eyes. He was trembling, sweating and unable to speak for several moments.

  “I’m okay,” he finally managed. Looking around he saw the concerned faces of the rest of his adoptive family and waved them off, apologizing for disturbing their sleep.

  “God, what happened to you overseas?” Karen asked him.

  “Nothing I want to talk about,” he said, taking her hands in his. “It was a lifetime ago; it’s over and I need to let go of it.”

  “Maybe if you talked about it…”

  “No, not now. I’m going to go relieve Bailey on guard duty.”

  “It’s not your turn for another two hours.”

  “Like I could go back to sleep now even if I wanted to. I’m okay. It was just seeing those young kids’ bodies being stacked like so much firewood. Some things you never get used to, no matter how many times you’ve seen them.”

  Karen wanted him to stay, to talk. She wanted to hold him and be held by him, but he pulled on his pants, shirt and boots, picked up his rifle and went out to see Bailey.

  . . .

  “Is he going to be okay?” Eric asked her the next morning.

  “For now,” she answered, and he let it go at that.

  “I’ve been mea
ning to ask you about that sign over the front door,” he changed the subject. “Emerald City?”

  “It’s an inside joke,” she smiled. “You had to be there.”

  With a shrug, Eric moved off and joined Bailey who was using a pair of bolt cutters to cut rectangles of the heavy wire fencing to place over the windows. Ethan was scanning the road with his binoculars as Lauren walked a cup of coffee over to him. He took the cup and smiled at her and Lauren’s face lit up. She talked with him for a while until her brother called her over to hold up a section of wire while he fastened it over a window. Karen marveled at how Lauren could remain so naïve and innocent after everything she’d seen and been through. In most every way except physical appearance, she was still not much more than a child and Karen didn’t know whether to envy or pity her.

  While Karen stood her watch, the three men fitted wire to all the window frames, setting two of them on heavy hinges so they could be unlocked and opened from the inside to provide alternate escape routes. That accomplished, they laid sections of logs in a staggered pattern along the driveway to force any wheeled vehicle to slow down and weave its way around them in order to get near the house. Eventually Lauren called them all to dinner and they sat down to eat and talk and make plans for the coming week.

  “I wish we had music,” Lauren remarked. “I really miss listening to music.”

  “I can’t believe that all three trucks have CD players and there’s not a single CD in any of them,” Bailey said. “Next time we go on a run, I’ll make it a point to look for some.”

  “Oh, I’d be so grateful,” Lauren beamed.

  “It’s no big deal,” Bailey hastily put in. “If I happen to run across any, I’ll grab them.”

  “We still have a few hours of daylight,” Ethan announced. “Let’s put it to good use.”

  “Oh, the heck with that,” Karen objected. “All we seem to do anymore is work. “I think we should uncork a bottle of wine, pop open a few beers for you guys and take one night to just relax and unwind.”

  “I’m for that,” Lauren replied enthusiastically.

  “There’s so much that needs done,” Ethan started.

  “You of all people need this the most,” Karen scolded. “I’m not saying we all get bombed out of our minds, just that we have enough to get warm and fuzzy and, just for a few hours, try to forget, try to pretend that we have a normal life again. Isn’t that the ultimate point all this work, all this effort; to get back to some kind of normal life?”

  “Warm beer doesn’t appeal to me all that much,” Eric said. “How much wine do we have?”

  “Enough,” Karen said, getting up and heading to the pantry.

  Two hours later, Eric was laughing at his own jokes, some of which were on their second or third telling, Bailey was having difficulty keeping his balance when he stood up, Lauren was giggling almost non-stop and Karen was feeling romantic, whispering suggestions in Ethan’s ear and caressing his leg.

  Ethan, for his part, was still nursing his first beer, always alert for any movement or any sound from outside.

  It was after dark, Bailey was sound asleep and Eric was in the bathroom holding his sister’s hair back while she got sick over the toilet. Ethan stood looking out the door when Karen came up behind him and put her arms around him, hugging him and letting one hand drift down across his belly and below his belt line.

  “You need to go sleep this off,” he told her, disengaging himself.

  “Oh, come on,” she whispered seductively. “You know you’ll enjoy it.”

  “Seriously, if anything happened tonight, none of you would be of any use. Get some sleep.”

  “The whole point of this evening was to help you unwind,” she persisted. “Why don’t you let me relieve some of that tension,” she asked, brushing her lips against his and pressing tightly against him.

  “Go to bed,” he told her, gently pushing her away. “You aren’t going to feel very good in the morning. Remember that the next time you want to get ‘all warm and fuzzy’.”

  “I’ll do all the work,” her voice purred.

  “Good night, Karen.” He kissed her forehead before turning her around and giving her a light push away.

  The infected didn’t generally move around much after dark and, when they did, were clumsier and noisier than during the daylight hours so he had plenty of time to think that night, which, for Ethan, was not necessarily a good thing. He didn’t want to think about the dead anymore, about mortality and mangled bodies, but his mind was relentlessly drawn to the image of Bailey loading the young children into the truck, the blond girl dropping in the street in front of him, the ragged orphan shot to death just before her suicide vest exploded. Above all, he didn’t want to go to sleep anymore, to dream about violent death, of women and children immolating themselves just for the chance of taking a few soldiers with them. He could still see the faces of his fellow platoon mates who didn’t make it out alive. Some of them were buried with military honors back home but some simply disappeared without a trace in a huge fiery explosion. The worst part was that, for all their good intentions, they really hadn’t made any appreciable difference. The violence and the killing continued unabated, centuries old hatreds still smoldered and flared and chaos and anarchy were still the rule rather than the exception. So much good could have been accomplished, so much sincere effort had gone into bringing order and peace, but it was all for naught. Now, even if their mission had succeeded it would have all been in vain. A new order of chaos, a new type of warfare had erupted, not just in those faraway lands, but here, in his own country, his own hometown. For the first time in the history of humanity, literally the entire world was at war with no part of it being spared the attendant horrors.

  Ethan walked away from the house, out behind the garage, and sat down and cried.

  Chapter 17: The Rescue

  Jerry rubbed the sleep from his eyes after Garth woke him up in the morning. They had a quick breakfast and several cups of instant coffee before packing up to leave. Consulting their maps, they plotted out a route that, if all went as planned, would bring them to a small hamlet around noon. Their hope was to find a town that had yet to be looted and a house close enough to use it as a supply base but remote enough to be off the most travelled roads.

  It was closer to one o’clock when they made the town after finding an alternate route around a collapsed bridge, but it looked promising. Desiccated remains were strewn about the streets, the sidewalks, parking lots and commons but the majority of the buildings appeared relatively undamaged; enough time had passed since the original outbreak that the infected had done whatever damage they could and moved on in their endless search for sustenance. The shelves of the local IGA were still well stocked though the stench of rotting meat from the long unpowered coolers and freezers in the enclosed building was worse than that of decaying corpses in the open air. Their trucks already heavily laden, they left the goods to be collected later while they explored the town.

  The city hall/courthouse/police station was the largest building, rising four stories and covering an entire block, but it appeared that the survivors had made their last stand here and the interior was completely trashed and fouled with dried blood and gnawed body parts. The bank across the street was an imposing structure of brick and glass, but offered nothing of any value, though Jerry did take a thick wad of hundreds from the cashiers’ drawers, explaining to a puzzled Garth that it would be a kick to use crumpled C-notes to start their next campfire.

  The next largest structure, aside from the grocery, had once been a nine-unit apartment building but now consisted of a crumpled chimney, ashes and charred boards. There was a small hardware store in town and a gas station where Garth used his homemade pump to draw fuel from the underground tanks. Their quick reconnoiter complete, the two men headed out of town searching for a likely spot to take up residence.

  Two hours and eight slain infected later, they found a house at the end of a long, paved drive
way off a secondary road. Six steps led up to a huge, white-columned porch at the front of a four-bedroom home. The living room held a large, elaborate cast-iron stove, which, along with a smaller one in the dining room, appeared to be more than adequate to heat most of the downstairs. Each bedroom was originally equipped with a fireplace, which had been sealed off, cast-iron stoves now connected to the flues. In the backyard stood a long, open, roofed structure holding several cords of firewood. A well with a working hand-pump standing within twenty feet of the back porch was the final factor in their decision to make this their new home.

  Days later, numerous runs into town emptied it of all the edible food they could find along with any other supplies for which they could conceivably find use and additional runs to other homes in the general vicinity more than tripled their ready supply of firewood. There remained still the problem of not having enough people to adequately defend the house should they be discovered by infected or other undesirable elements. The pair were loath to going out alone in search of other survivors and both dreaded leaving their home unguarded while they were gone, but circumstances left them no choice and they took two trucks out every few days to search for survivors, communicating with a pair of toy-store walkie-talkies.

  It was nearly three weeks later that they found their first survivors.

  Garth stood beside an elm tree at the top of a small hill surveying the area with a pair of binoculars when he spotted movement just off the road a few hundred yards ahead. At first, he thought it was another pack of roaming infected, but upon closer examination, found they were pursuing a group of five people. A second herd of infected numbering perhaps twenty were closing in from the right and the people were being channeled toward a twelve-foot tall cliff face with no possible escape. Garth quickly apprised Jerry of the situation and the two of them started their trucks toward them.

  The survivors, equipped with only baseball bats, lengths of pipe and half-inch rebar drew up to the cliff face and resigned themselves to go down fighting. The faster of the infected reached them in twos and threes and the group was able to fight them off, but the main body was quickly closing on them and they were prepared to be overwhelmed when the first shots rang out. In their desperate fight, they’d not even noticed the trucks drive up and were both amazed and relieved at the sight of two armed men coming to their rescue.