by Bobby Adair
Jerome’s screw plinked to the floor. He shouted, “We need to get out of here.”
My screw dropped out and the panel fell free.
I spun around and shook Murphy. “Murphy, you need to wake back up. We need to go, man.” No response.
“Murphy.” I slapped him across the face, once, then twice. His eyes opened. Good.
I dragged him up off of his butt.
The first few of the infected reached the crazy guy’s body and fell on him with their mouths open and their hands tearing at his clothes.
Jerome was already in the tunnel, climbing down the ladder.
I pushed Murphy’s bulk toward the tunnel opening. It was hard. It was slow. The infected from the other direction were getting close. They started yelling and howling. They were excited.
“Murphy, turn around. It’s a ladder.” I yelled. “Murphy, we gotta go.”
Murphy complied and we got his feet into the hole. He started down the ladder but halfway in, he stopped and stared at me in a daze.
“Damn it, Murphy. Move.”
Eight or nine infected were gorging themselves on the crazy guy. Other infected were flowing around the scrum and were eyeing me.
I leaned forward, put my hands on Murphy’s shoulders, and pushed. “Move, Murphy.”
I felt his bulk move and then slide into the darkness. I knew it was about eight feet down to the floor of the tunnel, far enough to chance an injury but the alternative was to stay and die.
I felt fingers on my back, grasping at my shirt. All choices were gone save one. I dove into the hole.
Chapter 14
Through pure luck, the pursuing infected fell over one another coming through the hatch into the tunnel. In a tangle of bodies, with more piling in on top, none of them were able to pursue us until we were out of sight around a corner, and a few hundred yards down another long, straight tunnel.
When we were spotted, we made a quick turn down another tunnel that brought us expeditiously to an alcove with an unlocked door. That door led up to my old freshman dormitory. We hustled through the door and bolted it behind us.
The dormitory building was at least as old as Gregory Gym, but its last renovation was forty years behind, so it had no air conditioning. That meant that it was empty for the summer session of classes.
With keys pilfered from the administrative office, I led Murphy and Jerome up to the fifth floor, thinking for whatever reason that height equated to safety.
It was well past midnight when I unlocked a dorm room door. We quickly piled into the room’s hot, stagnant air. Once inside, closing and locking the door was top priority.
The dorm held four bunks and four empty desks. Jerome and I wrestled Murphy into one of the lower bunks and he passed out immediately on hitting the prone position.
“Pillow?” Jerome asked.
I looked around the room and didn’t immediately see one. I shrugged. Just as well.
Two five-foot tall dormer windows faced south. The room was dark but I stood to the side and carefully opened each by about six inches, enough to let some air flow into the room, but not open wide enough to be noticed from the ground.
Below us, across a lawn the size of a football field and across an empty professor’s parking lot, the gym from which we’d just escaped was alive with activity.
Jerome came up beside me to see what I was watching.
Soldiers were nervously walking in the parking lot, facing the building, talking, smoking, and keeping a ready hand near the triggers of their weapons. A group of police officers stood together, talking and gesturing at the gym.
What was going on? What was there to do about it? Those were the questions on everyone’s mind, and no doubt, the topic of discussion below.
Still staring out the window, I said, “I need to go back down to the office on the first floor and see if the phone is working. There’s a nurse I need to call.”
“About what?” Jerome asked.
“She’s one of the nurses from the hospital. She thinks I may have antibodies in my blood that might be helpful. She asked me to call her when I could.”
Jerome shook his head vigorously. “That’s a bad idea.”
“Is she wrong?”
“Um…no. I mean…what’s she going to do? She’s busy caring for patients and shuttling them off to the gym over there. She won’t be able to do anything with the antibodies in your blood.”
“I didn’t say that she was going to do anything herself,” I argued.
A crashing sound pulled our attention back to the plaza below.
Several panes in the enormous gym windows had broken out and fallen to the concrete twenty feet below. Through the windows, I saw the full silhouettes of the infected standing along the top row of bleacher seats inside, pressing their hands on the glass panes in the old metal frames.
A loud pop caught the attention of every ear in the plaza. One of the windows’ frames flexed across its entire width—roughly ten feet. More panes popped out and fell to the sidewalk. Before anyone below could react, a huge section of one of the window frames busted away from the wall and fell to the ground. Like water from a spigot turned fully on, the infected flowed out through the window.
Soldiers hollered in surprise. Some shouted for assistance.
The first infected out the window hit the ground and were soon covered by others falling out on top of them. Bodies piled into a pyramidal mound up to the height of the window and became a squirming, screaming ramp that more of the infected stumbled down as they poured out of the gym.
Soldiers in the parking lot started shooting tentatively over the heads of the advancing wave of infected.
What I didn’t think of until that moment—and what I’m sure the soldiers didn’t realize until it was too late—was that they weren’t dealing with rational humans beings. The hoard wasn’t frightened by the popping noise of the rifles.
In moments, the soldiers were in danger of being engulfed by the mass running at them.
The soldiers backpedaled and started shooting into the crowd.
Bodies erupted in bloody explosions where the bullets found their marks. Some of the infected fell, and some continued forward in spite of their wounds.
Soldiers went down as the hoard overwhelmed them. Some retreated, but kept firing. Others broke and ran.
“Holy crap,” I muttered as I inched back a little from the window.
“You can say that again,” said Jerome.
More soldiers and police hurried around the corner from the front of the building to support the retreating men, but it was too late. The situation was beyond control. Their line collapsed under the onslaught of the infected.
Screams followed. Not the wild screams of the infected, but the terrorized screams of the dying. Gunfire died away or faded into the distance.
In the first battle I’d ever seen, the infected rolled over the soldiers without slowing down. As a reward for their victory, many of them feasted on the fallen bodies of the soldiers and policemen, who had been either too brave to flee or too slow to get away.
“God, that’s horrible,” I said.
Jerome backed into the darkness away from the window. “We don’t want them to see us up here.”
“The police?” I asked.
“The infected,” he answered. “If they do, they may come after us.”
“Can they?” I asked, “Figure it out, I mean. With their frontal lobes fried, is getting up here too complex of a problem?”
“I don’t know, Zed. But I don’t want to find out.”
I stepped back from the window. “I don’t either.”
The battle wound down. Gunshots became less frequent. Most of the infected dispersed from the plaza.
I asked Jerome, “What next?”
“What next?” Jerome asked me, anger putting an edge in his voice. “You led us here. I figured you had a plan.”
“Don’t get pissed at me. You’re the guy from the CDC, who’s supposed to k
now everything about this…this plague or whatever it is.”
Jerome’s anger disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. “Plagues are bacterial. This is almost certainly viral.”
“Whatever.”
“Call it a pandemic,” said Jerome.
“Double whatever,” I spat back. “I’m no doctor. I’m kind of on the user end of this disease thing, you know. From where I sit, plagues and pandemics are pretty much the same thing. Everybody catches cold. Everybody dies. Everybody turns into a mindless monster. It pretty much comes down to a bad something happening to everybody.”
“You don’t have to be a dick, Zed.”
I thought I did have to be a dick. I was still a little pissed about Jerome ordering me to take care of the crazy guy back in the gym. He had a PhD and worked for the CDC, but that didn’t make him my boss. I gave it a minute before I said, “Getting out of the gym was my only plan, at first. Like you said, we were in danger of getting attacked by the infected when we were in there. You were right about that. They seemed pretty anxious to get their hands on us when we were getting into the tunnel.”
Jerome nodded.
“Once we got into the tunnel,” I said, “the dorm was just the first place that came to mind as a place to hide out for a bit and figure things out. It seems to me that we’re in a pretty crappy situation. The infected see us as a meal. To the uninfected, we’re just more infected. To them, we’re a danger, and apparently the currently accepted cure for infection is a bullet.”
“The soldiers had to shoot them,” Jerome said. “You saw what happened. They didn’t have a choice.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
We stood there in the sweltering dorm room in silence for a good long while, listening to the sounds of the world falling apart outside.
Jerome broke the silence. “Whatever we do next, we need to keep an eye on Murphy.”
Jerome was probably right about that, so I said nothing.
He continued, “We don’t know for certain what he’s going to be when his fever breaks…or doesn’t break. If he comes out as a ninety-nine like us, then great. If he’s 104 or up, we need to be prepared to do something about him.”
“Do something?” I asked.
“Don’t be coy, Zed. You can see where this is going. You did what you thought was right in trying to get him to the hospital in the first place, but things are different now, and they’re going to hell in a hurry. We need to start thinking about survival.”
“Survival?” I asked.
“The police. The fire department. Hospitals. Doctors. They aren’t going to be here for us pretty soon. Maybe they’re gone already.”
I shook my head. “Will it really get that bad?”
“Zed, it’s that bad or worse everywhere this thing has spread.”
“But…”
“There aren’t any buts. Look out the window. The infected are taking over.”
What Jerome was telling me was a truth I didn’t want to accept.
“We’re going to have to look out for ourselves,” said Jerome. “At the very least, as you astutely pointed out, even if everything miraculously returns to normal, you and I are pariahs. We’re infected. We’ll have no one to take care of us but us. We’ll be lucky if we’re not gunned down. I don’t see any happy endings for you and me.”
I dropped into one of the desk chairs. Jerome was right, but I wasn’t quite ready to deal with that level of bleakness.
“All I’m saying,” said Jerome, “is that we need to talk about what to do with Murphy. If he goes full 104 or up, we’ll probably be able to escape if we decide quickly and execute our plan. But he’s a big guy. If he wakes up with a reduced brain capacity and a big appetite, he might kill both of us before we can do anything about it. Hell, he might kill both us if we’re fully prepared. He’s a big, really strong guy. Zed, he’s a time bomb.”
Jerome was right about that. I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t even want to acknowledge it, but he was right.
“Zed, I know you don’t want to talk about this but we need to. We need to be ready to put him down if it comes to that.”
“Kill him,” I said. “That’s what you mean.”
“Of course that’s what I mean. You know that. If he’s 104, then it’ll be him or us. We’ll need to run or we’ll need to kill him.”
“How do you propose we put him down?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jerome. “I don’t have an answer to that. That’s part of why we’re talking now. If we wait until he comes back around, and he’s a 104 and we’re sitting here, or worse, sleeping here, then we’re dead.”
“What do you suggest?”
“I think one of us should sneak outside once it settles down a bit and try to grab a gun or two from those dead soldiers or police down there.”
“Excuse me for saying so,” I said as I shook my head, “but that sounds a lot like suicide.”
“Yes, it’s a risk, but I think we need to get ‘em while the gettin’ is good. I don’t know how bad things will get but they’re likely to get worse before they get better. We’re going to need to be armed if we’re going to survive this, and I don’t just mean Murphy.”
“What do you think the odds of your going down and getting one of those guns and getting back up here alive will be?” I asked.
“Probably a lot better than the odds of our still being alive an hour after Murphy wakes up as a 104, if we’re not armed,” Jerome suggested.
“Better?” I asked, “Why would they be better?”
“Right now, all of the infected are feeding. You have to remember, Zed, we’re a food source of last resort for them. I don’t think they like to eat each other.”
I peered out the window. A hundred or more infected were feeding on the bodies of the fallen soldiers.
“Or we could leave him here,” said Jerome. “We could go find another place to hole up. I mean, what’s your attachment to this guy, anyway? Is he your brother-in-law or something?”
“No,” I shrugged. “Well, he helped me out at the jail this morning.”
“The jail? You were in jail?”
He said it in a condescending way that made me want to punch him. I decided that I didn’t like him very much. I said, “It was bullshit. My stepdad, who I guess was infected, killed my mom and some guy from their church. The police arrested me because they thought I murdered them all.”
“That’s messed up.”
“Yeah.”
“So you just met Murphy this morning?” Jerome asked.
I nodded.
“And you helped him get to the hospital after he got bitten. And you saved him when we were in the gym. What’d he do for you at the jail?”
I said, “It’s not important. But there’s more.”
“What?” Jerome asked.
“Murphy knows of a place in east Austin.”
Jerome said, “You seem to cringe when you say that.”
“It’s not the best part of town.”
“Pretty soon I don’t think any part of town will be good. What kind of place is this?” Jerome asked.
“It’s a bunker under some guy’s house.”
“And he’s going to let Murphy in?” Jerome was skeptical.
“He died a few years ago or something,” I said. “He built this bunker under his house.”
“And Murphy knows where it is?”
I nodded. I hoped.
“And he knows how to get in?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “His cousin Earl did.”
“He did?”
“He got shot at the jail.”
“Oh.” What little enthusiasm Jerome had for the bunker idea seemed to wane but he said, “If ever there was a time to need a survivalist’s bunker, now would be it. Clearly, Murphy has some value. I think it’s worth the risk to take a chance on him. I think you should go down and get a gun.”
“Me? It was your idea.”
“I know, but hear me out
on this, Zed. I work for the CDC, I know about the outbreak. I’m an expert, the kind the world might need if we’re going to get out of this with an intact society and you work for…Where do you work?”
“I have the most fulfilling job in the world,” I said.
“What?”
“I put a legal, yet addictive, drug in the hands of jonesing addicts and make them happy.”
“What are you talking about?” Jerome looked at me, seemingly clueless.
“For a CDC employee you sure can’t figure things out. I hope you’re good at memorization.”
“Stop playing games,” Jerome told me. “C’mon, what is it, like Starbuck’s, or something?”
I nodded.
“I thought you went to college here. Did you party too much and drop out?”
“No, I got a philosophy degree,” I mumbled.
“Oh.”
I sighed. “I’ll get the guns.”
Chapter 15
I stood at the first floor doorway, looking out across the lawn and parking lot. To the east, bordering the plaza, stood the ROTC building and a maintenance building. To the west lay a street lined with enormous old oaks full of squawking grackles. Across the street was a six-story building full of classrooms and professors’ offices.
Scattered across the lawn and parking lot lay the bodies and remnants of soldiers and policemen, all being eaten by the infected clustered around them.
Gunshots echoed regularly in the distance. Sirens wailed without end. The smell of smoke tainted the air. Ugly, low clouds hung in the sky, dirty orange in the light coming off of the city below.
With the glass door open, I had one foot in the building, one foot out, as I weighed the risk of death on the bloody plaza against the risk of death tomorrow or the next day for having no gun to defend myself. I pondered the value of stealing rifles from men who’d died trying to defend themselves with those very weapons. Mostly, I tried to find a way around my fear.
I wondered if my fear was pointless. I wondered, with the infection coursing through my veins, if I was effectively dead already, whether I was just pretending to be alive until the virus finished destroying my brain.