Chapter
24
After leaving the second checkpoint, we headed to Marty Cummings’ house, hoping to convince him to oversee organizing the town to gather food for the survivors. He was likeable and he had a gift for rallying the community to accomplish unlikely tasks.
Nobody seemed to be at work. All the stores we passed were closed. Everyone was scared of the infection and rightly so. After less than twenty four hours, the consensus seemed to be that the best way to stay alive was to remain in isolation. We arrived at Marty’s house; the curtains in the front window were tightly drawn, but both cars were in the driveway. It looked like tracking him down was going to be easier than we had hoped.
The sprinklers were on in the front yard, giving the appearance that life was proceeding normally. In reality, no one had come out to turn them on. They were on a timer and would keep cycling on and off every day as long as there was power and water. A sprinkler at the edge of the walkway to the house was out of adjustment and was spraying onto the sidewalk that led to the front door. I waited for the stream of water to leave the sidewalk and begin its semicircular arc across the yard. Once the path was clear, I traversed the rest of the walkway with Matt on my heels, wearing his mask.
The front door was recessed between the living room on the left and the kitchen on the right. The outer walls of the two rooms created a fifteen foot long corridor to the door. Both the kitchen and living room had windows that faced into the corridor. I attempted to peer into both rooms, but the curtains in the living room and venetian blinds in the kitchen obstructed my view.
I pushed the illuminated button to the left of the door and heard an electronic chime inside the house. I took a step to the left of the doorway. Habits are hard to break, especially unconscious habits. This one was drilled into me by my training officer when I first got out of the academy. He told me it would give me a little extra cover if someone came out shooting. It stuck with me.
I waited for the tell tale sound of approaching feet. After thirty seconds I still didn’t hear anything. I rang the bell again, gave the brass clacker hanging on the door three hard raps and, for good measure, yelled, “Open up, it’s Connor.” I tried the door handle. It was locked.
“This isn’t looking good, Matt,” I said, turning around to face him. “Let’s go around back and see if there’s a window or door unlocked.”
We waited for the sprinkler stream to move off the sidewalk and hurried down the walkway. Not wanting to get wet, we walked along the edge of the lawn until we came to the neighbor’s yard and walked up the border of the two properties until it came to the weathered wooden fence that divided the Cummings’ front and back yard. After waiting for the corner sprinkler to begin its arc away from the fence, we made a beeline for the gate. I pulled on the string which disappeared through a hole drilled at the top of the innermost fence board. The tension on the string released the latch on the other side of the fence. The gate squeaked open on hinges that badly needed oil.
When the gate swung open, Matt drew his gun. I did the same in response to Matt, not sure what he had seen, but trusting his instincts none the less. Then I saw what had spooked him. The edge of a blood pool was just visible on the concrete patio at the corner of the house. As I neared the corner, I was able to see a greater portion of the yard. When I was nearly even with the corner, I could see far enough around it to see a body lying face down on the patio.
Flies had already found the blood and corpse and were thick on both. I kept my eyes up, searching for what may have killed the man laying at my feet. I could see the entire yard and it was empty. I stepped around the body and startled the mass of flies, which took flight in unison, filling the air with a
buzz
. The body at my feet was Marty’s.
With the entire patio in view, I saw a set of footprints leading from the semi congealed pool of blood to the open sliding door and into the house. The prints were made by a medium sized foot without shoes. I assumed they belonged to Marty’s wife, Carol.
I started to announce myself when I walked through the open door into the house, but the current situation called for different tactics than any previous day in my career. If Carol had turned, the last thing I wanted to do was announce my arrival. I silently followed the bloody prints around a corner inside the house. They made a right hand turn and I followed. Carol was standing at the entryway facing away from us, scratching at the oak door. Both of her hands were covered in blood up to her elbows. From the back, her hair was in disarray.
The noise we made at the front door had obviously drawn her attention to that area. Her twisted mind was still focused on what had been on the other side of the door. It was incapable of realizing that the cause of the noise was no longer there. This was yet more proof that the infected had lost their higher reasoning abilities. Their mind functioned on instinct, the foremost of which was the desire to feed.
Although I knew my fear that Carol was infected was correct, I couldn’t force myself to pull the trigger without confirmation. “Carol,” I said softly. “It’s Connor.”
At the first syllable, her posture straightened. She paused for a moment, determining the direction of the sound. I heard air pass through her sinuses in rapid bursts as her nose, and apparently heightened sense of smell, confirmed what her ears had already detected. Her body snapped around rigidly and a pair of lifeless eyes bored into mine. Her head canted quizzically to the left for a brief moment then snapped back to vertical as her lips pulled back, in what was becoming a familiar expression, displaying a set of bared teeth. Her face was covered with gore and her clothes were blood soaked. A chunk of flesh was missing from her forearm.
I knew what was coming and didn’t wait for her to attack. I aligned the front and rear sights on her forehead just above her eyes and squeezed the trigger. An explosion ripped through the house and was magnified by the confines of the enclosed area.
The bullet passed effortlessly through the front of her skull and scrambled her brain before exiting the rear and punching through the wooden door. The impulses that had been traveling up and down her spinal cord instantly ceased. With no further instructions being relayed, the muscles in her legs relaxed and her body crumpled onto the tile floor. The index finger on her left hand twitched twice and then she lay motionless. Carol had died some time ago; now her body was dead as well.
Before I had a chance to feel remorse for having shot a family acquaintance, I heard a thump from upstairs. The noise was followed by several more thumps then rapid footfalls moving in a linear direction, presumably down a hallway. Then they were on the staircase which fed into the living room to my left. The edge of the living room ceiling blocked the top of the descending stairway from my view.
The first thing I saw was a set of white shoes with untied laces flying wildly as the foot struck the first visible stair step. Then blue jean clad legs descended into view, followed by another set of feet in tan work boots. The torso of the lead body descended far enough to enter my line of sight. It was attired in what had been a blue plaid button up shirt. Now, most of it was a reddish brown with splotches of the original design still visible at the sides.
“This is a fight we don’t want to be a part of right now,” Matt hissed behind me just before he fired into the chest of the first body prior to the head coming into view. The torso bucked backwards, but did not fall.
Carol’s body was blocking the door. There was no way to swing the door inward without moving her body. I holstered my gun, trusting Matt to cover my back while I cleared a path out of the house. I clutched Carol’s wrist and pulled to the side of the doorway. At first, friction grabbed at her body. As I slid her through the pool of blood that had already formed around her head, the friction decreased drastically and the body slid easily on the slick tiles.
Matt continued to hammer away with his forty caliber. It had only been three or four seconds since his first shot, but he was already yelling, “Empty!” I turned back to the stairway and tore my pistol from the holster. There were three dead bodies on the ground between the stairs and five feet from where I were standing. There were three more coming at us. I took aim at the first and fired. Its erratic gait caused its head to wobble from side to side. As I pulled the trigger, the head bounced the other direction and I missed. I fired again and hit it in the jaw. It kept coming. The third shot found its mark and the body fell to the ground. I acquired the second infected, which was just behind the first one. I fired a double tap to the head and it collapsed. I shifted my aim to the next, which had just cleared the last step, and fired repeatedly until it went down, too. My slide locked back.
I yelled, “Empty!” and dumped the magazine onto the ground and slapped another one into the handle of the pistol, pushing the slide release. Before my reload was complete, I heard the crack of Matt’s pistol to my right. More bodies were descending the stairway.
I retreated to the front door, twisted the handle, pulled the door inward and yelled, “Move out,” hoping Matt would hear me over the explosions from his pistol. He must have understood because he started moving in my direction as he fired. Every time a body stumbled and fell, another one appeared on the steps.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Matt drop the muzzle of his pistol as he moved behind me and passed through the doorway. I followed, back stepping through the entry to keep bullets going downrange until I could close the door.
This time, we didn’t wait for the sprinkler to clear the sidewalk. We ran through the spray toward the street, hoping the door knob would confound them long enough for us to get to the truck. My brain was working at an incredible rate. Everything seemed like it was in slow motion. As I ran down the sidewalk, I saw individual droplets fly upwards as my foot struck the thin film of water on the sidewalk. I was able to track the drops in my peripheral vision as they arced toward the grass. A rainbow appeared suspended in the sprinkler mist in front of me. I took another step and it was gone. In the midst of everything going on around me, I marveled at my heightened senses. They should all be shut down as part of my fight or flight response. For some reason, they had become super-sensitized.
When I reached the truck, whatever anomaly had caused my heightened sense of awareness ceased. Everything returned to normal speed. I didn’t try to catalogue what was happening physiologically.
I yanked on the door handle and flung the door open in a frantic effort to get at my rifle, which was resting on the center of the front bench seat with the barrel pointing at the floor. I stepped toward the interior of the truck as the door opened and was suddenly cracked on the head. My vision went dark with the exception of a bright starburst which lasted for a fraction of a second and then vanished. My vision returned. I realized I had thrown the door open with such force it had reached the stop and rebounded back into my head, nearly knocking me unconscious. My wits returned enough to remember I still needed my rifle, which I extricated from the truck. I moved toward the rear and took aim over the bed. Matt was coming around the hood with his rifle in his hands.
The door knob was proving too much for the limited mental power of the infected. We waited for at least thirty seconds. I could see the curtains in the living room moving back and forth as the infected brushed against them, trying to find a way to get to us. The left curtain moved away from the center several inches, providing a small window into the house.
Suddenly a face appeared in the window. It moved forward and came to an abrupt halt as it struck the glass. Two hands came up on the window, moving back and forth across the invisible barrier. As the hands moved back and forth, the curtains were forced open further. Another body appeared in the widening gap and repeated the process of bumping into the glass with hands moving across the clear surface. The hands forced the curtain even further to the side.
Within a short time, the curtains had parted three or four feet. Fists began hitting the window. The strikes were soft at first. The force behind the blows increased as frustration turned to rage. A crack appeared. On the next blow, a fist passed through the glass. The jagged edge dug deeply into the arm protruding through the shattered window. Red fluid ran down the surface in narrow rivers. The arm moved back and forth, trying to escape the clutches of the glass. The shard finally gave way and fell inward as the arm was wrenched back, but not before it had shredded the skin of the protruding appendage.
Matt began shooting into the visible space between the gaps in the curtain. As one body fell, another took its place. Within thirty seconds no more bodies appeared. After two minutes, with no more faces appearing in the window, we topped off our magazines and approached the front door. This time, the sprinklers had reached the end of their cycle and shut off. I slowly opened the door. The living room was littered with bodies. Some were still moving. None were upright. I covered the stairs while Matt finished off the infected that had refused to succumb to their wounds. In a matter of minutes, we had cleared the house.
The last room we cleared was an upstairs bedroom. It appeared that all the infected had been occupying it. The comforter from the bed was wadded in the corner. The once white sheets were strewn across the floor and were now mottled reddish brown. Trinkets from the nightstand had been knocked off and the toppled stand now lay on its side. The stench from the room was overwhelming.