Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (12 page)

An attack like that never
happened, so I’m sure my pack holds at least two of those pink pills somewhere
inside. I’m familiar with their effect already. I stole a few sophomore
year
to help me study for a final exam.

As I jog, I dig through the pack
with my good hand. The other grips the 9mm despite the constant sting from its
missing fingernails. Fortunately, the medical supplies are near the top of the
pack. Keeping a steady pace, I tear open the kit, find the bag containing the
pills, and pop both into my mouth. Then I stuff the medical kit back inside,
dig out a water bottle, and take a long sip to wash them down.

I’m not sure if taking the pills
on an empty stomach will make me throw up, so I keep searching the pack until I
find PowerBars in a front pocket. I wolf down two of them and immediately feel
better.

Once the food settles and the
pills take effect, I’m able to bolt through the backwoods of Peltham Park
without much complaint from my body. The pain is something I’ve learned to ignore.

Still, I wish the explosion had spared
the Jeep. With its off-roading ability, I could have stayed off the main roads
and cut my ETA down to just twenty minutes. Judging by how long it took me to
get there by foot the day before, I know Melanie is at least five hours away.

I see my first group of infected
after an hour of running. I take cover behind a tree and watch them shuffle and
lurch like sleepwalkers in the dimming light. There are three of them, two
males and a female, but with night settling over us, I can’t tell if they’re
late-stagers or not. Hopefully, they’re as blind as bats.

I could go around them, but
instead I opt for a diversionary tactic. I pick up rocks until I have a handful
and start tossing them at a dead tree about twenty yards away. The stimulants
help me focus on the tree and nothing else, and I manage to land most of my
throws.

With the infected now moving
toward the source of the noise, I sneak past them, continuing to launch rocks.

But I screw up.

I’m so focused on diverting the
three infected that I don’t see the fourth until I almost walk right into it.

It’s a child. A little girl with knotted
blonde hair.

I stop a foot in front of her,
right hand still clutching a rock I was about to throw. The girl is shockingly
dirty, covered in dried mud and leaves. There’s a long, thin branch stuck to
the side of her head.

She’s in bad shape. Her skin is a
pale, semi-translucent sheet that wraps tightly against her bones, covered in
sores and scrapes. A milky cast over one eye tells me she is at least partially
blind. She can’t be more than three years old.

I drop the rock. I don’t have
what it takes to bash in her head. Now I’m not sure what to do.

Can she even see me?

Her nostrils flare, detecting my
smell. She opens her mouth and releases a shrill moan that sounds disturbingly
like a healthy little girl crying because she’s lost.

I run past her, avoiding her
grasping fingers. A quick glance over my shoulder tells me the other three have
heard and are now hot on my trail.

Like most infected, they can’t
run very fast. But there’s no telling what kind of stamina they possess. I’ve
seen infected stand in one place for longer than I thought humanly possible. One
guy stood outside my house for more than thirty hours because he caught sight
of me on the roof. If that incident is any indication, these three—not
four, since I imagine the girl got left behind—will probably chase me for
hours.

I book it out of there. I’m still
running when the remaining light bleeds out of the sky, leaving the forest dark.
It becomes a nightmare of black shapes I think are trees, though my imagination
paints them as something much worse. The infected make a racket as they continue
to chase me. No doubt my scent is leading them right along.

That gives me an idea.

I stop by a tree with a mess of
branches sticking out of it.
All of this
running has
drenched my clothes with sweat. I throw down my pack and rest my gun on top of
it, then proceed to rip open the buttoned part of my
Nomex
suit that covers my chest. Beneath it, I’m wearing a polyester shirt. I tear it
off in a flurry of movement.

The fabric is damp with sweat and
probably smells a lot like me. I sling it over a branch. The infected are close
behind me. I can hear their clumsy footsteps rustling the underbrush.

I pick up the gun and my pack and
sprint away at an angle, then swing around to catch them from behind.

The infected run past me, a
flurry of inky silhouettes tumbling across the underbrush. Gripping the pistol,
I dig out an LED flashlight from the pack’s side pocket and wait a few moments
longer.

I raise the flashlight, turned
off for now, alongside my gun. My aim is shakey.

The infected attack the branch carrying
my shirt, making snarling noises that sound like a pack of wolves tearing apart
a helpless animal. I creep toward them, pop on the flashlight, and aim the
pistol at the frenzied figures that suddenly appear in the beam.

One of the men has gotten caught
in the branches, and the other two are trying to push him away to get to the
shirt, which is also caught. Those two whirl around to face me. I shoot the
closest one in the chest to push it back,
then
do the
same to the other. They stagger. I use the opportunity to take better aim.

Headshots.
Both
of them.
My father would be proud.

After I take out the one that had
gotten caught in the branches, I button up my coverall, shoulder my pack,
holster my pistol, and shine the flashlight at my compass to reorient myself.

I don’t know how close I am to
town, but I keep going.

The Colonel had set a deadline
for his return. If he wasn’t back by sunrise, Wheels could have his fun with Melanie.
I recall the image of his sharp teeth, so much like those of a piranha.

I guzzle water and inhale another
PowerBar
, though my appetite has been killed by the
stimulants.

And I keep running.

Whispers of daylight fill the
sky.

Sunrise hasn’t happened yet, but
it will in less than an hour. I stopped checking my watch hours ago after
almost tripping across an unseen branch. Time doesn’t matter,
anyway—daylight is my deadline.

The trip hasn’t been easy. At
this point, my feet are covered in patches of throbbing, wet
pain—blisters that have formed and popped. It feels like I’m hobbling
across a carpet of stinging jellyfish.

I make it to a familiar intersection
on Route 1. To my left is the Exxon station where the Colonel worked once as a
cashier.

Fuck him.

Melanie is all I think about as I
force my legs to move. I find cover behind the wasted metal shell of a delivery
truck tipped onto its side. From there, I study the intersection and the street
that branches eastward toward the coast. It should take me to the industrial park
where the warehouse is located.

Farther down that road, the
infected aren’t much of an issue. This area is residential, and as a result,
there are more forested patches of land between buildings. I’ve learned to feel
safe in areas with lots of trees. That feeling has never gone away.

I arrive at the warehouse minutes
before sunrise. A steely blue light dominates the sky, not strong enough to
cast shadows, but enough to see the broken windows of distant buildings inside the
industrial park.

I reach the warehouse and stay
away from the road in front. My knees burn from having to run while crouching,
but I do this in case Wheels is armed with a sniper rifle. Taking the long way,
out of necessity, I circle the building while keeping among my friends, the
trees.

A chilling question hangs over me:
What do I do next?

I’m at the edge of the loading
area behind the warehouse, in a dirt lot where I take cover behind a row of
massive tanks that were once red but are now
a faded
rust, the paint cracked and flaky. I look over the edge of one and study the
building.

The Colonel and his men did an
excellent job fortifying the place. They built barriers made of wooden boards,
steel planks, and sand bags perfect for providing cover while shooting. They
even erected barbed-wire fences around the personnel entrances to discourage
invaders from barging through. The wide loading bay doors that once opened to
admit the tail ends of trucks are covered in webs of stainless steel cables
bolted in place around the edges. Looking up, I see lumpy shapes along the sloped
rooftop—more sandbags stacked to make cover.

I know we used a door earlier to
get outside. And I remember a heavy bang after they closed it. It’ll be locked,
and I don’t have the proper tools for lock picking or hacking a steel chain. We
never packed those into the emergency bags because there simply weren’t enough
of those tools to go around.

I don’t see movement on the roof,
so I make a run for it, my destination a low wall of sandbags halfway between
me and the warehouse
.

Something cuts the air next to
me and smacks
into the pavement.

I throw myself toward the sandbags
and press against them. Did he shoot from the roof or a window I neglected to
see? Either way, the good news is that he’s shooting at me and not at Melanie.

The sandbag behind my head vibrates
as another slug hits it. I flinch and try to flatten as much of myself against
the ground as possible.

“You get up right now,” Wheels
shouts at me from above, “or your little girlfriend dies.”

He’s going to kill her anyway.
Does he think I’m stupid?

Breathing hard, my chin scraping
the pavement, I look for a better position of cover closer to the warehouse. His
voice gives away an important detail of his location: namely that he’s shooting
from an elevated position higher than the first floor. From that elevation, he
won’t be able to shoot me as long as I’m pressed up against the building, not
unless he stands at the edge of the roof or leans out of a window. If that
happens, I’ll put a bullet in him.

“I swear to Christ I’ll do it,”
he shouts, and now it sounds like he’s very high up, probably the rooftop.

I consider his threat. The man is
clearly a psycho, but would he really kill Melanie right away? Or would he be
smart and keep her hostage a while longer?

It’s a tough call, but I make the
assumption she’s safe. Wheels probably knows by now that I got the best of the
Colonel, as well as Bandanna, who I’m pretty sure was their best marksman. If
Wheels even has half a brain in that cannibal head of his, he won’t waste the
most precious resource and last line of defense he has: a girl I clearly love.

“You shoot her,” I say in my
loudest voice, “and you’ve got nothing. Your friends are dead. I’ll have all
the time in the world to hunt you down!”

“Is that right, Kip?”

There’s amusement in his voice,
and not the sort of arrogant, condescending amusement I’m used to from the
Colonel.
Wheels isn’t
fully confident about his
situation. Maybe he has a trick up his sleeve.

“Take all the time out there you
need,” he says. “Hell, I even got something to keep you entertained in the meantime.”

I hold my breath and wait. Then I
hear it, a soft smack against the pavement next to the building, followed by a
sizzling noise, and the firecrackers begin to go off, one after another.

I can hear Wheels laughing over
the mini-explosions. It hits me that those fireworks might be how the Colonel
and his men found us in the first place. Curse that old man in the window. If
only we had passed him by.

Smoke. Those firecrackers are
notorious for kicking up smoke. I already catch its heady, sulfuric stench. I
look around the sandbags and see a cloud of it against the wall. It flashes
bright orange with each pop.

A chorus of human moans and
guttural grunts rises in every direction. Infected. They’re coming to explore
the noise. I can see flashes of movement in the trees—ruined bodies sprinting
toward me, or at least lumbering quickly.

Wheels is
still laughing. I chance a look at the roof and catch sight of him peeking out
from behind a low wall of sandbags similar to mine, a hunting rifle propped
against the top edge.

I fire the 9mm at him without
taking close aim. The slug pings off the roof. He dips behind the sand bags,
and I use that sliver of time to throw myself over my own wall of cover and
sprint to the warehouse. Immediately, I flatten my back against the wall.

The last firecracker goes off. The
smoke billows up, thick enough as it crosses his line of fire that I know I’m
safe from his aim. I bolt along the wall, hook around the corner, and scan the unfamiliar
terrain on this side.

This side of the warehouse is just
as heavily fortified as the back. I see a door that I assume is the one we used
earlier. It’s the only one on this side of the building that isn’t boarded up.

Of course it’s locked—a
steel deadbolt that requires a key. Shooting it won’t do much good, either. It’s
the same brand my father and I used back home. Tough to break, even with a gun.

A hole has been drilled through
the door at eye level. I look through it and see only darkness, and yet it
feels like someone is staring back at me.
An unlikely
possibility.
Even if Melanie has broken free of her bindings, I doubt
she would be standing by this door just waiting for me to come knocking.

I hear a sharp yell from above,
followed by gunfire.

Wheels.

What could he be shooting at now?
Firing at the infected won’t do him any good. Maybe he tripped and fired the
rifle by accident? The roof is slanted, so it’s possible. And that would
explain the yell that was definitely his.