Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (15 page)

I’m outside now. The space around
me is suddenly vast and quiet and full of light. It’s as if I’ve entered a
completely different world. The quiet tells me the infected have all entered
the warehouse.

I reach through the hatch,
stretching my left arm as far as it will go, my other hand clutching the edge
for support. From this angle, the task ahead of us seems impossible.

There is no way this is going to
work.

Melanie can’t lift the body
alone. Even if she could do it, my arm muscles are spent, and there is no way I’ll
be able to raise it and help her out afterward. And to attempt it all with one
arm, the other occupied with keeping me in place…

It gets worse.

The whole point in bringing
Wheels with us was to throw his corpse to the infected
outside
, giving them something to focus on while we made our escape
over the opposite edge. But the infected are no longer out here. They’re
inside
the warehouse now, meaning our idea
is worthless.

It also means I don’t need to
lift the corpse.

“Melanie, let go of him!” I
scream at her. “Grab my hand!”

“What?” she shouts back at me.

She is bent beneath the corpse’s
weight, struggling to drape the legs over her shoulders and hold the ankles.

“It won’t work,” I tell her.
“Leave him there! Take my hand! You have to get out!”

“I don’t understand, Kip!”

A grinding
pop
goes off next to me. The extra weight on the platform has yanked
out one of the metal loops screwed into the ceiling—a fixture installed for
the sake of attaching a support rope. Melanie ducks as the platform drops a few
inches. She blinks up at me, more confused than afraid. It hasn’t hit her yet
that she is going to die.

“Take my hand! Melanie, just do
it!”

Directly below her, the infected
have gathered into a ravenous mob. The knowledge of what is about to happen
sinks in, and Melanie lets out a sob.

“Oh, no. Kip!”

“Grab my hand,” I shout at her.
“Now! You have to jump!”

She shakes her head at me, eyes
glistening with tears. Her face is so close I could reach down and touch her.
But only if I release my other hand.

There is another pop as a second
metal loop detaches from the ceiling. The support rope attached to it falls. I reach
my arms through the opening toward her, and Melanie jumps at exactly the right
moment. My hands find one of her arms, and I grab her as the platform detaches
completely and sails down, along with Wheels’s corpse, into the mob.

I press my forehead to the roof’s
metal surface, pulling with my neck and arm muscles and every other muscle to
get one of her arms out of the hole. Then I roll away, bringing her arm with
me, never letting go even as it bends and scrapes along the edge.

There is no moment, like in the
movies, where the hero gracefully pulls the damsel through to safety. Instead,
she and I are locked in a brutal, messy struggle in which victory is measured one
inch at a time, one painful scream after another. Her arm might as well be a
stubborn weed I’m trying to yank out of a garden, with the merciless way I’m
pulling on it.

When she’s finally through, I
slam the lid over the opening. The arm that saved her life dangles limply at
her side. She almost faints, and I grab her before she can roll down the
sloping surface.

The arm is out of its socket. Though
I’ve never actually done it, I manage to pop it back in after instructing Melanie
to cover her mouth with her other hand to stifle a scream.

She doesn’t scream—not even
a squeak—as I slam it back into place.

Instead, she rolls away,
clutching the shoulder and squirming from the pain. When she finally sits back
up, the first thing she does is slap me across the face. I reel, covering the
sore spot with one hand.

“Do it again,” I tell her.

I leave my cheek exposed.

She surprises me by grabbing my
neck and pulling me in for a hungry kiss. I hold her in a fierce embrace that
makes her whimper a bit from the pain still in her shoulder.

I could die right here, content.
But Melanie kills that peaceful moment.

“The
virals
,”
she says.

They are still gathered in the
storage space below us, lifting a noise that makes the roof vibrate.
A whole horde of them.
I glance over the rooftop and into
the back parking lot where I had entered earlier.

The lot is mostly empty. I see only
a few stragglers, the blind ones trying to feel their way around. One missing
both legs drags
itself
forward. None of them poses
much of a threat.

“They’re all inside the
warehouse,” I say.

“No,” Melanie says, still dazed.
“Leaving. They’re—they’re coming out again…”

“How do you know?”

“I saw them. They know we’re not
inside. They’re coming.”

I scramble over to the hatch and hold
it open. My eyes take a few seconds to adjust to the darkness, but eventually I
see that Melanie is right. The horde of infected—finished with devouring
Wheels’s corpse—is now pushing outward, trying to funnel through the door
they used to get inside.

The scent of gasoline wafts up to
me.

“Can we jump down from here?” Melanie
says.

I shake my head. “No way.”

We’re two stories up. If we were
to jump from here to the pavement, our chances of breaking an ankle or a leg
would be astronomically high.

“The grappling rope,” I say.
“It’s our only chance.”

I swing off my pack, locate the
grappler, and yank out all twelve feet of rope.

“Here.” I hand it to Melanie.
“Fix it to the edge. Climb down.”

“But what are you—”

I ignore her for the time being
and focus on digging through my pack, seized by a burning idea.

When I find what I need inside my
pack, I hold it up in a firm grip and shoot a warning look at Melanie. Her eyes
widen at the sight of it.

“Go,” I tell her.

She turns and makes for the edge.
Within seconds, she finds a rust-eaten patch in the corrugated surface and sets
the grappler into place.

We lock eyes—a solemn,
hopeful gaze—as Melanie slips over the edge and disappears.

I give her thirty seconds, time I
spend studying the shifting mass
of
infected through
the hatch. They’re like a bunch of partygoers in a crowded nightclub that has
suddenly caught fire, so desperate to get out that they can’t help but climb
over each other, effectively clogging the only escape route.

At the center of the storage area
is the Colonel’s enormous stash of gasoline cans. The infected jostle the
shelves, knocking the cans over, and I can only hope some of the gas has leaked
out to pool around their feet. The intensified smell tells me it might have already
happened.

The grenade feels heavy as I hold
it over the opening. I’m at twenty-six seconds in the countdown, on my way to
thirty—and destruction.

Twenty-seven…

Twenty-eight…

Twenty-nine…

Thirty.

“Good-bye,” I whisper.

I pull the pin and fling the
grenade—a
fragger
like the one I used to kill
the Colonel and Bandanna—into the warehouse. It lands nowhere near the
gas cans, but that shouldn’t matter in such a closed space.

Five seconds. That’s all I have
until the boom.

I sprint toward the grappler, gather
a few feet of rope, and hold on for dear life as I throw myself over the edge,
hoping the grappler will hold.

It does, but only for a second as
a violent tremor jostles the building, accompanied by a skull-cracking boom.
The blast rips apart the boarded window in front of me and sends a shower of
splinters into my body, and my ears fill with a steady, high-pitched whistle
that drowns out every other noise.

That whistle is all I hear as I
fall two stories toward concrete.

I’m only half-conscious when I
feel something soft break my fall.

Not
soft
, exactly, but it certainly isn’t concrete. It isn’t my pack,
either, since I no longer feel it around my back. My eyes sting too much to
open them, but I know—I’m
certain
,
actually—that I’ve landed on top of Melanie. She must have tried to break
my fall.

Reality becomes a dark, throbbing
mess of sensations I can’t decipher. My eyes won’t open. The whistle in my ears
mixes with a scream I know is mine, though I can’t feel my mouth.

Something grabs my coverall and
drags me away from the building.

Hands. I know from the way the
nails dig into me.

All I can think is the infected
are taking me away from the smoke; away from Melanie, who might still be alive;
away from this unfinished life so they can devour what’s left of it.

“Kip!”

She’s alive.

I open my eyes—the left
one, anyway—and blink away dust. My right eye remains sealed and stings
inside its socket.

Steeped in shock and disbelief, I
reach up to touch it.

“Don’t,” Melanie says, pushing
down my hand. “Can you feel your legs?”

I move them, surprised there is
no pain. But that’s because all of the pain is concentrated in my lower back.

With Melanie’s help, I get up, as
shaky as an old man recovering from a bad spill. The pain in my lower back is
awesome—and I mean that in the literal sense, as in “something that
inspires awe.” Never have I felt pain like this in my life, nor did I even know
it existed.

With a sharp cry, my legs give
out and I tumble back to the ground.

“Oh God,” Melanie says, bending
over me. “What is it? How does it feel?”

“Hurting,” is all I can say
between gasps.

“More of them are going to come. Let’s
try and make it to the trees. You can do it.”

No way in hell, I want to tell
her. But I’m gasping too hard to speak. The pain is like having spears driven
into me, bypassing my skin but shredding the muscle and bone beneath.

“Go,” I tell her through clenched
teeth. “Run…”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Go!”

“But I love you, Kip.”

Finally the pain is too much, and
I pass out.

When I open my left eye again, I
see high grass and trees. My nose rakes in a smell of weeds, dry and untamed,
and the more powerful, acrid stench of smoke. I’m lying on my left side, my face
against fabric Melanie must have laid out for me.

She appears in my field of vision
and crouches next to me.

“How do you feel?”

The pain in my back is still
there, though now it’s more of a dull throb than the vicious, stabbing,
ripping, grinding agony from before.

“How long have I been out?” I ask
her.

“Ten minutes.” She smiles at me.
“The longest ten minutes of my life.”

Over the new few minutes, I
manage to stand, sling my pack over my shoulders, and take a few steps without
too much grunting. The fact that I can stand and walk means I haven’t broken my
back, though running right now would be impossible.

“All right,” I say, “let’s
g—”

The pain flares up suddenly, the
same vicious, stabbing, ripping, grinding…

“Oh God fucking damn it,” I say
as my legs give out again.

I fall to my knees and struggle
to remain upright, as if doing so is a way of resisting the truth: that this is
the end of my road, right here. Once I collapse, there will be no getting up
again.

One thing I need to do first,
before the end.

“Run home,” I tell Melanie.
“Don’t argue. Just go.”

I sound like my father in his
final moments: defeated, faced with certain death, and ready for it.

Melanie falls to her knees in
front of me, adoring green eyes roaming my face.

“I’ll wait,” she says. “You just
need more time. The smoke will keep away the
virals
for—”

I cut her off. “Shut up.”

A wounded look comes over her. “I’m
sorry, Kip.”

I fight back a surge of self-pity.
When she’s gone, I’ll let myself cry.

“There’s something you should
know,” I tell her. “I don’t love you. I was going to hurt you. Rape you. And kill
your mother and sister so I could take your stash. I’ve done it before.”

“You’re lying,” she says with a
few quick shakes of her head.

“I’m not. It’s the truth. So get
out of here.”

Her eyes fill with tears. She is
still shaking her head—more slowly now, as if in addition to shock and
sadness, she also feels disappointment. My face remains as hard as I can make
it. The constant sting and throb in my gouged right eye makes it easier to feel
like a monster, like Wheels, whose spirit I pretend has possessed me.

“Kip…”

“I said shut up. Don’t you get
it? I would’ve followed you home to your stash. That’s all I cared about. I
don’t feel anything for you. Just go away so I can die in peace.”

The words ring hollow in my ears.
My heart shivers instead of beats, pumping ice-cold blood that chills the rest
of me. That same chill washes over Melanie. I can tell by the way her eyes
widen slightly in disbelief.

“Go away,” I tell her. “This is
your fault.”

“Is it?” she says with a sniffle.
“Then just tell me one thing.”

“Aren’t you listening to me?” I
yell at her. “Just go! Fucking get out of here!”

She blinks but doesn’t budge an
inch.

“That’s all I needed to know,”
she says.

“What are you talking about?”

My entire body is trembling now,
my back painfully stiff. Another minute and I’ll be on the ground again. She
can’t be here when that happens. She might never leave.

“What are you talking about?” I
ask her again. “Why won’t you just leave me here?”

“Because,” she says, blinking
away fresh tears, “you truly love me.”

Before I can say anything, she
leans forward and kisses me.