Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (18 page)

“My father was a Ranger,” I tell
him, “and then a Green Beret. Maybe you knew him. Arthur
Garrity
?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. But he was
my brother. You can be sure of that.” He grips my shoulder,
then
pats it. “And that makes you my kin.”

I’m not sure how to respond.
“Thank you, Pete.”

He smiles and tips his head at
Melanie before backing away from the window and into the receiving arms of his
wife. She urges him to put on his sweater, and he immediately complies.

Five minutes later, we arrive at Melanie’s
house, and I follow her instructions to drive onto the grass and pull around
the back. It’s much nicer than mine, but hidden deep inside a neighborhood
where stretches of forest separate each residence, similar to my family’s place.
Probably why they survived so long without getting attacked.

Melanie runs to the garage door
and pounds a distinct beat against it that could never be replicated by
accident. It almost sounds like Morse code.

There’s a clicking and clanking
noise from above—locks and chains being undone. The window above the
garage door is boarded up,
nails
holding it in place, but
the way it swings open tells me the nails and boards are just an elaborate
disguise.

In the dark opening, two heads
rise cautiously to peek over the edge, one blonde,
the
other auburn-haired. The blonde one is a little girl. Sarah. The other must be Melanie’s
mom.

They’re both cautious enough to
hold back squeals and shouts, though the little girl has to clamp both hands
over her mouth to contain her excitement. Her mother’s face lights up with joy,
and immediately she drops a rope ladder through the window and motions for her
daughter to climb inside.

I watch with a growing sense of
hope as Melanie turns to me, smiling.

“Go,” I tell her. “I’ll hold the
rear for now and help the others.”

As I watch her climb gracefully
up the front of the garage, I feel a hand settle on my shoulder. Pete is
standing next to me, wearing his ratty black sweater again. Only he isn’t
watching Melanie climb. He’s looking up at the clouds.

I expect him to say something
God-related, about being blessed or smiled upon by the Lord.

“It’s going to rain,” he says
instead,
then
turns to help his family out of the
truck.

I smile at the simplicity of his
words.

“Spoken like a true survivalist,”
I say.

“Not all men of God live with
their heads in the clouds, you know.”

“Especially not ones that used to
be Rangers.”

“Not many of us left,
unfortunately.”

Together, we watch Melanie slip
through the window and pull her mother and sister into a fierce embrace.

“I guess we should help your
family,” I say, looking at Pete.

I can’t tell if he heard me. He’s
squinting with happiness at his daughters, the youngest of whom—a gangly
teenager—is struggling to place a foot on the ladder’s bottommost rung
with help from her mother.

“Let’s do that, son,” he says
finally.

It takes several minutes to help
them up, and on a few occasions, I think I hear the moans of a nearby infected,
which makes me pull my gun.

But it’s just the wind, probably
bringing in that rain Pete was talking about.

Pete and I help his wife climb up
the rope. She calls me “dear boy,” and I respond with “ma’am.” I feel the icy
splash of raindrops—big, heavy ones—against my face.

Pete goes up next. He tells me he
doesn’t need any help, thank you very much.

Soon I am the last one standing
in the driveway. I holster my gun, grab the ladder, and look around before I
climb. Everything is silent and still except the rain, which makes a slapping
noise against the tree leaves and a thudding against the house.

To me, it isn’t gloomy or
depressing. The rain is clean, natural, and untouched by the virus. It’s the
only part of the world that I know will always remain the same. I tip my head
back and let it coat my face.

Then I pull myself up the ladder,
toward the dark square of the open window.

Melanie isn’t there. She must be
with her family, comforting them and explaining what happened. I continue quickly
up the ladder. All I want is to be with them.

Looking up, I see Melanie stick
her head out the window. I stop and stare at her. She winces at the cold sting
of rain and touches a wet spot on her scalp, as if water falling from the sky
is a new thing to her.

As always, though, we are on the
same wavelength, and she responds to the touch of rainfall by leaning even
farther out the window, head tipped back, eyes closed, shoulders thrown back to
let the water coat her face.

She looks down at me, wearing a
smile of pure contentment.

“Come up,” she says with a wave.

I climb the rest of the way. Melanie
takes my hand and pulls me into the warm, dry darkness on the other side.

According to published reports in
regional newspapers like
Clean World
Gazette
,
Farmer’s Almanac
, and
Repairman Sam
, the last infected person
in the U.S. died from a gunshot wound to the head February 14, 2029, in a small
Nebraska town called Victoria Springs.

Valentine’s
Day.

Our love letter
to the virus, signed by a bullet.

It took a whole decade for the
majority of the infected to die out on their own, mostly from animal attacks
and exposure. We got so good at hiding and protecting ourselves from the threat
that the virus struggled those last ten years to find new hosts, and was
virtually extinct by the time that last bullet was fired.

The last infected
man—nicknamed “Mr. Valentine” by the press—was by then a mere
skeleton
. Naked and hairless, he weighed ninety pounds and
was completely blind.

Two brothers who had been out
photographing
sandhill
cranes found him inside their
shed. He was crouched with his back resting against the wall. They snapped a
few pictures and called their father—a forty-four-year-old liquor store
owner named Colin
Smythe
—who killed the
infected man with a .22 magnum round fired from an antique Smith & Wesson
revolver. A few more pictures were snapped of the corpse. Then the
Smythe
family wrapped the body in a tarp and contacted the
press. The rest is history.

Back then, the world needed
heroes, and Colin
Smythe
became one.

You could say I became one, too,
though not in any way I ever expected.

A whole ten years before Mr.
Valentine’s diseased brain splashed across the wall of Mr.
Smythe’s
rickety shed—marking the end of what is now called the “Hunger Virus”
threat—Melanie and I and the
Hirscham
family
decided to make our way to
Brightrock
.

We spent three nights in her
house in Peltham Park to convalesce before setting out for the mountains. Melanie
divided that time between comforting her mother and sister and going over plans
with Pete and me for our trip. At night, she slept beside her little sister,
Sarah, to make sure the girl had someone to comfort her after a nightmare.

I’ll admit those nights were
tough. I had nightmares of my own. All I wanted was to hold Melanie in my arms
and dream of never letting go. That came later.

I went out alone on one more
supply run to find gasoline with Pete. Melanie stayed behind with her family.
The run was easier now that I had the truck and knew where to look. The
Lubroline station gave me everything I needed. Pete and I stocked the back of
the truck with the precious items—godly trinkets—that would help us
gain admission to
Brightrock
, even though they didn’t
require such a thing. We ended up donating all of it, anyway.

Brightrock
was a tight-knit, heavily fortified religious community in New Hampshire’s
White Mountains. Every one of its sixty-two residents called themselves “New
Light Protestants.” This came from their belief that the virus would someday
die out, and the remaining survivors would rebuild civilization in God’s honor.

Melanie and I found a comforting
element in their ideas—a kind of sturdy, incorruptible hope in mankind—that
led her to convert and me to dedicate my life to their cause.

Our first few weeks in
Brightrock
were spent learning their ways, adjusting to a
life full of chores, and gathering the materials we would need to build
ourselves a shack in which Melanie and I could live with her mother and sister.
We slept on the church’s dirt floor. Other villagers invited us to stay with
them, but the shacks were too small, and none of us wanted to be a burden.

I enjoyed building our shack. Pete
and I chose adjacent lots and worked so closely that it was like we were
building two separate halves of the same building. All those days and weeks of
cutting wood, laying boards, and hammering nails helped us grow close. He was
the first person I told about my decision to propose to Melanie.

I was twenty-one, Melanie only a
year younger, when our marriage took place on a bright August afternoon.
Everyone in
Brightrock
was there. Melanie’s mother,
Amy, made her wedding gown, a simple yet elegant dress of beige silks she had
brought from home. The fabric and cut of the dress accentuated Melanie’s curves
in a way that seemed out of place in such a religious community. Despite a few
jokes and chuckles from the younger villagers, no one seemed to mind.

Amy also made a silk eye patch
for my blind eye and a shirt to go with the finely tailored suit I had purchased
from another villager. In exchange for the suit, I gave the man my combat
knife. I couldn’t stand to look at it anyway. It resembled the one I had used
on my father.

The day of our wedding, Melanie
and I stood facing each other in the afternoon sunlight as Pete—or, in
this case, Pastor
Hirscham
, the town’s newest clergy
member—held a tattered Bible to his chest and spoke of love, loyalty, and
the light of God. He managed to slip in a few words of wisdom from the Ranger
Creed, which made me smile.

“Do you, Kevin
Garrity
,” he said, “take Melanie Reis to be your—”

Melanie and I kissed each other
fiercely before he could finish. Everyone had a good laugh at that.

Our house was finished by then,
except for the paint we had yet to mix and spread across its beams. I had built
a bed frame and a mattress stuffed with duck feathers. Luckily for us, several
of our wedding gifts had consisted of blankets and sheets—scarce in a
community this rustic, and way more comfortable than the sleeping bags we had
been using.

Our first night as a married
couple, Amy and Sarah stayed with a friend so Melanie and I could have the
house to
ourselves
. We were slightly drunk from an
evening spent sipping moonshine with a few friends around a campfire. Stinking
of booze and burning logs, we crashed through the door and into the bedroom,
already kissing and stripping each other of our wedding attire. We were in the
best shape of our lives from all the outdoor work we had been doing and from a
diet consisting mainly of vegetables, berries, and lake trout.

When we saw each other naked for
the first time, standing in the wash of moonlight falling through the window of
our bedroom, we were both stunned. Our bodies were covered in a layer of hard
muscle. It was something we had taken for granted the past few years, when
survival had been our only concern.

Our hands roamed across each
other’s chests, bellies, and arms like we were touching statues in a museum
where that’s strictly forbidden. Melanie ran her fingers across the cords of
muscle wrapping my midsection. She gripped my arms and squeezed. I slid my
palms around her slender waist,
then
made my way up to
cup her breasts. We were like Adam and Eve discovering human nakedness for the
first time.

Melanie reached up and touched my
eye patch.

“All of it comes off,” she said,
peeling it away and tossing it to the floor.

I dove in for a kiss, but she
held me back.

“Slowly,” she said. “I want
tonight to last forever.”

“It already has,” I said.

She smiled at my stupid joke and
took a step back.

I watched, heart jumping, as she
released her hair from its elaborate, ceremonial bun and shook it. Thick auburn
tresses spilled across her shoulders, hiding her breasts only enough to leave
their soft undersides exposed. Her belly flexed rapidly with each nervous
breath.

“To think I almost shot you,” she
said, breathless.

I shook my head in amazement. “To
think I ever walked by you in school without saying anything. And now you’re my
wife.”

“Say that again.”

“You’re my wife.”

“Kip…”

“Come here. Now.”

We lunged at each other. For
minutes, our kiss never broke, even as I grabbed her buttocks, lifted her off
the ground, and pressed her against the wall. Her legs curled around my waist
and tightened. Sweat poured off our bodies, fragrant in the night’s humid air.
Melanie dug her nails into my back at one point, cutting my skin, and I
retaliated with a bite against a nipple that made her gasp.

“The bed,” she told me.

I spun us away from the window.

Crossed the two feet of space to
the mattress.

And landed as a shotgun blast
tore through the nearest wall.

That’s how it sounded, anyway. It
turned out to be the pinewood bed, which had collapsed.
Nothing
to panic about.
But a minute later, a group of our fellow townspeople
burst into the bedroom, led by a worried Pete
Hirscham
.