Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (3 page)

There were two other men in the
Jeep. In the back seat, a thickset guy with oiled, wavy black hair and a bushy
black beard held a pistol to the temple of a more muscular man seated next to
him. The muscular guy had a shaved head and looked like an ex-convict. He also
looked terrified.

I watched with growing alarm as
the man with the black beard stood up suddenly, lifted the ex-con-looking guy,
and tossed him out of the Jeep.

He screamed as the infected tore
into him. The two men in the front of the Jeep smiled at the carnage, the
driver even chewing gum as he watched. The one in the back seat just stared in
admiration at
his own
work.

I recognized him—the guy
with the bushy black beard who had performed the execution.

Still standing, he rested his
bearish, tattooed forearms on the Jeep’s frame. He had a neck tattoo that
revealed itself as he craned his neck to say something to the driver. With a nod,
the driver blew out his gum and sent it into the frenzied pack. He cut the
wheel, floored the gas pedal, and left behind a cloud of dust as he tore out of
the parking lot.

It was the neck tattoo that
triggered my memory of him. An unusual design, it was a rendering of black
roses attached to a thorny stem—except the stem was made of barbed wire. Realistic
shading on the skin made the wire appear to dig into it. The design was wicked;
tall enough to run along the underside of his chin, it bloomed black roses
along its entire length, at least a dozen of them.

And here’s your change, good sir,
the man had said to me—not
quite a British accent, but more the voice of a man with more personality than
he can contain.

He had been a cashier at the
Exxon station just down the street. Before the Outbreak, I used to pass the
store on my drive home from soccer practice and sometimes swing in to buy an
energy drink if I had to pull an all-nighter for school.

He had been a talkative guy back
then. More than once, he had informed me that too many Red Bulls could screw up
my kidneys. We got on a first-name basis, though I forget his name now after so
many years. I used to wonder about his black-rose-and-barbed-wire tattoo, and
whether or not he was one of those ex-cons working a shitty hourly job as a way
to reintegrate with society. He just had one of those looks that
said
“prison.”

After what I had just seen in the
Citizens’ Bank parking lot, I was probably right about the prison thing. I put
away the binoculars and readied myself for the next leg of my journey.
Hopefully I would never cross paths with the guy again.

Or his neck tattoo might end up
being the last thing I’d ever see.

What follows is a true account of
my three days and two nights in Peltham Park.

For those interested in how I survived
after a half dozen others had to die, go ahead and continue reading. Maybe
you’re a historian or social scientist fascinated with what we now call the
“Hunger Virus” era. Or you’ve grown up sheltered and crave a sense of adventure
you can only get from books.

There’s also the possibility that
no one will read my story, and putting down these words is just my way of
trying to cleanse my mind of the nightmares that wake me up each night—the
ones where I’m covered in sweat, raking in each breath, and thinking there’s
blood all over my hands.

Blood of my father that I could
have sworn I washed off years ago.

In my memory of that time, I’m
just a scared twenty-year-old kid whose entire life is about to change in ways
he never imagined—and it begins with a mistake I make the very first
night.

* * *

It’s time to rest, even though I
could go further.

Night has fallen and the
buildings of Peltham Park are black against a purple, glittering sky. There
isn’t a single light anywhere except the millions of stars above. Empty shells
of old cars squat in the dark, dimly reflecting the cosmic glare, each one a
sad reminder of movement, destinations, progress. In the distance, a wolf emits
a lonesome howl that makes me think of the wilderness that was here when the
first settlers arrived.

With the entire town abandoned,
it’s easy to waste thought energy on this kind of nonsense.

I’ve reached my destination, the SuperMart
on Route 1 where my mother had once picked up her medication. Crouched behind
the building, which is part of a connected row of stores, I’m thinking this is
the end of the line for now. I can’t go any farther, not without daylight. Dawn
is maybe eight hours away.

Plenty of time
, I tell myself.

The time, though, my inner voice
sounds like it’s mocking me.

A nearby Dumpster tipped onto its
side should serve pretty well as a shelter for the night. It lies with its
opening facing a concrete divider. I manage to quietly move it a few inches so
the lid can rest on the barrier, forming a roof of sorts. I rotate the Dumpster
with one corner touching the concrete wall, leaving only one narrow opening to
serve as an entrance; then I crawl in and spread my sleeping mat so my head
will lie opposite the opening. That way, if one of them reaches inside, it’ll
grab my boot before any other part of me. It smells god-awful in here, though I
can tell the years have removed the worst of it.

I keep the pistol close to me,
along with the tube attached to my
Camelbak
, in case
I wake up and need to have a drink. I also keep an empty plastic bottle nearby
in case I have to urinate in the middle of the night.

I close my eyes and listen to the
sound of the wind as it carries the moans of infected moving along Route 1.

I dream about my mother.

Several times during the night I
wake up in that foul-smelling darkness thinking I’m back in the house with her
and Dad. I have trouble remembering the dreams that wake me, but I know they’re
the same ones that have haunted me since she died. Dark dreams in which my
mother sits across from me in various unlit rooms of our house, and though
neither of us moves or speaks, I can tell she is slowly losing her mind. I know
by the way she stares at me through black eyes like holes in her skull.

For almost two years after the
Outbreak, Mom and Dad were the only two people in my life—not just the
only two I loved, but the only people I had any contact with whatsoever. Despite
this closeness, my father and I didn’t know about Mom’s addiction until it was
too late.

Painkillers. They had been her
drug
of choice, her way of finding peace. I remember seeing
her sprawled on the couch most days, wearing her pajamas and staring at
nothing. She kept the source of her daily stupors hidden from us. We thought
she was depressed, but then again, my father and I were spending twelve hours a
day training and fortifying the house. We were shocked when we found out the
truth.

On rare good days, when she was lucid
and in a bouncy mood, Mom would don her apron and cook for us. We ate using the
fine silver, the white, precious china, and the crystal glasses. If something
broke, we laughed about it. When we felt like splurging, we would dip into our
stock of batteries and run the portable stereo. My dad and I would swing my
mother around the living room to the music of Ray Charles and other Fifties
greats. Or we would listen to Frank Sinatra and reminisce. Eric Clapton was too
much for Mom and always made her cry.

The day she began to turn was one
of the worst of my entire life. It was my father’s paranoia that saved his life
and mine.

“Where were you?” he asked my
mother.

Mom had just come in through the
emergency hatch we had built in the back of the house, the one that couldn’t be
opened from the outside. She’d had to knock to be allowed back in. We hadn’t
even seen her leave.

“I went next door,” she said, slurring
her speech. “It’s no big deal, hon.”

My father checked her pockets and
found the painkillers. The prescription had been made out to one of our
neighbors.

“They were dead,” my mother said.
“In bed.
Dead in bed.
He shot her and then himself.
Shot her and then
himself
. Dead in bed.”

She had walked there and back wearing
no shoes, which supported my theory that she had already begun to lose her mind
even before catching the virus. There was dried blood on her feet.

“Honey,” my father said. “Sweetheart.
What did you step on? Are you cut? Tell me where the blood came from, Jessica.”

My mother smiled and said in a
girlish voice, “Stepped on a bedbug. Dead in bed.”

I had never seen my father cry
until that moment. Tears streamed down his face as he ordered me to my room.

We locked her in my parents’ bedroom,
where we could only see her by looking through the keyhole. The room was always
dark, even in the day. More often than not, she was little more than a
silhouette in the lines of sunlight slicing through the boarded windows.

Sometimes Mom just sat there and
pulled out her hair. Other times, she would snarl and tear at the mattress, or
jostle the backboard like she was trying to pull it out.

I don’t know why I watched. One
morning, I found her only inches away from the keyhole, one eye narrowed as she
tried to see me through it. Her face was covered in red slashes, most of her
hair already missing.

“Kip,” she said in a harsh
whisper. “Is that you? Did you put the trash out?”

My father used his Desert Eagle.
He waited until she was in a state of fitful sleep. By that point, she rarely
slept soundly, if at all. He opened the door, walked in, and closed it shut
behind him. I sat at the piano, running my fingers over the keys without
pressing them, listening and waiting for it to be over.

He took an enormous risk in
leaving the house to bury her. I spent that whole day waiting for him, convinced
he wasn’t coming back. When he finally did, we made dinner, then spent the
evening talking about the things we loved most about her. We cried and talked
for hours, then agreed not to speak of her again. She was in the past, like the
rest of the world we had once known. Survivors didn’t live in the past.

And just like that, we moved on.

Daylight,
finally.

I haven’t slept more than a few
hours. My body is stiff, and my mouth tastes like the Dumpster smells. I eat a
quick breakfast—peaches and a
Powerbar
—before
sliding out of my little shelter to seek cover in a grove of trees nearby. I
don’t make the mistake of assuming I’m alone.

But I am—for now, anyway.

The town is pale blue and quiet
in the early morning light. This time of day always makes me nostalgic, and I
think of days past even as I tell myself to pay attention. My heart sinks with
each step I take toward the SuperMart.

The place has been ransacked.
That much is clear from the broken windows and the debris all over the parking
lot. And yet I entertain the possibility that the inside has been left
untouched. There are infected all over the front parking lot, and maybe, just
maybe, their presence has been enough to keep away raiders and scavengers all
these years.

The chances of that are slim.

On a positive note, the infected aren’t
formed in groups. I count close to thirty scattered across the small lake of
concrete, all standing apart from each other. Even from this distance, I can
smell their dank clothes and unwashed, putrid bodies. Their rotting heads droop
forward and their necks are a vile shade of red from burning in the sun.

A woman stumbles around in a
circle, arms jerking as if she is conducting an orchestra that exists only in
her own diseased mind. In the distance, a skinny man dressed all in black
wrestles with a toppled shopping cart that must be from the grocery store at
the opposite end. Most of the infected are just standing there or shuffling around
aimlessly.

The grocery
store.
I forgot there was one here. Maybe it’ll have—

But any urge to explore it
dissolves when I see the gaping black hole where the entrance used to be. It
looks like someone backed a garbage truck through it.

I make my way around the strip of
buildings. The SuperMart has a set of two loading bay doors in the back. I take
it as a good sign that none of them is busted or covered in graffiti. Above
them is a ledge that extends a few feet from the windows, which are surprisingly
intact. I take out my grappling hook and toss it up. When it finally catches, I
test it a few times before shimmying up the rope.

The storm windows are made of
impact-resistant glass, difficult to break without making a lot of noise. I use
the glasscutter to cut a rectangular opening, and the suction cups to pull out
the glass so I can quietly set it aside. Once I’m through, I find myself in an
office that has been trashed, a place so quiet I almost expect to hear the beep
of a computer.

It looks like hell in here, but
there is no sign that
raiders
or scavengers have been through.
I allow myself a few seconds to bask in a pleasant, hopeful feeling.

Out in the dank, unlit hallway, I
come to a featureless gray door on which my flashlight reveals two signs, one
stating “Employees Only” beneath another that reads “FIRE ESCAPE” with the
universal symbol for stairs. First turning off my flashlight to avoid drawing
attention, I open the door. Of course, the stairwell beyond is completely dark.
I catch a whiff of infected. It’s light, just a fringe smell, which means the
stairs are probably empty. I crouch in the darkness, close my eyes, and listen
anyway.

Not a thing. I decide it’s safe
to turn on my flashlight and make my way down, my senses on full alert, the
flashlight’s beam stretching shadows on the wall. When I reach the bottom of
the stairs, I turn it off and peek out the door to the shopping area.