Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (6 page)

For the next few weeks, I stayed
indoors and brooded about it, until I found out from a mutual friend that
Hailey had been planning for months to spend the summer in North Carolina at
her aunt’s beach house. (The woman also had a place in Italy, where she
“summered.”) I called up Hailey’s online profile and discovered—it wasn’t
even July 4
^th
yet—that she had already found herself a tanned,
muscular, lifeguard boyfriend.

Still, I vowed never to sketch a
portrait of a girl ever again. I was damned good at it, too. I also vowed never
to tell a girlfriend how much I cared about her until she made the plunge
first. The Outbreak made both of those promises unnecessary, but I’m sure I
would have followed through with them. That’s how insecure I was back then.

Turns out I haven’t changed a
bit.

As I stand here staring at that
shivering arrowhead aimed at my neck, deadly weapons strapped all over my body
to protect against the endless threat of murderers, mindless cannibals, and a
killer virus—all three of which live, literally, in my
neighborhood—the only fear that goes through my mind is one that can be
summed up in seven simple words.

Now she isn’t going to like me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean
to be intense”—damn it, Hailey—“but it’s just that…”

“It’s okay,” Melanie says,
lowering the bow. She tips her head in the direction she wants me to follow.
“Come on. I’ll show you the way in.”

She stabs the arrow back into its
quiver and slips the bow over one shoulder, so the string lies diagonally
across her chest. We make our way carefully over the broken glass until we
reach an unmarked metal door with a simple chain-and-padlock setup.

“Is this the only lock?”

She takes out a small key, pops
it open, and frees the chain. Quietly, she slips it out, link by link,
then
lays it on the floor next to the doorframe.

“Take out your flashlight,” she
says.

I dig it out. Melanie opens the
door, and I flash the beam into the darkness to reveal a bending, concrete
stairway that leads downstairs.

“What about it?” I say.

She gently takes my flashlight
and shines it on the edge of the first step. I see a thread-like glimmer
running parallel to the floor. At first, I think it’s a strand from an
unfinished spider web, but a closer look tells me it’s actually a thread
someone has placed there.

“No way,” I say in amazement. “A
trip line?”

“I always thought it was called a
trigger line,” she says.

“What is it connected to?”

“A hand grenade.”

“I have to see this. Is that the
only line?”

I’m already grabbing the
flashlight from her hands.

“Yes. But, Kip, be careful.”

I step into the stairwell and
shine the beam down the angular tunnel between the handrails. Craning my neck,
I catch sight of a small, greenish globe hanging there that must be the
grenade.

“Nice work,” I say. “This is
next-level stuff.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I
catch a smile Melanie quickly hides, like she’s embarrassed by her own pride.

“Maybe now you won’t think I’m
such a
noob
,” she says.

I haven’t heard that word in
years, and it sends a warm wave of nostalgia over me. Once I’m out of the
stairwell, Melanie closes the door and locks it back up.

“So how do you get down there?” I
ask her. “Without losing a leg, I mean.”

“It’s this way.”

I feel like a dumb puppy
following its owner around in hopes it’ll get a treat. I don’t mind. I’m
learning. This is way better than the trash heap I probably would have built
for myself as a semi-permanent shelter.

Igniting her own flashlight, Melanie
guides me away from the rigged stairwell and through a short hallway in back that
leads to a tiny, one-man office. The place smells like decay and contains
nothing of value, only a cracked and pitted wraparound desk made of
particleboard.

She falls into a crouch,
flashlight beam illuminating a human skeleton beneath the desk.

I pull back at the sight of it.
I’ve never been this close to a dead body, though to call this a body is a
stretch. The grinning skeleton is mostly intact and lies stretched across a
torn canvas blanket, making it look as though the person was asleep at time of
death.

Melanie pulls the
blanket—and the bones along with it—away from its original spot. In
the beam of her flashlight, I see a thin board about three feet long and a foot
and a half wide on the floor, pushed up against the wall. It lies there as if
to cover something beneath it.

Melanie lifts the board and
reveals something even more impressive than the grenade trap in the stairwell:
a hole someone has dug through the concrete.

It’s a tunnel leading
underground.

“No way,” I say, mixing the words
with a chuckle. “You have got to be kidding me.”

She arranges the set-up so she
can pull it back over the hole from inside. I like the way she thinks. She and
my father would get along famously, and I’m struck with the sudden urge to
introduce them to each other.

“Go ahead,” she tells me.

Without even a thought that this
might be a trap, I go first, dropping several feet to yet another concrete
floor. I ignite my flashlight and watch Melanie wriggle through. I catch her as
she drops.

Suddenly she’s in my arms, her face
a few inches from mine, breath warm against my chin. Our utility belts are
bulky and press into each other, making it awkward to stand that close, but I
barely notice it. For the next two seconds, I feel more comfortable than I’ve
ever felt with another person, especially a girl.

She pats my arm impatiently and
thrusts her chin at the darkness behind me. Terrified, I swing
around,
pulling the Glock out of my chest holster to aim at
what I’m certain is someone sneaking up on us. But all I see is an empty room.

Well, not exactly
empty.
The room is full of supplies. I set
down my pack and approach the piles lying all over the floor, growing more
amazed with each passing second.

There’s very little of what my
father calls “bulk valuables” down here, items like gasoline, medicine, water,
food, and ammo that are prized in large amounts. But there’s a whole lot of
what he calls “godly trinkets.” These are items that possess high value on a
purely individual level, like a topographical map, a compass, lock picks, or a
functioning rifle.

With the exception of guns, I see
all of those items and more. They’ve been gathered into small, unorganized
piles scattered throughout the room, as if the person who brought them down
here was hoarding treasure with no end goal in mind.

“The I.V. stuff is in that
garbage bag against the wall,” Melanie tells me, pointing.

“Thanks. I’ll get it after I help
you find that chain.”

“Just take it. I trust you.”

I kneel in front of the garbage
bag and dig through it. The bags and tubes are still in their original seals,
though of course, I’m still going to disinfect the hell out of them when I get
back, just in case. I leave the bottles of saline solution behind.
Too much weight.
Plus, I can make that stuff from scratch
back home.

With the extra gear, my pack is
now several pounds heavier than it was this morning. Hopefully it won’t slow me
down. I lay it against the wall and turn to Melanie.

“Did you scavenge all this
stuff?” I ask her, throwing the beam of light at her as she moves across the
room. She stops at a metal table and lights a candle next to a box full of
them—yet another precious item, a luxury to some.

“My father found this place
during a supply run,” she says absently. “He made a map for us—my mother
and my little sister and me—in case we ever had to leave the house. It’s
more of a temporary shelter. You couldn’t live down here.”

“No, probably not,” I say.

She suggested earlier that her
father took his own life, a terrible thing I can’t imagine having to live with.
I keep my mouth shut so as not to remind her of it. But I’m curious as to why a
man with a wife and two daughters, who was brave enough to go out on supply
runs, would abandon his family like that.

She lights a few more candles,
creating a warm glow that reminds me of my father sprawled across the couch in
front of the blazing hearth in our living room. I click off the flashlight, slip
it into my pocket, and approach her. She turns to me. The candlelight shivers
along one side of her face, exposing an eye agleam with moisture.

“He left us,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

A tear breaks away and runs down
her cheek. “More than a year ago. The sun was coming up. I never woke up early,
but that day I did. I don’t know why I looked outside. My window was boarded up,
but I looked through the crack into our backyard, and I saw him.”

“What was he doing?”

I place my hands on her elbows
and feel the way she’s shivering, not from cold but from the memory of whatever
it is she saw her father do.

“He was carrying his pack and a
laundry bag full of stuff. It was food. He took some of our food and left, and
I watched him run to a van that was waiting at the other end of our yard. When
the door opened, I saw people inside.
Men and women with bags
of stuff.
He got in and sat down on the floor. He didn’t even look at
our house, Kip. Not once. He just kept his eyes on the floor. Then a man stuck
his head out and looked around. He closed the door really slowly, like he
didn’t want to wake us up. And then they left.”

A list of possible explanations
runs through my mind, but only one makes any sense at all.

“Melanie, what did your father do
before the Outbreak?”

She blinks at me. “He was a
doctor. A surgeon.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry.”

She nods. I don’t have to explain
it to her. She already knows.

A surgeon. I’ve heard of this
sort of thing before—people with valuable skills being recruited by bands
of survivors hoping to create their own isolated communities, usually up in the
mountains where the infected, raiders, and, to a lesser degree, slavers, aren’t
as likely to travel.

If it was a man being recruited,
like Melanie’s father, the leader of the community might promise to set him up
with a beautiful young wife. Maybe even two or three. Any sort of doctor would
be a godsend in a community like that. Her miserable prick of a father was
probably waking up right now to a pair of teenage wives asleep on either side
of him.

“Was he the one who taught you
how to use that bow and set up those traps?” I ask her.

She shakes her head, looking down
at the floor.

“I taught myself,” she says. “I
practiced every day after he left. We were running out of food. I knew I’d have
to go out on a supply run someday, but I never expected it to be like this,
Kip. Not this bad.”

She turns away from me, sniffles,
and wipes her eyes dry.

“Melanie, how long have you been
out here?”

“Almost two weeks. Oh God, Kip, I
need to go home. I need to see my mom and my sister. They’re probably freaking
out. Sarah’s only twelve. She has nightmares that make her scream at night. I
can’t imagine…”

Her voice trails off as she
shakes her head at the thought.

“You could hike back to them,
couldn’t you?” I ask her.

She gives me an incredulous look.
“Without a gun? Are you crazy? And I only have twenty-two arrows left. What if that’s
not enough?”

I nod. “I see what you mean. Where’s
the bicycle?”

“It’s hidden in the trees,
beneath a tarp with a dead viral on it.”

Viral
. That’s one I haven’t heard in a while.

“All this stuff,” she says in a
voice thick with rage, “and not a single
fucking
bicycle chain. I’ve looked through all of it.
Every single
bag and box.
But the one thing I need isn’t here.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “We’ll
get that chain. But first, we need to figure out where to look.”

“What about the drugstore? Could
we go back?”

An idea hits me, accompanied by a
memory of looking into a building and seeing what looked to be chains scattered
across the floor. It’s so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner.

“They don’t sell them at drugstores,”
I tell her. “But that’s okay. I know a place.”

“Where?”

I smile at her. “Ever heard of
Tommy’s Bike Shack?”

We’re about two miles away from
Tommy’s when our empty stomachs just can’t hold out any longer.

Melanie and I talk about our old
lives as we break out PowerBars, powdered milk and sugar that we mix with
water, and tinned peaches and pears. It’s a good meal, and I hide my burp
afterward.

“Don’t,” Melanie says.

“What?”

“Hide it. It doesn’t bother me.”

A low burp grumbles out of her
throat. I respond with one of my own. We smile at each other, though my smile
quickly fades away. This won’t last. The more I enjoy her company, the more
painful it’ll be when we have to say good-bye.

We pack our garbage so as not to
leave a trail, then make our way behind the buildings along Route 1 toward the
bike shop.

“Did you ever date anyone at
school?” she asks me. “I mean, other than Hailey.”

I slow down, almost stopping
completely. “You know about that?”

“Everyone did. She slept with,
like, five guys that summer.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“So,” she says, “was there anyone
else?”

“Why do you care?” My tone is
playful, but I’m curious.

“Geez, Kip. I’m just making
conversation.”

We make our way through thick
underbrush in silence. Thorns snag my coverall. It’s a crappy path, but safer than
using the road or crossing the lots.