Jon stopped as he got out of the car and listened. A light breeze rustled the trees, shaking loose the day’s rain that pitter-pattered over the soft ground. He could hear a woodpecker in the distance; a good sign. Fiends tended to want to feast on any flesh: bird, reptile, fish or mammal - if it had a heartbeat, it was fair game. Most animals sensed a Fiend well in advance and fled long before they arrived with their grunts and howls, sounding like a mad troop of chimps.
The leather of his motorcycle racing coveralls creaked as he stepped onto a large granite boulder to get his bearings. Feeling relatively secure, he kept his riot helmet off to allow his ears and eyes to work better. The Moto Guzzi rig, while garish in color, did an effective job of warding off bites. The leather, with its thick padding and built in skid plates for motorcycle racing, was just strong enough to give him time to maybe break loose, maybe strike out with the baton, thrust with a knife.
The piss was downright luxuriant as he stood and relieved himself for the first time in several days without a bottle held to his crotch. As far as a good crap, he’d have to take something to help with that. An uncomfortable constipation had taken hold of him and he knew it wouldn’t let loose until he could squat and feel invulnerable.
The breeze momentarily picked up, startling him as the higher branches waved back and forth, the forest suddenly filled with noise. He instinctively zipped up and crouched, clutching his shotgun, spinning in a three hundred and sixty degree turn. Seeing himself in the window of the Jeep, hunkered down with the gun, he stopped and chuckled while standing up again.
About one hundred yards off, he spotted the edge of what looked like a lake shimmering through the trees. Grabbing his helmet and locking the Jeep, he marched in the lake’s direction. He’d been trying to get to the Canadian Wall when he ran out of gas. As foretold in every modern apocalyptic tale, all the major thoroughfares were teaming with the infected, and blocked with abandoned cars. His only choice was this backwoods escape. He hadn’t accounted for just how rural New Hampshire actually was. The last two gas stations he had passed were abandoned, the pumps turned off. He didn’t have a clue how to turn them back on. A hoped for gallon of fuel in someone’s barn turned out to be pre-mixed with oil for a lawnmower.
His GPS showed him to be shy of the border by a hundred and fifty miles; a long way to hike in rugged country with limited food supplies. A lot nicer to have a steel and glass cage around you. He needed another vehicle. The lake likely meant summerhouses. Summerhouses often meant a summer car. Unfortunately, houses also often meant Fiends.
Damned infected people had plenty of brains left to figure out that most folks just hid in their homes. Of course that was changing now. The Exodus had placed the bulk of the healthy American population behind the Canadian Wall. The infected weren’t far behind. The food supply had moved north and so were they.
Jon's grandmother intruded on his thoughts again, interfering with his need to focus, to walk quietly. At first he figured she just had the flu. The flu was raging during the winter and had the same initial symptoms as Cain’s or ‘The Terror Disease’
as the
New York Post
and
The Washington Times had dubbed it
.
While covering the
Stand
at the Orlando Wall, Jon was able to take a break and visit Granny Kat who had retired to Daytona ten years before. As his last living relative, he doted on her like a spoiled child. She in turn did the same and they worshipped one another in a way often lost as a child passes into adolescence. Granny Kat had cooked a key-lime pie that night, just in time for Jon’s arrival. She hugged her grandson and then had to sit down, gulping what she said was her third glass of water in an hour. She was sweating and her pallor had turned gray. Jon escorted her to the couch in her sitting room and put a blanket over her. He got a thermometer and confirmed the fever: one hundred and three.
With what seemed like standard high fever delirium, the fierce fever of Cain’s masked the loss of mental clarity. What was really happening was an incredibly rapid digestion of the frontal lobes of the brain and a near repurposing of its complicated design. Within an hour, Granny Kat no longer recognized her grandson. A couple hours more and she didn’t recognize herself. Like the endgame of Alzheimer’s, the bacterial assault resulted in the complete destruction of personality. However, unlike the cruel reduction of self that is dementia and its various forms, Cain’s left the victim with the most ancient part of the brain intact; the reptilian - the part that harbors fear, anger, the need to survive, lust, and the killer instinct. The highest form of existence, love, was replaced by something wholly unholy. It was irrationally hungry, thrilled with sexual assault, and gained profound pleasure from the kill. The unique virtue that made the human animal humane was lost whole cloth.
When Granny Washington suddenly came off that couch with the strength of a rabid jungle cat–
Jon felt his chest constrict with the memory of it, a combination of intense remorse and subconscious terror. His face had grown flush, he could feel the heat of it, and he realized that he was holding his breath. He exhaled and told himself to pay attention. Losing focus was a fatal mistake. After… after her death… his safety had become less of a worry. Nevertheless, he still had a job to do. Though there was no news desk anymore to send updates to, for his own sanity, he remained a reporter. His work was what saved him from a deep depression, and it was another reason why he was one of the last ones heading out.
He assumed he had been spared from the disease so far because of his near obsession with drinking only bottled water, a sip of which he took now as he walked through the woods. It had become unfashionable to drink bottled water in recent years (the attached carbon footprint having become unacceptable to a society fighting global warming) but Jon still kept the stuff squirreled away in his car for when he was alone. He’d occasionally get a honk and a finger wag from a scolding fellow driver, but most folks left him alone, others tipping their bottles in a toast, sharing a moment of sin.
It was May now. The whole disaster had begun the previous September. Until January, it had remained contained in Florida. When it became clear that Cain’s had been released in the water supplies of ten of America’s biggest cities, the Federal government actually had a plan C. It involved a massive evacuation to Canada, as well as Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Mexico became a de-facto haven, but the newly finished border fence stopped most escaping American’s cold, and at the mercy of a rapidly growing army of Fiends at their backs. Mercy… mercy was a quick death. Mexico (the country now run by a massive drug cartel in all but name) handled its own small northern outbreak with brutal efficiency, quarantining the depth of its first twenty miles of its US border with ruthless death squads. Hawaii and Puerto Rico became victims of an air travel society when, early on, the sick and the healthy alike looked for refuge on those islands. Paradise was lost as the Pacific State and the Caribbean protectorate were sealed off and ultimately abandoned to chaos. As far as Jon knew, it was only the US that had been attacked. His shortwave radio merely told of the economic collapse occurring on the rest of the planet and the concurring bedlam that was its natural consequence. And now there was another twist: He hadn’t witnessed it himself, but a few soldiers talked about it. Some kind of mind control. Like the infected could reach out mentally, get in your head and mess with it. None of the men he talked to could really describe it other than to say that it scared the crap out of them worse than a whole charging mob of the marauding berserkers. Jon could only take their word for it. His own experience with infected people had been harrowing enough without the added element of mental telepathy.
A branch snapped under his right foot and he stopped cold, listening for the consequences. He needed to concentrate. His city-boy gait must have sounded like a foraging bear without a care in the world. As he resumed walking, each crack of a stick had him wincing at his clumsiness, his unintended signal of approach. As he got closer to the water, he began to make out the lines of a small house. It had a pitched roof and clear-coated pine siding. It looked to be in good shape — at least from a distance. He stepped onto a dirt driveway that must have wound its way back to the road where his Jeep was parked and paused, looking through the trees. He had a small pair of binoculars on his hip and leaned his shotgun against a tree to allow for a steady view.
There didn’t seem to be any movement. No generator, no lights, no smoke. The only sound continued to be the breeze; the woodpecker seemed to have moved on. He moved forward more slowly, really watching his footfalls. As the house became more visible, he could smell what he hoped wasn’t there. He’d done a story about slaughterhouses a few years back. The smell of fear and blood is its own unique aroma. He stopped and slid his riot helmet over his head, leaving the visor up so that he could see and hear better.
The windows on the near side of the house looked to be broken in. A rotting, fly infested corpse lay on the ground outside. No way to tell if it was a Fiend or a victim of one, but the fact that the skeleton was mostly intact indicated that it was probably the former. Fiends didn’t go after each other; the disease had no reason for assaulting itself. Somehow, the infected recognized the un-infected and only attacked them. Nature nevertheless continued with its egalitarian ways - in this case a parade of insects was slowly reducing the corpse to its component parts.
Jon slowly made his way around the perimeter. The evidence of a last stand was everywhere. The fools inside had watched too many zombie movies and had assumed that they could just board up their windows. The boards had been pried off - no point in trying to break a door down with so many windows to go for. The builder had wanted to take advantage of the view. The lakeside was almost all glass - broken glass now.
After Atlantic City, Jon knew better than to walk inside what seemed like an empty house, at least not without knocking. Lowering the visor to his helmet, he lifted his police baton and whacked it a few times against a tree. If there was a Fiend inside, he could expect it to come charging out any second, howling for a kill… nothing. He waited a beat and then whacked the tree again, just in case it or they were asleep and needed waking… still nothing. He raised his visor and called out, “Hello? Anyone home? Anyone alive?” Lowering his visor, he stepped forward.
Not all Fiends attacked like drug-addled lunatics. Some hid, biding their time. Some knew how to hunt. For some, a primal instinct stayed with them, an animal cunning. These were the truly dangerous ones. They were the alphas that could organize others into a pack of sorts. The Army called them troops, just like chimps. They even kept the understanding of rudimentary tools, mostly in the form of a club or a rock as a projectile, but blades or any sharp instrument could come into play.
He stepped onto the porch, picked up a shard of wood planking and tossed it inside, listening to it rattle across the floor… nothing. He stepped through one of the smashed picture windows. The house was trashed. Overturned furniture and broken glass, books, board games and puzzles, family photos and fishing trophies; all of the trappings of a happy vacation home turned to refuse. The kitchen had a big granite-covered island, behind which the occupants had made their last stand. Their picked-clean bones told the tale of their grizzly end. They were scattered around the room, the evidence of a feeding frenzy.
From a count of skulls, it appeared to be a group of five. At least one was a child. There had also been a dog, a pretty big one from the looks of it. A cautious search of the rest of the house confirmed that they had all died together in the great room. The Fiends had feasted and moved on. But for a few kitchen knives and a golf club, there were no weapons in the house. Someone had fashioned a mace from a bat and some nails, but that was it. They didn’t have a prayer.
He inspected the cabinets and found them to be nearly empty of food. There was a myriad of other supplies - flashlights, extra batteries, radio, gas canisters - but not much more than would be expected in a cabin. These people had been caught pretty much flat-footed. The fact that there was no car outside told him that either someone had gotten away or more likely, decided to try their luck elsewhere before the onslaught occurred.
He stepped back outside and walked down to the lake. The house had a small dock with an aluminum rowboat tied to it. As Jon scanned the shoreline, little wavelets made metallic sounds against the hull. About a hundred yards to his right was another house, or what was left of one. It appeared to have burned to the ground. In the middle of the lake was an island. It looked to be about a half mile out. With his binoculars he could make out a small empty dock. If there were any other structures, they were obscured by the trees. He decided to walk up the driveway to see if there might be a car between the house and the road, perhaps an unlucky would-be escapee or maybe the folks in the house parked closer to the road to throw an attacker off the scent. It sounded lame, but he didn’t have anything better to do.
The driveway led back to the road. No car except his dead Jeep. In short order he found the driveway for the burned house. From a hundred yards away, he could smell the charcoal crusted timbers. It had been rained on at least once since it burned, and the black pile of timbers let off a wet acidic smell. As he walked, he heard the woodpecker again. It was a reassuring sound; a bird busy at work meant it felt secure. There was a separate garage that remained intact, but the main house’s chimney had collapsed onto the driveway, blocking the barn-style door. There was a side door standing ajar. He paused and then took a cautious step forward, peering inside. Eureka, an old mid-nineties Volvo was parked amongst a slew of recreational stuff, a canoe, a small sailboat, rafts, as well as bicycles and other garage items.