The Survivors Book III: Winter (21 page)

"
Well, there's no logical reason to assume that we can't eat zombie pigs," he commented.  "I mean, have you ever tried?"

"
No!" I exclaimed, horrified by the mere suggestion.  "You would have to be a special kind of crazy to actually consider doing that.  They're all… rotten and stuff.  Gross."

"
Yes," he said slowly, as though talking to a child.  "I didn't say they were appetizing.  I was just suggesting that it's entirely possible that they're edible.  Appetizing and edible are two different things."

I opened my mouth to argue, but at the same moment it suddenly clicked that he was trying to bait me.
 "Hang on just one corn-picking minute… are you just trying to get out of ever being put on kitchen duty again?"

"
Of course not!"  He made a dismissive gesture with one hand, but it was just a little bit too dramatic to be real.  "I'm just saying, don't knock it 'til you've tried it, right?  Like Brussels sprouts."

"
That's it, now you're doing the dishes every night for the rest of forever," I teased right back, folding my arms across my chest.

"
You have no sense of humour at all."  He started to say something else, but something out in the rain caught his attention.  His eyes flew wide and he slammed on the brakes so suddenly that I was jerked half out of my seat.  If we hadn't been travelling at a snail's pace because of the rain, it could have done serious damage.  Luckily for me, it just ruffled my feathers.

"
What?" I exclaimed, shoving myself back into my seat.  "What is it?"

"
There's someone out there," he answered, his voice barely above a whisper.  "Or something.  I can't tell."

"
Stop the convoy," I told him, my irritation at the sudden halt vanishing in the blink of an eye.  "I'll check it out."

"
Sandy, no," Michael protested, grabbing my hand.  "Not by yourself."

"
I have my gun right beside me, and I'm already dressed for the rain."  I gently extracted my hand from his, and pulled the hood of my coat up over my head.  "I won't leave your line of sight.  Join me as soon as the convoy is safe."

He might have had a few more words to say, but I didn't hear them.
 In a single, well-practiced motion, I was out the door and in a fighter's crouch, with my shotgun aimed into the mists.  I wondered briefly whether the weapon was safe to use in the rain, but there wasn't time to ask.  If it was an enemy up ahead, I had to be sure.

The rain was so heavy that it had me drenched in a few seconds flat, but the leather kept my skin mostly dry.
 As silently as I could, I crept around to the driver's side of the Hilux, and stared at the road in front of us.  There was something there, something moving with slow, jerky motions, but the details were obscured by the haze.

Suddenly, the door beside me opened and Michael leapt out, wrapped in a newly-salvaged leather jacket of his own.
 His lacked a hood, though, which forced him to squint to keep the water out of his eyes.

"
What is it?" he asked, so quietly that his voice was almost a whisper.

"
I don't know," I admitted softly.  I lifted a hand and gestured for him to accompany me, but I didn't wait to see if he followed me.  I didn't have to.  If there was one person I knew, it was Michael.  He'd always be at my side when I needed him, and that was why I trusted him.

I sensed him half a step behind me as we crept forward, weapons at the ready.
 Slowly but surely, a humanoid figure started to resolve out of the haze.  It was moving southwards in a slow, halting gait.  I knew without having to see its face that it was probably one of the infected, but I always erred on the side of caution.  There was no undo button if you chose to shoot first and ask questions later.

I held up my hand and made a gesture instructing Michael to hold his position, and then I crept forward and began to circle around the creature.
 For a few seconds I walked beside it, following a parallel course while keeping myself well out of its reach.  Eventually, I drew out in front of it, turning as I moved until I was very nearly walking backwards.

Suddenly, it turned and looked at me.
 Its mouth gaped, and it let out a terrible, blood-curdling, familiar screech.   I jumped back, my finger on the trigger, fully expecting it to leap at me the way the mutants usually did.

Nothing happened.
 It just stared at me, completely expressionless, and kept on shuffling southwards.  I glanced at Michael, but he didn't have an answer any more than I did.  Once the creature passed me, it seemed to lose interest in me completely.

Curious, I took a few steps backwards, to bring myself back into its field of vision.
 Again, it looked at me, issued one of those horrid, skin-crawling screeches, then kept on walking as though nothing had happened.

"
What the hell is that?"  A breathless voice asked behind me.  I glanced back, and saw that Skylar had joined us, along with most of the fighters of the group.  "It sounds like a mutant."

"
It sounds like one, but it isn't attacking," I answered, just as confused as she sounded.  "I don't understand."

"
How can it shriek like a mutant but not be one?" Michael asked what we were all thinking.  "Why isn't it attacking us?  Where's it going?"

"
Maybe it's going south for the winter?" I suggested, trying to squeeze a little bit of humour out of a situation that wasn't funny at all.

"
It's a proto-mutant," Skylar said suddenly.  I glanced at her, and saw her staring back at me with wide eyes.  "Like, something halfway between the mutants we know and the normal infected.  It's turning into a mutant."  She paused and stared at it for a second, then looked back at me.  "What's it wearing?  Is that a uniform?"

"
I think so, yeah," I answered.  I hurried back over, and slowly stepped back into the creature's line of sight.  Again, it shrieked at me, but made no attempt to attack me, which gave me the time I needed to get a good look at it.  "Looks like a nurse, or maybe a cleaner, I'm not sure.  I think I see an ID tag.  I'm going to try and grab it.  Cover me."

A series of grunts, and the sound of bodies moving and guns being cocked was the reply to my request.
 I nodded once, then I leapt forward and tried to grab the tag hanging around the thing's neck.  My first attempt failed, but it didn't even seem to care.  I made a second grab, and this time my fingers closed around the cold, wet plastic.  The safety clasp holding the lanyard in place popped open when I gave it a good, hard tug, and with that the prize was mine.

"
It's so faded, I can barely read it," I said as I returned to my group.  "That logo is familiar, though.  Do you guys recognise it?"

"
Yes," Michael answered, shading his eyes to keep the rain out of them as he studied the tag in my hand.  "It's the logo of the hospital where we met.  That thing is from Hamilton.  How the hell did it get this far south?"

"
It seems pretty determined to go wherever it's going," I commented, watching the thing shuffling away from us.  Suddenly, realisation dawned on me.  "Oh, God.  It's not just a proto-mutant.  It's a plague-bearer."

"
What?" Skye exclaimed, turning to stare at me.  "You think it's going south to spread the mutated virus?  Can that happen?  That the infected be re-infected?"

"
I don't know, and I sure as hell don't want to find out."  I spun around and pointed at her.  "Go back to the convoy and get as much accelerant as we need to get this thing burning.  We have to destroy it right now!"

Skylar nodded and ran off, leaving Michael and the others staring at me.

"Sandy, what are you thinking?" Michael asked, running his hand back through his wet hair to smooth it away from his face.

"
I'm thinking…"  I paused, turning the idea over in my head.  The more I thought about it, the worse it got.  "Michael, how many people worked at that hospital before the plague?  And how many patients were there?"

"
I don't know," he said.  "Hundreds, at least.  Probably thousands.  I mean, where do people go when they get sick?  They go to a hospital.  It felt like half the city was there towards the end."

"
So, where did all those people go?" I asked rhetorically, turning to look him square in the eye.  He stared back at me, not quite seeming to understand.  "Okay, think about it.  Let's assume that there were at least a thousand people there.  We know that sometimes the virus burns fast and devours everything, but we also know that sometimes it burns slower and takes longer to totally destroy the infected, right?"

"
Right..." he echoed.

"
So," I continued, "if we presume that half those poor folks have burned out by now, that leaves five hundred people that should have been in that hospital when we met.  How many did we see?"

"
Only four or five," he said, his eyes slowly widening.  "My God… where did all those people go?"

"
Out into the countryside," I answered morbidly.  "Spreading the mutated infection between them and the regular undead that are still on their feet.  If I remember my high school biology right, a virus breeds by consuming a host's cells, which in turn kills the cells and makes them unsuitable for the virus to keep breeding in.  The visible decay that we see happens because of that cell death.  So, if Ebola X is still living and breeding in these infected after so long, it must have figured out a way to keep reproducing inside dead cells, without destroying them completely."

"
Right…" he repeated again, though I could see on his face that I was starting to lose him.

"
Michael, this is it," I said, grabbing his arm.  "This is why the mutants are happening.  Somehow – I don't know how – the virus has been breeding inside dead cells to save itself from dying out.  That means it can keep breeding indefinitely inside the same host.  It's been doing that for ten years.  If we estimate that a single virus produces a million offspring every few hours, what happens when we multiply that by a decade?  What happens over the course of thousands and thousands of generations?"

Suddenly, the light bulb seemed to go on behind his eyes.
 "Evolution."

"
Evolution," I agreed, my expression grim.  "I think I get it now.  I think I finally understand.  There isn't just one strain of the virus, not like we thought.  There are hundreds of ever-so-slightly different strains, because of the population evolution happening inside each host.  We can group them into three primary categories, though – the fast-burning virus, the slow-burning virus, and the new mutation."  I counted them off on my fingers, my brow furrowed in thought.  "At first, we only had the two strains, fast-burning and slow-burning.  Natural selection has most likely killed off the fast-burning strain by now.  But, the slow-burning strain survived, because it evolved a way to breed without destroying its host.  And then the slow-burning strain kept breeding over and over again, until it started to turn into the new mutation.

"
With Ebola X being airborne, when the new strain emerged it could easily spread amongst the available hosts.  So, we can assume it evolved in the hospital, where there was – or should have been – that big concentration of people.  The infected would have no real immunity, so if the new mutation was dominant then it would spread like wildfire…"

"
…and infect all of those docile infected with the new mutation?" Michael summarised for me, a look of horror spreading across his face.  "So, if this plague-bearer finds another population of infected…"

"
…then it's going to spread the new virus to them, and then they'll turn into mutated infected as well," I answered softly.

"
We have to destroy that thing.  Right now!"  His voice rose to a shout, and he raced past me with his weapon at the ready.

"
No!" I cried, dashing after him.  "Don't waste ammunition!  We have precious little as it is, and for all we know the same thing may have happened in Wellington or Palmerston North or anywhere else that there's a dense concentration of infected."

Michael froze with his gun already raised halfway to the firing position.
 He looked at me, then looked back at the infected.  "You want to use your Taser on that thing?"

"
Why not?"  I shrugged, reaching up to rest my arm on his bicep.  "It's reusable, and it works.  We need to use renewable energy sources whenever we can, or we're going to end up with nothing left but a sense of regret and an empty chamber."

"
Well, that seems a bit dramatic," he said dryly.  With a heavy sigh, he lowered his weapon and nodded to me.  "Do you want me to do it?"

"
No, I've got this," I answered.  Just as I was handing him my shotgun, Skylar came running back with a flask in her hands.  She watched me pull out my Taser and flick it on, her eyes widening.

"
Is that safe to use in this rain?" she asked nervously.  "I thought water was conductive?"