Origins of the Outbreak (20 page)

The officer helped the other three people out of the building and turned to come back inside.
“Hey, that's it, man. You get the fuck out of here or else you're brains are gonna decorate the walls,” the gang leader said.

Gary walked past him to the girl and helped her to her feet
.
“Hey, big man
!
I said she stays. We gotta have some entertainment to help pass the time!”

The three men chuckled and slapped each other on the back.
Without warning, Gary turned and spread his arms wide, running full speed. He tackled all three at once and kept going until they crunched against the cigarette counter.

“Go!” he shouted, unable to tell if the woman was still even in the store.
He still had his massive arms wrapped around the gang and began to squeeze. The sound of sneakers squeaking on the tile behind him told the police officer that she'd recovered and made a break for it.

A rifle dropped at his feet and he kicked it away.
Then a sharp pain exploded in his abdomen, just below his bulletproof vest. One of the fuckers had stabbed him.

The pain intensified as the leader of the gang pulled the blade out and then jammed it home on the opposite side.
Gary's strength left him and the three men shoved him off. “You had to be the hero, huh Mr. Cop-man? Look what it got you!” The three of them began to kick him in the ribs and head.

“Shit!
That pendejo's bleedin' all over my floor. Take him outside!” the leader shouted.

They struggled to carry his bulk out of the store, but they finally managed it and deposited him unceremoniously in the street.

“Go get your gun, Hector. We're gonna kill this fool right here as a warning to stay away from our turf.”

Gary heard one of the men run back into the store.
“Please… I have a family,” he managed to say through swollen, cracked lips.

“You think I give a shit,
vato? You had your chance. All you had to do was leave that fine piece of trim for us and you'd still be alive. Not anymore, pichula.”

Gary rolled over onto his back.
He wanted those fuckers to see his face, so he could haunt them forever.

Tires squealed and the gangbangers shouted something
unintelligible.  Then there was a loud crash as a vehicle impacted against the barriers meant to keep cars from accidentally running into the store.  The Mexican gang was crushed against the concrete.

The woman
with the injured arm swam into Gary’s vision. “Come on! I know two of them are history, I don't know about the third. We've gotta take your car, mine's toast.”

Gary winced in incredible pain as he rolled over and pushed himself to his knees.
Once more, Coach's voice yelled at him
,
Get up you pansy! It's just a minor wound, and this is the fourth quarter!  You've gotta go protect your family.

He reached down deep inside his reserves and pushed up off the ground.
The woman placed a shoulder under his arm and helped him to his police cruiser. She shoved him roughly into the passenger seat and ran around to the driver's side.

By the time she was seated, Gary had fished the keys off his belt and handed them over to her.
She gunned the engine and tore out of the parking lot. “Holy shit, this has a lot of power!”

“Yeah, be careful.
I saw what you did to your last car,” he grunted.

“What hospital should I take you to?”

“Take me home. I don't think we should go near the hospital anytime soon.”

“That bad, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah.
They'll take the injured to the hospital first. Then they'll turn and start attacking people.  We don’t want to be anywhere near there.”

“But you're bleeding
.
A lot.”

“My wife is a nurse.
She can help me just as much as a doctor can. I'll get over this or I won't.”

“Okay, where are we going?”

“Get on the 35. We live north of Waco. I'll tell you when to get off.”

She looked over at him.
“Amanda. My name's Amanda.”

He patted her shoulder with a bloody hand.
“Thanks, Amanda. Gary.”

“Can your wife do anything about my arm?”

“Yeah, she can help with that too. Do you need to call your family, let them know where you're going?”

“I don't have a family.
I lied about having kids so they’d let me go
.
Didn't work though.”

“Where were you planning to go when the zombies
–” he grimaced in pain. “When the zombies came?”

“My apartment
.
I didn't get any food though, so I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“You can stay with us, Amanda.
Any woman that has balls as big as yours is sure to be a huge help in the coming days.”

She nodded her head enthusiastically.
“Thank you, Gary! Oh my God, thank you!”

Th
e
Prepper
,
7:17 a.m.

“This is it,” Kenny groaned, his face red with exertion. “This is the big one!”

Plop
!
th
e
turd fell from his rear and landed against the bowl of the low-usage toilet
.
“Ugh, yeah
.
That hit the spot.”

He finished reading the “Soldiers of Survival” magazine and placed it in the rack beside the commode.

“Wow, I needed that!”

“God, Kenny!
Can you at least turn on the fan? And I don't need the play-by-play next time!” his wife Carol yelled from the cramped front chamber.

“Yeah, sorry
.
Guess it's gonna take us a while to get used to being in such a tight space, huh?”

“It wouldn't be tight if you'd opted for that extra pod like I asked.”

“Dammit, Caroline
.
That was another forty thousand dollars!”

“Well, no one is
gonna give a shit about money anymore, you said so yourself. We should have had it installed.”

Kenny wondered what deity he'd offended in a past life to be shackled with that woman.
He and Carol – Caroline when he was angry – had met at a preppers’ convention seven years ago. It was love at first survival camp. Although their beliefs on how the world would end differed, they instantly fell in love and moved in together after only a few weeks of long-distance dating.

Kenny thought that the dollar would destabilize due to massive immigration and bring the world markets crashing
down right along with it. This would cause an all-out war because of the impending totalitarian government response and the Mexicans fighting to gain ground. Carol believed that the overuse use of GMOs in our everyday food would cause more and more cancers that would become both more deadly and airborne, causing widespread chaos. Either way, neither of them had predicted zombies and had even sniggered at the preppers that they knew who did believe in them. 
Goes to show you that you can’t imagine every scenario
.

Kenny had spared almost no expense in preparing th
eir doomsday survival location – minus the additional living pod which they could have used to store some of the goods piled up haphazardly in their subterranean abode. Over time, they'd eat enough food that the space would free up and they could move around more comfortably.

They'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase the land and three survival pods, dig holes for them and stock them up with supplies.
That was after they'd been able to save a lot of money since Kenny and Carol were both handy. They installed solar panels that were hidden in trees, ran the plumbing themselves and had devised low-cost ways to trap, purify and store rainwater
.
Guess the banks will never get the rest of their money now though
, he laughed.

The only concern that either he or Carol seemed to have was that they had to leave their house in uninfected Dallas and drive into the infected zone near Gatesville
.
They'd made the trip late last night, after dark so scavengers couldn't see them, and had – literally – ru
n
into a couple of the creatures along the back road to their hideout.

When they arrived, they’d sprinted for the safety of their pods. 
Kenny still needed to go out and cover the truck so they would be totally untraceable, though. God! They'd been so scared last night after they hit those two zombies. They'd laughed themselves to sleep after they were safely behind the heavy-duty, blast-resistant steel door and the terrors of the undead were locked outside. He wouldn't admit it to Carol, but he wasn't sure if hitting those creatures had been the right thing to do.

They had no clue how or if these things communicated.
What if they were attracted to scent? What if having the blood of those others on their bumper would only attract more of them? Carol may have had a good night's sleep, but his slumber had been restless and full of worry. He planned to take the truck several miles away from their site and clean off the gore the best he could in the river. Then he'd drive back and camouflage the truck so it couldn't be seen from the air and would look like an overgrown cedar patch to any observers on the ground.

Now that he'd taken his daily dump, he was mentally prepared to go topside
.
“Alright, wife
.
I'm getting ready to go up and clean up the truck
,
the
n
when I get back, I'll camouflage it.”

“Sounds good, Kenny.
Remember the signals?”

“Yeah, I remember them.
'Shave and a Haircut' is the duress code, don't open the door. Three rapid bangs then a pause and one more means to open it up.”

He'd learned about the
duress code from an issue of “Soldiers of Survival” several years ago. What it was used for was when someone had been compromised, but appeared fine to a guard. The code would alert them that someone had gotten to Kenny an
d
wa
s
either waiting out of sight or had a scope on him from far away. If he banged out the duress code, they had a lever inside which would activate pneumatic pistons and raise a six-foot tall shield up from the ground, creating a mini safe area that he could use to safely duck inside. He hoped that they'd never have to use that little invention, but it always paid to be prepared.

Kenny got dressed and took a short-barreled 30–30 rifle from the gun locker beside the front door.
He walked over and gave Carol a kiss. “You think we can break in the bunker tonight?”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“We've had sex in here probably twenty times since we built it.”

“Yeah, but we were never actually locked down,” he replied.

“We'll see. Just get back here soon.”

“'Kay,” he mumbled as he pushed past a stack of condensed milk cases.
When he got back to the door, he pulled down the periscope to check out the area. He'd paid extra for the military-grade contraption. It wasn't the type of periscope that most people thought of with glass and mirrors. The forty-pound device was a solid block of ultra-clear plastic that extended three feet. It still used mirrors inside, but because it was made of the durable plastic, even if someone shot the damn thing, you could still use it, you just had to look around where the round impacted.

A quick 360–degree s
can showed nothing of interest – which was exactly how he liked it. He gave it two minutes and then scanned the area again. “Okay, the way's clear. Make sure you lock the door behind me.”

“Alright, be safe,” Carol said.

He nodded and spun the wheel. It gradually released the pressure on the seals and then the heavy door swung away into the morning. The dull light filled the space and he had to squint, despite the lighting that he'd rigged up inside.

“Damn, it's bright out!” he muttered.

“Close the hatch so dust doesn't get inside!”

“Damn, woman!
You don't stop, even in the end of times!”

“There's no reason to tax the air filtration system if we don't need to,” she chided.

“Hell
,
tha
t
I can support. Alright, see you soon.” He stepped over the threshold and closed it gently behind himself
.
Damn woman and her nagging!

He rested the rifle in the crook of his arm and walked over to the truck.
Dried blood and intestines covered the front bumper. He thought about what he was supposed to do in order to get rid of it.  There was a creek about six miles away that he planned to go to. He'd drive the truck in and then wash everything off in the water.

It didn't take him long to drive over to the water.
He'd never seen anyone driving on the old dirt road, but there were several houses along the way, each of them a potential threat t
o
hi
m
and Carol.

He hadn't started out as such a loner, but he'd evolved into one over time.
It was part of the territory he supposed
.
As someone who foretold the collapse of society – and really believed it – regular people tended to distance themselves from him
.
As time went on, he craved conversation with non-preppers less and less. He was absolutely fine with the support network that he'd developed over the years. He didn't know where any of his friends' hide sites were and they didn't know where his was, which was just fine. In the next few days, he planned to call them over shortwave radio to see how they were holding up.

He'd received a cryptic call from his buddy Sage yesterday while he was at work.
Sage lived in Austin and had said that the end was here. He was making a run for it with his dog Banana to their site. He promised to get in contact with Kenny over the radio as soon as he could. That's what had sent him over the edge. Sage was one of the smartest guys he knew. Hell the guy even had frozen dog sperm so he could impregnate Banana if they would be spending a few years underground. He may have been borderline crazy, but he knew that he needed somebody to talk to and eventually his dog would die of old age.

Kenny turned from the road and dropped the truck's front end into the creek.
He made sure to set the emergency brake and then got out to wash off the mess.  The morning was warm, but Kenny was fine in the water. Ten minutes into the wash and he felt an incredible sense of calm settle over the area. Everything seemed to g
o
still
,
even the birds that had been loud as hell earlier were now quiet….

“Shit!” he shouted, his voice shattering the stillness.
He splashed loudly to the cab of the truck and got the rifle. Seconds later, they arrived.

A group of twelve zombies emerged on the far side of the creek.
Kenny didn't hesitate. He'
d
gon
e
to survivalist weekends for the last four years. They passed survival tips and techniques, but a big part of those weekends was learning to shoot under pressure. This was the greatest pressure that he'd ever been exposed to, that was for sure.

He gripped the bed of the truck and swung up into it with ease.
Carol may nag the shit out of him, but since they'd married she’d managed to convince him to drop over fifty pounds and he could now run for ten miles without stopping.

He calmly brought the rifle to his shoulder and aimed down the iron sights
.
Crack
!
The first round sped from the barrel. He worked the lever action without even waiting to see if he'd hit the creature that he was aiming at.

Crack
!
Chamber another round
.
Crack
!
Cock the lever, chamber another round
.
Crack
!
Kenny was on autopilot
.
Crack! Crack! Crack! Click. Click.

He'd gone through all seven rounds and five more creatures advanced towards him.
The demise of seven of their companions – Kenny had learned to be
a
ver
y
good shot under pressure – didn't affect them at all. They continued forward, hungry for his flesh.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered as he dug in his vest for additional shells.
Several dropped with lou
d
ping
s
off the bed of the truck. The noise seemed to echo across the peaceful creek bed. They'd practiced firing when people yelled at them and hitting them with sticks, but they'd never really rehearsed reloading under that same pressure. It was always high fives and beers when they completed a firing table.

He managed to get three rounds into the gun and brought it to his shoulder.
He recognized that he was shaking and took a moment longer to breathe and aim before firing.

Crack!
Crack! Crack! Click
!
Kenny was out of time. The two remaining creatures had emerged from the creek. The first stumbled into the side of the truck and he jabbed the barrel of the rifle straight into its eye as hard as he could. The zombie fell, dead from the weapon smashing into its brain.  When it fell, the rifle was jerked from Kenny's hands.

“Fuck!” he screamed in frustration.

The final creature had reached the side of the truck and it was slowly pulling itself into the bed of the truck with him. Kenny reared back and kicked with everything that he had.

His steel-toed boot connected with the zombie's jaw and knocked it backwards over the side, but it was up almost instantly, pulling
itself into the back of the truck once more. He looked around in frustration what was he supposed to do?