Surge (15 page)

“Once again, if you can’t handle it, it ends now,” I repeat and see her drop the pout in exchange for a scowl when she realizes that I’m not falling to my knees and kissing her feet. “Just don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

“Fine,” she snaps. “I’ll help.” A flash of tangled red hair flashes like fire, when she shoves clothing on and slams the door on her way out. Well, it looks like I’ll be going back to abstinence, and I’m good with it since my hand can do just as well, if not better than that red headed bitch ever did.

It also looks like John just gained a new member for his ranks. Because there’s no way in hell that phony witch will ever be allowed to enter my domain again.

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After Victoria slammed out of my room, I went to do my rounds. Each time I come back from a trip outside the gate, I follow it up with a routine. This includes making sure our booby traps haven’t been tripped and are in functioning order, then I check the rain barrels and the small garden that line the balcony off my parent’s old bedroom. It’s only during my rounds, or for bathing in their master bath; that I can work up the courage to enter their former retreat that John now occupies. Out of respect for my parents, we switched their mattress out with one from a neighboring condo for him debauch with his harem.

Before we had Cory to construct our rain barrel system, we used to collect water with pots and pans. Obviously, this wasn’t all that effective, so we had just enough water to scrounge by for drinking, but not enough for bathing. Yeah, we were reeking to high heaven with an unpleasant perfume of body odor for about six months, that is until John and I found a creek down the road. So, while we were dipping in chilly water and watching each other’s backs, Sarah was restricted to sponge baths. I know, it was awful, but we weren’t taking the chance of bringing Sarah out in the open.

We tried to shield Sarah from as much as we could, because we didn’t want her losing hope as the months trickled by without any aid coming our way. Of course she knew what was going on, since she’s wasn’t blind or deaf, so she seen the news reports back when the power was still on, heard the wheezers screeching in the street below, and watched the bombardments being dropped. But we didn’t want her to know how bad it truly was, so we kept up the facade. John and I played up our normal, silly selves to keep Sarah distracted with normalcy. We played board games, used the pool table, told jokes, and came up with stupid shit to do so we wouldn’t start bouncing off the walls with hyper energy.

It was impossible to keep it up, especially when it was obvious just how truly changed the world was, especially with the glaring the evidence of no electricity, plumbing and our shut-in status. But we couldn’t risk leaving our condo unit with Sarah, because we weren’t confident we could keep her safe due to our lack of skills. John’s dad had taken us hunting or to the gun range a few times, but we were by no means experts with our backgrounds; me being a former stock boy and John a lifeguard at our local Y center. Yeah, I teased him to no end about working for the YMCA when he’s straight, but that’s just what guys do. It doesn’t matter anyway, since John paid me no mind, because he loved working with the kids and had been there for the four years prior to the infestation. But back to Sarah, another reason we didn’t want her out in the open, was because of the close calls we had in our complex alone.

You see, we depleted our food supply within the first two months, which is understandable when you have three people with nothing better to do but sit around fretting. We were already showing signs of malnutrition from eating nothing but canned food that’s been overly processed, and that was split three ways, but then to add emaciation to the list? I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit around, waiting for help that might never come, while we starved to death.

That was when I made the decision to raid the other condo units in our building. I would have travelled to a grocery store, but the bombings were less than a mile down the road, and I didn’t want to risk it. I wanted to get food, and get back before John or Sarah could get any crazy ideas in their heads to follow after me. The only way that they would have agreed to let me go out alone, was if I stayed close; that way I could scream for help. You already know that if I got bit, I wouldn’t have screamed for help; I would have crawled my ass into the woods, and hung myself from a tree, as opposed to bringing the infection anywhere near Sarah or John. But I agreed to their terms anyway, so that I could get what we needed without endangering either of them.

So, after I locked Sarah in our condo with John, I went to check out the other units. Because the power had gone out a month before, since it was last February that we got the lockdown order, and it was only April 2013 when I started leaving our unit, it was dark by the time I had convinced John and Sarah to let me go out. I equipped myself with a flashlight, a knife, and my dad’s 9mm. As I mentioned before, he was a lawyer; and quite paranoid that one of his ex-clients would come after him, so he kept it locked in a safe in his closet. With weapons is place, I slipped out into our condo’s foyer, and used the back staircase to go down another level.

It was quiet inside the stairwell, so I crept down to the second floor unit. An old lady named Dolly lived there, and I knew her since she used to bake me goodies when I was a kid, and pay me fifty bucks a month to carry in her groceries; even when we had an elevator. I didn’t complain, since I was a teenager and I liked the money, plus she made the best walnut brownies from scratch. Dolly had to be the sweetest old woman I’d ever met, which is a rarity in itself since her blue-haired counterparts were never very nice. Always yelling at you to get off their lawn, or whacking you with their cane if you did something they didn’t like, or arguing over paying full price when they should have gotten the senior discount. Or maybe, it was just my granny that did that, so I’m prejudiced?

Either way, that was not Dolly. She had a heart of gold, even if she was a tad lonely. She was a widow, and her kids lived in Idaho with her grandkids, so she lived alone. But she didn’t become a crazy cat lady. Instead, Dolly had her car service called in daily at eight A.M. sharp, and went to the senior center. There, she spent the day doing whatever old people do at the center, be that activities or hanging out with her cotton-headed friends, until six o’clock when she was dropped off. This would be why I didn’t think to check on her, since I figured that she would have been locked safely in the facility the next town over.

Boy, was I wrong.

Dolly lived on the floor below ours, so I went down to the second floor. Thankfully for me, Dolly was one of those trusting people, so her door was unlocked. This meant that I could just turn the knob and walk in, as opposed to having to kick it down. I’m sure that John would have come running if he heard a crash, so I was doubly thankful for it.

Stepping inside, I shut the door behind me, before I continued down the entry hallway. All of the condos in our unit were cookie cutter copies, so the layout was identical to ours, and I’d been in here countless times, so I knew where the kitchen was. I continued toward my goal, not hearing any noises, but there was this horrid odor in the air.

I recognized it as an awful mix of rotten meat and dairy, the same smell that our condo unit had a few weeks back when the power never turned back on. We tossed our spoiled food out the windows, and pushed the fridge out into the foyer; but even before we rid ourselves of the rotten food, our unit didn’t smell anywhere near as bad as this. There was another identifiable smell underlying the rot, but I ignored it, as I walked through the great room.

That’s when I started seeing stuff on the carpet. Since it was dark in the condo, with the sun going down, the shades being drawn, and I only had a small flashlight to guide my way; I didn’t know what it was until I accidentally stepped in a pile of it. I remember looking at the shit on my shoe, wondering when the fuck she got a dog; and why the hell she left the poor thing alone, when I heard it. It was a cross between a growl and a raspy hiss, but the thing baring its teeth at me, was no longer Dolly.

It was wearing one of Dolly’s signature flannel nightgowns, the same one she was known to wear anytime she went out on a quick trip to buy scratch tickets at the corner market, so I knew that it was her; even while everything in me was praying that it wasn’t. I tried convincing myself that some deranged hobo had broken into Dolly’s condo, and stolen one of her nightgowns; while Dolly was safely locked up in her senior center and playing bingo with the angry elders she called friends.

But it wasn’t true, no matter how much I wished it were. What used to be Dolly, was now the beast in front of me. Dolly’s grey hair, which was usually immaculately coiffed into a loose braid-bun thingy, was nothing more than patches of stringy strands. Her frail body was hunched slightly forward, and the hands that she used to knit me ugly sweaters with, were curled into gnarled fists. She had a weeping wound on her neck, which had trailed black blood down the front of her dirty yellow nightgown. Worst of all, was the stench coming off of her. Even from ten feet away, I could smell the mixture of raw sewage and body odor coming off of her, thus informing that it wasn’t dog shit that I stepped in.

I gagged at the foul odor, and the reminder that I had stepped in human waste, as I reached for my knife in my pocket; even though I could shoot a gun. John and I used to go hunting with his dad, no, not real hunting; since I’m an animal lover and would rather shoot myself in the foot, than kill deer. Yes, I eat meat, but I wouldn’t be able to hack a chicken to death, before eating it; I preferred the packaged stuff in the grocery store. Anyway, Mr. Moure used to take John and me up to this resort in New Hampshire where they offered shooting life like targets in the woods, so you got to experience the fun of shooting real guns, without the whole killing aspect. I don’t care if that makes me a pansy, I liked it, and it allowed me to use both rifles in the woods, and hand guns at their range.

This meant that I was fully capable of taking care of one infected granny, but I didn’t want to alert John or Sarah. I also didn’t want to attract the wheezers outside, so I gripped the handle of my kitchen knife and stared down my target. I so did not want to do it. This was my sweet little neighbor who baked me homemade cakes for my birthday, and iced it with whipped topping, since she knew that I hated the artificial shit. This was the woman who used to come to John and I’s baseball games to cheer us on, even if my own father wouldn’t show his face. The same woman who used to knit me those god awful sweaters every Christmas, but I would wear it at least once in her presence, and smile to show how much I loved it.

Hey, I’m not heartless, and they were the warmest sweaters ever. I might even have the one from last Christmas, since it had just passed when the 44 wheezers escaped from the labs. I didn’t want Dolly to be infected, never mind having to be the one to take her out. But infected Dolly took the decision out of my hands.

I remember her lunging forward, faster than I’d ever seen her move in my entire fifteen years of living above her, making me have to dodge quickly to avoid her claws. Yes, she had freaking claws. I don’t know if it was because she hadn’t cut them in a while, or if the mutation made them rival Edward Scissorhands’s length. Okay, they weren’t that long, but they were about a quarter of an inch longer than her fingers, which is pretty damn long for natural nails. Whatever the cause, I didn’t want Dolly landing a gouge in my flesh like she used to do with her lottery tickets.

After I dodged her swinging arm, I spun around to swipe my blade at her. Since I had no knife training back then, I utterly failed at that poor attempt. I missed her neck, which was what I was aiming for, when Dolly did that growl/wheeze sound as she went for a bite of my arm. I threw myself back to avoid her teeth, not realizing that I was backing toward an end table, so I went toppling over it and landed with a crash on the other side. The table tipped, throwing a lamp on top of me, and Dolly jumped onto the pig pile. She was fucking strong, I remember that clear as day.

Her wrinkled fingers, that used to knit hats for her grandkids, were clinging to me in a Kung-Fu grip, and her face was less than four inches from mine. The lamp was crushed between us, and I had my forearm across her chest to hold her back, but because I was a newb, I dropped my friggin knife and flashlight when I toppled over. My flashlight somehow landed at an angle to profile her face, so I could see her red eyes and the drool as it dripped from her stinky mouth, to land on my cheek.

Again fighting the urge to vomit, I tried to toss her off with a shoulder shake. No dice, so I tried using my legs. I was panicking more and more with each second that I stayed trapped underneath the infected Dolly, so I threw all that nervous energy into a leg press. I managed to get one foot under her belly and kicked forward. The lamp went one way, while we went the other. Dolly’s grip stayed strong, so my shirt got pulled along with her, meaning that I got choked out a bit, but it allowed me to reach the flashlight. I couldn’t see my knife, and I wasn’t wasting another second with the feral grandma, so I pushed aside any feelings of wrongness I had.