Surge (16 page)

This wasn’t Dolly. This wasn’t the woman who was a surrogate grandparent to me, and she wasn’t some frail, helpless old woman that I was attacking. I repeated it over and over again, as I bashed her skull in with the flashlight. Thankfully, the bulb cracked on the first blow, so I didn’t have to see what I was doing. Knowing that I was killing something that was formerly human, was bad enough, but to see it? I don’t think I would have been able to do it right then, especially with someone that I knew and cared about before they turned rabid.

I don’t know how long it took, or how many bashes to the skull it took, before the thing under me finally ceased moving, but I know that it was dead when John burst into the apartment with a flashlight of his own. When he flashed the beam on me, I immediately stopped swinging, dropped my bloody weapon and threw up right there on the corpse. I couldn’t even lean to the side and avoid disrespecting Dolly any further. I was covered in her black blood, my own vomit, and other things I couldn’t name; so I couldn’t blame John when he took one look at me, then the bloody pulp on the floor, and turned a pale-ish green, before running toward the nearest bathroom. I heard him doing some retching of his own, when I finally managed to crawl away from the body.

I never did make it to Dolly’s kitchen to look for food. John did something with Dolly’s corpse, what he never told me, but I was thankful for never having to deal with it. We went back to our condo, and I went straight to the master bedroom. I took three pot-fulls of our precious water, and scrubbed my skin raw, before I retreated into my room. I locked myself in there for a week straight, out of fear that I could be carrying the infection due to the massive amounts of black blood that was on me, along with drool that dripped on my face. I didn’t eat any of the food John left at the door, which he obviously managed to get from somewhere, but I did drink a little bit of the water when he threatened to break the door down.

When John finally convinced me that I wasn’t infected, since I wasn’t shitting myself, or coughing up blood, I came out of my self-imposed solitary confinement. When I saw Sarah’s worried face, still gaunt even with John feeding her, I decided right then and there to make myself stronger. To train harder, and to leave emotions out of it. I needed to be the big brother, the protector, and keep my promise to my dad of taking care of Sarah. That was when John and I started training in hand to hand combat, and a little bit of knife handling. We also added the condition of never going out alone. We would lock Sarah in our condo and watch each other’s backs.

With that decided, John and I cleared out all of the condos in our complex. Six of them had wheezers inside, one of which was formerly a family of four, but I didn’t look at it that way. I looked at it as it’s them, or us; and I chose us, so the nameless faces of the infected were taken care of, before we took the former residents’ supplies. When we ransacked every condo in the complex, we had to spread out and leave our safe haven. That’s when Cory found us.

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John and I were shopping in a grocery store down the road from our condo, when we saw him. Dressed in head to toe fatigues, we originally thought that he was either infected military personnel, or aid, but we weren’t going to approach him until we were sure. John and I followed him at a distance through the market because he looked more human, since he was walking upright. It wasn’t confirmed until he took two knives from his thigh holster, hurled one at a wheezer running at him, and buried another in the temple of the one closer to him.

Yeah, we immediately started screaming like little girls,
‘We’re here, we’re over here!  We need your help!’

Cory scowled at us, before throwing more knives at the incoming wheezers, which we had attracted with our excited exclamations. When he ran out of knives, he pulled out a silenced gun, and finished them off. Once the bodies were lying at his feet, he tucked his gun away and stalked over to us. Grabbing both of us by our collars, Cory knocked our heads together.

‘What the fuck was that for?’
John demanded as he rubbed his smarting head.

‘You stupid fucks attracted a crowd,’
Cory hissed.
‘And I don’t have time to deal with bull shit.’
When he moved to go around us, I grabbed onto his sleeve, making him turn and raise a fist. I immediately released his jacket and held up my hands.

‘We don’t want any trouble, we just want to know where we should go? Where it’s safe? Where’s your group? The backup? ‘Cause I don’t see anybody with you. Where’re the tanks, the guns, the bombs...’
I continued rambling until Cory rubbed a hand down his face and shook his head.

‘Look, I’m not with anyone,’
Cory said.
‘I don’t know where you should go, or where it’s safe, so I can’t help you.’

‘But you have to!’
I exclaimed frantically. He was the first person that we’d seen in months that wasn’t infected, and he was military, so he should have known something.
‘They said to wait, and we’ve been waiting for six months! What the hell are we supposed to do? What about Sarah?’

‘As I’ve already said, I can’t help you,’
Cory repeated
. ‘I was on leave before the outbreak, so I don’t know about any refugee camps, and I don’t know who Sarah is.’

‘She’s my sister,’
I said.
‘Surely you have someone to take care of. A friend, a cousin, your mom, a freaking sibling! Something!’
Cory’s faced hardened, so I tried to appeal to his humanity, no matter how buried it might have been.
‘You’re military, right?’

‘I was,’
he answered with a shrug.
‘What of it?’

‘Protect and serve,’
I said.

‘Country’s dead,’
he retorted.

‘We aren’t,’
I countered.
‘But we will be if we don’t get some help. We don’t have any formal training, but you do. Show us what you know and you can be on your way to wherever you were headed afterward.’

‘Or you could stay,’
John proposes.
‘There are only three of us.’
Cory clenched his jaw, so I pulled out the family card.

‘Please, we need help,’
I said.
‘My sister, Sarah, she’s only fifteen, and she’s starving to death. If you don’t show us how to survive, she’ll be dead within a week.’

Yeah, I stretched the truth a little, but it worked, because Cory finally agreed to follow us home. He only had the bag on his back, and that’s all he’s had since he never left. He arrived at our condo, looked at our laughable booby traps, food and water collecting techniques, shook his head and set his bag on the couch. We’ve since gotten him a mattress from another unit, so he now has a place to rest his head in the den down the hall.

The first thing Cory did was demand a trip to Home Depot. He took the keys to my Cobra and said he’d be back. I trusted him then because I took his sniper and backpack as collateral. But Cory was a man of his word, because he came back an hour and a half later. We lugged the barrels, tubing, tools, nails, lumber, rope, tape, and other various supplies through the gate in quick runs. Cory had pulled the car as close as possible, and we threw a few pigeons; which he had killed, to the wheezers to munch on while we unloaded. After carrying it all upstairs, Cory got to work.

He first cut holes in the tops of the barrel lids, and then he poked holes in the plastic tubing and fed it through each barrel’s top. Using a tarp, he rigged it with rope and tape so that it aimed downward at an angle, leading to a funnel which was connected to the tubes. Hence, we had six functioning barrels that put our pots and pans to shame. With a water supply available, Cory constructed a six by three rectangular box with the lumber and made it have two tiers. The top tier he nailed in a slotted pattern with boards, before putting a mesh barrier on the bottom and filling it with soil. Once the dirt was fed some plant food and hydrated, he planted various seeds for staple vegetables like potatoes and carrots, which have long shelf lives.

Cory’s inventions are what I’m checking on right now. I check the water system first. The tarp has been replaced already because some asshole bird decided to fly through it, but it looks good today. The angle is right, leading directly into the still connected funnel and tubing, so each barrel is ready for any more showers that may come our way.

Once I’m satisfied with the amount of available water for drinking, bathing and cooking, I check our garden. There are now several wooden, rectangular shaped boxes that Cory and I have constructed to accommodate feeding more people. Each one has drainage underneath, and are all filled with various vegetables and herbs. After I make sure that they’re prospering, I make my way to our appointed sniping position.

Our condo takes up an entire level of the complex, as I said Dolly’s was, but there’s a hallway that acts as a foyer. It’s separate from the living space and where the now non-functioning elevator used to land and has emergency staircases for exits at both ends. The window in the hallway facing the front is where we have a chair setup for who’s ever on guard duty to use. Like Carlos is utilizing right now. Walking over to join him, I lean against the wall before speaking.

“It was a good idea training the others,” I say, somewhat begrudgingly since I should have thought of it myself.

“But shitty timing,” he replies. “We honestly thought that she was alone, so we let Mike help out.”

“Well, he needs some more help,” I counter with a grin, showing that I’m not holding it against him. “Because he shot Olivia.” That gets his attention. Carlos’ dark eyes abandon his watch for a second to meet mine. “She said it was only a flesh wound, but I haven’t been able to check it out yet.”

After a nod, Carlos asks, “Where the fuck did you find her? Here Osco and I are, showing Mike how to aim, when we see this dark angel walk in calmly with a machete to necromance the wheezers to death.”

“It’s a dog whistle,” I correct him. When he looks at me similar to how John and I looked at Olivia, I just nod. “And believe it or not, she found us.”

“More like saved our asses,” John retorts from down the hall. He walks over and assumes a similar position to mine on the opposite wall. “Twice.”

“You expect me to believe that one tiny chick saved both of your asses?” Carlos asks incredulously.

“One pint sized ball of badass indeed saved us from our own stupidity,” I concur.

Seeing the look of interest in Carlos’ eyes, I relay the sports store incident, with some embellishment added by John, painting him in a better light of course. Claiming it was my idea to break into the case to begin with, the lying bastard, but I let it slide since I still went along with it. Just because it wasn’t my idea, doesn’t mean I’m not just as much at fault for following through with it, as my mom always said. And I’m man enough to own up to my mistakes, unlike the cowardly bastard grinning like the cat that got the cream. Too bad asshole, there isn’t even any cream left for you to get, you moron.

After we finish telling him about how we met Olivia, John and I leave Carlos to his watch; with us promising him a switch soon, and him promising us to spread the word on Olivia’s attributes. She’s going to need all the help she can get to gain acceptance in our group with her aggressive nature mixed with a dash of crazy.

Entering the condo, John and I head to the kitchen to see how our new supplies are coming along. The girls are working together diligently to put away our backpacks full of goods. The duffels are also unloaded onto the counter and organized into categories of weapon use, medical supplies and clothing. After all is found well and good in the kitchen, we make our way to my father’s old office and newly appointed sick room. New recruits are usually held here for a few days, just to be on the safe side, before we let them out.

This is where we find Dr. Akio, Tommy and Leonard. Leonard is propped up on the twin mattress in the corner, another drag in from a different unit, and trying to read a book from the floor to raised ceiling version of a library in the room. But reading is impossible with Tommy keeping vigil over his ailing grandfather. He keeps fussing over Lenny, fluffing pillows or fetching water and looking altogether lost; while Akio keeps using his doctor voice and asking,
‘How are you feeling?’
To which Lenny replies,
‘Old, now back off.’