Threnody (Book 1) (25 page)

Chapter 27

October 2, 2015

Forest, Mississippi

With all the chaos and destruction he witnessed over the last two days since his departure from North Carolina, Ethan Long found comfort in knowing that his younger brother lived only a few miles from his parents. 
He’s not the same as me, but he’ll take care of business if it comes down to it.
Despite being a decorated war veteran and serving in some of the fiercest military engagements in recent history, he found himself ill-prepared for the atrocities he faced when he arrived at his parents’ home.

While the blood and gore made it impossible to accurately piece together the events that transpired, the gruesome scene that assaulted his senses when he stepped into the living room of his childhood home left no doubt as to the end result: someone became infected, and the rest of his family followed suit.  Whether they were unable, unwilling, or uncertain of what to do, he was not sure.  The new off-white carpet his parents put in after he and his brother moved out was now a sickening, dark burgundy shade, perfectly matching the formerly tan walls that now dripped a similar dark crimson.  The stale air, tainted with the cupric smell of dried blood combined with the rank odor of vomitus and excrement, seemed incompatible with life.

Uncoordinated and agitated, the five cadaverous bodies stumbling around the front room were impossible to differentiate from one another aside from the differences in their height.  Ethan knew immediately with painful certainty that he was staring at what remained of his family.

Undoubtedly his younger brother brought his wife and three young children to stay at his parents’ house so he would be able to better protect them all from the Hell unraveling in the world outside. 
That’s what I would have done
.  Unfortunately, with all of his attention directed at the world outside, he never considered the possibility of being destroyed from the inside by the ‘Trojan Horse’ amongst them.

Standing motionless in the front doorway, Ethan felt as though his heart ceased to beat, and time around him crept to a standstill.  Horrorstruck, he watched with blurred, narrowed vision as the people he loved so much approached him with arms outstretched as if to embrace the son, brother, and uncle they had not seen in so long. He gazed intently at the vacant eyes and the vile, primal look of need adorning each of their torn, bloody faces, as he stood transfixed by the lurid play being acted out before him. Much the same as his muscles, his mind was paralyzed by the scene flashing before him.  Oblivious to the encroaching danger, he tried in vain to take a step forward to meet the impending embrace of his family.  To his great fortune, his feet remained rooted to the spot as if firmly encased in cement. The split second he gained from his incapacitation was just enough for his training to take over—brutally unhindered by the emotions and sentiments plaguing his human mind.

In a flurry of movement, he shifted his weight to the side, parrying the first set of reaching hands that came into grasping range as he simultaneously drew his pistol and took aim at the closest abomination.  He was thankful he was unable to determine who it had been, knowing that had he recognized the first victim, his all-too-human mind would have caused him to hesitate long enough to render his unimaginable decision moot. Seconds later, five tumid, rancid bodies lay motionless on the stained carpet, each with a tidy little bullet hole left by an expertly placed round to the head.  The smell of gunpowder and the fetid gases of necrosis joined the noisome stench that permeated the stagnant air.  Dark, glutinous ooze seeped out of the bullet holes, and suffused with the dried blood and unidentifiable tissue randomly strewn across the defiled carpet.

Moving forward posthaste, carried by the training that was now as ingrained as any innate neuronal reflex arc, he knew there were likely two other threats remaining in the house. 
Threats?
  The ‘threats’ were his family, but by now his tactical mindset was switched on and in full control.  For Ethan, the switch between the emotional, civilian human’s brain and the callous, tactical soldier’s brain always occurred without much effort, and this time was no different.

Rounding the corner into the kitchen, Ethan stopped dead in his tracks.  The two remaining ‘threats’ stood before him in a display more horrible than all that he witnessed in the previous room.  An adult, apparently female and most likely his brother’s wife, Melissa, stood disemboweled to the left of the small island in the center of the room.  Yards of sinuous, engorged small intestine spilled from her eviscerated abdomen, dangling like the tentacles of a beached Portuguese man-o-war.  The entrails were snagged on some unseen object and offered restraint to the miscreant as it clawed the air desperately trying to reach him.  To his burgeoning horror he caught sight of movement along the floor to the right of the island.  Lying there was a much smaller person who Ethan knew immediately was Paul, his brother’s youngest son.  Entangled in the loops of bloated intestines, he struggled futilely pulling himself toward Ethan as the visceral, maternal bonds continually tugged him back.

Insides roiling and palms sweating, Ethan could take no more, as he bent forward and regurgitated the scant contents of his stomach.  Seeing something as sacred and pure as the relationship between mother and child being treated with such blatant irreverence left Ethan feeling an overwhelming mix of despair, betrayal, and despondency.  Even during times of heinous war, there were certain lines that were not crossed by other humans, even one’s enemies.

Recovering slowly, he raised his head and questioned whether he possessed the intestinal fortitude to still the two miserable beings.  He stared blankly at the ravenous things in much the same way one would gawk at the victims of a terrible car crash. Despite their grotesque appearance, and the fact that they wanted nothing more at that instant than to tear him apart, they were his family.  In fact, after the events of the preceding room they were now his
only
remaining family.  With a mixture of pity, revulsion, and self-abhorrence, he turned and closed the kitchen door leaving the two abominations to their macabre game of tug-of-war.

In a daze, Ethan left Mississippi driving on autopilot, incognizant of the outside world.  He seemed to drive by muscle memory, without any conscious thought on the matter, back to Elwood’s garage—the last place he had been before his world was shattered.  He was unsure of how long he sat in the parking lot before he recognized the patches of bloodstained gravel and his truck still tethered to the tow truck.  As if the survival instincts of his primitive brain mutinied against his higher powers which remained stunned and dormant, Ethan’s commandeered body walked into the garage and settled into a motionless, unthinking heap on the second floor of the building.

Perhaps two days passed before the shock of the experience began to lift, granting his painful reality the freedom to resonate through all the recesses of his mind.  In that instant, Ethan understood the choice that lay before him all too well.  He had seen it before in every combat situation throughout his military career.  When confronted by the life-and-death, kill-or-be-killed reality of war, every person had a question to answer—‘Do I want to live?’  Answer ‘yes’ and survival becomes a possibility.  Answer anything else and there is no reason to fight, as death has already won.

For Ethan, this ‘combat mindset’ flipped on and off like a light switch, though he always found it easier to turn on than to turn off.  This, he knew, was not singular to him; countless soldiers never truly came back from ‘the war.’  Taking in the entirety of the last few days and the harsh reality of this new world, Ethan knew he wanted to live but also knew he would never be able to completely come back from this ‘war.’

October 14, 2015

Marengo County, Alabama

Cold, hungry, and dehydrated, Ethan slowly came to his senses slumped in a corner of the second floor of Elwood’s Garage.  Realizing he had to take a stand if he wished to live, he staggered wearily out of the garage, intent on dealing as much damage to the ungodly plague as it had dealt him. Using the survival and evasion skills learned during SERE training as well as additional scavenging tactics picked up in the field, he was able to exist largely undetected.  He set up a more comfortable camp at a house in the previously affluent neighborhood of Hermitage Estates.  Being a gated community there were relatively few infected in the immediate area.  For the most part he made it a point to simply avoid the infected rather than to engage them.  Such clandestine tactics were the backbone of his previous military operations, so they were second nature to him.

To Ethan, confrontation took an otherwise stable, controllable, and predictable situation and added far too many variables into the equation—in other words, such actions turned order into chaos.  Conducting the business of war in such a covert manner took an extraordinary amount of self-control as well as nerves of steel.  Being within spitting distance of the enemy without making a sound or any hostile action was not an easy task.  Still, having lived it, Ethan could not deny its effectiveness.

During the nearly two weeks he had been in Alabama, Ethan encountered exceedingly few uninfected survivors.  In the first several days of the outbreak he witnessed many people fall victim to the pestiferous harbingers of the plague.  Some managed to evade death and disease, but these occurrences overwhelmingly seemed to be the result of sheer dumb luck.  A group of two – one male and one female – successfully engaged in open combat with a small horde of the infected.  By the time he made it to the scene of the melee, however, the two vanished, leaving a dozen exanimate corpses in their wake.  While he sincerely wished them well, Ethan could not help feeling that such outright assaults would eventually lead to their tragic demise. 

Operating under the principle of avoidance was definitely advantageous for his survival, but it generally left him in suboptimal position to assist or link up with the rare survivor he encountered.  This, however, was not the case when the ragtag group of survivors ventured into Hermitage Estates.  With the paucity of infected on the neighborhood streets, he could move with relative freedom while still remaining undetected.  This made the task of surveillance of his new neighbors quite easy.  It was the largest group of survivors he had seen, nearly a dozen people, and they moved with a carefree nonchalance more suited for a leisurely vacation than a plague of apocalyptic proportions.  Ethan was not sure if they simply lacked any tactical knowledge or experience, or if they just did not care. From the first glimpse, an uneasy feeling welled up inside him. 
These guys are going to be trouble.
  He spent the rest of the afternoon observing their actions from a distance, being careful to remain undetected.

Despite his disconcerted feeling about the group, he did not see anything overtly concerning during the day’s stake out, so Ethan decided to retire to his camp several streets over from the houses occupied by the bikers.  At about 3:00 A.M., he awoke to the sounds of gunshots, yelling, and glass breaking.  Fearing the neighborhood was under attack, he grabbed his gear and set out to assess the situation.

Standing in the shadows of a tall Magnolia tree, Ethan was mortified when he saw the source of the commotion that roused him from sleep.  A large bonfire constructed by the bikers burned in one of the yards; long, orange tongues licked upward into the night sky like tendrils of a vine desperately seeking higher purchase.  Two men were positioned around the haphazardly built fire.  Fueled by broken furniture, clothes, and all manner of now useless household goods, the fire threatened to rage out of control at any moment.  While both men were clearly intoxicated, one seemed to teeter precariously next to the raging inferno, undaunted by the intense heat or the impending danger of the flames.

Even over the din of the two drunken fire bikers and the roar of the bonfire, Ethan could hear the sound of the others within the houses.  He ascertained that most of the noise was coming from the closer of the two homes confiscated by the group.  Moving closer, yet still remaining out of sight, Ethan began to mentally assemble everything his senses were feeding him, as he had done so many times before in combat situations.  He thought he heard at least four or five distinct voices.  While most were male and sounded intoxicated, there were at least one or two voices that did not seem congruous with the individuals he saw coming in earlier that day. 
Had others arrived after he abandoned his surveillance?
  The feeling of uncertainty about whom and what he was dealing with was disquieting to Ethan, and he mentally kicked himself for not remaining vigilant with his surveillance.  Before he could dwell on this any longer, he detected an unmistakable change in one of the unknown voices coming from inside the house.  As he moved closer, the feminine voice that had sounded like crying at first surged to a frantic crescendo of agonal screaming and pleading.  When combined with the obstreperous laughter and jeering catcalls of the men in the house, there was little room left for the imagination as the awful scene clearly materialized in his mind.

Not relishing another thought on the matter, Ethan leapt into action.  With two violent jerks of his Ka-Bar, the fire bikers were neutralized.  Cupping his hand over the mouth of the more intoxicated man, he drew his razor sharp blade across the front of his neck, transecting his trachea as well as his jugular veins and carotid arteries before pitching his choking, gurgling form forward into the fire, amidst great spurts of blood.  Before the second man ever had time to react, Ethan had his mouth covered and the tip of his knife twisting around within the left ventricle of his heart.  Riding the second biker to the ground, Ethan was back on his feet the instant he felt the body beneath him go limp.  Turning toward the front door of the house, he heard yet another change in the commotion coming from within.  He was unsure of what was happening as he heard a sudden increase in the men’s laughter combined with a pained, angry male voice yelling louder than the rest.  The female’s voice was now conspicuously absent.

Before he could consider the situation further, he saw a shadow move behind the window adjacent to the closed door, and shifted his position to put the large fire between him and the men in the house.  The front door burst open, and the revolting sounds of brutal, carnal pleasure spilled out into the cool night sky.  Immediately on the heels of the waves of raucous laughter was a half-naked biker wildly spewing all manner of vulgarity into the heavens.  His grizzly, gray beard hung down onto his shirtless chest.  The man’s beard, chest, and beer belly were covered with fresh blood.  One hand struggled to keep his unbuckled pants up while the other grasped his mouth that spewed copious amounts of blood along with his garbled profanity.  Moments later, another biker, also shirtless, came staggering out – clearly laughing at whatever misfortune had befallen his comrade.

As Ethan’s eyes drifted down from the man’s decayed, meth-rotten teeth to the bundle held loosely in his tattooed arms, as lackadaisically as if he was taking out the trash, he stood aghast unwilling to comprehend the scene before him. Before he was able to act, the biker unceremoniously delivered his package—a bruised and battered young lady—to the waiting arms of a crippled and maimed rev pinned to the ground by a spike from a horseshoe game.

Ethan rounded the now dwindling bonfire that had nearly burned through the undiscovered body of the first biker just in time to see the rev tear the first chunk of flesh from the swollen, bruised cheek of the poor woman.  He was grateful that the lady seemed unconscious until, much to his horror, he noticed her wide eyes.  She did not resist the monster’s attacks, but rather stared straight ahead with eyes that conveyed acceptance, and something else he could not place. 
Defeat—she lost her will to live. The agonizing death was less painful than whatever she just endured.

The thought infuriated him as he raced full tilt toward the biker who had delivered the woman.  Without slowing, he lunged forward landing a brutal knee directly in the biker’s solar plexus.  This folded the biker in half and sent him sprawling in the direction of the pinned rev and the young lady.  Wasting no time, Ethan pounced on the confused, breathless biker, driving elbow after elbow into his face until it was transformed into a ruined, bloody mess reminiscent of his own face after his injury years ago.  Groaning, the biker tried to speak, but only spluttered blood and bits of broken, rotten teeth; the wrecked face looked like a pot of tomato soup just starting to boil.  Hopping back to his feet, Ethan stomped down hard directly in the middle of both the biker’s lower legs and his arms, shattering all four extremities.  He pulled the stake out of the back of the rev and, in turn, buried it in the back of its skull.  Again withdrawing the steel spike, he held it high over the biker’s head as if poised for the final blow.  With all the rage and fury he could muster, he brought the sharp spike down fast and hard.  It made contact with a resounding
thump
.  Breathing hard, Ethan stared at the crippled biker, writhing in agony and pinned to the lawn next to the woman he carried from the house.  Ethan chanced a glance at her knowing there was nothing he could do for her.  He thought that the look in her still wide eyes had morphed into one of gratitude.  Ethan turned toward the shirtless, bloody-mouthed biker, leaving the crippled man to the whim of the monster he created.

The gray-bearded biker stood transfixed by the blur of movement that left three of his comrades dead in a matter of seconds.  His mouth was filling up with blood from his partially severed tongue that had been bitten off by the woman.  The pathetic biker began to cry as he choked and muttered incomprehensible, gurgling sounds.  No longer feeling the urgency of his former assaults and tired from his exertion, Ethan walked menacingly toward the biker as the man back-peddled away from him.  Without a word, he launched a fierce front kick that landed square on his bare chest, and sent him flying back into the embers of the eagerly awaiting bonfire.

A loud crack suddenly rang out from behind him as a high-pitched
whizz
tore past his head.  Instinctively, Ethan dove for cover as the bonfire flared brightly, refueled by the addition of the organic matter.  He was not entirely sure of where the shot originated, though he reasoned it most likely came from the other house.  Hedging his bets, he scrambled around the rejuvenated fire effectively concealing himself to anyone in the second house.  Immediately, he flipped onto his back so he could face the first house, still uncertain if all threats were eliminated from within.  Seconds later a few more shots punched through the flames, confirming his suspicion about the location of the shooter.

After a few moments, Ethan saw no activity in the first house, and decided it was most likely devoid of life.  He could see no cover in the immediate vicinity, and the path to the house offered little protection.  Knowing the concealment provided by the bonfire would be fading at any moment, he decided to simply make a break for the front door of the house.  Ethan was halfway to the door when the first shot broke from the semi-automatic rifle; the slow reaction made him wonder if the shooter simply failed to anticipate his action or if he was drunk as well. The first bullet struck wide, as the ensuing barrage stitched an ever-tightening line poised to intercept his path.  Sensing the shooter was on track to cut him off before he reached the safety of the house, Ethan zigzagged in an attempt to throw off his attacker’s aim as the report of more shots erupted behind him.  Even running at full speed and less than two yards from the door, Ethan knew he did not have much time before the bead of the rifle finally found its mark.

In a wild attempt to minimize the profile he presented to the shooter and to clear the threshold of the house, he dove headlong into the doorway.  With a painful crunch, his shoulder contacted the heavy wooden door as he barreled into the house’s foyer.  He rolled to the side the instant he hit the floor, just as a line of bullet holes bisected the spot where he had landed.

Groaning in pain and gasping for air, Ethan pushed himself against the inside wall of the foyer.  He cradled his throbbing arm as he tested its movement.  Although it hurt like hell, he was relieved to find that it was not broken.  He sat perfectly still and listened intently to everything around him.  He heard no more shots fired from outside and no movement from within the house.
Interesting, maybe someone over there has a sense of fire control.  Perhaps they aren’t complete amateurs after all.

He moved in a low crawl across the foyer, being careful not to pass through any beams of light shining in from the receding bonfire.  When he made it into the next room, he cautioned a glance out the front window toward the other house.  It appeared completely devoid of all activity.  He thought he saw at least one light in the house prior to his attack but now there were none.  While he saw no sign of the shooter, Ethan knew he was still out there.

As his position provided adequate concealment and afforded him a fair view of the other house, he remained there motionless.  He was surprised that the people in the other house possessed the discipline to wait patiently for him to slip up. 
These guys are just full of surprises
.

After several long minutes he saw the subtle movement of a curtain in a second story window as a brief, almost imperceptible, glint of moonlight reflected off a vanishing, shiny surface. 
Got you.
  Ethan kept an eye on the house for any further signs of movement as he scanned his surroundings for anything of use.  Against the far wall of the adjacent room, highlighted by the light filtering in through the window, he saw the outline of a hunting rifle propped up as if its owner just went for a quick bathroom break.  As he formulated a plan to acquire the weapon and neutralize the men in the other house, his attention was drawn to the small band of slow shambling forms trudging across the lawns of the two houses.  Ethan watched in amazement as a bleach blonde, stringy-haired rev wearing a waitress uniform from Joe’s BBQ Pit staggered right through the bonfire heedless of its destructive power. The greedy flames instantly consumed her desiccated form.  While there were relatively fewer infected inside the walls of Hermitage Estates, Ethan was fairly certain that every rev in the neighborhood was either in the front yard, or on the way to the party.