Fractured: Outbreak ZOM-813 (16 page)

It looked as if the whole town had driven down this road to get out. Vehicles lined the two-lane highway, some wrecked, some burned, and some looked simply abandoned. It seemed the people who lived in the area didn’t make it past this point. Perhaps they had abandoned their vehicles, or maybe they lost their lives to the infected.

The highway dead ended into a T-intersection.

Dan slowed the truck until we came a complete stop.

“West. Turn left and head west. We know their property is against the ocean.” I was overcome with emotion. “Map. Ethan, honey, can you grab me the map in the glove box?”

Ethan popped open the glove box, reached for the road map, and handed it back to me. I quickly scanned it while Dan turned, taking the road left.

“Forest Road doesn’t look like a main road. It’s right off this one to the left.”

Dan took his eyes off the road, catching my eyes for a brief second in the rear view mirror, and then brought his eyes back, straight ahead.

Like all the miles we covered, these last few seemed to take forever. The rocking motion the road created under the tires as we held a cautious 30 miles per hour almost brought a comfort to my mind, like putting me into a meditative state, only I was still conscious. Like a baby being rocked so they stop crying. 

Dan slowed the truck down and turned left when we reached the old sign that read
Forest Road
. This simple action flooded energy into my body, making me want to jump out of the truck and run the rest of the way.

“This is it.” My eyes followed a wooden fence lining the road. The property was huge. The paved road became bumpy gravel. Dan slowed the truck, and Jaxon and I eagerly leaned into the back of the front seats. 

Several cars clogged the gate in the wooden fencing that lined the property.

Jaxon adjusted in his seat, studying the property.  

“Do you recognize any of these cars?” Jaxon asked.

“No. But their cars were still at home.” 

Dan continued forward, driving carefully past the wreckage. The entrance wasn’t fully blocked, allowing Dan to maneuver the truck through the mangled cars.

There were no bodies in the cars, and I hoped that would be a good sign. Maybe these were for the sole purpose of keeping people out.

The house was on the back of the property. An old craftsman style farmhouse designed for modern day with a large, white porch lining most of the house.

There were no visible cars parked nearby, and no signs people might be inside the house.

Dan stopped the truck and put it in park. He picked up the weapon that he had placed between his seat and the center console.

Mayhem sniffed the air, but I had no intentions of getting out of the truck just yet.

“Why aren’t they coming out?”

“Do we have the right house?” Jaxon scanned for any immediate threats.

“We have the right house. I’ve seen pictures of the place,” I protested.

“I’ll leave the engine running, you know, just in case.” Dan opened his door and stepped out.

I pulled Mayhem away from the door so I could follow. Jaxon went out his door, leaving Ethan inside.

It was so quiet.

The ocean breeze was cool and rustled the grass as it blew inland. The property ended at a cliff that fell into the water. The house was so still. We couldn’t expect lights to be on telling us there was life inside, but I thought that some signs of life would be present. For one, my sister and her family running out the door to greet us.

There was nothing.

I stood in front of the house, staring at the front door. Every fiber of my being wanted it to open from the inside. I wanted Mel to run out holding the baby and Jason by their side. I wanted them to throw their arms around me, and we would all be together again.

Dan walked around one side of the house with his gun drawn, Jaxon walked around the other, his gun also pointed straight ahead in a tactical stance.

I stood, and I watched the front door.

I pulled my gun from the back of my waist band and approached the house.

There were three steps leading up to the porch to the front door.

One.
  The wood under my feet creaked and bent as my weight pressed against it.

Two.

I took a deep breath and paused. Waiting. Listening. Hoping that if something did decide to burst out of the front door, it would be alive.

Three.
I took a moment to just wait. Maybe Dan or Jaxon would come from around the house with good news.
Nothing.
I moved slowly across the porch with my eyes aimed directly at the front door. Each step seemed to be heavier than the next. My breathing was shorter, and my heart seemed to pump the blood so vigorously through my veins that I could feel each pulse through my entire body. I took a deep breath, waited one last, long moment, and reached for the door handle.
The front door was unlocked.

It opened easily without any of the squeaking that I had anticipated.  I let the door swing open until it stopped against the wall.

I half figured an infected would greet me at the door, bursting through, starving, and tearing at me to get a taste of my flesh. But there was nothing. Nothing dead or alive. The quiet was almost disappointing. An infected would at least give me some type of closure. But there was nothing.
  Standing there in the doorway, realizing we were alone, I stared into the empty home. An empty space that was undisturbed, as if the residents just vanished.
“Babe?” I didn’t even hear Dan come up behind me.
“They’re not here.” I looked back at Dan. Jaxon had joined him at the base of the steps. “They should have been here.”
“Honey. We always knew the chances were…..”
“No. No, the plan was to meet here.”

Dan and Jaxon said nothing. And I knew there was nothing they could say to make me feel any better.
My family hadn’t made it and they may never.
We had no plans past this point. Our focus had always been to get here, to Summer Springs Valley where everyone would be together until all of this blew over. It was the failure of optimism at its finest.

  It was as though someone hit a release valve on my emotions, and they poured out like a river; my eyes were the floodgates. Everything that had built up over the last few weeks flowed out of me in ragged sobs. I stumbled down the stairs and into Dan’s arms. It was just us now. I had to come to some realization that we may never see anyone we loved again.

Jaxon returned to the truck to get Ethan and Mayhem.

“We should unpack,” I suggested, not really wanting to let go of Dan quite yet.

“Yeah, I’ll go help Jaxon.” Dan pulled back enough to look me in the eyes, “They could still be out there. And we’ll be here waiting for them when they get here.”

I gave Dan my strongest smile with a firm nod of my head. He gently wiped the tears from my face and went to the truck to unpack.

For the next few days there was always something that needed immediate attention.  There was food to be found, fences to be checked and fixed, windows and doors to be secured and fortified.  As the days stretched into a week, the urgency started to wane. 

The central coast brought a gloomy fog that rolled over the hills and blanketed the land by late afternoon. The chilly winds off the water made the weather constantly feel like a mild winter. The cool weather and dark skies matched my ever-darkening mood perfectly.

The whole house was typically asleep not long after sundown. The enormous weight of what we had been through weighed me down both physically and emotionally. I didn’t have the energy for conversations or the capacity to enjoy stories.  My depression ran my world.  

One night as the house slept, I found myself wide-awake. and I started a puzzle. I worked frantically until the early hours of the morning. It was as if life itself depended upon my completion of this meaningless task; like everything could be right with the world again if I could simply put this damn puzzle together. In the end, there were 3 missing pieces, and I started to tear the house apart looking for them. 

“Honey, what’s wrong?” Dan’s voice caught me off guard as I didn’t think I was being loud enough to wake anyone.

“I looked everywhere. They have got to be somewhere,” I protested.

Dan stopped me while I was going through the spare sheets a second time looking for the pieces. He held me in his arms. “It alright, honey. You can let it go.” 

I cried for an hour straight and then slept for 2 days. 

When I awoke, Jaxon was making breakfast while Ethan was coloring on a pad of paper at the breakfast table.  Jaxon must have heard me get up because he had a cup of coffee ready for me. 

“Where’s Dan?” I asked, pulling Ethan from his crayons.

“Can I show her?” Ethan chimed in before Jaxon could answer. He had already grabbed my hand and was leading me to the living room. 

On the coffee table there was my puzzle, complete with the last pieces. 

“They were stuck in the box!” beamed Ethan. 

As I stood and admired the scene, a picture of a track and field event with athletes, spectators, officials, and families, Dan opened the front door, walked in, and put his hands around my waist.  He didn’t need to say anything, and neither did I.   

I took a walk around the property a little later and found myself standing on the edge of the cliff looking down at the vast ocean, listening to the waves crashing against the rocks below. In this moment of peace, I felt as though I was standing on the edge of the world.

Despite all that we had gone through, what all of the entire world had gone through, we were still here, and we were alive.  It wasn’t the end for us or the human race. We may have lost the world we knew, and we may never find the answers we want. But we would start over. We would love again, experience happiness again. We wouldn’t just survive. We would remember how to live.

The fractured world would heal.

END OF BOOK ONE

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1

April, 15, 2015   Florence State Prison, Florence, AZ –

The cloying stench of death and the reek of the unwashed dying permeated the air. It clung to his clothing and seeped through the bandana covering his mouth and nose in a failed attempt to stifle the foul odor. A century of death and decay wept from the limestone walls like a miasma, joining this new source of foulness. Levi Coombs fought down the nausea gripping his stomach and grabbed the legs of the body, while Howard ‘Ax’ Axleman wrestled with the corpse’s arms. Together, they flung the corpse onto the cart as they would a bag of manure. The body meant little to either of them. He was a convict like them, and cons meant nothing to anybody, people who society had disaffiliated, dismissed, and discarded. After three years behind bars, Levi had lost all respect for his fellow man and his fellow inmates. He had seen the worst society had to offer, all crammed onto a few acres tucked away out of sight behind high walls and razor wire, guarded by men with guns.

“Whew! He’s ripe,” Ax commented, wiping his hands on his pants and wrinkling his nose beneath his handkerchief mask.

“He didn’t smell much better alive,” Levi said. “Bastard’s farts stank up the entire cell block.”

Ax chuckled. “Yeah, Andrews was a piece of shit, all right. Still, it’s a nasty way to go.” He paused before glancing up at Levi. His brown eyes peering over his handkerchief looked troubled. “He might be the lucky one.”

Levi glanced down at the corpse. The raw, ragged wound in Andrews’ neck where a Staggerer had ripped out a fist-sized chunk of flesh might have killed him, but he was a dead man anyway. Like most of the population, Andrews had the Staggers, coughing up his lungs and crying like a child for his dead momma. The neat round bullet hole in his head had been added shortly after death by one of the few remaining guards to prevent Andrews from turning zombie like the others.

“None of us are getting out of here alive,” Levi said. “The guards had rather see us dead than outside roaming free.”

As they rolled the cart down the corridor, the squeaky wheels created ghostly echoes reflecting from the walls in the nearly deserted cell block, sounding like the moans of the dead. A few residents peered warily through their unlocked cell doors but elected to remain inside, choosing the relative safety of their cells over the freedom of movement. Just outside the cell block door, they dumped Andrews’ body unceremoniously onto the growing pile of corpses ripening in the sun, disturbing the flies crawling over the bloated flesh. The flies rose from the corpses in a dark cloud, buzzing obscenely.

Andrews was the last body in Unit 8, at least so far. Death had become so prevalent, so expected, that no one in the unit held out much hope for their chances of survival. Most of them simply waited for their inevitable death. Levi wasn’t that complacent. He wasn’t going to join the pile of cremated corpses.

A guard stood outside holding a red plastic can of gasoline in one hand and a 9 mm Colt Carbine in the other. He eyed the corpses and the two men with equal disdain.

“Stand back,” he yelled, waving the barrel of the Carbine at the two men.

Levi raised his hands as a gesture of submission and stepped back. Ax did the same. Both knew better than to argue with the guards. No one questioned whether a corpse was a Staggerer or a con who had failed to obey a guard’s orders quickly enough. The guard emptied the two-gallon container over the pile of corpses, backed away several yards, and pulled a road flare from his back pocket. From past experience, Levi knew what was coming and retreated to the open door of the Unit 8 cell block. He glanced at the death house next door where legal executions had once taken place. Now, anywhere would suffice. Any execution carried out by a guard was legal. No one questioned their reasoning. No one cared.

The guard struck the flare on the concrete sidewalk and tossed it onto the stack of corpses. With a sudden whoosh, the bodies became a blazing funeral pyre, to be cremated without fanfare or ceremony, simply trash to be disposed of on the rubbish heap. The guard, his duty done, turned and left, walking past several blackened stains on the concrete from previous pyres. He paid no more attention to Levi or to Ax. His fellow guard in the tower at the corner of the wall had them in his sights. To the guards, the two cons were just pieces of meat awaiting disposal.    

Levi was used to such callous treatment. When he had arrived at the Florence State Prison in 2012 as a three-time loser, he had been shoved into a cage and quickly forgotten. Living among thieves, murderers, rapists, gang bangers, and drug dealers, he had become as hard and as unyielding as the concrete surrounding him and as sharp as the razor wire running atop the walls. He had fought with guards and with fellow inmates, but mostly he had fought with himself. One thing only had saved him from descending into the dark pit of oblivion – the wild mustangs.

Training and caring for the wild mustangs the Bureau of Land Management brought to the prison had kept him sane. Breaking and riding the feral horses, even in the small dirt enclosure allotted to them, had given him his only taste of freedom, his only contact with a living creature pure and unsullied by man’s dark desires or his need to screw over one another. Now, the mustangs were gone, released when the Staggers hit the state. The authorities had seen to the freedom of the animals but kept the cons inside to die.

Levi didn’t know what the Staggers were, nor did he care. Rumors flew in a prison like toilet paper in a riot. Everyone had his tale to tell. All he knew was that people became sick, died, and came back to life. At first, they stumbled around like drunks, thus the name Staggers, but as time passed, they became fast, deadly killers consuming human flesh. The infirmary was full of the dead and the dying and only one overworked doctor remained on duty. Sick cons remained where they were, and the harried doctor came cell-to-cell checking on them when he could.

The first casualty Levi had witnessed in Unit 8 was Big Moose Callahan in for rape and murder. He fell ill and died within six days, hacking up his lungs like a TB patient. Before they could remove the body, Moose came back to life, attacked a guard, and ate his face. After that, all hell broke loose. The sick were separated from the healthy. Every cough sent men scurrying in the other direction.

Of the almost 4,000 convicts in the Florence State Prison, fewer than three hundred remained. The cons near the end of their sentences, or those deemed safe for early release, had been freed a few months earlier, leaving only the hardcore criminals. Since then, Levi had been attacked twice. He bore a livid scar on this right side where a shiv made from a toothbrush had almost punctured a kidney. The doctor had stopped the bleeding, stitched the wound, and returned him to lockup. Now, he carried a weapon of his own, a sharpened piece of copper tubing ripped from one of the bathroom sinks. Only one person had threatened him since, and his body had been burned with the Stagger victims.

A pall of black smoke, reeking of scorched flesh and gasoline, billowed around his face. He brushed back his long red hair and coughed. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he told Ax.

Ax rolled his eyes. “Sure. Why don’t you just ask a bull for the key?” he said, hitching his thumb at the retreating guard.

Ax’s sarcasm annoyed Levi, but he let it slide. “I have a better idea,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling.

Ax stared at him. “What?”

Levi shook his head. The best secret was the one only one person knew. “I’ll show you tonight in the cafeteria.”

He paced his small cell the remainder of the afternoon. The door wasn’t locked. He could have walked the length of the entire cell block if he wished, or wandered onto the yard. The remaining cons could now come and go as they pleased within the confines of the prison, but few chose that option. The guards were trigger happy, and one stumble could turn a fall into death sentence. One cough could invite a bullet to the head. Having a barred metal door to shut if someone turned zombie was another reason most remained indoors.

That evening, in the much shorter than usual chow line, Levi took his place behind a con named McHugh, a great hulk of a man with a nasty disposition and a reputation for hurting people for pleasure. He didn’t like McHugh, and McHugh didn’t like anyone. He was taking a chance getting so near the quick-tempered con, but tonight the risk was worth it. As they shuffled down the food line, McHugh loaded his tray with double helpings of everything, growling his displeasure at the hapless servers who cowered from him. Levi placed nothing on his tray. His stomach still reeled from the stench of the dead. He remained close behind McHugh, following him down the serving line. As they neared a table, Levi raised his empty tray, slammed the corner of it into the back of McHugh’s head with all his might, and then shoved the stunned man forward into the space between tables. McHugh, dazed by the unexpected blow, dropped his heaping tray of food and stumbled around groaning, banging into tables and reaching out blindly to maintain his balance.

“Staggerer!” Levi shouted at the top of his lungs and pointed at McHugh.

Other frightened voices immediately took up the yell. Cons scattered like frightened children as the guards closed in, shoving their way through the throng like bulldozers, swinging wooden truncheons at random heads too slow to move out of their way. Levi grabbed a confused Ax by the arm and yanked him along; joining one group huddled near the kitchen door. McHugh recovered enough sense to realize what had happened. He searched the room for his attacker. As his gaze fell on Levi, he raised his hand, pointed, and growled in rage. As he did, his head exploded, disintegrating from a flurry of bullets from frightened guards standing on walkways above the mess hall floor. Brains and blood sprayed the floor, the tables, plates of abandoned food, and the nearby cons. Men panicked. A melee ensued, as men scurried away from the gore, afraid the disease was spread by blood.

Mouthing a silent thanks to McHugh for his unintended aid, Levi and Ax eased through the kitchen door unnoticed. The cooks and cook’s helpers were staring at the turmoil on the floor and paid little attention to them, as they slipped into one of the trash bins.

They waited for hours in the filthy bin, buried beneath scraps of food, potato peelings, and empty cans. The smell was nauseating, but not as bad as the burning bodies. Eventually, as Levi knew they would, the workers rolled the full trash bins to the incinerator room where trash was ground into small bits before being burned. As he hoped, with the shortage of guards, they were allowing the trash to build up before separating the recyclables from the burnable trash, if they still bothered with such petty details in a world no longer concerned with environmental issues. After the workers hauling the trash and the single guard accompanying them left, he and Ax slipped out of the bins.

Covered in food scraps, Ax looked around the room, his hands on his hips. “What now?” he asked.

Levi brushed a dried crust of mashed potatoes from his shirt and pointed up at the smokestack rising from the incinerator dominating the center of the room. A conveyor belt ran across the room, ending in the massive jaws of the grinder, last step before the incinerator. When active, the incinerator burned trash at temperatures of over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. A series of recovery systems trapped and scrubbed harmful flue gases of their toxic chemicals. The system rarely worked as efficiently as the EPA required, but it was easier to pay the fines than to repair the unit. One benefit of the system was that the waste heat provided hot water for the showers. Now, it was silent.

“We climb out there,” he said.

“Are you crazy?” Ax replied. “We’ll fry.”

Levi smiled. “Relax. The incinerator is off. We can stand a little heat. There’s a maintenance ladder inside. Once we’re outside, another ladder will take us back down to the roof. From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump over the wall.”

Ax eyed the incinerator with trepidation. “What if they decide to start it up?”

He chuckled. “Then, my friend, we die a horrible death.”

After using a metal rod to pry open the small maintenance door used to remove ash from the incinerator, and wriggling his way through the tiny opening, Levi stood inside the narrow chimney and stared at the small circle of moonlight above him. It represented freedom. Ax, groaning and bitching, forced his bulk through the small opening and stood inside the smokestack.

“Christ Almighty, it’s hot in here,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow with his hand.