Infectious (Book 1): Death is Just the Beginning Read online

  Infectious

  Part One – Death Is Just The Beginning

  Copyright (c) 2017 Steven J Davies

  First Published 2014 by Steven J Davies

  Contents

  License

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Notes

  License

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the Amazon store for your country and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter One

  Things were actually quite peaceful after the outbreak, once the initial panic and bustle had settled down that is. There was a lot of fighting in the beginning; tens of millions were killed, and not just by the virus. As the authorities began to realise that the virus could not be contained, that once it had gained a foothold in a town there was nothing that they could do to stop it spreading, they began taking measures beyond containment. Looking back, I can see how they thought these ‘measures’ were necessary but it still gives me the shivers to this day

  One infected person could pass on the virus to hundreds of people in just a couple of hours if, just for an example, he was in a shopping mall at the time. Those hundreds could easily become tens of thousands by the end of the day.

  The infection was, is, extremely virulent; it was passed orally, but just a speck of infected blood or saliva was enough for it to be transmitted and incubate. And that was the second frightening quality of the virus; the incubation period was extraordinarily short, just a matter of hours in most cases. Many of those infected died quite quickly; the virus invading the body and shutting down the central nervous system. It was a painful death, but they didn’t suffer long, at least not initially.

  The virus kept the brain alive – infected cells acting as repeaters for electrical impulses between synapses. It was not enough to keep the brain going for long, and many functions were lost as the organ began to shut down; nothing could prevent or slow the effects of oxygen deprivation. It was long enough though, for the second stage of the virus’ life cycle to take effect.

  The electrical impulses that gave life to cells were once again firing around the body as though nothing had happened. Even cell degradation slowed, and eventually stopped. The mitochondria attached to each cell, sucking energy from cells in a living host, began to plow its own stored energy back into the dead cell. The result was a battery powered mannequin, with a stripped down brain controlling it. Lungs slowly began to regain their ability to function, as did the other major organs. The only exception was the brain; oxygen starvation having destroyed all but the most basic of functions.

  These poor souls could walk, eat and see… everything a sloth could do, but not much else. They were left with their most primal instincts intact, the rest was dead. We have all seen zombie movies at one time or another, but the reality is much different. These undead monstrosities are basically big slobbering dogs on two legs. Albeit big slobbering dogs on two legs that wanted to rip your face off.

  Not all infected were created equal though, there were different kinds. Just like any other virus, it didn’t have the same effect on everyone. Some people just became carriers and didn’t show any symptoms at all. Some were killed outright and never got back up. The vast majority though became the nightmare creatures that we all know and love from the big screen.

  Then there were the Junkies. At least that’s what we called them, because they acted like adrenaline junkies. They were hit by the second stage of the virus without suffering through the first. In other words they were unaffected except for the huge surge of energy that was shot into them courtesy of the mitochondria electrical dump. These guys went on the biggest caffeine rush of their lives, however short-lived that life may be. If they were not killed by massive heart failure then they were ripped apart by packs of infected when they decided to take them on single, and bare, handed.

  For all of the horror, I am reasonably sure that bunches of guys in white lab coats were locked away somewhere, busy fiddling with their chemistry sets trying to find a solution. I will probably never know for sure, I doubt anybody ever will. What I do know, is what I saw. Mushroom clouds tend to leave a lasting impression. The tactical nukes were meant to destroy the virus by removing the carriers and the infected. By the time the nuclear capable nations realised the futility of their decision, it was far too late; entire countries were laid to waste, devastated by their own heavy handedness.

  The countries that were not nuclear capable, or unwilling to launch, received a helping hand from some of the others in their desperate attempt to save humanity. The whole African continent was virtually turned to glass; even the cockroach would find life hard there now. In the West, small towns survived, a couple of the larger cities in Europe and North America were spared too – the dawning of the truth coming too late for everybody else. The truth being that nothing on earth could stop the spread of the virus – it was just too damn fast!

  Pockets of survivors walled off sections of their towns and cities, securing what they could in the little time available; gates were manned twenty four hours a day by armed guards. The walls themselves were built as high as could be managed, armed guards patrolled them constantly now. It took time to build all of this, some areas of the ‘wall’ were just piled rubble and debris, temporary measures as defences were built and upgraded. These outposts were sometimes no bigger than a few square blocks in size, most were smaller even than that.

  Outside of these walls is what we call ‘no-man’s land’, and nobody ever ventured outside of the walls without good reason and never alone or unarmed. At first little expeditions were made to find supplies or other survivors. Pretty soon after the walls went up hardly anybody left the outposts at all, because there was just no point anymore. Livestock that could not be brought ‘inside’ were dead, and if anybody was out there when the walls went up then they were surely dead by now too.

  To survive meant self sustaining communities and every roof in these walled towns and outposts had a makeshift garden covering it. They didn’t produce enough food for the average family, but the communal vegetable gardens on the public buildings helped. All in all they did OK for themselves, it could have been worse; they could be out here with the rest of us poor bastards. I’ve been surviving out in no-man’s land almost from the start, feeding on whatever couldn’t run away fast enough.

  It was my girlfriend, Sarah, that infected me. We didn’t know she was a carrier – she had none of the symptoms and the outbreak had only just begun out in the rural areas. We were in bed, fooling around, when she bit my neck. Just a bit of fun, but she was too rough and broke the skin with her teeth.

  For a few days we both thought I had flu, even as it got progressively worse. It was as we watched the world burn on the news, and outside on the street, that we started getting scared. It was on day five of my illness that I died, the virus ‘reviving’ me a few hours later. I felt okay at first, all things considered. At that point I hadn’t even realised that I had, technically, died.

  Sarah was next door begging for clean water, I could hear her voice as though it was the only sound in the world that mattered right at that moment. It was when she came back in that the shit hit the fan. She had never looked
so beautiful to me, but beautiful in the way that a raw steak is to a starving lion. She was barely in the door when i jumped on her, teeth tearing into her throat while my fingers gouged her eyes.

  The garbled, choked off screaming deep in her throat was the most beautiful sound that I had ever heard in my life. Our neighbours found me, squatting over her in the hallway ripping chunks of flesh from her still warm carcass. Seeing me shoving globs of meat in to my mouth, Paul and Kelly just ran. I don’t blame them. I left the city after that, moved around from place to place.

  Being a raw flesh eater isn’t brilliant, but if I want to live then I don’t have much choice. You see, I am a zombie and while I am still in control of my faculties, I do have zombie needs and desires; the virus feeds the mitochondrial parasite in order to keep the body ‘alive’, and mitochondria need living tissue.

  I tried fruit and veg, I really did, but it meant that I had to eat constantly! Nobody wants to see a dead guy continually stuff his face with cabbage do they? I tried goat next, as an alternative to my neighbours, but the virus affects all mammals, regardless of species. The damn thing chased me, slavering, for six miles before i managed to lose it in the ruins of the city.

  I stay away from the others as much as I can; I think I just confuse them. They somehow can tell the difference between a healthy human and one of their own; presumably in much the same way a dog wouldn’t normally eat another dog, an infected won’t try to eat another infected. Probably not enough nutritional value or it just isn’t in the interests of the virus - the controlling force.

  They know I am infected, but they know I am not like them either. I have a few bite marks from a few that had decided that they wanted to try a little nibble. Finding anything even remotely edible in this brave new world is a challenge, because if it was a mammal then it was probably infected. Fish were off the menu because of the irradiated water supplies, and birds were ridiculously hard to catch in significant numbers.

  I did make an unusual, and very interesting, discovery though. It appears that rats can carry the disease without being affected by it, making them a viable food source – for me anyway. I had never given much thought to rats, I had neither liked nor disliked them. Now they had become a staple of my diet though, I just thought of them as furry chickens. Tasted like it too, actually

  I find that the best way to eat rat is to bite off the head then squeeze the body while holding it upside down over your mouth. Once you have drank your fill, you just skin the body and chow down. I don’t bother with the legs or head though, too much bone for meat. My little discovery did make me wonder though, whether anybody else knew about the rats ability to carry the virus without adverse effect? I knew from a paranoid friend, back when the biggest threat was the government, that it was roughly a hundred miles from home to Chorley, home of the Health Protection Agency and probably my only hope of being being cured.

  It would take an absolute age to get there without transport but I had to try. Maybe with my blood and the rats to experiment on, they could work towards some kind of vaccine? I didn’t hold out much hope but everything about the idea screamed ‘road trip’, so off I went. After leaving Coventry, I wandered around - literally lost; I knew Chorley was to the North, somewhere, but which way was that?

  After a few false starts and asking directions at outposts (outwardly, I look as human as anybody else which helps a huge amount!) I managed to get pointed in the right direction and I even managed to snag a toy compass! It wasn’t massively accurate, but I was told it still worked like a regular compass… More or less. I figured that I should be able to spot the town once I was close enough, so the compass didn’t need to be pinpoint accurate anyway.

  With a destination in mind and a fairly rough idea of where I was going, off I set. The plan was to find the Eastern Bypass, a few miles north of Coventry, then follow the M6 all the way to Chorley. Simple. Right?

  Chapter Two

  It was fairly quiet on the roads, nobody drove anywhere anymore for a start. People rarely ventured outside of their settlements – not even to visit neighbouring towns, there just wasn’t any point anymore. The walled off towns were completely self-sufficient, there was nothing in no-man’s land to tempt them. Sure, a few adventurous types scoured the ruins of the old cities, looking for the non-essentials that could make life just a little more bearable. For example, Scotch whiskey was a favourite; a brave man could earn a living bringing that stuff in to trad

  A few others had taken it upon themselves to rid the world of the infected (almost nobody called us zombies, it just seemed so comical). These guys spent nearly all their time out here, in ‘the real world’ as they liked to call it. They were more dangerous than the infected; they were usually half baked and mad with grief for a lost loved one. That was the average merc; filled with ideas of revenge and with nothing left to lose.

  I have no idea if there are more like me, I haven’t met one yet, but the mercs wouldn’t see the difference between us and the other infected. I don’t really blame them either; if I was hungry and out of rat, I would cheerfully bury my head in their guts and eat the fuckers from the inside. I do have some control over the hunger, but no so much that I can ignore it completely. If a guy is hungry then I guess he is going to eat, whether he is a vegetarian, meat eater… or, technically, a zombie.

  I was following a long overgrown highway, just near Charlestown, when I spotted a small group of infected. They were clumped in the centre of a ring of vehicles, hunched over, eating greedily from the ground. I couldn’t see what they had found, not with all the cars in the way, but it looked as they had gotten some really fresh meat. There were trees either side of the road, perhaps some infected woodland creatures had been unfortunate enough to pick a fight with a group larger than themselves

  I started laughing at the image of a bunch of zombie squirrels and chipmunks going head to head with a shuffling horde. Too late, I clamped my big mouth shut again. Almost as one, the group of infected turned their heads to look at me with barely functioning eyes. The look of confusion on their blood smeared faces was comical, or it would be if it didn’t make my guts bubble with fear. I had been dead once, and I have no intention of experiencing it again.

  It can still be dangerous for me to be around the infected; 9 times out of 10 they will keep walking, confused but not threatening. If I stumble into a group when it’s feeding time, however, I’m just as vulnerable as anybody else. I have never really thought about it too much but I guess something in their zombie heads is more aggressive where food is concerned.

  I put my best brain-dead look on my face and shuffled forward, resisting the urge to groan ‘braaaaiiins’. I have no idea why that popped into my head, this was hardly a time to laugh, but I had to struggle not to nonetheless.

  A few of them stood, still staring at me, chewing slowly on whatever they had found in the road. Some kind of decision was obviously made and passed through the pack, because almost as one they fixed me with their full attention. The infected that were still crouched now stood to join the others, moving toward me and getting faster with each step. Some clambered over the cars that stood in their way, others just moved around them. Frozen to the spot with fear, all I could do was watch this slobbering zombie pack bring their tooth filled mouths closer to me.

  This wasn’t the first time I had been in a similar situation, but this was different; the cars were fairly close to each other and the weeds growing through the cracked tarmac seemed to conspire against me – snagging on my jeans and trying to trip me. There were a half dozen infected moving toward me, and they were quickly closing the gap between us.

  The first guy reached me, opening his mouth to reveal a row of blood stained and broken teeth. As his hand reached out to grab me, I batted it away and punched him in the jaw. His head disappeared in a red cloud of blood and brains, splattering my face with gore and bits of skull.

  Wiping globs of brain matter from my eyes, I looked up to see the other infected dropping
to the ground. Some went straight down, extra holes appearing in their heads. Others danced a little jig, blood and fabric clouding up from small impact sites on their bodies.

  My head began to clear a little; the immediate zombie threat gone, the panic subsided and I began to hear what was going on around me. The sound of gunfire was unmistakable now, whoever had just saved me was now throwing rounds at the remaining infected. It must have been over in seconds, but it felt much longer.

  Nothing was moving now, just the branches in the trees swaying in sync with the breeze. The silence following the gunfire was almost disturbing, like it didn’t belong here in the middle of this gruesome scene.

  “Hey, you! You OK?” The voice belonged to my saviour, a dirty faced woman of about thirty. Her dark brown hair, tied back in a ponytail, swished behind her as she jogged toward me, weaving through the cars and hopping over corpses. She was beautiful! Slim, athletic and wearing a dark green vest top, she looked every inch the zombie slayer – Amazon warrior style.

  All I could do was stare at her and wonder what her legs tasted like! Her expression began to shift as she got closer, the realisation of what I am bringing her up short. Her right hand, complete with pistol, came up and into my field of vision.

  Oh crap! “Wait, just stop! It’s OK! I’m not…”

  I was interrupted by the gunshot.

  My heart skipped a beat, strange as that may sound, when she pulled the trigger. My body is amazingly resilient now, but I am pretty sure that a bullet to the head would shut me up forever. I didn’t go down though, in fact I didn’t feel a thing; the guy behind me though was now missing a fist sized portion of his head. Looking from the cranially challenged corpse to my saviour all I could manage was a hoarse “um, thanks”

  “No problem shambles. Not seen one of your lot for a while, thought they were all dead”