Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (8 page)

Through the empty square, I see
only the gray-white of sky. Rising into a standing position gives me a better
vantage point, and I gradually see rooftops and a streetlamp, walls and busted
windows, followed by human heads and shoulders. A throng of infected, marching
up Route 1. The closest ones are only a dozen yards away.

I stuff the mirror into my pocket
and motion for Melanie to follow me in the other direction. We’re on our way to
the back exit when a noise makes us freeze—the
scrape
scrape
of feet dragging themselves
over dead leaves. It’s coming from the window by the
back
door, not the front.

“We’re surrounded,” I whisper.

Right now, the infected seem to
be parting around Tommy’s Bike Shack like river water around a jutting stone.
We need to be careful. A single noise loud enough to attract one or two could
lead to an entire horde.

I look for cover, but there is
literally nothing inside the former store to hide us from the windows.

For once, I am at a complete
loss. I’m just plain scared. I hate the feeling of being surrounded. Once, when
I was thirteen, a group of kids surrounded me in enemy territory during a game
of Capture the Flag. Instead of running or giving up, I started throwing
punches.

“I’ve got an idea,” Melanie says.

The panic recedes. I look at her
face in the shadows, and I see a smile. Goddamn, she’s tough.

“What is it?”

I’m nearly floored by her next
words.

“Pass me those firecrackers,” she
says.

It doesn’t take us long to get
set up.

“I’ll count to three,” I tell Melanie,
who nods behind the raised compact bow. “Then I’ll light it.”

Imagine her crouching there and
facing the window. One leg is folded beneath her weight, the other extended for
balance, her right elbow pulled back to keep the bowstring tight. She looks
like an Amazon girl-warrior in modern-day clothing.

One thing about this picture is strikingly
odd, and that is the strip of mottled, red-and-white firecrackers hanging from
the arrow.

Now, imagine me holding a
matchbook, about to strike the flame that will ignite the fuse uniting all of
these mini-explosions.

Before this happens, I’ll explain
what is at risk. The shot needs to be perfect. High enough so the window’s
ledge doesn’t tear off the fireworks, but not so high that the arrow hits the
top part of the frame and sticks there. I’m not worried about the
sides—it’s a broad window, and I know Melanie is good at this.

However, one shot is all she
gets. If she messes it up, the fireworks will remain inside the building.
They’ll go off, and every infected in the entire man-made world will close
around Tommy’s Bike Shack to rip open our bellies and devour our internal
organs while we die slowly from blood loss.

“One,” I say, staring at Melanie’s
unblinking green eyes.

God, she’s beautiful. Even with
the dirt on her face. For some reason, I see this as a good moment to tell her
that.

“You’re gorgeous,” I tell her.

A corner of her mouth
rises
—a desperate smile that floods me with warmth.

“Was that two?” she says.

The explosive strip hangs
perfectly still, Melanie’s poise steady.

“No. This is.” I strike a match.
“Two.”

I bring the match toward the
fuse, which splits into a web work that will light each cracker in quick
succession. A strip this length will pop for a full minute, maybe more,
assuming the moisture that has mottled its red-and-white stripes has left it
dry enough to pop at all.

“Three.”

I fire up the main fuse.
Immediately, the bowstring snaps and the arrow disappears. The bow barely flinches.
The shot is a clean one.

She did it.

From the trees behind Tommy’s
Bike Shack, the firecrackers emit a crackling noise that sends chills through
my entire body. Melanie and I grab our packs and bolt through the back door,
into the trees, where we immediately make a beeline southward, away from the
noise.

As we run, we throw glances over
our shoulders to make sure we aren’t being followed. The firecrackers are still
popping like mad. Luckily the river of infected was coming from the north,
which means our path southward is mostly clear.

We have to cross Route 1 to get
back to the Lubroline station and Melanie’s bicycle hidden beneath the tarp
(“with a dead viral on it,” as she had put it). Now that the firecrackers have
probably alerted every infected person within a mile range, we need to make
sure we don’t call attention while doing it.

We skulk on a leaf-covered
driveway between a shady motel and a seafood shack. The driveway empties into
Route 1, on which more infected have gathered like rioters. Dozens of them head
north, hobbling in their eagerness to reach the fireworks, which are almost
dead. A couple more go off, and then that’s it.

“We should fire another one,” Melanie
says.

“There’s one more strip,” I say.
“You ready?”

She nods and reaches for another
arrow as I go for the canvas bag in my pack.

Behind us, a man’s voice says,
“Don’t move or I’ll blow your fucking heads off.”

“Toss the weapons over here,” the
man says, “then turn toward me real slow, like molasses.”

Melanie and I are still crouched against
the building, facing Route 1, too alarmed to do anything but stare into each
other’s wide, frightened eyes. She’s holding her bow in one hand, the other
halfway to her quiver. My fingers are on my holstered Glock. Soon, the infected
will lose track of where the fireworks came from and start fanning out, and
everyone—including the man behind us—will be in a world of trouble.

“I said toss your weapons and come
toward me. Now.”

Melanie and I do as we’re told.
Without my pistol, I feel like I’m missing a hand. We turn around, press our
backs to the wall, and lift our arms in surrender.

The area behind the motel is a strip
of parking spaces. The Jeep I saw at the Citizens’ Bank is parked sideways
across three of them, facing us. My stomach sinks at the sight of it,
especially when I recognize the man with the neck tattoo staring at us from the
back seat.

The one who spoke to us wears the
same faded red bandanna and holds the same automatic rifle as yesterday.
Instead of standing in the front passenger seat of the vehicle like before,
he’s in a shooting stance a few feet away. The rifle is an M16—serious
firepower even in a situation like this. You’d have to be insane to bring a
weapon like that out here.

Unless you’re
hunting something that might shoot back.

“What do you want?” I ask the
tattooed man in the Jeep, since I know he’s the leader.

He doesn’t respond. He just
stares at me. His eyes are wide, like he’s watching a lottery in which one more
lucky number stands between him and a big win.

Bandanna approaches me, flips the
rifle around, and jabs the butt stock into my stomach. I double over, the
breath knocked out of me.

Melanie places a hand on my
shoulder. I brush it off and rise, quietly struggling to breathe. Bandanna
steps back and aims the rifle’s deadly barrel at me again.

“Your stash,” he says.

It’s hard to concentrate while
staring down the barrel of a gun that could tear you to pieces. I blink at him,
frozen with indecision.
My
stash is
back on Exeter Road, but Melanie’s stash is in the Lubroline station down the
street. I’m not sure what he’s talking about.

“I don’t mean the girl’s stash,
either,” the man says as if he’s read my mind. He pulls his lips back in a
grisly smile that reveals a twisted mess of brown and yellow teeth. “I know
that one probably ain’t shit. Yeah, we’ll get to it later, but what I want to
know is where
you
come from, kid. You
ain’t
from this part of town, are ya? You got new
gear, a fancy pack, a nice Glock. I
know
there’s
more where that came from.”

I glance at my pistol, which he
has kicked back toward the Jeep. No one has moved to pick it up. The driver of
the vehicle, who still looks like a wild man from the mountains, stares
intently at Melanie. The one with the tattoo hasn’t moved or changed his
expression at all.

They won’t wait much longer for
me to answer. There’s no way I’ll give them my address. Then I think: what if
they threaten Melanie?

“
Caballeros
,” the guy with the neck tattoo says in a surprisingly
crisp and springy voice. “Let’s finish this at base camp, shall we?”

Caballeros
. That’s Spanish for “gentlemen,” only there isn’t
anything Spanish about him. He’s just having fun. To them, this is probably
another day at the office.

I barely have a chance to blink as
the guy with the M16 rushes forward. He jabs the rifle’s butt stock into my
face, knocking me out.

“Wake up, little scavenger.”

He says it in a sing-song voice
that reminds me of the lullaby that begins with, “Hush, little baby.” Behind my
closed and heavy eyelids, I picture the way my mother looked when I saw her
crouched in her bedroom, only the keyhole between us, her face covered in slash
marks.

I don’t want to go there ever
again. I open my eyes with a gasp.

The first thing I notice is the dark
ceiling high above me, followed by the way the cold, stagnant air smells, a
combination of concrete and gasoline. My right eye remains half shut, sealed by
what I know is dried blood. It coats my face like a layer of hardened paint.

Something floats into my field of
vision and stops dead center.

My lucky
rabbit’s foot.

“Guess these blasted things don’t
really work, huh?” the man holding it says before flinging it away into the
darkness.

He bends over me until all I see
is his repulsive, familiar face, the black rose tattoo staining his fleshy neck.
He’s chewing something with a noisy smacking sound. It smells like peanut
butter
PowerBar
.

“You know, these are quite
delectable,” he says with a few more smacks. He holds up the half-eaten bar
still in its wrapper. “I haven’t enjoyed one in quite some time.”

He takes a huge bite out of it,
then tosses the rest away and wipes his hand against his T-shirt.

The guy is uglier than I
remember, his dark eyes embedded in a nest of dirty wrinkles, his black beard
like tightly packed pubic hair, sprinkled with grime. As he grins down at me, I
notice in the thin yellow light of a nearby bulb or lantern that his teeth are
slick with
PowerBar
he is too lazy to lick away.

I lift my head to glance at my
surroundings, despite my fear that he might hit me for moving. But he doesn’t.
Instead, he pulls back and watches me. I see his two buddies in different positions
around the long wooden table to which my arms and legs are tied with rope. The
skinny, wild-looking driver of the Jeep sits on a wooden crate, while the other
stands by a table on which various metal instruments have been laid out.

Torture devices?
Or just tools for fixing the place?

My head and neck hurt too much to
lift any further. Quick glances to my left and right tell me we’re in a dark
warehouse full of steel-beam shelves, each a dozen feet tall, and mostly empty.
The only light comes one of the shelves to my left, where a gas lantern lets
off a weak glow that reminds me of a campfire in a dark forest at night—a
place I’d much rather be than here.

Melanie.

What have they done with her?

“Please,” I say.

“You’re shivering,” the tattooed
man says before throwing an amused glance at the others. “He’s shivering. After
everything that’s happened, all it takes is three bottom-feeders like us to
scare the piss out of him.”

“Please,” I say again. “Where is
she?”

The black-rose-and-barbed-wire
tattoo stretches as the man crosses his arms and looks at me askance.

“Hey now, how about you let me
lead this inquisition?” he says.

I hate how familiar his voice is,
and how harmless I once found it. A sharp pain grows in my head from resting it
on the flat wooden surface.

“You look familiar,” he says. “Tell
me: where have I glimpsed your youthful visage?”

I don’t answer. He shows me the
hairy back of his right hand.

“I asked you a question, young
squire.”

Fuck. Being hit again will sap
more of my strength. I have to keep him talking long enough to figure out an
alternative.

“The Exxon station,” I say.
“You—you were the cash register guy—”

“And you’re talking out your ass,”
he says in a single breath, chuckling lightly at the end of it.

I’ve made him uncomfortable.
Good. Fuck him.

Bandanna interrupts. “I thought
you said you were an FBI ag—”

“Shut your unclean mouth, you
rag-headed faggot.”

Bandanna makes
a
tsk
sound and goes back to whatever
he was doing.

Despite the broken glass in my
skull—that’s how it feels, anyway—I lift my head to glance at them
again. Bandanna is now sharpening a hunting knife against a whetstone. The skinny,
wild one is still sitting on the crate, probably staring at me, though I can’t
tell since his long, wavy hair blocks his face from the lantern light. All I
see is a black void where his face should be, surrounded by what looks like a
wig from a Halloween costume of a serial killer.

A wave of pain and dizziness
forces my head back against the table.

“Please,” I say again. “Melanie…”

“Is that her name?
Very beautiful.
Change the spelling—
Melania
—and
it means ‘darkness.’ Did you know that?”

“Please…”

He hammers his fist against the
table with a loud bang, so close his knuckles brush my coverall. It’s then that
I notice they’ve removed my utility belt, but not my boots—bad news with
a little good news thrown in.