The End: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (28 page)

“So that explains their need to feed,” Clay said.

“Exactly.”

“Let me get this straight. So you are saying that as long as they have something to eat, they aren’t going to die?”

“Right, and if we deny them sustenance, it is only a matter of time before the fungus turns on itself, slowing down the body’s natural system. Once it does that, it will feed on itself and it slows down rapidly.”

“Yeah, but if it only would take a few years to get rid of them, then, what is all of this ten years’ crap all about?” Gus bristled, while he crossed both arms, puffing out his chest.

“
Ten years
is right, Gus. I have estimated that it will only take six years, or so, for them to actually run out of food. Add a few more years for good measure and we have ten,” Grech replied, leaning against the table.

“So you got that figured out, do you? What about how this all started, then?”

“Now Clay, do you really think they would have you come all this way if I didn’t have that bit of information?” Grech said. “Your government has sent you in here, with the pretense that they want to figure out what’s going on, and that means they lied to you. They know what’s going on. They are the ones that have funded my research for the last decade. Leave it up to the Americans.” Grech huffed.

“If we’re going to waste time down here talking answers and pointing blame, then explain that broken glass back there that we passed. All that dirt.” Gus broke away from the table and swiftly made his way back toward the hidden mishap.

Gus ripped away the covering to find what looked like a massive, broken ant farm. It had to have been at least twenty feet wide and fifteen feet tall. A huge crack in the center of the structure had released its contents onto the floor. Dirt, gray specks of dust, and not much of anything else, still lay exposed. As Gus stood there, looking over it, Grech and Clay made their way beside him.

“Yes, we had a large shipment of infected ants carrying the fungus and they got out. That’s what spread the plague out onto the streets. There’s nothing we can do about it now and pointing blame isn’t going to help. If it was anyone’s fault, I blame your government for pushing my company, pushing me. They demanded too much and in too little time. When things are rushed, accidents happen.”

The three men stood over the mess for a moment in silence, then, Grech continued again. “We contained the spill and killed all of the specimens before the outbreak could get out of control. Several people got bitten by the ants and they were taken care of. The breach occurred, when one of the lab workers that denied getting bitten, was infected and took a leave of absence. Three days later, the coast was hit. How was I supposed to know something like this would happen? We didn’t invent the disease—it is in nature. We were just studying it.”

“Something like this is fixable,” Clay said. He stepped between Gus and the old man, hoping that Gus would keep his cool. “We have blockades covering the entire East Coast. We keep it from spreading and in a few years it dies out on its own. Right?”

“Wrong,” Grech said in a bitter reprimand. “Like I said before, I have all radio frequencies, from here to the end of the Earth and back, and what I have heard over those waves, in the last twenty-four hours, have been anything but good.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Gus.

“Follow me, and I will show you.”

After walking clear across the room once again, they made it back to the table filled with surveillance monitors and the highly technical and overpowered radio transmitter. With Grech seated at the head chair in front of the microphone, Clay and Gus took seats behind him, in similar chairs. Next to them, Grech turned the monitors back to normal, but not before showing the pilot still on the rooftop shooting to help pass the time.

The large section of small monitors changed from various shots from the above ground facility to the sight of a fallen warzone. The living dead, thousands of them, walked the streets.

“So what? We saw plenty of that on our way in here. We are a good ways off from the quarantine borders. What’s your point?” Gus asked.

“My point is this…” Grech sighed. “This is footage of Atlanta, Georgia. There are also other feeds I could show you in other states as well.”

“That is way outside of the Q-zone!” Clay gasped.

“That can’t be possible.” Gus grimaced. “You’re a liar!”

“That isn’t even the bad news, son,” Grech said. “The clean sweep they had scheduled for Monday officially got pushed to sunup tomorrow. They are blowing up everybody and everything before it gets any more out of hand, and there is nothing anybody can do about it.”

“All the more reason to be on our way!” Gus said.

“No reason to rush. You, of all people, should know that they aren’t going to just let you up and walk out of the dead zone like that,” Grech said.

Gus stated, “But General Baker wouldn’t let—”

“Your General is in the dark. They all are. I know, because I have been listening in. The Tallahassee area will be bombed too. If you want to stay alive, you could do what’s right and bunker down with me until it’s all over.”

Gus yanked his M-4 up. His eyes caught one last glimpse of the footage displayed in the set of screens. “You’re right about one thing, old man. Someone has to do what’s right.”

7

“Hurry up with it already. I got to take a piss,” Stately Christopher said.

It was well past lunchtime, and Benton insisted on running the final phase of tests on a few of the blood samples before taking their break. That chubby little prick always wanted to stay ahead of schedule, not for any other reason than to possibly have the opportunity to impress, if and when it presented itself.

Benton readied the injection of anti-coagulant, while Christopher stood there, dancing in place. “Hell, if you need to go that bad, then just go. Come back before heading to the cafeteria. We need to both log out of the computer systems at the same time.”

“Log out at the same time…” Christopher said with a sarcastic tone, mimicking Benton. He stepped away from the table and headed toward the door and out into the hall to relieve himself.

Benton finished getting things ready for the shot. He wanted to see what the result would be on Professor Taft when introducing the chemical compounds to the already clotted, rotting tissue. The effects on each of the blood samples seemed to vary from sample to sample.

Standing over Taft’s rotting corpse, Benton began to administer the shot into the dead man’s neck. The thick silver needle slid in with ease, the flesh softening from rot and pus. It made a squishing sound as it penetrated the graying flesh. Taft didn’t seem to mind one bit. Although upright and moving about, Taft was dead. It wasn’t as if he could feel the pain. As Benton pressed the thick fluids into Taft’s neck, the bright red liquid left the syringe and entered the creature’s blood stream, or what was left of it.

Taft reacted in a way that Benton was not prepared for. The zombie, that had once been his fellow lab associate, lunged forward, grabbing hold of Benton’s arm, the one that had been administering the shot. Other than grabbing him, the zombie remained still, staring at the captured limb, with its fogged eyes and drooling mouth.

Benton froze in fear, not exactly sure what he should do. When they first tied Taft up, he was thriving with life and aggressive, but that quickly died down after a day. He had drawn blood from the dead man numerous times before, and not once had the thing leaped out like that. Benton was shocked, letting go of the syringe. It hung there, half hanging from the creature’s neck. Black and gray liquids ran down from the needle as the weight of the cylinder pulled down on the putrid skin.

Benton slowly pulled away, but the monster’s grip quickly tightened. Benton frantically looked over his shoulder at the table behind him. It seemed to be so far away.

Before he had time to turn back and look Taft in the eyes, he knew what had happened. A sudden, unbelievable pain shot through his forearm causing him to let out a scream. He was afraid to look, but the pain made him jerk his head around.

Taft was pulling his head away from the stout little man’s upper arm. Blood, chunks of red meat, and white flesh came away with one massive tear. It peeled away like an orange skin. Blood poured out from the cavernous chunk of missing skin and muscle. The blood splashed as it poured out onto the cold white tiles below.

As Benton looked on in horrifying shock, unable to pull himself away from the zombie’s grip, the ghoulish figure came down for another bite. His rotting and germ-infested teeth fell upon Benton again, tearing into the same spot on his arm. This time, the bite went so deep, that as Taft pulled away, portions of the bald little man’s bone became visible. He screamed, almost passing out from the pain.

The door swung open, and Christopher dashed into the room. He ran around the table and landed on top of Benton, grabbing him by the shoulders. Trying to help pull him free, he pushed against Taft with his right foot.

In the same instant that Benton came free, crashing to the ground with one hand covered in blood as he held his open wound, Christopher lost his balance, falling forward. He caught his footing and kept from crashing into the chained zombie, but not before getting too close. His right hand grazed right past the creature’s face as he caught his balance. The abrupt pain caught him off guard. The ghoul’s putrid rot-filled teeth chomped down hard and landed a clean bite right down on Christopher’s hand, between the thumb and his index finger. He pulled away, instantly covering his pained hand with his other, and stared in shock and disgust at the foul creature that had just taken a large chunk from him. “You stupid fuck!” Christopher shouted, as he spit into the zombie’s face.

He instantly thought of Benton and looked back, but didn’t see him. Only a thick trail of blood littered across the tile floor suggested his whereabouts. The door to the lab was wide open. The bloody trail disappeared out of the room and around the corner into the hall. “You have got to be fucking kidding me, Benton,” he said whispering to himself. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to turn into one of those things!”

Christopher calmly sat at the table doing what he could to stop the bleeding on his hand and began to gather up the materials he needed to give himself a shot. He sure as hell hoped it would do the trick. It just had to.

8

“What the hell do you mean she committed treason?” Rob Foster said.

“That is exactly what I said. You better watch your mouth, boy. Remember who you’re speaking to,” General Baker said.

The two men had been going at it in the General’s office for several minutes now and Foster was having enough of it. The General had lost it and there was no getting through to him. “I’m sure she had her reasons for doing what she did, sir, but that’s no grounds for throwing her in a cell. And the civilians are there with her, I take it?”

“They are. They are going to stay there until the bombers come in and clear up on Monday. As far as your little girlfriend, you can just forget about her. She isn’t going anywhere either,” General Baker argued.

“The bombers aren’t going to destroy the base,” Foster said.

“I’ve learned different. Of course, the officers will leave before it happens. Consider yourself lucky.”

“That’s murder! I can’t believe you’d go along with this.” Foster’s face was getting redder by the minute.

The intrusive chime of Foster’s radio caught both men by surprise.

“Lieutenant, come in. Over,” the voice said, echoing with static, clipped to Foster’s hip.

Foster eyed General Baker with a glare of frustrated rage. Removing the large handset, he took gaze away from Baker, looking out between the blinds of the office window. “Go ahead. Over.”

“We have some activity at the main gate, sir, thought you might like to be informed. Over,” came the voice from the other end.

“What kind of activity? Over.” The two disgruntled men eyed one another again, but this time with curious glances.

“A small truck, sir. Civilian. Over.”

“What’s it doing? Over.”

“That’s just it, sir, nothing at the moment. They’re just sitting out there in plain view. I think they want us to see them. Over.”

*

The small Chevy sat quietly idling in the middle of the street about a mile and a half from the main gate. The front of the military base was overrun with the walking dead. The entire fence line was crawling with them, especially so at the gate’s entrance. The rotting corpses shambled forward, ten and fifteen bodies deep, right where the survivors planned to get into the safe zone. The entrance was blocked. A few straggler ghouls lingered farther out into the streets and the surrounding fence line, but for the most part, they were heavily concentrated on getting past that gate to the fresh meat. The stench was unbearable. It wafted into the air, replacing the breeze’s summer aroma with something foul and decaying. From as far off as the truck sat, they could see the buzzing of flies over the heads of the dead.

*

“Holy hell, there are so many of them,” Victor said, sitting in the driver’s seat, with Ashley seated next to him.

“It must be all of the activity that excites them. The outgoing and incoming helicopters generally pass over this part of the fence line every day. It must be drawing them in,” Ashley said, eyes fixed on the obstacle ahead.