Degeneration (53 page)

“
Shut up! Just shut the fuck up you self-righteous bitch!
”
Richard screamed. “I want to talk to Andy!”

Stacy tittered.

“
I’m sure you do. You’re crazy; you know that right?
”

Images flashed behind his closed eyes. His sister, Stacy, many years ago, laughing, stood in the kitchen, yelling at him.

“
They never should have released you after the first time!”

His sister, Stacy, lay face down in a pool of blood as he stabbed the knife into her chest repeatedly.

“Mom would still be alive.”

The kitchen door opened. His mother stepped back and dropped the bag of groceries she was holding. The bottle of milk shattered. She screams.

“Dad would still be alive.”

His father ran into the kitchen, holding the car keys in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. The keys fell to the floor and landed in a puddle of milk.

“
You’re a sick freak. They would have known, if they would have paid attention that first time. I remember the first time, your first time
..
.
”

A mangled cat lay dead in the backyard, beaten into an unrecognizable pulp by a rock. The general consensus was that the neighborhood kids did it, but he kept the collar in his closet as a trophy. Stacy found the collar. She was nosy. She was always so damned nosy.

“Our brother would–”

“Stop it!” Richard screamed.

“
You’re a canc
er to society, isn’t that what the judge said? I wasn’t there, thanks to you, so my memory is a little foggy.”

“Shut up!”

“
You s
hould still be rotting in there,” Stacy said, smirking.

‘F Block’, cell 22. He had hated the guards in that block, but he liked looking at the nurses. The nurses were always nice to him.

Richard pounded his fists against the side of his head, screaming, as he kicked his feet up underneath the dash repeatedly.

“
But, y
ou know that, though, don’t you? You know that you belong in there!
That’s why you can’t help but go back! Just look at you! How tragic!
”

“Stop it, you jabbering bitch!” Richard shouted.

Stacy tittered, infuriating Richard.

Richard screamed at the top of his lungs and bashed his head against the steering wheel. His forehead split open and blood dribbled down the bridge of his nose. He kept the accelerator pressed firmly against the floorboard and the tires spun uselessly in the mud.

Richard closed his eyes tightly.

“Go away!” he shouted.

Stacy went silent and all that he heard were the infected gathered around the vehicle, moaning.

Slowly, he opened his eyes.

He felt a presence next to him and saw something in his peripheral vision.

He looked over at the passenger seat, foot still mashed on the accelerator…

The corpse of the soldier who committed suicide was gone.

Stacy sat next to him, rotted skin hanging off of her face in clumps. Her body was ripe with gangrene and her dress was soaked with blood. Her abdomen was sliced open and her blackened innards lay in her lap.

“You’re not immune! You’re going to burn for what you did to us!” she yelled, maggots falling out of her mouth.

Richard immediately startled at the sight of her and jolted away from her corpse, hands still wrapped tightly around the steering wheel; the wheels of the APC jerked to the right.

The tires managed to gain some traction and the APC violently jerked as it pulled out of the mud.

Richard whiplashed against the steering wheel and Stacy vanished, the dead solider took her place.

The APC mowed a path through the infected swarmed around the front of the vehicle. It effortlessly plowed through the corpses and the windows were quickly covered with a thick layer of gore. It cleared the horde, shattered through the wooden fence that surrounded the Falls Lake camping area, crushed two picnic tables, and crashed to a grinding halt against a massive oak tree all within a few seconds.

Branches and ash fell from the tree and a flock of startled infected blackbirds took flight.

What remained of the horde staggered after the APC and followed the destructive path it created.

Richard’s foot limply slid off of the accelerator and the diesel engine stopped giving growling protest. He groaned in pain, trying to fight the urge to faint. The pistol had slid off of his lap and fell onto the floorboard.

             
The narrow windows were coated with gore from the outside, blocking all visibility. There was no way he would be able to navigate his way onto the freeway and get to Butner.

             
“Damnit!” Richard screamed.

             
“
Now what are you going to do? Just sit here?
” Stacy asked from the backseat. “
You always were a coward.”

             
“I’ll show you what the fuck I am going to do, you bitch,” Richard said. He reached down, grabbed the pistol from the floorboard, and forcefully opened the driver-side door.

             
The door swung out and knocked a staggering infected man wearing fishing attire onto the ground.

As soon as the fisherman fell, he snarled and tried to get back onto his feet.

             
Richard leapt out of the armored vehicle and pointed the barrel of the gun pointblank between the man’s eyes and pulled the trigger.

             
The gun seized; the round was a dud.

             
The fisherman lunged forward and–

             
Richard jabbed the barrel of the pistol deep into the fisherman’s left eye and then gouged out the man’s right eye, twisting the gun as he dug the barrel deep into the man’s skull.

             
The fisherman let out a shrill scream and started convulsing as he clawed blindly at Richard.

             
Richard let go of the pistol and shoved the fisherman backwards, sending him tumbling backwards down the ash-covered embankment towards the water’s edge.

The infected horde chasing after the APC was only a few yards away. He didn’t have much time.

Richard used his bare hands to scrape the gore off of the windshield. His efforts only afforded a few miserable streaks of visibility, but it would have to do given the circumstances.

Richard wiped his blood-smeared hands off on the front of his pants and jumped back into the APC, slamming the door shut behind him.

Richard threw the vehicle into ‘R’ and plowed a path backwards through the besieging horde as he backed-up onto the camping site’s parking lot. Once on the asphalt, he threw the transmission into ‘D’ and raced along the camping site’s access road, leaving the pursuing horde behind.

The bright halogen lamps mounted on the roof penetrated deep into the scraggily forestry that surrounded both sides of the narrow dirt road. Many of the taller trees had toppled from the earlier shockwave. Infected animals scurried away from the vehicle while others uselessly charged against it, snapping their necks in the impact.

The armored vehicle smashed through a pair of chained aluminum swing gates that blocked off the dirt access road from the paved street and flattened a sign that read ‘PICNIC AREA CLOSED’.

Richard coughed.

“
You’ll never ma
ke it to Butner and you know it,” the condescending voice of his sister echoed once again from the center of his head.

“Watch me, bitch,” Richard said.

He turned onto the paved road and sped towards I-85, passing countless cars that had been bulldozed over into the ditches along the sides of the road.

A park ranger staggered out from in front of a disabled sedan and stopped in the middle of the road. He slowly turned towards the approaching APC, snarling, frozen in the headlights.

The vehicle hardly jolted as it struck the park ranger, rolled over him, and left his mangled corpse lying in the middle of the street.

“
Why do you go through all of this trouble?
It won’t change what you did,” Stacy said.

“Because I owe it to him, damnit,” Richard answered.

He drove past a green sign on the side of the road: I-85 – 3 MI

“
He’s dead, now. He’s
beyond your help. You know this…” Stacy said, her voice seemingly coming from in front of him.

Her voice infuriated him.

“No, Stacy, my brother is a fighter… unlike you. I made sure that you couldn’t run that fucking mouth of yours anymore, though,” Richard said. “I killed you.”

“
I’m not the only one
you killed
. I still know
what I saw. I’ll tell everybody,” Stacy tittered.

“You won’t say anything to anybody. I killed you. I killed you...”

The vehicle passed a generator-powered roadside sign. Its lighted digital message of promised safe locations was obscured by a large piece of plywood. A painted message sprawled across the plywood read:

FEMA CENTERS ARE OVERRUN! THE BIG CITIES ARE DEAD!

NO HELP COMING
! THERE IS
NO VACCINE
!

33

T
h
e APC veered onto the on-ramp of northbound I-85. The ramp was clogged with charred skeletons and burnt vehicular husks that had melted into the asphalt courtesy of the military’s earlier interstate bombardment campaigns. The vehicle maneuvered around the remnants of an overturned bus and turned onto the interstate.

The military’s I-85 blockade a few miles away, just outside the Durham County border, kept the northbound lanes leading north from Raleigh and Durham mostly clear but had southbound traffic snared up for miles. By the time the blockade had been overran and the panicked drivers caught in the traffic jam noticed the first napalm bombs dropping, it was too late for them to escape. Their vehicles ended up becoming their tombs. The remnants of the vehicles in the southbound lands had melted down and coagulated together amongst countless blackened human skeletal remains.

On the other hand, the northbound lanes only had a few scattered vehicles caught in the bombardment; a tall concrete median divided the freeway and kept the chaos that plagued the southbound lanes from spilling over into the northbound lanes.

The trees along both sides of the freeway were charred black and everything in sight was covered in ash that continued to flutter down from the polluted sky.

Richard kept his eyes fixated straight ahead and tried to read the burnt freeway signs as they swayed with the stale breeze. The low fuel indicator light illuminated on the dash display, but he didn’t pay it any mind; he was determined to reach his destination.

He drove across the long bridged section of I-85 that crossed over Falls Lake.

The lake was thick with bloated floating corpses and capsized fishing boats. Part of the southbound section of I-85 had crumbled away into the lake and left a multitude of vehicles ebbing in the water.

He swerved around a burnt RV and pushed a wrecked highway patrol cruiser off the bridge and sent it plunging into the water.

“
Why the rush?
” Stacy asked, sitting in the backseat, picking at her rotted flesh.
“
You already know that he’s dead
.
”

“He can’t be,” Richard muttered, annoyed.

He finished crossing over the dilapidated bridge and picked up speed.

             
“
You honestly believe that, don’t you? You
honestly think that he is there?” Stacy asked, amused.

             
“I know he is,” Richard said. “He is waiting for me.”

He drove for miles across the desolate landscape, not noticing as the sunset behind the impenetrable ash-ladened cloudscape.

             
The charcoaled scenery of the burnt forest along the interstate gave way to desolate farmhouses, empty fields, and darkened billboards advertising fast-food restaurants as the vehicle escaped the interstate’s napalm strike radius.

             
Infected started to meander onto the freeway in scattered droves as the vehicle passed. They shuffled aimlessly onto the pavement in-between stalled cars in hapless pursuit.

             
Richard ignored the wandering hordes and kept his eyes focused on the interstate signs. His stomach was cramping and he felt noxious. He felt like the infection was finally starting to take hold of him.

             
Finally, he saw the sign he had been waiting for:

BUTNER – NEXT 2 EXITS

             
He turned off on the first Butner exit ramp, vehicle running on fumes, and left the interstate behind.