Drifters

Drifters

Also by J. A. Santos

Elias

Defeated

Black Hole Hell

Drifters:
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright ©
2014 by J. A. Santos

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book
review.

First
Edition: 2014

Vassago’s
Book Company
Levittown Lakes c/ Ramon Morla HN20
Toa Baja, Puerto Rico 00949

https://www.facebook.com/pages/J-A-Santos/216040425205001

Ordering Information:

Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, educators, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the above listed address.

To my lovely children.

Thank you.

Without you, I would have never achieved my dream
.

Drift·
er ˈdriftər/ noun: drifter; plural noun: drifters 1. A person who is continually moving from place to place, without any fixed home or job. Synonyms: wanderer, traveler, transient, roamer, itinerant, tramp, vagabond, vagrant, hobo, bum "a lonesome drifter who had come from parts unknown
"
.

Drifters

Chapter One

The silence of the still night is welco
ming. No sound of the critters of the night squirming around. Just silence. The road is deserted and the wind hits my red hair making it dance to its invisible fingers. I feel so well today. No hunger churning my stomach, no rare occurrences around me, just the lonely road and this still night.

I may be alone o
n the road, but that is what it needs to be done. What I am is not some weird creature that like its loneliness, I am as I have to be.

I look to the stars twinkling
, remembering the song Blaze of Glory by Jon Bon Jovi. I can see myself with the cowboy hat and mounted on the iron horse as it took me away to another adventure in another place, another town. I smile to the idea.

You see, I’m a drifter, no home, no job, no
real family. I sleep wherever the night catches me. My head gently resting in a hard rock or a bunch of leaves, or even my shirt tucked away underneath it while I lay bare chested on the ground. It really doesn’t matter, you’ll understand later.

My blanket, always
the night’s air, if cold or hot it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I get tracked by those chasing me and I have to run. Other times I can stay for months, weeks or several days and work to have money to drift, to run to the next town or state.

As
I walk this lonely road at night I started to remember the first time I escaped that place, why I ran from it never looking back. I was fifteen stuck in a laboratory for some disease they said I had, no recollection of anything before that. It seemed as if I had just woken at age fifteen. The sickness I had I never felt until several days later after waking in that tiny room. The hunger, that’s what they called it, it was so intense my mind went to a state of confusion, no words could reach me. After I came too and they showed me the video. I was scared of myself. I looked as a mindless Zombie ravaging the body of a nurse who came inside just to trickle more blood from my arms. The sight was terrifying my red short hair, at the time, was glowing red from all the blood. My eyes went blank and rolled inside. I did not remember anything from the moment, as I saw the video. I could see my face had no expression as my arms flew to the nurses neck twisting his head to the right, my mouth opening wide bearing teeth as a wolf do when protecting his area. The sound coming out of my mouth was more like a deeper watery growl with a deeper me in the voice. I heard the screams as my mouth closed on his neck, blood spattered on the floor, walls, bed sheets, and pillow. As someone hit the pause button, in the screen his face, a static silent scream, eyes open wide filled with terror stared at me from the TV set as I watched the paused video in silence, it was something I could never forget, the picture stayed in my mind for as long as my life went and is going. It was the first time ever saw the hunger, the other side of me. 

My mind cleared as soon as the nurse was dead and
the hunger satisfied. They never tried to stop me. They never tried to hold me back, they just watched from what I know now was not a mirror, and as I came to, the sight was even worse. The mangled twisted body of the nurse under a pool of its own blood, my red mouth still oozing the heavy and copper metallic tasting liquid from it, my hands that tore through his torso was covered in a glove of red, same I had in my mouth. I looked left and right, up and down my body, trying to understand what had just happened. My breasts bloodied with the frenzy the hunger brought, but now was satisfied, I screamed. I screamed from the horrible site and for them to come inside, to help the nurse on the floor, but he was already dead and they never came. 

The body of the nurse stayed with me in that small room for about three days, for me seemed more than a years’ worth of
the horrible sight. The wretched smell of his body starting to putrefy was covering every inch of the small room. It stuck to my flesh and my clothes when on the third day I heard a gurgling sound, like a scream filled with water, which came from the body. My hands still had the bloody gloves, but now darker and sticky like molasses. I was in a corner, crying, murmuring me to sleep, but I never could. I felt horrible for what I have done, when I heard the sound, my knees were tucked deep in my chest, arms around them holding tight, my face buried in them as the ostriches do when they bury their heads in dirt. I tore my face away from my hole and looked up, when I saw the body of the nurse twitch like if it was been shot electrical shocks over its body. The sound came again. That’s when the door busted open, a man tall like a skyscraper appeared with a military uniform and shot him on the head. The shot echoed in the small room so loud I put my hands over my ears.

After the incident
he explains the hunger, more over what I was or am. You see I’m not just another human like you, I have something extra. Something in my blood that makes people come back as mindless animals, as if I can activate the lizard brain we all have deep inside. My body is not weak I’m stronger than a bear now. As he explain, if infected by the hunger, if you were alive, your consciousness will falter away slowly; the hunger will carry you to the next meat source, human or animal and satisfy its needs. If dead, the huger would bring you back, able to see what you are doing, but unable to control your actions, one would be able to speak, to feel the satisfactions of eating the hunger driving you mad. I am the carrier of a terrible fate for anyone to suffer. They were, where I was held, trying to duplicate me in a sense. The perfect soldier, dead, hungry and only way to stop it, was severing the communication signals from the brain, in other words destroy the reasoning of men.

I am the only one who can still carry my mind as much as the will to keep the hunger at bay. I struggle with the hunger as much as I could, I sometimes would even speak to it as if it were a person in front of me.

On that same year, and after the nurse’s incident they started letting me go outside, take some air, feel the warm sun on my skin. I guessed that whatever this disease was could only be transmitted by my blood or from some secretions from my mouth like the bacteria infected mouth of a Komodo dragon. I was glad because now I could find a way to escape the lab. Every day they would come inside; pinch me with needles as they took samples of blood, always covered in blue plastic suits, like astronauts. One day I found, to the north of the lab, the fence had a loos corner and tugging at it I made a crevice big enough for me to squeeze outside. I thought of going to my room gather some clothes and put them on a back pack and my ID, which was how I learned my name, Sara Garber, and only thing I had from my past life, or so I thought.

I
did not gather some cloths, I squeezed outside and I just ran. I ran for as long as I could and I still do.

Now
at thirty-three, many things had happened in those twelve years drifting. I had found many people that I could care about, I found myself doing things that would horrify many, but some humans deserve such horrible fates. I never could stay too long at any giving place. The longest I stayed in one single state was about four months. In those months I met Med and her murderer. I just did what needed to be done and moved away fast.

I spent a year completely away, deep in a forest that I didn’t know exactly where it was.
I was looking for a way to stop myself from consuming mindlessly; suppressing the hunger that does not involved me killing myself. My name is Sara and as many people would tell me, since I am a woman, and woman seldom chose to be drifters, not that I chose to be one. I have to be one.

They would say
; be careful outside you never know what monster lurks in the shadows. To which I would always nod and smile at them. If only they knew what I now know.

This night I’m walking on Route 66, the mother road, a piece of nostalgic American history straight to Flagstaff
through Winona. I came from a small town just a little more to the west called Canyon Diablo where I had to run cause of a little problem I crossed. I looked remembering the fire on the small barn and I see headlights in the distance. I looked forward and up again. The still night was just ending, clouds started gathering fast, the sound of thunder startled the silence I was enjoying. Wind picks up blowing harder, grabbing my hair making a tangle mess of it now, not softly as it did earlier. I grab my hair and pull it off my face and I knew that a small storm was coming. I looked back again, the headlights were getting closer and I could make the color of the car, it was a bright yellow. I stopped walking and extended my hand forward holding my thumb up and waited. The car came closer and I could sense something wrong. I did not know what, but something was definitely wrong.