Infected (Book 1): The First Ten Days (14 page)

Marcus yanked me by the arm and we went on the search for a way out. He couldn’t afford to support my weight at that time. He needed as much time to react as possible in the case that we were attacked. I followed close behind and let the lantern be the guide. No doors or side tunnels could be found that we could veer away into. The runner moved again, it ran further away but the immediate worry were the sounds nearest to us.

I used whatever energy necessary so that I could move at the pace of a fully functional person. Marcus gained some distance on me while he looked for a door or another way out of the tunnels we were trapped in. We passed a subway station a while back. This was a great thing because it meant we were due to pass by another, but it was a double edged sword because it made having to turn back a difficult choice to make after we covered so much ground.

Marcus ceased movement and held the lantern high up. After I caught up to him I became horrified. A runner stood there; it twitched and inhaled loudly. I didn’t know whether to move or just stand there and wait to be killed. Marcus clearly had no clue what to do either, but both of us stood there like a couple of idiots, nowhere near a solution or plan of action.

More movement, but it didn’t come from the runner that was in front of us, it came from the one behind it. Out of the darkness ran out another runner and it dashed straight for Marcus and me. Marcus turned around and ran back, he pushed me out of the way so the runner wouldn’t catch me. When I slammed into the subway wall the second runner joined the race. It ran at me while Marcus ran from the first one. “Run away, I’ll catch up! I’m going to distract them!” Marcus yelled from inside the darkness he vanished into.

Out of fear my mind tried to process the information a million miles at a time. I instantly remembered the infected weren’t the smartest of the things left on the planet, and with this in mind I made a run straight for the runner. As it came closer to me I dashed to the side and hoped it wouldn’t automatically turn but rather continue to run or progressively stop. I ran right by it, the opposite direction that Marcus went. The runner stopped short of the wall and made a strange wide turn before it went after me again. Although the darkness persisted, I ran along the wall and stuck my hand out to touch it in hopes that I would come across some entrance I could use to escape and be safe.

I don’t know what convinced me this would work, but I was sure it would. I ran and the runner ran faster. It was bound to catch up. I was screwed if something didn’t come to the rescue. And just as I hoped, I touched a door. A small ledge, half a foot long, stood in front of the door, I climbed it and felt around for the door handle but couldn’t find one. The runner was almost on me when I found the handle and I pulled the door open. I shut the door as fast as I could and the runner slammed into it behind me.

The screams of the runner trapped on the other side of the door were persistent and angry. I touched around the door for some sort of lock and found none, but as I felt around I found hooks on the door, hooks that could hold something, and they connected to the wall. There had to be a wooden plank or some sort of piece of metal that could barricade the door when held by the hooks. On the floor in total darkness as expected, there was a steel bar. I picked it up and put it in place to hold the door shut. With my hand against the wall, I took off, further into the darkness.

The tunnel I took was extremely narrow, large enough for people to move through but no vehicle could fit. The tunnel was only slightly larger than the door I came in through.

I walked in a straight line for a while before I could find any turns, when I did I no longer needed to feel around the door to be aware of my surroundings. Immediately at the start of that turn there was faint light. Maybe a subway station still with power was up ahead. I headed in that direction with the visibility barely increased as I moved further in. A large room awaited me up ahead. The floor ended in front of me, I fell fifteen feet down a shaft. When I hit the bottom the visibility was significantly better. I stood up and looked around at hundreds of runners all focused on me because of my loud fall into what could only be called their home. Things were bad (Clearly).

So let me catch you up. At this point in the story, I was involved in zombie festivities. A bunch of brain-dead, once human, nonhumans threw a party for themselves and I crashed that party, or into it. I mean sure, they lacked music, food and dance, but I brought their favorite food, so I did provide for the party. So the crash couldn’t be so bad with food right? WRONG! I was the food I brought. Let’s continue.

So I’m somewhere underground with no sense of direction and a few hundred runners directly in front of me. My guess is, they took the same fall I did and ended up trapped down there. But within the seconds that I stood there scared out of my mind, I thought rationally enough to assume there wouldn’t logically be a room underground with the only entrance being a drop that can’t be reached from the bottom. By logical obligation there was another way in and out of the room. The question was where?

It didn’t help that the infected at the back of the group dashed in my direction; they provoked the ones in the front and a chain reaction stampede of infected began. I ran instinctively, like a coward.

Being obligated to run so often was a great weight loss technique. Sucks that I was already thin, the only thing left for me was to become so light I wouldn’t be heard and so thin I wouldn’t be seen, a living skeleton of sorts. I made a mental note to become so light and thin the infected would fail to notice me ever again.

I ran along the wall to have the infected line up behind me and with hopes they would stumble over each other and maybe slow large numbers of them down. As I ran I turned my attention up briefly to where the dim light came from. I couldn’t find the source; it just seemed to be brighter for no given reason (Cliché convenience for the sake of the story perhaps?)

When my attention came back to the walls an exit presented itself. It was also the entrance for multiple runners. The runners that came in through that hallway added to the collective behind me, rapidly increasing their numbers. I had to take another lap around the room and either reach another exit or hopefully reach that entrance again, once the infected finished spewing out of it. Another lap entailed that I would run straight through the endless stream of infected to get to the other side of the room, and if I turned back, it meant I would slam into an even larger wall of infected.

The infected that came through the entrance couldn’t tell my location among the rest of the infected until I was close enough for them to see what they chased. This gave me a good chance to run through them without any attempt to grab me until I was clear on the other side. Without further time wasted on the plan I reached the entrance the infected used. With a deep breath I straightened my arms out in front of me to push away the infected the moment I came in contact with them. And then the impact

The second I felt something touch my arms I spread both of them far apart and pushed three of the infected away, one with my right arm and two with my left. I pushed the two on my left back into the hallway they come from. This went smoother than I expected, they were all behind me and none took hold of me. I looked back and noticed they stopped bleeding out from the hallway that I planned to escape through, so at the end of that lap I could take a hard left and go down the hallway, but I still needed to finish the lap.

I was still weak, better than before but overall still weak, but my will was stronger than my weakness. I wasn’t going to die there. Not after all the other junk I survived the last few days.

I forced my body through the dizziness and weakness to finish the third lap around the room, and a sharp left turn into the hallway followed. It was a narrow hallway that could fit maybe two people side by side, the infected struggled to get in all at once but eventually they seeped through, one at a time. I kept my pace up while I approached two turns up ahead. One went left and the other went right. I made a quick choice and turned left. It was the wrong choice.

The left turn led to a dead end too far from to get back from. The infected already took the left turn too by the time I realized I needed to turn around. I was trapped. I couldn’t go back through an impossible number of runners. I could barely outrun them; there was no survival in a head on collision with them. I kept my pace down the hallway till I hit the wall at the end and became completely trapped. With my back against the wall I noticed something over me when I stared at the stampede of infected headed my way, a ventilation system that opened directly overhead. It wasn’t a dead end after all. And the ceiling was low enough for me to reach it with a good enough jump. On the first hop I knocked the protective cover out of the way and on the second one I grabbed a hold of the edges and went up. I barely made it in.

The infected crashed the wall and brushed against the bottom of my sneaker as I entered the vent. I moved down the ventilation system. It would be a matter of time before I found the way back to the surface with the use of the vents.

I crawled through until I reached more darkness. So many runners being in one location at the same time was a concern for me. I refused to take an exit downwards. I feared I would fall back into another large number of infected and not be able to get back up. Although I could have apologized for having crashed their party and asked them for help back into the vents since I’m sure they would have lent a hand out of the kindness of their hearts. But that was more of a last resort.

The ventilation system looked endless through my eyes. I crawled and crawled but found no way out. It still managed to be safer than travel below, with all the runners gathered up. My search for an exit was useless, now I faced death in a vent somewhere in the middle of nowhere important. Not only was there something obviously wrong with me to the point that I kept pulsing health and sickness back and forth, but to crawl in such a tight spot took away energy I wanted to save too. I stopped crawling and laid down to sleep. It was a comfortable spot to sleep in and regain some energy; tight and protected. The exception to the pleasantry of the vent was the cold from the outside that flowed through, but considering the circumstances, I could live with sleep in the cold. After all, I’ve managed worse conditions in the days prior.

The cold woke me back up. I didn’t dream a thing. Time no longer mattered, especially not in the vent of the public transit system. But even if I made it outside, the time was no longer important, day and night, that’s all that mattered. I felt great again, but the last time that I felt great lasted a short while before I felt like I would die again. My power nap gave me enough energy to move for a bit longer. Who knew how much rest I had? I was going to avoid sleeping in the vent again; I needed to make some progress in my travel.

I manage to make it to a climax point in the story of The Vent and Me. But it wasn’t exactly the climax I looked for. Two paths were ahead of me, but it wasn’t left or right. The choices I came across were to either climb twenty or so feet upwards, without anything to hold on to, or go straight down into no-man’s-land. Clearly I chose the impossible climb upwards. But because they were located one directly over the other, if I messed up on the top it meant I would crash down to the bottom and end up where I didn’t want to go in the first place. I moved to the edge and looked up. The passage was narrow enough for me to press my beck against one side and my knees against the other. This would allow me to crawl up with ease, but if I slipped from such a height in a spot so tight it would surely kill me. So many doubts and second thoughts came to my mind while I analyzed the situation. Nothing would suck more than to die because of a fall during the zombie apocalypse.

Once I was convinced that going down involved the likelihood of infected waiting for me, I got into position to go up. Back against one side and hands and knees against the other; it was time to climb. (Look ma, I broke gravity!) For obvious reasons this was a painful position to be in, but I sucked it up and gradually climbed for what seemed like forever, limbs tired and burned from so consistently rubbing against the sides of the vent on my way up. Eventually I reached the top and left the vent into an alley.

Walls surrounded me; there was no way to get to my current location without the vent which I just used or by going down the ladder that sat in front of me. With no other exit options, I went over to the ladder and climbed it to the top of a one story building. It was flat but long enough so that I couldn’t see what was on the ground on the other side of it. As I reached the opposite side of the building I saw where all of the infected in the tunnels and railways come from. I was at one of the train stations and below me on the ground, hundreds upon thousands of infected stood around with no purpose or direction.

I was reasonably safe on top of the building. I assumed it was the train station entrance which I stood on but there was no way I could know for sure from up there. As I focused on the crowd I mapped out a route to successfully move around them and work my way out of the area. To anyone else, including me, it would have looked impossible to make a move through such a thick crowd.

The headache returned but it wasn’t accompanied by dizziness so it went ignored.

I rehearsed the path in my head that ached: Jump off of the building into the trash, out of the trash and under the car, away from the car and around the bus stop; wait a second while they catch up, double back to the car and use the car as a boost to the truck behind it, over the fence by the truck and clear. Now how simple was that? It made complete sense and I was convinced I could get away with it but I wasn’t convinced my mind was being honest with me about being convinced. Yeah, it’s confusing.