Decimation Series (Book 1): Contagion Read online

  “What? Who’s dead?” She looked at my shirt and pants; I was covered in blood. “Are you hurt? Are you bleeding? All the soldiers…”

  “The blood isn’t mine. All the soldiers I found are dead. All the passengers from our flight that I found are dead, they all look like they were beaten to death, some were torn apart. I mean literally torn to pieces. There’s blood everywhere. I found lots of bodies of people who looked like they had whatever she has,” I panted, pointing at the sick woman on the ground, “and they’d all been shot.” My hands were shaking. Worried I might accidentally pull the trigger, I handed the gun to Alex, who made sure the safety was on and tucked it into his belt. I leaned forward bracing my hands on my thighs, breathing heavily from running. I realized I had blood on my pants and hands from where I had slipped in a pool of it. I explained that many of the bodies dead from gunshots were also soldiers, and they all had been sick.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” I said urgently, “but I know we need to be away from here right now.”

  Stephanie stayed kneeling, the woman’s head in her lap. I could tell she didn’t want to leave the sick woman, and I didn’t know how to make her.

  Stephanie looked down to the woman’s face and saw glazed, rheumy yellow eyes staring back at her with terrifying intensity.

  Suddenly a snarl of animalistic rage ripped from the sick woman’s mouth, mucus spitting out in a spray and she reached up with both hands and grabbed Stephanie by the hair.

  “What...” Stephanie managed to say before she cried out in pain, the woman’s hands tearing at her hair.

  Heaving herself from where she lay prone on the floor, the woman pulled herself up and, with her hands grasped deep in Stephanie’s long brown hair, smashed Steph’s head into the floor.

  I rushed forward and tried to grab the woman around the throat from behind. She snarled and twisted in my grasp. She let go of Steph and turned to attack me.

  Her eyes were blank, empty, glazed over. Instead of trying to save Steph, now I was trying to save myself. She was howling in a blind fury, smashing at my face with her fists. Her breath was pounding at me, her face close to mine, and each breath sprayed green slime out of her mouth and all over me.

  I managed to protect my face from her strikes, and with a desperate shove, I pushed her backwards into the bathroom, smashing her back against the sink and stunning her for long enough for me to step forward and slam the door shut.

  “What the fuck?” shouted Alex, stunned.

  “Alex, grab Steph and get her out of here! You guys get into the van, now!” I shouted.

  He grabbed my wife, helped her up, and they ran out to the minivan, Steph cradling her injured head.

  The bathroom door shook as the woman inside screamed and pounded against it, mindless animal rage trying to get at me.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it, trying to get my bearings. I looked around, there was nothing to brace against the door to hold it shut. The floor was smooth, cold tile, if I braced a chair under the door handle or pushed the table up against the door, it would just slide out of the way. All I could do was make a break for the door and hope I could make it out of here and into the van before this crazy woman got at me.

  From where I was, I couldn’t see outside to the van, I could only hope the three of them were inside the vehicle and ready to move.

  Steadying myself, I took a deep breath, and went for the front door.

  I threw myself through the doorway and leapt over the counter, ran to the minivan where it sat with the driver’s door open and waiting, and climbed inside slamming the door behind me. I wrenched the keys and the engine started right up.

  Panting, my hands shaking, I looked back into the rental office. Over the quiet purr of the engine running, we could hear her screaming and snarling with rage, pounding her hands against the bathroom door.

  “Kevin, what the hell is going on?” cried Steph, her nose bleeding.

  I shook my head. With no answer to give her, I put the van in gear and slowly drove away, leaving behind us the animal sounds of the sick woman stuck in the bathroom; trapped there because in her state of rage she couldn’t think to twist the door handle.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Day 3

  We drove slowly along the 400, headed north towards Sudbury. To my surprise, it hadn’t taken long to leave the city behind, its buildings, strip malls, hotels and car dealerships crowding in on the highway. With no traffic, we made good time getting away from the airport and once across the river and heading northbound, the buildings started to disappear. I could easily have put the pedal down and made better time, but under the circumstances I didn’t trust my reactions; I wanted to be able to stop quickly if we needed to. Also, I had a feeling finding fuel was going to be a bit of an issue, and at the slower speed we were burning much less fuel. I hoped we would be able to siphon gas from cars along the way, but until we were away from the heavily populated cities, I didn’t want to take the chance.

  Aside from some accidents where we could see cars smashed into other vehicles, or sometimes into the lane dividers, we saw no other vehicles. We stopped at the first couple accident sites, but there were no people there. Several of the cars had snot and bile spattered across the dash and around the interior; some were covered in blood.

  We didn’t find any people, alive or dead.

  “Where is everyone?” wondered Jamie from the back seat where he sat beside his brother. Steph sat beside me, the map folded and tucked down beside her seat. It was a straight shot north and so far, there hadn’t been any navigation required. I had my phone plugged into the van’s USB charger; I didn’t really have any use for it right now, but as I was starting to learn, old habits die hard.

  It was the same thing I had been wondering since we got out of the airport terminal. From what the rental agency brochures told us, the Greater Toronto Area including the connected suburbs was well over six million people. We had been driving for almost thirty minutes and hadn’t yet seen a single person.

  “We’re going to need a plan,” I said, not taking my eyes off the road ahead. “We’ve been lucky so far, but that luck can’t hold. We’re going to run into people sooner or later, and we should have some kind of a plan about how we’re going to deal with that.”

  “Whatever this sickness is, it’s obviously not what we were first told,” said Steph. She had changed her shirt from the one that was covered in the sticky mess from the sick woman in the car rental office, but her pants were still smeared. I hadn’t had a chance yet to change my clothes, and between the blood I slipped in back in the airport terminal and the spew I had taken from the car rental woman, I looked like a freaking horror show.

  “Back at the airport it looked like the soldiers and the other passengers had been overwhelmed by the sick soldiers and maybe a mob of civilians, maybe from the street. I don’t know where the passengers from the other flights were being held, maybe in one of the other wings or terminals, but everyone I saw in our area was gone.” I didn’t need to remind them that was hundreds of people dead in a matter of minutes, and that we had been lucky to get away.

  “What can do that?” asked Alex, still in shock. “What can make you go crazy like that?”

  I looked at him in the rearview mirror. “Nothing we’ve ever seen or heard of before obviously. But think this through for a second: we’re in a city of millions of people, and we haven’t seen anyone yet. So, unless there was some major evacuation operation that we weren’t told about, they’re still here, somewhere. Hopefully most people aren’t sick, and maybe they’re just following orders, they’re hiding themselves away and quarantining themselves. But from what we’ve been told, I don’t think we can count on that.”

  Everyone let that sink in for a minute, the probability that right now there were tens or even hundreds of thousands of infected homicidal maniacs roaming the streets, somewhere, in the city around us. All we could do was hope that we didn’t run into many of them at
once, or if we did, that we were able to outrun them.

  I saw Steph looking down at her hands in her lap.

  “Kev, back at the airport, when you went back in… did you see… did you find Seth and Michelle?”

  I had been waiting for that. I told her I hadn’t seen them. I told her I hadn’t seen anyone that we had gotten to know there, back among the dead. I lied to her.

  She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. I had never been a very good liar.

  I was about to tell her anything that happened to them wasn’t our fault, we had offered to help them and were turned away, when suddenly in the dusk ahead I saw a figure covered in blood, hands waving in the air sprinting towards our car from the side of the road.

  I jerked the wheel in surprise and took my foot off the gas pedal. I started to slow down, but then I realized this might be one of the infected just as easily as someone needing help.

  As we got closer, I could see it was a woman, probably in her late thirties. She was stocky with short blonde hair, and I could see the look in her eyes; it was terror, not rage.

  “Help me, please help!”

  I came to a stop and reached over and was about the thumb the unlock button for the doors, but hesitated. Steph noticed.

  “But Kevin she needs help, we can’t…” Steph began, and I cut her off.

  “We need to make sure she’s okay before we let her in, that’s all.”

  I rolled my window down an inch and waved her over to my side. She ran up to the side of the van and started pulling the door handle frantically.

  “Whoa, slow down, slow down, please step back for a second okay?” I looked at her face; she was filthy and had blood splashed across her forehead and eyes, as well as the rest of her shirt, but her face looked free from any sign of sickness.

  “I’m not sick, I’m not, but please let me in and get us out of here!”

  I looked at the others, and they nodded their agreement.

  I pushed the door unlock button, and the rear sliding door opened. Jamie crawled through into the back-row seat as the stranger scrambled in to sit beside Alex and closed the door quickly.

  “There are hundreds of them just down that street, we need to move now,” she said frantically, eyes darting back the way she had come.

  I nodded and started ahead slowly, leaving my window down slightly so I could hear. Looking down the dimness of the street she had just come from, we could see a crowd of people moving, and we could hear their screams of rage. Suddenly I saw one of them break off from the crowd and with a shriek of fury come bolting towards us. Others followed suit, and within seconds there were dozens of infected pouring from the side street with more coming from behind.

  Hammering on the gas, we took off leaving them, and two strips of smoking rubber, behind. Looking back, I could see a crowd of hundreds of them, maybe thousands, flooding the street in a living wave of violence, climbing over one another for the chance to get at us.

  In our rearview mirror, the crowd got smaller and dropped back from sight as we tore away from them.

  Turning to look behind us, as if to make sure the mob hadn’t somehow managed to keep up, the woman let out a deep, ragged breath and fell back into her seat.

  “Thank God you came along,” she said in a quavering voice. “I’ve been stuck under that car for hours, I was afraid I was going to be there all night.”

  “Holy shit,” whispered Jamie from the back seat, looking back at the seething mass of infected swarming the highway. “You were hiding under a car with that crowd around you?”

  Our new passenger nodded, wiping off her face with her shirt as best she could with shaking hands. Alex handed her a bottle of water, which she took gratefully.

  “I hadn’t left my apartment in over three days,” she said. “Like they told us to on the TV, I stayed isolated to avoid the sick. A couple days ago things got crazy. I could see mobs of crazy sick people everywhere out on the streets. I saw a couple get beaten to death across from my apartment. But then the power went out and I was running out of food and water, so I had to come out. I don’t have a car, so I was on foot. I checked a couple local stores, but they’ve all been looted, they’re mostly empty. And then I heard this crowd coming around the corner, so I just crawled under a car waiting for them to pass. They didn’t.” She drank from the water bottle again.

  “Was there any evacuation order given?” asked Steph. “We’ve been driving for a while and other than you and that crowd, we haven’t seen anyone. We were starting to think the city was completely deserted.”

  “No, there was nothing,” she replied. “There was some stuff on the news, then a few public alerts in the media and online about this terrible cold that was circulating, but that was it. Online there were all kinds of crazy theories from the nuts on there, but most news feeds were downplaying it. Then the power went out, and I haven’t heard anything since then.”

  “Where are you guys coming from?” she asked, correctly assuming we weren’t from here in the city.

  Steph and the boys introduced us and explained our circumstances as we drove, and I kept my eyes open in the dusk, watching for movement as our headlights cut in front of us. She introduced herself as Taylor.

  “Listen, I think we need to find somewhere to stop for the night,” I interrupted them. Our original plan had been to drive straight through in shifts but seeing that ferocious mob fill the street behind us made me realize how exposed we were out here in the darkness.

  “Anyone who’s infected nearby is going to see our lights long before we see them,” I stated. Glancing at our new passenger in the rearview mirror, I asked her, “Taylor, you said this was near your neighbourhood; do you think we can stow away at your apartment for tonight?”

  She glanced around the van looking at us, obviously uneasy about the idea of having a bunch of strangers settle in with her, but also obviously unable to say no since we literally just saved her life.

  Finally, she agreed and started giving me driving directions. We took the first turn and started doubling back.

  We arrived at her block and drove by slowly without stopping, looking for any sign of people. There was none. Cautiously, I pulled the van into the alley behind her building and killed the engine. We all sat quietly, waiting to see what would happen.

  A few minutes went by, and everything looked okay. Grabbing our packs and making sure not to slam any car doors, we climbed out of the van, locked it, and followed Taylor into her building.

  ♦♦♦

  Despite the falling darkness, from inside Taylor’s fourth-floor apartment I could see a bit further around us and back into the city. I couldn’t see the lake, though; I guess we had come too far north. Too bad, I thought to myself, I had never actually seen Lake Ontario before. Maybe tomorrow in the light.

  Looking up and down the street and at the surrounding buildings, I didn’t see any movement. I could see plumes of dark smoke in the sky several blocks away, as well as from several other areas around the city. I was guessing fires started from looting, or maybe an accident, and there was simply no-one to come put them out.

  Turning to Taylor, I asked if she knew how to get up to the roof of her building.

  “Yeah, no problem,” she answered. “I go up there sometimes in the summer to suntan. We can go up the fire escape, there’s only one more floor above us.”

  “Good thinking,” nodded Alex. “We can go up and catch some rays tomorrow!” His brother swatted him, a wry grin on his face.

  I frowned at the twins.

  “Tonight, after it gets full dark, I’d like to go up there and see if we can see anything. If there’s a rescue centre or evacuation post set up anywhere, they might have power, it might be lit up. It will be easier to see it in the dark,” I said.

  This time Alex nodded in genuine appreciation for my obviously stunning intellect. I smiled at him smugly and took a bite of my sandwich.

  Not to be outdone, Jamie threw a good idea into the mix. “I was t
hinking, if you’re running low on water and supplies, we can always check your neighbours’ apartments,” he said. “Anyone who may have left when the health scare hit wouldn’t likely have taken their food with them, and at the very least all of the toilets will have clean water in the reservoir that we can collect.” He looked around at us, shrugging. “A little breaking and entering can likely be forgiven in a life and death situation like this.”

  “What if we find infected people?” asked Taylor.

  I told her about the woman from the airport car-rental kiosk who hadn’t been able to figure out how to open the door of the bathroom. “I think if we just go door to door and knock quietly, we should be okay,” I suggested. “We’ll just keep our eyes open, go slow, and be ready to get back here in a hurry.”

  To be safe, I suggested we should have some tools and stuff ready by the door to be prepared to bar it and keep it shut if we had to.

  We all agreed these were some good ideas and went to work getting everything together. Taylor gathered all her pots and pans and some empty bottles for us to collect water in, and she had a pile of some cloth grocery bags for any supplies we might find.

  “What have you got for tools?” I asked. She went to a closet and pulled out a small toolbox. Like most urbanites living in an apartment, she didn’t have much. She had a hammer, a pair of pliers and a few screwdrivers; I figured with the flimsy way these apartments were built, it would be enough to get us into the other apartments in the building while causing the least amount of damage to the doors and frames.

  With the last of the light, I looked at the gear we had assembled, and figured it was a good start. We’d get up and going early tomorrow as soon as the sun came up, and hopefully, with some luck, we’d be on our way tomorrow with some extra supplies.

  Steph handed out some of the sandwiches she had grabbed from the airport kiosk earlier today. If we were careful, I figured we would have enough food for a couple days for the four of us. I sat down wearily in a chair in the darkness of Taylor’s apartment. I couldn’t believe everything that had happened today. It felt unreal.