Infected inside

Infected (chapter 4)

Making my way down the bunker I saw an army cot, a blanket folded neatly on top and an arm chair that looked like it was falling apart in the opposite corner. To the right there was a table full of empty food tins, unopened food tins, and the same with water bottles.

Looking at my weary face he said, “take the bed, I’ll sleep in the chair.” I was too tired to feel guilty or argue about it so I made my way over to the bed, threw my backpack on the floor and collapsed onto the bed passing out almost immediately.

A month had passed by and Slowly we had formed a bond. At first it started with me having night terrors and flashbacks of what had happened to my parents. I would scream and cry in my sleep and thrash around, sweat dripping off of me. Liam as I had come to know his name was, came over that first night and shook me awake. “Hey, wake up kid.” He shook me harder until I woke with fright and smacked him in the face, I kicked at him and thrashed around wildly hitting him in the face more times then I could count trying to break free. He used his strength, biceps bulging with the effort as he wrapped his arms around me until I could no longer move. I screamed and tried to wrestle free while he ignored me until slowly I had come back to reality and realised where I was, calming down and being hit with shame and embarrassment. He hadn’t judged or said a word just let me go and nodded for me to go back to sleep. It had been like that every night for the last month until slowly the dreams had become less frequent.

“Hey kid, what are you doing?” Pulled back to the present by the sound of his husky voice I looked at him and then down at the gun in my hand. He had been teaching me how to use guns and over time we had both learnt it was best for me to just stick with a 9mm, I think that’s what he called it.

I had been holding the 9mm in my hand for a while and not been doing anything when I was supposed to be cleaning it. “Sorry, daydreaming,” I mumbled.

He taught me that it was best to start with your simpler weapons first and only when you ran out of ammo or came up against something more dangerous did you go on to bigger stronger firearms. When I’d mentioned about him using his machine gun to save me he had said that it was the only ammo he had left which had me feeling emotional to know that he had used the last of his own ammo on me, a complete stranger.

Whenever I tried to ask him about his life before this he always shut me down but I never gave up so now, I tried again and asked, “what was your life like before this? Did you have family? What did you work as?” I don’t know if it was my constant chattering that drove him nuts or whether I had indeed managed to wear him down but finally he answered, “no family, I was an only child and my mum was a single parent, she died of cancer three years before all of this s**t started.”

I looked up at him but he was focused on cleaning his own gun out, using it as a distraction to not feel too much.

“I had a pet dog.” He carried on. “Loved that son of a b***h like she was my best friend, she went everywhere with me.”

“What kind of dog was it?” I asked.

“She was a German shepherd. Dodge.”

When my eyebrows rose he answered, “she would come on tours with me, she had a special talent for dodging bullets from the enemy, never got hit once so we named her dodge.”

“So you were a soldier?” I asked.

He nodded and laughed, “I had a lot to learn when I first joined, there was a lot of teasing and joking around but out there in battle, when there was no one else but eachother, we were nothing but brothers.” He looked lost in thought, a sad look crossing his face before he shook it off and stopped talking.

After five minutes of silence I had to ask. “What happened to dodge?”

I kept my gaze on the gun in my hand, making sure not to look at him and hoping this would make him more comfortable in opening up.

He didn’t answer for several seconds and I flicked my gaze up quickly and saw his fist clench around his gun turning his knuckles white. “We were together during this s**t show for a few months, she saved my ass a couple of times and I saved hers, we were a team. I didn’t know about this bunker at the time so we camped in quiet areas. We found a wood similar to this one and camped deep inside and hid in the long tall grass but somehow they found us.”

His voice grew deeper, not with anger I realised, but with the effort not to break down and cry. I woke up to her cries and saw those f*****g zombies biting into her. They were tearing chunks of her flesh and dragging her away, she was clawing to get back to me frantically but it was too late.”

A tear slid down one of his cheeks and he angrily wiped it away. “That’s when I realised the virus infects animals faster then humans. I couldn’t figure out why they stopped eating her alive. When she came out of the shadows her eyes were the same orange glow as theirs, she was foaming at the mouth and snarling which she had never done in all the time I knew her. She launched herself at me and tried to tear into my neck, the other zombies were coming at me and I had to shoot them, there was no light except the flashing from the gun and the moon. I had one hand around dodges throat to keep her from biting me while shooting the others but I was running out of ammo and options. I had to pull the f*****g trigger in her face and kill her and then I had to run, I couldn’t even bring her body to bury. I had her blood on me for weeks before I found somewhere to wash up.” He was crying angrily at this point and I ran over and pulled him into my arms. I held him like a child, rocking back and forth and making soothing noises, he let me for two minutes before pulling away, wiping his face and putting on a jovial face and loudly said, “come on then, finish cleaning.”

I knew he was done talking about anything else and stopped badgering him. When we were done cleaning the guns he went to go wash himself in the shower that whoever had made this place had created. He pulled the black curtain around and turned the shower on, throwing his clothes to the side. He had some fresh clothes lying neatly on the floor within arms reach. A black t-shirt and jeans. I saw a gap between the curtains and quickly averted my eyes but for the life of me I could not stop myself from looking back over and watching. His body was perfect, six pack abs that I knew now were from the working out he did every morning and night to keep himself in the fittest shape for fighting. The water cascading down those luscious abs had me following its trail down to his hips and lower so that I saw a very decently sized manhood between his legs.

I was drooling when he turned and caught me watching him. He frowned at me and pulled the curtain more so that I could no longer see anything and I was left blushing. It was evening by now, we were a little behind on schedule but when he came out of the shower all dressed we got our things together, my 9mm attached to my hip and him with his shotgun. We needed to go out and get more food and that meant going into town where the majority of zombie activity was.