Infected inside

Infected inside (chapter 10)

The day arrived and I met up with Danny In the early hours of the morning. I asked him as we packed what we needed, “won’t anyone miss you?”

He didn’t slow down as he replied, “no, wife died five years ago and we never had children.”

I was nervous as hell and I was more nervous now with Danny coming along. The fear of losing someone else had my stomach doing somersaults and I could barely breathe at the thought, I didn’t think I could lose someone close to me again. I tried to reassure myself that he had both a military background and was one of the best MMA fighters in the country, besides, our aim was to be stealthy and go unseen for as long as we could. Fighting was a last resort, using loud firearms an even more last resort.

I used Danny’s laptop to email a quick message to John giving him an update and telling him he better be prepared for the story.

I had already called in sick to work so they wouldn’t be missing me. Danny had a contact who could smuggle us secretly into the state I had not so long ago run away from. Where WIC was based. I had fled from there knowing they would never stop searching for me, to be honest I had no idea how I had managed to evade them for this long but I was thankful.

Being back in the same city I had eluded WIC felt surreal. The last time I had been here had been when I was running for my life, when the pain of losing Liam burned through my veins and burned even brighter in my heart almost crushing me. I blinked back the tears and focused on the mission. I couldn’t afford to be emotional now and expect to survive. I had dyed my brown hair blonde to try and better disguise myself. It was cold here and I wrapped my parka coat tighter around myself and pulled up the hood.

Danny followed my lead as I bobbed and weaved my way through the crowd of people doing their last bits of Christmas shopping. It would be Christmas in three days. We walked until the chatter of people died down and the lights of the shops grew dimmer and dimmer. I turned left two times and then did a right and another left. I don’t know how long we had been walking for but I knew it was long enough that my feet were aching. I looked back at Danny but he didn’t look phased in the slightest, he wasn’t even sweating.

I on the other hand was sweating profusely in my jacket now and knew I would smell not so pleasant when I took it off. I scraped back the few loose strands of my hair that slipped from my ponytail. We were so close now and my stomach started doing somersaults again as we drew ever nearer.

We were almost in the middle of nowhere by now except for a few empty closed down buildings and the huge building that had the print WIC written across it. I shivered as I looked at the name and forced my feet to carry on. We made our way around the back of the building, crouching down low and taking our time, making sure no one noticed us or grew suspicious. I crept slowly toward the fence until I reached it and looked through. Danny joined me and started taking note of where each guard was stationed, seriously, he had a notepad and pen in hand, he was literally taking notes and I stared at him.

He finally looked up at me and whispered, “what? You can never be too careful, we want to remember every detail, even the useless information our brains will filter out.” I suppose he was right and looked back through the fence again. Then I looked back at Danny slowly and said, “wait, why are you taking notes if we are about to go in?”

“Because we are not about to go in.”

“But-“ he cut me off and added, “unless you want to get killed?”

I frowned in confusion and he sighed, putting away the notepad. “We need to learn their routine, what times they get sent out to guard, where each post is that they’re assigned to, how long for, when they have breaks etc. We want to know every detail, we want to go in when it’s quiet not when they are all on guard or at the busiest times.” That made sense and I was suddenly super glad I had him with me.

It was growing dark and then it was actually dark when Danny finally signalled for us to leave. He had everything he needed. It was a slow and miserable walk back, I had been all hyped and rearing to go into WIC and get what we needed, now the adrenaline had left my body I felt miserable and the weather was miserable too, lightly drizzling with rain.

My fingers were numb from the cold and wet when we reached a fast food place. Danny ordered us meals, burgers, fries, a drink and a sundae. My stomach rumbled violently at the smell of the food. He booked us into a b&b ordering two separate rooms. He gave me my key and I followed him up the stairs. He waited for me to open my room 44 before opening his room next to mine and saying goodnight.

I rushed the food down my throat so fast I don’t know how I didn’t choke but it felt so good to feel full. I rarely felt full these days as I usually had to chose between affording a meal and training sessions.

The room was quite cosy actually, with the dim light of the lamp glowing and soft brown sheets on the bed. A bedside table that the lamp was sat upon, beige carpet, white walls and an arm chair that looked a little too like the one in the bunker me and Liam had stayed in. I swallowed the damn lump that always got stuck in my throat and went and looked in the small bathroom. A toilet, sink, basic toiletries and a shower. I jumped in the shower and stayed there for a long time. I allowed myself to cry and cried until my chest hurt and I couldn’t cry anymore. I missed Liam, I missed my parents and I wished the stupid zombies had never existed, I wished this was all a bad dream but it wasn’t and I had to live with the horrors of what I had seen and experienced forever. I couldn’t even find comfort in someone else, no one else understood no one else could ever truly understand what I had been through, I was the last survivor of that experiment and I still didn’t know why they had come and saved me. Though slowly I had to come believe it was because they needed one survivor, needed one person to tell the tale through their own eyes because no amount of cameras was going to be enough, they needed a real living survivor to describe in detail the horrors of what had happened and probably to explain fully just how the infection worked and spread.