Brink of Extinction Read online

  “Spreading the infection.”

  “No,” the man’s voice was suddenly harsh and loud, like the bludgeon of a blunt instrument. “That didn’t happen.”

  “Why? I thought – ”

  “After the first outbreak was contained the military began working on experimental antidotes,” the man went on as though the boy had never spoken. “They were trying to create a way to fight the infection – to stop the spread of the zombie virus being transmitted. One man came up with a solution – an extreme solution. His name was William Mitchell. He was with USAMRIID and what Mitchell came up with,” the man paused and his voice lowered to a whisper, “was something called Debex-343. It was some kind of hybrid anticoagulant. They immunized two hundred thousand young soldiers and put them into the field to face the horde.”

  “How did it work?” the boy’s voice too had become small.

  The man shrugged his shoulders and slowly shook his head. He held out his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is what it did.”

  “What? What did it do?” The devastated ground that surrounded them, the biting cold of the afternoon… suddenly none of it seemed important.

  “It made a person bleed out,” the man said. “The blood thinning anticoagulant they created was triggered by severe body trauma. As soon as a soldier in the trenches was bitten by one of the infected, their body just seemed to melt. They bled out. It gushed from the wounds and it erupted from their eyes and ears and their mouths so quickly that they never had time to turn. They died before they could become infected.”

  A vast sweeping silence descended on the man and the boy, as they stood alone in the emptiness of the desolate countryside. The wind lifted, moaning and undulating through the trees and carrying with it the first sprinkles of ice and rain, and the last bleak light of the day retreated over the old battlefield as night rushed down upon them.

  “The ground became bogged with blood,” the man’s voice was a distant echo in his own ears – a gallon-and-a-half of blood from every man who was bitten. They bled on the men beside them, they bled into the dirt of their trench, and they bled over the sandbags and the grass and those who had already fallen before them. The world was washed in their blood and the sky turned orange behind a veil of flames and the smoke. The world was on fire… and the soldiers who died were trampled into the soft bloody mud of their trenches.” He sighed, as though to speak was to purge himself of some heavy traumatic burden that had weighed impossibly on his shoulders. He looked up then, and his eyes were glistening, his face a mask of tortured emotion. “That field – the dirt and devastation you see – is not just a battlefield. It’s a mass graveyard for over fifty thousand brave young heroes.”

  * * *

  The man and the boy came down off the overpass, following the course of the road for a mile and walking in silence. The night and the cold rushed down upon them with dramatic suddenness and it was almost completely dark when at last the man paused and narrowed his eyes warily. He was standing on the shoulder of the road under an old street sign. He tilted his head and heard the faintest of sounds, like a mournful whisper, on the breeze.

  Ahead, hunched as silhouettes against the fading light, he could see the outline of a row of houses, their shapes fractured, the lines of roof and wall somehow misshapen. The man lowered the canvas carry bag and crouched to rummage through the meager contents. He found the Glock, felt the cold comfort of it in his grip. He stood up slowly and as he straightened, he tucked the weapon down inside the waistband of his jeans, the steel of the weapon cold and rigid against his lower back. He turned then to the boy, and warned him to silence with a gesture of his hand. The boy nodded.

  “We need a place to spend the night,” the man whispered. He glanced up into the brooding sky and felt the spatter of more rain and ice sting his cheeks, then pointed down the road. “I’m going to check out those burned out houses. You stay here.”

  The boy’s expression darkened. “But I want – ” he started. The man did not let him finish.

  “Do what I tell you!” the man hissed through gritted teeth, his frayed temper and sudden alert instincts making his voice sound ferocious.

  They glared at each other, the man’s eyes simmering with his pent up frustration and the boy’s jaw thrust out defiant and resentful. The man took the boy by the collar of his jacket and dragged him into the straggle of bushes that fringed the road. “Stay low… and stay here,” the man demanded. “I will come back for you.”

  The boy pulled indignantly away from the man’s grip and dropped down bitterly into the wet grass. The man stepped back onto the edge of the road and went forward in carefully measured steps.

  The roof of the first house had collapsed in upon itself so that all that remained of the home was a single blackened brick wall and the broken charred remains of timber beams. The grass around the derelict house had grown as high as his knees. The man paused in front of the ruins and carefully ran his eyes across the ground. He could see no trail, no path in the grass that would show a sign of habitation – but the structure would afford no shelter from the elements. The man was about to move on when he heard the noise again – this time clearer and closer. It sounded like a muffled sob, a soft restrained cry of grief that had been swiftly choked off. He went into a crouch and instinctively his hand went behind his back to snatch for the Glock.

  The next house was a dark two-story mass beneath the gnarled spreading branches of an ancient tree. The roof was all angled and pitched, the boarded-up windows like empty unseeing eyes. The fence posts that marked the front of the property had been burned down to blackened stumps and the smell of wood smoke was faint on the breeze. The man took a couple of hesitant steps along the front path...

  Suddenly there was a violent crash of noise and then the huge hulking figure of a man stood within an open doorway, his brawny shape silhouetted by the glow of flickering firelight that came from somewhere within the house. There was a gun in the stranger’s hand. He raised the weapon, pointed it at the man’s face and his voice was a belligerent bellowing challenge.

  “Who are you?”

  The man held his hands wide, let the Glock slip from his fingers into the grass beside the overgrown path, then raised his hands, palms out and placating, until they were level with his shoulders.

  “I mean no harm, friend,” he said. His voice stayed level, his eyes steady. He stared at the stranger in the frame of the doorway and saw big rugged features screwed up into an aggressive snarl. “I was just looking for somewhere to spend the night.”

  The stranger came out through the door, the gun in his hand shaking slightly. He moved a little to the side and as he shifted, the man saw into the front room of the house. On her knees with her back to him, hunched and rocking mournfully, crouched the figure of a woman, her hands clasped into futile little fists by her sides. The man flicked his eyes back to the stranger. He looked past the muzzle of the weapon and saw eyes that were red-rimmed and puffy, a face swollen with anguish.

  “This house is taken,” the stranger said, his voice cracked, and coarse as gravel. “We’ve got no room for any one.”

  The man nodded, took a slow step backwards, his hands still raised. Then the woman inside the house burst into a grief-stricken moan of agony, and both men turned their heads. Now the man could see another figure, stretched out on the floor beside where the woman knelt. It was a child, lying with its hands folded across its chest, the expression on the face serene… and very still. The light from the fire caught the blonde curls of the child’s hair and cast it in a golden glowing halo.

  The man looked a question back at the stranger. “The child… is everything okay?”

  The stranger came closer, thrusting the muzzle of his gun into the man’s face, and now his face became ugly, filled with rage. “Are you a doctor?” he demanded, his voice cracking like a whip.

  The man shook his head, but stayed staring at the dark stranger, his gaze unflinchi
ng. “No.”

  “Then you can’t help. So go – before I do something you will regret.”

  The man stepped away, went back down along the path. He retrieved the Glock from the grass, all the while covered by the brutal black weapon in the stranger’s fist. When he at last returned to the burned fence posts that bordered the property the man looked back one last time.

  “I’m only looking for shelter for the night,” he said again. “I have a son…”

  The stranger in the shadows of the porch waved his gun, and now his tone was cutting and bitter. “So did I,” he said. “Keep walking till you get out of range, and don’t stop again until you do.”

  * * *

  The man found an empty house a mile further down the road, and he and the boy slept fitfully through the night huddled by the glow of a small fire. In the darkness before sunrise the man stirred the ashes and sipped at a cup of coffee, listening carefully to the soft sounds of the new dawning day. He could hear the drip of water and, far off, the sound of a barking dog.

  He lit one of his few remaining cigarettes and left the ruins of the house.

  It had snowed during the night, and the world was layered in a thin blanket of white. It covered the road and the grass, and it lay on the bare branches of the trees like Christmas tinsel. The man stood silent and unmoving, and marveled at nature’s ability to disguise the ravaged world’s ugliness beneath a mask of white and a sunrise of golden light that was beginning to spread its rays.

  He finished the cigarette and then walked a slow, careful circuit of the house, studying the soft snow for footprints. When he was satisfied that the ground had not been disturbed, he went back into the house.

  The boy awoke to the pressure of the man’s hand shaking his shoulder and a shaft of sunlight through one of the empty windows. He sat upright with an effort and let the threadbare blanket slip off his shoulders. He screwed up his face against the light. The cold overnight had stiffened his legs and his head felt hazy with fatigue.

  “What?” the boy’s tone was an ill-tempered growl.

  “Time to get up,” the man said. “We need to be on our way.”

  They shared a can of condensed soup, warmed in the dying coals of the little fire, and were ready to leave fifteen minutes later. The man hefted his canvas bag – and then froze.

  Faint – so faint that it might have been merely his imagination – the man heard a new sound. He turned his head, closed his eyes and his face became a frown of deep concentration. He stood like that for several seconds, and then at last his eyes flashed open, filled with sudden alarm.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said, the words spat out in urgency. “A truck, or a car.”

  He clambered through the burned ruined shell of the house until he stood hidden by a wall, with a view down the long winding road. The sun had crested the rim of the horizon, making the morning shadows through the trees long and angular. The man fixed his gaze on the end of the road where it curved out of sight behind a low rise of brown grass. He could see nothing, but the sound of an engine was now clear in the silence. It was an abrasive snarling sound in total contrast to the tranquility of the snow-covered landscape.

  The boy saw the man’s manner change abruptly. The man ducked down and ran back to where he was waiting, doubled over and urgent.

  “What’s happening?” the boy’s voice quavered.

  “Trouble,” the man said instinctively. “We have to get out of here. Right now.”

  On the far side of the road clumped a ragged fringe of trees and long grass, but it would mean scampering across open ground, not knowing when the vehicle would round the corner and come into sight. If they were caught in the open…

  The man ran through the wreckage to the back of the house. Behind it hunched another house that had been burned to rubble, and there were more houses on either side of where he stood. He didn’t want to be caught here. If trouble found them, it would be too hard to defend with just one handgun; too many blind corners, too many places to be caught and surrounded. He wanted to be in the woods, where he could evade and escape.

  “Come on!” the man snapped.

  The boy followed him back through the house and they crouched in the broken front doorway like men about to leap from an airplane into the vast empty void. The sound of the vehicle’s growling engine drew closer, coming in fits of high-revving snarls and then backing off again so that the noise seemed to pulse in waves. The man clenched his jaw, took a long deep breath, and then thumped the boy in the middle of his back.

  “Go!” he hissed.

  They scampered side-by-side across the open road, running with their bags thumping against their backs and the straps tugging heavy at their shoulders. They ran until they were into the veil of trees and grass and then paused, fifty yards beyond the far side of the road. Before them the woods thinned into a field of open snowy ground and in the distance they could see more houses, spaced widely apart like farming properties.

  The man doubled back with the boy following him, keeping within the dense cover of the wooded grove, and making his way back in the direction of the overpass. He knew they had left the clear sign of their footprints on the snow-covered roadway, and he wanted separation. If the driver of the truck saw the outline of the prints and decided to investigate, he and the boy had to be somewhere else.

  They walked for a hundred yards and then the man steered the boy back through the woods to the edge of the road, keeping carefully concealed in the long grass. The sound of the truck’s roaring engine grew to a clamor of noise, overlaid with wild crazy whoops and shouts. The man threw his bag on the ground and crawled forward on his stomach through the dense grass until at last he could see. The boy stayed beside him, and they were breathing hard with their hands over their mouths to disguise and filter the moist clouds of their ragged breath.

  There was a flicker of glaring sunlight reflected off metal, and then through the long grass the man saw a big 1-ton Ford truck approaching at a slow crawl. The vehicle was painted red, the color camouflaged by sprayed mud and dirt, and in the back of the truck stood two men wearing scruffy combat fatigues and holding shotguns. In the driver’s seat was another man with a long dark beard and sleepy, hooded eyes. Then a fourth person appeared – a woman sat suddenly upright in the passenger seat of the vehicle. She was young, and there was a length of rope knotted around her neck. The girl wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and stared blindly out the side window, seeming to look directly at the man where he lay hiding, with dull hopeless eyes.

  The two strangers in the bed of the truck were peering into the dense border of bushes, the vehicle’s big engine almost idling as it went past at little more than walking pace. The man and the boy shrank back.

  “They’re looking for us,” the man realized. They had seen the footprints.

  He touched the boy’s shoulder with one finger, warning him to stay still, then leaned his head close until his lips were almost brushing the boy’s ear. “They’re searching for us,” he murmured. “They saw the footprints. If the truck stops, I want you to run back through the woods and head for one of those farm houses we saw on the far side of the field. I will find you.”

  The man eased the Glock from out of the waistband of his jeans making slow deliberate movements. The truck was twenty yards down the road now, belching grey clouds of exhaust that mingled with the frigid morning air like a smoke screen. The man felt himself begin to relax. He let some of the tension ease from his body, became aware of the ice-cold dampness soaking through his clothes. He let out a deep, relieved breath… and then the truck suddenly stopped.

  In an instant the man felt every muscle and fiber of his body re-string with taut strain. The blood in his veins was a sudden tattoo of pounding at his temples and the beat of his heart leaped and accelerated. He swiveled his eyes to the right until he could clearly see the back of the truck and he stared unblinking until at last his vision watered. One of the shotgun-holding strangers had climbed down
off the truck and begun walking along the shoulder of the road, back towards where the man and the boy were concealed, while the other thug had run across to the far side of the road and disappeared into the line of ruined houses. The man watched the nearest gunman come closer. He was a big, beefy figure, heavy in the gut, wearing a filthy pair of denim overalls. He held the shotgun in front of him, squinting into the dense tree line with piggy little eyes, his booted feet crunching in the snow.

  The man held his breath and glanced at the boy. He made an almost imperceptible gesture of dismissal with his head. The boy glared at him and the man frowned sharply. “Go!” the man silently mouthed the order and his face darkened with annoyance and rising alarm.

  The boy stared back, unmoving and defiant.

  Then abruptly, dramatically, the thug with the shotgun walked to where they lay and stood motionless for long seconds. He seemed so close that the man imagined he could almost reach out his hand and touch the gunman’s foot. The man and the boy stopped breathing, and for long perilous seconds the thug swayed from side to side as though he were trying to peer through the screen of trees. The man could smell a stench; the thick odor of the thug’s body, mingled with the rancid smell of unwashed clothes and grease.

  Sudden distant shouts of triumph from across the road made the gunman standing over them turn his head sharply. He looked away from the trees, staring beyond where the truck stood idling in the middle of the road, and then he gave a loud whooping cry like a baying hunting dog that had tracked the scent of a fox. The stranger lowered his shotgun and went lumbering excitedly back in the direction of the truck.