Origins of the Outbreak Read online

  The duffle bag went into the back seat of his car along with the boots that he’d picked up from the foyer and he placed his coffee mug in the cup holder. As he straightened up from the inside, the bushes on the opposite side of the car began to shake. He glanced over and thought there must have been some type of wind gust that came through that he didn’t realize – that, or the neighbor’s damn dog was out again. He’d almost hit the stupid mutt on several occasions as he backed out of the driveway for PT.

  The bushes had stopped moving, so he rushed inside to get the trash. If he dilly-dallied too long, then he’d get caught up in the rush of traffic at the gate. Craig pulled the bag out and tied it off. Then he quietly placed another in the can and walked over to the door. He closed the door carefully behind himself and locked it.

  Before he’d even pulled the keys out of the deadbolt some motherfucker jumped him from behind and grabbed hold of his shirt. His years of Army combatives training kicked in instantly and he reached over his shoulder and gripped the hand. He held the hand tightly as he twisted to face his attacker and the guy’s wrist snapped.

  Craig had seen some shit. He’d shot people in combat – some of them less than ten feet away – but he’d never held someone’s body as a part of them broke. He dropped the hand in horror and looked up into the ruined face of a security guard. The soldier recoiled even further in horror as the guy in front of him – the thing – didn’t even seem bothered by his broken wrist.

  Giant patches of skin had been pulled from his neck and in the porch’s weak light Craig could see that dried blood covered the front of his uniform. The guard’s eyes were sunken into his skull and the skin on his face that wasn’t torn or missing seemed to sag like it had lost all of the elasticity that normally accompanied a living person. Whatever it was, the thing in front of him wasn’t natural.

  The creature’s throat emitted a loud moan and it quickly dove in towards Craig. He sidestepped and kicked hard into its knee, which buckled at an awkward angle. Again, the man showed no emotion and lunged towards Craig.

  He had a moment of panic as he realized that the thing was now between himself and the safety of his house. Inside his home was where his family slept and he knew that this guy could just turn the keys and get inside. He made a poor decision to try and grab the creature and throw it into the yard.

  When he reached for it the thing turned its head and bit down into Craig’s wrist. He shouted in pain and surprise. He tried to yank his hand backwards and the fucker pulled forward along with him as it held on like a dog holding a chew toy. The sergeant punched with his left hand into the side of the thing’s head and kept punching over and over until the skin on his knuckles split and bled.

  The punches bounced ineffectively off of its head but Craig’s arm finally came away from the creature – at the cost of a mouth-sized chunk of missing forearm. He held his arm protectively against his chest and watched in a daze of pain and horror as the security guard chewed his skin and swallowed. Its dead eyes focused on him and it stumbled towards him once more, but the dislocated knee gave out and it fell forward.

  Craig wasn’t fast enough to step out of the way and the creature’s one good hand clamped around his running shoe. He tried to pull away, but the thing was incredibly strong and it pulled itself onto his leg and bit into his quadriceps muscle right above the knee. This time, Craig screamed in terror and grabbed onto the porch pillar to keep from falling. If he fell, it was all over.

  With his upper body supported by the pillar, he kicked hard with his opposite foot to dislodge the creature. It came away with a ragged strip of flesh and lay on its chest chewing happily. Craig knew that he only had a second before it was done and attacked him once more.

  He looked around in desperation and his eyes settled on a paving stone several feet down the driveway towards the street and away from the house. He limped backwards to the garden and risked a glance back at the porch. The creature had managed to stand, but fell when it tried to take a step in his direction. It quickly abandoned the attempt to walk and dragged itself towards him.

  Craig finally made it to the garden and picked up the brick. The sickening sound of bone scraping against concrete made his stomach churn as the creature pulled itself along with both arms. The wrist that he’d broken slid along the driveway and bones poked through the skin. It moved faster at a crawl than he’d been able to limp on his feet and the damned thing was already less than two feet away from him.

  He thought about running into the house to call the police, but he knew that with the determination that this thing had, it would find a way inside. He raised the paver above his head and smashed it down into the forehead of the fucker.

  It collapsed downwards, but began to struggle upwards so he fell to his knees and bashed down onto the back of its head. The thing continued to struggle so he raised the brick again and smashed as hard as he could manage. The skull gave way and the paver crushed the creature's head in a sickening mix of sounds.

  He swung the brick one more time into the ruined skull to ensure that it was dead and stood up. He started to limp towards his car, but turned and picked up the brick to take with him. Craig thought it was dead, but there was no telling so he didn’t want to be disarmed.

  By the time he’d staggered to his car and opened the door, he was exhausted. He fell into the driver’s seat and leaned drunkenly over to the interior where his cell phone sat in the center console. Through bleary eyes, he found his phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  As the phone rang, he tried to assess the damage to his body. The large muscle in his upper leg had rolled up like a window shade when that thing bit through the ligament that held it stretched tight from his hip to his knee; part of the muscle was missing, eaten by that… thing. His right arm was in ruins as well. There was a mouth-sized hole in his forearm and from what he could tell, it was at least two inches deep and he was bleeding all over everything.

  Craig tried to hold his phone to his ear, but his good hand began to shake uncontrollably, so he pushed the speaker button and set the phone down on his lap. The emergency line continued to ring with no answer. After almost a minute of waiting for someone to answer, he laid his head back on the headrest.

  So tired… Just need to rest, he thought as he closed his eyes and waited for an operator to answer.

  Finally, a recording picked up on the 9-1-1 line. “All lines are currently busy. If this is an emergency, please hang up and try again. Otherwise, please call your local police department at –”

  “Goddammit!” he groaned, knocking his cell phone onto the passenger floorboard when he tried to hang up. Maybe the house phone will get through if all the cell phone lines are busy. He practically fell out of the car trying to stand and go inside. Craig managed to stagger to his porch steps before he collapsed and passed into oblivion.

  The Construction Worker, 8:22 a.m.

  “Fuck you, asswipe!” Mateo shouted at the car full of people who’d just sped by the stop sign he held. It was a little past eight in the morning and it was already hot and humid and his temper was not going to take too many more of the dickheads that had been through today.

  Into his handheld radio he said, “Hey, Ben. We got another one speeding your way. You don’t have anybody coming, do you?”

  “Hell, I just released about ten cars,” Ben replied.

  “I hope they’ve got good insurance then, ‘cause there’s gonna be an accident.”

  “I’ll call Freddy’s Towing and let them know that we’ll probably need them.”

  “Good thinking,” Mateo agreed. “Let me know if a gray four-door loaded down with shitbirds makes it past you.”

  “Will do.”

  Mateo’s job, for the time being, was to hold the slow/stop sign along the access road to I-35, the major north-south interstate in Texas. They were switching the two-way side roads to one-way in an effort to alleviate traffic problems and there was currently a ten mile stretch of road closed down to do the work. The
crew was using large acetylene torches to loosen the painted yellow stripes and then painstakingly coming behind with scrapers and scraping the paint from the roadway. Once they were done with this section a paint sprayer would come along and paint the white lines, indicating that it was now a one-way road; it was very exciting work.

  The crew had been having problems all morning long with people coming from the Belton area and blowing past them in a rush to get to the highway and the police were nowhere to be found. Usually they were crawling over construction sites, but not today when the crew actually needed them. Typical.

  Somehow the cars avoided an accident. There must have been some close calls, but no wreckers would be needed. That helped Mateo immensely. He didn't need that kind of hassle to shut down the job site. He was just about to relax when the screech of metal on metal made him whip his head around. Sure enough, the last car got into an accident – although, as the construction worker looked down the way, there wasn't another car that they'd hit.

  “Aww, what the hell?” he moaned to himself and brought the radio to his cheek. “Hey, Ben. We just had a single-vehicle accident right here in the lane. You'll need to stop traffic on your end until I can figure out if they can drive out or if we need a tow truck.”

  “Roger that, Mateo,” Ben's voice drifted from the speaker. “What happened?”

  “I don't know,” he responded. “It looks like they ran into the Jersey barrier and now they're stopped about three hundred feet from me. I'm gonna head down there and see what's up.”

  “Okay, sounds like a plan. I'll let folks on this end know that the way is blocked and that they may want to swing down around Salado and then come up the back way.”

  “Yeah, that may be what we need to have them do. Good thinking,” he added.

  Mateo clicked the walkie talkie onto his belt and sighed as he judged the distance to the crash site. It was just on the edge of where he'd consider walking to, but he didn't want to risk fouling things up even further by getting his truck stuck in the narrow construction lane if the car was drivable.

  He decided that walking would be the best way to keep things clear so he planted his stop sign in the Jersey barrier and jogged over to his truck. He pulled a plastic orange- and white-striped saw horse from the truck bed and hastily assembled it in the middle of the road. Then he placed a ROAD CLOSED sign on the new obstacle and turned to begin the long walk down to the accident.

  It was right about the distance from home plate to the right field wall on a baseball field. For some reason he still measured short distances in relation to a ball field, even though it had been more than ten years since he played in high school. Go with what you know, I guess.

  As he neared the car, he saw that they must have hit an animal. Blood smeared along the wall, whatever they hit was probably crushed between the car and the barrier. It wasn't until he got to within ten feet that he noticed the legs.

  A boot was suspended off the ground, trapped by the front fender against the wall and an entire leg lay awkwardly on the ground. The limb had been inside a pair of jeans at one point, now it lay in ruin.

  “Oh fuck. Oh fuck…,” Mateo's hands shook almost uncontrollably as he brought the radio back to his mouth. “Ben! Ben, can you hear me?” he screamed.

  “Yeah, what's wrong, buddy?”

  “They hit a person. Oh god, there's blood everywhere. Ben, call the EMS.”

  “Shit. Okay Mateo, is anyone hurt?”

  “I'm not there yet, but there are two goddamned legs without a fucking body!”

  “Holy hell,” Ben cursed. “I'm calling them now.”

  “I'm here, gonna see what I can do.”

  “Okay.”

  Mateo tried to put the radio back on his belt, but he dropped it when he saw the woman through the open driver's door. “Holy shit! The ambulance is on the way!” he screamed at the legless man gesturing wildly from the ground towards him.

  The driver of the car was covered in blood and wasn't moving. She must have gotten injured in the accident when she swerved to avoid this guy, he decided. Mateo tried to get around the car door, but it was lodged, so he rushed around the back of the car and when he rounded the corner, he saw the carnage in its totality.

  The guy – Holy shit, it's Sean from the pub! – was missing one foot and his other leg was completely ripped off. Blood ran in rivulets down his face from his head and mouth. Mateo rushed forward and took off his belt to tie a tourniquet around Sean's leg.

  “Sean, I'm going to help you out,” he said more calmly than he felt. Sean was so fucked up that he just moaned incoherently at him and kept opening and closing the one hand that he could still use.

  Mateo slid his hands under Sean's armpits and lowered him as gently to the ground as he could. A random thoughtflashed through his mind, wondering why the bar manager was trying to get in the car. He risked a quick glance inside. Oh yeah, she's probably dead, he thought.

  The driver of the vehicle had several bloody streaks that covered her clothing. It looked like her skirt had been slid up and she had large oval-shaped lacerations. Are those… bite marks? Her leg closest to the door had several large chunks missing from it. He looked up at her and realized that she had a huge bruise forming above her eye. Maybe she isn't dead; she's just unconscious!

  He momentarily forgot that he was still supporting Sean under his armpits and reached up with one hand to feel her pulse along her jugular. It was there, but it was very weak. Mateo wondered if he should try and focus on her instead. Before he had the opportunity to make his decision, Sean turned his head and bit Mateo’s thumb off.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelled and dropped the injured man roughly to the ground. The nub where his thumb used to be spurted blood, adding to the fluids already on the ground.

  “What the fuck, Sean?” he asked as he stared at his hand in horror.

  The man, whom he'd always been friendly with, just continued to moan and gesticulate wildly.

  Mateo looked around frantically for his thumb, but he couldn't find it. Eventually his eyes settled on the bar manager and all the blood around his mouth, then they worked their way up to the woman with the bite marks on her legs.

  Sean had a seizure or something, he rationalized with himself. There's no way he did that on purpose.

  A sudden, intense pain exploded in his head and he grasped it with both hands. “Ow, motherfucker!” he shouted.

  The pain didn't seem natural to him. It was like a mixture of being punched in the head and having a wicked hangover at the same time. The pain inexplicably moved down to his stomach and he doubled over, grabbing his midsection.

  Before he had time to wonder what was happening, his heart began hammering rapidly in his chest and he became hyperaware of every little noise around him. Sounds amplified, while his vision grew dark. He tried to understand what was happening to him, but his mind refused to accept the fact that he was dying.

  His heart rate bottomed out as suddenly as it had elevated and within seconds he didn't have enough energy to move. He collapsed heavily against the side of the car. From somewhere far away he was dimly aware that Sean had latched onto his leg with his teeth. Mateo watched in a daze as the man pulled backwards and a fold of his work jeans was ripped away.

  Mateo passed out before Sean went back in for his second, real bite. He died within minutes.

  Shortly after Sean lost interest in consuming his dead flesh, Mateo's corpse stood upright and glanced around the car for food. He didn't see anything, so he started walking down the road towards town.

  Sean pulled his torso along in the opposite direction from where the construction worker had gone and the trapped driver jerked wildly against the side of the car. The seatbelt kept her restrained inside until the emergency workers arrived and she bit two of them before they realized that they needed to stay clear of her.

  The Clubbers, 10:28 a.m.

  The four men looked around, irritated. “What the hell are we supposed to do with this?
” Robert asked.

  They sat in two golf carts on the seventh tee of the Leon Valley Golf Course and one of the maintenance tractors sat right in the middle of the green. It was still running, but the workers were nowhere to be seen.

  “They've got to be around here somewhere.” Doctor Johnson stated. “They wouldn't just leave the tractors there. Maybe the workers had to take a quick restroom break in the wood line.”

  “Then why the hell wouldn't they just drive over to the building where the bathrooms are? I pay too much for this shit,” Robert fumed.

  “Take it easy, son. I'm sure there's a simple explanation for the equipment sitting in the fairway.”

  “Don't tell me to take it easy, Doc. You said yourself that you only had three hours today and that we'd be cutting it close if you were going to make your afternoon appointments. This is going to cut into your game.”

  “If that's what the Good Lord has decided to send my way, then so be it, Robert. Maybe the driver is picking up something on the other side and we just can't see. I'm gonna go down there and try to figure this out.”

  “I'm with Doctor Johnson,” Matt Harper said. “Come on, Bob. Let's try to correct the problem and move past it.”

  “Jesus – sorry,Doc. I –”

  “Don't apologize to me. Say you're sorry to Jesus, Bob.”

  Robert looked at the older man and grimaced. “You're right. Sorry. I just wanted to have a nice round of golf with my partners before I had to go back to the dealership.”

  Robert and Matthew Harper owned the largest automotive group in the Belton/Killeen/Harker Heights triplex. They played golf every Friday morning with their business partners Abraham Johnson and Ian Barton, both cardiologists at Temple's Scott and White Hospital. The doctors had provided financial backing to the salesmen to open their first dealership over thirty years ago and they'd maintained a small interest in the business throughout the years.

  Matt pressed the gas pedal on the cart and it began moving forward. Robert followed quickly behind his younger brother in the second cart. They sped down the pavement along the green until they were even with the tractor and stopped.