A New Type of Realism

(16) Choke On Your Words

  He was really gone. He was dead. The man that had risked his life to rescue me after I'd so stupidly run off, the man that I had looked up to for what felt like a life time, had been killed by the monsters of the modern day.  

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I tried to cry, but the tears wouldn't come. The rain drops did for me, what my own eyes could not do.

I knelt, watching the feast, until the downpour from the heavens stopped. I didn't care that by spending time by his side, I was putting my own life in danger, the infected on the horizon would catch up with me any moment, but to care would have been shallow. The thought didn't even cross my mind.

When I was ready, I stood up from where I had been kneeling, and walked slowly back to the truck. I started the engine, and drove away. I didn't look back, no matter how much I wanted too. I was in such a state of shock that I hadn't thought that it had been strange that Kyle's assailants hadn't tried to attack me.

As I drove, I thought over what had happened, not wanting to accept that HE was the one it had happened to. However, the events provided a few interesting pieces of information about what we were dealing with.

Firstly, the infected definitely weren't reanimated corpses running around with an unhealthy appetite for flesh. I'd stayed with Kyle's body for what had seemed like hours, and there had been no sign of any reanimation on his part. This meant that these things were just sick people. They didn't have some sort of contagious disease that reanimated the bodies of the dead, and they could be killed as easily as any healthy human being. Unless, of course, that it took longer than an hour to bring someone back from the dead.

Secondly, I now knew the order of the infecteds' priorities. The highest on their list was to satisfy their hunger for nourishment. Infecting others was only the next down on the list. The way that the infected had attacked my friend had clearly shown me that. Those bites were all fatal wounds, there was no way that anyone could have survived that vicious attack.

Finally, though I guess I had already known this point, but the events of today had confirmed it; the infected were mostly as dumb, if not dumber, than the common and greatly known, garden rock. Trying to out-think them was child's play, unless of course, you were dealing with Cloud. I hadn't managed to gauge the levels of his intelligence, though knew for certain that he was at least more intelligent that the rest of the infected.

However, there was a downside to their lack of brain cells. It created certain difficulties when in a sticky situation. You could not simple try to 'talk' your way out of it, trying to reason with the infected was like attempting to argue that the 'blob-fish' was the greatest looking and cuddliest animal in existence.

Just another point to add to the growing knowledge that we had about the infected; they can run. Fast.

The one thing that we still didn't know, was for certain, how the disease spread. Of course, the initial infection was from the 'miracle cure for cancer', but how did it jump from host to host? It must have been extremely contagious, otherwise the government wouldn't have abandoned England and quarantined it.

If it truly was that contagious, then surely you could catch it through the air, just being in the approximate vicinity of an infected should get you infected. If that was the case, then the people across the borders weren't safe. No, it couldn't be that, the government wouldn't have ordered an evacuation if that was the case, it was a waste of resources and pointless. It would mean that the whole of the UK, not just England, was a lost cause.

Maybe it was like the films, and a bite was all it took? That would make sense, since none of the group had been bitten, and therefore, none of them were infected, but this hypothesis could not be proven without clear evidence which we had none of. I could only assume, and that just wasn't good enough.