Drifter

Chapter 2

A wave of heat and energy washing over me, pushing me backward with more force than I thought was possible. I hit the building behind me and felt a shock wave run through my body. Every nerve was on fire, and I was sure my left hand was broken, but it was my ears that hurt me the most. I had lost all semblance of normal hearing, replaced with a defining high pitched tone.

I forced myself to roll off my back and onto my hands and knees. I didn't think I could make it to my feet, not yet anyway. I looked up toward what had been my building, it was little more than a smoldering pile of rubble. Flaming debris covered the street, and as my hearing started to return, I could make out screaming and crying somewhere in the near distance. About two meters away from me, another person lay face down on the street. His right leg twisted at an unnatural angle. As I began to crawl toward him, I could hear the sound of the quarantines only fire truck in the distance. I didn't think it was going to make much of a difference. No one could have survived that explosion. The building was little more than a smoldering foundation now.

I reached the body on the street and rolled him onto his back. When I saw his face, I recognized him immediately as John Glen, one of the Knights. I had met him a few times before in passing, even exchanged friendly greetings. I didn't think I would have the chance to get to know him any better. John's head had hit a large chunk of rubble when he landed. Part of his skull had caved in leaving a hole in his forehead where I could see part of his skull lodged in his brain matter. I could feel my stomach twist and I had to fight to keep my dinner from coming back up. I pulled myself up until I was as tall as I could be well still on my knees. I forced myself to take a deep breath, I had never smelt burning flesh before but I knew what it was as soon as my lungs filled with it. I had to get out of here, the firefighters were all volunteers with their own alliances, and whoever was responsible for this attack might not want any witnesses. I had to get back to the police precinct that currently served as the Knights main headquarters and let Fredrick know what had happened. Next to me John let out a long slow moan, he was starting to change. I knew that leaving him might serve as a small distraction, but we had been part of the same team, I owed him more than that. I used my right hand to push the bones of my left hand back into the correct sockets. It hurt more than anything I could remember feeling before, but I knew that the virus would repair the damage quickly. I looked around the area and found a large chunk of smoldering concrete. Doing my best to ignore the pain in my hand, I gripped it firmly in both hands. Just as Zombie John was crawling to his knees, I brought it down on the back of his head with all the strength I could muster. It made a sickeningly wet cracking sound as his head collapsed in, and he crumpled back to the ground soundlessly.

I made it almost a full block before I lost my dinner. Hunched behind a dumpster, covered in sweat, my left hand hanging limply at my side, I heaved up everything in my belly and kept right on heaving. When nausea finally passed, I wiped my mouth with my good hand and started toward the center of the quarantine, where I would find the Knight's base.

I moved as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself. I didn't want to alert anyone other than my own people, not yet anyway. It would take time for word to spread to the other gangs headquarters that were spread out on different ends of the zone. I knew that when the others realized we had been hit they may take it as an opportunity to eliminate what little was left of the law here. I couldn't let that happen, so I picked up my pace. By the time I got into the same street as the station, I had sped up to a sprint without realizing it. I prayed Fredrick was here, with all the commotion he may have left to see what had been blown up.

I turned the corner and could see the lights from the station glowing from the other end of the street. The station had one of the only generators in the quarantine. Left by the authorities when they evacuated, it had been hard to hold on to. Everyone else wanted it for themselves and in the early days, the station had been attacked twice in attempts to take it. But a police station was a very defensible location, and both attempts had led to more dead men than anyone wanted to risk again.

I slowed my pace down to a jog and as I moved closer to the lights. Relief flooded through me. I had made it. I had known when I joined the Knights that I would need to be strong, to do things I could never have imagined doing when I was blind, but no amount of knowing could have prepared me for what had happened tonight. All my friends in the building were gone, all the girls I had laughed and joked with, all the men and women I had trained with, gone. As I thought about all the people I had lost John's face swam into my mind with startling clarity followed by the sound of his head caving in. I stopped where I was in the street and hunched over as another wave of nausea hit me. As the feeling of sickness started to pass I let go of my knees and straightened out to my full height of 5'9. To my left there was an old electronics store that had closed when the town had been repurposed as a quarantine zone called Trader Pete's the sign had originally read;

Empire of all most everything,

Trader Pete's

But someone had used a can of red spray paint to darken out most of the letters, now it just read;

Emily in Trap.

I had often stopped to look at the sign since my own name was Emily, at first it had given me a very odd feeling of dread, but time had made me forget my feelings. Tonight though, that feeling was back stronger than ever.

Both the windows of the shop had been smashed in, presumably when the sign had been painted, but there was still an impressive lineup of tv's that no one had bothered looting. Lack of electricity made most luxury items less appealing in the Zone. In the rounded square face of the largest tv, a new GM 32 inch. I could see a girl looking back at me, Her eyes were so wide and bloodshot I could barely make out the yellow color that identified her as infected. Her blond hair was cut short just under her ears and stuck out in every direction imaginable, a mess of ash and blood matted into it. Her face was even dirtier than her hair, also covered in blood and ash but also what was unmistakably vomit. I knew the girl was me, but she was also a total stranger. I looked at her transfixed, and she looked back from the tiny world inside the tv. The last thing a saw as I looked at the girl was her look of utter shock as a baseball bat struck the back of her head. And then I was on my knees, my head pounding, my ears ringing I grasped at conciseness with everything I had, willed it to stay with me, but I could already feel darkness creeping into the corners of my vision. My last thought as everything went dark was that I had been so close...