Jacob's Odyssey (The Berne Project Book 1) (3 page)

Alex finally managed to right himself on his hands and knees, and then fixed his dull lifeless eyes on me. I hardly recognized him. The light ash-gray skin on his face was drawn tightly inward and was nearly translucent, exposing a network of dark blue veins and crimson arteries that forked upwards from his neck. His jaw was slack and his mouth agape. Whatever minimal level of awareness he possessed was of a primal nature, and his only focus seemed to be on me. He rose determinedly to his feet and stretched his right arm out toward me as if he were trying to reach for me. Then he groaned in anticipation and staggered forward in my direction.

I frantically scurried backwards across the floor as fast as I could, heading for the far wall, jolted out of my fear-based inertia by a powerful will to survive—a will that surprised me with its raw fervency. A surge of adrenaline helped me crab backwards as fast as Alex was moving toward me. But I knew the wall couldn't be too far away and I was quickly running out of room. Just before I hit the wall with the back of my head, my butt connected with the Glock 17 and it scudded across the floor and into the floor board. Instinctively, I reached behind my back and searched for the gun. And as I felt the butt of the gun with my hand, Alex lunged at me. He fell awkwardly and heavily to the floor but was close enough to me to snag the pant leg of my jeans just above the ankle. I tried to pull my leg away but his grip was too powerful, and he began to pull me away from the wall. I lost contact with the gun and repeatedly kicked him in the face as hard as I possibly could. But my blows only postponed what seemed inevitable.

I kicked him one last time with every ounce of strength I could muster and then twisted my head and body around to find the Glock. In one motion, I reached for the gun, spun around, and fired three times into my brother's gray face. The back of his head exploded, sending fragments of bone and brain matter flying through a misty spray of crimson that momentarily hung in the air.

Alex's angled head lay at my feet, his pale yellow eyes staring into nothingness. A trickling of blood seeped from the close-knit entry wounds in his forehead, dripping rhythmically onto the floor. He looked nothing like my brother. I set the gun down next to the Ziploc bag and keys. They had fallen from my chest when I twisted my body to grab the Glock. Alex's hand still gripped my pant leg. I took a surgical mask from the Ziploc bag and used it to pry his fingers from my leg without having to touch him. Then I moved backward till my back rested against the wall. I drew my legs up to my chest and hugged my legs with my arms and began to rock back and forth, and I closed my eyes to shut everything out.

I'm not sure how long I sat there rocking, mesmerized by the movement of my body. I took solace in the movement, in the rhythm of it, in its simplicity. It was as if my body were chanting the same simple prayer again and again, though I had no idea what the words were or what they meant. All I knew was that I felt comforted, and I wanted to prolong that feeling for as long as I could, and I really didn't care that somewhere along the way my consciousness had gotten lost amidst the metronomic movements of my body.

After a while a quiet muffled vibration began to echo somewhere in my head, repeating every few seconds. And my rocking fell into rhythm with the vibrations. It felt so natural. And it stayed that way for a short while. But then the vibrations intensified, lost their rhythm, and took on a frenetic cadence. That's when I began hearing the moans and realized the sounds weren't coming from my head. I stopped rocking myself and sat perfectly still, listening. Then I opened my eyes.

The sounds were coming from the area of Alex's picture window. They were slightly muted but were becoming clearer as the moments passed. I got up to investigate, carefully circumventing my brother's body and the pooled blood near his head. I watched every step I took, meticulously avoiding the blood splatter which fanned out from Alex's body in a wide, irregular arc.

The picture window curtains were partially opened, exposing a two-foot wide gap to the outside world. I stood no more than a foot from the window and watched as an infected man rammed his bald head into the window, took two steps back and did it again. And while his steps were awkward and his body stiff, he butted his head into the glass with great ferocity. Blood pulsed out from a two-inch gash at the top of his forehead and channeled down through the features of his face. There was a cloudy, rosy smudge in the glass where he had rammed his head into the picture window again and again. He was a pudgy man with wide shoulders. His face had the same taut appearance as Alex's with arteries and veins in shallow relief behind a thin mask of ash-gray skin. Rivulets of dark blue veins on the top and sides of his head made it appear as if his skull cap were cracked by deep, dark fissures. He had been joined by several other infected who were frantically pounding on the picture window with their fists, moaning and rasping loudly.

Their moans increased in intensity when they saw me standing in front of the window—their shrill cry a wailing grumble filled with desperation and longing. About a dozen of them were gathered at the window, pounding and moaning and pressing against one another. Then two more infected trundled into the front yard, drawn by the strident moaning. They headed for the window where they joined the others. A young woman standing next to the pudgy man began headbutting the window too. She kept slamming her forehead into the window in piston-like thrusts, grunting and screeching with each headbutt.

I stood there in a haze watching them. They didn't seem real to me. It was like one of those moments where you were outside of yourself watching things unfold as if you were disembodied. You were perfectly safe because you weren't really there. It was like watching a movie that had you in it, and while there might be a few dangerous moments, you never really felt threatened because that wasn't the real you in the movie. The real you could never truly be in danger. More than anything, I was mesmerized by them, and I watched them with a childlike curiosity.

They were a motley group—senior citizens, teenagers, children, working adults. Some had bite marks on their arms or necks or legs and some didn't. One boy, maybe twelve, was missing most of his left arm. The ones behind the front line of infected were stretching their arms out toward me, clamoring to get closer. While most were dressed for summer, there was a slender young man in a blue blazer and loosened mauve tie, his shirt flecked with dried blood. I'd have thought he would have struggled in the early evening heat with the sports coat on, but it didn't seem to bother him. And the heat didn't seem to bother an elderly woman clad in a suffocating beige pant suit. They didn't seem to pay any attention to how hot the early evening July sun was. The only thing they seemed to notice was me. Each pair of wild jaundiced eyes were riveted on me. No doubt, I was the apple of their eye.

I suddenly realized I was standing in water. I was fairly certain the water hadn't been there when I first came to the picture window. But it was there now, and that made me wonder how long I'd been standing in front of the picture window. The water pipe must have been leaking for some time now, and a quarter-inch film of water covered over two-thirds of the living room floor and had found Alex's feet. But it didn't matter, because none of it was real. Not the water, not my brother's diseased dead body, and certainly not the crazed groupies outside.

As the water spread across the floor, a sudden, aberrant sound woke me from my dream. A distinct, short-lived tinkle. The sound of glass cracking. And just like that the moaning stopped for a fleeting moment, then resumed at a feverish pitch. A six-inch vertical crack now dissected the rosy smudge, and then I realized this wasn't some illusory dream I had imagined. The pudgy, infected man was now ramming his head into the window with savage intensity as was the infected woman next to him. The rest of them furiously battered the window with their fists. The picture window began to clatter noisily from the barrage.

My senses had awakened and I felt the same adrenaline rush I'd felt earlier. But despite all the aroused energy, I couldn't seem to get myself to move. Then a vicious headbutt from the stout pudgy man and the window crack lengthened dramatically and forked outward in random directions like lightning. A couple more blows and the window would shatter. I needed to get out and realized the only way out would be the door to the backyard. I just needed to move. I was panicked but lucid at the same time. I looked back at Alex as if he might be able to help, but he remained motionless on the floor with a gaping hole in the back of his head. I noticed the Glock lying close to Alex and thought it might be my salvation, but my feet remained pinned to the floor. My body was riddled with fear and simply wasn't responding to the alarm my mind was sending out. Then everything seemed to happen at once.

I heard the glass crack and break and I turned my head to see a large slab of glass come crashing down to the floor where it shattered and exploded. I took a step back, but a few of the shards ricocheted off the floor and into the pant legs of my jeans. Pudgy man and the woman next to him were clambering to get over the window sill and get into the living room, and other infected were trying to climb over them to get in. They were in a frantic state.

A great urgency swept over me and gave me the impetus to move, but my mind and body were still out of sync and in my haste to get to the Glock, I stumbled and fell and landed in the water next to Alex. Alex's eyes were remarkably still and there was nothing he could do to help me now. Pudgy man was halfway into the room, only being held back by the others trying to climb over him. I reached out and grabbed the gun and the surgical masks and scrambled to my feet. I hustled toward the hallway as pudgy man landed with a thud onto the floor, splashing water across the room. His gray face and bald head were a crazy network of veins and arteries and smeared blood. He desperately reached toward me and tried to get up at the same time. I ran into the dining room which separated the living room from the kitchen where the back door was located. A sudden inspiration had me tipping over chairs in the dining room to create a barrier between the dining room and the kitchen. I raced to the back door and heard pudgy man slosh across the living room floor as I opened the door to the backyard.

I locked the back door and slammed it shut. And while it made little sense to lock the door from inside, it somehow, quite illogically, made me feel safer. The infected had shown no aptitude where doors were concerned and they'd made no attempt to get in the house through the front door which I suddenly realized I had left unlocked.

Being out in the open, I found I was able to breathe and clear my mind. The backyard would offer me a respite, at least for a while. If the infected didn't know how to open a door, then it would be difficult for them to get into the backyard. There were only three windows in the back, one above the sink in the kitchen, a small bathroom window with thick, opaque glass and another window in Alex's bedroom. None would be easy for the infected to navigate. Alex usually kept his bedroom door shut, so the kitchen window would seem to be the only possible entryway into the backyard.

It occurred to me that the infected weren't going to give up no matter how difficult it might be for them to get into the backyard. They had shown themselves to be determined and relentless. I knew I needed to have a plan. Then I heard moans that seemed to be much closer than the moans emanating from the front yard. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise, and I strained to hear where the moans were coming from. A sudden crash and the sound of wood splintering answered my question.

I ran over to the side of the house and saw one of the vertical wood planks in the fence separating the two houses cracked at its midpoint. They must have followed the sound of the back door being slammed shut. At least two of them were ramming their bodies into the fence, and I could hear several more infected headed to the fence. The fence was flimsy at best and had been that way for a number of years now. The six-foot wood fence had turned gray from twenty-five years of neglect. It hadn't weathered the years well at all.

I fit the surgical masks into the back of my jeans but kept the Glock handy. I quickly headed for the fence in the back of the yard and started to pull myself over. It was more of a struggle than I imagined, and I had to drop the gun on the other side of the fence. The fence groaned bearing the brunt of my weight, and as I slipped over into the neighbor's yard, I glanced back and could see the fence beginning to buckle under the assault of the infected. Even though I landed softly on the grass, I felt a sharp pain in the shin area of my left leg. I pulled up my pant leg and discovered a thick red welt where a glass shard had struck my leg. I was lucky my leg hadn't been cut. But my leg was the least of my worries. I knew it wouldn't take long for them to get through the rickety fence now, no more than a few minutes.

The surgical mask was bugging me, so I removed it.

I felt nakedly conspicuous at the prospect of skulking through neighborhood backyards carrying a gun like some criminal, but there was no going back.

It took me several hours to get home to my condo apartment limping through two miles of backyards. The adrenaline released through my circulatory system created a kind of frantic edge that gave me the energy and alertness I needed to make it home. As long as I was extremely careful when it came to crossing streets, I knew I'd be okay. And after an early incident with a German Shepherd, I steered clear of backyards with dogs. I didn't have to worry about people. I never came across a single person hanging out in their backyard. I imagined they were glued to their televisions, mesmerized by coverage of the crisis.