The Infected: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (9 page)

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"Wake up, lady."

Sam's eyes shot open. She gagged as the long plastic tube slid from her throat. She attempted to scream, but a small hand wrapped over her mouth. Sam looked wide-eyed at a girl, no more than 14 years old, staring down at her.

"Shhh," the girl hushed her. "Please, lady, be quiet."

Sam struggled, twisting her head to the left and right, but the girl gripped her face tighter.

"I'm not going to hurt you. Stop."

Sam fought for a moment longer and then calmed. The girl loosened her grip and after a moment removed her hand altogether. Sam took a deep breath, and when she did, every muscle in her body ached. She tried to look at the girl but her eyes wouldn't focus.

"Cole?" Sam asked.

"Is that your friend?"

"Yes. Where is he?"

"I'm not sure. We'll find him though. This is going to hurt. Don't scream."

"What's going to—?”

Sam clamped her jaw together to fight the urge to scream. A guttural moan emitted from somewhere inside her throat and her vision blurred even more. She looked down and saw the rubber end of the feeding tube dislodge from her abdomen. The girl covered Sam's mouth just in time to mute a scream. Once the scream subsided, Sam gaped at the deep hole in her torso.

"Sorry," the girl said. "I'm so sorry." She released Sam's mouth and picked up a piece of gauze lying between Sam's legs. She positioned the gauze over the hole and placed two pieces of surgical tape over it.

The pain shooting through Sam's stomach abated, and she looked up to the girl. Surgery distorted her face but not to same extent as Doc's. Her lips were two sizes too big and her forehead seemed rippled like something had been inserted underneath it. She wore silver studs in both cheeks where her dimples would be and a silver ring through her eyebrow. Her eyes were wide and an obscene purple color. They matched her tinted hair.

"What's your name?" Sam asked.

"My name is Alexandria," the girl whispered. "But you can call me Alex. What's yours?"

"Sam."

"Sam, we need to go before the doctor gets back."

She was discombobulated but still detected the urgency in the girl's voice. She rubbed her eyes trying to clear the fog away from her mind. The needle from the I.V. pulled at her skin and she winced in pain. "Why?"

"Because I think they plan to kill you. I overheard one of the soldiers say that the General was coming for you in the morning," Alex said as she helped Sam into a sitting position. "He said the General had taken a fancy to you, but they vetoed letting you live here."

"So they'll kick us out?" Sam asked. Her throat was raw from where the breathing tube had been and it hurt to speak.

Alex shook her head. "They won't let you leave."

"Then why wouldn't they just let me die in my sleep?" Sam asked. "Inject me with some lethal dose of something and turn off the machines?"

"Because the General will want to have his fun first." Her words were ice-cold and brought a chill to Sam's flesh. "We need to get out of here before that happens."

Sam, with Alex's aid, twisted her legs over the bed and looked down at the floor. She regretted the decision at once. The checkered tiles spun and her stomach lurched.

"Do you need my help with that?" Alex asked. She pointed to the tube disappearing under the hem of Sam's hospital gown.

Sam shook her head. She wrapped a fist around the rubber tubing and pulled. Tears filled her vision. She had to tug hard and grunted as it tore from her body. Her muscles trembled and stars formed in front of her eyes. She handed the tube to Alex and tried to steady herself.

"Are you okay?" Alex asked.

"I'm going to puke," Sam managed.

The sentence had barely left her lips when Sam was no longer looking at the floor but rather the inside of a trash can. The muscles contracted in her stomach with each wretch. Each time she heaved, it felt like she was being cut open and ripped apart.

"Kill me," Sam cried out in-between vomiting and trying to catch a breath.

Alex pulled Sam's long brown hair away from the mess and held it behind her back. "If we don't hurry, they will kill you," the tiny voice whispered. "But they'll do things to you first. Horrible things."

The nausea subsided after a moment and Alex removed the bucket. She came back with a moist towel and wiped Sam's mouth. Then she removed the tape from her arm and pulled out the I.V. needle.

Sam's head pounded and her body ached with a blinding ferocity. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to move. It hurt to blink. Every movement was the most challenging of her entire life. She wished that she would have died in the wreckage. Anything would be better than this.

"Who is Jordan?" Alex asked.

Sam's jaw fell open. "How do you—?"

"You said his name a lot in your sleep."

The sound of his name brought another round of tears to her eyes. The painful throbbing of her heart returned. It hurt because it was as broken as her body. The bullet that pierced his heart had also shattered hers.

"It doesn't matter," Sam whispered. She stared down at her bare legs sticking out from the paper nightgown. They dangled over a white and black checkered floor. Beside her, the machines that had been keeping her alive hummed and beeped. "He's gone now. He's safe from this place."

"That's good," Alex said. Sam shot her a look and the girl's purple eyes grew wide. "Not good that he's dead, but good he's not in this place. This is not a good place."

"Where are we?" Sam asked.

"An underground city called Lost Angel," Alex said. "Before he died, my dad told me that there's a sign right above us and that's where they got the name. But we can't go up-top to see it because of all the," she dropped her voice to a whisper and said, "halfways."

"Halfways?"

"The dead people that aren't really dead."

"The infected."

"Is that what you call them where you're from?" Alex asked, her eyes wide with excitement. "Where are you from? People are saying you and the other must have come from a bunker like this one, because people can't survive out in the world by themselves. Where is your bunker at? And what's the rest of the world like? I bet it's bad." The more the girl talked the faster the words spilled from her mouth and the more prevalent the nausea became.

Sam held up a feeble hand. "One question at a time."

"Sorry." The girl's alabaster skin turned rosy. "It's been a long time since I've talked to anyone other than the President. They don't let us talk to anyone. Well, besides for who picks us. But mine only wants to talk about boring stuff. And gross stuff. Sorry. I'm talking too much again."

"It's okay," Sam assured her and attempted to slide out of the bed. Alex came to her side and slipped an arm around her. Sam hesitated and then shifted her weight to her feet. The room faded and turned a vacant shade of white. Sam grabbed ahold of Alex's shoulder and squeezed with all her might. After a moment, the feeling passed, and the world came back into view.

"Where are you from?" Alex asked.

"New Hope."

"How far is that from here?"

"I don't know." Sam winced as she took a shaky first step. "Not far, I think."

"President Gates says there's nothing left of the old world."

Sam thought of those same words come from Prime Minister Troy's mouth and how the citizens of New Hope had believed that lie. The Ministry convinced them to live in fear of the unknown because of the infected. She thought of Concordia. The queasiness turned bitter. "There's more out there. Much more than this."

She took another step and stumbled. Her knee slammed onto the hard tile and Sam cried out in pain. Alex caught her before she went down and lifted her back to her feet. She was weak. So much weaker than she had ever felt. The wreck had ravaged her body. It scared her to be this weak.

"Where are we going?" Sam asked. She gritted her teeth together as she took another step.

"The chair by the door."

Ten feet from her, a chair leaned against the far wall of the room. It looked to be miles in the distance. Sam groaned. Alex patted her on her bare back and nudged her forward.

The touch on her bare skin made Sam realize that the paper thin night gown was leaving her backside exposed. She tried to grab one of the rear flaps, but the pain in her shoulder stopped her. Her cheeks turned red hot.

They shuffled across the room at a snail's pace. Each step was a challenge, but each successful inch forward was a tiny victory. Every time she could place one foot in front of the other, she was that much closer to reuniting with her friend. She had to go faster. Eric and Doc's conversation echoed through her mind. The thought of him being
utilized
made her skin crawl.

"Where do you think Cole is?" Sam asked.

"I'm not sure. They moved him a week ago."

"A week?"

"You've been out for a long time."

Sam's blood ran cold. "If you had to guess where he was?"

"One of the surgical wings."

"Why there?"

There was a long pause and then Alex said, "They do experiments here. Bad ones."

They reached the chair and Sam collapsed into it. Alex crossed the room to the wardrobe next to the bed. For the first time, Sam caught a glimpse of Alex as a whole. The young girl's face was not the only thing that had been operated on.

The girl's breasts spilled from a tight t-shirt with a low-cut neck. They were much larger than a budding teenager's should be and accentuated by her freakishly thin torso. The girl's rear was proportionate to her breasts, but judging by the size of the stick-thin thighs poking out of the short skirt, they had manipulated that as well.

In the faint illumination of the overhead fluorescents, Sam could see tiny scars running up the girl's bare white legs. Her pallid skin was fair. Not like the doctor's translucent skin but rather a child who had grown up sheltered from the sun.

Alex turned and caught Sam staring at her. Her big lips curled downward in an almost-frown and her brow furrowed.

"You know far too much about operating rooms," Sam said. "Don't you?"

Alex blinked and her eyes gleamed. She took a breath, blinked again and thick streams of mascara ran down her face.

"It starts after we're picked," Alex said. Her voice quivered when she spoke. "They want us to look like the girls from the magazines. The girls from the old days."

The words caught Sam off-guard. "What does that mean?" she asked. "What does it mean to be picked?"

Alex shook her head and buried her face in her hands. Sam wanted to go to the girl, to comfort her, but knew that without help, she wouldn't make it two feet across the room.

"On our twelfth birthday," the girl began, her hands still pressed against her eyes, "they give all the girls a choice. We can continue to work the mines down below, or come up here and…" The girl's voice trailed off.

Alex let out a loud sob and shook her head. After a moment, she straightened and wiped her eyes with her bare arms. The dark mascara smeared across her cheeks.

"And what, Alex?" She had forgotten about escaping and about Cole. Her blood simmered and somewhere, deep inside of her, a fire ignited. She already knew the answer. She could see it written all over the girl's face. But she braced herself anyway.

Alex removed Sam's sneakers from the bottom drawer, set them on the ground and straightened.

"We do a
different
kind of work up here," she said. "But they don't tell you that when you're 12 years old. They don't tell you about all the surgeries you have to go through or how you'll never see your family again."

Alex pulled Sam's blue coveralls from the closet and turned toward her.

"They don't tell you that your new job will be permanent baby-maker and that you have to pretend like you like it when some old man pushes his stuff inside of you every night."

Sam's mind spun like the wheels of a car stuck in snow, desperately trying to gain traction. The thought of this happening to anyone was blood-curdling. Her thoughts drifted to the baby factories in New Hope. At least the Ministry gave them a choice. Here there were no choices, and they were doing it to children. It was reprehensible. Unforgivable.

"All you know when you're 12 is that you don't want to work in the mines anymore. Anything is better than working 18 hours a day in the pitch-black until every muscle in your body turns to jelly and soot covers every inch of your body. You do that for the first seven years of your life and by the time you're of age, coming to the upper levels is the greatest thing you've ever heard of."

Alex crossed the room with the clothes and helped Sam to her feet. She pulled the paper gown over her head and Sam fought the instinct to cover herself. If this teenager had to be subjected to the horrors she spoke of then she could withstand a few seconds of humility without complaining.