WorldLost- Week 1: An Infected Novel (18 page)

Cindy quickly ate her food and drank her water, finishing
before the rest of us. “Honey, slow down or you’ll make yourself sick,” Shannon
said to Cindy. “We’ve got some food that we can share with you. It's stuff that
was in the freezer and needs to be used up before it all rots since the
electricity went out yesterday.”

Shannon was a pretty woman, in her later twenties, early
thirties, with an air around her of confidence and strength. She commanded your
attention and I was intrigued to hear what she had to say.

“Tell me how you guys ended up here in this town.” She asked.
“We’ve had limited interactions with people outside of the town and some rough
characters have passed through in the last four days. All the news channels are
offline, the internet isn’t working and cell connectivity seems to be down.”

I gave her the short version of our trek from Charleston,
leaving some of the details out as I didn’t want to give too much away.
Information was power and right now, she had all of the advantages. After
telling her about our last four days, I asked, “What about you guys? What
happened here?”

Shannon was walking her daily rounds through the truck stop,
ensuring all areas of the business were being managed properly and taking care
of any customer requests, questions, problems or needs that her area supervisors
needed when the world as she knew it went to hell.

Her father was at home that day preparing for a hunting trip
to Alaska, something he did every year since her mother had passed away. He was
packing, getting his guns and gear together, shutting up the house for the trip.
He planned, as always, to be gone for a month and this year told Shannon to
handle things while he was gone. She was the oldest of the three children and
her two brothers were still a bit reckless and got distracted too easily to
manage the business fully by themselves. She planned to drive her dad to the
airport in Parkesburg later the next day, but that didn’t happen as planned.

That day started as all days began at the truck stop;
truckers driving in, tourists dropping by to pick up the last of the supplies
they needed before hitting the lake and the locals coming into the cafe for
morning coffee and the huge cinnamon rolls the cafe was known for. She did
notice that more people were coughing, looked a little sick and more people than
usual were anxious or hurried.

At ten in the morning, Shannon began her normal walk around
the complex to check on everyone. She started in the retail space, checking the
temperature of the drink coolers and freezers that held frozen treats and foods,
changing out the breakfast fast foods for the lunch items, straightening the
shelves and notating what she would need to grab from the back room to restock the
empty shelves. She finished all of the work in the retail space and handed off
control to the cashier so she could move to the gas pump area.

At the pump supervisor’s station outside the truck stop, she
checked the various logs and metrics the gas system provided to see if they
were on track for daily goals and talked with the current supervisor on duty,
Adam. He was a good looking guy and Shannon secretly had a crush on him, but couldn’t
do anything about it since she knew her dad wouldn’t approve of the
relationship.

Adam was talking about an incident a tourist had told him
about, something about a car on the side of the road back in Parkersburg. Shannon
wasn’t really paying attention as she was looking at Adam instead. He said the
tourist told him that the driver of the car was moving around the car, from
door to door, window to window, hitting them and trying to get to a woman who
was locked in the car. The woman looked terrified and was moving around the
inside trying to secure the inside of the car. The witnesses called the state patrol
as they drove by; because they didn’t want to get involved and reported what
they thought was a domestic dispute.

Shannon didn’t think anything about the story, domestic
violence between people happened all the time in the backcountry, even though
it was wrong, but she was little concerned that women in the car might be in
trouble, especially since it wasn’t on the truck stop property. The next time
she saw a state trooper, she would talk with them about it.

It was normal for the state police to stop at the truck stop for
their breaks to get a cup of coffee, or a cinnamon roll or to gas up their
patrol cars.

She told Adam let her know if anything new came of the story
he had told her and to keep up the good work. She left Adam and headed into the
truck stop garage area to talk with her brother, Rob, who managed the garage
and dealt with the various service trucks they used for roadside assistance for
travelers and truckers that were broken down on the highway. Rob told her that
they really weren’t that busy; they didn’t have very many calls yet today, but
they did have a strange situation earlier, but he was waiting for the mechanic
that was dispatched to return before getting her involved.

The garage received a call from a trucker that was broken
down about twenty minutes west of the truck stop and Rob had sent out his
mechanic, Garrett, to handle the broken down trucker.

Garrett called in when he got to the broken down trucker and
was getting ready to go and talk with the trucker, but he didn’t see the driver
around the truck. He assumed that the trucker was in his cab waiting for the service
tech. He was going to go out and see if the driver was in the cab as he thought
and would radio in once he had an update.

About thirty minutes later, Garrett radioed in and told Rob that
he had been attacked by the driver and that the driver had bit him during the
scuffle. Once he was able to get away, he climbed back in his service truck,
drove away and left the trucker on the side of the road still broken down.

Garrett tried to call the state patrol to report the incident,
but he couldn’t get through to them; he just kept getting a busy signal. He
thought he might be in a bad cell area, so he called the garage over the CB
radio. He was going to head to the Parkersburg to drop by the urgent care
center to get the bite looked at and cleaned.

So far, Garrett hadn’t returned to the truck stop or checked
in via the radio or cell phone. Rob was a little worried and had sent out
another mechanic to check on Garrett at the urgent care facility.

Shannon told Rob to let her know when Garrett was found and
what the situation was. She also told him to call the urgent care center to see
if either of the mechanics had arrived.

She left the garage and moved inside the truck stop and heading
to the cafe, passing the community showers the truckers used when they were on
a long haul. As she passed the men’s shower, a half-naked trucker came bounding
out the entry and bumped into her.

“That fuckin dude is eating Burt!” He screamed and continued
to run to the front door with his boxer shorts on. She was surprised by what the
guy had said but also wasn’t quite sure if she heard it right.

Had someone
eaten someone else? That was crazy talk.

She radioed Brian, her other brother, and let him know what
had happened and that he should meet her in the men’s shower ASAP just in case
something was happening. Brian was head of security, so he needed to be
involved.

She walked in the locker room area, announcing herself and
found four men restraining another guy against the opposite wall of the entry
door. The guy being restrained, the apparent attacker; was covered in blood
from head to toe and fighting with everything he had to get free from the guys
restraining him.

One of the guys holding him was yelling at him, saying that
the guy had bit him and that he was going to kill him.

Another guy was yelling at the guy complaining about the bite
to shut the hell up so they could try to calm the attacker down.

The whole scene was chaotic and out of control.

To top it all off, lying on the floor in front of them was
another guy, apparently the one that had been attacked. He wasn’t moving and
there was a pool of blood forming around him on the white tile floor. His
stomach was torn open with his intestines lying on the tiled floor, but his
eyes were wide open. Shannon couldn’t believe what she was seeing; this had to
be some kind of joke.

It had to be.

She didn’t know what to do, for once she just wasn’t sure, and
she was at a loss on what she should do next. She just stood there looking at
the scene unfold in front of her.

Brian walked into the locker room and found Shannon standing
there, with her mouth open, just staring at a dead body on the ground while the
other people in the room tried to handle a guy that seemed out of his mind.

He moved to the guys holding the apparent attacker against
the wall and helped to get the guy on the floor and after several minutes of
forcing the attacker down and got his hands and feet tied wrapped; Brian looked
over at Shannon who was still stuck in the same place staring at the dead guy
on the floor.

He was busy with the guy struggling on the floor so he screamed
at Shannon to get her to focus on the situation, telling her to get on the
phone and call the 911. After several attempts at getting her attention,
Shannon finally broke her trance and used her cell phone to dial 911, but it
was busy. She tried again, thinking she must have hit the wrong numbers, but it
was still busy.

People were starting to come into the locker room to see what
was going on.

Rob moved people aside, telling them to step away and to get
out of the locker room pushing his way into the room asking what was happening.
Many of the people crowded into the locker room were videotaping, but some were
trying to contact authorities. No one seemed to be successful at reaching them
and the video takers were all complaining about the Wi-Fi being down or their
service provider's network being offline.

Shannon finally came back fully to reality and realized that she
had to take control of the situation, so she started barking orders to everyone
in the locker room.

She told the crowd to get out of the locker room as she
pushed them physically out the entry door.

Coming back into the locker room, she told Rob to help the
guy that had been bitten. Rob took the guy to the sink area of the locker room and
started to run water over the bite to clean it out.

She told Brian that this was a crime scene and that as head
of security, he needed to control it while she tried to get a hold of the
Sheriff. This meant he needed to deal with the guy they had restrained.

She counted on them to manage their areas of responsibility
and she would handle hers she told herself. She ushered the remaining people
out of the locker room, telling them to go back to the cafe and wait for the
sheriff, she was sure they would want to question everyone.

She headed for the main office to make more calls using the
landline and to make sure that the surveillance video system had a tape in it.
It wasn’t unusual for the system to run without a tape as her dad was cheap and
her brother was forgetful.

In the office, she found that the system did, in fact, have a
tape in it, so maybe they had caught some of the attacks on tape. She tried 911
again but it was still busy which was now starting to concern her. She tried
using the landline to call her dad.

He answered immediately and told her that something was wrong;
he had been watching the news which was showing people going crazy, attacking
each other, attacking authorities, just going crazy. He was leaving the house
to meet them at the truck stop.

She was relieved that he was coming in to help them. He had a
way about him that people felt comfortable around him and he was good at
handling a crowd, not to mention difficult situations. He had a leader’s
presence and people were quickly ready to get behind him. She used the landline
to call 911 again and was finally able to get through.

Mary Sue, the dispatcher for the region was unusually short
and direct. Shannon had known her since grade school and she was always sweet
and patient. She wasn’t that way today. Mary Sue explained that all the deputy’s
and state patrol officers were out on calls and that they were experiencing a
larger than normal call volume. She told Shannon that something was going on,
but she really didn’t know what, just that there were multiple reports of
people attacking each other and that it required calling all of the off duty
officers to help deal with the call volume. Mary Sue told Shannon that it might
be a good idea to close up and hunker down. Mary Sue hung up without saying
goodbye, again, something she never did.

Shannon thought that was unusual and she was starting to get concerned.
She really wished that her dad would get here to help with the situation.

Shannon headed back to the shower room where she found two
bodies on the ground and her brother Brian reloading his pistol.

Brain stopped reloading and in a composed and relaxed state explained
what had happened. Shannon was kind of spooked by his casual way of explaining
it.

There were two dead people on the floor.

He continued his story saying that the original guy that was on
the ground, the one who had been attacked first, with the stomach torn open,
had come back to life and attacked the truck drivers that were restraining his attacker.
All of the truckers got freaked and scrambled running to exit the locker room as
quickly as possible; some of them ran to the back of the shower looking for the
back exit. The guy they had restrained broke free from the plastic restraints
and both of the infected turned their attention to Brian.

Both of the undead moved quickly across the room in an
aggressive way. It was enough to scare Brian that he pulled his gun and shot
both guys point blank in the head. The shots were extremely loud in the tiled
locker room.

Once the shots were made, the remaining crowd in the locker
room scattered leaving Brian in there by himself with two dead bodies. He knew he’d
have to answer for the shooting, but he knew deep down, inside, that what he
did was right; it was the right thing to do. He stayed to ensure the room was
secured for when the Sheriff arrived.

Shannon told him that she didn’t think the Sheriff would be
coming, that they were on their own for the time being. No one was coming to
help them, their dad was on the way, but no one else was. Shannon told Brian to
help her get everyone out of the truck stop and lock it down. It was time to
shut down and do what Mary Sue had suggested; get the place locked down.