Reader Discretion is advised. This chapter deals with the subject matter of suicide. You've been warned.
Chapter 8
If We Don't Have Hope
The sun rose over the still city. Light swept across one of the buildings in the housing community, chasing shadows away. Another building came to life, the sun's rays reflected blindingly off the glass.
As Riley made his way through the backyard, he passed the aftermath of the attack. He stared at the group before him as if they were apart of some sort of grotesque assembly line.
Jesse and Graham added wood and brush high for a funeral pyre. Their previous anger towards each other gone. Kendra dragged a demon to the pyre and dropped it at Samantha's feet. Samantha swung a pickaxe and shattered the demon's skull. Jesse and Graham then stepped forward, lifted the robed demon, swung it by the head and feet and tossed it onto the fire.
"When you're done, I'd like to talk to you." Riley said to Jesse in passing.
After about another fifteen minutes of stacking and burning the bodies, Jesse and the others went back into the house and saw Riley and the others sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast and waiting on them.
Seeing that they were eating some MRE issued powdered eggs, bacon, and a couple of cans of fried Spam he sat down to it anyway.
"Me and Sam were talking last night." Riley started as he finished his food. "We were serious last night when we said that we would help you guys. First to get out of you guys' hair we are gonna all move into the other houses that aren't being used."
"Me and Riley would take a house, the girls would get a house, Mr. Wellington would get his and the others would get one." Samantha added.
"But those other houses don't have power in them."
"That's where I come in." Mr. Weliington said as he spoke up. "Before this... mess started I was an engineer. I was originally thinking that since this town hasn't been looted much that we could try to find some generators, but then there is a problem with finding enough gas to run them. Then I started thinking that if I could find the right materials that I could make some solar panels or at the very least a wind mill."
"Wow you can do that?" Jesse asked, amazed.
"If I find the right materials, yes."
"But that's not it." Riley said getting his attention. "We were thinking about turning one of the houses into a hospital. Lexie is the first real doctor we've come across in a long time and we wanted her to have all the stuff she would need. Medical supplies, lab equipment, the whole works."
"So what are you planning to do?" Kendra asked.
"Before we came here we saw a big moving truck a few miles away." Riley went on. "So we were going to raid the hospital, Lexie told us about and bring everything she needs back here."
Seeing the beginnings of a plan coming together, Jesse suddenly thought about something. "So what, did you guys give up on trying to make it to the CDC?"
"No." Samantha said as she gave Riley a look. "We were actually thinking of going there today. We can take some backroads to get there but it shouldn't take longer then two hours at most."
"Getting that medical equipment and supplies are important too." Jesse said as he thought about the situation. "Maybe me and Kendra should back you up. I hate saying this because I've watched horror movies my whole life, but we should split up our teams. Some of us can go to the CDC to check it out and report back in and the others should go to the hospital to get supplies."
"What about the materials I need for my project?" Wellington asked.
"The supplies we need from the hospital are all there in one place." Jesse reasoned as he ate the last of his bacon. "The supplies you need are probably gonna be spread all over the city. The best thing we can do is wait until we're all back together again and then go out together and get what you need."
With that said they finished their food and went to get cleaned up. As they all met in the living room they decided on their teams. The team heading towards the hospital was going to be Lexie, Graham and Kendra. The team that was going to the CDC was going to be Jesse, Riley, Ensign Donovan and surprisingly Oz of whom didn't want to be cooped up in the house. Samantha and Hernandez were going to stay behind and watch the house aswell as the other survivors. Their teams assembled they gathered the gear they needed and left the house.
It had taken Jesse and the others a little longer then they expected to get to the CDC. About an hour longer to be exact because of the traffic jam from hell, when they had went down a side road. Pushing several cars out of the way and killing a few walkers they were on their way again. Seeing a big white building off in the distance they smiled until they got closer to it.
"Oh my God!" Jesse mumbled to himself as he and Riley peered through his windshield.
The Silverado pulled to a stop and Jesse stepped out of his truck. Then one by one, the rest of them crawled out of it. They just stood there, in a line, their mouths opened, as they took in an urban battlefield.
Dead Soldiers, shot in the head, some eaten, filled the street and lined the steps of the CDC. They had obviously went hand-to-hand with the countless walkers that filled the street. It was a sick massacre on both sides.
A pile of corpses blocked the main entrance and Riley and Ensign Donovan gave each other a look that seemed to say, what now. Suddenly, Riley heard a noise next to him and as he looked down he saw a soldier, now a walker, reaching out toward Donovan. The others jumped back and Riley pulled his weapon, aimed a shot, but BAM!
Jesse fired first. Looking up he saw that Jesse was giving him an accusing look. Knowing that he couldn't have been wrong about this place, Riley tried the main entrance. And to his dismay, it was locked. Seeing an intercom panel, he pressed a few buttons, and realized that it was dead. Not giving up he then pounded on the door. A long moment of pause. No response. There wasn't anybody here.
Another long moment passed and Red Squad looked around taking in their new situation. The door was locked and they were surrounded by dead soldiers. Now panic started to set in.
"You led us here." Jesse said angrily meeting Riley's gaze. "What the hell were you thinking? We should've just went with the others to get stuff for the house."
"He made a call." Donovan spoke up, taking up for his commanding officer. "We had to come here and make sure."
"Make sure of what?" Jesse asked. "Make sure we all got killed?"
As the two started to bicker, Riley looked around and saw a surveillance camera moving. Curiosity getting the better of him, he walked up and looked directly into the camera.
"Ummm, guys." Oz said as he got their attention. Looking at him and then what he was looking at, they saw almost two dozen zombies shambling towards them. They were quickly being surrounded.
As quickly as they started to shoot into the crowd, the doors to the CDC suddenly went up. As the light from the inside of the building hit them, they turned around and saw an older woman in her late forties wearing a white lab coat.
"Quickly come inside!" she yelled as she ducked back into the building. Not having to be told twice, Riley shot a few more bullets at the ghouls, before they ducked inside too. The zombies pounding on the door as it closed behind them.
As the U- Haul truck came along to the hospital and stopped at the loading dock, the group inside it struggled not to vomit. Bodies, upon bodies, upon bodies were hastily wrapped in white sheets and stacked like firewood along the hospital wall. There had to be hundreds of them.
Blots of long dried blood dotted the sheets, leaving no doubt that they were shot in the head. It was depressing that none of these people had atleast had a funeral and were dumped outside like garbage waiting for pickup.
And to prove that point they slowly walked by a couple of dump trucks, sitting silently by themselves, their load beds filled with sheet wrapped bodies, stacked in layers like sacks of grain.
"Oh God." Lexie said quietly as she started to throw up her breakfast.
"You gotta get yourself together, doc." Graham said as he glanced back at her. "What we see in here might be alot worse then this."
"I know but... God how do you get use to this smell?" even after all her years as a medical professional, she had never smelled something so bad. Now she was really glad she had missed work that day or this could have been her thrown carelessly in a white sheet on the ground.
Ignoring her question the group moved on with Graham taking lead, Kendra in the middle and Lexie, trailing behind them. Albeit quickly. Walking up the steps of the docks, Graham turned and gave Kendra a signal to get ready, as he opened the door.
Stepping in, he quickly looked around before he held the door open, for Kendra and Lexie to walk in. As they did, he let the door close behind him, only for them now to be trapped in pitch black darkness. Taking a glow stick out of his pack, he slapped it on his leg twice until the stairwell was bathed in green light.
Moving forward, the staircase seemed like a black cavernous void yawning before him. And that's when he smelled it. The stench of death. Trying to ignore it, they started to walk up the railing and caught a direct whiff of the stench below.
"What is dat?" Kendra asked, knowing what the answer was.
Curiosity getting the better of him, as they reached the top of the stairwell, Graham peered over the railing. There was nothing but inky blackness below, the light from the glow stick not reaching.
"I have some more of these." he said as he turned to Kendra and then leaned over the railing and dropped the stick.
As all three of them watched as it dropped, they saw as it smacked a corpses cheek, bounced off of it and landed in front of it's dead eyes.
"Damnit!" Lexie yelped.
Even though the others said nothing they shared her sentiment. And now everything was coming together. When whoever had done this ran out of sheets, time, and manpower, they just started shooting them and dumping them over the railing. Trying to block out images of the hundreds of dead bodies that could be down there, they went through the next door and out of the stairwell.
Coming into a long hallway they saw a group of double doors with a sign that read cafeteria on it. As they got closer they saw that a two-by-four was jammed through the door handles and the handles themselves were chained and padlocked.
Painted hastily on the left door was a message that said "Go away" and on the other side it read "Dead inside." As if sensing that they were there the door heaved slowly outward, pushed from the other side. The two-by-four creaked and the chain went taut as fingers probed through the crack before their eyes.
As those pale white fingers touched on the chain, more hands appeared all up and down the crack of the door. Giving each other a look they headed further down the hallway. Turning a corner they saw a dead nurse laying sprawled in the hallway, visible by the glow of the skylight. She was torn open and the blood on and around her was so old that it had turned dark brown.
"Was dat anybody you knew?" Kendra asked.
"Yeah... I... I think that was Amy McCallister."
"Let's just get what we came to get." Graham commented as he saw more and more dried blood on the walls. Some of it was smeared with a hand print or two in it. And looking closer he saw lots of bullet holes in the walls as well.
"So you're telling me that all of us are infected?" Riley asked of Dr. Lawson as the group all sat in her lab. Her assistant Reginald passing them out bottles of water.
"Yes... I'm sorry." Lawson replied. "It doesn't matter how you die you'll come back as one of them, just as long as you don't have any brain truama. You see your brain releases all sorts of things like DMT into the body when you die, so when the virus and high levels of chemicals from the brain mix together, you turn. All of the other doctors left when this first happened.. to be with their family's. However me and Reginald stayed behind to try to find a cure."
"Well did you?" Oz asked as he started to scratch at his arm. Honestly he knew in his heart that they probably didn't after witnessing what was outside.
"No." she said at a loss. "Something similar happened in Colorado some years ago. It was in a place called Raccoon City. But this... this is another beast in and of it's own."
"God damnit, Adam!" Jesse said angrily, making Dr. Lawson and Reginald stare at him.
"Adam?" Lawson asked, readjusting her glasses. "How do you know about him?"
"Wait... you know who Adam is?" Riley asked, not noticing that Donovan had sneaked off. "Who are you, really?"
"I worked for the Initiative aswell, Agent Finn." she said as her demeanor suddenly changed. "Before you came along I used to work at Maggie Walsh's side. God that woman was brilliant."
"Did you two..."
"Set this up?" she finished for Riley. "Yes and no."
"Lady I would suggest that you stop talking in riddles." Jesse said, making a show of showing his gun off. To his surprise, she merely laughed at him.
"Boy I've done all I can do and seen all I can see in this life." Lawson went on. "This place is a housing for some of the worlds most dangerous deseases. That's why the higher ups rigged it so it would blow up in case something like this happened. Me and Reginald have been gathering fuel from cars and a secret gas depot this whole year to keep this place running but we were just avoiding the inevitable. In about an hour and a half this place is going to blow up, taking me with it, so believe me when I say your little guns don't scare me."
As she told them that they had just noticed that there was indeed a timer in the room counting down.
"Riley, maybe we should..."
"Not yet. Now answer my question. Is this or is this not your fault?"
"Like I said, yes and no." at his look she ammended. "The virus was actually created to destroy the demon population on earth. That's why the Initiative was capturing demons to see if there was a common virus strain that could be used to kill them. Adam was created so that we could make sure that the virus wouldn't affect humans. We wanted to see if his demon half would die and his human half would stay alive. It was done so that people who somehow had a mixed heritage with a demon could live a normal life, with the demon half of them being dead. We didn't count on five things though. We didn't count on Adam killing Maggie, him stealing information about the secret virus project, him creating the virus, him using Maggie's access codes to have mandatory flu and immunization shots laced as they were sent out with the virus and said virus mutating so that it would kill humans too."
As she finished her story, Riley just stood there in shock. His whole time fighting the good fight for the Initiative was just a lie. He really thought he was doing the right thing by capturing demons, but now to find out that it was just for a experiment that cost the lives of so many people.
POW!
"What the hell was that!" Jesse shouted as the loud noise startled him and made him cut his hand on a glass beaker.
"It was a gun shot." Oz said as they all walked out of the room and into the hallway.
As they got out there they saw that Donovan was laying in a pool of his own blood, him having blown out the back of his head.
"Aw man." Oz simply said.
"He must have done this because we're all infected." Jesse suggested. 'Maybe he has the right idea. What's the point of going on knowing we'll all turn into one of those things?'
"Yeah." Riley commented loosely as he gathered Donovan's dog-tags and rifle as Oz took his handgun out of his dead hand. "Now come on lets go."
"So what you're not going to offer to take me and Reginald with you?" Lawson asked as the group headed for the door. "That's not something that the good guys do."
"The way I see it doc, you and Reginald have exactly one hour." Riley said still walking towards the door. "You and people like you created this hell. Now live and then burn in it."
With a sneer and already accepting death anyway, she watched them go and went back into her lab. Not having anything else to do she turned back to her work. Remembering that Jesse had cut his hand, she took a sample of his blood and put it under the microscope.
"He doesn't have the virus." She said in astonishment. "Maybe I can make a..." and that was all that she got to say as the counter finally counted down and the building started to explode.
A/N I hope this explains what happened to the citizens of Frazier Park to everybody and why there weren't more zombies in the city.