U.G.L.Y. Part 7

"Duncan!!"

I opened my eyes and Sophia was staring at me with a look of terror on her face.

"What!?" I said, my mind clouded with sleep.

"What the h.e.l.l were you dreaming about? You were chewing on your bag and making this awful sound."

"Oh Christ, It was of the first night when I ran but I didn't get away. I was bitten then I turned." I tried to clear my head "If I keep having dreams like that I am going to lose my mind."

-Sophia-.

As the convoy moved on, Sophie and I sat quietly looking out across the countryside from the back of the large transport. I was still shaken from my dream but it was wearing off quickly. Sophia looked up at me then down at her left hand. She still wore her wedding ring and was twisting it around her finger. She began to cry.

"Can you talk about him?" I said to her as I put my arm around her an gently pulled her close to me.

"I should have been with them" She said. "I should have died with them".

She began to sob heavily as she recalled the day she had left. Sophie's work with the CDC demanded a lot of her time. She typically worked 80 hours a week and when she was not in her office or traveling for business, she was typically spread out across her living room with case work and research papers lying around the room. Her husband and kids asleep upstairs. Often she would work till the early hours of the night and seldom did she find herself awake enough to join her husband in their bed.

She explained that this situation had left her husband upset and bitter. He had given up his job as a technical consultant to stay home with their kids so she could pursue a medical degree but once she had reached her residency it had grown to be too time consuming for her to play an active part in her family.

"He had an affair" She sobbed. "I was gone all the time, and he spent a lot of time with the other moms at the kids' school. I'm sure he was very popular with the single moms, especially since I wasn't around. Eventually he got close to a woman that was part of the carpool and they became intimate."

"How did you find out?" I asked, knowing it really didn't matter. I think she was more upset over the fact that she had let her situation become more important than her husband than that he had been with another woman.

"I came home early from a trip in the middle of the night. I quietly crept upstairs and opened the bedroom door and I saw her on top of him. They were making love." She had stopped crying and a look of anger was showing on her face. "I left the house and drove to a hotel. I wasn't supposed to be home for two more days and I was enraged at him so I called a friend of mine, A man that I used to date when I was young and asked him to come see me."

"Did you sleep with him?" I asked.

"Yes, we spent most of the next two days together. The time with him was wonderful, we hadn't been together in many years and for a brief time I forgot about everything else. We shared an imaginary world with no responsibilities for those two days."

"Did you confront your husband when you got home?"

"No, I came home pretending that nothing had happened and he greeted me like he normally did. There was no hint that anything was going on. That went on for several weeks until I was a.s.signed the project that took me out of town just before the first wave overran our neighborhood."

The truck engine droned on as we continued east. It was almost dark and to the west we could see the failing glow of the sun on the horizon.

"We slept together one last time the night I left. I was on top of him and just as he began to climax I asked him if she had let him do that to her. He looked into my eyes and said he was sorry, then he kissed me as deeply as he had ever kissed me before. It was a final kiss. I didn't say anything else. I finished packing and then kissed the kids and I left. The next time I heard from him was when the house was overrun."

"Were you going to leave him?" I asked "When you said that to him, did you plan on leaving him or were you going to live with it?"

"I don't know. I loved him very much and I couldn't blame him for is infidelity. I didn't feel like I had done anything wrong when I spent the time with my friend either. Maybe I had put us in limbo and was ready to clear the slate and erase that pain from my heart. I think I felt a little betrayed but I was willing to let it pa.s.s. I have no idea why I asked him about her or why I really wanted him to tell me."

"But in the next instant," She continued, " They were gone and this horrible mess began". I couldn't go home, and all I could do was stay where I was and try to help figure out what was going on. I had forgotten about the rest till now, till we became intimate".

She looked into my eyes.

"You remind me of him, the friend I called. You even have the same color eyes".

She reached behind my head and ran her fingers through my hair. I leaned forward and kissed her. She reminded me of someone too.

-Three Days-.

"Is there any coffee?" I asked, still groggy, as I stumbled into the makes.h.i.+ft kitchen that had been set up in the triage area of the refugee camp.

"Yea, the coffee is cold and tastes like s.h.i.+t. I Had to use the grounds from yesterday." Sofia said, looking through her dirty mangled hair at me. She looked as rough as I felt this morning but as always, she pleasantly caught my attention.

I had to look away, suddenly aware I was staring into her beautiful green eyes. She noticed and smiled, not that either of us had the energy to do anything about it. But still I felt the yearning to have her.

"Supplies are running out and we haven't been restocked in too long now. There is still no word if we will be" She continued with a sullen tone in her voice.

It had been several days travel from the train crossing to this desolate camp in the mountains. When we got here there was still some coordination with government controlled military units across the country.

Larger bases further east, in the great planes, and some locations in the midwest were still secure and isolated enough to continue operations and make attempts at controlling what was thought was left of the country.

The Marines that were left, were still holding up their structure. They were a strong bunch, brave and heroic, set on wiping out the scourge and taking back their great country.

Major Levitt was becoming a more somber figure over the last few days. He had scars, physical and emotional, and when he spoke you could hear it in his spirit. Decisions he had made over the last few days were beginning to take their toll.

He was strong but I think he began giving up towards the end. But he and his men were gone this morning, perhaps foolishly giving themselves to protect the rest of us. Maybe they simply gave up and wanted to go out in the biggest blaze of glory they possibly could. One last "OOOORAH" for all of humanity. I don't blame them, they were hero's and deserved to die like hero's with purpose and not for nothing.

It had been two days since a last communication crackled over the weathered radio set tucked away in the makes.h.i.+ft command tent. On the table next to the radio sat a log book with coordinates and a rough plan for extraction scribbled down.

The radio operator had been killed the day before. He was on patrol around our camp when he was attacked by a mountain lion. By the time anyone got to him he was dead. He was our first casualty of nature and it felt strange. It felt unnatural now.

We were running out of food, Communications stopped and now all we had left to consider was that we finished preparing for our extraction, and hope that a transport was at the airfield we had been given coordinates for when we got there.

The plan called for extraction three days from that bleak morning. It will be a tough run, and we have few vehicles left running. The ones we have, would be loaded down and slow moving. The terrain was rugged. Little more than game trails crossed the plateau and we needed to get to the dirt airfield with enough time to meet a transport, but not early enough to allow any hosts to catch up to us.

Hosts weren't slow, especially after they had fed. They could get up and moving in a hurry. Too bad these guys weren't like living dead zombies in the movies that just lumbered along blindly eating what ever fell in front of them. The infected pursued their prey.

These guys were active and well fed, they may not be outwardly conscious but they instinctively fed as often as they could. Their energy levels were high and and they could coordinate attacks. They had started hunting in packs and that was making it more and more difficult for the remainder of us. We were tired and stressed beyond our limits and we were dying. Our mental health was failing. They were fed, rested and driven by instinct and we didn't stand a chance.

-The Airstrip-.

To the north of our camp there was an old airstrip that was a holdover from a WWII training command. The airstrip was old but the runway was long enough to land a C-130 on. After arriving here, we managed to coordinate a weapons drop from an Air Force Base to the east over the Rockies. It was very exciting to watch and reminded me of my days on aircraft carriers.

When the drop was made they didn't even land the plane. An inbound C-130 did a fast touch and go then deployed parachutes out of the cargo doors in the back of the plane. The parachutes pulled pallets out of the aircraft and onto the air field.

The plateau was thickly forested with basically one route to the airfield. This was an integral part of this upcoming extraction plan. We were to lead as many hosts as we could into the valley surrounding the airstrip. When we arrived we were expecting a C-130 to be waiting to haul us out, engines blazing.

The boxed valley could corral the hosts for a long enough time to facilitate the transport getting to a safe distance, then there would be a brilliant explosion and as small nuclear warhead would strike center in the ma.s.s of hosts.

We were the bait, which was fine with everyone that was still alive. We all knew this was it, there was no more fighting off the inevitable. We were going to die here if we didn't leave. If we got out we could watch the destruction of maybe thousands of hosts. But even then it wouldn't be enough, there would be more.

The next several days were long. We were getting hungry and had little energy. I spent much of the second day resting to save energy. Levitt kept his Marines busy with menial tasks. They didn't mind and seemed happy to be doing something that felt important.

As darkness overcame us on the second night we sat silently around a small fire. In the distance we could hear owls and the occasional bat. Some coyotes began to yelp, and as in response, a chorus of infected screeches were heard echoing through the valley.

-24 Hours-.

"24 hours until we stage for the a.s.sault" Sofia spoke calmly in the doorway of the storage room I was working in. "You should get some rest".

I sighed and looked at her, squinting in the morning light.

"It doesn't matter" I said "tired or not, I'm not going to survive this thing" I sighed again, running my fingers over a picture of my kids I had pulled out of my wallet, "I don't want to live past today".

Sofia knew how I felt. She survived because she was away during the contamination that over ran her family. And she listened in horror as they were killed. She hated herself for being alive. She wasn't there to protect her children.

Neither was I. This last great attack perhaps would be our chance to drop the numbers of infected enough to give the military a chance to fight back. It was the end of the fight for us though.

To the south there was a narrow fire road that led up to the plateau, which let out about two miles from where thousands of hosts had been collecting over the last few days. They had found some cattle and were feeding almost continuously.

The fire road was gated with a fence, ten feet high, that ran a few miles in either direction. The fence completely blocked the road. so there was some chance that these mindless monsters wouldn't find a way in. The infected had followed the convoy from Montrose.

"Devildog, patrol one, do you read?"

The radio base station in the command tent range out. There were four Marines on patrol; A staff Sargent named Hicks, two corporals, Stephano and Dubler, and one pfc Dalmer.

"Devildog, patrol one, someone pick up G.o.d d.a.m.n it!" pfc Dalmer was screaming over the radio.

"patrol one, devildog, calm the f.u.c.k down. Whats the problem" The radio operator on duty was Corporal Danielle Cooper. She had short black hair and was very well built. She had a soft temperament normally but could be tough as h.e.l.l. Especially when it came to the other marines. She was one of two surviving women in the unit, one was the Navy corpsman, Janice and corporal Cooper was infantry like the others.

"We are located south of camp at the top of the trail head to Tuscan meadows. We have eyes on the gate at the bottom of the trail through the telescope and can confirm that the fence has been breached. There are hosts headed our way at full sprint." Dalmer said, still screaming.

"How much time do we have?" Cooper responded "They couldn't be more than half a klick at this point. Last check of the gate was one hour ago and it was intact. Given that, s.h.i.+t I don't know how long does it take to run ten miles?" He asked.

"Keep eyes on em, I'll get the Major " Cooper ran out of the radio tent and headed for the dinning area.

Major Levitt was sitting at a table drinking a cup of coffee and reading. Prior to joining the marines he was a science major at Caltech, and he spent a lot of time reading about tech and science. I had something in common with the Major and often we would talk about science, s.p.a.ce, and on occasion, we would talk about philosophy and the end of the world. We all knew we were going to die and collectively we had decided we would live as long as we could and ride the apocalypse into the ground.

"Major!" Cooper ran quickly into the tent. " Patrol is reporting the trail head gate breached by those sick f.u.c.kers... Uh sir"

"How far?"

"About a half a klick, they are keeping eyes on it" Cooper said.

Levitt knew it was just a matter of time before they would breach the fence. Somehow these things would keep catching up to them. They would stop long enough to feed on anything they could find. livestock and wild life were abundant in this part of Colorado which had been helpful up to this point. The infected were eating better than they were now and there was the growing issue that they were getting weak and the infected were getting stronger and faster.

Levitt checked his watch " s.h.i.+t 24 hours till the strike" he said "They'll be here long before that".

He looked at Cooper "Lets take a ride and see what we can see".

Levitt was calm as always, at least on the outside. They walked quickly to a waiting Humvee and headed south towards a hill over looking Tuscan valley and the trail head. Cooper was behind the wheel, driving fast through low shrubs and rough retain. They came up on an empty vehicle and parked next to it. The patrol was about 100 yards from the vehicles, perched on the edge of the plateau. Levitt could see the four men at the edge of the trail next to a small telescope mounted on a tripod.

"Major, we have eyes on the leading edge. They are moving fast and easily in a mile or so now." Staff Sargent Hicks looked stressed, he was sweating and his voice wavered as he spoke.

"Relax staff Sargent" Levitt said calmly "they aren't here yet, let me take a look"

Levitt looked through the eyepiece and could clearly see the broken gate and what appeared to be a solid line of infected moving at full sprint toward them.

"Nine miles to go, they have made it a mile in a half hour. To be safe, we have about 3 hours to break camp and move into the woods."

"The woods sir? We're gonna run?" Cooper looked at him in disappointment.

"Yes ma'am, we are gonna run like h.e.l.l, we can't beat these things on our own. We have to live long enough to lead them into the strike zone and take out as many as we can. That is our mission, so we pull up stakes and hide out with everything we need to make that happen. We have to live for 24 more hours and these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds aren't going to give us that much time. Understood?"

Levitt was stern with Cooper. He understood how they felt, he wanted to head down that trail and take them on himself, but he knew they wouldn't last long enough to even make a dent. The chance of becoming infected in a frontal a.s.sault was too high. There was no way he wanted to go out that way and neither did anyone else there.

If they made the strike zone they either had a chance at escape or a quick death, with no infection. It didn't matter either way to Levitt, he was ready to end this.

"Get your a.s.ses back to camp. Dubler, setup a remote surveillance camera through the telescope so we can keep eyes on their advance."

"Aye!" Dubler was the resident tech guy, computer savvy and always playing with techno toys. His skills had been useful to the unit since they headed out of Tacoma. He always managed to find equipment along the way.

As they were moving through Salt Lake City on their way to this location, he found surveillance equipment, telescopes, and computers, along with power supplies and some pretty cool solar recharging units from an electronics store that was left mostly undamaged when the infection ran through the city.

In this camp, he had wired surveillance cameras up to a main server that could be monitored from the radio room. A makes.h.i.+ft computer information center that ran off of car batteries and a small generator they still had.

The patrol hurriedly worked their way back to the camp and started preparing for their escape.

"Doc!!" Levitt yelled across the compound. "get a mobile med kit together. Enough to set up a mobile triage."

"Mobile triage? Major!" Janice was leaning out of the medical tent wearing a lab coat over her camouflage uniform. Her surgical gloved hands were covered in blood from an autopsy she had been carrying out on a captured host.

-Janice-.

Janice was in medical school before being deployed to Seattle. She had been a corpsman for ten years and had applied for an enlisted to officer program that sent her to a military sponsored medical school. It was a great opportunity for her to advance and have the military pay for her to become a doctor. Now she was practicing her newly found skills exploring the anatomy of an infected man. Not even a man, he was a boy, no older than 17 she guessed.

There had been some progress in determining the mechanism of the infection before communications were cut off. The CDC had determined that the Ophiocordyceps unliateralis fungus had caused something similar to an allergic reaction in hosts In the first wave. Initially it had caused ma.s.s hysteria and homicidal responses towards other living beings.

But in those that were ill, the fungus was unable to enter into the bloodstream. This however gave it the time to adapt to its new environment. The initial infection prevented reproduction of the fungus as it had no way out of the human body and into a new host.

In nature this same fungus attacked ants and caused a similar response but once the fungus had driven the ant to a suitable location, it would grow stalks out of the hosts head and release its spores, to be picked up by a new host ant later.

In the human adaptation of the fungus however, it could not spread through killing the host and growing stocks from the cranium. The human skull was too thick. Instead it released its spores into the saliva glands, a bite would then allow it to pa.s.s from host to host.

An infected host needed only to bite another perspective host deep enough to draw blood then the new spore would spread. The infection was almost instantaneous through the blood stream and into the brain. The fungus also kept the host alive by instructing it when to feed. Somehow it tied itself into the nervous system and could read signals from the body.

Otherwise the infected were like any other biological creature and could die just as easily. When the fungus got to a certain point of its life cycle it would eventually grow to be larger than the cranial cavity could support and would grow through the sinus cavity, the ocular cavities, and through the auditory ca.n.a.l. Growing out of the nose, eyes, and ears would render the host unable to function and it would die.

That is how Janice got her science project, affectionately named Oscar. The unit had come across this host Stuck in a dumpster behind a convenience store as they were driving through Montrose Colorado on their way to the plateau.

The convoy was scavenging for supplies. They stopped in a small market to collect what we were able to find. Coffee, beef jerky, cigarettes, alcohol. Very little was left but we did manage to dig up some sc.r.a.ps of packaged food.

While checking the pantry area of the small kitchen where they prepared hotdogs and nachos, a loud banging sound behind the store got our attention. When we went to investigate, we found Oscar banging against the sides of a closed metal dumpster. It had become blinded by the stalks of the fungus growing out of its eye sockets. Somehow it had fallen into the dumpster, maybe while scavenging for food as there were rats all over the trash cans. Janice convinced the Major not to destroy it so she could collect and dissect it. Levitt thought it was clever to refer to it as Oscar the grouch because it was discovered in a trash can. The name stuck.

Janice dropped what she was doing and started putting together medical supplies in small kits that could be carried on packs.