Hi Folks, first up I want to thank all of the people who understood what last week's story was about. For those of you who didn't like it, no hard feelings maybe this one will be more up your alley. Before we get started I'd like to thank my partner in crime, Mikothebaby for editing this story, without her it would probably read more like a bunch of random letters separated by semicolons and commas. It was actually her who taught me that two commas in a row is just bad. Before we get started I have a warning for you. I don't do them often but this is a two part story. The conclusion will come up next week unless I get struck by lightning or my car falls on me. SS06
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There was no need to look over my shoulder to see how fast the man chasing me was running.
That is, of course, if you could still call him a man. I was putting every ounce of strength and stamina I had into running but he was slowly, inexorably reeling me in.
The bastard must've been a God damned track star, because I'm no slouch when it comes to running. There aren't very many people who can keep up with me. This guy, again though, was not only keeping up, he was catching up.
With the fence that I'd crawled through to reach the abandoned warehouse coming up swiftly, I decided to put him out of his misery. I began to slow down and he ran even faster. His speed was flat out and he gave away a lot of agility running that fast. His brain power was already depleted, so my next move took him totally by surprise.
As he started reaching out trying to grab me from behind, I suddenly just stopped and curled into a ball directly in front of him. My move was so sudden, that he had no chance to slow down or stop himself. He stumbled awkwardly over me and landed flat on his stomach on the ground.
I jumped up nimbly and stood over him. He growled in anger for about a second before I put him out of his misery by slamming the head of my flanged mace through his skull. The growling stopped immediately, but the body shuddered a few times. I quickly stepped back leaving my mace in his skull.
I drew the Katana strapped diagonally across my back just in case he was still alive. I watched for a few seconds and saw no signs of movement, so I sheathed the Katana and approached the body again. I tried to yank my mace out of the skull and couldn't.
Shit, that mace was one of my favorite weapons. It was an original piece from the fifteenth century. There was no way I was leaving without it. I put one foot on the man's neck and braced the other on the ground and pulled with all of my strength. The mace came free and brought a chunk of skull with it. I'd have to remove that once I got back to camp. I looked around me and saw several more of them but they were at least a hundred yards away. I laughed thinking about that, because I'm the only person I know who still uses the term yards. Most people have finally switched to the metric system as if any of that shit matters anymore.
I jogged quickly over to the fence and found the hole I'd cut in it and my wire cutters. I grabbed the cutters and ran over to my car. I knocked on the window and heard the electronic locks pop open.
As I opened the door, music loud enough to alert everyone in the area to our presence filled the air. I could hear angry growls from the people behind the fence.
"Took ya long enough," grinned my wife Dana. She continued to bop her head to the music as I sat down in the driver's seat and started the engine.
"Hey buddy, gas isn't rechargeable," she said. "And the sound of that motor will let everything in the area know where we are." I turned the music down, and grabbed her by her face.
"With the racket you're making, Dana," I said. "Everything in the area already knows we're here." I pulled her face gently to mine and kissed her. Her arms snaked around me and her mouth opened as her tongue sought and dueled with mine.
"I love you Jer," she said. "Sometimes..."
I just looked at her. "Sometimes I wish it was just the two of us. I wish we could just find our own little hidden safe zone and live out our lives without constantly scavenging and hunting for supplies for all of the others. I especially wish that at night," she said.
I looked at her crazily. Nights were the most dangerous times. It really was better to have more people around.
"Jer, I get tired of us having to have furtive sneaky sex," she said. "I just wish that we could just let it all hang out. I dream of you just pounding the shit out of me and me being free to scream out exactly how good it feels and exactly what I want you to do to me. God damn it we're married. We're supposed to fuck our brains out. It's natural. It's the way it's supposed to be."
"That was a long time ago, in a kingdom far, far away," I sighed. But she was right. I loved Dana more than I could ever express. We'd been married for three years and together for more than that but I could count on one hand the number of times that I'd been able to hear her screaming out her passion. It simply wasn't that kind of world anymore.
It wasn't really anyone's fault. There hadn't been a World War III. There hadn't been any kind of Biblical apocalypse, nor had Aliens taken over the planet. Our downfall had come about from a combination of very small things. It took a perfect storm of almost infinitely small proportions to take down our society.
Thirty years ago, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, medical science had started to track a growing number of viruses that were resistant to antibiotics. But modern medicine had also trained most of the populace worldwide to depend on medical care. If you got a cold or the flu, you weren't supposed to simply ride it out. Nope, you had to go to see a doctor so he or she could prescribe the latest and greatest antibiotic. In many cases, it didn't make sense. There was never a cure for the common cold. If you got a cold you simply had the virus for seven to ten days. The treatments simply made the misery of those seven to ten days easier.
So what a lot of people did was to go to work while still sick. They had to go to work because they saved their sick days for vacations and sporting events or entertainment. It just didn't make sense. Why would anyone go to work while they were sick, so they could stay home and go out while they were really well?. People back then were crazy.
Anyway, it may not have made sense, but it made dollars. The drug companies were constantly finding all kinds of drugs and antibiotics to treat more and more of the symptoms. It got to the point where no one wanted to have even the slightest discomfort. If you had a runny nose, you didn't need a tissue, you needed an antibiotic. If you had a headache, you needed a narcotic. An entire generation of pain free wimps got us to that point.
The researchers warned us. They told us that the strains of viruses were beginning to mutate into super-bugs that couldn't be taken down with antibiotics. Society refused to listen. "They'll come up with something," they always said. And the drug companies did. They always came up with something. Ten years ago in 2020, the first Mega-virus was discovered. It was called Ambubola. The weird thing about it was that unlike the Ebola virus that it was mutated from, it didn't eat tissues. It was called Ambubola for short but it really meant Ambulant Ebola. Ambulant meaning that after the virus killed you, you were still moving around. The cases of Ambubola were few and far between. Patients stricken with the disease were not dangerous. They were simply medical curiosities.
After all, most of them were brain-dead. They had no desires, no agenda and no motivation. They simply stood up and moved. A few years later though, as the Ambubola virus continued to mutate and combine with other viruses, something awful happened; and that's where the perfect shit storm occurred.
It was the worst possible outcome. Think about it, if Ambubola had combined with the common cold then we'd have a few harmless dead patients that stood up and sniffled and sneezed, which again would have been no big deal. But when Ambubola combined with Rabies we got hell on earth. Rabies was relatively slow acting. Ambubola sped that up. Rabies, once it reaches the brain is characterized with aggression, paranoia, foaming at the mouth and the desire to bite. The disease is also transferred through that bite.
Rabid Ambubola or RAB, as we call it, spread quickly. We believe that it was created by cross-contamination in a European hospital that was doing research into both Ambubola and Rabies. I've heard several different stories about how it happened. The most plausible seems to be that a patient who'd unknowingly had rabies, which takes months for the symptoms to show up got an organ transplant from a cadaver. The donor cadaver had been from a person with AB.
The AB sped up the rabies. The patient bit several people in the hospital. Before anyone knew what was going on, the disease made it into the wild. There were hundreds of cases within the first few days. There thousands by the end of the week and it was global buy the end of the first month.
There was, of course, widespread panic. Governments tried to contain it. They tried quarantines and sending in troops, all of which failed. Society soon fell. Countries became a thing of the past. With everyone fighting to survive, the old rules no longer applied. I've heard about cities and places starting up again, but usually they fail. There have been places that started with a few people who walled themselves off from the rest of the world. They grow their own food and do everything they have to do to stay clean and secure. But they always fail. It only takes one person to bring them down.
There are trillions of infected people who go out looking for fresh blood in large herd-like gatherings. The people in these groups resemble and act like a type of zombie. There are difference between them and traditional zombies though. The RABS as we call them, are not slow shuffling creatures who eat blood and brains. They have all of the physical attributes that they always had. So a RAB that looks like an old lady, has all of the strength and speed of that old lady. A God damned track star like the one that just chased me is going to still be as quick as hell. I once ran into a RAB that used to be a fucking basketball player. The asshole leaped over two other people to try to bite me. Of course, the worst one I've ever taken on had to have been a professional wrestler. I saw that bastard jump off of a car, do a flip and body slam one of the guys in our group. Once he bit the guy, it was over.
Stopping RABs isn't really too much harder than killing any other person. Since the virus is transmitted through the system by the blood, you can cut them severely enough that they bleed out and they'll die. But that, in some cases, can take a long time to happen and during it, they'll still try to bite you. The best ways are to decapitate them or destroy the brain.
Once a person is bitten, there's only one way to save them. There is no vaccine, no serum and no cure for RAB. The only method that works is amputation and that's only effective if the bite is on an extremity.
There are rumors of a cure. I've heard that scientists have developed a genetic retrovirus that can rewrite an affected person's DNA and eliminate the virus. But to tell you the truth it just sounds like bullshit to me. I keep running into people here that say that there are RAB free places in Europe or Asia. I also run into people from Europe who've come here because they were told that the US or what's left of it, is a RAB free zone.
For now, we just keep doing the same things we always do. We hunt for supplies and check each other often.
As we head back to camp from our latest forage, the thrumming of my car's exhaust system is a pleasant sound. My car is an antique. It's a 2012 Mustang GT. It's left over from when Detroit resurrected the muscle car era. The motor puts out 412 horsepower and the car is ungodly fast. It's also ungodly loud, so most of the time I don't use the motor. My car has also been retrofitted with small electric motors that run on lithium ion batteries in EV mode. When I use the motor, it recharges the batteries. The car's roof, hood and trunk deck lid are solar panels that also recharge the batteries on sunny days.
Normally I run in EV mode. I do that because it's far quieter. I have no need to let packs of RABs know that we're in the area. But I also run EV because I can only get gas when I find it. It isn't difficult to find gas but I have to go through all the effort of pumping it out of the tanks of what used to be gas stations. I've heard that in the old days, all you had to do was to show up at a station and wave a little card and you could put gas in your tank just by sticking a nozzle in your fuel door. I really don't believe that though.
I take a look over at Dana. She's still singing along to some song that she found on the Mustang's huge hard drive full of music. There are literally thousands of songs on it. Most of the music is from 20 or 30 years ago. Dana really likes the category they called "Pop." I really like both the "Metal," songs and the "Rock and Roll" songs. I also like some of the "Country," songs. Neither of us liked the ones they called "Rap," though. It just seemed like a bunch of angry people shouting at each other and complaining about their God damned problems. The "Punk," songs were the same way. Maybe that's why they called them "Punks."
I looked at the center console's display to see what song Dana was listening to. It was a song called, "Walking on Sunshine." I wondered what the hell that even meant.
"Dana, that woman was probably dead before you were born," I laughed. "I doubt that she's walking on anything."
Dana, like my car, is one of a kind. She's short with short brown hair and brown eyes. She has an exotic caste to her face. Her family was originally from Mexico she tells me. She has barely average sized breasts, but I love her thick legs and her ass. Dana's ass is a work of art. I get hard just thinking about it.
