Free Great Bitten: Outbreak by Warren Fielding Page B

could have sped him up with a bit of fast forward he’d have been charging. As it was, the infected that we were encountering either had no balance or the forward velocity of a three-legged tortoise. I suppose I felt a little lucky, if you only think of the one-on-one situations. It’s a shame that this wasn’t one massive game of poker. I backed in to the kitchen and grabbed a knife out of the block on the sideboard. The heft of it felt immediately more comfortable, though it was difficult to get less deadly than a sponge. I suppose just knowing there was a pointy bit at one end that was specifically designed to stab filled me with a lot more confidence. Ass had no coordination and as he lurched towards me I braced myself. Not everything was like the movies so far, but the weakness, the only thing guaranteed to kill these things permanently, was by destroying the brain. The news and my research both had confirmed that much.
    In the heat of the moment, you don’t think about the moral implications of your actions. I had already seen so many extreme and bizarre situations in the last 24 hours that I already felt emotionally numb to a lot of what I was seeing and doing [3] .
    It isn’t difficult to call forth aggression when there’s a rancid man iridescent with unnatural rage intent on making you his next quick snack. I can’t remember how many times I plunged a knife in to that man’s eye sockets, pushing his forehead back so I could angle the knife up and into his brain. I can’t remember how many times I hacked at his neck, desperate to sever his spinal cord. I can’t remember cracking open his skull against the floor to make sure I could expose that rotting lump of jellied grey, crushing it under my foot as it oozed in to the floor.
    I had a blissful few seconds of muffled foggy silence, the storm of the apocalypse raging the other side of the world as I listened to the heaving of my own exhausted chest, before the noise of the house came crashing in on me as my mind left the tunnel of my inner consciousness and my ears popped, letting in the outside world.
    Carla was screaming. Rick was yelling at her to shut up, wrapping his arms around her and shaking her by her shoulders. They were both across the other side of the room. The kitchen and the edge of the dining room were splashed with red. Christ knows what I looked like. I’m pretty sure I’d try to run away from me too, and I was pretty impressed that they were even still in the house.
    I shook my head and rubbed at my face with the palms of my hands, doing en-masse with blood what millions of women have probably done with mascara over the years before really realising what I was doing. I had just wiped off infected blood from my arm in the fear that it would get in to my own circulation, and here I was virtually licking the stuff. Bile rose in my throat and I was immediately heaving, the whisky burning as it worked its way involuntarily up my throat. I dashed back to the cursed sink, bringing up little but liquid as my body convulsed and worked out what my brain had now convinced it to be poison. I gripped the edge of the sink for dear life, knuckles hard, riding the waves as bright sparks started popping across my vision. Pain pulsed in my temples and I felt sweat springing up on my forehead. Was this what the plague felt like? Was I about to change?
    I was panting hard when I heard movement behind me. I looked over my shoulder to be greeted with the petrifying si ght of Rick holding a hammer high with white knuckles and looking at me as if I were a predatory animal preparing to bite. Perhaps he thought I would be. Pretty brave and a damned sensible move on his part under the circumstances. I spat in to the sink and squared up to him. Damn, but he was a bit of a bottler when it came to the crunch. His hand was shaking and his pupils were dilated; if we’d been in a club I would have assumed he’d just snorted more than his fair share of coke. He looked