Read Online The Infection by Craig DiLouie - Free Book Online Page B

disappears. Wendy is still shooting, burning quickly through the next magazine. The first woman comes back and wrestles with the Kid for the carbine, her jaws chomping in a blind rage. He hears a scuffle and the crack of the cop’s police baton striking bone. The Kid shoves the woman against the wall and smashes the carbine into her face repeatedly until she slides down the wall leaving a smear of blood. Panting, he turns and sees Wendy fighting two men twice her size and kicking the shit out of both of them with her side-handle baton. He clears the jam out of his carbine and signals to her, murder in his eyes. She backs away just in time for him to gun them down with several bursts from the hip.
    They stand quietly for several moments, unable to speak or move, utterly drained. Just breathing. A pall of gun smoke hangs in the air. The cordite bites their nostrils, competing with the bitter smell of blood and the rank stink of the dead Infected.
    “You kick ass,” he says finally.
    “It’s the training.”
    “That was way too close.”
    “We’re going to be okay.”
    “You’ll have to teach me your judo skills sometime.”
    “Wait,” the cop says. “Do you hear that?”
    The Kid shakes his head, trying to get rid of the ringing in his ears.
    “I can’t hear anything,” he says.
    Ethan, Anne and Paul rush into the corridor, breathing hard.
    “We heard the shooting and came as fast as we could,” Anne says.
    “Sounded like a war up here,” Paul says. “You okay, boy?”
    “We’re okay,” the Kid tells him.
    “Quiet,” the cop says. “Something is coming.”
     
    ♦
     
    The survivors train their light and weapons on the doors at the far end of the corridor. A strange sound comes to them that slowly reveals itself as something familiar. Chewing. The sound of an animal chewing a piece of meat, oddly amplified.
    “What the hell is that?” the Kid says, wincing.
    A fresh wave of sour milk stench assaults their nostrils with an almost physical force.
    “God, that smell makes me want to puke,” the cop says.
    “Don’t even say that word or I’ll actually do it,” Ethan says, pale.
    “Wait,” Anne tells them. “Quiet.”
    A baby is crying.
    Ethan takes two steps forward before Anne reaches out and grips his arm, holding him back.
    “It’s a baby,” he says, his eyes wild. “A little baby. Oh, God.”
    Paul grunts in surprise, holding his dying flare. A baby in the hospital, alone in the dark. A miracle baby. How did it survive? What has it been eating? Is it Infected?
    “That’s not a child,” Anne says.
    The creature pushes the doors open and slithers through. The survivors flinch and take a step back with exclamations of horror and revulsion. It is a giant worm, half as thick as a car and twice as long, with an enormous blank face made up of wrinkled folds of skin. The creature appears to be blind, propelling itself towards them using tiny appendages, something like a cross between giant warts and tentacles, that cover its body. It looks sick, its body pale and grayish and covered in purple bruises, trembling as it slithers, starving.
    Ethan sobs in horror, unable to comprehend the existence of such a repulsive thing. His concept of reality is disintegrating. It is as if the map of the world were now blemished with big blank spaces marked with the thickly scrawled warning: here be monsters.
    The worm plows into the dead, pushing the corpses against the sides of the corridor.
    “Can it see us?” Wendy says.
    The monster shivers at the sound of her voice, pausing in front of one of the bodies and nuzzling its hair. The massive blank face cracks open, revealing a gaping black maw ringed with sharklike teeth. It promptly begins to absorb the corpse headfirst with a slurping sound.
    “Oh, God!”
    The creature shudders, then resumes its feast, cracking bones. Chewing.
    “I’d like to leave now,” Ethan says, shaking.
    “What do we do?” says the Kid. “Anne? What are we going to