The Reaper Virus

  A PERMUTED PRESS book

  Published at Smashwords

  ISBN (trade paperback): 978-1-61868-1-928

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-1-935

  The Reaper Virus copyright © 2013

  by Nathan Barnes

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by George Cotronis, Ravenkult Studios

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Preface

  Chapter 1 - Infectious Headlines

  Chapter 2 - Preparation and Mutation

  Chapter 3 - Corrosive Revelation

  Chapter 4 - Before Sunrise

  Chapter 5 - Confinement

  Chapter 6 - Hopeless Night

  Chapter 7 - Escape Plan

  Chapter 8 - Into the Void

  Chapter 9 - Life Corroding

  Chapter 10 - All Good Things Must Come to an End

  Chapter 11 - Budding Wasteland

  Chapter 12 - Premeditated

  Chapter 13 - Why So Serious?

  Chapter 14 - Preconceived Notions

  Chapter 15 - Passageway

  Chapter 16 - Driftwood

  Chapter 17 - Desperate Times

  Chapter 18 - Ascent

  Chapter 19 - Desperate Measures

  Chapter 20 - Hell's Eulogy

  Chapter 21 - Good Samaritans

  Chapter 22 - Boundaries

  Chapter 23 - Cache

  Chapter 24 - Chariot

  Chapter 25 - Helpful Hints

  Chapter 26 - Whispers From Home

  Chapter 27 - Atonement

  Chapter 28 - Judgment

  Epilogue - Heart Beats

  Special Thanks

  Hellacious

  Dedicated to my three reasons for surviving.

  Introduction

  In the fall of 2011, I was at the Baltimore Comic-Con promoting my podcast Torres vs. Zombies when I meet this guy and his wife. We struck up a nice conversation and it turns out that he and I have some things in common: we both live in Virginia, we both have an incredible partner who is supportive of what we do, and we were both starting out trying to make a living doing something that we love within a genre we were passionate and knowledgeable about. Here is the biggest thing we had in common—we both have the ability to ride the passion we have to the top. Since I was looking to do some interviews and no one wanted to bother with me (you know since I’m not Max Brooks, no offense Max, love ya’, babe), I figured, “What the hell, let me interview this kid and see what he’s got.” It turned out to be a great interview. We exchanged emails and phone numbers and he asked me if I wanted a preview copy of the book; it still had some editing and changes but for the most part was ready to go. I said, “Sure, why not?”

  What I got when I opened up that email was nothing short of incredible. You see, this wasn’t a story about some super soldier. This wasn’t the story about Johnny Badass, the Navy Seal, or Frankie Never-die, the tough as nails survival guy, or Sammy Sure-shot, the most incredible marksman who ever lived. This was the story about me, or rather someone like me. An average Joe. Mr. Ordinary. Some regular guy, who has a regular job, who has a regular family whom he loves dearly and what happens when the shit hits the fan. How does the regular guy survive? How does the love he feels for his family drive him to do things that he never thought in his wildest dreams he would or could do in order to make it back to protect those that mean the most. I never thought about it in the way that Nathan writes.

  You see, in my dreams, just like in yours, we are Johnny Badass, but in reality we are Nathan, both the writer and the character. We are the average Joes who want nothing more than to protect our families or die with them. That is what makes this book so powerful. Nathan gets it. I didn’t have to be a superhero to save my loved ones; I can do it as me. I got to interview him once again when the book was finally published and that is what you hold in your hands right now. The story of you and I—Johnny Average—and what we would do and how we would survive… —or die in a world where the living dead walk and all the superheroes are gone. Exactly how Nathan does.

  Nathan, let’s do it again when the second books comes out. I’ll bring the watermelon and the vodka; you bring the knives and the beer…

  Alfredo Torres

  Host, Torres vs Zombies

  Preface

  What do you see when you close your eyes? Maybe your imagination takes over and shows you the things you’d like to see. In those moments you become a hero, a savior, a lover, or anything else that takes you away from the life you know.

  A lifetime ago those fleeting moments once brought me imaginative satisfaction. Now all I see are rabid, once human mouths tearing away at whatever remains of my soul. All things considered, escaping the end of days with my life and haunted memories should be considered luck…

  But now the world is dead, with hordes of evil wandering about in search of any remaining life to consume. No, I’m not lucky… I believe the undead are the lucky ones.

  Before the end I was a police dispatcher, experiencing civil service in all its thankless glory. The position yielded only tidbits of information on all happenings. Long ago I grew to accept that during any event, local or global, I would never get the whole picture, only a cryptic mental mosaic.

  A viral epidemic began to appear in the headlines. My work gave me slightly more information than the general public received. After the story broke, I sat at a state computer all night reading news stories looking for tiles to add to my “mosaic”. I knew this situation was different. The news rarely keeps a common theme for this long of a period. No matter how tragic something is, something worse always comes along to take its place because the media is the embodiment of Attention Deficit Disorder. I listened to the talking heads report about the spreading virus, and I began to understand more than ever that there was more to it than they were leading the general public to believe. Sometimes there is nothing worse than being right.

  So who am I? My name is Nathan; I'm a thirty year old husband and father of two. I'm a big dork, a good dad, and married a woman far better looking than someone like me deserves. I'm lazy, on the overweight side and see myself as kind of a “professional quitter”. I dropped out of college where I had gone for criminal justice as part of my lifelong quest to be a cop and save the world. Actually I was a cop for a short while. At least I was until the rigorous training at the police academy kicked my fat ass and I got injured. Something as minor as a twisted ankle and busted finger served as just enough to have to drop out. The dispatch center ended up becoming my home.

  My level of dependability matched the department well. Eventually I found that my co-workers on the night shift shared my twisted sense of humor, which made the hours of the shift bearable, even enjoyable at times. Being twisted is almost a prerequisite for spending at least eight hours a day listening to people in their worst moments, or just plain bitching.

  The police department was far from normal; in fact my department was quite unique. It served a college campus integrated throughout the city of Richmond, Virginia. When most people hear "university police" they get a bit of a stereotypical image in their head of a bunch of wannabe cops beating drunken college asses, but it wasn’t like that at all. The agency was home to around 140 sworn officers, a special narcotics unit, a security department, and provided exclusive police protection for the regional trauma hospital.

  U
niversity pamphlets bragged that the school was a "diverse, enriching, unique, and fulfilling higher education experience!" Diverse? To an extreme. Enriching? Ha! Unique? Doesn't even cover it. Fulfilling? That depended on who you asked. The reality is that the university was a thriving school buying up as much of this festering historical city as possible. Maybe the campus was just a completely different city within a city at night. Or maybe the problem was I only heard the bad things... actually that's exactly the problem, hearing the bad things.

  A few years ago there was this big flu pandemic that swept the globe. The viral outbreak was the result of the H1N1 virus, or "Swine Flu" as the dumb shits in the media kept calling it. It killed thousands of people, terrified many more, and finally fizzled out. In the years since, there have been a few different variations of it, a resurgence of paranoia by the media, and basically no change in everyday life.

  About a year ago they started talking about something different. Some called it a mutation of the H1N1 virus; others called it something entirely new. It started slowly, barely making headlines. I had to know more.

  I went to every news site imaginable; no two said the same thing about where it started. Some said Africa, some said China, and others said Area fucking 51. This was the first thing that had me worried.

  Normally the media tries to pick one side of a story that at least gives the impression they know what is going on. But this? Even through paranoia and sleep deprivation, I knew something actually wasn't right. The death toll hadn’t been announced at that point, but I had a feeling it was high.

  From the information I was able to gather, symptoms were severe muscle pain, nausea, vomiting, seizure, and in many cases, death. Every “expert” said something different about how the virus spread so it was difficult to pin down specifics. Each night at work brought more and more shit from the hospital. Abnormal floods of sick people became more common. Reports of sick patients becoming disorderly and biting or attacking the staff came into the office several times a night. Officers were constantly being dispatched to maintain control over the crowds of hypochondriacs that flowed into the emergency room like water seeping past a dam.

  I told myself this was just another Swine Flu and I had watched too many movies and played too many video games. Naturally, I was wrong. It didn’t take long for the world to go to hell, and fighting for our lives quickly became as normal as brushing our teeth.

  After all that’s happened, I’m left with precious silence in this dark room, safe for the moment. Chance relaxation is invaded by the flood of memories from the preceding weeks. Any efforts to silence my thoughts have been in vain.

  Whether this is a result of good fortune or a karmic version of punishment, I have been given the chance to recall the events leading to this moment. So I’ll take myself to the beginning and try to think of it as therapy. Long ago a teacher told me that getting thoughts on paper can help you cope with them. Right now, I’d give anything for some peace of mind. Although from what I’ve seen and done, I feel peace of mind is a luxury as fleeting as the notion of safety itself.

  If you’re reading this, then you’ve been put in the unfortunate position of judging me. I ask that you judge me for who I am and what I fought for, not what I’ve done.

  Chapter 1

  Infectious Headlines

  Day One.

  November 9th – 0130 hours:

  The headlines were all about people getting sick. Everywhere you looked you were given the distinct impression that there was no way to avoid the illness.

  The media was getting more details about the virus itself. Evidently it did share origins with the H1N1 Swine Flu, however, the main difference between the two was that the illness, which had been named the R32PR virus, was incredibly unstable and mutated at a rate exponentially higher than its swine flu cousin. The name for it came from some chemical formula, I think. I bet they just picked some letters and numbers to make it sound like they knew what they were talking about.

  According to one story I read, the first known generation of the virus was named ‘R1PR’. Scientists still couldn’t seem to narrow down where it came from, only that it was probably from some third world cesspool and had accidentally been unleashed on the world. Also, the virus was so unstable that it mutated thirty-one times over a span of just a few months, with each mutation becoming more severe and volatile than the last strain. The most recent mutation caused it to be far more contagious.

  The hospitals cracked down on the number of people allowed to visit their loved ones. I saw a lot of people wearing facemasks, even though at that point they had not yet said it was airborne. The president gave some song and dance speech about being vigilant and using good hygiene. Easy for him to say; he’d never been to our dirty fucking city. No one in my family had gotten sick yet, but I told the kids to let me know if people at school were getting sick more than usual. My kids were young, but they were smart, and I was confident they’d be careful.

  I had to juggle my information gathering with answering the phones. Luckily most of the really paranoid people called during the day… at least I had that going for me on the midnight shift.

  * * *

  0513 hours:

  The first news agencies to update in the morning were always the ones overseas due to the time difference. I found this on The British BBC:

  “Speaking on a condition of anonymity; a scientist working with a joint venture of the London Health Sciences Centre and St Josephs Health Care London attempting to map what is now know as the R32PR virus was quoted saying the following:

  ‘The virus is more unstable than anything we have ever seen. Each mutation is the result of the host strain being introduced to a foreign strain. The result is not a combination of the two, but rather acceleration and strengthening of the host. Recent growth of infected subjects is most likely the result of the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth mutation. We cannot be sure which virus it was introduced to, but it’s possibly something to the effect of a member of the family Calicivirida – commonly known as the Norovirus. Norovirus affects people of all ages. The viruses are transmitted by contaminated food or water and by person-to-person contact. I suspect this to be the case due to recent growth in the pandemic centralized in urban areas. What concerns me are recent reports of symptomatic severity growing exponentially. We are now working to predict its mutation and contain the host virus before it is exposed to something far worse.’”

  This scared the crap out of me. I knew for a fact, from my years of service in this lovely city, that there were some dirty people out there. What would happen if the virus got into someone already festering with several other diseases? Would it join forces with any virus it came across? That could be bad. I thought it might be best to stock up on some supplies and be prepared to stay at home for a while.

  I was due to be off work at 0700 hours, assuming no one called out and I didn’t have mandatory overtime. I decided that instead of going straight home that a Wal-Mart trip was in order. With any luck I’d get there before people woke up to mob the stores. I hoped this was just paranoia, and the worst that could happen was that I would save trips to the grocery store for a month or so.

  I used the downtime at work to prepare my list of items. The sooner I was in and out of that place the better.

  * * *

  Day Two.

  November 10th – 0013 hours:

  A lot of people started freaking out. The Today Show did this big segment about the R32PR virus. I think it’s funny that a virologist in the U.K. can spill the beans about this being a source of concern and no one mentions it, but as soon as those jackasses on the morning news show say something…

  I’m lucky I went to the store early. Usually when I was there that early on a Monday morning the only people I had to contend with were the red-eyed stock clerks. On that particular trip though, there were a few other people, but most seemed pretty with it. I noticed a majority of them were congregated around perishables. My tactic was a bit di
fferent.

  My shopping cart was packed. I ended up grabbing a second one and pulled it behind me. However, before I made my way to the food side I had a random eureka moment and started looking for basic survival stuff. If I ended up not needing it, then great – I’d rather give random Christmas presents or take my son Maddox camping than be caught with my pants down. We already owned sleeping bags and basic camping gear thanks to my childhood spent as a Boy Scout, but I picked up two extra sleeping bags and some cooking gear suitable for the woods. I grabbed two cases of water purification tablets. The goal was to get four to six of the little things like emergency blankets, travel toiletries and more of the personal use stuff as opposed to group use items.

  I also grabbed a few boxes of ammunition. Years back I bought a twenty-two caliber hunting rifle from a buddy of mine. When you spend as much of your time around cops as I did, eventually you’re going to get a gun. I also took Maddox shooting every now and then, more than anything just to give him a respect for firearms at an early age. He was only eight years old, but I’d be damned if he ever touched a gun without knowing what they can do.

  My favorite items came from the electronics department. I picked up a six-pack of two-way radios, the ones with a two to three mile range. I thought it might come in handy at some point or another, but I would hide those from my wife Sarah just to avoid the inevitable argument. She’d just tell me it was a waste of money. The next items I didn’t think she would mind because she was always a closet hippie – a few solar battery chargers along with an array of compatible batteries.