Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 70

Once we've turned around, we drove off and kept going down the road until it opened to a wider one. The entire street was blocked by vehicles and bodies.

"No. No freaking way," Haskell gasped as passed an overturned truck, boxes of medical supplies spilled out across the road. I followed where he was looking at, and saw that the gates into the Med district had been knocked down.

A bus had rammed its way through the gate, partially splitting it open. I could see the bus driver's dead body hanging across the broken windshield, shards of glass all over his face and torso. There were more bodies inside the bus, all butchered and mutilated. On the ramparts, bodies of soldiers also lay dead. There were no vectors around.

Peter stopped the car. With the gates obstructed by abandoned vehicles, the Range Rover could not fit through the narrow gaps. "Well, I guess we're walking," he said.

"Can't we like, I don't know, ram through it?" I asked. I knew what I said was impossible, but I was frustrated that we're so close on getting to downtown, and now we had this to contend with.

Peter just narrowed his gaze at me and shook his head.

I turned red. It was a stupid question.

I climbed out of the car. We walked toward the civilian entryway, abandoned luggage scattered on the waiting line, a few still in the hands of its owners, now lay dead. I saw a Superman action figure in the middle of a pool of blood. In one of the cracked luggage was a mound of women's lingerie. Another backpack had nothing but canned goods. Bullet casings littered the road, bullet holes were all over the cars and the walls. The plywood barricades over the buildings' windows, supposedly to prevent anyone from walking around the gates, had been pried wide open. I peered in and saw more bodies, though most of them belonged to vectors, their two-pupil eyes gazing up the ceiling, and very much dead.

Luke strode toward the waiting line and knelt over the backpack with the canned goods. Luke shrugged at me. "We never know." Though, he had to leave half a dozen cans because it was too heavy.

"Food is food," I said.

Luke nodded. "Yep. Food is food."

The bag had energy bars of cranberry and walnut, and Luke handed two of each. I quickly opened the first one, realizing I hadn't eaten breakfast, and I was hungry. I kept the last one in my pocket. Peter and Haskell looted the dead soldiers of ammunition, putting two or three extra magazines in their pouches. Luke picked up an M4 carbine on the ground and also handed another one to me. I walked over to a dead soldier and grabbed some more 9mm ammunition for Betty. I caught sight of the soldier's combat knife still attached in its sheath, and so I took it off him and put it around my waist. I felt better now that I had bullets in Betty, an M4 strapped to my back, and an emergency knife. Still, I'd rather fight the vectors ten feet away from me.

"Where did all the vectors go?" Haskell whispered, looking left and right to see if someone might have heard him.

"Where the prey has gathered," Peter answered right away. "Doesn't matter. Anywhere but here."

It had been a couple of hours since the wall fell, enough time to create all this devastation and tragedy. By now, many of the survivors had hunkered down somewhere safe or built their own makeshift shelters. At least that's what I liked to believe. To think that they've joined the ranks of the vectors was terrifying. I wanted to accept that the living still outnumbered the infected, but reality wasn't very kind to such fantasies.

We couldn't go through the turnstiles by the entryway, packed high with dead bodies, and a section of the ramparts had partially collapsed on it. We had to go through the bus sticking out of the gate. Peter and Haskell went inside first, poking every dead body on the way, making sure they weren't vectors. Most of the dead wore scrubs, and I had to look away when some of the bodies were children, a few still had hospital tags around their wrists. I realized they were the same patients being transferred, the same children I saw in the hospital this morning. One of the dead women had her arms around a little girl, and I recognized her as the mother who told her daughter they'd go on a field trip. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach, so when we reached the end of the bus, and Peter pulled the lever of the emergency exit, I hopped off right away and vomited. Luke gently rubbed my back.