The Infected by Gregg Cocking Page A

ones that are supposed to look like rocks? So I was off to see what I could get – I first tried the gardens around me – nothing – no solar lights and none of the infected. So I headed further from my unit. The ones I thought I remembered seeing where closer to the gate, so I headed that way slowly, stopping every few metres to check for any signs of life. A couple of units away from mine I struck it lucky – they had two of those big ones (the ones sort of on pegs), so I reached over the wall and pulled those out - they have pretty big solar panels so I was chuffed with those, but I was sure that I needed more. Quite a lot more. I left one in the road to be picked up on the way back and carried the other with me – those pegs are serious weapons.
     
    A couple of units later I stopped in my tracks, frozen to the spot. There was Huge, lying in a garden on the other side of the wall mere metres from me. I could feel the sweat dripping off my brow. I slowly lowered myself to the ground, nail gun at the ready. If she was able to smell the dead dog that was stuck in a sealed off car, surely she would be able to smell me over the wall? I raised my head slowly to peer over the wall – she hadn’t moved. I crawled a metre and a half forward so that I could have a look through the gate. The back of her head faced me and all I could see was her matted hair and her blood stained floral dress rising slowly and descending again as she breathed. Her left hand, stretched out away from her body, flickered as the sun caught her wedding ring. Where is your husband, I thought, and a chill ran down my spine as I pictured him creeping up on me from behind. I checked my surroundings again and steadied myself.
     
    Then I shot her. One quick squeeze of the trigger and her undulating stomach stopped moving. The nail disappeared into her skull and a thin line of thick, murky blood trickled from the small hole that it made. I felt sick. Not because of the stuff oozing out of her head, but because I had just killed someone. Something. I once hit a bird while I was driving, and I think I might have killed it on purpose, and this felt strangely similar. The bird had been in the middle of the road while I was driving, and as I exclaimed, “Move, you stupid bird,” I hit the accelerator instead of brake. And killed it. There were feathers everywhere and I had to take my car to the car wash just to get rid of the bird guts on my radiator. I’m sure something inside made me speed up on purpose. I felt terrible for weeks afterwards. But that was just a bird, this was a person. Sort of.
     
    The only good thing, I suppose, is that I now know that the nail gun that I have been carrying around for protection is actually a viable weapon. And all those hours I wasted shooting at business cards with the nail gun when I should have been designing some menu for some or other new age restaurant that was bound to go out of business within six months was actually worth it.
     
    Huge’s husband popped into my mind, but before I could imagine what he would have thought of what I had just done to his wife, I slowly got up and moved on. I didn’t want to be out there for longer than I had to be. Luck was obviously with me, as the next garden wall that I looked over was one of the ones that I had remembered from before – lying strategically around the garden were four solar powered lights crudely disguised as ‘rocks’. I jumped over the wall so as not to make a noise by using the garden gate (I had been woken uncountable times in the middle of the night by people coming home and opening their gates). I grabbed the four rocks, unzipped the bag and carefully placed them at the bottom. I knew that four would be nowhere near enough, so I hopped back over the wall and continued vigilantly on my search.
     
    To cut a long story slightly shorter, after about half an hour of creeping around the complex, I made my way back with a grand total of 13 solar powered