Chapter eleven

The situation in New York had devolved in just a few days. The entire city had turned into a battleground for the war between the army and what the people were now calling 'the infected'. The military with their guns and tanks fought with zombies and crawlers but the best they could do was hold them at bay. Even when they used helicopters to bombard them, they were still unable to eradicate them completely. It was somewhat suspicious. In the end the city was divided into areas controlled by the military ,those controlled by the infected and the front line areas where the military and the infected were constantly clashing.

And now my name was being painted all over New York by the crawlers. The military had identified me as the main cause of the outbreak, 'patient zero' they called me. They were adamant that the key to curing the outbreak lay with me and they were combing through the city searching for me.

Under these circumstances, I couldn't just keep hiding out and pretending that everything was fine not to mention the fact that I was running out of homeless people to prey on, so I left my hiding place and headed towards the nearest infected controlled area.

Once I entered the so called infected area, I saw nothing but zombies shuffling in the streets. Crowds of men and women of every age and color mindlessly drifting around without any goals, sometimes bumping into each other, lamp posts and walls of buildings.

Strangely enough these zombies didn't immediately attack me like I thought they would. In the news, I have seen how they violently attacked anyone who got even remotely close to them but they were docile as I approached them and they didn't do a single thing even when I passed right by them. It was like they thought I was one of them. Who knows, maybe I really was one of them in some sense.

I shook that thought away and instead I grabbed one of the zombies shambling around me and absorbed him. I needed information on the infected and why they keep leaving those strange messages with my name in them and what better way to get the information than straight from the source?

My brilliant idea hit a snag when my absorption yielded nothing but faint fragments of the man's previous life and then a confused jumble of hunger and violence. It seemed that these zombies really were brainless monsters driven only by mindless instinct.

So what now? The zombie idea had yielded zero results and I was left with tons of unanswered questions. How was this outbreak related to me? Was I really the cause of all that was happening? Why were the crawlers writing strange graffiti about my 'family' waiting for me? I didn't have any family, what could they be talking about?

The zombies couldn't provide me with answers so I had only one other option, the crawlers. And that meant going to the front line, the place where the fighting was most intense and most of the crawlers congregate to fight the military in a heated battle for supremacy and territory.