How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse

Chapter Twentyfour

“You mean a Second Stage?” He asked.

“What’s a second stage?” I asked back.

“ Well the virus, it changes people right? A Second Stage, or what you call a Special, is an Infected that’s fused better with the virus than the others, they go through a second change, more unpredictable and volatile than the first change.”

“What makes them fuse with the virus so well?”

“Beats me. Echo had only managed to get their hands on a handful of them when Peter contacted me, that’s my dad’s old friend.”

“You know what this means.” I said to Kitty as the thought came to me. “Washington is definitely out of the picture, Echo will be swarming all over it.”

“You were thinking of going to Washington?” Asked Jacob.

“Yeah, we found a file and in it we figured out Washington was where Echo had their main US office.”
“Tell me, do you have a death wish?” Jacob asked incredulously.

“No, we thought that Echo might have been wiped out, we wanted to see if they’d left anything useful behind.” I tried to defend our thinking.

“The whole of Washington is now their HQ. A massive wall, 100ft high keeps out the Infected. They cleared the whole city and demolished huge sections of it, it’s the biggest ‘safe zone’ in America. I’ve not seen it personally, but I’ve heard stories.”

“Maybe we should avoid Washington for a bit.” Sandy suggested, her eyes still scanning for signs of the Second Stage we knew was out there in the town, somewhere.

“I think you’re right. For now we’re just going to focus on getting the hell out of this town.” We’d left the bulk of Infected behind but up ahead there were more that had been attracted from the other direction. They were stood still and silent just like the others.

“What if it’s not a second stage?” Asked Kitty.

“What?” I asked.

“That sound, what if it’s not a second stage, what if it’s Echo.”

“No, if anything Echo would try to make them more active, they really love to use the Infected as their weapons, if they can save getting their hands dirty, they will.” Jacob said. As much as I wanted to scan the surrounding area I had to keep my focus on the road, it was full of debris and there was lots of potential for a flat tire and that would not be good.

“Fuck! It’s behind us!” Yelled Kitty, immediately beginning to fire. “It’s going after Zak!”  

I looked at it in my rear view mirror. It was horrific. Big, muscular with huge shoulders. It’s mouth was by far the most terrifying thing about it. A circular gaping maw lined with hundred of tiny, sharp teeth. Huge bat-like ears made up for the fact the thing had blank, unseeing eyes.