The Diseased Heart

Chapter 7

A passage from the book, Hidden Sanity.

As Harris drove through the deserted city that was once filled with activity, I gazed out the window at the crumbling buildings of what was once our home. It was hard to believe this infection had spread so far, but we knew that we were about to live in a movie. The outbreak was only a few weeks ago now, at first we all thought it a joke, giant insect legs tearing through people's spines? It wasn't possible, we all thought it was some bad hoax. Oh how wrong we were.

A few corpses lined the road, I averted my eyes from the sight. Doing so allowed me to see a person run out of a disheveled gas station as a Crawler from inside snarled at them, judging by the tattered uniform, they used to work there before they became a mutant.

Harris saw the human too, and he drove the car over to where the person had ran. It was likely they were a survivor, the apocalypse only began a couple of weeks ago, so many people hadn't been evacuated, as teams for such jobs were getting scarce. Harris drove the sputtering truck through the small alley filled with rubble and garbage from toppled dumpsters.

We both hopped out of the truck and walked down the alley, watching our steps for anything that may lay on the dirty ground. I could hear muffled whispering from a gap in a wall, and cautiously looked into the dark room. It was fairly roomy in there, it must have been a back storage room of one of the ajoining shops which now had a broken wall.

Inside I could see a makeshift camp, with a few sleeping bags and small backpacks, there were very few supplies though, it seemed whoever was here was sorely unprepared. Looking around further, I saw the frozen form of a child cowering in the back corner. Without hesitation, I walked over to the young girl, slowly as to seem as least of a threat as possible "Hello?"

She stayed frozen, staring at me, her short black hair covering half of her face, too afraid to even brush it aside. In the next moment, I was hit in the back of the head with a metal water bottle, and I fell forward with the impact. The girl jumped up and ran, along with what sounded like a few other people. I knew Harris was just outside, and they wouldn't run far.

If they ran off, they may get hurt. If the others were the same age as the girl, they were far too young to be out alone, no less in this wasteland filled with Crawlers! It made perfect sense why they were unprepared, but why were there children all alone out here?

I heard two boys yell out and one girl scream, followed by two sets of footsteps running off. Shaking my head, I stood back up and ran out, catching a glimpse of Harris holding onto two young boy's arms, I ran, following the two girls I saw running off down the road.

One was the girl with the black hair, and another had longer brown hair, she was holding her arm and pulling the black haired girl behind her. I was able to run up to them, as they were slower than I was, and grab them before they ran into the forest where Harris and I had seen a Crawler nest just days before. They'd be dead within the hour if they went in there.

They both yelped and tried to pull away. I thought something may have happened to them with raiders or gangsters. It was likely why they were trying to take on the offensive and maybe why they were all alone.

It had taken me and Harris a full ten minutes to calm them down and get them to realize we wanted to help them instead of hurt them.

They were able to see we wouldn't hurt them, but they didn't trust us, which was to be expected. They told us their names, the black haired girl was Hailey, the brown haired girl was Chloe, and the two boys were Jason and Michael.

Hailey and Chloe were shy and barely spoke, Hailey for the most part, Michael seemed to be ready to fight us if we tried anything, and Jason explained to us why they were so cautious around us. Their families had either been killed or went missing when the virus first spread, they even suspected Hailey's parents evacuated and left her behind.

They had never met eachother before this apocalypse, so when they ran into one another while searching for help, they decided the best way to susvive was to group together, as someone might be more inclined to help a small group of children rather than a lone one who might be hiding something.

They had been hiding for these few weeks, just trying to stay alive and find someone to help them, until they started to experience first hand how awful people had become in the face of a crisis. A group of delinquent teen gangsters had found them when Chloe went out to find supplies, and followed them back to their camp.

They tried beating them and even tried to kidnap Chloe, but the sun had set by then, and the delinquents were jumped by Crawlers, allowing the kids to remain hidden in their camp where Crawlers couldn't fit inside. They had assumed that now all people had been driven to attacking whoever they could to get out if this wasteland, and when Jason saw our truck, he had quickly tried to get back to the camp before we saw them.

I was glad we found them, we could bring them with us and they would no longer have to fend for themselves and hide from whoever they saw. Who knows, they may even be abke to help us with gathering supplies if they already knew how well enough that they lasted this long.

I was hoping none of them were infected, or this could really backfire.