Barren Fields Read Free Page A

some answers. If any of the shooters wanted to harm him, they would have by now. Other than some glances his way, they seem to have more important things to do than speak to him.
    The true horror of the situation hits him when he opens the door of the cab. The groaning sound of waves hitting a metal hull he heard earlier is actually a wet, guttural moan coming from the people being shot at. It is the sound of the infected when they cannot reach their prey. George climbs into the truck bed to get a better look at the crowd on the other side. That awful sound is not coming from hundreds, but rather what appear to be thousands of bodies pressed up against each other along the other bank of the waterway, and more are approaching from behind them.
    He climbs back down from the truck and walks over to the shooters—almost in a trance-like state of disbelief at the whole situation.
    “What the hell is going on?” George finally gains the presence of mind enough to ask the closest shooter.
    “We have to shoot them. We have to keep shooting them, or they will make it over here and kill us.”
    “But they are stuck on the other side of the water.”
    “For now they are. These things are attracted to sound, and a police officer is down the street trying to get the drawbridge raised so we can try keeping this area free from the sickness. We don’t want to keep shooting them, but we have to keep them from moving south to the bridge.”
    “Can’t the police do anything about them?” he asks before he can stop the words from escaping his lips.
    The man stops shooting and looks at George.
    Normalcy bias took over George’s thinking for a moment before he remembered the numbers he saw while standing in his truck bed. What could police do to stop a situation when so many people are infected at once? How many police officers are left to help if that letter from Eddie is right?
    “Do you live out here?” the man asks.
    “No, I was out fishing and came in to help a friend. I’m heading into the city to find my father.”
    “You have no idea what’s going on, do you?” he asks but doesn’t wait for George to respond. “Those people we are shooting at are the good residents of the city. We got pushed back to this spot early this morning from St. Bernard Parish. New Orleans is a wasteland of disease. Everyone left there is either infected like the ones we are shooting or hiding from them.”
    “They can’t all be infected,” George says in a desperate tone. “The hospitals must still be taking care of people.”
    Shaking his head in a slow depressed manner, the man replies, “No, I’m sorry, the hospitals fell last night. I tried making it to one of them with my wife but...” He trails off in his description after mentioning his wife. “As far as I know, anyone that could make it out did. If you want to make it into New Orleans you’ll have to go through all of those sick people to do it, and trust me when I say this group in front of us stretches all the way back to the city.”
    “My father...” is the only thing George can say.
    The man he was speaking to puts his hand on George’s shoulder in a show of support and returns to shooting at the moaning host before them.
    George walks back to the truck, gets in, and shuts the door muting the calling sound of the sick people and gunfire. Even though he can’t accept that New Orleans is already lost, his brain is working through the logic of it all and it does make sense. The city is flanked by two military bases, and if they were exposed to this drug yesterday, then infected soldiers would be able to converge on the city from two sides overnight spreading the infection as they went. The inoculations of Zeus would have been rushed to the hospitals and police yesterday as well to deal with the infected people coming out of the bases and surrounding areas.
    It’s a perfect storm of medical horror. A drug designed to protect people from violence is actually the cause of