Chapter 25: Final Stand

Waking up earlier than usual, even for him, David marveled that he felt more alive than he had for several days. Despite the many deaths they had to contend with the previous day, he felt revived, despite the small amount of sleep they'd gotten. What's more, his normal 'morning wood' was making its presence felt, and his thoughts began to turn to play. Glancing over, he noticed Alice in the predawn light, and he was sure she'd sleep at least until dawn. He figured he'd take a chance. It should be fine as long as they could be quiet.

Rolling over he kissed Ellen, hoping to awaken her in a mood to play. When her eyelids began fluttering, he held her head lovingly and ran his hand along her side, trying to get her senses purring. Coming awake, Ellen smiled, feeling the same as David—thankful to be alive and wanting to make the most of what they had—she quickly got with the program and began kissing him back.

Once they were both responding, David progressed some. Ignoring the others, he peeled Ellen's T-shirt up and began playing with her breasts as he kissed her. They'd been too tired the previous night to strip completely, especially since they knew Alice would be sleeping with them.

Ellen softly moaned her appreciation, letting her own hands roam, pulling David's T-shirt up as well. He stopped long enough to sit up and pull it off, and then got back to what he'd been doing.

While doing that, they'd jostled Flora, who'd been lying on David's other side, between them and Alice. Without making a sound, she opened her eyes and watched the amorous couple for a few minutes as she allowed herself to wake up. Joining in their spirit, she too found herself feeling ready to appreciate life, and wanted some intimacy as well, a kind of human flesh blanket to protect herself from the cold chill of the many deaths from the previous day. Reaching over, she started running her hand along David's back.

Breaking their kiss, David turned to her, smiled, mouthed the world 'I love you', and then returned to kissing Ellen while reaching back, grasping Flora's hand.

Caressing David's ass, Flora quickly glanced at Alice, noting she was still asleep. She'd worked hard yesterday and was fairly accustomed to early nights and waking at a specific time, so Flora felt safe she'd continue sleeping for a while. Whether it would be long enough her to get her turn or not, she didn't know, but at least a couple of them would manage to start the day the right way.

David finally stopped kissing Ellen, giving her one last peck goodbye, and then headed south. He kissed across her cheek to her ear, down her neck and over her collarbone, heading to her breast. Once he reached his target, he circled her areola in ever decreasing circles, planning to tease her a bit before he got there. However, it didn't take long until he zeroed in the center of her breast, and took her nipple into his mouth and hungrily sucked on it. Enjoying himself, and glanced up to look Ellen in the eyes in order to show her just how much he loved her.

"Shit!" he recoiled, jerking back.

Alarmed by David's abrupt and out of character response, Ellen leaned up and ran her hands over her chest, figuring she had something on her, either food or some sign of the time they'd spent caring for Billy.

"What?" she asked, finding nothing wrong. By now Flora was concerned as well, and was looking on, although her view was obscured by David's shoulder.

In response, David pointed at Ellen's chest, a spot above her breasts, and about five inches to the right. Ellen looked but couldn't see anything from her angle of vision.

"I don't see anything. Flora, could you get me a tissue or a washcloth?"

"No, it's not that," David told her in anything but a reassuring voice. "Look," he insisted before realizing she couldn't see it. Pulling back, he quickly scanned her chest before finding something else which he pointed out to her.

Straining to look, she leaned up even more and tried to focus her eyes. When she did, she saw a distinctive pimple with small radiating purplish blue lines leading away from it. It was small, but once she saw it, it was clear what it was.

"FUCK!"

"What is it?" Flora asked, still not able to see what they were upset about.

David sat up, looking over Ellen's torso one more time before turning to Flora. Reaching up, he grabbed her T-shirt at the neck and yanked it, ripping it down the front exposing her chest to the two of them. Flora just stared at him, unable to fathom why their attitudes didn't seem to match the circumstances, shifting from romantic to shock to violence. Seeing she didn't get it, he pointed to her breast. Looking down, Flora saw what he was pointing at.

"Mother Fucking Shit!" she cursed.

While Ellen only had a couple of small blue star shapes on her chest, Flora's was covered with a variety of small pimples, each showing a black head, surrounded by a reddish hue.

"What are you guys going on about?" Alice groaned, rolling over. "If you're going to have sex in the morning, at least keep the language down until those of us who can't join in can finish sleeping."

She was shocked completely awake when her father spun on her, grabbing her by her shirt and yanking her up into a sitting position. He then used two hands to rip her T-shirt apart, sending the decorative buttons on it flying. Shocked by her father's behavior, she tried to cover her suddenly naked breasts with her hands. However, abandoning her shirt, he reached out, grasped her wrists, and pulled her arms away and to the sides, revealing her breasts to everyone who was suddenly staring at her.

"What the hell are you doing?" she demanded. "Are you nuts or something?"

"Look," Flora said, pointing to something just above her left nipple.

Looking down, Alice looked at her breast, merely noticing how naked it was, and how the sudden onrush of cooler air was making the nipple more erect, the last thing she wanted it to do while she was being assaulted by her father. But then she refocused her eyes, looking beyond her nakedness to where Flora was pointing.

"Sacrilegious Ducks!" she exclaimed, too surprised to remember she was now allowed to swear, instead reverting to what she used to say as an alternative to cursing. There, located just a few inches from her nipple, right on the soft supple skin of her breast, sat a large ugly pimple. But she wasn't as shocked to see a pimple there as she was with the associations with others she'd seen with the same type on their faces.

Glancing up, she looked from one person to another, each one having their chests exposed. Ellen had a few of those radiating blue marks, not many, but enough to be distinctive. Her father had the same marks, again not many in total, but he still had them. Flora, though, had a bunch of pimples that looked similar to what Alice had, but they looked different somehow. Curious, Alice reached up and pinched one, which caused a small steam of blood to leak out of it. She yanked her hand back as if she'd been bitten by a snake. She knew she cursed for real then, but it was so long, with so many four letter words in it, she wasn't actually sure just what it was she'd said.

"We've all been infected," Ellen noted concisely.

"Not only that, but we have several different strains," Flora observed. Alice couldn't respond just then, as she was running to the bathroom in a desperate search for the antibacterial hand lotion, holding her hand in front of her like it was a vile creature threatening her very life.

"Strip off your shirt," David insisted, indicating Flora.

She looked at the tattered remains of her tee, and then lifted it up and over her head, handing it to David. He gingerly accepted it and examined the inside. Seeing what he was looking for, he held it up for the others to see. Inside were various scattered dark remains of dried blood smeared across it.

"Shit, I've infected you!" she exclaimed, staggering off the bed. "Amy infected me when she threw up on me, and now I've given it to you. I've killed all of you," she said, beginning to cry piteously.

"Shut up!" David insisted in an unsympathetic manner. Shocked, she did just that, staring at him. "You didn't get us sick. It looks like we each have something different. What's more, Amy didn't have any of these symptoms, and Billy didn't have these symptoms either. It was just our time. These diseases are floating around in the air. It was only a matter of time before they reached us, and now we've finally gotten them. No one is to blame."

Flora, while still shaken to the core, felt relieved by his words, even if she didn't completely believe him.

Alice returned a moment later, her naked chest gleaming in the early morning light, her beautiful flawless skin marked by the ugly blotches of death scrawled across it. "What the hell are we supposed to do now?" she asked plaintively.

"Strip the bed," David told them, once more snapping into his decisive mode. "And get rid of those clothes. Don't let anything touch anything else. Use the pillow cases to stuff everything into. We want to control the contaminants as much as possible, even if we are already infected."

"What? You think you can prevent us from cross contamination after we spent the night spooned together?" Ellen asked skeptically.

"No, I'm not thinking of us, I'm thinking of preserving the health of the house for whoever is left to use it after us. Hopefully it will be one of us, but... ," he said, not bothering to finish what he envisioned happening.

Alice was the first to follow his advice, quickly stripping off her panties, her fear of being exposed and naked in front of the adults now completely forgotten. They had much more important things to be concerned with than body shyness. She no longer had time for embarrassment.

The others followed her lead, being careful to not touch the other's garments, even though they all knew they'd been exposed already.

"Alice, grab everyone some fresh clothing. Make sure you get something long sleeved for Flora, she's the one most at risk of spreading something," David insisted. She hurried to comply as everyone began moving around. David, since he was standing as well, got his own clothes ready.

"What are we going to do?" Flora asked. "There's no sense in quarantining us if we're all exposed. After all, there aren't enough places to give us each our own space."

"No, it makes no sense trying to isolate each of us, but we can't stay here. Ideally, the house should be kept safe, just so it can be used again. Hopefully some of us will survive, but if not, then someone else can use it, safe from whatever we suffered from. What's more, we can't stay here, because if we're all sick then at least one of us will end up dying here, and having a dead body lying unattended in a closed house for long will render the entire place unfit to use."

"But what about our cross contamination?" Ellen asked, sounding like she was getting panicky at the prospects they could each contract the others' diseases.

"We deal with it. There's no way we can avoid it, and we'll need each other to make it through this. If we each help each other we all stand a better chance of surviving."

"Do you really think we're going to survive this?" Alice asked. "At this stage, after everything you've seen?"

"All I know is that I'm not going to give up on you, just like I didn't give up on any of us before this. I plan to go down fighting for each and every one of you. If I have to sacrifice myself to take care of the rest of you, then I'll gladly do it," he answered. Seeing that the women had the bed effectively stripped he began issuing new directions. "Flora, take those outside to the burial pit. If we can, we'll bury them later but that's a lesser priority. And put something on your feet. We don't need to contaminate the floor so it'll be unsafe for anyone else to use. Ellen, you'd better get breakfast started. I know no one is going to be interested in eating, but we need to stock up, because we'll soon be unable to eat and we need to consume as many calories as we can to help us survive over a long period. Alice, get some orange juice started. And forget the coffee. The last thing we need now is caffeine. It probably won't make any difference, but there's no sense trying to eat something unhealthy for our last meal."

Everyone took his words as law, not bothering to question what he was suggesting. He knew what to do when no one else did, and they were more than glad to do it just so they wouldn't have to wonder what lay ahead of them. After they were gone, he took one last look around. Heading back into the bathroom he picked up some combs, brushes and toothbrushes and left, backing out of the room as he closed it for the last time.

Downstairs, Ellen was busy putting on a pot of oatmeal. The eggs were already long gone and she didn't want to consider what state the few chickens they had outside were in. They had other breakfast options, but some thick rich oatmeal seemed like the best option at the moment. The whole oats in it were calorie rich, and certainly much better for them than boxed cereal.

After Alice handed him a tall glass of OJ, David began issuing more instructions. "Alice, you're officially on disinfectant duty. Wipe everything anyone touches. We'll try to leave this place as clean as we can. Forget the dishes, though, we'll hope running them through the dishwasher on high heat will kill anything, though we have no way of knowing that at this point." He started to sit down before reconsidering it, calculating what to do next while standing. "I'll need to shut down the turbine. There's no sense leaving it running, wearing down the parts if we can't use it. There should be enough of a charge left for whatever we'll manage to consume in the outbuildings. I should also turn off the heating and cooling systems, though I'll leave the heat on the pipes to ensure they don't freeze if no one turns the power on before winter comes."

"Aren't we being a bit overly fatalistic?" Ellen asked, glancing up as she stirred the oatmeal.

"At this point, I don't think we can be too fatalistic," he replied, just as Flora entered. "Alice, make sure you go over each of the doorknobs we use as well."

Flora entered bearing a small basket of fruits she'd picked outside. "I figured this might be our last chance to enjoy fresh fruits, so I picked whatever I could. There's no sense saving them for another day."

As Ellen began ladling out the oatmeal into bowls, David continued. "We'll eat outside. The sooner we get out of here the less we're likely to screw things up. I'll be out in a minute; I want to shut everything off first. When we're done, we'll wash everything by hand using the water in the trailer."

Needless to say, breakfast was a sedate affair. Although Flora and Ellen tried to introduce some light banter, they each knew exactly what was ahead of them. Instead they ate quickly, appreciating their last bites of fresh fruit. Flora had stocked the trailer with several prepared meals they could easily reheat using the tiny stove and microwave, so they shouldn't need to reenter the house again. David locked the front door, then laid the keys on the door mat just to the side of the door so it'd be easy to find. To everyone's surprise, when David returned from shutting everything down, he carried his and Maggie's handguns with him. He'd debated whether it was intelligent bringing them along, but he didn't know what they might encounter. The spread of the disease might cause the animals around the house to react unpredictably. Plus, they never knew when someone might decide they'd want to stake a claim on the house, not bothering to wait for them to die on their own. Those risks outweighed the threat that one of them might decide to follow Caitlyn's lead, though that was still a worry in everyone's mind.

Things didn't get any better, either. While the others were still relatively healthy, not showing any more symptoms than the few marks on their bodies, Flora started to worsen almost immediately. Such a response demonstrated what they'd all feared, that the diseases had continued to mutate, becoming ever more efficient in their killing efficiency, taking less and less time to kill than they had only days before. While David took care of Flora, Ellen set up everything in the trailer so it was easy to access, knowing it wouldn't be long before they were all too weak to venture far to get whatever they'd need. They also each took turns voiding their bladders and bowels, knowing whatever they didn't eliminate would end up in their beds before long. Such everyday items may seem distasteful in the light of health, but when you're staring death in the face you take such considerations seriously. David put the two handguns in a high cabinet at the end of the trailer so they'd be hard to access when everyone was on their last legs. It seemed cruel, and unlikely to make a difference in the end, but David still hoped at least one of them would survive this.