Then I found out where the point of issuing weapons was in Leninsko-Kuznetsk, but I could not bring myself to go there, coming up with new excuses for myself every day. I was ashamed to admit it, but I was afraid afraid, as never before in my life, to the point of trembling in my legs. Here on top of the mountain I was safe. The supplies of food and water should have been enough for a long time, and I really hoped that by the time they were running out, everything would settle down and return to the usual course for everyone.
After the connection was gone, in addition to my own skin, I was only worried about the fate of my sister and her daughter. Katya divorced her husband and moved, as she herself put it, for a while to live with me. It happened exactly a week before the first news about the epidemic. At that time, I, accustomed to a lonely life in a small apartment in the center of Novosibirsk, gladly agreed to a business trip to Leninsk-Kuznetsky, because my seven-year-old niece Vika was still a wild child, and after the family reunion it was impossible to rest in my house and dream. No, of course, I loved my sister and nephew very much, especially after the death of my mother they were the only relatives. They just appeared in my measured life at the wrong time and very impudently. I was glad to be able to leave them for a while. Now the thought of
While there was a connection, I talked to Katya on the phone almost every day and knew that my relatives were relatively safe. As soon as the riots began, Katya's ex-husband arrived and took them and Vika to his cottage outside the city.
Despite his addiction to alcohol and a strong temper, Oleg was an intelligent man and did a lot for the family. I knew this from the rare family gatherings at which I had the chance to talk to him. Later, Katya told that the military came to their cottage settlement, and, having occupied the territory, turned the settlement into a refugee camp. Since the settlement was surrounded by a high brick wall, an excellent fortified place emerged, guarded by armed men. Katya tearfully asked me to return as soon as possible, and I promised to do this as soon as the situation cleared up a little.
I spent my days sitting on the rocks and watching through binoculars what was going on in the city. No one was extinguishing the fires, the shots were less and less frequent, and the streets, although there were few of them, were staggering around with the infected, whom I recognized by their shackled jerky movements. After some time at night, I began to hear a howl. He was clearly neither human nor animal. Even the infected, hearing him, tried to hide, wandering around the empty entrances and basements.
One night, in the light of the raging fires, I even managed to see a gorilla! It was a gorilla, I definitely saw it! She deftly jumped from the roof of the house to the balcony and disappeared into the darkness of one of the apartments. At that moment I was sure that I saw her, but now I doubted. Worse, the power went out. Whereas before I cooked on an electric stove and kept open cans in the refrigerator, now I had to cook on a campfire.
The place where I took shelter had enough food and water to last a whole construction team for a month, working on a cell tower and building a large communication center. For me alone it would have been enough for three months, no less.
However, it was strange that electricity did not disappear everywhere: in some parts of the city it was still available, appearing from time to time, and in other places, like on my construction site, it completely disappeared.
The position of the chief communications engineer I held required me to go on business trips to various cities and accept objects for rent, the construction of which my company TeleSeti carried out on a subcontract basis for large cellular companies.
In this mining town, my task was to accept the next node from the builders, as well as control the installation of the BS on top of the cell tower. I thought that it was the installation of the BS that would be the most difficult for me on this trip, since more than anything in the world I was afraid of great heights. Now, against the backdrop of the horror that was happening around me, the fear of heights seemed pitiful and insignificant to me.
My construction camp consisted of only three blue-colored cabins with white windows, four stone walls covering the cabins from the wind from the west side, and a huge bright yellow five-axle aerial platform weighing sixty tons, if my memory serves me right.
Alone, the hours and days dragged on slowly, and it became easier to convince myself that this place was not worth leaving.
I thought a lot about what was happening, and longing drove me crazy. Sometimes I was amused by the memories, for example, about my mortgage, which is now unlikely to have to be paid. True, and a decent area in which I bought an apartment, perhaps, it is already difficult to call it calm and prosperous. According to the sister, when the connection was still there, now everything was teeming with the infected.
At the entrance to the city, I saw a gas station and, not reaching it about two hundred meters, out of habit, turning on the turn signal, turned to the side of the road.
The city looked dead and abandoned. I tried to catch the details of the picture that formed such a feeling, but in vain it was just felt in my gut. The smell of burning, to which it seemed that he was already accustomed, struck with renewed vigor. You could feel it even with the windows closed. It is not surprising, because half of the city was shrouded in black smoke, because somewhere in its other part a large factory or warehouses had been burning for a long time, and there was no one to extinguish them.
The rain was ending, and I clearly saw four gloomy figures on the territory of the gas station. One of them was a woman in a long white dress. She stood with her head resting on the gas station. Three more were near the motorcycle lying on its side. I knew for sure that they were infected: they seemed to be sleeping standing up, and I didnt want to wake them up at all. The head ached a little. The morning came out painfully saturated, fatigue made itself felt.
Anyway, if I go to the gas station, I have to deal with these four ghouls, and that was the last thing I wanted in the world. It was clear that sooner or later I would have to face the infected and have to kill them, but I so wanted to postpone this unpleasant moment for later. I started making up excuses for not going to the gas station and thinking about the best place to get gas. The arguments "against" were very logical, in my opinion. What if the gas station is closed? After all, the speakers are turned on from the control booth, in which the armored glass, the lattice on the window and the reliable door are clearly not made of cardboard. In addition, I had no idea how gas stations are generally arranged and work. My knowledge in this area was limited to inserting a gun into the tank hatch and paying for gasoline at the checkout. And the devil knows how many more infected there are,
After looking around and making sure that there was no threat, I settled in a chair more comfortably and began to think about what other safe ways there were to get hold of gasoline. It seemed the most obvious to drain it from other cars, but for this, at least, a hose was needed, which would not be a fact that would help, because modern cars, as far as I knew, had a mesh installed in the tank chute. Although I didn't know for sure. The next idea, much more viable, in my opinion, was the opening of garages in some garage cooperative. Theoretically, in garages, people could store gasoline even in barrels, and, by definition, there should not be many infected there. I already liked the idea! I remembered how I passed one garage cooperative on the western outskirts of the city.