The Infected 1: Proxy Read Online Free PDF Page B

consider it.
    Her smile let him know that she was just playing back, so Brian sighed and shook his head dramatically.
    "I should have known that it would be too good to be true. Sigh oh sigh."
    Leaning in she touched his hand briefly, which didn't hurt, he realized, the bruises there having faded over the last days, leaving discolored skin now, but not the black and blue mottling that had been there from when he'd hit the guy with the gun.
    The idea of him having tried to take on an armed man and that Infected guy at the same time boggled his mind for a moment. Then he felt a crushing wave of anger. At himself. He'd failed and that innocent woman had died because he wasn't... enough. Not even close.
    The look must have passed over his face, because the doctor asked him what was wrong, probably afraid she'd insulted him or something. Brian didn't want her to feel bad, it wasn't anything to do with her, so he explained quietly.
    After a while she pulled out a yellow pad from the bag she carried, a beige or cream colored thing, Brian didn't know the exact name to call the shade. Much past primary colors his names for things started to get more than a bit creative. Then she pointed at something on the paper.
    "Her name, the woman, was Barbara Dorn, Barbie to her friends, she worked as the counter person at a mechanics shop in the same town the bar is located in. She's the sixty-eighth victim of a serial/spree killer known as the Jackal. You fought with him and his accomplice, a non-infected man. We don't have a name for him yet. In the last fifteen days they've killed twenty-seven more people, including five members of a CERT team in Houston Texas. Five armed men, wearing body armor. I know it won't help, telling you that it wasn't your fault, your first modality won't let that be enough for you. But I wanted you to know that no one else, not even professionals with training for this, have been able to do any better than you did." She put the pad down on her lap, out of view as he laid in the bed.
    Brian worked the white control lever, raising the bed as far as it could go.
    Once sitting all the way up he swallowed, "I know that I couldn't really be expected to win, intellectually. I mean, if they'd been two girl scouts hitting me with boxes of cookies and pillows it would have been a tossup as far as a who'd come out on top, so putting me against some super-powered psycho and his even crazier armed buddy is just... insane. I really know that, I swear!" He shook a little, the anger at himself coming back as he thought about the fight. "But if I could have just gotten her away somehow... Run or something. Run better... I tried and it didn't work. Or fought them harder or... something, maybe she could have lived? I don't even know what they did to her..."
    Doctor Tull just shook her head, but Lancaster spoke, walking in just in time to hear the question.
    "They... raped her for several hours, then the Infected known as the Jackal killed her, literally eating her alive. His friend then sodomized the corpse - what was left of it - and relieved himself on the other dead bodies. Most of this hasn't made the news, Brian, and just shouldn't, not ever, so if anyone asks about it, don't let it out. The fact that these fucks are killing so many people already has the country in an uproar. We have to stop them." The agent had dressed in a black suit again, but this time with a deep green shirt on underneath.
    Maybe he had a date, Brian mused.
    Then the thought made him wince. Barbara Dorn wouldn't have any more dates now. Brian would have traded his life for hers, but he'd had that chance and left her there for them to... He couldn't even make himself think all the words. They were monsters of a kind that shouldn't even be able to exist, much less be allowed to.
    What those men, those things, he decided, because no one human could to something like that, had done, horrified him and made him angry again. Brian worried out loud that anger