The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) by Will Hawthorne Page B

We swapped anything we had in abundance for anything that we needed, before they went off on their way without another word.
                  Some people simply suited the apocalypse and adapted naturally to it.
                  This man clearly wasn’t one of those people.
                  I took up the wooden chair Mae had been using and sat down at his bedside, keeping my distance and looking over at him. His hands were still tied.
                  For some time I watched him, he refusing to look over at me despite the fact that I knew he was aware of his surroundings.
                  ‘What should I call you?’
                  A pause, then-
                  ‘Morgan.’
                  His voice was husky, but at least I had gotten something from him.
                  ‘How are you feeling?’ I finally asked. ‘Gave me a bit of a shock there when you came through the forest.’
                  Silence.
                  ‘Look; you can talk and we can have a friendly discussion, try and do our best to help you live, or we can dump you in the forest to die. I won’t have anybody threatening the sanctity of this place, or the people who live here. We keep to ourselves, don’t mean any harm to anyone, including you. Unless you decide to-’
                  ‘You’ve no idea what’s coming for you, boy.’
                  When he finally did speak, his words came out with such surety and measure that it daunted me. It wasn’t so much the foreboding nature of what he said, but the conviction with which he said it. It intimidated me more than I would like to say, and I struggled to keep my shock under wraps, hidden away from showing on my face.
                  ‘What’s coming for me?’
                  ‘For all of you. Those things, they just… There were so many of them. It was insanity. Coming at me like animals…’
                  ‘What things?’
                  ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
                  ‘You can’t be infected,’ I said, looking him up and down. ‘Anybody the virus can kill it killed a long time ago. No mutated strains, either. None that we know of, anyway, and I seriously doubt that the first case has just so happened to show up at our town out of nowhere.’
                  ‘First time for everything…’ He said with a cough, spluttering wildly. Spats of blood flew onto the sheets before him, and I felt myself unconsciously moving away from him in my chair. ‘We let her in, just like you let me in… The biting, it was... They just bite, over and overand if there’s anything left of you then you come back as one of them…’
                  ‘One of what?’ I asked, staring him down as my heart raced.
                  ‘She took a while to die, but… But…’ The man sighed, before an odd, discomforting smile appeared on his face. ‘It’s funny, really. The way this has all gone. We never found out where she got it from… But she came from the south. Out cold before we could get a word from her…’
                  ‘From where? Where ?’
                  It appeared that all of this had done him in, though. All of a sudden his eyes glazed over and his mouth fell open, and his body began to seize as he struggled against the bed.
                  ‘Mae? Mae! ’
                  A few seconds later she and Larry came bounding through the door and over to the bed. I stepped back, watching this odd, nightmarish scene take place before as his body continued to seize and I heard the death rattle click out from his lungs.
                  This situation flew by me so quickly I almost missed it. For a few seconds longer his body surged as Mae and