Plague Has Begun-Chapter 2

I have renamed The Plague has Begun to Biters. Starting with Chapter 3 the articles title will be Biters-Chapter3, Biters-Chapter4, etc...

“Hey Dan, wake up,” I whisper softly trying to wake my companion Dan who is enjoying his shift at sleeping. We take turns standing watch and sleeping every night.
“What,” he whispers back, always aware that to talk to loudly is to be a threat.
“I heard something in the eastern staircase.”
We move quietly out of the 22nd floor apartment we are hiding in. We came to this particular building about a month ago and after fortifying it, (blocking all entrances, destroying the elevators, setting booby-traps) we have worked our way from apartment to apartment, changing every night and scavenging what we can from each former residence.
“There it is,” I instinctively take up a crouched shooters position and raise my silenced .22 in front of me and wait. We are facing the eastern staircase and can hear the slightest, though very much real, rubbing sound coming from the stairs. It the sound jeans make when they rub together at the thighs. I can't hear Dan though he is less then three feet away. We have become efficient at hunting the biters.
“Mitch, I'm going to check it out, cover my six. Infill in two if I'm not back,” he says to me.
Dan creeps down the hall to the staircase and silently opens the door to the stairwell. We have oiled the hinges every other day on every floor since coming here. Always be prepared has become our motto.
He disappears in the shadows of the stairwell and I wait, counting the seconds in my head. Two minutes and if he isn't back I go in.
This has been our approach ever since the plague took over. Dan is my oldest friend and amazingly we both survived the first few months of infection on our own before meeting up in our hometown, the same town where the disease was bio-engineered. Coincidence or fate brought us there at the same time looking for anyone from our past who may have survived. We have travelled and fought together ever since and our friendship developed into an unbreakable brotherhood. We both knew that sending one man in to search for his missing partner was just not smart. One dead is better then two dead. But as the population of the world decreased, being left alone seemed worse then dying. So for years our technique is one man recons and comes back with information, or if he does not come back the second man infiltrates the area and searches him out.
Two years ago I was the recon man checking out what we thought was an abandoned house in a small town on Lake Ontario. I was nabbed by a gang of rough-heads. Rough-heads are what we call the groups of survivors who took the plague as an opportunity to do whatever they wanted. They steal, murder, rape and torture people they come across, biters and non-biters alike. They are criminals in a land without laws.
There was four of them and they got the drop on me, hitting me in the back of the head with a crowbar while I was checking out on of the bedrooms. Dan had waited four minutes before coming in and in that four minutes the rough-heads beat me to within an inch of my life. Just when I thought it was over Dan rushed the place like a one man army, firing four shots from his pistol and making every one count. Four shots, four dead. One of the rough-heads got off a shot before he was hit though and caught Dan in the gut. It missed all major arteries and with my small knowledge of medicine I was able to stitch him up and keep the wound from being infected. His stomach hurt him every single day now though. If it wasn't for him I wouldn't be here today.
I was thinking all this while simultaneously counting seconds in my head. His two minutes were up and I had not heard a sound since he had gone in. Then I realized I had not heard the rubbing sound either that we had heard originally. I moved fast and silent into the stairwell and immediately started heading down, the way I knew Dan would go, since we couldn't possibly be ambushed from above. Three floors down I stopped and spotted Dan crouched on the next floor down.
“What the fuck are you do...,” he shushed me and I knew right away we were in trouble. About six floors down was what sounded like a group of biters breathing heavily the way they always do. I risked a glance over the rail and could just make out eight heads all staring into the darkness surrounding me. They must have heard us and stopped to figure out where we were.
“How did they get past our trip wires without ringing the bells?” I asked not expecting a response. We should have been more prepared for this. Ammo is hard to come by these days and I knew I only had three shots in my cartridge and Dan had two. Even with perfect head shots we were going to have to deal with three biters hand-to-hand.
Dan looked at me and grinned.
“Oh brother” I sighed and rolled my eyes. We retreated back up the stairs and took up our shooters positions on the 22nd floor.
“Good luck,” Dan whispered his eyes cold.
“Good shooting,” I whispered back.
And we waited.