by Rob Horner
Seen up close, his face was a fright mask of blood and gore. He hadn’t just been blinded; his eyes were missing. Great pits of seeping fluid, more black than red, gaped below the ridge of his forehead. Thick ichor like dark red snot crusted his face, as though his eyes had been punctured and all their liquid insides allowed to run out, hardening and drying in the creases beside his nose.
Muffled under two hundred pounds of scrabbling dispatcher, Buck tried to call out a warning, but it wasn’t necessary.
Caitlin took a single step back, planting her right foot, gun out and steady.
She waited until he was over Buck, crouched and ready to spring at her. Then she fired into his head.
* * * * *
Brandon came awake slowly, certain he was snug in his bed with the familiar weight of Russell’s arms draped over him. He desperately wanted it to be so. That would negate the horrible night he’d endured, when people turned on one another, friend and stranger alike, attacking with teeth and fingernails.
The weight was there, warm and comforting. He could feel the bristle of Russell’s cheeks nestled against his neck. Brandon smiled sleepily; Russell needed to shave.
Strange sounds intruded into his sleep-fogged thoughts. Some were distant, like the slamming of apartment doors and car doors, voices raised in anger or fear sifting through the thin walls. Closer in was the nasal breathing of his partner. Russell might be snuggled in too closely, squashing his nose. Why else would he sound like a snuffling toddler slurping on a bottle?
There were other problems, minor aches that didn’t jive with a lazy day lounging in bed.
His legs felt weird. Like…feet at the cusp of numbness weird. He knew if he turned one way or another, blood would rush back into them and set off a firestorm of pins and needles.
If he didn’t move, it would only get worse.
Maybe if I move just a little, it’ll get Russ to shift too.
He tried to roll over, but the bed didn’t feel right.
He wasn’t on his back.
He wasn’t on his bed.
Brandon’s eyes shot open as he surged forward and upward, struggling to his feet. Russell’s weight held him back, and the sudden movement set off the electric acupuncture pain he’d been worried about. Russell’s hands were on Brandon’s shoulders, holding himself in place against his neck.
He’d fallen asleep. Oh my God, he’d fallen asleep!
Desperate to get free, Brandon raised his arms to shove Russell away. Russell shifted, and the motion brought a stinging, tearing pain to the side of Brandon’s neck.
Horror filled him.
He’d been bitten. Had to be.
He had to see. Had to know. Had to get away.
Brandon pushed harder, and Russell fell away. The other man didn’t try to hold on and didn’t jump right back to attack again.
Rising, he ignored the fiery pains in his feet and turned to face the mirror. His left hand came up to cover the wound, as if he was as afraid to look at it as he was desperate to see it.
He met his own eyes instead, leaning in close to make it harder to see anything else.
This is stupid. I need to look. It might be fine. Buck got bit and nothing happened to him.
His eyes were haunted, shadowed with fear. The bulky shape of Russell shifted in the background, ambling out of the bathroom. He didn’t try to renew the attack. That meant something; it had to.
Just outside his left eye was another darkness, a tiny, skinny thing like a strand of dark hair laying on his cheek.
He thought about brushing it away. Just thought about it.
And it grew.
As he watched, the strand grew thicker and longer, expanding in all directions with a gelatinous pulse.
Brandon moved his left hand from his neck to his face, intent upon dislodging the…
It’s a hair that’s all it is just a stupid hair maybe even an eyelash
…strand, but that only uncovered his neck.
His neck had been bitten, chewed on. There was a small puncture wound like half a vampire’s kiss surrounded by a wide area of excoriation, as if Russell worried at the skin with his front teeth before finally breaking through.
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
The old commercial wasn’t funny when it was his neck in question.
Why else would he sound like a toddler slurping on a bottle?
Around the wound were more of the black lines, rising from the skin only to dip below it again, undulating snakes which worked their way up to the jaw line.
“No!” Brandon shouted, startling himself with the sudden volume in the small bathroom.
The lines meant more than that he’d been bitten. It meant he was infected.
He might not have much time. Brandon wore a watch, but he hadn’t checked the time when he sat down and had no way to judge how long he’d been asleep or how long Russell had worried at his neck.
He felt all right. Scared as hell, but that was to be expected. His neck didn’t even hurt.
Shouldn’t it?
Well, maybe…it wasn’t that bad a bite. Wasn’t even bleeding.
“Shit!”
A thousand thoughts crammed his brain, ways to kill himself before he could become a danger to others. But what did he really know about it? He’d never been suicidal, never thought about what should or shouldn’t be in a house to avoid the temptation to do himself harm.
Would any of it matter? Some of those people had limbs ripped off. They must have bled to death. Yet they still came back.
It was hopeless. Even if he could muster the courage to take his own life, what good would it do? He didn’t want to be a…whatever Russell was…but if it had to happen, he at least wanted to…
To what? Be a good-looking gay zombie?
Brandon laughed, then stopped when silent tears sprang from his eyes. His laughter was terrifying. It was crazy.
He was going crazy.
The ones who were shot in the head didn’t get back up. Officer Tim showed you that.
Yeah, right before he got carried off to be some kind of blue-clad guinea pig in the morgue.
That was the key, though, wasn’t it? Head trauma. Brain injury. A bullet to the brain would do it.
Listen to me talking about shooting myself in the head. I don’t own a gun. I’ve never even fired one.
He pushed aside the memory of picking up a dropped pistol, pointing it at a trio of rushing forms, then finding himself unable to pull the trigger.
Okay. No guns. And I can’t very well start bashing myself in the head with the bat…
He could picture it though—his big, dumb ass holding the baseball bat down low and bopping it inward, whacking his forehead over and over. Would there be any force in that? Probably not.
A gunshot sounded from outside, or maybe the sound of a car backfiring, a single pop unaccompanied by any screams of pain or fear.
But it gave him an idea.
Outside. The key was in the outside.
Brandon and Russell lived on the third floor. They had a small balcony that was more concept than reality—the idea of a balcony, really—certainly not big enough for both of them to relax in a lawn chair and enjoy a quiet evening. Just a sliding glass door, two feet of concrete and a railing up to his waist.
He met his eyes in the mirror again, refusing to look at the glistening worm writhing on his face and unable to see the twisting snake coils around his neck.
He was ready. He was resolved.
He turned from the mirror and walked through the bedroom and to the living room. Russell wandered aimlessly from room to carpeted room, like he’d never been in the apartment before.
A nylon cord in vertical runners controlled a hanging set of blinds. He pulled the cord, retracting the swinging shades.
Just open the doors and go headfirst over the railing.
Just open the doors and go headfirst over the railing.
It’s all you have to
do.
He reached for the metal handle to slide the glass door aside and stopped.
Just open the…
His hands wouldn’t listen.
…doors and go…
He couldn’t finish the thought.
His hand dropped from the handle. He turned, walked back across the breadth of the apartment, and opened the door to the third-floor landing.
He was become.
* * * * *
Jessica pulled the borrowed van to a stop outside the small house she shared with Johnny. There were some in the hospital who assumed they were married; they’d been together long enough, so why would anyone think anything else? Johnny had asked, once, but Jessica turned him down flat.
“When you get that temper under control, you can ask me again.”
She’d been afraid when she said it. Hell, she was afraid whenever she said anything that might contradict one of his beliefs or go against something he wanted to do. He’d been known to fly into a rage over less.
But he took the answer as it was intended—not as a definite “no,” but more as a “maybe later.”
That was one of the good nights.
Sadly, those were all too few and growing farther between.
His anger and tendency to violence was also the reason they didn’t have children yet. She wished she could say he’d never hurt a child, but she didn’t know. He might be fine; but she couldn’t take the chance. What if he only took out his anger on her? That kind of domestic abuse still left marks on children, even if it wasn’t directed at them.
She let him think he’d convinced her to go off the pill, but the very next month she had a Mirena implanted. God forbid he ever found out about that.
Staring at the dark house, Jessica wondered why she felt so compelled to go in there. She could be holed up with Tina right now, but to what purpose?
Nothing they’d endured said this was anything other than a one-off occurrence. Surely the powers that be would have everything back under control by tomorrow. Heck, it might already be under control, and what they’d gone through had been a…what? A fluke? People going crazy after being bitten by other crazy people…that wasn’t a fluke; that was contagion. Black veins popping up around bite marks, then spreading like the world’s worst case of lymphangitis? A fluke was one person. That it happened to everyone meant something much larger was in the works.
It couldn’t be a fluke, but it probably wasn’t anything planned, either. As crazy as things might get in America from time to time—and nothing but a bad dose of crazy could explain the current occupant of the White House—she wouldn’t believe her government had anything to do with the nasty virus running through the hospital.
It might be an accident. There were probably people already working on it, trying to put the genie back in its bottle. She’d ride out the night at home, and by tomorrow everything would be forgotten.
Except the dead people. They wouldn’t be forgotten. And what about their families? Not just the people in the back. Either Rose or Grace, maybe both, complained there were crazy people in the lobby, trying to bust their way into Registration.
Jessica held her head in her hands.
Accident or intentional, one-time thing or widespread epidemic, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She’d be lucky to still have a job in the morning, and wouldn’t that just set Johnny off, if he suddenly became their sole provider? No more weekend hunting trips with the boys, then.
It was the hunting trips that decided her. Johnny might be an asshole, but he was the kind of asshole who survived.
Liberals loved to make fun of rednecks, until the bodies started falling and the dead began walking.
Johnny might be the type of man who hit her occasionally, but he wouldn’t let another damned soul touch her. He had guns and he knew how to use them.
If this was something like she whispered to Tina, a zombie outbreak like in the movies, there wasn’t another man she’d feel safe with.
Jessica climbed out of the van and started up the sidewalk.
Chapter 11
“It’s the blue house on the left,” Libby said, pointing from the passenger seat, her arm coming dangerously close to smacking Adam in the face. He flinched but said nothing. After ten years together, he was used to this quirk in her character.
“I see it.”
“The lights are on.”
“Yup.”
“Isn’t that a little odd?” she asked. “I mean, it’s three in the morning. Why would all the lights be on?”
Dr. Crews didn’t want to answer. The thoughts racing through his mind were too awful to put into words. Better to keep them to himself a few more minutes, just until they could get to the house. Maybe if he didn’t tell Libby, it wouldn’t be true.
That was stupid. It was crazy. But it was his hope.
He still wasn’t sure he believed everything that happened in the hospital. He wouldn’t believe it at all if he hadn’t been there to see it. People going crazy after being bitten by other crazy people? Black lines like a distorted vision of infection, racing away from a wound and toward the head rather than the heart?
Yet all he had to do was allow himself to feel the deep-seated ache in his arm to remember the blow as it was driven against the edge of a counter. All he had to do was close his eyes to see again the sweet face of Rose as it transformed from trusting faith to angered hunger. And with that also came the final image of her, as a bullet from his gun tore through the side of her head. It didn’t matter that Buck pulled the trigger. Nor did it matter that it had to be done; if she wasn’t killed, she would’ve bitten him, maybe worse.
His gun. His bullet. His fault.
Shaking his head, Adam tried to push the images away.
Focus on the here and now. Focus on getting Chris and Carlton home and keeping them safe.
There was only a single car parked in the driveway, a white or silver Ford SUV. It was hard to be sure of the color in the dark of night, and Adam had never been good with SUV models. It had the oval logo in the center of the rear hatch, and if F-O-R-D didn’t mean Found on Road, Dead, then it spelled Ford.
Adam drove past the driveway, then stopped, reversed, and backed into it so the nose of his wine-red Honda Accord faced back into the street. Libby didn’t question the move. She also didn’t question him when he left the ignition running, climbing out and making sure the doors didn’t lock behind them. He didn’t know what he’d say if she did.
He’d served in the Army. He’d patched up soldiers and Marines wounded by IEDs in Afghanistan, removed bits of shrapnel and small arms’ slugs from arms and legs. He’d lain awake at night, unable to find sleep over the constant sounds of an active military camp in enemy territory. He’d woken panting from terror-filled dreams where the bodies of soldiers he couldn’t save came hunting him, dead eyes accusing, judging.
He could say those experiences taught him to be ready, play into the accepted PTSD paranoia affecting so many veterans who returned from the desert.
Except…
It wouldn’t be the truth.
Libby would know. She might not call him out on it, but she would recognize the lie.
Through their courtship and the deployments, through ten years of marriage and seven years with twin boys ruling every aspect of their lives, they never lied to each other. Truth was the foundation of their relationship, the strong bulwark against which all of life’s trials and tribulations struck and faltered. If she asked, he’d have to give her a truthful answer, and that would only scare her more.
He’d tell her soon, but it could wait until their sons were safely back at home. Once he was assured the craziness of the emergency department hadn’t expanded beyond the hospital, he could tell her.
She came around the front of the sedan as he turned to face the brightly lit house.
Nothing moved within that he could see. No flash of a child bouncing on a couch. No adult shadows flitted across the thin curtains.
&
nbsp; “Maybe they just left the lights on so the kids wouldn’t get scared,” Libby offered. The tone of her voice said she doubted the claim even as she made it. “You know, just in case someone wakes up in the middle of the night.”
Adam didn’t remind her that no one answered the phone when she called.
“Let’s go see,” he said, taking her left hand in his right and walking up the short drive to the house.
* * * * *
Twenty minutes wasted, Buck thought, but without any anger.
Still, twenty minutes when they could have been back at his house, protecting his family.
It wasn’t really wasted time, not if it provided information.
After dragging himself out from under Jerry’s corpse, with Caitlin’s help, he spent a few minutes trying to raise any of the crews on the radio. The radio worked—at least, as far as he could tell it did—but no one answered. Local police dispatch was also silent. He flipped to a few other channels he knew by heart but couldn’t raise any attention from Spartanburg or Greenville, either. There was a book somewhere in the cramped radio room, a three-ring binder with all kinds of transponder signals and radio frequencies written down, but he didn’t want to take the time to find it.
He hadn’t felt it quite as badly when Caitlin dared him to follow her into the building. But it came on strong as they moved through the break room.
It wasn’t just in the hospital.
That was the underlying problem.
It was one thing to bring a patient in with the heaving, puking and shitting everywhere. They all went crazy in the hospital. He couldn’t know for sure that events would have played out the same if the patients had stayed home. He couldn’t afford to think like that, because it meant his family wasn’t safe.
Once the timer was stopped and that particular worry uncorked, there was no putting it back in the bottle.
He needed to get home, check on Olivia, and make sure Jacob was safe.
There was no question about Caitlin coming along. She’d already said she had no one else to be with and nowhere else to go. She’d saved his ass several times in the hospital and once more in the radio room. Damn right, she could come along.
