by Rob Horner
* * * * *
“Buck! Watch out!” Caitlin yelled.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Buck stamped on the brake pedal, headlights picking out the image of a man in uniform standing in the middle of the road at the edge of the subdivision.
“Is that—?” Caitlin began, squinting.
“I think so,” Buck answered.
“Officer Tim?”
“Yeah.”
The officer waited, head cocked to the right and tilted slightly.
“I didn’t think he could walk,” she said.
“He was badly concussed, but nothing wrong with his legs or spine, as far as I know,” Buck added.
“What’re you talking about?” Jacob asked from the back. “Who’s that guy? Is he a cop? Can he help Mom?”
Alarms from houses and cars continued to shatter the night with sound. More disturbing were the occasional blasts from shotguns and other small arms. It wasn’t their use that bothered him, but their sporadic nature. In this part of South Carolina, just about every home had some sort of weapon for defense. There should be more shots, not less. And as more people woke to the outside cacophony, the number of firearm discharges should be increasing.
They needed to get out of the neighborhood.
“He was taken,” Caitlin said. “We saw it happen. Dragged off toward the morgue.”
“Think he got away?” Buck asked.
A scream from behind grew from barely noticeable to near deafening. Buck turned to look and saw only a flash of white like a flapping t-shirt or the tail of long nightgown before a heavy weight thumped onto the roof.
Jacob screamed. Caitlin jerked in her seat and suddenly the snub-nosed pistol was in her hand, barrel pointed at the roof.
The police officer moved and damn, he was fast.
A pounding from above like fists hammering on the roof of the low sedan.
Jacob began to cry.
The officer closed the distance, his face flashing white as death in the splash from the headlights. His eyes were twin suns, glowing red as he stepped to the side. It wasn’t light shine, some weird refraction from the headlights; the redness shone from within. Black lines twisted out from his mouth, writhing along the jaw bones on both sides of his head, like some vine-encrusted picture frame outlining the white of his skin and the fire in his eyes.
“Shit!” Buck said again.
The thumping on the roof turned into a scrabbling as whoever was up there moved forward. A face crept over the lip of the roof, peering into the windshield.
Caitlin uttered a short scream even as she tracked the face with her pistol.
It was Olivia.
And like the policeman, her eyes were devil red.
* * * * *
The sense of wrongness was there, within the car. It wasn’t just one person, not just Buck. There was another with the same…potential. Someone whose very existence was a threat to the become.
The car froze, pinning the hunter with its lights.
From behind the vehicle came the shatter of glass and the sense of the other hunter burst forth, as though the fragile shield had muted it.
But she came on, leaping off a small garage overhang and racing up the street. Ten feet away she jumped, landing spread eagle on top of the stopped vehicle.
He surged forward, his movements not quite fast enough to be considered a blur, but obviously quicker than a normal human could manage.
Did it fill those in the car with despair? Did they tremble at his newfound physical prowess?
Caitlin screamed as the other hunter clambered over the vehicle, powerful hands gripping the edges of the frame and jerking her body forward so her head hung down across the windshield.
The hunter stopped at the driver’s window, peering in.
Buck was there, in the driver’s seat. Caitlin occupied the shotgun position.
And in the backseat, doubled over on himself with his head almost between his legs, was a sobbing boy.
The hunter couldn’t see his face, but his smell was a perversion as strong as Buck’s. He was the other.
They both needed to die.
The hunter reared back to punch through the window.
“Back, Buck!” Caitlin cried.
Everything happened at once.
* * * * *
It clicked in her head, one of those connections the brain makes without any conscious effort or thought.
Her mother called it intuition, but Caitlin didn’t like that term. It inevitably led to sexist concepts of women’s intuition versus man’s logical thinking. All people had a measure of it, regardless of gender. Those who spoke the loudest were less inclined to listen to the quiet inner voice of subconscious reason, where inferences were made and deductions processed. Granted, those same people who talked loudly generally had the least informed things to say and believed sheer volume would prove their superiority of thought or opinion.
They were being hunted.
There was no other reason for Officer Tim to be there, and only a half-hour after their flight from the hospital.
Officer Tim was clearly different from the other—zombies—crazy people they’d encountered. He moved extremely fast, and his eyes glowed like burning coals.
The woman on top of the car had the same kind of eyes.
They needed to get away from them.
“Back, Buck!” she shouted, reaching out her left hand as a jamming bar against his chest. Her right held the .380, and she quickly brought it bear, aiming across their bodies at the leering face just outside his window.
Buck reacted at the same time, perhaps misunderstanding her words. He reached to the gearshift dial between the seats, giving the dial a quick twist to throw the car into reverse.
It wasn’t what she meant, and she didn’t have time to stop herself from squeezing the trigger.
Buck slammed his foot on the accelerator and the car scooted backward, throwing her forward against the seatbelt. The gun discharged, the sound deafening in the enclosed quarters. Both the big man and his son yelled in surprise and fear. There was no crunch of glass or scream of pain; the bullet punched through the doorframe below the window. Whether she hit anything outside the car, she didn’t know.
Buck hadn’t had time to put his belt on, but he was in control and had the steering wheel in a death grip, stabilizing himself.
The former police officer had his arm drawn back like he wanted to punch something, but his fist struck empty air as the car rolled out of reach.
The woman on top of the car tumbled forward, bouncing against the hood and rolling onto the ground.
Now, while they’re in front of you!
Caitlin thumbed the switch to lower the passenger window. As soon as it was down enough to allow her arm to reach through, she pointed the pistol at the two forms.
The car was moving, but they were only a dozen yards away.
It was an easy shot for someone with Caitlin’s training.
“No! Don’t!” Buck shouted, and suddenly the car wasn’t backing in a straight line but was zigging and zagging back and forth as the big man hauled on the wheel, desperate to prevent her from taking a shot.
“Buck, hold it steady.”
“No. That’s my wife!”
The woman in question regained her feet.
The car slowed, and neither policeman nor woman moved. From this distance, it was easy to fool herself into thinking their eyes weren’t really red, just picking up a strange reflection from a streetlight.
Continuing to turn, Buck heeled the vehicle around in the middle of the street, avoiding parked cars and wandering people. This time not allowing the car to come to a complete stop, he spun the dial back to Drive and pulled off away from the two with the red eyes.
Twisting, Caitlin spun just in time to see the man and woman take off after them, running faster than any human should be able to, overtaking the small car before it could get up to any speed. She screamed as the man charged up on the passenger side, hand rea
ching out to grab the doorframe.
“Son of a bitch!” Buck said, watching his own mirror. But he didn’t slow. Not this time.
Officer Tim grabbed hold of Caitlin’s door, the tendons on the back of his hand standing out, straining to maintain position as his legs worked to keep up with the vehicle.
For one long second, all she could do was stare. The idea that a man, any man, could move his legs fast enough to keep up with an accelerating car was astonishing.
His face drew closer, like he was gaining on them.
She had a chance to put this one down, at least. Maybe Buck wanted to argue about the woman, but the police officer was a clear and present threat.
Then the moment was gone.
The hand slipped away as the car reached the far end of General Drive. Buck made a quick left onto a small side street, then another left onto Route 150, where he pushed the car beyond the posted speed limit.
* * * * *
This new body, his become body, could perform at a level no normal human could match. But it had its limits.
The hunter realized this as more weight began to pull against his left hand. The car had reached a speed beyond what his legs could maintain. His feet left the ground, his body becoming airborne. Eventually his grip would fail, and the resulting fall might damage him beyond his ability to recuperate or even to function.
Reluctantly, he let go. His legs continued to race, absorbing the built-up speed and pumping to prevent the rest of him from going face first onto the concrete.
He managed to bring himself to a jog, then to a stop.
Behind him, the other hunter raced to catch up.
No words passed between them.
He sensed the correct next move.
The hunter was tasked with eliminating those who’d escaped the hospital. Certainly, Buck and Caitlin were two such, but there were others.
This new hunter had no such orders and wanted only to mete out a strange form of justice to the man, woman, and child who’d just escaped.
The female hunter nodded, understanding passing between them along some lines of communication which neither understood.
As one, they followed the hybrid, turn by turn onto West Third Street then North Limestone Street, past the hospital and to the small side street leading to the ambulance station. Here the hunter veered away. It was clear to him that the trio were heading to the Interstate, and clear that the other hunter intended to continue chasing them.
He left her to it. His strangely enhanced senses had picked up the smell of the van again.
He had other prey to capture.
Chapter 14
There were noises audible through the front door, but they didn’t match any of Adam’s expectations and thus sounded alien and disturbing.
It was a sleepover. There should be giggles and screeches, the racket of a television blaring out an obnoxious Disney movie, and one or two harried adult voices yelling for everyone to quiet down and go to sleep. Instead there were only soft sounds like the slight crunch of winter boots on a coat of new fallen snow mixed with a lapping as of a dog’s tongue, but lower and slower, some large breed trying to drink stealthily.
A knowledge blossomed in his mind, a terrible knowing engendered by the sounds, but he pushed it away.
It couldn’t be right.
He denied the knowledge.
That would keep it from coming true, right?
“What is that noise?” Libby asked. She’d paused in the act of pushing the doorbell. Her hand hung suspended in the air, right index finger pointing at the small, lighted button. “It sounds like—”
Don’t say it, he thought.
“—chewing. But that’s crazy, isn’t it?”
Time slowed enough for Adam to consider and reject a dozen ways to prepare her, maybe half of which might have saved her. He said none of them, but each would exist in his mind until his mind ceased to function, a dozen branching points of this timeline, a dozen ways her fate could have been altered.
Time resumed, and her finger pressed the doorbell.
Soft chimes played, a truncated refrain which sounded like church bells ringing joyfully. All other sounds ceased.
Though Adam had no idea what the inside of the Carpenters’ home looked like, his mind had no trouble furnishing an image.
A battlefield with the victors long departed. Dead men scattered everywhere. The scavengers have come, long-snouted canines bloodied to the eyes as they root in the ripe corpses, tongues seeking, front teeth nipping at select morsels buried deep within. Then the mongrels pause in their feast, gore-covered heads rising as one. Their ears twitch, nervous but eager to find the source of a sound carried on the wind.
The chimes sounded again when Libby pressed the doorbell a second time.
And still silence from within.
“They must’ve heard that,” she said. “With all these lights on and the noises we were hearing, someone has to be awake.”
How did you get your wife to leave a place where her children supposedly slept? How did you convince her of something you weren’t even sure of yourself? How did you reconcile this feeling of despair, a complete and utter resignation that your children were lost to you, with a raging desire to just get away?
What kind of father did that make him?
If what happened in the hospital was happening here, then they were dead, gone, changed into whatever word you wanted to use for the walking dead. They had to be. Anything alive in that house would be yelling, screaming, calling out for help. The doorbell would be a lifeline to them, a desperate last chance at salvation.
What would he accomplish by going in there, besides offering up himself and Libby as two more victims to the spreading plague?
If.
That was the magic word.
If they were changed. If the same thing as the hospital was happening here.
In the end, it was the if which decided him. He hadn’t had the courage to speak his fears before she pressed the button. All the other branches were closed off to him. There was only the if. And whenever an if popped up regarding a child, you couldn’t turn your back. You had to know.
“What’re you doing?” Libby asked.
“Just going to check,” he said, releasing her hand and reaching for the doorknob.
It’ll be locked, he thought. It’ll be locked and neither one of us is a cat burglar, so we’ll have to call the police or sneak around the house looking for a window.
But it wasn’t. The knob turned in his hand and the door swung inward on oiled hinges.
Inside was the battlefield.
Libby screamed.
* * * * *
For a moment which lasted through a single heartbeat, Adam’s mind flashed back to the imagery of a minute before. The corpse littered battlefield. The scruffy scavengers scrounging for scraps. The splash of blood in shades of red ranging from bright and shiny to dark and dry.
Then his heart stuttered from saunter to sprint, and the reality inside the home replaced the imagined picture in his head, even more terrifying because it wasn’t imagination.
The Carpenters were a family of modest means, solidly middle class. Paul worked for Duke Power as an electrical engineer and earned enough to allow his wife to stay home and teach their children. Their house reflected an image of coziness and comfort; well-made but inexpensive furniture lined the large great room, the kind of couches where a bunch of kids could snuggle up to watch television but which wouldn’t be destroyed if a handful of buttery popcorn fell between the cushions. A matching recliner sat angled to the side, plump and gray. The beige carpet was undoubtedly kept vacuumed, just as the standing picture frames on the mantel were kept dusted and arranged in a line.
Except…
Now the walls, floor, and furniture looked like a masterpiece of gestural abstraction, an action painting in the style of Jackson Pollock, except only one color was on display, rather than the multihued overlays which typified the style. Red lay on eve
rything, sometimes pooled in congealing puddles, sometimes arcing in narrow lines like calligrapher’s script. There were bodies, too, some lifeless and still, limbs akimbo or trapped under prone forms, while others moved with steady purpose.
In the initial rush of visual stimulus, Adam didn’t note individual faces or features; his mind provided only generalities—there were eight or nine bodies present, all children. Since the Carpenters only had sons, it was a unisex sleepover. Every child wore some form of boy-targeted sleepwear—Marvel superheroes, Transformers characters—which differed only in the shades of blue, green, black, and gray. Half were children of color, though racial differences were lost in the horror of the scene.
His breath was gone. His strength threatened to follow. Adam leaned against the doorframe. His boys were there; even under the gore, he recognized their matching haircuts and identical features. His heart constricted, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure it would ever beat properly again.
Then Libby broke the spell.
“Oh my God, Chris!” she yelled. “Carlton!”
Adam couldn’t move. The words wouldn’t come. He reached for his wife’s shoulders, but she slipped forward before he could grab her.
She rushed into the room, unaware or unmindful of the danger. Would she have heeded it even if she knew?
She didn’t see the arms of the children reaching for her as she raced past the first few; her eyes were only for her sons, both of whom were bent over a third child, faces pressed against a bloody torso.
The disturbing image of scavengers returned, and Adam called out.
But it was too late.
Every child in the room turned to follow Libby’s path toward her sons.
“Libby! Don’t!” Adam yelled as she reached the twins.
One hand went out to each, a mother’s reach with a mother’s desperate strength. She grabbed them by a shoulder and pulled. They resisted at first, unwilling to leave their feast.
“Carlton! Chris!” she screamed. “Stop that! What’re you doing?”
