by Rob Horner
Unfeeling, because the dead do not recognize pain, the hunter flipped himself to his stomach. Being numb didn’t mean lacking understanding of danger. He needed to get up. He couldn’t face the beast from the ground, not lying on his side like a frightened child. The hunter didn’t understand why the dog hadn’t become like her packmates, and he didn’t have time to puzzle it out. Perhaps, as with the humans, there were simply some who couldn’t receive the gift.
The dog didn’t continue the attack, not immediately. Instead she stood three feet away, clearing her mouth of the sizable chunk of gristle she’d pulled from his leg, as if the taste of his flesh was nauseating.
Stupid animal, he thought. Should have finished me.
The hunter rolled onto his stomach, placing his hands beneath his shoulders and drawing his knees in for ballast.
His left leg didn’t seem able to respond properly, so instead of being on all fours, he looked like a lop-sided table with a bent fourth leg.
The dog…smiled at him, as if she’d been waiting for just that moment.
She rushed forward again, leaping onto his back. Her muzzle flashed down, teeth driving for the hard bones of his cervical spine. Something snapped, and the strength fled the hunter’s limbs. He fell onto his stomach, unable to move arms or legs.
The dog’s weight vanished. He saw a flash of white as she leaped over his head and continued around the house, racing for her human family. Her paws clattered against the chain link fence, claws scrabbling for a hold, pushing herself up and over.
The hunter’s lungs expanded, alveoli half-dead from atelectasis creaking and crackling in his chest, before he blew his anger and frustration out in a single wordless vocalization.
A small caliber pistol fired. Maybe the trap caught someone and perhaps it had only slowed the escapees. Either way, he needed to hurry.
But he couldn’t move.
The van’s engine fired up, revved for a moment, then faded.
And he lay on the ground.
The other become, the husband and the third dog, finally brought themselves out of the house; the hunter heard them crunching through the grass.
There was a hierarchy to the become. Those blessed with the ability to plan could communicate with those who were not so blessed. Fewer chiefs and more Indians, as the old saying went.
But there was also a drive to efficiency. Every become had a purpose, and those who couldn’t fulfill their purposes were so much detritus.
The husband and dog wandered past the hunter without pausing.
A moment later, the gate squealed again as the two become headed out to spread the contagion.
The hunter was left face down in the grass, aware of what he was but incapable of any motion.
He was paralyzed and he couldn’t die.
He couldn’t die but he was paralyzed.
His hunt had ended.
* * * * *
A low whistle filled the car at speeds above fifty miles per hour, a consequence of the bullet hole in the driver’s door, but neither Buck nor Caitlin complained. They were on the Interstate, north of Charlotte and heading for Virginia. They had no desire to go any slower than necessary.
Jacob had fallen asleep in the back seat, worn out from the events of the evening and the excitement of their escape.
No, that wasn’t the whole truth.
He was also exhausted from a straight hour of crying after they got away. Even at nine, he understood what had happened to his mother.
Maybe he understood it better than the adults.
Weren’t kids hard-wired to accept the impossible, their brains steeped in fantasy fiction? Maybe when his mom first reached for him with black on her face and red in her eyes, he’d already accepted that she was changed. They had nine or ten seasons of The Walking Dead and uncountable movies before it to thank for that.
Caitlin’s phone buzzed in her lap. She reached for it, but before she could unlock it with her fingerprint, Buck started talking.
“Sorry about before. You know…not letting you…um…”
It was the softness in his voice, the tangible struggle between worry for his wife and fear of doing something to endanger his child, which prevented her from snapping back at him. He hadn’t said a word as they fled Gaffney, just concentrated on driving like it was rush hour instead of the dead of night. There were cars and trucks on the road, but the traffic seemed much less than usual. It made sense, considering that her father knew something was going on. This wasn’t confined to Gaffney, South Carolina, so why wouldn’t there be fewer vehicles on the road?
“It’s okay,” she said, matching his tone. “I didn’t know that’s who it was.”
“Jacob told me she’d…changed. But I didn’t… I didn’t open the door to see. Maybe I should have.”
Caitlin didn’t know what to say to that. She’d seen Buck handle himself well in the hospital. But those zombies were different, slower, less powerful.
“I think,” she said at last, “if you’d opened the door, it wouldn’t have been you who came out and got into the car.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
She waited a moment in case he had anything to add. When he didn’t, she unlocked her phone and checked the message.
“Holy shit!”
“What?” Buck asked.
Flipping through the text chain, Caitlin replied, “Remember when you asked me to tell my Dad that I’d be coming to DC with you, and to see if he would tell me what’s going on?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I sent the text while you were…um…in your house. I said you’d been bitten but didn’t get sick, right? And he sent back, ‘Absolutely. Bring your friend. We know O-negative blood is immune to the infection, but he might have developed a specialized antibody after being exposed.’”
“Wow. So, they not only know something’s going on, but who’s immune?”
“It gets better,” she said. “There’s a lot he can’t tell me, not over unsecure text. He’s deliberately vague. But he’s never lied to me and he’s always answered my questions to the best of his ability.”
“Sounds like a pretty cool dad.”
“Yeah…well…maybe on some things.” She turned her head and cleared her throat. “Anyway, from what he says, there was an explosion in Atlanta and something bad got released.” She held up a hand, forestalling Buck’s next question. “He didn’t say what exploded or whose fault it was, or what got out. The word he uses is ‘bug.’ ‘A bad bug’ got released into the air. Any O-type blood is immune to a primary infection by the bug, but only O-negative is immune to secondary infection by an infected person.”
“Secondary infection meaning being scratched or bitten?”
“Apparently.”
“So maybe I wasn’t just lucky,” Buck mumbled.
North of Charlotte, the highway narrowed to four lanes, two running north and two south. They were close enough to civilization for there to be streetlights along the Interstate; they wouldn’t reach dark roads until they got into the mountains just south of Virginia. Traffic was sparse, but the roads weren’t deserted. Watching the dark trees blur by, Caitlin wondered how many people out there had no idea what was happening. It couldn’t be everywhere, not yet. Why hadn’t there been a public service alert, a news report…something…to announce that life as they had always known it was on the verge of collapse?
“I thought, when Austin bit me and I didn’t go crazy, that I was just lucky,” Buck said. “I thought maybe he was just sick, and the attack was an alteration in his mental status brought on by his acute distress. I thought I’d dodged a bullet. But he could’ve been like the others, crazy-sick, and the only reason you didn’t have to put a bullet in my head is because of my blood type. How random is that?”
“Not as random as you think,” Caitlin said. “I’m O-negative, too.”
“So’s Jacob.”
“I figured.”
Buck reached over, fiddling with the radio controls, bu
t didn’t immediately turn up the volume. “I usually keep this thing on Radio Disney. For Jacob, you know? I don’t listen to the talking heads on the news channels. It’s either people arguing, or someone trying to tell me how I should vote because of the color of my skin. There’s enough arguing and yelling in the station when people get into a political debate, so I prefer not to subject myself to it when I don’t need to.”
“We should probably try to get an idea what’s going on, though,” she said. “It’s three and a half hours still to Richmond—”
“I thought we were heading for DC?”
“We are, but we won’t be able to get in.”
“How’s that?”
“Dad says martial law is coming, but he doesn’t know when. They’re trying to get a few principals into the capital before everything goes off the wire. Who knows? Maybe it won’t be so bad. But he wants an estimate of our arrival in Richmond. Says he can have a helicopter meet us there to bring us in.”
Buck glanced at the dashboard and said, “Glad I filled this thing up before I went on shift.”
“Will we need more gas?”
“Shouldn’t. I get about five hundred miles to a tank with the hybrid. Man. Jacob is gonna love flying in a chopper.”
Caitlin smiled. “I’ll let Dad know our ETA.”
“Okay. Guess I’ll turn on the radio. See what we can figure out.”
Chapter 21
The city hadn’t fallen yet, but it was wobbling, close to toppling.
Austin Wallace smiled at the rising sun, new sensations and awareness filling him.
The become were everywhere. He could feel them. Some wandered through houses where scared family members huddled behind locked doors. The become could try to find a way in instead of banging their heads against hollow wood, or they could leave and seek less-protected prey, but their mental faculties were far below what they’d enjoyed before becoming.
Some of his new people were meant as laborers, muscle to lift and pull without the intelligence to plan and rebel.
It was the new order.
One in a hundred were a cut above the common laborer, cunning and bright despite the change, but still subservient to a higher become. They were lieutenants and would be the key to the become’s future in a world where there would soon be only those become, and those who died because they weren’t.
Then there were become like Austin, a small percent of a small percent. Calm. Methodical. Logical. He carried the weight of the become on his shoulders and would be responsible for leading his people to a place of supremacy in the new world order. Where he commanded, others obeyed. Even the lieutenants.
“Come,” he whispered. Sound was not the mechanism by which his orders were heard, but vocalizing helped focus his concentration. It also felt good, he admitted. One of his greatest fears, in the extremis of his illness, was that he’d lost the ability to communicate. It was a small facet of his former personality, something ineffably tied to his love of teaching, this need to establish a rapport across sociological divides.
He stepped away from the hospital where he’d been born and turned his face from the sun.
“Come. Join me. Follow me.”
Four become moved up behind him. Randy, Kenja, Danny, and Cliff. He couldn’t reach his hunter but assumed he was off seeking prey.
Austin has his own mission to accomplish.
Deep inside was an inexplicable desire to congregate, to establish a society very different from what the world knew.
Answering calls came to him as they walked out into the street, turning right and heading for the Interstate.
It was enough. They were coming.
One thing enabled him to sublimate the instinctive drive to form a society.
His family.
Bitsy was out there, somewhere to the west. Carolyn, too, though his sense of her was far less than of his daughter. She was also become, but not on the level of himself or Bitsy. It didn’t matter. Bitsy was who he needed to find above all others.
Before they reached the Interstate, his following of four had increased to forty.
* * * * *
Caitlin didn’t want to get into the things where her father wasn’t the best. She didn’t want to talk about all the schools she had to leave in the middle of the year, or all the friendships abandoned. She didn’t want to think about costing her high school cheerleading squad a national championship by her sudden departure, or how most of the moves weren’t necessities but were rather decisions made solely to further her father’s career. Wherever Roger Boyles could go to earn the next rank, work his way up the Army hierarchy, that’s where Caitlin and her mom went, and any other commitments be damned. They weren’t consulted and they were certainly never asked. He ordered, and they obeyed.
It wasn’t all bad, growing up the only daughter of an Army general. Caitlin spent more time on Army bases and had more honorary big brothers than she could count. Every officer under her father’s command looked on her as a niece or acted like a godfather. Every Major’s son about the same age was either an appropriate playdate or a potential high school suitor. She learned how to fight, how to shoot, anything anyone wanted to teach. While other girls were struggling with a Learner’s Permit and worrying whether they’d be chosen Prom Queen, Caitlin was scrunching down in the co-pilot’s chair of a UH-60 Blackhawk, getting unauthorized flying lessons from a horny pilot with something to prove. More balls than brains, as the old saying went.
Sometimes, that combination worked out just fine.
The Fusion Hybrid hummed over the highway, a smooth and pleasant ride despite the circumstances which precipitated its necessity and the minute whistle of the wind through the bullet hole. She should be able to relax. Wasn’t that what a girl was supposed to do with a capable and responsible guy like Buck behind the wheel?
And yet, something didn’t seem right.
Dad said shit was hitting the fan and something was spreading everywhere. They were contemplating martial law. That didn’t fit with smooth and pleasant.
When she’d come to work earlier that night, everything seemed fine. She hadn’t checked the news, but if there were more people lining up to get into the hospital than normal, it wasn’t such a drastic change as to make her sit up and take notice.
She tried to remember her epidemiology coursework, but it was a struggle. The spread patterns of communicable diseases never held much interest for her. Better to focus on the identification and eradication of whatever bug infected the current patient than to worry about where it came from or where it was going. It couldn’t go anywhere if you killed it or prevented it from taking hold.
There was person to person spread, which described most of what they’d seen. Whether it was direct contact or airborne transmission, no matter how virulent the bug, its spread was limited to a straightforward chain of events. If the explosion happened almost two days before, that might explain why it was only now beginning to show up in South Carolina.
And yet, her father was concerned about DC getting bad.
How could an infection which originated in Georgia already be worse in the nation’s capital than it was in South Carolina?
Air travel.
“Oh shit!” Caitlin said, startling Buck.
“What is it? You get another text from your dad?”
South Carolina was catching a slow burn from the infection because it wasn’t a major destination for the airport in Atlanta. Hell, Greenville was almost a neighboring city. But what places would be considered short hops from the southeastern hub? If an insect could be considered a vector for disease spread, what about an airplane?
“No. It’s a pattern.”
Carefully, choosing her words, Caitlin tried to explain the picture forming in her mind. Major cities like hot zones, with the areas in between feeling the flow as it crept over them.
“Like a nuclear scenario,” Buck said, his eyes on the quiet road. “Big bombs hit big cities, and the fallout spreads around them
like rings around a stone dropped in a pool.”
“Exactly. And we’re leaving a fallout zone.”
“Heading for a hot spot,” Buck concluded.
“DC?”
“Hell, probably Richmond. Definitely Charlotte.”
“You think?” Caitlin asked.
Before he could answer, Caitlin’s cell phone rang.
“It’s Jessica.”
“Put it on speaker.”
* * * * *
Caitlin texted her father while listening to Jessica describe the harrowing events at Tina’s house. She hadn’t known Tina’s husband or Jessica’s boyfriend, but that didn’t diminish their pain or her response to it. When they escaped the hospital, it seemed like maybe they’d be okay, that the worst was behind them. Now she knew differently. Things were just getting started.
Concerned about Richmond not being safe. Have other survivors, including a dog.
Wait one.
Buck explained his fallout theory, which Tina jumped on, though her voice came through as a broken whisper.
Brodnax, Virginia. Mecklenburg-Brunswick Regional Airport. Military transport. 0900 tomorrow. Be on it.
We’ll be there.
Jessica wound through the story, ending with the attack in the van and their subsequent escape. She wasn’t hysterical, but her voice indicated a woman who’d dealt with just about all she could handle for one day. She needed a plan.
Caitlin gave it to her.
“Is it a good idea, going to an airport?” Buck asked, looking over his shoulder at his sleeping son.
“It’s a regional airport,” Caitlin replied. “Small birds, private pilots.”
Buck nodded. “So, doubtful anything from Atlanta would have landed there.”
