by Dirk Patton
With eyes the size of saucers, the man began blubbering for mercy. He dropped the truncheon, the hard wood ringing loudly on the concrete as he sank to his knees in supplication. Twitching his arm, Igor made the chain dangling from his wrist resemble a slithering, iron snake.
“Where is she?” he growled through gritted teeth.
The man was too terrified to answer. Igor raised his arm and flicked it forward, sending the chain flailing like a bullwhip. The three links on the end struck next to the guard’s face, taking a small chunk out of the concrete wall.
“WHERE IS SHE?” Igor bellowed, advancing and flinging the overturned table out of his way.
“Two cells that way,” the jailer answered, pointing with a shaking hand.
Igor whipped the chain sideways. It struck the man’s head hard enough to crack open his skull and break his neck. Before his body slumped to the blood covered floor, Igor was already running to find Irina.
Rushing into the cell, he let the chain drag behind him as he crossed to the gurney where she was restrained. The guards hadn’t even given her a sheet and she lay there naked, staring at the ceiling. When Igor leaned in, she slowly shifted her eyes to look at him without moving her head.
“Kill me,” she whispered. “If you love me, kill me.”
40
Rachel waited outside the aircraft until the pilot retracted the air-stairs, closed and secured the door. She was an old hand at surviving in hostile environments and carefully scanned the surrounding desert with the rifle to her shoulder. Dog, a few feet to her side, kept his muzzle raised, scenting the gentle breeze coming from the south.
“Not any that way, huh?” Rachel muttered when he remained quiet.
She knew nothing about Arizona, having only ever seen it on the dash to Mexico to rescue Vance a few months ago, and didn’t realize she was standing in the middle of a vast emptiness with very few outposts of civilization. But an Interstate Highway cut through the area so there had to be something. A truck stop or rest area. Somewhere she might find an infected.
The sun was barely above the horizon, but it was already hot on her skin. Sand pushed by the constant breeze skittered across the asphalt and she was already thirsty. Looking to the west, toward Yuma, she dismissed any thought of going in that direction. While she would have been more than thrilled to encounter Viktoriya and put a few more bullets in her, she couldn’t risk losing that fight and failing to find some infected blood.
Turning to face the rising sun, she began walking with the rifle held across the front of her body. Dog walked at her side, tongue already hanging out in the morning heat. She knew the need for water would rapidly become a problem for them, but the baking rays of the sun were more of a problem for the people staying behind in the aircraft. It wouldn’t take long for the interior to become a sauna. That thought spurred her to a faster pace which Dog effortlessly matched.
Almost three hours later she had seen no sign of an infected or even that humans had ever been here other than the ribbon of asphalt stretching into the distance. Heat shimmers hovered above the blacktop, creating mirages that looked like water standing on the road. The environment was completely silent other than her soft footsteps and the continual sighing of the wind. An occasional tumbleweed blew across the road, rattling and scraping its way along.
The first time that had happened, one as large as a beachball had passed just behind her. The sound it made had caused her to whirl with rifle at the ready. Once she’d realized what it was, she’d felt silly for having been spooked so easily. But the desert was as strange as an alien planet to a girl who’d grown up in the lush green of the southeastern United States.
She was just glad the sun was up, even if it was hot as hell. Traversing this forsaken, sun-bleached world at night would have been ten times worse. Sure, she’d been on foot when they’d lost their vehicles during the Hoover Dam collapse, but she’d been with John. Somehow, he never seemed to be scared of anything. Cautious, sure, but he would ignore things that made her imagination run wild and skin prickle with gooseflesh.
With a start, Rachel realized she’d just covered another half a mile without paying attention to her surroundings. Bored from walking, her mind had wandered and she’d been thinking about John instead of watching for signs of infected. Frustrated with herself, she stopped and turned a slow circle.
In the distance ahead, a towering dust devil smudged the empty sky. Sand shifted in the ever-changing wind and the tall stalk of an agave plant slowly swayed. With a sigh, she pulled a bottle of water from her pocket and took a few cautious sips despite wanting to tilt her head back and drain it. Bending, she cupped her hand and poured some in for Dog who greedily lapped it up and continued to lick her palm until she pulled it away.
Tightly capping the bottle, she resumed her trek, climbing a gentle incline that ran to the top of a low ridge. Cresting, she stopped for a beat before quickly retreating a few steps and lowering herself onto the hot pavement. Dog tucked in next to her and stayed there as she crawled a few feet forward until she could peer over the ridge without silhouetting herself against the sky.
At the limit of her vision she could make out some vehicles sitting in the roadway. What she had earlier thought was a dust devil turned out to be a column of black smoke rising from one of them. Staring at them, Rachel’s stomach clenched when she recognized the blocky outlines. Humvees. But were these the same ones the Marines had been driving?
They lay there for fifteen minutes, watching. She couldn’t tell if all of the Hummers or only one had burned, but the volume of smoke pouring into the air was steadily decreasing. Was this why the Marines hadn’t arrived? But what could have happened to stop three heavy vehicles full of well-armed men?
There were only two possibilities that Rachel could think of. A Russian patrol, or infected. Neither was something she was prepared or capable of dealing with on her own, even if she did have Dog. If this was the enemy, it would almost certainly have been an aircraft on patrol that had spotted and taken out the small convoy. That was better for her because that meant there weren’t ground troops in the area.
But if it was infected, it would have required a sizable herd to stop and disable the Hummers. She’d been in enough situations with John where they’d had to push through hundreds of bodies that she knew there would need to be a tightly massed group to stop a military vehicle. With a frown, she acknowledged that even then it didn’t make sense. Humvees were capable of navigating almost any type of terrain. All the Marines would have needed to do was to leave the pavement and drive around a herd. There was no reason for them to try and ram their way through.
“Here’s where John would tell a Marine joke,” she mumbled to Dog.
Rachel twisted to check behind them, then faced front again and carefully pulled out their sole bottle of water. She sipped sparingly before pouring more into her hand for Dog. As he noisily lapped it up, she turned her thoughts back to the situation in front of her.
“Can’t be infected,” she said under her breath.
Tucking the bottle safely away, she rolled onto her back to search for aircraft. She hadn’t heard one, but well knew that meant nothing. Dividing the sky into sections in her mind, then thoroughly scanned each one. Nothing.
With a sigh, she rolled to her side and gave the vehicles another long look. Satisfied there was nothing further to be gained by inaction, she got to her feet and hurried forward to clear the crest and not silhouette herself any longer than necessary.
It was over a mile to the Hummers. Rachel moved with an abundance of caution and it took half an hour before she reached them. Rifle up and tight to her shoulder, she gave them a wide berth as she circled the area. Her first circuit was just checking for threats. Seeing none, she straightened her aching back and lowered the weapon.
The Humvee that had burned was riddled with holes. Not little ones like from a rifle or machine gun, but large, gaping ones that confirmed the vehicle had been destroyed by canon fire
. The hood and roof were shredded, supporting her notion that an aircraft had been the attack platform. There were still two Marines in the front seats, their bodies shattered and blackened beyond recognition.
She started to step closer but pulled up when she felt the heat radiating from the charred metal. Turning, she looked at the remaining two Hummers. Neither showed any damage and both sat with their doors swinging open in the wind. Frowning at the incongruity, Rachel slowly moved forward to peer inside the closest.
No blood. No spent brass. It’s like the Marines had just vanished. Or had they been captured by a patrol that had been working with the aircraft that shot up their convoy? Rachel checked all around but didn’t find any shell casings on the ground and dismissed the idea that the men had been captured. They wouldn’t have given up without a fight.
Not wasting any more time on trying to solve the mystery, Rachel opened the back of one of the surviving Humvees. Empty. Checking the second one yielded no better results. Turning, she looked at the burned-out husk of the third. The one that had been hauling the medical and surgical equipment she might need to help save John’s life.
“Goddamn it!” she snarled, lashing out and kicking a blackened fender.
The impact of her steel-toed boot with the sheet metal banged loudly and she caught her breath, chastising herself. Despite being in the middle of nowhere and very alone, she’d learned that making unnecessary noise was never a good idea, no matter your situation. Taking a calming breath, she whirled when Dog suddenly growled.
The sand along the north side of the pavement was undulating like the surface of the ocean when a monster is about to emerge. But a single monster would have been preferable to what suddenly burst forth from beneath the ground. Dozens of children, all less than four feet tall, charged at her and Dog with chilling screams.
41
Rachel stood rooted in place, shock and revulsion washing over her. As the children raced across the west bound lanes and into the median, she saw their eyes flash red in the brilliant sunlight. Mouths open in screams, she could see fangs that belonged in a predator’s mouth, not a human’s. Most of them were stained with what appeared to be fresh blood.
Dog lowered his head and stepped forward, his motion jarring her into action. Screaming for him to follow, she dove into the closest Hummer. He was right behind her, scrambling across her back into the passenger seat.
With a strength born of terror, she slammed the door just as a boy’s fingers brushed her hip. The heavy steel crushed his hand and the child screeched in pain and went into a horrifying frenzy until he freed himself. Rachel looked to the side and if not for medical school and surviving the apocalypse would have retched when she saw three small severed fingers lying on the floor.
The other children arrived, easily leaping onto the Hummer’s tall hood which was above most of their heads. They threw themselves at the windshield with a fury unmatched by even infected adult females, staring at her with unblinking, blood red eyes. Dog was going berserk, barking at them but calmed somewhat when Rachel pulled him into a close hug.
As savage as their attack was, within seconds they seemed to realize they were unable to batter their way through the thick glass. Seemingly coordinated, the screaming stopped and wherever a child was they sat down to watch her and Dog. But they were doing more than that. Methodically, each pair of eyes was scanning across the exterior of the Humvee, searching for a way in.
Rachel shuddered as she watched them, her mouth falling open in horror. The children were behaving more like apes than humans. The way they moved, but even more so the way they sat. And the teeth!
Two long, thick fangs were in place of what modern humans call eye teeth. They curved down and inwards, mating with a smaller pair growing up from the lower jaw.
For the first time she realized all of the children were completely naked. Both boys and girls already had pubic hair, even though from their size she would have guessed none were more than seven or eight years old. But what the hell had happened to them?
“Oh, my God,” Rachel whispered, shivering as she clung to Dog and looked at the mass of infected. “Oh, my God.”
She snapped her head around when there was a hard thump. It was a boy, staring in at her as he pushed on something below the level of the passenger door window. When he saw her looking, he increased his efforts and Rachel suddenly understood he’d found the door handle and was trying to open it.
Shoving Dog aside, she started the engine and was already pressing on the accelerator as she jerked the transmission into drive. An instant before the gears engaged, the passenger side latch released and the door began to swing open. Then the heavy vehicle shot forward with a screech of protesting rubber and the child was battered aside, the small body pushing the door closed with a slam.
As Rachel accelerated, children leapt off the Hummer and landed nimbly on their feet. Unlike the infected she was accustomed to, they didn’t begin a mindless pursuit. Instead, they simply stood watching the vehicle drive away. Before she was too far to make out details in the mirror, she saw them move as a group back to the sandy area and bend to the ground.
“Oh, my God... oh, my God... oh, my God,” Rachel said over and over as she drove.
Her hands were shaking so badly she had to lower her speed to maintain control of the vehicle. A lump of fear in her throat threatened to constrict her breathing and in response she began panting. Soon, she was near hyperventilating. Dog whined softly, recognizing her distress and pressing his head into her lap.
For a moment she felt as if she were starting to regain some composure, then had to slam on the brakes. Popping the door open before the Humvee was stopped, she stuck her head out and threw up onto the pavement. Her body wanted to continue heaving and the impulse was to keep leaning out, but terror overrode everything.
Sitting up, Rachel slammed the door and after a quick check of the surroundings allowed herself a moment to sip some water. Head tilted back, she finally managed to get her breathing under control. Dog whined and she shared some water with him as she looked all around them again.
“Oh, my God,” she said, her hands moving to cover her belly. “No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not infected. I’m not infected. They’re going to be okay.”
A nearly irresistible urge to lean over and throw up again passed through her, but she managed to force down the bile that was rising in her throat. Another deep breath and she wiped a sheen of sweat from her face and took her foot off the brake. The Hummer began idling forward and Rachel wanted nothing more than to drive back to John as fast as she could. But she hadn’t found what she needed to save him. Or had she?
Reaching down, she picked up one of the infected child’s fingers that had been severed. There wasn’t much blood in it, but there was more than enough to extract the virus. Wasn’t there?
Stepping on the brake again, Rachel held the finger up for a closer examination. It looked like a normal human digit, except for one thing. Unlike a normal human, the nail was thick and rough. Many times thicker than hers, in effect making it a claw.
Picking up the other fingers, Rachel brought out the bag of syringes and placed them inside before resealing it. It was only a few minutes back to the jet now that she had a vehicle, but she didn’t want to take a chance of losing even one more drop of blood. If she got there and Joe couldn’t use them, she’d have to head back out and find an infected. Right now, she needed to see her husband.
42
Rachel was still rattled fifteen minutes later when she pulled to a stop near the jet’s nose. Before stepping out of the Hummer, she took her time scanning the surrounding desert. Dog waited patiently, familiar with the routine of checking the environment before leaving the relative safety of a vehicle.
Seeing no sign of the children, or any other infected, didn’t make her feel any better. They’d caught her by surprise earlier, and because the wind had been out of the opposite direction, Dog hadn’t been able to scent them. But sitting pa
ralyzed in fear wasn’t improving the situation so she released the latch and stepped out.
The rifle was up and ready as she dashed to the aircraft’s open door. Dog ran at her side, surging ahead and leaping aboard without need of the stairs.
“Close the door!” she snapped at the pilot as she rushed into the cabin.
“What’s wrong?” Joe asked, peering through the windscreen with a worried look.
The Russian stared at her a moment, then did as ordered. Rachel didn’t relax her grip on the rifle until the locking lever was in place.
“How’s John?” she asked before Joe could inquire about her dramatic entrance.
“Unconscious. He’s in a lot of pain. Did you find some blood?”
Rachel stared at John’s unmoving form. Mavis lay next to him, clinging tightly. She was wide awake, big eyes watching them.
“Rachel,” Joe said softly, touching her arm.
She turned to him and he winced after trying to frown at the haunted expression on her face.
“What happened out there?”
“Here,” she said, thrusting the plastic bag with the child’s fingers into his hands. “Will this work?”
Joe held the bag up to examine the contents, going still when he saw what she’d handed him.
“These are a child’s fingers,” he said softly.
Rachel nodded but didn’t offer any explanation.
“What’s with the nails?”
Rachel took a deep breath, considering shutting down Joe’s questions and pushing him to get to work. Then thought better of it and quickly told him what she’d seen.
“I think that may be what happened to Chapman’s Marines. They came under attack from a jet or a helicopter and bailed out because they couldn’t outrun an aircraft in a Hummer.”
“You mean these kids got them?”
