Genesis Virus

by Pinto, Daniel

  She cranes her neck out the window, “help,” the incessant roaring of engines and honking drowns her voice out and alarmingly adds to her confusion. From outside the car, she looks like another road-rage driver swearing her head off.

  “Keep breathing.”

  Blood runs down from the corners of Benjamin’s mouth and she looks back longingly into the outside world. “Help.” The word comes out in a mousy inflection. She slants her torso out the rolling car; the seatbelt is sideways, cutting into her flat belly. Benjamin’s eyes are white and he’s savagely convulsing again, his wrists are disjointed and his arms flop into everything as if they have no bones and are light as air. Coffee cup swirls outside, rearview mirror turns, and the radio is flipped to maximum.

  The incoherent sounds he makes come out like a person with a swollen tongue trying to argue. Streaks of blood flow down Benjamin’s window and the rearview mirror flies into her waxed eyebrow, knocking her shades outside. She closes her eyes, excruciating pain surges up and down her body, her bleeding face bobbles at the end of her neck like bait on a fishing lure out of the window, and her vision’s bumpy at best.

  “Hold on.” She honks the horn, it’s long and piercing, she puts the car in park, it jerks. She opens the door, shifts a thumb onto the seatbelt release latch while looking at Benjamin, his hands are stiff and bent in angles hard to look at. Bewilderment concerning the heavyset man’s newfound agility and aggression is on the bottom of her list of concerns. Her bowels constrict and hold like the feeling of riding a quick starting elevator to the unknown. Her mind’s loud and chaotic, a crammed kitchen serving full capacity with no one in sight to save the day.

  The passenger door is methodically swinging ajar, the horn sounds spent. Gripping the windowsill she focuses solely on the crash tableau in front, then from nowhere a police zombie dives into her lap and jolts up for her young chiseled jawline. She oscillates her sweaty face, straining her neck away with a hand extending for the door, in doing so her head rings off Benjamin’s head, and the collision is as loud as an old clock striking twelve. Her world becomes black.

  Benjamin’s face collides into his window and he spits out clumpy blood and saliva. The cop zombie has cracked chain-smoking lips, if he screamed, they will split in two. She shivers at the sight of the man and automatically puts the car back into drive, more zombies rise from the ground, all the helpers, official and unofficial. United in a new cause.

  She rotates in her seat to face the zombie, pulls on the steering wheel and her headrest at the same time and kicks a bare heel downward at the police zombie, on the second kick it opens wide and her calve is flayed open by the zombie’s top row of teeth. A burning sensation cripples her resolve, and she barely side-knees the zombie in the mouth, it licks her gash, and its sweat burns the cut like hydrogen peroxide. She bangs the door to a close as best she can over and over into the zombie’s shoulder blades, their eyes meet for an eternity...firm and steady gaze, unreadable eyes of birds of prey…she slams the door and this time the zombie tumbles lower as it reaches for her bloody thighs and slips. Blood makes the best lubricant.

  Another vehicle pushes into the driver’s door. Her right shoulder pushes her door open; rejuvenated zombies are rolling on the ground in deadly embrace with the first responders and the second on steamy concrete.

  The police zombie is still clinging to the carpet lining of the car floor, so she grabs the door handle, it catches the wind, yanking her out halfway out the car, the seatbelt straps cut into her abdomen and her shirt stretches two sizes too big for her.

  She hangs over the zombie as she outstretches for the door, it bites upward for her face like an alligator jumping up for a person crossing a rope bridge. She flexes her stomach obliques and closes the door out of breath; the zombie’s head is now pinned by the door, its eyes bulging, and its teeth cracking off into her naked toes. Blood stings her left eye shut.

  “Now what?”

  She becomes light-headed, holding the steering wheel with one hand, the door with the other, and a foot on the gas. The line on the speedometer swings to the side in an instant. A sleepy hand lets go of the door, her face rests on the steering wheel like a pillow, she accelerates with the door fully open, and the police zombie flies back into her back tire pulverizing him into the asphalt like chalk. The Curio violently shakes as if it’s driving down a hill made entirely of logs. She drives through two more civilian zombies, swipes a cop in the hip, and ultimately swerves right smack into the stationary fire truck’s taillight. Both of her blue eyes are fully alert again, the car door window shatters, she spits out chucks of dense glass, more roll down her sweaty back. The door bends in an obtuse angle and a firefighter jumps high on the side of his truck, dodging the car with the lift of his legs. The car up ahead shudders to the side and hubcaps frisbee their way off the side of the freeway and ricochet off of car windshields down below.

  The news chopper in the sky dips its nose and hovers over the Curio. Her car is a scampering rat in the light looking for the safety of its home; she crashes her way onto the freeway shoulder, Benjamin’s tossing around like a rock in a can. The car rubs up against the partition from the freefall, metal squeals like nails on a chalkboard, causing her to clench her teeth and the door to fly away like a kite.

  “Benjamin, are you still with me?” She wipes her face with her T-shirt, making it worst, so she opens the glove department and wipes her eyes with the travel size tissues still in the plastic.

  “Aw fuck…why in the hell…I think I just killed a cop…everyone saw it was in self-defense.”

  Benjamin’s chin falls to his chest; air speedily bubbles out like a flat tire. A paralyzing feeling like being hit with a cold shower seizes all her nerves. Benjamin ceases entirely and looks peaceful for once. People look in disbelief at her driving over the trash on the freeway shoulder. Some honk at her out of jealously and others out of principal.

  “Wake up.” She rubs the crick in her neck.

  She cursorily taps the man’s freezing skin as if testing if it’s too hot to handle. On the next tap, Benjamin seizes her hand and comes back to life. She screams in his face making it worst for herself. He grabs her ponytail and wrestles with her for her left hand, as she pulls her hand the car mimics and sways to the left then to the right, scratching paint off the sides and shattering the headlights. Other drivers get out of their cars and look at each other then back at the disfigured Curio. She lets go of the steering wheel, drives with her knees, and with the help of both hands and an upward thrust she swiftly pulls her hand back from the ironclad death grip like it’s wedged under a boulder.

  Benjamin laps up the blood on his window like a man dying of thirst in the desert. Her face blossoms red and her toes sink deep, curling under themselves and into the car’s pedals. The semblance of life within Benjamin yet the absence of the old-self, flummoxes her to the point of temporary insanity. She rubs the dashboard up and down, as if trying to find the off switch to this, screaming in her head as her hair vacuums up and out of the window.

  “…Benjamin…”

  The man conjures up an athleticism he would of killed to have. Screws shoot into the backseat with a force from built-up pressure and the driver’s seat unsettlingly rocks side-to-side like a creaky horse seesaw, the zombie’s hand comes a hand length from her eyes. She stiff arms him and throttles the zombie, crushing his windpipe, holding him back like a lion tamer. Guilt floods her head for a second. The zombie slaps her neck and she flinches into the ghost window in a delay reaction. Bear claw marks are strewn from her chin to collar bone. She tries to remember the moment she woke up today, she did right? She lets out a scream only to be hit in the throat with the ball end of his wrist, taking away her right to express her fear. Her head’s driven back and this time the freeway wall burns the side of her forehead then propels her back into the arms of the zombie. “Ahh.”

  The irritable zombie wants all of her and gnaws at the seatbelt across her chest.

  One of
the zombie’s hands pierces through one of the slots in his steering wheel, the high beams are shining bright and the windshield wipers are coming and going with long pauses. The zombie hyperextends his left arm, as the arm almost achieves a full rotation with the wheel until the powering steering rewinds the wheel to the starting position, cracking all the bones in Benjamin’s shoulder. Meanwhile, the young woman has been watching the broken arm and turning the wheel in the opposite direction proactively, succeeding only in not driving off the freeway in a suicide/murder attempt. Down below is the mundane and she misses it like a lost childhood never to be relived.

  She holds the zombie back with a thumb lodged in his eye, a trail of blood leaks onto his white starched collar. Matching each other’s intensity, the car is exponentially gaining speed to the loss of blood. Pleasure is a drug and pain is the cure for it. She honks and cars obey, moving as far left as possible. Traffic hasn’t changed, it’s as if she hasn’t moved from the incident of the accident. She thinks: I can’t get out my door for miles, I could stop and get out through the back door and break the back window if I have to, he’s trapped. This road leads to death.

  With the right hand she shoves the driving manual into the instructor’s mouth and pushes his head back, she looks at the back window and unsnaps her seatbelt. Out of nowhere, the Curio comes to a hard stop, her entire body flies forward into sturdy plastic and the zombie releases the brake.

  The car travels at 5 mph. She wakes up, knowing she wasn’t unconscious for only a second and it couldn’t have been longer than a day, traffic is her constant, in a dimmer daylight.

  A laceration is just above her hairline; she pokes at it and with a wondering hand goes to put the car in drive. She feels a gust of wind within the car reminiscent to hot breath on her neck. In her cone of vision, she finally sees the driver zombie open and close his mouth, her heart stops, she wants to move as it happens, but it’s so fast like seeing a glass teacup fall from the edge of the table and are powerless to react. Eyes are curse to witness the horrible, not to stop it. A primeval fear light-speeds back and forth through the walls of her brain.

  Seeing the man in the car, it all came back to her a millisecond too late. The zombie slurps down half her ring finger with its pink nail, in its mouth in erotic excitement, smacking its lips. A reservoir of adrenaline dissipates as quickly as it arrived, pain awakens a distant memory inside of her. Inordinate of blood pumps out of the man’s mouth, he spews his severed tongue; it sticks to the windshield like a wet sponge. Blood fills the craters in the man’s face, giving him rouge colored cheeks.

  She turns in place as if restrained by a straitjacket. She slips her bloody mangled hand against the center console, the radio blares at maximum. Will I become his progeny?

  Watching him watch her.

  All the blood rushes to her core as a safety precaution like in hypothermia, then fires back out in milliseconds, repowering her limbs. First she bites down on her seatbelt, reaches for the center console, holds her breath and presses her torn ring finger into the glowing red car cigarette lighter. It makes a sound like fresh meat falling on a hot pan.

  She twists and writhes exactly like the zombie moments earlier. Flabby dead arms fly over her head. The pulsing vein between her brows is engorged; her teeth grind over and over. Her heels feel like putty slamming into the metal floor.

  “…Damnit.” Tears wash lines of blood off her face.

  The zombie swings its head like a lever towards her, she jams the cigarette lighter through the zombie’s right eye, and then hammer fists her pain into the zombie’s eye, hoping he feels her suffering. “Die.” She forgets about driving and whops the zombie’s head into the steering wheel.

  The skin over her finger and the zombie’s eye is completely shut and dried out, blacken and smelling of coals in a pit on a cold winter night.

  She takes in a dozen breaths within a minute, overloading her brain with oxygen, nostrils dilating and eyes zapping left-to-right like a pendulum. She retakes the wheel in defiance rather than safety.

  The zombie bobs its head with an unnatural speed, blurring it’s face. She regains 20/20 vision and keeps both eyes on the man as she reaches under her seat, the car jumps five feet then five more, then rises to about 20 mph. Not her doing. The Curio has no side mirrors or rearview mirror, but two reckless drivers.

  Encapsulated in her own tomb and knowing how she will die. She has always been apathetic to the apotheosis of anything, especially the church. If she drove through one, would it help? She has a sickening feeling, she will never be happy again even after bearing witness to reanimation and the worst part is; she has wasted so many happy days due to pettiness.

  Her fear has no bounds like the universe, but so does her willpower. “Yaaa.”

  She side-jabs Benjamin’s cheek with his business pen, wriggling it in all directions, creating a red cross. The nape of the zombie’s neck is stricken red and the levy of blood is about to break through. The steering wheel judders in her firm grasp, a thin trail of smoke seeps through the slits in the hood. “Don’t die.”

  She ducks under a monkey swing, turns her torso, knees remaining straight, and upraises a new pen like a tomahawk, jams the black pen with a metal triangle tip, into the man’s carotid artery. Halfway in, blood gushes out in a downward stream from his neck, velocity of a violent sneeze. The blood gets in her mouth and nose; her body thinks it’s drowning. She blindly jams the pen into the man’s dark lumpy bag under his left eye. Both are losing blood and both do not care. His blood creates a rippling velvet curtain against his window. She can only see clearly ahead through her side of the windshield and out right to the inviting freefall death. Outside highway trash has been flying into her door-less side, compiling on her lap and feet.

  She drives on through the last stretch of traffic, amazed at his tenacity, minus eyes, blood, and no soul.

  She sweeps her hand in the glove department, grabbing the last thing, lodged deep into the corner.

  “I should have did this from the beginning.” Her toes are cold and webbed together by blood.

  She repeatedly jackhammers a thin screwdriver into the zombie’s growling mouth it makes contact like an icepick going through a solid block of ice. Teeth bounce off glass like tiny hail before the storm. A gurgling sound from within the undead bullhorns its way into her eardrum as the two heads almost become one. The zombie opens wide and a ball of teeth are cutting into the back of the zombie’s throat. She wants to mount his lap and rip his fucking head off, but instead she stabs him in the heart, his head lowers, and she puts her seatbelt on and races for the exit. “That should do it.”

  Passing three red lights and slamming on the dead brakes, maintaining ludicrous speed, she succeeds only in keeping the dead instructor alive. Is he smiling?

  Painted red, her face and arms look like some ancient Aztec warrior after a human sacrifice ceremony. People in their cars around her shriek away from her and the beast she’s controlling. Her shirt’s dampen into her skin in the back, her ribs are extenuated and the only armor she has left. Each time she yells to warn drivers, her teeth look porcelain white contrasted against her blood-caked skin. She’s weaving past old ladies in old cars and hipsters in even older cars, unconsciously moving her entire body with each turn hoping it helps. The seatbelts forms fresh lash marks on her belly.

  A cop on a clunky motorcycle says. “Pull over.”

  The police siren breaks up a path in the distance. She pumps on the brakes in a futile effort; quickly glances at the emergency brake and sees an image of her immediate future of the zombie eating her thumb this time. Make yourself small like a ball.

  The Curio is maintaining a top speed of 50 mph racing towards trees. The cop swings for her through the door opening; she can see the reflection in his shades of the zombie doing the same thing. Trapped in the middle of two pissed off men, she leans forward against the wheel dodging both.

  She hears the man siting next to her in a mellifluous tone say, “it
hurts, get me to a hospital...I don’t want to die.” She focuses on the zombie that’s gurgling and hissing, not the teacher. A car up ahead is coming head-on towards her, the honking is an alarm clock, she tugs away from it, clipping her police officer. He slides in the middle of the street. Smoke from her hood billows up and beyond. Wayward skid marks are following her. The skin inside of her mouth is dry and raw from screaming in attempt to save the lives around her, if only they would listen.

  The Curio hops the curb; she forcefully bounces up twice, hitting her head on the car roof, speeding through the line of ducks. A man throws a loaf of bread into the windshield, and she screams louder than the honking. Beats on the horn some more, her palm is numb and blue, the horn excites the zombie in the rattling seat and it terrifies the group of kids shakily rollerblading alongside the trail trying to keep up with the adults. The car comes down a hill ramming through a portable barbeque pit, empty white chairs, and pulls away from a dog barking beside it.

  She doubts she could ever sleep after this, if she had the chance, she’s definitely going to prison where her kind is the perfect jailbait. If I don’t kill a kid or a dog I might get off easy with life.

  Her stomach is in her throat, she braces her hands against the roof of the car, and there’s no sound only the steering wheel slamming into her sore breasts. Her world is inverted; the blue of the sky and of the lake is one giant color blob as she flies through the air.

  The zombie’s chipped teeth rake the skin off in a strip on her left shoulder midair over the calm lake. The car hit the hill fast before the lake and comes down just as fast like a slung arrow. A giant splash, a tall pillar of water, then silence.

  Floodgates are open. Lights die…wipers cease…car is one with the water. Flying in a black sky in the daytime, the car stands erect and determined to see what’s at the bottom, a deadweight sinking into the expansive waters. She’s ascending Jacob’s Ladder to heaven with Benjamin holding onto it.