Dead Last (Vol. 1): Dead Last

by Quaranta, Marc

  "What is it?" Scott asked him.

  Dan sat down at the computer and read a message to us.

  "Dan, thank you for your post. Me and my family really appreciate somebody like you reaching to help out frightened strangers. We haven't come across too many good people in the last month. Not since this all started."

  Haylea and I couldn't believe that somebody messaged him back.

  "I am from South Bend, Indiana. My family and I heard about a large group of people at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in the middle of downtown Indianapolis. Rumor has it that there is a refugee came inside the arena. People have set up a safe place there. We are going to head down there right away."

  "However, if we find that the camp is no longer there, it is nice to know that people like you exist and maybe we'll take you up on your offer. Thank you, Dan. God Bless and good luck."

  Dan started typing back another message, but I stopped him, "What are you doing?"

  "I'm just wishing him good luck as well."

  I let him go and watched him send the message.

  "I don't believe somebody responded that quickly."

  "Bankers Life Fieldhouse? Why haven't we heard anything about that?" Scott asked.

  "Well it hasn't really been on the TV," I said back.

  "You think it's true?" Haylea asked me.

  "I don't know. It might be perfect timing. If it's real, we can go there."

  "What about WTIX?" Dan asked. He hadn't been around for our other conversation.

  "We can't stay here forever, Dan," was all I said.

  "I just don't know if I believe it. It's about an hour away. Can we risk that far of a trip to come to find it was never real," Haylea wisely said.

  "It's real."

  Jack was standing behind Scott and Haylea. They turned to him. We all acted normal, except for Dan. He seemed to be a little more uncomfortable around Jack than he used to be now that he knew Jack was a killer. Dan always wanted to be an actor but wasn't doing a great job of acting like he didn't know anything about Jack.

  "How do you know?" Haylea asked.

  "I saw it."

  "You saw it?"

  "Yea, there is some sort of monitor back there that has a camera over Indianapolis. I saw people heading there."

  "The Tower Cam," Haylea and I both said at the same time.

  We quickly moved around the desk and headed to the news department. I could hear the others following behind us. We moved around the cubicles and got to the ENG station. I looked at all the buttons and switchers and tried to find the right way to route the Tower Cam onto the monitor.

  I figured it out and pushed in the right code. I routed RX-25 into 0255 and in a quick second the camera was on the monitor. There weren't any people. Downtown was completely empty. There were a couple of small fires. Cars were flipped over and broken down. The windows to several stores and offices were cracked and shattered. But there were no people. We turned around to see that Jack was hoping we would be seeing more people.

  "I'm telling you there were people down there. Dozens, if not hundreds."

  "I don't believe you," Haylea said.

  "Why would I lie about that?"

  "Why wouldn't you tell us about it when you first saw it? If you saw people down there, don't you think you should have told somebody about it."

  "No!" he responded with passion.

  "No?" Haylea couldn't believe him.

  "That's right. No. For the same reason that Dan shouldn't have posted a message on Facebook. We don't know what outside people are capable of. We can't trust any of them. We can't keep counting on the outside to save us. We need to save us."

  "We need to tell the others," Haylea suggested.

  "What? Are you even listening to me?" Jack said.

  "No."

  Haylea's response made the hair on my arms stand up. It was short and abrupt.

  "This may be an opportunity to find more people and start a new life. They may have answers. We need to tell the others about this. Maybe they'll want to go."

  I thought about it for a moment. There were times when I disagreed with Haylea because Jack made more sense. In that moment, I honestly could say that Jack was right. We had no idea what anyone outside was capable of. We may get down there and there may be a group of people that made the whole thing up that just want to get supplies. It might be a trap. But Jack was a murderer and I wasn't going to agree with a damn thing he said, but, more importantly, I wasn't going to disagree with my fiancé anymore.

  "Let's get everyone together. Meeting in ten minutes," I said.

  LV

  Haylea Meyers

  I f the power is going to go out, I don't want to be around here when it happens.

  I went around the west side of the building and Kurt went to the east side. We gathered everybody around, back to the usual meeting area next to the kitchen, to talk about what we had seen on Dan's Facebook.

  As usual, Kurt started everything off. He said that's it's been a very hectic few days, but he failed to realize that some of the hectic things hadn't been brought to the rest of the group's attention so he quickly changed things up by saying they weren't as bad as the weeks before.

  Everyone seemed to be in pretty high spirits today. It was good to see. Janet and Barry were hand in hand. I found myself staring at their hands clasped together. They had such a strong bond between the two of them that, obviously, couldn't be broken. I thought about how much she does for him. Spelling everything out for him, signing every little word, filling him in on everything he can't hear. It must have been a hectic job, but she never seemed to mind doing it.

  While most people seemed to be doing better, Frank was not one of them. He stood with blank eyes and his arm around Reggie's shoulder. He was there in the room, but I don't think he was ever there. We could have run any idea by Frank and he would probably agree to go along with it never knowing what he was agreeing to.

  Molly wasn't taking part in the meeting, either. She was in the back room with the kids. She never took part in a lot of group discussions, but ever since Joe died, she stopped taking part in anything. Heather had to bring her food and water. Heather had to make sure she was getting enough sleep and that the kids were taken care of. Heather was now the babysitter for not only the four of them, but also Molly, herself.

  Kurt took a break from speaking to the group. He was just about to get to the part about the Tower Cam and Bankers Life Fieldhouse, but I didn't want him to always be the one that people were leaning on. He was right before. It wasn't that he was always wanting to lead, but he did it because nobody else would.

  "Listen, guys," I began. I could see Kurt's face sprout up when he saw I was going to take the podium. "Dan sent out a Facebook message about our location."

  "You did what?" Travis shot him an angry pair of eyes.

  "No, it's okay. It may actually help us."

  "Or kill us."

  "Travis, stop. Somebody replied and said that there is a large group inside Bankers Life Fieldhouse downtown. It could be the army, some sort of military. They've created a safe environment."

  "How do we know this guy wasn't just lying to get us out of the building?" Jenny surprisingly asked. Her liveliness almost gave her the appearance of being smarter.

  "I saw people on the Tower Cam," Jack spoke up.

  "He said he saw dozens of them heading to the arena."

  "Well let's go look at the Tower Cam," Travis said.

  "It's pointless. Everybody is gone. The streets are empty," Jack said.

  "Let's look again."

  "Trust me. No one is there," Jack said sternly.

  "And that may be because everybody is inside the arena. It may be safe."

  I looked over to Kurt who was no longer taking part in the discussion. He had pulled Emily over to the side and was having a private conversation with her. The only guess I had was that it had something to do with Sam and his health. Kurt had told me the other night that Sam wasn't getting any better. He
was still bleeding internally and losing strength.

  "The thing is," Jack began, "We don't have enough room in the vans to get everyone down there at once."

  "Oh, so you guys go and you never come back for us?" Travis panicked already.

  "That's not going to happen, Travis," I said.

  "Then I'm going with--Jenny and I are going with."

  "That's fine. Come with. But as I was saying before I was interrupted," Jack tightened his beady eyes in Travis' direction. People were so easily intimidated by him. "Not everyone is going to be able to go. We'll have a group go to Bankers Life and a group stays here. If they find that the place is safe, they'll come back for us."

  "They?" I looked at him.

  "Yea, I'm not going," Jack said. "And if you ask me, it's a big mistake."

  "Well, I am. Anyone else that wants to go can. So, who is in?"

  The group began looking around to one another. Everyone was waiting for somebody else to make the first move. As of right now, it was Travis, Jenny, Kurt, and myself that were going, but I was hoping for more. Travis and Jenny weren't going to be much help. We needed more people.

  "Look, I know that some of you--"

  A scream interrupted my thought process. It was a loud scream. A yell. A cry. It was like a dozen people all simultaneously dragged their nails on a chalkboard. When it was over, the air was sucked out of the room. Nobody spoke. Nobody breathed. We waited for something. Anything.

  Heather came sprinting down the hall. I never noticed that she had walked off from the meeting, but then again, I didn't care what she did. She wasn't on a list of people to pay attention to. In fact, she was dead last.

  She was running on her last breath. Her face was red and her tears falling down her face. There was blood all over her T-shirt. A group of us walked over to her. We would have run, but as fast as she was moving, she broke the distance between us. A step or two before she got to us, she fell to her knees and started crying hysterically.

  "What happened?" Kurt yelled.

  "Is this your blood, Heather?" Emily asked.

  She couldn't answer. She just shook her head. She tried to point, but her arms were weak and limp. She finally managed to hold her thumb in the direction back by the Master Control area.

  Everyone took off running. I stared at Heather for a few more moments. I didn't know what I was feeling. I was numbed and had no words for the way she looked. Her face was a full shade of red brighter than anyone's I'd ever seen before. Her eyes were so swollen and puffy that they were probably an inch further out from her face. After I took in how horrible of a look she had on her face, I ran after them.

  I got to Master Control, but there was nobody there. I looked down the hall and saw the whole group standing at a doorway. Down from Master Control there was an empty room that workers had been working on. It used to be filled with cubicles, boxes, old computers, and everything else that we didn't use, but they were finally turning it into a room that would be useful.

  We were using it as the room for Molly, Joe, and the students to sleep in. I ran after them. They were looking at something. All of the color in each one of their faces had been sucked out. They were nothing but white ghosts now. I pushed past them, which was like moving stiff mannequins, to see what they saw.

  I got to the front of the group and I could feel the blood escape my face. My legs lost all feeling and my fingers went numb. The tingle felt like small staples being forced into my skin, taken out, and then forced back in. I tried to take a breath in, but only a small, lifeless noise of what breathing shouldn't sound like came out.

  Just like Heather before, I fell to my knees and put my hands over my mouth. What we had just seen in that room was enough to drop anyone to their knees. Kurt and Jack were both speechless. Neither one of them moved. Kurt was frozen still and Jack's weight gave out and he fell onto the wall. He slid down until he was with me on the ground. I looked over to him and he stared at me with bland, hopeless eyes.

  This was a sign to me. We needed to get out more than anything or else we would all end up dead.

  I looked back to the horror. There was so much blood that had already stained the carpet. Molly took her own life. There were slits on her wrists and blood trickling down onto the floor. I don't want to sound like a horrible person, because I know how sad death is, but the real tragedy was a few feet to the right.

  The bodies of four kids were lying next to Molly's blood ridden corpse. The four students that she brought into this building the day of the outbreak were all lying next to her. Dead. No blood on them, but they weren't breathing. Their skin was pale and cold.

  LVI

  Emily Clark

  S ome things in this world are hard to understand. There are certain tragedies that are hard to come to grips with. It's not easy for us, complex human beings, to deal with the unexpected. The unpredictable. While the death of an elderly person is never easy, it is easy to understand. That is the way the world is supposed to work. Be born, live life, die old.

  But when somebody takes their own life, it's hard to understand. It's hard to put yourself in that person's shoes. Could life have been so terrible that they really needed to end their life? I guess Molly could never come back from Joe's death. She saw him die in front of her very eyes. It wasn't a pleasant way to go, either. She saw Seth put a piece of medal into the side of his neck.

  What's worse than suicide? Seeing children die. It's not the way the world is supposed to go. It's not the way life is supposed to go. We are buried by our young. It should never be the other way around.

  I closed the door to the room that Molly and the kids were lying in so that nobody would have to look in there anymore. I did the best that I could do at figuring out what exactly happened in that room. It was clear that Molly slit her wrists, but I wasn't quite sure what happened to the kids, at first.

  I came around the corner to where the group sat in silence. Everybody was sitting together, now. This wasn't a time for somebody to go sit in a corner by themselves. This was a time of togetherness. We needed to lean on each other, but more importantly, we needed to understand what had happened. Even Frank and Reggie were involved with this meeting. Everyone was involved...except Sam.

  "So?" Kurt walked over to me. He whispered to me like he wanted to keep things between us, but I wasn't going to do that. Everyone had a right to know. Not just Kurt Elkins and me.

  "One of the pillows in the room was very damp in the center like somebody had been drooling on it all night."

  "What does that mean?" asked Heather who was still so shaken up.

  "It means that before Molly took her own life, she suffocated the kids with the pillow. She killed them...and then once they were dead, she cut her wrists."

  Heather shut her eyes and walked away. She fell into one of the chairs in the kitchen and put her head down and started crying. Nobody walked over there to comfort her. Nobody was in the mood to comfort anyone. We were all flustered by what we'd seen.

  "It's the air. The air got to her. It's the air," Travis began stuttering. He wasn't speaking clearly, but was putting sentences together.

  "It wasn't the air. Relax," Jack spoke up from the edge of the kitchen.

  "Look at this! Look what she did! She was crazy. The air made her crazy!"

  "Nobody's crazy," Jack said.

  "The air makes people sick. Infected. Not crazy," I reminded everyone.

  "It doesn't do anything to anyone," Jack said.

  I noticed Jack and Kurt shared a look. I wasn't able to describe the kind of look they shared, but I think they were hiding something. Jack looked intent on doing something while Kurt didn't look so confident.

  "At least, it doesn't do anything anymore," Jack finished.

  "What are you talking about?" Haylea asked.

  "When Emily, Kurt, Frank, and I were coming back from the hospital, something happened to Kurt."

  "What?" Haylea looked really upset.

  I was afraid of this informati
on getting out...but it had to.

  "It's okay, Hay," Kurt said. "Frank was beginning to get upset. He was starting to doubt this new world and if we even have a purpose living in it. I had to do something. I had to prove to Frank that we were going to make it--that we are going to make it."

  "What'd you do, Kurt?" Haylea asked concerned.

  "I went outside, outside of the van, and took my mask off. I took in a deep breath."

  "What? Why the hell would you do that?" Haylea shot to higher levels of anger.

  "Frank has a son. I wasn't about to let what happened to Molly happen to Frank and Reggie. He needed proof that we were going to make it."

  "Proof? So, your proof is to kill yourself?"

  "I'm still alive. I've shown absolutely no signs of infection. The air isn't a problem anymore. Whatever it was, it's gone now. It...it evaporated."

  "You can't be sure of that," Jenny said.

  "I am sure of it. I'm not sick. Reggie is not sick. None of us are sick."

  "Sam is sick," I heard Heather talk about my husband like they were best friends.

  "Sam got sick early on. None of us are going to get that way," Kurt explained.

  "This is ridiculous. We need to isolate him," Travis suggested with demand.

  "You touch him and you'll be the one begging for isolation," Haylea stepped in front of Kurt.

  "Would you all shut up!" Jack shouted. "Kurt is fine. Nothing is wrong with the air. That's not the problem anymore!"

  "Yes, it is!"

  "We have to isolate him. Travis is right," Jenny agreed with her dumb boyfriend.

  "Oh, fuck this," Jack said.

  Jack pulled his gun out and all of us collectively held our breaths for a moment. The thought of Jack pulling the trigger on Kurt, I think, crossed all of our minds, but that thought was put to rest when he walked past Kurt.

  Jack pointed the gun at one of the top windows and pulled the trigger. The pop of the gun echoed throughout the building. Jenny and Heather quickly covered their ears.

  The glass shattered on impact and fell to the ground. He moved his sight about three feet to the left and shot again. Breaking two windows at the top of the glass wall. The air was freely flowing throughout the building now. We were going to be breathing it in for as long as we lived in this building.