From the living room he can hear the television. The sound can’t quite drown out his mother’s crying or his dad trying to console her. Dad has been in here every fifteen minutes or so since they got home. As though to make sure Dan doesn’t suddenly disappear. Their only remaining child.
Dan feels a lump forming in his throat at the thought of Jennie. She was the hardest part telling their parents about. Seeing their faces crumble as they received the news just made everything worse—more real, somehow. The possibility of all this being a dream fell away when Dan saw his parents burst into tears. Nightmares don’t affect other people.
He still can’t grasp it. He can’t imagine a world without Jennie. How could he? He has never seen a world without her. She’s been here since before Dan was born. And now she’s lying on a table somewhere.
He pushes that image out of his mind. It doesn’t exactly help him to fall asleep.
Wonder what the doctors will say once they examine the many corpses? What will they even find? If the zombies were animated by some voodoo magic, will there even be a virus in the bodies? On the other hand, if there’s no virus, then how were they able to contaminate others?
The answers will surely come within the next days. Once everything returns back to normal. Smart people will get on television and explain it all. How it could have happened, what went down and how it was all stopped in the last second.
Will people ever know how close the world came to ending? Will Dan be recognized as one of the people responsible for stopping it? Will some people even come to see him as a hero?
He sure doesn’t feel like one. A hero would probably have saved the world and his sister.
His eyes tear up once again, but Dan is too tired to cry; he simply doesn’t have the strength, and finally, his thoughts begin to drift further away as sleep comes sweeping like a freeing darkness, pulling him down deeper and deeper.
Dan sleeps as the evening grows dimmer outside his window. He doesn’t notice how the door to his room is opened a few times, as his dad’s face, eyes all red and puffy, peeks in and then disappears again.
Dan doesn’t dream. His sleep is too deep for that.
But an image nonetheless makes its way into his consciousness. Now, as his brain finally relaxes, the memories are loosened up and that thing that kept bugging him gradually floats to the surface and materializes.
It’s a cat. A black cat.
“Whiskers,” Dan breathes, not waking up, but turning his head jerkily from side to side. “It was the cat …”
A part of Dan’s subconscious recognizes the message, and it tries waking up Dan, but his body is simply too exhausted to obey. Instead, he slips further down, his muscles relaxing, and his sleep turns calm again.
NINETEEN
Paul is jerked awake abruptly. He blinks and looks around in the darkness. It takes him a few seconds to remember where he is and what woke him up. Did someone call his name? Or was that just a dream?
“Paul …”
The voice is Irene’s. She’s lying next to him, her blanket halfway on the floor, her skin glistening with sweat. She’s frowning and turning her head. “Paul, watch out …”
“Irene,” he croaks. “You’re dreaming, sweetheart.”
His wife doesn’t wake up, but keeps whispering incoherently in her sleep. He reaches over and shakes her gently. Still, she doesn’t awaken. Her skin is flaming hot. Could it be a fever?
Paul sits up with a sigh. It’s stifling hot in the bedroom, even though the window is open all the way. The summer sure is merciless this year. But this night feels even hotter than the many previous ones. Paul gets the silly notion that it’s Irene giving off heat and raising the temperature in the room even further. Ridiculous, of course.
“Please, watch out, Paul,” she whimpers.
He sits up and looks over at her nightstand. The pills are right next to a glass of water, but he remembers her taking them before they went to sleep, so it can’t be the chemo bothering her. They’ve had many sleepless nights since she started the second round of treatment, but fever has never been one of the things tormenting her. He reaches over and takes the glass.
“Irene, drink some water, you’ll feel better.”
He tries putting the glass to her lip, but she thrusts her head sideways, hitting the glass with her chin and causing him to spill most of the water over her neck and chest.
“Ah, goddamnit,” he moans.
To his astonishment, though, the splashing water doesn’t wake up his wife.
He notices her hand, lying restlessly on her stomach. It’s swollen like a rubber glove full of air, the fingers thick as hot dogs, and—doesn’t the skin look weird? It’s hard to tell in the darkness, and Paul isn’t wearing his glasses, but he’s pretty sure Irene’s hand is greenish.
His eyes fall on the Band-Aid a few inches above her wrist.
What did she say happened? Whiskers scratched her, I think.
That stupid cat. Paul has never trusted it. Had it been up to him, that cat would have been put down a long time ago. He would even have been happy to do it himself, using his old hunting rifle. But Irene loved that arrogant little beast, so …
He recalls her complaining about the scratch marks itching before they went to bed. She cleaned it thoroughly using hydrogen peroxide, like she used to do back when the kids were small and would fall and scrape their knees. So the scratch marks couldn’t have been infected—could they? Maybe some resistant bacteria got in when Whiskers scratched her. God only knows what that nasty animal might have had its claws in. A dead bird, probably.
The Band-Aid seems to be bulging a little. Paul grabs her twitching arm and pulls off the Band-Aid carefully. He lets out a gasp as he looks at what is no longer a harmless scratch, but a throbbing, oozing boil.
“Bloody hell,” he snarls, jumping out of bed. “Wake up, Irene! We gotta get you to the ER!”
“No, Paul,” she whispers, and for a moment he thinks she’s awake, but when he looks at her face, her eyes are still closed. Her demeanor is calmer now, like she’s falling into a deeper sleep. “Watch out, Paul,” is the last thing she says, before falling silent.
He stands there, looking at her for a moment. He’s not sure why, but he’s struck by a sense of grief. The thought of everything she’s been through this past year. First it was the cancer, and now this traumatic experience with the policeman sawing off his own leg right outside in their shack. The thought that Irene had to see that … It took the police most of the evening to get everything cleaned up, after they had taken pictures and done tests and whatnot. Paul is not sure he’ll ever be able to go in to the shack again without thinking about that.
And now this … some infection in her hand which probably got a hold of her because her immune system is already weakened by the cancer treatment.
Paul turns and strides into the living room, looking for his phone. But he can’t find it anywhere. Then he remembers he brought it into the bedroom. He usually never does that, but he wanted to be sure he heard it in case the police called them.
He walks back through the house, brooding. The thought of going to the ER in the middle of the night doesn’t exactly make him ecstatic, but he doesn’t want to take any risks concerning Irene’s health, so they have to—
He stops abruptly as he almost bumps into Irene, who is standing in the open bedroom door, her eyes closed, her body swaying uncertainly.
“Irene?” he asks. “I think you’re sleepwalking, dear. Come back to bed, all right? You need to sit down.”
He takes her by the shoulders. As their skin touch, he’s surprised to feel how cold she is. The heat has completely left her body within a few minutes.
Then, just as he’s about to turn her around, Irene opens her eyes wide, and Paul can immediately tell there’s nothing left in those eyes of that woman whom he’s known and loved for most of his life. He just has time to think one last amazed thought: She’s dead.
Then Irene lunges at him.
To be continued …
Day 3—out December 8!
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—Nick
Dead Meat (Book 2): Dead Meat [Day 2] Page 7
