The Imminent Scourge

by J. D. Anderson

  “I think I had her as a freshman.”

  “Anyway… we need to get going…” Dr. Miller tried to lift himself up. He gasped through his teeth in pain and gave up, sliding back down along the tree trunk.

  “Do you need help?” asked Cathy.

  “No, I’m just—” He tried again, with the same result. He began unbuttoning his shirt from the top. “There’s something in my back, or… would you mind taking a look? I think maybe something got jammed in there.”

  He pulled the collar of his shirt down around his shoulder, revealing the top of his neck and back. She leaned down a little. There was a dark wound just where his neck met his shoulder, so he had clearly sustained some sort of injury. She bent lower to get a closer look at it.

  “Yes,” she said, “ I see something.”

  Nearer to it, she saw that it was oval-shaped. There was swelling around its edges. The skin had been torn away. The outline was jagged, like the marks of teeth—

  “You got bitten,” she muttered.

  Dr. Miller’s heavy panting stopped for a moment, and then continued, as though he had needed to hold his breath in order to take this in.

  “Shit,” he spat. “Goddamn it.”

  “It doesn’t look like it’s spread very far,” she said. “Maybe, if you have a knife, we could cut around it…”

  Dr. Miller wrinkled his face in almost a sneer at the idea. “It’s too late,” he said morosely.

  “Can’t we do something about it?”

  Dr. Miller said nothing but reached down to his belt. He undid the snap on a small compartment made out of leather.

  Cathy said, “How do you know how it works? What if it spreads through the skin, or something?”

  Dr. Miller extracted a small white, red, and blue box and placed it on his lap. Then he reached around behind him towards another place on the belt.

  “We’re not far from the road. We can go and wait by the road, and maybe someone will drive by…”

  Dr. Miller pulled his pistol out from behind his back and laid it in his lap next to the box. He opened the box, revealing the butts of a dozen bullets.

  “They could take us to the hospital, and there, you could…”

  Dr. Miller snapped the magazine from the handle, and began putting the bullets in, one by one.

  “But I suppose, you’re probably too weak to walk…”

  “Listen, lady, I don’t know if you’ve ever shot a gun before, but I want you to do me a favor.” He snapped the magazine back into the handle. He pulled back the slide, and then snapped it back in place. He switched off the safety, and then turned the gun, holding it by the muzzle so that he held the handle out toward her.

  “Here.”

  She took the gun from him and held it in her right hand, the weight of it pulling at her arm.

  “I want you to do me the favor of giving me a death with dignity.” He placed his hands in his lap like a child. “Aim it at my temple so that it goes straight through. That way you’ll get my brain—I won’t become one of them. Just one shot.”

  “But, I can’t just kill you…”

  “I’m dead already.”

  “You don’t know that… We could still…”

  “Just hurry up and do it already. I don’t know how much longer I have.”

  She stared at the gun in her hand. She looked carefully at Dr. Miller’s temple, which stared at her, broad and bald, like a clean piece of paper.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Her hand shook. “No,” she muttered. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Don’t make me do it myself!” he shouted. “There isn’t any honor in suicide. And besides, I might miss! You’re the only way.”

  “No,” she said again, quietly. She dropped the gun on the forest floor.

  Dr. Miller looked down at the gun. “I’m trying to protect you!” he said.

  He picked up the gun and thrust it out at her again by the muzzle, his hand shaking. “You don’t have a lot of time left. I’m not going to do it, so you’d better hurry up and do it unless you want me to die and come back as one of those rotting corpses hungry for your—”

  Cathy grasped the gun and held it up, locking her elbows and pointing it at him. Her hands trembled violently.

  “Do it! Hurry up, do it!”

  She fired. The gun almost jumped out of her hands. Dr. Miller uttered a weak cry. She lowered the gun and refocused her vision, and saw that she had hit him in the chest.

  “Goddamn it, you couldn’t even—get that right—”

  She stumbled closer to him, dropping her foot, and fired the gun full in his face, fired it twice, and a third time.

  When she stepped back, she dropped the gun. His face was destroyed. Pieces of bone, flesh, and brain matter had become embedded into the tree bark and spattered the ground surrounding his body. What was left of the head was bent very far back, like a gaping mouth that had overtaken the entire face in mocking laughter.

  She collapsed to her knees on the ground, kneeling by the gun and the headless body. She sat there for a long while, and then she dropped her head to the ground, next to the gun, and drew her elbows in under her body against her knees and curled up her ugly hands underneath her chest. She breathed in the smell of the indifferent forest floor, and listened to the sounds of the birds singing, and the wind rustling in the trees.

  #

  She must have fallen asleep, for when she sat up again, her eyes had the feel of having been closed for a long time, and the sun’s light shown more gently at an angle through the foliage.

  The gun was still there, and the body, and the box of bullets. A name flashed through her mind: Brooke Miller.

  She picked up the box of bullets and the gun. She couldn’t remember how Dr. Miller had ejected the magazine. She fiddled around with the gun for a while, making sure that the safety switch—which she did remember—was engaged as she did so. At last, she released the magazine and pulled it out.

  She had fired four shots. There were six bullets left in the magazine, and six in the box. She took four of the bullets from the box and loaded them into the magazine, reloaded the magazine into the handle, and took the other two bullets and put them in her pocket.

  Then she rose slowly to her feet. Her legs were weak, her feet numb and heavy, and the skin of her legs was tingling. She wiped her brow with the back of the wrist of the hand that held the gun. Her forehead was more greasy than sweaty, and wiping it did little more than spread the grease around.

  She felt as though she should not leave the corpse behind, but she also felt that she must do some good—that she must go back and find Brooke Miller, if she could, in honor of Dr. Miller’s legacy. She felt ill prepared for this mission, of course, but she was armed with a weapon now, and at least some working knowledge of these—things.

  With a certain amount of regret, she turned away from the corpse and retraced their path through the forest. Before long, she made out the structure of the school from between the trees, and at length she emerged from the woods onto the grass field.

  The building stood tall and blank, indifferent and unchanged. There were no signs of anything within or without.

  Judging that her passage would be clear and that she was not being observed, she headed up the hill to the main entrance of the school.

  Away from the hushed ambient noises of the woods, the school grounds were strangely quiet. Her own footsteps seemed very loud, and she thought that if any of them were around, they certainly would hear and begin their pursuit. But none must have heard, for none came running.

  When she reached the main entrance of the school, she stopped and looked in through the dark windows. The main entrance to the main office, and at a right turn was the hallway leading to the gymnasium and the auditorium. All was dark, and there was no motion.

  She tried the door. It was still unlocked.

  She pulled at it gently, trying to make as little noise as possible, and to avoid any sudden movements that might att
ract attention. The door opened smoothly on its hinges, making no noise, and she slipped in, ducking down out of the main line of sight from the office windows.

  She looked to the left and the right of the hallway and saw that they were empty. As at the opposite end of the school, blood covered the floor in a slick layer about an inch thick. As the door closed, darkening the hallway once more, she crept deeper in. It was familiar, and she felt sick. She tightened her grip on the handle of the gun. With her left hand, she turned off the safety. Then, with more force than she imagined she would need, she pulled back the slide as she had seen Dr. Miller do.

  She crept across the empty hall toward the office with some vague idea that starting at the central location of the school would give her a better idea of whether or not Brooke Miller was alive or not. Deep down, she knew this to be absurd, but no better solution presented itself.

  Once she had crossed the hall, she pried open the office door, slowly and quietly, and still staying low. She slid inside and let the door close behind her. It latched shut with a click. The office was dark and silent. She stood and walked into the room.

  Before she could react, one was upon her—she felt its cold fingers on the back of her arm and its pressure on her—she spun and fell back, trembling. It loomed over her and she looked up at the nearly glowing eyes in the darkness. Another stood behind it and a third above her from the opposite direction. She flailed wildly, knocking one down, but the other two clutched at her with a force so strong that they tore her skin as she scrambled to get away.

  With great difficulty, she brought herself to her feet, and looking up she saw that there were a great many of them gathered there in the office—fifteen, maybe more.

  She looked at them desperately through the darkness, trying to make out their features. The hideous transformation that they had undergone made many of them anonymous and unrecognizable. She did not recognize Brooke Miller, but even if Brooke was among them, it would not have mattered. If Brooke were alive and unchanged, somewhere else in the building, that would not have mattered either. She was up against too great a number.

  Then among the pairs of eyes were two that caught her attention—two that she recognized. They were hollow and indifferent, but they were set in a face that, despite its terrifyingly mangled and disfigured aspect, told of grief so profound that it had written itself across the face in permanence that transgressed both death and unnatural resurrection. They were Sara’s.

  At this sight, terror of a different sort struck at Cathy and with what little strength and courage she could muster at the instant, she threw herself into the creatures behind her and ran for the workroom, the entrance to which lay at the back of the office behind the secretary’s desk. She hurled herself through the doorway and slammed the door shut on the horde, throwing it shut with her entire body. Then, amidst the pounding of their hands, and the screeches and howls of their hungry incantations, she slid down the door onto her knees beside it.

  She looked at the gun, turning it over in her hands the dark. Then she noticed something on her hand—a dark spot on the back of it near the base of her left thumb. A bite.

  Something inside her sank with a force that seemed to tear through her, a feeling so profound that it was as though some physical membrane or barrier inside of her had just been broken. The physicality of it suggested at first that it was the result of having been bitten, but the feeling had occurred at the sight of the thing—not as a result of the thing itself.

  Then she felt a deep despair. It was more than just despair that arose from her hopeless situation—it had merely unlocked this despair from within, which transcended it. It was as though she had always carried the despair with her, and it had been kept secret from her until this very moment.

  Then she remembered the stillborn infant, an image that returned in her psyche as though it were the only image she had ever really seen in her life: a blue stillborn infant with its purple cord around its neck. She wished to return to the infant, to pick it up and hold it as though that would bring it back to life—not some insensate mockery of life, but real life—even though she knew this to be impossible.

  But there was something beneath her despair, something that except for the despair she never would have known was there either—like a quiet noise that she never would have heard unless it were in the midst of a deathlike silence. This thing beneath the despair found its expression in something like anger, but without rage, or determination, but without a goal.

  All that she had known had fallen away from her, and what remained, or what now presented itself, was utterly foreign. There was nothing sensible to it, so it was not with any sense that she rose from her crouched position on the floor and went to the worktable. She knew that what she would do would be painful and would likely fail. But for the first time, success and failure seemed altogether irrelevant. Something had been upheaved inside of her. A profound shift had taken place.

  She set the gun on the counter and took hold of the paper cutter with her thin, wiry, ugly hand. Holding it down, she wrenched the metal paper guide from the wooden base and lay it aside. Then she positioned her left arm on the base so that her other thin, wiry, ugly hand, the hand that had been bitten, hung over the edge, the joint of her wrist resting on the metal corner. She loosened the joint, hoping to allow for an easier passage of the blade. She tried the path of the blade and let it touch the skin of her wrist gently as confirmation that her blow would hit its mark. Her arm lay heavily on the wood.

  Then she swung with a force so strong that it was as though God himself had driven down the blade.

  The bones cracked at the impact and a spray of warm blood erupted in her face. A shock—not of pain, but of a galvanizing, almost electric sensation—coursed through her arm and seemed to engulf her entire body for a moment. She blinked away the blood and looked down. It had come free, clean and easy, as though it had always been meant to come off.

  She sat down and reached her right hand up to the sleeve of her left arm and tugged on it as hard as she could. The fabric was flimsy and ripped free easily. She balled it up into a large, loose wad, and pressed it against the bleeding stump of her left wrist. She rose and stood at the worktable again, and this time, took a rubber band from a tray and wrapped the band around the torn blouse sleeve, blotting the wound and also acting as a makeshift tourniquet.

  The blade’s attachment had weakened with the strike, and it lay askew against the base. She pulled at the handle on the blade and twisted it. It came free of the bolt and came off in her hand.

  She decided to leave the gun. She wasn’t able to reload it anymore. And the blade needed no reloading.

  The door thudded and the creatures moaned from without.

  She pressed the blade flat against her face and closed her eyes.

  Then, after a moment, she opened them again and looked at the door.

  She knew that Sara was outside. She knew that she would have to face her at least once more. But she knew that it was not really Sara. It was some corruption of the flesh, a deception of biology, or nature, or—she didn’t know what—but it was not really Sara. She was certain of that.

  Holding the blade steadily and firmly in hand, she lifted her leg and placed her heel on the handle of the door. The latch clicked, and the door swung open.

  THEY RETURN

  Loneliness had become a part of him. Loneliness was his dark and tattooed skin; it felt the vacant air and rose in ridges at the cold. It was the sight of his eyes; it made clear the emptiness of the house, the hills, the sky. It heard all that he heard, muffled with the cotton of the dead silence of the day.

  It went with him at night when they came out of the darkness, when they visited him one after another. It overcame him and rendered him powerless as he stared at the distorted faces of his past, driving them back into the woods, firing shot after useless shot into their impossible bodies. And when he returned to the house at dawn, spent after the nightly cycle of warfare, Loneliness to
ok him in her ambivalent arms and laid him down on the cot and watched disdainfully as he fought against the heresy of daylight for sleep.

  He would wake in the evening, and before going out into the dark with his gun, he would refill the generator with gasoline, prepare food on the stove and eat it, and perform various maintenance tasks about the house. At dusk, he would open his Bible and read it in preparation for the work of the night. This drove Loneliness back a little.

  He knew that God was watching over him. But he had felt it more keenly when he was the only one, when Loneliness had been only a vague figure looming on the horizon of every moment. But now she stood in every doorway of every room, watching without eyes, speaking without words, crawling through the skin over his skull. The emptiness and silence of the house seemed to suggest to him her indifference to his existence and it had all but drowned out any real sense he had of God.

  As he often did, he looked down at his tattooed arm to remind himself of his own name—“JUDE”—and he reminded himself of his name to confirm his own existence. He closed the Bible on the desk and looked up at the faux-gold cross which he had hung on the wall. It had been in the house when he had arrived. He had hung it very high, far up the wall, so that he could see it from every room of the house. Incidentally, it looked better far away than up close; there was some bezeling on it that disagreed with his taste and made the cross seem old-fashioned and womanish.

  He set his teeth and rose from the desk. His body imbued with Loneliness, he plunged into the twilight and racked the slide on his pistol. The metallic click-click burst through the silence and died in the distant brush.

  He waited in the thickening dark. The sound of the vacant wind tore through the trees at the edge of the field and whispered through the grass as it blew nearer to him.