“I’m serious, boss.”
“I know,” Kim snapped, the panic causing her Kentucky accent to thicken. She grabbed her laundry basket from the top of the pile and flung it into the road. She tossed out two pieces of luggage behind the basket to open the equipment bin.
“Help!”
Kim looked to her left. Across the street, a woman was helping a man stay on his feet. The man clutched at his throat like the people in the restaurant, choking and suffocating. The woman leaned close to him, eyes wide. Then she lifted her cell phone and dialed a number. Before she finished, the woman’s eyes widened, and she gasped for air just like the man.
Adrenaline surged through her body. Kim pulled the plastic bin closer and popped off the lid with shaking hands. She grabbed the filtration masks from inside and handed one to Shelly before she took one for herself. Kim fitted the mask to her face and adjusted the straps to form a tight seal. Shelly did the same, though Kim had to help her.
Shelly stepped back and took a deep breath.
“Make sure the seal is tight,” Kim said, her voice muffled as she gestured to the edges of her mask.
Shelly nodded and tried to get her thumbs between her mask’s seal and her skin. The seal tight, she gave a thumbs up to Kim.
A screech of tires jolted Kim like lightning as she reeled to see a sedan skidding toward them in the road. Kim leapt back to avoid the car as it slammed into the back of her Toyota. Metal, glass, and plastic erupted in every direction. Shelly was sandwiched between the two cars in a sickening crunch of metal and flesh.
Kim fell into the middle of the road, blinking up at the mass of metal as it jumped the sidewalk. It plowed over a bench and several signs before coming to a stop. Kim stumbled to her feet and walked toward the mess. Her eyes couldn’t make sense of it. Her brain couldn’t register it. The driver of the car lay slumped over the wheel, face swollen and neck bulging. Kim spotted the blood splattered across the back of the Toyota. Shelly’s upper half lay sprawled on the hood of the sedan, arms thrown upward with the impact.
“Shelly!” Kim screamed inside her mask, as she stumbled forward. Her legs seemed filled with concrete, her knees unwilling to bend. Reaching the steaming, hissing wreck, Kim leaned over and put her hand on Shelly’s back. The woman’s spine was twisted and broken. Blood was pooling on the crumpled hood.
Kim brushed aside a lock of tangled blonde hair to reveal her assistant’s wide, dead eyes staring back at her through the plastic of her skewed mask. Blood trickled from her nose and the corner of her mouth.
Kim gasped and backed away from the vehicle, tears stung her eyes. Despite the chaos growing around her, she couldn’t stop looking at the wreck and the shattered body of her dead assistant. They’d been together since Kim’s first position at Ft. Collins, and Kim had been proud to call the woman a friend.
A hand grabbed Kim’s face from behind to rip her mask off. But Kim had fixed the mask tight, so the fingers slid across the plastic with enough force to pull Kim’s head to the side. With a cry, she threw her arms up and spun around, knocking the attacker away. Not to be deterred, the attacker swung at Kim in a blur of fists, and Kim stumbled backwards against the sedan in retreat.
She raised her arms to protect herself, catching sight of a woman’s tangle of inky hair and a pair of mad-looking eyes. Pressing her left hand against her filtration mask to keep it on her face, Kim balled up her right fist and blindly punched the woman. Her fist struck something hard, and pain lanced up from Kim’s wrist to spike in her shoulder. It hurt, but it got the woman to stop her attack.
Kim peeked over her hand and saw that same desperate, suffocating expression in the woman’s eyes that she’d seen in so many others. Tendons stood out on her neck, and black slime traced the edges of her nostrils and lips. With a soundless scream, the woman grabbed for Kim’s mask with both hands, fingers desperate to take it for her own.
With nowhere to retreat and her hand bruised, Kim raised both of her arms and charged forward, knocking the woman backward into the street. The woman hit the ground and tried to jump right back up, but she didn’t have the strength. Robbed of precious oxygen, she could only sit up and glare at Kim as she clawed at her neck and chest weakly. The woman’s hateful expression dissolved into terror and the desperation of a person who knows they are about to die.
Kim glanced up and down the street to ensure no cars were coming and fell to her knees beside the woman. The woman clutched at Kim’s arms, staring into her eyes as if Kim could absorb the pain and confusion of her passing. Finally, the light left her eyes, and Kim laid the woman down gently.
Tears blinded Kim as she stood and turned in a circle. Her car was totaled. More people were wandering the streets in distress. Anyone who tried to help those in need became victims themselves as the affliction passed between them. Or was it only from the air?
The smartest of them turned away from the trouble and sprinted toward the center of the city. One man burst through the doors of a nearby bike shop, stiff-legged and stumbling. His head whipped back and forth, eyes hunting for a safe place from the suffocating tendrils. He spotted Kim and her filtration mask and lurched in her direction.
The terrifying possibility that he might take her mask was enough to put her legs in motion. The question was, where to go? She wasn’t far from the CDC building. Probably less than ten blocks. And while she’d only been there twice before, Kim thought she could find the building without too much trouble.
With a deep groan, Kim left the dying man behind and sprinted north toward what she hoped was safety.
Chapter 2
Kim Shields, Washington, D.C.
Kim ran along the left-hand sidewalk, tennis shoes pounding on the concrete. She kept glancing over her shoulder, expecting a car to come careening onto the sidewalk and run her down.
She ran past groups of confused people, many looking up at the sky as the wind blew the dusty tendrils over them. Others died where they stood, hacking up pieces of lung into their hands. A group of people pounded on a man’s car as he squealed out of his parking spot to get away.
Kim couldn’t stop to help them. Her senses were on high alert, every cell in her body prepared to fight at a moment’s notice. Two blocks up, the street split between a baseball field on her left and a tall block of condos on her right. A handful of corpses lay in the street, and there were no immediate threats that she could see. Kim slowed to a fast walk, keeping beneath the shadow of the trees while she caught her breath.
Moisture from her feverish face condensed around the edges of her mask, blocked her peripheral vision, and made her face itch. All she smelled was stale plastic. She reached to pull her mask up to wipe the inside, then caught herself with a curse and drew her hand away.
“Don’t be stupid,” she told herself. “Be very careful, Kim. Once that stuff gets into your lungs, you’re done for.”
Even as she understood the lethality of the situation, another part of her wondered how it could be. She avoided the wind-blown tendrils where she could. The ones that settled on the ground in front of her created what looked like patches of scorched concrete. She didn’t stop to study any of them, though they reminded her of forest fungus or a house with walls overrun by mold stains. The tendrils were likely spore clusters. Several types of fungal strains ran through her mind, but her brain’s analytical ability had reset in favor of pure instinct.
At the bus stop at the end of the block, a group of people were fighting. Kim squatted low as she approached and peered through the moisture of her mask to see what they were fighting over.
The curious treasure was a long canister about the length of her arm, with a thin pair of hoses connecting it to a breathing apparatus. The people were shoving and kicking at one another to take the canister for themselves, not seeming to care if they tore the hoses free.
An oxygen canister?
Someone in the crowd snatched the canister free, slammed the breathing apparatus to their mouth and took a deep breath
. The crowd tussled to get it back, the entire group scuffled into the middle of the street and left a wheelchair-bound man behind. He appeared to be dead, with his puffy red face thrown up at the sky and his arms down stiff at his sides.
Kim made a disgusted sound and ran across the street. She approached 7th Street bridge, moving toward Capitol Hill and hoped she was close to the safety of the CDC building. The sound of sirens echoed through the city, and the faint rotor buzz of a distant helicopter touched her ears.
As she reached the end of the block, a group of teenagers popped out of an apartment building and stood on the front stoop, jostling one another and laughing. One young man held a radio in his arms, blaring loud music to drown out the surrounding noise.
Several tendrils floated above the kids’ heads, coming dangerously close. Two girls sat down on the top step while two other boys passed around a 2-liter of cola, too caught up in their party to notice the immediate threat.
On a whim, Kim stopped at the bottom step and shouted at them, gesturing with her hands. The two girls who’d sat down saw Kim, though they regarded her with expressions of amusement.
“Hey, get back inside,” Kim shouted. “Cover your face.”
The two boys on the porch shared an uneasy smile as Kim tried to get them to listen.
“Get back inside,” Kim shouted again. “The air is poison.”
The kids blinked at her and burst out laughing. Kim must look ridiculous. There was no way they heard her with her mask on, and they were probably used to the sirens since they lived downtown.
One boy breathed a spore tendril, and his humorous expression faded. His mouth fell slack, eyes confused. He swallowed and swallowed again, gagging, slamming his hand to his throat as something cut his air off. The kid’s eyes ticked to Kim, confusion turning to panic as he stretched and twisted his neck. His friends had stopped laughing, too. The girls sitting on the top step stood and tried to help the boy while his male friend backed away, unsure.
However, the choking boy had already collapsed on the porch, his body starting to convulse as it cried out for air.
The other boy started coughing, too, jerking back against the rail as if something had him by the throat. Eyes darting around in a mad panic, everything else forgotten, the kid leapt off the porch, knocking past Kim and running into the street. He spun in a circle, slapping his chest, clutching his neck and throat as he ran out of precious air. With a heart-wrenching croak, the kid collapsed to his knees and fell flat on his face. He convulsed once and lay still.
By the time Kim turned back to the kids on the porch, they were all coughing on the spores. All of them spitting their lungs into their hands and trying to voice their horror in screams that never came.
Kim closed her eyes and backed down the steps. Then she turned up 7th Street, swallowed down an enormous lump of dread, and ran.
Chapter 3
Kim Shields, Washington, D.C.
Kim crossed the 7th Street Bridge over I-395. Cars sped by below her, the drivers oblivious to the nightmare spreading all around them. Above, the black tendrils drifted and undulated through the sky.
Glancing back, Kim saw several dozen people chasing her. No, not chasing her, but running from whatever was back there killing everyone. She thought she recognized one person from the bus stop, but she couldn’t be sure with her mask fogging up and dripping moisture. Several people ran with their shirts pulled up over their mouths, understanding the danger and doing their best to keep the deadly spores out of their lungs. Still, they fell on the concrete, one by one, dropping like flies against a wall of insecticide.
Kim faced forward and kept running, the road ahead seen through a few inches of tunnel vision. Her ears, separated from the rest of her senses, absorbed the rising sounds of chaos: a crash below on the expressway, more screams, sirens, and frantic cries for help that echoed off the buildings.
Reaching the end of the bridge, Kim approached the intersection of 7th Street and Frontage Road. A car engine roared on the bridge behind her, and Kim leapt to the side, grabbing the chain link safety fence to hold herself up. She turned in time to see one of the pedestrians bounce off the hood of the sedan and go tumbling over its roof. A male driver leaned over the wheel, gripping it tightly with his wide eyes pinned straight ahead.
The car flew past Kim as the crescendo of sirens reached its peak. An ambulance swung into the intersection from Frontage Road, only to be T-boned by the reckless driver. Kim cringed at the bone-crunching impact, ambulance and sedan spinning around in a spray of metal and glass.
With a grunt, Kim sprinted toward the wreck, stopping only long enough to make sure there was no one else flying through the intersection. She saw the driver of the sedan choking and pounding the steering wheel with his fists. He was as good as dead, so she moved on to the ambulance.
The front driver’s side door had been smashed shut in the wreckage, so Kim stepped on the running board and peered inside. The passenger side medic appeared unconscious, but the driver was blinking at the front window as blood dripped from her head. Her airbag lay draped and deflated over the wheel, smeared with blood.
“Do you have an air filtration mask?” Kim asked, peering at the equipment spilled inside of the cab.
“What?” the driver asked, dazed as she dabbed at her bloody head with her fingers. “My head.”
“Never mind your head!” Kim shouted, enunciating clearly. “Do you have something to cover your face?”
“I...I don’t understand.”
A black tendril landed on the window, stretching out in a lengthy line of spores that clung to the glass. It seemed to pulsate and give off a faint, crimson radiance Kim hadn’t noticed before. It looked angry and merciless.
Kim pointed at the spores, shouting, “Do you want that stuff in your lungs?”
The ambulance driver shook her head, snapping out of her daze as she reached for a box that had toppled over in the crash.
Satisfied she had the woman’s attention, Kim pointed to the ambulance radio. “I know you’re in pain,” she shouted, “but you have to call this in. Let emergency personnel know to wear air filtration masks. Let them know that the air is dangerous. I repeat, the air is dangerous.”
The driver lifted a mask free and tossed it into the passenger’s lap. Then she found one for herself and started to pull it on over her head. “Got it,” she said with a slow nod. “The air is dangerous.”
Kim looked the woman in the eyes once she had her mask on. “And be careful.” She tapped the plastic visor of her own mask. “People will kill for one of these.”
The driver nodded and leaned over in the seat to attend to the other medic.
Kim stepped off the door runner and turned in a circle. People in the parking lot across the street had turned to watch the ambulance wreck, and a few were jogging over to help. Others stared back the way Kim had just come, watching cars fly out of the contaminated zone, skirt the wreckage, and zoom toward the far side of town. That wasn’t good. If those cars, or the people inside, were contaminated with spores, they could be carriers of the infection.
As the people coming to help the ambulance approached, Kim waved them away. She shook her head, shouting, “Get inside, cover your faces!” They stopped, some of them making confused gestures, but Kim was insistent. She waved them toward the fleeing cars and pointed back the way she’d come. A man and a woman turned to the south and caught sight of the tendrils drifting in the wind. They shared a knowing look with one another and sprinted down the street.
The others weren’t so quick or fortunate. Those who remained in the street and parking lot were caught by the wispy tendrils. They turned their faces upward, swatting at the drifting spores and dispersing them like a cloud of gnats around their heads and shoulders. They breathed it in and were assailed with chest-wrenching coughs, their faces turned into gasping, gagging visages from some nightmare tapestry.
Some ran back inside the buildings while others did the spinning, hacking danc
e Kim had become so used to seeing.
Turning north, Kim put herself into motion and ran hard. She thought the CDC building was one more block north and two or three blocks east. But even as fast as she ran, the wind blew the tendrils faster. They alighted on everything in long, rope-like strands, swelling and spreading almost immediately.
Kim sprinted to the next block which was the corner of 7th Street and East Street. She turned right on East Street but then stopped cold when she saw a bus load of students staggering in the narrow, two-lane street. They were clearly afflicted, clearly dying, when a police car shot in from the other direction and plowed through the line before swerving to smash into a tree.
Her vision clouding with tears, Kim resumed running north. She huffed and pounded past a building that stretched an entire block, its ends curved toward the street like a giant embrace. A glance up told Kim this was the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Already, people were scrambling away from the spore tendrils, and Kim ticked off control procedures in her head. Normally, she would have been thinking of a way to quarantine sick people from the healthy population, but this was an opposite situation. She had to quarantine healthy people away from infected bodies and keep them from breathing contaminated air. They may need to shut down all air conditioning units and ventilation systems in every building in the city.
And what if the spores spread outside the city?
A sudden anxiety spurred her on. She needed to get to the CDC office where she might do some real good for the people of the city. Angry resolve settled in her chest. And even though she could barely see out of the sweaty, dripping mask, her long legs pumped harder, carrying her across the concrete jungle with long strides.
Spore Series (Book 1): Spore Page 2
