Fortunes & Failures - 03

by T. W. Brown

The Big Man cut the bindings on her wrists and ankles. She tried to sit up straight and everything swirled as the room swam and her vision blurred. Huge hands scooped her up and carried her downstairs. Unable to help it, her head fell against his chest.

  The next thing she knew, she was laid out on the rough, shell-textured concrete that surrounded the swimming pool. A moment later, he was rolling up one of the big wheelbarrows and stopping beside her. She hadn’t even realized that he’d been gone. Am I passing out? she wondered. She didn’t think so. Picking her up again, he placed her naked body in the cold metal basin of the wheelbarrow. The next sensation was the dousing of her body with pitchers of sun-warmed water. Then his hands went to work on her with soap and a washcloth.

  Surprisingly, his hands were gentle as he cleaned her thoroughly from top to bottom. At one point, he even cautioned her to close her eyes as he rinsed her so that she wouldn’t get soap in them. Still, she refused to let her guard down.

  When he was finished, he helped her stand so that he could pat her down with a towel. He handed her a water bottle which she sniffed before taking a drink from. He’d given her a swallow or two every day, but this was a full bottle. Kirsten drank her fill, savoring every drop.

  While she drank, he pushed the wheelbarrow over to the knee-high grass and dumped it. He waited for a moment, then beckoned her to follow him back inside. Her mind raced with all the possibilities, trying desperately to think of anything that she could do. She came to the conclusion that her choices were absolutely nothing. She could barely walk, much less run or climb. And where did she hope to go? Naked, weak, and starving, she stumbled after The Big Man who had already gone back inside the house.

  She made it to the stairs that led up to the back entry and stumbled. Struggling to her feet, she made another attempt. This time she fell hard and cried out. The Big Man stepped back out onto the landing and stared down at her. He seemed to consider her much like she would an insect for several seconds before finally scooping her up and carrying her inside.

  This time she was certain that she’d passed out. She opened her eyes to find herself back in her bed. All of the linens had been changed. A tray sat on the nightstand beside her bed. It was piled with canned pears, what looked like a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and a pile of barbecue potato chips. Tears welled up in her eyes in unison with the drool that slipped from the corner of her mouth and trickled down her chin. She knew this trick all too well. He would eat it while she watched. Only…after the bath and the clean bed, a kernel of hope had bloomed against her will. Did she dare to hope? With that thought, her body began to shake. The more she fought it, the worse it got. Soon she was crying uncontrollably and trembling to boot.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” The Big Man asked, his lips sickeningly close to her ear.

  God help her, Kirsten nodded. She felt something cold press against her budding left breast. The knife. She knew its feel very well. Just as she had suspected, this was a trick.

  Then, big hands scooped her up and set her on the floor. She looked up and The Big Man towered over her.

  “You can have everything you see on that table, and all the water you can drink.” The Big Man gestured with the knife towards the table. “After.”

  After? Kirsten was puzzled. Then, The Big Man unzipped his pants and pulled that disgusting thing out.

  “Your mouth,” The Big Man said in an excited whisper. “And if you bite me again…I’ll cut off your tit with this knife and make you watch as I feed it to those things out there. But,” he inched closer until it was right in her face, she noticed it was already poking straight up, “do this…and you can eat.”

  “Promise?” Kirsten whispered after a long pause where her eyes couldn’t keep from all the food just a few feet away.

  “Promise,” The Big Man said.

  Choking back the tears, Kirsten rose up unsteadily on to her knees. She looked up, but the candles were behind him and all she could see was blackness where his face should be.

  Kirsten opened her mouth.

  

  Jenifer-zombie closed her mouth on the warm flesh. She didn’t recognize the screams, nor did she differentiate between those sounds and the sounds of others like her that were moaning, growling, and feasting. A hand reached over, grabbing the arm she clutched as she fed, her teeth tearing away a chunk of meat just above the elbow. Hunching over her prize, Jenifer-zombie shielded it from the intruder.

  Eventually, as was most often the case, the feast spoiled. The warmth was gone. Seeming to forget that she’d just been devouring part of the arm still being held in her blood-soaked hands, Jenifer-zombie stood, casting the useless limb aside. The last bite, holding no warmth, and thus, no value, tumbled from her open mouth. She resumed her walking.

  Their numbers had grown over the days and weeks. Always on the move, the herd swept up singles, and sometimes ten or twenty of her kind as they moved without a purpose until sound caused them to wheel as one giant organism and follow to its source. They devoured anything in their path: one day a trailer home tipping over to spill out its occupants; another day, a roll-up door to a warehouse never designed to thwart the press of a thousand bodies against it. Always there were the screams which only served to give her and her ilk a focus.

  On and on they walked. None of them paid heed to a tremendous storm that blew them to the ground time and again. Futility was not a concept understood by Jenifer-zombie or the others in her wake.

  Into a neighborhood they came. This was a real zombie walk. By now, Jenifer-zombie was in the vanguard of over three thousand. Her head turned, drawn by an enormous source of heat at least twice her size. Others had already peeled off in pursuit. It vanished into a wall of foliage and appeared a moment later; seeming to float just above the hedges.

  Jenifer-zombie plowed into the group already filling the street. Her group swallowed, and was swallowed. Like a river meeting another until they poured into a mighty ocean, that is how their numbers grew.

  Within hours, the hedges that had surrounded the wall beyond for over a century were gone. The dead stood. Howling and moaning and crying, their numbers grew every day. Amidst the thousands, Jenifer-zombie stood with them.

  

  The warm, late summer rain fell, momentarily cleaning the air and knocking down the stench of undeath that permeated everything. Shaw tightened the straps of his backpack and slipped out the door. He would leave the compound through the east gate. That would put him closest to the river. He would follow that back to Newark.

  It had taken no time to figure out what Dr. Peter King had done. Part of Shaw was impressed. The young man had bided his time, picked his girl—and her pregnant sister—and escaped in one of the five-ton trucks; a truck that he’d passed during the retreat.

  That was the most impressive part of what the doctor had pulled off. He remembered thinking that it must’ve been one of theirs and that it had crashed up onto that curb during the chase of that SUV. He was willing to bet that every single one of the people that he was now leaving to search for was in shouting distance that day.

  He crossed East Main Street and stopped to look up at the body writhing above him on the cross that he passed in front of before reaching the tall grass beyond. Trying without success to recall this one’s name, he smirked. Dead eyes stared down at him. He couldn’t actually see them in the dark, but he could feel them on his body. It began to moan, and others joined in the hellish chourus.

  With that, Shaw strode into the tall grass that came almost to his waist. He wore steel-toed boots and shin-guards, so he wasn’t too concerned about what may be hiding in the brush.

  It took him longer than expected to reach the railroad tracks. He would follow them until sunrise, then find a place to sleep for the day. As he walked, Shaw’s mind drifted back to the day his life tunred upside-down. He’d been in Mercy Hospital, sitting beside his dying father’s bed. It was difficult watching the most amazing man, father, and Marine that God had seen fit to grace t
he world with, wasting away from some mysterious form of cancer that ate him from the inside.

  All the top minds from Washington denied that those cannisters used to kill off the foliage of the jungles of Vietnam were in any way harmful to the men in the helicopters who sprayed it; much less to the men on the ground. The scientists stood in their shirts and ties with their goddamned liberal lawyers, raised their hands, and swore to a God they constantly tried to disprove the existence of, that they would “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Of course they did that in front of a liberal congress.

  Shaw had been holding the Bible, having just finished reading one of his father’s favorite books from the New Testament: Timothy. It was literally as he closed the Bible when the monitor made that noise. All the numbers on the screen started going to zero. Doctors and nurses rushed in, but all they could do was declare time of death. His dad had insisted on a DNR order.

  “God will choose the time of my passing,” he’d managed through the mask on his face that provided him with oxygen, “not man. When He calls, I’m prepared to answer, son.”

  Charlton Shaw stepped out into the hallway. A man in the room across from his father’s was tumbling out of his bed. All of his alarms were going off too. Nobody else was there to help; it seemed as if a majority of the staff had rushed in to witness his father’s death. Not one single medical staff member could be found. Charlton decided it was up to him to try and help this poor bastard.

  He remembered that smell when he’d walked into the man’s room. The man was on the floor, struggling to his feet. His hands gripped the rails on the side of the bed. Charlton rushed over and froze when the man’s head turned and he saw those eyes. He’d never forget that moment as long as he lived. The milky glaze shot with black tracers was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. They looked like they’d been filled with pus. Then his mouth opened and this hollow sound sort of oozed forth; it was ghastly. When he stood, his hospital gown fell to the floor revealing a slightly soiled bandage on one arm.

  The man lunged awkwardly, pulling his IV stand over sending clattering to the floor. The needle ripped from the back of his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice. He tripped over the jumble at his feet and hit the deck with a meaty slap. That didn’t faze him at all. He resumed trying to climb to his feet, his head jerking towards Shaw.

  When the man began crawling, Charlton backed up, retreating into the hallway. That’s where he ran into the nurse with her throat ripped out. Only, instead of being dead like she ought, she was clawing at Shaw’s arm. One hand brushed his face, and that is when he felt the coldness. It was as if, in that instant, somebody had switched on the volume. Screams and beeping monitors came from everywhere at once. Maybe they’d already been happening and this was the first his mind registered them. He didn’t know, nor did he care.

  Raised to be a Marine by a Marine, Charlton heard the voice in his head that demanded he fight. He was fully prepared to do so until he rounded the corner to discover three people bent over a fourth, ripping her guts out and feeding on them. She couldn’t have been any older than two years of age. Just past that horrific scene was another even worse. Two doctors were pulling a baby-shaped blob from the splayed open belly of another woman. It was still connected by a thick, purple cord. One of the doctors was rasing the fetus to its mouth.

  That had been too much. Charlton ran. He didn’t look back and he didn’t stop to answer the cries for help that echoed down the halls from every direction. He bounded down the stairs and out the emergency exit. The chilly spring day greeted him…that and the mundane goings on of the every day world. Cars cruised past and electric signs turned and flashed in attempt to lure the hundreds of passing consumers. That would be one of the last precious moments before the world knew. That was the last day anybody had called him by his first name. Now, he was simply Shaw.

  He realized that his shadow was stretching out from his feet. Glancing over his shoulder, the glow on the horizon signalled the start of a new day. Much like that afternoon when he had stepped out from the hospital into the last normal day of human-ity, Shaw walked with a purpose. The silhouette of a large facil-ity—the recycling center—loomed ahead. There would be plenty of places to hide there.

  A pair of slow moving figures tottered through the grass off to his right. Shaw would settle in, but first he would reduce the number of hellspawn by two. It might not seem like much, but it was a start. Also, beating their heads in made him feel better.

  

  Reginald stood in the sally-port, the face mask he wore to protect him from the chemicals used to ensure he was free of contamination fogged over slightly. Not that he cared. His eyes were full of tears which were doing a fine enough job of obstructing his vision.

  There was a ‘click’ as the mist stopped. Punching the numbers in the keypad, he waited for the indicator light to change to green, then he opened the door. As usual, he was greeted by Morris. The cat leapt up onto the workbench and waited. It had learned long ago that it didn’t like rubbing up against a wet Hazmat suit.

  Reginald paid no attention to the feline and went through the rote process of flipping on the banks of lights and starting all the lab equipment. He made his way to the observation area and made a perfunctory scribble of “no change” on each chart.

  He paused, then went to the infirmary. Flipping on a monitor, he watched the screen grow brighter until the picture came in to view. A sea of bodies remained smashed in tightly against one another. The fence had fallen long ago and now the bodies were pressed up against the concrete bunker that sat over the hatch allowing entry or exit to this godforsaken place.

  He switched off the monitor. The truth had to be faced… he…they were never getting out of this place. It was their home and their tomb. He sighed, running his fingers through his thinning hair. He rolled his head in an exaggerated circle, going from having his left ear practically resting on his shoulder, to the right. He rolled forward, tucking in his ever-decreasing-in-definition double chin to his chest.

  He rolled back and caught his reflection in the dead eye of the blank television monitor. He could see the smudge of darkness under each eye. He reached up and touched the knobby lump on the bridge of his newly mishapened nose. He’d done his best to set it after Lucy had punched him in the face, breaking it. She hadn’t been receptive to his last batch of wine.

  Once again she’d insisted that nothing could go wrong and no harm done if he’d just make her a batch of meth. He’d already made the foolish mistake of admitting that he had all the incrediants necessary to synthesize the product.

  “You’ll make alcohol, a poison that destroys the brain,” Lucy had raged, “but you draw the line at meth? What are you afraid of? The world is over! You even said so. Nobody is coming. What’s the big deal if I do a little meth? You could even keep it in your little mad scientists’ lab and dole it out in controlled amounts.”

  “Meth is a highly addictive substance that is—” he had tried to reason with Lucy. That was when her fist smashed into his face, breaking his nose.

  “Get out!” Lucy had screamed as her fists rained down on him.

  He’d retreated from his room, scurrying across the hall into the empty living quarters of one of his former colleagues. He’d gone to the mirror with a dirty tee shirt, intent solely on cleaning up the blood when he saw that his nose was obscenely crooked. Setting it as best he could, Reginald fell asleep weeping.

  When he awoke, he’d considered confronting Lucy, going so far as to stand outside the door with his hand on the knob for several seconds. Eventually, he chickened out, and here he was in his lab. Alone. He wandered around unable to decide exactly what task to undertake. He kept returning to the observation cells, staring at the specimens inside.

  Eventually he made his way to the grow room and checked on his rows of plants. He kept telling himself that he needed to get Lucy in there to see how things worked.Also, he needed to give her the keypad codes. Wh
ile he was always careful, it was impossible to discount the possibility that an accident may occur. Of course, after last night, he had no doubt that she would put him down if he turned. Hell…she might do it even if he didn’t.

  Checking the storerooms, he did a mental calculation of the vast quantities of dried and packaged meals. There should be enough to sustain four people for five years without supplements from the garden. Food was not an issue. The combination wind and solar power setup that supplied them with electricity should be okay for a while. Also, their generators were ready just in case. For all intents and purposes, they should be able to live comfortable for a few years without worries.

  Of course, if that mob topside ever dispersed… Reginald looked down on the long table. When had he done all this? Beakers, burners, and pans were laid out along with all the ingredients for a rather impressive batch of meth. Could it really be no worse than the wine and brandy that he’d cobbled together? And once he did this one thing Lucy would be his. His mind flashed to that first night he’d surprised her with the wine. She’d actually been…pleasant.

  Reginald pulled out the folded up piece of paper from his pocket. Like he would anything else, he double and triple checked his list. Going over to the lockers, he donned all his protective gear. Then, with a shrug, Reginald Cox went to work on his first—and only, he promised himself—batch of crystal meth.

  

  “Down this way.” JoJo jogged ahead of Juan, Thad, and Mackenzie.

  Everybody walked single file down the path leading to one of the island’s larger beaches. JoJo signaled for everyone to be quiet, and moved into the trees and vines so the others could come up alongside.

  A trio of aluminum canoes had been pulled up onto the sand. A half dozen backpacks had been set in a row on a dune, and a man and woman sat beside them, passing back and forth a canteen. Both were wearing handguns holstered under one arm and had pistol-gripped shotguns propped beside.