He shrugged, and looked somewhat disgusted. “It’s that sort of thinking’s what keeps me sane. But it still ain’t easy, them so young. You can’t help but feel sorry for ’em. Rotters or not.” He took a sip from his bottle. “You never had kids. Did you.” He thought about his own son, now dead. And he thought that maybe the boy’s death had turned out to be a good thing, considering. Not that he really meant it, not really, not at all, but he was grateful that his boy didn’t have to go through this. He chastised himself for allowing the thought to pass through his brain.
It was the bartender’s turn to shrug. “No, no kids.” She changed the subject back. “They ain’t human no more, Harley.”
He paid his tab and left a generous tip and walked out into the sunlight. Sometimes if was easy to forget he’d been drinking so early, and daylight could be a surprise. Like going to a movie matinee—some things were just better suited for night.
The list jutted from his hip pocket and he pulled it out for the hundredth time that day. Mostly descriptions and possible locations. Names were included but weren’t useful in his hunt—they no longer responded to their names. He hunted, for those parents who wanted their kids back, no matter what condition they might be in. No matter what condition Harley would inflict on them. This is what he’d been reduced to, he’d think bitterly. Goddamn truant officer with a pistol.
He didn’t bother with a motorcycle—which most people assumed he drove—hell, Harley was his birth name, not his vehicle of choice—and climbed into his Ford pickup and headed toward the sticks. Tim Gorman had last been spotted in the Highland Woods area.
He shouldered his backpack, locked the truck and headed into the overgrown forest that was known as The Highlands. Long pants and heavy work boots protected him from the elements, particularly rattlers. He hiked about half a mile in, marking his trail by spray-painting small red Xs on tree trunks, when he picked up the boy’s trail.
He assumed it was the boy’s. Evidence that a young man had been here, particularly this young man—tatters of his Megadeth T-shirt were draped over shrubs, caught in brambles and prickers. He’d surely be hiding. One thing the Rotters shared was an uncanny sixth sense, an understanding they were in danger. Even with their now-limited brain function they knew to hide. Until that maddening hunger drew them back out into the open.
“Come on, kiddo,” he said quietly, treading carefully over branches and mulch, drying patches of mud squelching beneath his boots.
He stopped only long enough to wipe his sweaty forehead with a bandana. Harley’s search for the Gorman kid had taken the better part of the morning. Finally he spotted the boy—and Harley thought of the term loosely, because Timmy was almost a man, big and cumbersome in life, now just ogreish in death. Timmy was chewing on something. Something thick, dark; something long and fat like a branch but decidedly hairier and with features branches just don’t possess.
Timmy was feasting on a human arm, ripping out chunks of flesh with his rotted teeth, pus dribbling from his facial lesions and soaking his meal. Not that he seemed to mind.
“Awww, Christ.” Harley groaned, wiping the spittle out of the corner of his mouth. Bile clawed up his esophagus and into the back of his throat and he swallowed twice, three times to keep his breakfast down.
There was no hope for this one. Too far gone, too many days had passed and Timmy was a full-blown Rotter now. Carefully Harley aimed, shooting off the top of Timmy’s skull. Enough of his face was still intact so that the family would at least have the comfort of receiving the body in recognizable condition. Unfortunately, head trauma was the only really effective way of dispatching a Rotter, and as long as Harley removed a good part of the gray matter, he knew the job was complete.
Harley tagged the body and added the name to his report. When he returned to his truck he called Dispatch, who would then notify the Recovery Crew. Hopefully they’d get there before animals or the elements—or some other Rotter—got to the boy first. Normally the crew was timely, but lately business had exploded and they could barely keep up.
Two left on the list for the day. Twin girls. He studied their pictures.
As he drove, he wondered about the survival of the human race. Whatever this was, this disease, this infection that had doomed the children was dooming humanity. Newborn Rotters, chewing and clawing their way out of their mothers’ wombs, or children changing into these flesh-consuming creatures … going to bed perfectly normal, parents breathing a collective sigh of relief and falling to their knees in supplication suddenly finding themselves fighting for their lives against their ravenous monstrosities in the middle of the night. No one knew what had caused the disease. Or how to cure it, despite children being studied, examined—autopsied. It was no longer safe to try to keep them alive. They had become too much of a threat.
Harley’s job as a police officer, and his proficiency with his firearm made him the perfect candidate for this detail. A job he despised. Calls from frantic parents had disturbed him at all hours of the day and night at home. Threats. Pleads. He’d heard it all. Warnings that if he killed their baby they would hunt him down and—
But this was all part of the job. So he’d had his phone number changed and unlisted and the calls stopped.
The kids (he could never bring himself to think of them as Rotters) tended to take to the woods. They avoided the towns. Maybe it was something instinctive, maybe somehow they felt safe. Safe.
Molly and Melissa, age six. Born three minutes apart. Changed into Rotters only that morning, and had last been seen heading into the woods behind their house. Woods that covered hundreds of miles, however. One thing about Rotters, though—they didn’t move too quickly. They could attack at rapid-fire speed once the illness had advanced, but they tended to travel slowly, as if lost, as if unable to decide where they wanted to go. And the younger ones, the ones who had not yet developed social or coping skills, the ones who had been clumsy in life and were just getting used to their own bodies were even slower.
It took Harley about an hour to pick up their trail. The air was thick in that part of the woods, swampy, almost soupy; hordes of mosquitoes and black flies assaulted him as he made his way through the dense foliage.
A short while later he spotted them in a clearing, huddled together as they rested beneath a weeping willow.
“There you are, girls,” he whispered, catching his breath, closing in on them. He left his pistol holstered as he crept quietly through the bushes and approached them from the side.
One of the girls lifted her head, looked in his direction but didn’t seem to have spotted him. The girls appeared almost normal; the telltale vacuous expression wasn’t usually evident until several days after the change began. But the other signs were there—the oozing sores, the distorted, runny facial features—as if the kids had been dead for days and were walking the earth again. And the animal-like demeanor—snarls and grunts and mindless predacious instinct—made it obvious that these kids were no longer human beings.
Their first impulse at this early stage was to run. In a few days they would turn predator, savage. But for now they fled. The first Rotter twin finally spotted Harley in the brush and took off into the trees, her startled twin remaining behind to watch the other run.
Before the girl could react and chase after her sister, Harley pounced, knocking her on her back. She snarled at him—language was the first thing to go, it seemed—and tried to bite, to claw at his face. The abnormal strength that would inevitably come was also not quite there yet, so her struggles were manageable.
He hog-tied her hands and feet behind her back and muzzled her before chasing after her twin.
The second girl hadn’t gotten far and was attempting to burrow her way into a rabbit hole. Harley grabbed her ankles and pulled her out of the ground and tied and muzzled her the way he had her sister.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you, kid,” he said, lifting her up and returning to the spot he’d left the other girl. He then picked up the
second girl as well—both children struggling furiously beneath each arm—and carried them back to his truck, carefully laying them in the covered flatbed.
“Harley, come in.”
Harley returned to the cab and picked up the radio. “Go ahead.”
“Where you been, Harley? Been trying to reach you for an hour.”
“Huntin’,” he said. “What’s up, Homer?”
“Just wanted your twenty, Harley. Making sure everything’s good.”
Yeah, he thought. Just swell. “Everything’s fine, Homer. I’m in the woods behind junction three. You sure my location’s all you wanted?”
Static hovered in the air for several seconds before Homer finally replied. “The Captain would like to see you as soon as possible. We need you to come in.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
Static again. Harley stared at the radio in his hand.
“Just come in, Harley.” Something strange about Homer—his usual hard edge had softened.
Harley nodded at the radio. He’d report in. Right after he took care of the twins in the flatbed.
His house wasn’t far from junction three. Sarah’s car was gone. Odd. One of them was always home; it was what they’d worked out. What they’d agreed to.
Harley unlocked the front door and poked his head inside. “Sarah?” No reply. He left the door open and went back to the truck to retrieve the twins, hoisted them beneath each arm and carried them into the house. He slammed the front door shut with his foot.
When he opened the basement door, the pungent odor of decay burned his nostrils. He’d never get used to that smell, like sulfur and rotting fish, like gangrenous flesh baking in the midday sun.
He took a deep breath of hallway air before plunging into the fetid stench that waited for him a few steps away. In the basement, he carefully laid Molly and Melissa on the dirt floor and prepared their spots.
This was getting worse, much worse. There was no denying that this was a progressive disease.
In the far corner of the room, the little boy once known as Jason Wheeler was developing into something unrecognizable. What had been pockets of pus sores were now runny leaks, consuming his limbs in Ebola-like fashion, distorting his face into a mass of spongy tissue. His nose was missing, the cartilage having dissolved into his cheeks. Black holes filled his mouth, nubs that had once been teeth gnashing and snapping at Harley. That little boy, all of eight years old, was now a misshapen mess, a caricature of his former self.
Around the room: the same. The children he had brought home to take care of and feed and love, the ones he could not bring himself to destroy, were evolving around him. Quickly developing into terrifying things without rational thought, becoming creatures intent on killing and eating and nothing else.
He prayed daily that a cure would be found, that if he held onto these children they might be saved. And Sarah had agreed to this since the beginning, several months earlier, was worried about the poor children that the rest of the world seemed to have given up on.
Even though what they were doing was against the law.
Even at risk to their own safety.
He wondered where Sarah was, why she had left the house unattended when they had agreed they never would, that it was a dangerous risk. And he suddenly wondered why Homer had sounded so uncomfortable on the radio.
“Oh, shit …” Quickly he chained Molly and Melissa to their new spots in the basement, working carefully, then untied and removed the muzzles from the terrified girls.
Around the room, the other Rotters reached for Harley, and for each other, tried to claw and chew their way out of their restraints. He knew they would settle down after he left. They always did.
“Sorry, kids,” he said, ascending the steps. “I’ll feed you when I get back.”
He returned to his truck. “On my way in,” he said into the radio. “Homer? You there?”
“Yeah, Harley, ‘course I am. See you soon.”
He wondered why he hadn’t asked Homer about Sarah. He thought maybe he didn’t want to know; that if there was bad news he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it over a dispatch radio. Not that Homer would have told him. Not over a blasted radio. Like last time there’d been bad news, it hadn’t been delivered over a radio, it had been delivered by three officers who were like brothers to Harley and who could catch him if he fell hysterically to the floor. But that hadn’t happened; Harley had retained control. And then he threw himself into his work to keep his mind away from the horrible accident. Keeping himself busy around the clock prevented him from having to think about his own life.
The warm summer air blasting his face as he drove didn’t help with the queasiness in his stomach. Half an hour later he arrived at the police station. Despite driving with the siren and doing sixty along the back roads, he was too far out of town to make it there any quicker. When he pulled up in front of the station, he spotted Sarah’s car.
The relief he felt when he raced inside and saw his wife sitting on the bench was enough to make him break down and sob like a baby.
Sarah stood up and threw herself into his arms.
“Oh thank God,” he cried, holding her tight. “I thought something happened to you.”
She shook her head and started to cry.
“What is it, baby? What’s wrong? What are you doing here?”
“Patrick,” she said, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand. “It’s Patrick.”
“Patrick? What?” He blinked rapidly, and his heart pounded in his ears. “What about Patrick?”
Sobbing now, unable to speak, she just shook her head and clutched his shirt.
Captain Mellner came up behind Harley and laid his hand on Harley’s shoulder. “We need to talk.”
“No,” Harley said, emphatically shaking his head. “Patrick’s dead. There’s nothing to talk about.”
Mellner took Harley’s elbow and led him into his office. He shut the door. “Sit down, please.”
Harley sat, unsure his rubbery legs would have supported him much longer. Little specks of white light danced before his eyes. He’d never felt faint before, not even when Patrick had died in the car accident, not even when he’d had to identify his little boy’s dead body. Not even at the funeral while viewing his four-year-old boy in his tiny blue suit. Not even then. Control. That was what it had been about. If Harley had lost control—if Harley had been forced to think about these events, which were impossible for a parent to think about—he would have lost his mind.
But now, somehow he knew what Mellner was about to say, and now the specks bobbed and flashed before his eyes like the Aurora Borealis.
“It’s not just the living children who are developing this disease. It seems to be reanimating … the … uh, the deceased.” Mellner sat on the edge of his desk and leaned forward as if prepared to catch Harley before he tumbled out of his chair and on to the floor.
“The caretaker at the cemetery called earlier”—(Digger, that’s his name, aren’t all cemetery caretakers named Digger?)—“and Patrick’s grave’s been dug up. Him and a few other children’s.”
“Grave robbers,” Harley muttered. “Some sick fuck—”
“No. He saw Patrick heading out the gates.”
“Oh, Christ no,” Harley cried, burying his knuckles in his eyes. “This can’t be. Please tell me this isn’t happening!”
Mellner wasn’t exactly the comforting sort and gingerly patted Harley’s shoulder. “We called Sarah in. We wanted you both here. In case Patrick …”
In case Patrick comes home.
Harley looked up sharply, his hands dropping into his lap. “I gotta get home.”
“No, Harley. I’ll send a car to your house.”
Oh, Christ. That was all he needed. He’d just heard the second worse news of his life and didn’t think things could plummet any further. But if those officers went inside his house, and opened the basement door … hell, his entire house stank of rotting children. They wouldn�
��t have to step much further than the front door to know something was dreadfully wrong inside.
“No, Captain. I have to go home.”
“Harley, I’m telling you, you’re not going anywhere. You know as well as I do what the S.O.P. is for this. Parents are not allowed anywhere near their children.”
Harley swallowed. “Then let me go with the officers. I won’t go alone.”
“No, Harley, you—”
“Captain, please. If it was Aaron, wouldn’t you insist on going?”
The captain winced at the mention of his son’s name. So far, Aaron hadn’t caught the disease.
“All right. I’ll send Tompkins. Ride with him.”
Harley returned to the hall and Sarah looked up at the sound of his footsteps connecting with the tiles. Sarah. He’d forgotten about her.
“What’s going on?” she asked, clutching Harley’s arm, digging her nails into the flesh.
“It’s okay, baby. I’m going with Tompkins back to the house.”
“Oh, Harley,” she said breathlessly. “The house? Oh, no …”
“It’ll be okay. I’ll think of something.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, baby, you can’t. This is a police matter now. Why don’t you go on over to your mother’s house? Don’t drive, Sarah. One of the guys will take you there.”
“Call me, Harley,” she cried, eyes wide with terror. “The minute anything happens, you call me.”
“You know it, baby.” He kissed her softly and caressed her cheek, trying to comfort her but knowing he wasn’t successful.
Tompkins’ attempts at pleasantries and sympathy were appreciated but ignored. Harley knew the procedure, knew what Tompkins was attempting, and he didn’t want any part of it. The forty-five minute drive back to his house—Tompkins driving the speed limit, the moron—was interminable.
“This bucket go above forty-five?” Harley snapped, breaking his silence.
“Sorry, Harley. We’ll be there soon.” And Tompkins broke into another soliloquy about how sorry he was, how he’d want to die if anything like this should ever happen to little Ginny.
In The End, Only Darkness Page 8
