Last Pandemic (Book 3): Escape The Chaos

by Westfield, Ryan

  But McGregor, even in his suit, appeared powerful in his strides, in his posture, in his stance.

  There was nothing to grab. Nothing to use as a weapon.

  Rory had nothing up his sleeve. Nothing to use. Except his mind.

  If he went into this fight in a fair way, he’d lose. He’d probably die, given McGregor’s apparent madness.

  He had to use his mind. He had to find some advantage.

  Another step down the metal staircase.

  Then he realized it.

  He was above McGregor.

  Gravity was on his side.

  He didn’t think about it any more. He just launched himself forward, jumping off the stairs.

  There were about ten steps between them.

  Rory’s body fell heavily, heading right toward McGregor.

  Rory slammed into McGregor, who grunted and snarled like an animal.

  Suddenly, they were on the ground, rolling around.

  The strategy had worked to knock McGregor off his feet. But that was as far as it had gone.

  Now McGregor already had the upper hand, only seconds into the fight.

  And Rory had nothing. No recourse. No power. No fighting technique.

  He tried to throw a punch, swinging his right fist up toward McGregor, who was on top of him, his knees punching into Rory’s thin, anemic chest.

  But it was a pathetic punch. It did nothing. Hitting McGregor’s suit with absolutely no effect. Probably hurt Rory’s hand more than it hurt McGregor.

  “I’ll make this fast, you asshole,” snarled McGregor, anger apparent in his voice even through the respirator.

  Rory was pinned down. Helpless. Hopeless.

  A hell of a way to die.

  He’d never thought he’d go out like this. Not in violence. There was a reason he’d dedicated his life to science, to working in calm laboratories rather than following in his father’s (a beat cop back in New Jersey) footsteps.

  Maybe something would happen at the last moment. Maybe Lily would intervene. Maybe suddenly something would crash into the back of McGregor’s head and knock him out or, better yet, kill him.

  But no.

  No such luck.

  McGregor’s fist slammed down into Rory’s mask, tearing it, the respirator smashing backward into Rory’s nose, coming loose from where it was supposed to hang.

  Everything was a mess. The mask and suit were all askew. But exposure was the least of Rory’s worries right now.

  Rory tasted blood. He struggled back, but he was helpless. McGregor had both his arms pinned to the laboratory floor with a single hand.

  McGregor’s fist slammed into Rory again.

  And again.

  After a certain point, the pain simply ceased.

  As did Rory’s thoughts.

  There was nothing but blackness, as his awareness and consciousness gradually slipped away from him completely.

  Nobody came to rescue him. Nobody came to save him. It was just his boss, smashing hard fists into his face, rattling his brain, pounding out the fury that shook his mind.

  14

  Brian

  Brian didn’t know how long he could keep up this ruse. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing. He wasn’t good at pretending to be someone else, someone he wasn’t.

  Why had he gotten himself into this mess? Why hadn’t he just stayed behind at the state hospital? After all, that was where they’d told him he belonged.

  All his life, he hadn’t fit in. All his life he’d known that he was different. One moment he could be talkative and gregarious. The next, he’d be by himself in a corner, muttering, judging everyone, hating himself.

  His mood fluctuated like a pendulum. Being different was too much effort. It had taken its toll. By the time his behavior had gotten noticeably strange during his senior year of high school, he’d welcomed the recommendation that he take some time to rest at the state mental hospital.

  He’d enjoyed the facilities at first. Then, over the years, he’d grown tired of it all.

  But it’d been too late. The years had passed, and the world kept turning while he stayed locked inside.

  When the time had come to leave, he hadn’t been able to. Everyone he’d known was older. Everyone he’d known had started a life of their own. Everyone he’d known had done something with their time, while he had just sat there, going to the group meetings, going to individual therapy sessions, and simply sitting alone by himself doing nothing at all.

  When, finally, he had decided to actually do something with his life, it was far too late.

  The years had slipped away from him.

  And then it had happened.

  The virus had hit.

  Who knew who’d brought it into the facilities outside of Santa Fe? Maybe a visitor. Maybe a doctor or a nurse whose partner was infected.

  Everyone knew about the virus. It was impossible not to. They’d seen it on TV and they had access to the internet, after all. They weren’t common prisoners and enjoyed many more freedoms than people who were locked up for actual legal transgressions, for actual crimes.

  Brian hadn’t made a move as the virus swept through the facility. He’d hoped that it would come for him. In a weird way, amidst his crazy delusions, he thought that he was destined to be killed by the virus. He thought that, in a way, it had been created for him and him alone. He thought, in a way typical of many delusional psychotics, that the world revolved around him. He didn’t understand that others had their own thoughts, worries, ambitions, and motives. He thought that he was the only one with a mind that thought and turned on its own. The others he saw as mere cardboard cutouts and nothing more.

  He’d watched as the doctors, nurses, patients, and orderlies had gotten sick and bled out onto each other and the floor. He’d cackled through the whole thing, praising everyone, including God and the devil himself.

  It felt as if things were finally happening for him. It felt as if he was finally alive. It felt as if he was getting what all his former friends and acquaintances had gotten, which was a purpose.

  His addled, delusional brain didn’t understand that a virus wasn’t a purpose. He confused intention and motivation with devastation and destruction. But could he be blamed? He was mentally ill and it only got worse as his supply of meds vanished. The line of patients receiving medications normally formed three times a day but now there were no patients and there were no doctors. At least none in a state fit enough to dispense or receive medication.

  So Brian had done the only thing that made sense to him. He’d made his way behind the counter that he normally was prohibited from venturing behind. He’d grabbed all the pills intended for all the patients. Then he’d swallowed them all. Dry.

  He’d hoped to die.

  He was ecstatic about the possibility, about what lay beyond this world and this life of disappointment and boredom.

  He’d hoped to go out, beating the virus at its own game.

  He vaguely knew that his thoughts were scrambled. He vaguely knew that none of what he thought made any sense.

  He didn’t remember the few days that followed. The pills hadn’t killed him, but they’d sent him into some sort of walking daze, and the next thing he knew he was out of the hospital, miles away, wandering along the roadside.

  Only bits and pieces of his memories from that time were intact. Only fragments remained. It was like a scene from a movie. Flashes of the cinematic visions remained with him: mountains in the distance, clouds forming around them like smoke, lightning flashing from somewhere, cars stopped, a horrible accident, bloodied bodies, broken bones that burst through the skin, a gunshot, people bleeding out along the road, whole families vomiting blood in unison.

  He didn’t know if he’d had an emotional reaction to all this. After all, his mind felt as scrambled as it ever had. The overdose of medication had sent him into one of the most bizarre detachments he’d ever experienced.

  The next thing he remembered, he was asking people for
Brian. He was asking if anyone knew him. Maybe he was looking for his long-lost high school friends from a decade ago. Or maybe he was looking for his parents. His father, after all, was also named Brian.

  But most likely he just couldn’t find himself, couldn’t find his own mind, and began asking for himself in the third person. Brian was his name after all.

  Almost no one paid him any mind. Everyone was too busy dying, too busy bleeding from their eyeballs, noses, and ears, from every orifice that could be conceived. Blood trailing behind them like a sick cosmic joke as they shuffled through the world, knowing that they were dying and knowing that there was no cure.

  He’d faded in and out of memory, in and out of consciousness. He hadn’t known what was happening for long stretches of time.

  Following one particularly lengthy blackout period, he found himself walking through the high desert with the sun high overhead. No one was around and there was just the smell of the juniper trees to accompany him, along with the song of some local birds.

  He’d never been able to stand birds. He didn’t know why. They’d just always bugged him. It had always felt to him as if they were pestering him, as if they were there only to mock him, only to taunt him, the dumb human on two legs who didn’t know what was what, who’d never had a real job or any real friends, the dumb ape-like creature whose family and friends had long surpassed him in every conceivable measure.

  And now where was his life going? He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there. He could barely remember the events at the hospital. He had a vague awareness of the virus, and of taking a lot of prescription medication.

  He’d faded out again, his memory going black, his mind going black, and he’d found himself in a house. He’d sort of ‘woken up’ in the center of a kitchen. There were pots and pans hanging all around him on the adobe walls. It was a quaint sort of kitchen with everything carefully arranged, with careful decoration.

  Brian had looked down at his hand. In it, he held a large knife.

  He looked around, surveying the kitchen, his head moving slowly.

  “What am I doing here?” he’d said, speaking to no one in particular, because it wasn’t for quite some time that he noticed the two adults who stood in front of him.

  Actually, cowered in front of him would have been more appropriate.

  They looked scared. Terrified. Almost shaking.

  There were a man and a woman.

  “Please,” said the woman. “You can have whatever you want. Just don’t hurt us anymore.”

  “Hurt you?” said Brian, speaking slowly, his intonation full of puzzlement. “Why would I hurt you? Who are you? What’s going on?”

  The man and woman exchanged a very confused look.

  “You don’t remember what happened?” said the woman.

  The man didn’t seem to be speaking much. He was just making strange panting noises.

  “Stop it!” shouted Brian suddenly, clasping his free hand to one of his ears. Of course, it did nothing to block out the sound. But it seemed suddenly as if the sound was the most intolerable thing he had ever come across. The worst noise on the planet. Worse, somehow, than the worst things imaginable, like nails on a chalkboard or the devil’s own disastrous strangled cry. “Stop it! I can’t stand it!”

  The man didn’t stop. He was breathing in a ragged way. The woman held him, her arm around him, and Brian now saw that the man was injured. There was a huge gash in his chest. Plenty of blood soaking through his torn shirt.

  Brian was perceiving the world in a scattered, uncontrolled way. Things came to him in an unordered fashion, as if he was coming into the world anew, completely fresh, and didn’t know what to make of it.

  The woman supported the man, keeping him from falling.

  A notion dawned on Brian, as he looked down now at the knife he held. There was blood on it.

  “Did I do it?” he said, his words quiet. He was looking right at the man, right at his injury.

  The woman looked petrified, simply too scared to answer.

  But he had to know. He just had to.

  This reminded him of another time. Another time he’d taken too many pills.

  Wait, had he taken too many pills now? Or recently?

  He couldn’t remember.

  Everything was a fog. A dense, impenetrable fog that rolled in like the waves of the ocean.

  He’d seen the ocean once. A long time ago.

  His mind was skipping around.

  It felt impossible to keep himself centered on anything.

  What was that memory?

  It was of the ocean. A gray day. No sun to speak of. A metallic sheen to the choppy waves. White froth on the edges of them.... He’d been just a kid, a little boy. Something had happened. Something with the waves. Some kind of violence. He had a memory of pain. His head slamming into something. His father angry, horribly angry. Something wrong with the boat...blood matted in his hair...blood ruining the upholstery of the boat...

  And that was it. That was the end of the memory.

  But there’d been another...

  He’d hurt someone sometime. Only fragments remained. He’d taken pills. A lot of them. Stolen from a medicine cabinet somewhere.

  There’d been violence. Shoving. Harsh words. A punch was thrown. Then he remembered his hands wrapping around someone’s neck. Squeezing hard. Strangled screams.

  Had he done this before?

  He looked down at the knife again, horrified.

  “Don’t do it!” squealed the woman, apparently mistaking his horror as aggression. “You’ve already done enough.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” he snarled, annoyance bursting up from nowhere at all.

  “I’m not...I’m just...”

  “Ugh,” grunted the man, blood spurting up from his mouth as he said the most intelligible thing he’d said in the whole conversation.

  His attempt to speak angered Brian even more.

  Gripping the knife harder, he lunged forward.

  His knife-wielding hand lashed out, his arm jutting forward with a power that he didn’t know he had.

  The knife point entered the man’s abdomen easily. Too easily. Much easier than cutting a juicy steak. So easy it didn’t seem real. Was he still dreaming?

  It sure seemed real.

  The man grunted in pain. Less than a scream. Less than a reasonable reaction.

  The woman screamed. She thrust herself forward, shouting, “Brian! Brian! No. No! What have you done?”

  Brian pulled the knife out of the man’s belly and took a huge step back, staring with wide eyes at what he’d done.

  “How did you know my name?” he said.

  The woman didn’t answer. She was sobbing, her head on the man’s bloody belly.

  The man was already dead. It had happened much faster than Brian would have expected.

  Brian stood there, his mind nothing but nonsense and madness, nothing but scattered dreams and thoughts of further violence. Feelings of anger. Feelings of embarrassment. All of the feelings making him feel far too hot, as if he were a furnace that might explode.

  “Look what you’ve done!” she said, snarling at him, turning away from her dying husband. “Look! What the hell’s wrong with you? You killed Brian!”

  He’d killed Brian? But how was that possible. He was Brian. That was his name. No one else’s. He’d been very clear about that back in the hospital, refusing to address anyone else by his name.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said, her voice frantic, her voice sounding distant, sounding strange. “We have a son!”

  “A son?”

  She didn’t answer. “Brian,” she was saying. “Brian! Wake up, Brian. Come on, Brian. Stay with me. Think of Cody. He’ll be home soon. I know he will. Don’t you want to see him?”

  “Stop that,” shouted Brian. “Stop using my name like that. He’s not Brian. I’m Brian.”

  But she wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t. No matter what Brian said,
she kept addressing the dead man as Brian.

  Brian could no longer tolerate it. The heat inside him had to come out. It had to go somewhere.

  He lashed out, thrusting himself forward, leading with the knife.

  It was over quickly.

  She screamed and then was silent.

  15

  Matt

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” said Judy, grabbing his elbow and pulling on it hard.

  “Huh? Now? Don’t you hear the sirens?”

  “Yeah, now.”

  “Sorry,” he said briefly to Brian, who just gave him a stiff nod.

  They strode somewhat far away from Brian, Judy looking over her shoulder as if checking to make sure they were out of earshot.

  “What’s up? We’re in a bit of a hurry here.” There was no need to mention the siren again. It was getting louder.

  Matt glanced over his shoulder. Brian was looking nervous. Probably because he and Judy were having a little private discussion. It was understandable that it would make him nervous.

  “You trust this guy?”

  “I thought we already went through this. Everything checks out.”

  “Does it? There’s something weird about him.”

  “Weird? He lost his wife. And his son is missing. It’d be weird if something didn’t seem weird about him. Look, we can talk about this later.”

  They were not close to the road, but they were within eyesight of it.

  And at that moment, a vehicle appeared there.

  It was an ambulance, with its lights flashing and siren blaring.

  “An ambulance?”

  It wasn’t hard to hear Judy because the sirens weren’t close enough to cover up her voice in any way.

  “Shit!” shouted Brian very loudly, all of a sudden.

  Brian had his hands at his hair, pulling on it, as if he was about to tear it out.

  “Brian!” shouted Matt, rushing over to him. “It’s okay!”

  “No!” shouted Brian.

  “It’s just an ambulance!”