Fair Haven

by Red Lagoe

  "Yes," she finally answered, reluctant to release her baseball bat, as he sat down beside her.

  A tattoo of crows perched atop a prison wall stretched across his left pectoral muscle. Melody tried not to stare at his body.

  "Yes what?" he asked wiping away the last bit of blood from his forearm.

  "I've been in the attic this whole time."

  "Smart."

  "Cowardly," she huffed.

  "I didn't even know you were in here. Why didn't you evacuate with the other idiots?" he asked.

  "Why didn't you?"

  John smiled through the scruffy beard growth. "That quarantine zone? We figured it was too many people, healthy and sick, all in one place. I don't trust it. Candace and I decided to wait it out and see what happens."

  "Is Candace your wife?"

  "No." He chuckled under his breath. "She lives on the other side of me. Her people were out of the country on vacation before this started, so she came to stay with me when things got bad. You know, maybe you should’ve talked to your neighbors more often.”

  "You know, maybe you should wear a mask when you're out there," Melody said.

  "Probably." He shrugged. "But I got blood in my eye and lived to tell about it, so I figured, fuck it. Not spread by blood.”

  "Saliva,” Melody said.

  “I think so.”

  "Like rabies—transmits through the saliva and causes neurologic dysfunction. But this is a thousand times worse," Melody said.

  Melody stared toward the window, but from her seated position, she could only see the half-naked autumn trees shifting in the gentle breeze against the blue sky. She released a long slow breath, like she had been holding it in for the past four days.

  John moved in quickly with the wash cloth to wipe away a spot of blood that she had missed on her forearm.

  "Missed a spot," he said and pulled away before she had a chance to protest.

  She should have kicked his ass for touching her again, but somehow it didn't bother her too much. She was definitely in shock.

  With a delicate motion, John raised his right hand up to her face, requesting approval to clean the specks of blood from her temples, but she backed away.

  "I got it," she said with a guilty conscience, secretly wanting him to touch her in any way he saw fit. Melody yanked away with a jolt and stood up to look out the window, wondering what the hell was wrong with her.

  "I didn't go to the quarantine zone because I've been waiting for my husband."

  John nodded and stood up. "I was afraid to ask what happened to him."

  "He left for work the day this all started here and...I don't know." Melody shook her head and changed the subject, "I know I froze out there. I'm not a total pansy."

  John lit up with an impossibly sexy smile. "Pansy? I know a pansy when I see one. Actually, I’m a little impressed." He crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  "Well if you're impressed with cowardly hesitation," she said, "there's more where that came from."

  "Not too many people around here have stepped up to help. Most just ran away, and the ones that tried to fight didn't make it. I'll admit that you, maybe, helped save me from a bad situation today. And you're a girl!"

  She raised her eyebrows at his remark.

  "What?" he asked, "You gonna complain that's sexist?"

  Melody laughed, wondering what she saw in him. "You should go."

  "You need me," he said.

  Melody laughed louder. "Are you kidding? You need me, as proven by your inability to fight off one chubby man."

  "I had it. I was pandering to your need to feel useful," he insisted, then looked around the room to investigate her home. "You shouldn't stay here alone anymore. Stay with me and Candace."

  "No. I'm leaving today."

  "It's getting late. Where you heading?"

  "To find my husband."

  John opened his mouth to speak what likely would be a protest, but held his tongue.

  "Candace and I have been talking about leaving town too—somewhere more remote. I've been teaching her to shoot from the second floor window to prepare her. I can teach you-"

  "Based on her skills, your offer isn't very enticing," Melody sneered. "Besides, I know how to shoot."

  It had been years since she fired her grandfather's shotgun up in the mountains, but she could remember the kick in her adolescent shoulder and not losing her footing, even though she was a whopping 110 pounds at the time. She missed her target—a doe—on purpose. Since it had been about fifteen years since she touched a gun, she was confident that her skills were lacking, but she wanted this John guy to know that she wasn't to be messed with.

  A faint voice yelled, "John!" Candace called from the second floor of John's house.

  "That girl." John shook his head. "She's probably worried... Neighborhood is clear for now. Lock your doors and pack up some stuff in case we all have to leave in a hurry. I'm going to take care of the bodies, close up whatever hole in the fence Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb came through, and I'll be over later to escort you over to my house where we can work on a plan to evacuate."

  "I don't need an escort," she argued.

  John turned to leave her house before she had a chance to debate it with him. This guy didn't know who he was talking to. He bounded down the steps of her front porch with a slight hobble and ran back to check on Candace. Melody gawked at his strong back as John jogged back to his house, then quickly brushed away her feelings as nothing more than a silly crush.

  Aside from three dead bodies, the street was clear of infected all the way down to Mason Drive. Nobody in sight.

  She worried for Marcus and wondered if he was out there trying to make his way back to her. She placed an ardent kiss upon her fingertips and placed them against the window, hoping that he knew she still loved him and that she regretted being so selfish that day he went to work.

  "I'm coming," she whispered.

  6

  Alone in the Dark

  Kayla Hartford's heart wailed against her chest after she called out into the darkness of the stairwell. Ready to dart back to the safety of the breakroom if she heard a sound, she listened intently. Silence.

  Entering the darkness like she had stepped through the gateway to hell, her body tremored. After finding the railing, she ran down the steps as quickly as she could, swinging her wooden chair leg at the darkness, terrified of running into one of the sick people at any moment.

  Kayla made it to the landing on the third floor and peeked through the small window on the door. The thought of continuing down the black stairwell overwhelmed her, so she opened the door to the third floor and tumbled into the safety of the light as if she had just finished the journey to Mordor.

  Kayla tiptoed across the rough, gray carpeted hallway of the third floor between the office cubicles as sunlight leaked in from below the shades of the wall-to-wall windows. Nobody in sight. None dead or alive.

  The bright outside world revealed something unexpected. There was no more rioting. No swarms of sick people attacking one another. There were some dead bodies in the street, but no upright wandering infected. The sun set between the buildings nearby, and its light reflected off shattered glass in the street. She made it. Take that, Styles Newman!

  Styles was her high school boyfriend. The so-called "love of her life" since she was 16 years old. When Kayla opted to go to college on the other side of the country to study biology, Styles laughed that she didn't have what it takes to make it on her own.

  "They're going to eat you alive," Styles said one night while he was drunk and getting a little too grab-happy with her breasts. She hadn’t been enjoying his company anyway, so she didn't cry for too long when he broke up with her. The coward did it two weeks after she left for school, via a text message—Sorry babe, this won't work.

  She wondered if Styles was alright or if they ended up eating him alive. Mostly, she worried about her parents and her brother and hoped they were safe aboard their sai
lboat or something.

  She stalled before the dark, daunting hallway—a stark contrast from the well-lit open space around her—and she could make out faint light glowing toward the end. A light from Lab One. She had delivered files down that hallway a few times.

  Kayla readied her broken chair leg in her grasp and slid with her back against the dark wall toward the ominous light, wondering if she would find survivors in there.

  Inch by inch, she made her way through the darkness, panting heavily, and praying not to die. Blackness encompassed her, and her bare toes could feel each jagged fiber of the carpeting. Anything could get her now, at any moment.

  Her breaths became heavier and tears poured down her cheeks, while she wished her dad was there to keep her safe. He was always there when she was scared.

  "I totally got this," she had said to her dad before leaving for college.

  Her vision blurred again from the welling of tears, so she wiped them out with the back of her hand.

  "I got this," she murmured under her breath.

  The laboratory window created a shaft of light onto a body. As she neared the large man in a white coat that laid face down on the floor—showcased in the light like a game show prize—her heart thumped within her throat. She shivered and held her hand over her mouth, trying not to vomit.

  She recognized him as Dr. Carter—such a friendly guy. He was over six feet tall, towering above tiny Kayla when he was upright. She had delivered files to him before, and even tried flirting with him once, but he had turned her down. Married. He had removed his ring from time to time, to handle certain materials, so she didn't know. She was mortified for pursuing a married man, so she did her best to avoid being the office whore after that. No more flirting was the rule.

  Kayla stepped over his lifeless body with a knot in her gut. She spotted a shadow of movement behind the blinds of the lab window.

  She tried the handle on the door, but it was locked. Peeking back over her shoulder for danger, she raised her timid hand and knocked on the door.

  She could hear someone moving inside, and tried to steal a glimpse through the edge of the blinds, but could see nothing. A desperate knock again, but there was still no response.

  "Hello!" she called out, but nothing happened. Knowing one of the sick would have come banging on the door if one was inside, she assumed whoever was in there had to be uninfected.

  "Hello?" she called again, a bit louder with a trembling voice. No response.

  Kayla had spent too many hours alone and far too long in the dark. She felt her grip on sanity slipping again.

  She lifted her wooden chair leg and smacked it against the glass. The glass held up, but the noise echoed through the halls, stirring the man on the floor behind her.

  Crying and carrying on, Kayla wailed against the glass again and again. And again, until all was hopeless. In an act of defeat (and lack of willpower) she dropped her arms to her sides and rested her face against the window sobbing, while Dr. Carter got up behind her.

  7

  Failure to Execute

  John left Melody's house and, after donning a fresh gray tee shirt, he began to haul one of the bodies—the woman in yellow—out of the street. Melody stripped her filthy tank top from her body and pulled one of Marcus’s pressed white shirts from the hall closet.

  She felt disgusting and a fresh shirt wasn’t enough to feel clean. Despite not having the electric water heater functioning, she wanted to shower anyway. A trembling sensation still ran through her veins from the incident in the street with the infected, while she debated whether to clean up, help John move bodies, or get the hell out of that house.

  A filthy face, nearly unrecognizable, stared back at her through the foyer mirror as she considered her next course of action.

  A thump coming from her backyard startled her. Melody flinched, then listened intently for more noises.

  She hurried to the sliding back door to look into her shaggy backyard. No intruders, but she could spot movement between the fence slats in the yard behind hers. She heard the thump again, it sounded close.

  She tightened the laces on her sneakers, grabbed her bat and, with tremendous caution, she glided open the door, making as little noise as possible. The idea to get John to help her cropped into her head, but she pushed it out before entertaining it.

  The birds were chirping in the trees as the few remaining leaves whispered at the touch of the breeze. She stepped onto the back deck and let the warm air blow through her thick knotted hair. The faint smell of death drifted through the neighborhood and robbed her of the brief moment of peace.

  Melody tied her hair back into a pony tail, barely able to contain the knotted mess in the hair tie, then gripped her bat with a heightened sense of confidence since her encounter with infected earlier.

  She neared the edge of her deck and stepped down to the first step. A clamoring from the house behind hers startled her, but she remained quiet, keeping an eye on the privacy fence. She took another step down, trying to peek through the narrow slats of the fence from afar, without success.

  She would have to get closer. But as Melody neared the last step, a set of pale dirty fingers grabbed her ankle.

  Melody lost her balance, screamed out, and crashed to the ground on her shoulder. An arm lunged out from under the steps as she kicked herself away from its deadly grip.

  The weak man, with skin blackening around his mouth, tried to squeeze himself between the spacing of the steps under the deck. He wore the same style of navy blue coveralls as the scrawny man from earlier that morning. HVAC guys. Marcus was right. The HVAC guys came—crazy bastards.

  She didn't expect that anyone would come, but there he was, snarling and drooling from between the steps, trying to bite into her.

  The noise attracted the body in the adjacent yard, and the privacy fence shook. Melody jabbed at her attacker with the bat, but she couldn't get a good swing in from her reclined position. She scrambled to her feet, then sprinted away to the side of the house toward the gate.

  While looking back to be sure he wasn't following her, she crashed into another man. Melody flinched, raising her bat to defend herself, but it was John.

  He grabbed onto her bat before she could swing it, and he steadied her against his body.

  "Whoa," he said, like he was calming a spooked horse. Melody's body pressed against his. She took a steadying breath, and forced herself away from him.

  "Get off of me," she shouted.

  "You ran into me, sweetheart."

  "Stop calling me that."

  John moved passed her and found the man under her deck. He took care of the situation for her, plunging his knife into his head.

  "I had it!" she said.

  "I can tell."

  The moaning increased from the other side of the fence, and John lowered his stance and whispered, "Come on."

  They stepped over the dead body between the steps and moved into her house, locking the door, and then watched the fence rattle. Moments later, the infected person at the back fence had given up and moved on.

  "Don't have much of an attention span, do they?" John said, and then sat down and leaned back in the wooden chair at Melody's breakfast table as the sunlight poured in.

  There he was again in her house. Being in his proximity excited her and frustrated her, and she wanted to run her hands along those arms and kick him in the nuts at the same time. John looked to the ceiling and rested his arms on top of his head, releasing a forceful breath.

  "You're bleeding." She leaned in to inspect John's elbow, which was scraped and filthy from the episode with the fat infected man earlier.

  "I'm OK," he insisted, "I scraped it while pulling myself out from under Jabba earlier."

  "Run your elbow under the faucet for a while. You should have done it right after being exposed. There's still bits of gravel in there."

  "The wound didn't contact the saliva," he argued.

  "Just run it under water," Melody demanded,
and left him in the kitchen to go grab her medical bag. As she reentered, she allowed her eyes to sweep across his body as he stood hovered over the sink. He shifted his weight off of his prosthetic leg and kept his elbow under the running water.

  "Are you a nurse?" he asked. "Oh wait, is that sexist for me to assume?"

  "I'm a veterinarian."

  John's scruffy face held a smile. "I love cats." He inspected his elbow as the water ran over the wound.

  "I wouldn't pin you as a cat person," she started to relax.

  "They're low maintenance, and ninja-like," he explained.

  "Cat people are ninja-like?" she asked with a devilish grin.

  John and Melody both laughed, exchanging a moment of cheesy jokes as if the craziness of the outside world didn't exist. John pulled his elbow from the water, but Melody pushed it back beneath the stream.

  "Keep rinsing," she said. "Just in case."

  "You're a bossy little thing, aren't you?"

  "When I need to be."

  "You mentioned rabies earlier," he said.

  She nodded and leaned against the counter. "It seems to be similar in nature. Neurologic symptoms. Aggression and drooling. There's probably encephalitis."

  "That sounds familiar," John said.

  "It’s inflammation in the brain, and this seems to be spread by saliva... These are all symptoms very much like rabies. Even the name they gave it—LV01. I'm guessing that LV stands for lyssavirus, but they never really gave much information."

  "No, they didn't have much time before the world shit the bed," John said.

  Melody continued, "Rabies is a type of lyssavirus, but rabies takes days, maybe weeks, for symptoms to show. Whatever this is takes hours, sometimes minutes, depending on the wound. There are multiple types of rabies-like viruses that fall under the category of a lyssavirus. But nothing like this one. Maybe it's some super-mutated version of one?" Melody shook her head and second-guessed herself. "I'm no expert, though."

  "You have more insight on this than anyone so far."