As the World Ends PART 3

by North, Geoff

  Cats started howling. They scratched at the wired walls of their tiny cages, and hissed at Louie as he worked his way along the narrow aisles. He covered his nose and mouth with one hand to block out the stench of feces and urine, and started to run. There was nothing in here he could use against his tormenters. Louie could see a door in the shadows up ahead. It wasn’t the way he’d come in, but Louie didn’t care. He needed to get out, and he needed to get out fast. The security card fell from his shaking fingers as he tried inserting it into the key slot. He started to whimper on his hands and knees searching for it in the red and black gloom. He found it seconds later, resting in a pool of dried blood and drool, inches away from a dead animal carcass. It had been a goat, or possibly a sheep—Louie could never tell the difference—and its pointed nose was jammed into the black wire of its cage. It had died there like that, stuck, starving, and thrashing. The black lifeless eyes stared at Louie as he scooped the key back up. He inserted it into the slot and escaped into the next room.

  It was much quieter, and the smell was tolerable. Louie pushed the strands of hair back hanging over his eyes, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. There was no way he was going back through that screaming hell and stench. He would have to find another way to the elevator. The lighting was better in here, and there was a calm order to the glass containers lining the walls on either side of him. Louie peered into one and saw a bug as thick and long as his thumb crawling about in a layer of black soil. Another one poked its way out of the dirt and started climbing up the glass. There were a thousand flies in the next one, feeding on a mat of squirming white maggots.

  Louie walked slowly, running his finger tips along the glass surfaces. I could load up a gurney with a whole bunch of these insect aquariums... toss them through the doors and let those assholes deal with a bug infestation. He decided against it. With his clumsy luck, one of the containers would undoubtedly break open before he ever got back down to level 10. There was another door down at the end of the aisle. Louie rushed towards it, hoping to find a corridor that would lead him back to the elevator.

  He found a small lab instead. A stool had been knocked over at an island counter in the room’s center. Papers had fallen to the floor. Someone had been in a hurry to get out when word arrived that the nukes were flying. They had left their work strewn all over the counter. Louie saw a small glass container on the counter. It was rectangular in shape, like the bug boxes in the room before, but a quarter the size. It was empty but looked dirty inside, the inner walls coated with blackish grime.

  Louie picked some of the papers up from the floor and started reading. Most of it was gibberish—charts, time tables and pie graphs, formulas and equations—proving he didn’t have what it took to become a research scientist, and never would. But some of it was easy enough to understand. They had been studying Lyme disease—a bacteria carried by deer ticks. Everyone knew about Lyme disease in Manitoba. The prairies were infested with ticks in the spring months. Though hardly life threatening, the disease could cause years of discomfort if not treated in its early stages. Louie’s mother had warned him as a child to never stand too long in high grass, and to always pull up his socks and wear long pants. Kids always came home with wood ticks stuck in their legs and bellies. Some even managed to crawl all the way up into their hair, and could go undiscovered for days.

  But wood ticks weren’t deer ticks. Deer ticks were much smaller, and harder to spot. The little fuckers would fill up on blood and eventually fall away, leaving their bacterial infection behind as a way of saying thank you.

  So where were the ticks? Louie looked about the lab, trying to spot jars on the shelves filled with the little brown arachnids. He spotted a vault door left open in the wall. He looked inside and discovered it empty. The area was small, smaller than a bread box, and there was a tiny socket receptor built into the back wall. It’s a cooling unit. Louie clicked the door shut and read the label attached to it. TICK LDV3. There were two more cooling vaults next to it labelled TICK LDV1 and TICK LDV2. He pulled the handle open on one of them and discovered a frosted-over glass container fitted inside. Louie looked back at the island work station where the dirty container was sitting.

  So that’s TICK LDV3.

  He went back to the counter and lifted the glass box up for a better look. Louie could see where it attached inside its cooling unit. There was a tiny docking socket in the upper corner, and a second one in the opposite corner that must have acted as an air circulator. The grime stuck up inside the glass walls started to move. Louie placed the container back down hurriedly and stepped back. The dirt—what he had thought was dirt—was swirling about inside like a thin layer of dark grey smoke. It coalesced up against the wall facing Louie and stopped.

  “What the hell is that?” He moved back towards it and placed a single finger up against the glass. The grey cloud clustered in towards the warmth, swarming into a thick black circle. Louie pulled his finger away, and the circle slowly started to spread back out, breaking up and becoming grey once again. “My God, what were they working on down here?”

  If Louie could’ve studied the creeping grey mist on a microscopic level, he would’ve discovered over a billion crawling ticks. He had to find that out by reading more of the scattered papers. TICK LDV3 stood for TICK Lyme Disease Variant 3. Louie pulled the stool as far from the container as possible and continued reading at the corner of the work counter. When he’d finished deciphering what he could, Louie pushed the papers away. He stared at the container and watched the grey cloud sway back and forth.

  “I don’t know if you little frickers are dangerous or not, but I’m betting you could really get under the skin of some friends of mine.”

  Louie decided to wear a hazmat suit for his second trip down to level 10. He held the container out at arm’s length the entire way, watching in revulsion as the dark mist broke into two groups, and clung up to the sides where his gloved hands were. This is bad. I think this might be really bad. He carried on anyway.

  There was a computer on the desk in the reception area of level 10. Louie placed his package down carefully and went behind the counter. He sat in the chair and brought up the video image on the other side of the doors leading into the emergency evacuation living quarters. The gurney was still up against the wall, and the containers filled with disease Louie had tried to kill his co-workers with were nestled on top. There was no one in sight.

  Do it fast, Louie. Open the doors, throw it against the floor, and get the hell out.

  He picked the container back up and went to the doors. He hesitated putting the key card into the slot. Maybe I shouldn’t do this. Maybe I should think things over... sleep on it. He remembered Tom Braden’s condescending face on the surveillance monitor. “He’s not better than me. None of them are.” The card went in and the light turned green. The three deadbolts snapped back into the wall, and Louie opened the doors. He tossed the glass box into the air like a grenade ready to explode, and watched. It hit the floor on one corner and clunked over three times. It didn’t shatter into pieces.

  “God-fucking-damn it!” Louie ran in and grabbed one of the disease sample canisters. He gripped one end in both gloved hands and swung down like a caveman wielding a club. It smashed into the glass and a spider web of cracks blossomed out. The grey mist inside merged towards it in a frenetic rush.

  Richard appeared at the far end of the corridor. “Louie? What the hell are you trying now?”

  Louie struck the container again as the security chief ran towards him. The glass didn’t shatter, but the ticks had found enough space in the cracks to get out. They crawled up the canister’s surface in a dozen strings of black for Louie’s hands. He released it and backed up for the open doors. Richard was less than twenty feet away. Louie slammed the doors shut and removed the key from the wall. The locks clicked back into place.

  What have I done?

  Louie thought he was going to vomit inside the sealed helmet of his suit. He worked it of
f and sucked at the air outside until the nausea passed. He looked at the gloves on his hands and wiggled the fingers. He tore the Velcro straps open and shook the gloves off. They’re on me. They’re crawling up under my finger nails and biting in... biting, burrowing deep. Louie studied his finger tips. He turned his hands over and stared at the palms, looking for black lines moving along the wrinkles. He saw nothing. They hadn’t gotten to him.

  Louie removed the rest of the suit and let it fall to the floor with the gloves and helmet. There would’ve been no escape for Richard. He was running straight into them when the doors closed. What did they do to him? What must it have been like?

  There was only one way to find out. Louie left level 10 for the last time, and headed back up for the security control room.

  Richard was lying face down on the floor with one bloated hand rested up against the door. Louie adjusted the controls and zoomed in on his former boss. He wasn’t moving. Richard Sheffield was dead. That nauseating feeling crept back up into Louie’s throat. He had totally intended to kill them all, but seeing this one dead man—the first of many—finally hit Louie like a punch in the gut. I killed him. I did that.

  Louie adjusted the camera’s angle, zoomed in closer on the corpse’s hand. He thought he’d seen something. Perhaps Richard wasn’t quite done yet. Why were his fingers so swollen? Louie brought the image into focus and gasped. The fingers were vibrating. Something was inside of him. One of the fingers suddenly jerked. The hand snapped back at the wrist. Louie watched in terror as Richard’s arm slid away from the door and his entire body began to spasm. He flopped over onto his back, and Louie cried out.

  The man’s neck had swollen out like a balloon ready to burst. The skin was grey and mottled over with moving black patches. The ticks were inside him, moving about, feeding on his cooling blood and growing. Richard lurched up into a sitting position. His head twisted from side to side until the skin could take no more. It burst open at the center of his throat, like a giant pustule popping. Brown gunk erupted out in a stream and splattered across the floor. The liquid started creeping along the tiles; it climbed up the walls, and it slithered over the gurney wheels. The gorged ticks had multiplied a million fold in the last few minutes, and their babies were searching for food. They moved down the corridor, like a terrible black wave, towards the living quarters beyond.

  Louie snapped the monitor off and puked all over the keyboard. He stood on legs that barely worked, and swayed back and forth. “What have I done? I never meant… I never suspected… Oh dear God… what have I done?”

  He had to get out, and not just out of the control room. Louie had to escape from this underground hell. The thirty-seven people left on level 10 would be dead in minutes at the rate those things were multiplying and spreading out. Louie didn’t plan on becoming one of them. He went to the stairwell next to the elevator and tested the door for the first time. He’d lied to Richard; he didn’t know for sure whether or not the outside world was completely cut off. Louie only knew the main elevator couldn’t travel up any further than level 2.

  The door opened and Louie craned his head up. Part of the stairwell had collapsed, but he knew he could get out. He could see dim, grey light poking through the battered chunks of concrete and flattened drywall. Louie climbed up into the rubble, wondering to himself why he’d waited so long to try and leave this place. Because I was too afraid to find out what was really out there. He yanked on a twisted piece of stair railing and pulled. Plaster rained over his head, and Louie coughed on dust. The cracks of light had turned into a gaping hole. No, I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to stay down here because I wanted to know how it felt to be in control… of other people… of their lives.

  Louie crawled through the rest of it, pulling himself up and out into the depressing grey light of day. As sick as it had made him to watch Richard die, Louie wished he could have seen it happen to the others as well. I should’ve stayed.

  Someone spoke from behind him. “Hello there.”

  Louie spun around, shocked. “Hello?”

  “Saw you climb up out of that mess,” the stranger said. “Surprised anyone could live through that. You okay?”

  “Yes, I suppose I’m fine… yes.”

  The big bald man looked concerned. “You sure about that, buddy? You seem a little confused to me.”

  Louie looked back down through the opening he’d come through. He thought he could see something moving down in the stairwell shaft. He hadn’t seen the ticks overtake the others, but he was sure they had.

  They’re dead, all of them.

  He could’ve sworn Richard was dead, too. But he’d seen his boss come back with his own eyes. He had seen his limbs move, and he’d watched him sit up. The ticks did that. They took Richard over, and they’ll take the others over as well.

  The man spoke again, softly. “You ready to get out of here, pal?” He held his hand out.

  Louie took the hand. “Yes, I’m ready to leave.” A piece of masking tape was stuck over a name tag on the man’s chest. Three letters were scrawled there in red marker. “Thank you… Roy.”

  Angela

  They had spent their first night together sleeping in the ditch. The night after, Angela and the children slept on the seats of an abandoned minivan. They stayed on the highway, taking water and food from cars, avoiding buildings altogether and sticking with what they could find from the openness of vehicles. Angela no longer wanted to sleep in houses, and the Fulger twins didn’t argue. They had all had enough of the terrors of being trapped inside strange houses and shopping malls.

  Angela wouldn’t let Michael and Amanda talk to strangers. It wasn’t safe, she’d told them. And the further they traveled out from the city’s center, the more people they found. There were more survivors on the outskirts where the bomb’s effects hadn’t been as devastating. The three hadn’t met anyone dangerous since fleeing the shopping center, no more needle-stabbing teens and fat gun-wielding maniacs, but nor had they encountered people wanting to help them. Everyone was in it for themselves now. There were no more friendly neighbors or concerned strangers. People seemed as scared of Angela and the children as they were of them.

  “I don’t think we should go out any farther,” Michael said as Amanda handed them each a bottle of water from a shopping bag of groceries sitting in the backseat of an old Chrysler Intrepid. “There’s not going to be as much stuff farther away from the city.”

  Angela shut the car door quietly and nodded. “I know we’re limiting ourselves. There’s lots to eat and drink in the city, but do you kids know what radiation sickness is?”

  “It’s when people’s hair falls out and they start throwing up,” Amanda answered. “Me and Michael have seen tons of movies about nuclear war and zombies taking over the world.”

  “I’m sure you have.” She ruffled the girl’s dirty hair. “I’m not all that worried about a zombie Apocalypse, but I don’t want you guys getting sick. I want to get out of the city where the air’s cleaner.”

  Michael drank a quarter of his water. “I don’t think the air will be any cleaner anywhere we go. That grey snow is everywhere, and when it rains, my skin stings.”

  We’re leaving the city because I don’t want anyone to murder you, she thought. We’re getting out as fast as we can because I think that big lunatic is still after us. “Just trust me on this, okay, Michael? Let’s see what things are like in the next town.”

  “Next town isn’t for fifty miles, and I bet it’s snowing grey shit there, too.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Angela replied, “and please don’t swear.” Angela thought she’d seen Roy the security guard poking his big bald head into cars the night before while the twins had slept in the minivan. She couldn’t swear to it since it had been dark at the time, and he was in the opposite lane—the one heading into Winnipeg, not the one leading out where they were hidden away. Odds were it hadn’t been him, but Angela wasn’t taking any chances. Roy had killed over a hundred people
in the North Kilpatrick Shopping Mall—the children’s mother among them—and the crazy bastard had said he would find them. I’ll find you thieving fuckers! You’ll pay for the stuff you took, and then I’ll fucking tear out your throats with my goddamned bare hands! Those had been his exact words, and Angela believed every one of them.

  You bet he’s still after you, girl. He’s going to find you, and he’s going to keep his promise. You should just wait where you are and let him get it over with.

  Angela’s stepfather wouldn’t shut up inside her head. The more frightened she became, the more hopeless things seemed, the louder he got. “He’s not going to find us.”

  “You’re talking to yourself again,” Amanda said.

  “Sorry.” She took the girl’s hand and the three continued walking west.

  He’s got guns, remember? I’m sure it will be quick and painless. Stay where you are and let him catch up. Let him end your worries with a bullet between the eyes.

  “Can I see one of the guns?” Michael asked.

  Angela was rubbing the skin between her eyebrows. “Guns? Why do you want to see one of the guns?”

  “I just want to hold one… see what it feels like.”

  They had two guns. One they had taken from Roy after Michael incapacitated him with an oversized golf driver swing between the shoulder blades. Angela had picked the other from the waistband of a teenager she had murdered with a knitting needle through the heart. “It feels like a gun, cold and heavy. There, now you know.”

  “You know what I mean, I want to hold it on my own. One of us should know what we’re doing in case we need to defend ourselves.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of defending all three of us, and you’re too young to be handling guns.”

  Angela and Michael hadn’t gotten along all that well since the three had been stuck together. He was continually challenging her, testing her ability to look after them. Angela had never had children of her own, and the twins had never been without a mother up until a few days ago. They were both adjusting, Angela realized. She would have to patient; their parents were gone, and she would have to fill the void as best she could.