“Hooo! I see one!” A junior executive whose name no one had yet bothered to remember pointed excitedly at one of the screens. “I see one!”
----------
Once pointed out and seen, the dead man could not be unseen. It was at the south-most point of the town, as the She Devils progressed past a tire retailer where the haggard apparition came out of one of the open bays. So well had the lack of life, the dust and grime camouflaged the man, that he had seemed invisible as he stood by a grimy and scuffed wall, unnoticed until he finally moved.
The gray man incongruously dressed in a disheveled gray three piece suit, covered in dirt and dust, had blended perfectly with the gray cement walls of the bay. He staggered out like a careful drunk and made his way toward the women like a man in no hurry, a man with nowhere special to go.
Cho, the team leader and weapon bearer, passed him by blithely, without noticing as did Kate Keller,they were both gazing straight ahead as if already locking on the final goal. Both women were oblivious to the threat and it was Xhiu Lee, the shy one who carried the food and first aid kits and already dragged behind, who saw him.
“Hey! Everyone! Look to your left!”
The two women up front stopped in their jog and turned their attention to where Xhiu was pointing. The expressionless man continued his approach but now seemed to be struggling to hasten his pace. They all looked unsure on how to proceed. They had seen the Turned on the news and in the movies. But most people had yet run into them one on one.
In the movies they were zombies, gory, noisy semi-dismembered corpses whose most prominent features were their teeth. You popped them in the head and that was it. Show business always made killing look easy.
“He looks...” Xhiu hesitated, “…normal.”
“From a distance maybe, look at his eyes,” Kate whispered.
Now a few feet away, the man’s eyes were easily visible. Opaque, cloudy pupils, the left eye was rotted and blown, visibly larger than the right.
“Okay,” conceded Xhiu, “not even close to normal.”
The forlorn figure staggered faster toward them.
“Wow. It’s like he’s getting desperate to reach us. Sad. C’mon, let's go people,” Cho said.
The three women looked at each other, shrugged and resumed their run with none of the arrogance and levity they displayed at the start of the race. The dead man began to follow them, but slow and unsteady, he was soon left behind.
----------
“What? Damn it!” Fats mumbled to no one in particular. "We really better see some conflict soon."
Ross, the cameraman embedded in the team, remained behind briefly and kept filming the dead man.
“Good shot there,” said the nameless junior executive.
Fats grunted his assent. The cameraman had zoomed in on the wasted, impassive face of the dead man. Fats was sure he saw confusion and need in the dead man’s blasted eyes. What if there was something, someone alive trapped inside the dead husk? The cameraman waited until he had the dead man’s attention — until his ruined eyes bored into the camera and straight in the viewers’ eyes. He came closer and closer, arms outstretched, the hands opened to grasp and the lips parted to bite. Ross waited, edging in until the man was in touching distance of the lenses, then turned and ran, double-timing until he caught up to the women, who had stopped to watch the drama.
Fats checked out the progress of the other teams on the other screens set up in the room. At the east, Righteous had enjoyed the smoothest entrance. They jauntily took off with no issues whatsoever. In that group, Amber was the rear wheel but it looked like she was keeping up. In the west, the Cobras postured briefly, traded high fives before moving on.
A phone rang in the large meeting room. Another nameless executive picked it up. “Fats, you got a call. Your wife —she sounds upset.”
“Which one?”
“I...I have no idea...” Was the flummoxed reply.
Fats chortled and looked at his smart phone. It had been in a “don’t disturb” setting. Several calls had been logged and messages had been left. He had missed them all. Sabrine was as needy and demanding as she was beautiful. It was a trade off he had accepted when he married her.
“I’ll take it.” He got up from the table and made his way to one of the private collaboration rooms that lined the sides of the larger meeting room, slid the glass door closed, and picked up the phone.
While everyone was looking at the screen or busy with data and spreadsheets Cheryl slyly tracked Fats’ retreat to the small private room. You miserable fat bastard, she thought. You are so finished. Fats had edged her out of all promotions and better opportunities for the past three years, and each year her resentment had grown, festering a bit more.
That she might not have deserved or qualified for the promotions and opportunities Fats got hadn’t crossed her mind and wouldn’t have mattered if it had. She was respected, but not liked. Able, skilled and hard working, but not given to introspection or empathy. Well, won’t we all just see about that, she thought. This show was her last chance to get even: to show them all. She smiled thinly and looked down at her clasped hands, waiting for the sliding door to open so they could move on.
She didn’t have to wait long. The conversation had been short and when the Fat man ended the call and came out he looking distracted and worried. Cheryl liked that, before she could say anything the rest of people in the room erupted in nervousness excitement.
“Alvin Boots got bit.” A nameless young executive rushed to be the first to deliver the bad news. “Idiot.”
Fats nodded, not really paying attention, his mind was elsewhere. “I have a family situation. Be back in a few hours. Cheryl, run this thing.”
She looked up at him, solicitous. “Can we do anything to help you?”
“No...No.” He looked at the room, everyone’s attention was on the large televison sets attached to the wall. He watched two of the younger interns nudging each other and shaking their heads, sharing knowing and cynical grins while pointing to the young man on the screen — whose arm was marked by a bleeding circular wound.
Both men comforted and comfortable with the unspoken knowledge that someone in their position and social group would never have to be in such a situation. Their privileged status taken for granted.
He felt his gut sour and a stab of anger, but the had his own problems to deal with.“Just take care of things, thanks for asking,” he mumbled, and walked out the room.
Don’t worry Fats, Cheryl thought as she waved him off with a friendly smile. I’ll take good care of you; I’ll take care of you all.
----------
“Serena, brings us a couple of beers, make yourself useful.”
First flag for Cobras
In the cold bleak room, Eliza zoomed in on Alvin Boots. His face was beaded with sweat and eyes bulged as he stared at the bite mark on his arm like it was an incredible hallucination.
The Fat Cobras had been going for their first flag, their map had led them to 1698 Hollybrook Avenue — a cheaper, old two-story home. The yard unkempt had reverted to nature, chocked with weeds and carpeted with fallen leaves. A small flat-bottomed fishing boat whose camouflaged patterned, plastic covering had failed under the elements was now an algae coated, rain-filled pond. With the energy and arrogance that comes with youth and strong able bodies, the boys had made plenty of noise looking for an entrance and eventually just kicked the main door in. Inside, the home was clean if worn by age, abandoned to darkness by drawn blinds and closed curtains.
Whoever had lived here might not have been rich, but they had been house proud and had cared and tended to what they had. The only noise was insistent pinging from the beacon. The team followed it upstairs to a closed room.
Alvin had rushed to it, pushed in the door wide open and she
fell on him then. The woman had been inside the room, right by the door, saw the arm push it in, and bit down. Her teeth broke through the sleeve.
Through the skin.
Through the flesh.
They kept going until the upper and lower jaws met.
Alvin had howled in agony as he tried to shake loose of her, but the woman had clamped down like a pit bull and only let go and staggered backward once she had pulled off her mouthful. She chewed, mouth open and slack-faced, with all the enthusiasm and interest of a cow chewing her cud. She seemed to take no pleasure from the fresh flesh but her eyes never looked away from his, once she regained her balance and came in for a second bite even as she still chewed the first.
Theo sidestepped her as she zoomed in on Alvin. Once behind her, he kicked in the back of her supporting leg and brought her down to her knees. While she struggled to get up, with a mighty swing he crashed a large rock into her temple. This fall to the floor was final; almost noiseless, muffled by the carpet, her open eyes at last sightless, Alvin’s flesh a gross protrusion from her mouth. For a while nobody moved in the disheveled sunlit room.
Theo yelled and broke the spell. “Ty, Tyshon! The medkit.” Ty was in shock, fixated on the dead woman on the floor and wasn’t moving.
Tight-lipped with nostrils flared, Theo sighed and headed for him, when he reached to take his backpack he finally got the bigger guy’s attention.
“Get away me, you little white fag...”
Alvin broke in. “Ty, how ‘bout you shut your mouth and help out over here.”
“Yeah.” Sullen but mindful of Alvin, he grabbed the medkit from the backpack and went over to him.
Eliza focused her shot on Theo. The boy was unperturbed, it looked like flat affect to her. She had fostered two troubled kids early in her marriage, and her experience brought that troubling behavior to her mind.
Flat affect, no normal emotions there, could be depression, madness or psychopathy. Either that, or the kid has ice running in his veins, she thought, before she turned her camera to the dead woman and lowered herself to her knees for a better close up of her ruined visage. When she heard a hissed moan of pain behind her, she got up and returned her attention to Alvin. The bravado and arrogance was gone, but he had gotten himself under control. She could see no fear on his face. She panned her shot from Alvin to Ty. They looked pole axed by the turn of events. This is not part of their script. This happens to the other guy.
On screens everywhere the attack had been played and replayed, a few times in slow motion for good measure; it had gotten the show some major media traction, and the event was well into the viral stage. Eliza guessed that by the afternoon it will have gone from viral to a full blown media contagion with the ratings and attention to match.
Tom’s voice came in over the headphones. “Team Cobra, you want to quit? Just say so and we’ll get you out.”
The guys — they only look old enough to be boys, really — looked startled, as though they had been caught doing something wrong.
“No,” Alvin said. “No, we good.”
“We're fine, let’s get that cleaned up so we can move along man.” Ty mumbled as he went about cleaning Alvin’s arm.
Theo, the youngest, most wiggered-out-wigger Tom had seen since Justin Bieber, didn’t say a word but slapped Alvin on the shoulder before putting his arm around him, and drawing him close in a awkward hug. Silly looking poser or not, he had been the one that carried a large rock he had grabbed on the way in, and cracked open the skull of the dead woman as she was going in for a second serving. He had done it with such speed and ease that it had looked almost rehearsed, like a well-practiced dance move. The boy had hidden resources.
“Probably a couple of miles to the next flag…can you make it Alvin?” Tom asked.
Alvin looked sick but nodded as he looked up and stepped up close to the camera, looking directly at whoever was tuning in. “Bitches, I am not going to kill myself! Okay? It’s a bite. It’ll get cleaned up. That’s it!” He kept a soft litany of curses going as he turned and proffered his arm to Ty for care. “Bitches in movies always go killin’ themselves on the first nibble. Fucking bitches...”
“Hang on, this is gonna hurt.” Ty poured alcohol over the bite to clean it, Alvin didn’t so much as flinch and he finished wrapping the forearm then gave his friend antibiotics from the medkit. “Ok you're good…let’s go.”
The camera followed them as they went downstairs grabbed the map from the backpack and looked it over.
“Ten blocks north, six west. Hillman's Coins,” Theo lifted a key from the backpack, held it up, it was new and glinted in the dimly lit room. “This better get us in.”
They resumed their race and the show cut out to a series of short dynamic branding animations. Background music, ad nauseam replays of the attack, in different zooms and different hues, all run at a rhythm that could give an epileptic a seizure before breathlessly cutting to a close up of Tom, standing outside the chain link fence of the deserted city.
“We've seen our first attack, people. This is real! This. Is. Dangerous!”
On the screen, his face was scaled down and shifted to an inset in the top right corner, contained in a vivid frame where it overlaid a list of the three players with their stats and images. Alvin’s was framed in dark red halo that glowed off and on in intensity. Behind the players’ images, the recent attack, shown in monochromatic shades of red played in a loop.
“We don’t know if Alvin will be okay...But he's playing on. Stay with us!”
The commercials cut in, Tom grabbed his flask and took a mouthful of burning liquid. It lit a delightful fire in his mouth as he played with it, twirled his tongue in the delicious heat then swallowed it with a sigh. Yesterday the flask had gotten empty all too soon and he was sure today was shaping out to be a three-flask minimum day. He signaled for his assistant. God bless her; she kept spares and wasn’t judgmental with the man who provided for her paycheck.
Daisy came running and they briefly huddled.
“That’s a dead boy.” She said.
He nodded, exchanged flasks she then rushed back to do whatever she’d be doing for the day. Refueled and calmer, Tom exchanged a nod with Zisk, looked at the crew. Somber and shock was the prevailing mood.
He tried to wrap his brain around what had happend; tried to measure his responsibility, his face felt wet and for one insane second he wondered if he had started crying and had been unaware of it. I'm not that damn sensitive, am I? He thought, befuddled: I don’t really even know the kid. Confused, he held out his hand, rain. More cold drops hit his face like needles and Tom looked up at the sky. So much for the sunny and dry November; the temperature was dropping fast and the sky in the north east had turned a dark tumultuous gray. Gotta call Fats, he thought. This is going to get real bad. Gotta call Fats.
One of the production assistants signaled to him to get ready for the end of the commercials, and proceeded to give him the go-live countdown: five, four, three, two, one. Now.
On the screen, the inset with his face was witnessing a quick recap montage of the Righteous team hitting the town; in stark gray monochromes that quickly transitioned to a full color feed. They had knelt for a brief prayer, gotten up, oriented themselves and moved at a fast jog. They were now almost at the first flag’s location. The cameraman delivered several close-ups of the Pine family, lingering a bit longer on the photogenic children. Righteous was the only team with four members, the father had been adamant about all of them going.
First flag for The Righteous
“Team Righteous, let’s stop and talk. How are you guys doing?” Tom queried.
Scott Pine ignored him, waving everyone onward while keeping a fast pace, until nearly a minute later he replied.
“No time to stop Tom—we're in this to win it. We're fine. Doing great.�
�
“Breathing hard there Scott. Team Cobra just got their first flag. Are you are going make it?”
“That’s right Tom—this team is absolutely going to make it!”
Tom looked at the drawn and anxious expression on Amber’s face and doubted she felt the same way. The kids didn't look happy either but physically they looked like they had no problems keeping up. One more block and a right turn later brought them to a wide street crowded with the indolent dead.
Race the Dead (Book 1): The Last Flag Page 3
