Ran (Book 1): Apocalyptica

by Joshua Guess

  I laughed darkly. “You’re goddamn right I’m scared. There’s so much we don’t know. Does this mean I’m going to turn into a zombie? I mean, the first wave was all people with injuries of some kind, then the people they attacked. Now this.”

  Carla chewed her lip thoughtfully. “You nailed it. We don’t know. Do you want to bite my face off?”

  She said it with a straight face, and while my first reaction was to give her shit for making the joke, I realized it was an absolutely valid question. “No. I don’t. I felt different while I was fighting, I guess. Sort of high. But once I came down I just got hungry. I don’t feel any weird urges or anything.”

  Carla sipped her bourbon, and watching her reminded me of an episode of Mad Men. She did it with the casual professionalism of someone used to working out complex problems while slugging back booze. “Okay. So you don’t have irrational, uncontrollable rage like the guy who tied you to that chair.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Yes! Exactly!” Carla replied, leaning forward. “You don’t have it yet, and you may not ever develop other symptoms. We don’t know enough about this plague or whatever it is to make assumptions. Why did it kill people with injuries? Why did others get sick later? Do your symptoms mean you’re going to turn into a zombie, and if so why hasn’t it already happened? We know the first wave turned within minutes.”

  I frowned. “You’re not filling me with confidence, here.”

  Carla smiled thinly. “Yeah, I know that. But diseases are such a wide spectrum that you never know what symptoms or outcomes you’re going to get. We just don’t have enough information.”

  The ambiguous nature of my infection did have that silver lining. That I hadn’t turned into an undead cannibal was encouraging, though the fact that not rising from the dead to eat other people was the bar set for good news was enough to depress me.

  Carla walked over to the emergency radio sitting on the counter. I’d pulled it out of storage before leaving the house. She turned the volume knob up and a stilted, almost robotic voice repeated a short message over and over.

  “Stay tuned to this station for future updates. Repeat: this is an emergency broadcast from the Centers for Disease Control and the US military. This message is being sent through emergency alert system overrides. We have researchers in a secure location and will update with any new information about the pathogen, which we are referring to as the Nero virus.”

  Carla turned the volume back down to an almost inaudible hum. “That’s been going on since yesterday, apparently. Most of the TV channels are down, but when I clicked it on earlier, the frequency for this was on the emergency broadcast screen.”

  I sat back in my chair and felt a wave of something that wasn't quite relief, but related to it, roll over me. Someone was out there trying to figure this out. “Why the Nero virus? Did you hear anything about that?”

  Carla nodded. “Yeah. Once an hour they send out a longer prerecorded message. Apparently it’s an acronym for Nervous, Endocrine, and Respiratory Override. Which seems like someone in their lab needed to come up with a reasonable-sounding name, to me. I mean, there’s nothing in there about people rising from the dead and being able to keep on walking after their hearts take gunshot wounds, right?”

  “Doesn’t seem so much like an override as just ignoring them altogether,” I agreed. “Nothing else?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Carla said with a sad smile. “But at least they’re working on it. I guess they don’t want to give anyone false hope by saying the wrong thing before they know more.”

  Nik padded into the kitchen and stopped next to me, nudging my hand in his usual sign that he was hungry. I responded automatically, putting my hand over his snoot and shaking it gently. He snorted and sank to the tile, looking up at me with huge brown eyes.

  “The dog thinks you’re okay,” Carla said. “That has to be a good thing.”

  I fed Nik and took care of a few routine things around the house. I told myself I wasn’t just keeping myself busy to take my mind off whatever the virus was doing to me. I reminded myself that I’d experienced enough terrible shit in my life to make this something I could handle.

  But that was a lie, if for no other reason than the sheer biological power of the Nero in my system. If it was going to kill me, I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I was terrified of the possibility, and an hour after my conversation with Carla I stood in the master bathroom looking at myself in the mirror.

  The threads climbing my neck were no darker, had grown no further. I stripped off my shirt and stood there in the tank top I wore beneath it. The lines of infection—so different from any infection I’d ever seen—radiated from just over my heart. I knew intellectually it was stupid to think of it that way. The deep vessels feeding to and moving from my heart couldn’t be seen on the surface skin of my chest.

  But the image was powerful, even so.

  “You okay?”

  I hadn’t heard Carla approach, and I jumped. My chest thumped so hard it seemed like my rib cage should be rattling.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I was getting a little worried.”

  “It’s fine,” I assured her. I turned back to the mirror, prodded one of the black lines with my finger. “Do you think the rage comes on gradually, or all at once? What if it happens when I’m asleep. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  The words slipped out more easily than I could have imagined. There it was, laid out. I didn’t want to die. I’d spent years and a ludicrous sum of money turning myself into someone who could survive anything. That was how strong my instinct to live was. But almost as much, I didn’t want to become one of those things. I didn’t want to devolve into whatever my captor, Len, had turned into.

  “Telling you not to worry about it would be pointless, insensitive, and stupid,” Carla said. “Not to mention kind of patronizing. You’re going to worry, and I think you’re enough a realist to know you should. So we’ll tackle it that way. We’ll sleep down in the bunker, you stay up here. We’ll be armed just in case.”

  The tone of voice was matter of fact, and I was sure many criminals had their circumstances laid out for them in that very same way. I was weirdly put at ease. Knowing the others, or at least Carla, who would enforce her ideas if it came to that, were willing to take precautions eased my mind.

  I smiled into the mirror. “Yeah. That sounds good. You guys should lock the entrances from the inside, too.”

  I waited all through the evening for the other shoe to drop. Like an idiot, I fell asleep with a flicker of hope.

  17

  I woke up in the middle of the night to veins that felt like a pyromaniac had filled them with his own personal mix of fiery death and lit a match.

  All sense of up and down was gone. The floor was hard and cold but not especially painful when I rolled out of bed and thumped down on it. My throat was constricted, too narrow to scream but just enough to breathe. My skin was tight against my muscles, stretched like rubber to the point of breaking.

  I had a moment of utter clarity during which I thanked Carla for suggesting Nikola stay down in the bunker. Then I had a seizure. Maybe a series of them.

  I can’t be sure that’s what happened because, you know, seizures are famously impossible to recall for the people having them. I knew time passed because the digital clock jumped forward a few times. Somewhere in there my tortured brain shrieked to just let me die, the pain in my body too intense and shifting to tolerate.

  There was no rage. Not the ‘oh, I want to shred your flesh to ribbons because you look delicious’ variety, at any rate. Sometime during my bout of muscular and neurological spasms I began to worry I’d just end up with permanent brain damage, and that pissed me off thoroughly. I hadn’t made it this far to end up vegetative. No sir.

  Fact: at a certain point, pain can make you pass out. I didn’t reach it.

  Which isn’t to say I was fully or even partially aware most of that ti
me. While I did catch the occasional glimpse of the clock, it was in a disassociated way. The numbers made sense to the ingrained pathways in my brain, the impenetrable logic stored in my neurons giving me a rational understanding. It was an entirely separate experience from the pain, which reached a crescendo more than fifteen minutes after the writhing agony in my flesh began.

  Then it dropped away. A rippling ache was the only residue, the only proof of the bone-cracking muscle spasms which had vanished all at once.

  I gasped ragged breaths on the floor of my room, interspersed with equally threadbare sobs when my lungs could manage to spit them out. Sweat poured from me, with no sign of stopping.

  Someone knocked on the floor. I heard a muffled voice say my name.

  “Are you okay?”

  I could just make out the shouted words and knew I didn’t have the lung capacity to answer. Instead I rolled my limp hand over and made a weak fist. Three fast taps, three slow taps, three fast taps. Or as close as I could come to it in that state.

  I didn’t hear an acknowledgment, but I was too exhausted to get upset about it. The heat in my bones, seemingly an artifact of whatever attack had hit my system, wasn’t going away. I continued to sweat profusely. I felt it rising, warming me like a sunrise. Assuming the sun was rising in Hell.

  I blacked out, which was fine. Ideal, really. Then I woke up—no, I woke THE FUCK up—as someone poured liquid nitrogen over every square inch of my body.

  My eyes burned from the sudden light. I found myself naked but for my boxer shorts, lying in the tub, and surrounded by worried and curious people.

  “J-just like college,” I said through chattering teeth.

  Carla leaned in and turned off the shower, then tossed a towel over me. “Sorry. You were burning up. I needed to get you cooled down as fast as possible. I undressed you, but I needed help to get you in here.”

  I let my head thump back against the wall and took some time to relish the cool droplets rolling down my skin. “Thanks,” I rasped. “I’m not inclined to give a shit about modesty right now.”

  Jem’s head appeared over Carla’s shoulder. “What happened? We heard you scream a couple times, but when we found you, you were just passed out.”

  My hand drifted automatically to my neck. “Felt like I was being tortured.” I briefly described the various sensations. “I thought I was dying.”

  Carla’s head cocked curiously. She knelt down next to the tub and gently pulled my hand away, tugging the edge of the towel down to expose the base of my throat. “Huh. That’s weird.”

  I sighed heavily. Weird was probably not ideal. “What’s wrong now?”

  “Hush,” she said. “Jem, lean in here. What do you see?”

  Jem’s frame was slightly too large for the bathroom, his shadow spilling over and blocking much of the light from the vanity. His eyes narrowed as he examined my neck. “It looks like it’s fading to me. Doesn’t seem nearly as dark.”

  “Stop,” I said. “Please be quiet. And give me a few minutes.”

  You know that thing people do where they think they know what’s best for you? Genuinely good people will often take statements like mine and interpret them through a filter. Maybe you just want to avoid talking about it, maybe you’re secretly asking for the opposite of what you actually want. I considered it a credit to the three of them—even Tony, who had silently watched from behind the others—that they took my words at face value. They were perceptive and empathetic enough to know that I didn’t have that many layers. What you see is what you get.

  So they left, Carla shutting the door behind her. It wasn’t that I wanted bad news and was upset by the potentially good. I very much wanted to be well, to live. It was just about being realistic; we had no idea how Nero worked, no clue how it might progress, and I didn’t want casual observations that might be laughably premature to get my hopes up.

  Not to skate too lightly over my suffering, but the next few days could be generously described as a mixed bag. Carla, who wasn’t nearly old enough for the job, took to mothering me in between managing what the boys were doing. I knew peripherally that Jem and Tony were slowly hauling truckloads of stuff to the property, and that they’d caught glimpses of other survivors while in town.

  My ability to concentrate on the goings-on was limited, because I kept having more of those attacks. None of them hit me with the strength of that first one, but even the follow-ups were enough to rattle me for hours afterward. The only positive spin I could put on them aside from the decrease in intensity was my ability to feel them coming. I suspect I’d have known something was terribly wrong when the first hit me had I been awake at the time.

  I was curled up on the couch—I would need to reorganize the house so my bed didn’t constantly sit in the way of the bunker entrance—while Carla sat in the recliner working on several running lists of supplies and plans. Two days had passed, forty-eight hours of occasional seizures, fevers, and bone-rattling muscle spasms.

  A familiar flush ran through me, as if someone turned on the hot water taps in my veins. “Another one,” I said, just before the first wave of spasms hit me.

  Carla saw me through it, as she had with most of the fits so far. I’d been the one to suggest taking measurements. It struck me as a good idea to know as much as we could, despite her reluctance to do anything but comfort me. Treating me like a lab rat wasn’t in her nature, but I’m known for my stubbornness.

  It was over in fifteen minutes, and as fucking awful as I felt, the new entry in the small notepad Carla used to record observations gave me hope. My fever was lower each time, the duration of the episode shorter. Fewer seizures, and my own notes showed a trend of less and less severe pain in my muscles.

  “Won’t be too long until you’re done having these altogether,” Carla said as she brought me a glass of water. “I’ll be glad. It feels ghoulish taking notes while you’re sitting there jerking around.”

  I downed the whole glass in one go. “Hey, I didn’t piss myself this time. That’s a win.” I put the glass on the table, and Nikola raised his head off the floor to sniff it. “Don’t assume it’s going to be over. This might be a side effect of Nero that doesn’t go away. I could have these the rest of my life.”

  Carla made a dismissive pfft sound. “You’re too negative. If you’re getting better, that implies you’ll get over this. You’re awfully cynical.”

  “Really?” I said. “Does that surprise you? Given, you know, the whole thing were I spent my childhood in what eventually became a cult? Because that being stipulated, I think I qualify as a realist.”

  She looked horrified, and tried to stammer an apology. I smiled and waved it away.

  “It’s fine, really. It’s easy to forget how awful it sounds to other people, but it really was a long time ago for me. Let’s say it taught me some lessons about expectations.”

  Carla went to refill my glass. “About not getting your hopes up?”

  “Sure,” I said. “When I got myself free, I saw a psychiatrist for a few years. I was having nightmares every time I fell asleep. The doctor explained they’d become less frequent over time, and might go away entirely.”

  “Did they?” Carla asked when she sat back down.

  I shrugged. “Mostly. I still have dreams about it now and then. That’s fundamentally different from this, though. I can’t risk going out there,” I said, waving a hand at the front door, “when I might start seizing at any time. I don’t want to risk anyone’s safety like that.”

  She fixed me with a measuring gaze. “And you feel guilty about not being able to help.”

  “Ah,” I said, pointing a finger at her. “You sneaky bitch! You’re trying to be my shrink!” I said it as playfully as possible, to let her know I was joking or at the very least didn’t mind. I knew it came from a good place. I also got the sense that she didn’t usually spend much time with women, socially speaking. It was a position I understood, since I didn’t socialize with anyone. Some people are
more comfortable around one type of person. I’m not overly comfortable around any kind of people.

  “Minor in psychology,” Carla said.

  I propped myself up in the couch, sitting lotus with the blanket wrapped around my legs. “I think I’d have gotten better faster if not for the attacks. The first one happened six months after I escaped.”

  “What, like panic attacks?” Carla asked, intense interest on her face.

  I laughed. “Oh, no. I had those, sure, but I mean actual, physical assaults. There were about thirty members of the church, but most were classified as victims. Only ten convictions. About half the people who went free were really, really pissed at me. The first one tracked me down and tried to put me through the window of a store I was shopping at.”

  Carla’s mouth dropped open. “You’re serious? What happened?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Well, store security dropped him like a ton of bricks, then had him arrested. I’d become friendly with a few cops by then, and I asked one of them for some boxing lessons. Came in handy when the second attack came. I call that one a draw; he broke one of my ribs, I broke his nose.”

  She shook her head. “You were just a kid. Jesus.”

  “No,” I said, mirroring the gesture. “I was young. I wasn’t a kid for a long time before that. I told you all the crazy training I’ve done. Didn’t you wonder why?”

  Carla looked mildly uncomfortable. “I figured it was a defense mechanism. You know, a way to feel in control after what happened to you.”

  I considered that. “Partly, maybe. But mostly it was the need to not get the shit kicked out of me. After those first two times, I started looking for anyone who could teach me anything about fighting. The dirtier, the better.”

  Carla smiled ruefully. “I’m almost afraid to ask how many times they came after you.”

  “Only because you feel ashamed as any tabloid addict,” I said with a laugh. “Seven altogether, over the course of three years. I think the last one finally drove home the point that I was not going to put up with their shit indefinitely. That guy, I put in the hospital. In the ICU, specifically.”