Plagued

by Barnett, Nicola

  Plagued

  By Nicola Barnett

  Copyright

  Copyright © Nicola Jane Barnett

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by MAC Art & Nicola Barnett.

  Book design by Nicola Barnett.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or in any electronical or mechanical means including information storage or retrieval systems, without the written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Nicola Barnett

  First published: 2014.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my late mother, miss you always.

  I would like to thank my loving—and long suffering—partner for his support while writing my first novel and also my sister, who has listened to me rant on and on about it for a very long time.

  Thanks to my family and friends. You know who you are.

  Special thanks

  My editor for her painstaking work (sorry about that) and all of her amazing suggestions. If there are any errors in the story, she’s completely blameless. It’s my fault for adding some more details. (Sorry about that, too.)

  The cover artist, Mac, for his unique style and, again, patience.

  Anyone who has read this and didn’t hate it straight away. Much appreciated.

  Contents

  Plagued

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Prologue

  Hannah returned home from work around midnight, holding her right hand tight and wincing in pain. She flicked on the light in the bathroom without looking and left large, crimson smudges on the switch. She ran to the bathroom sink and turned the cold water tap on, washing the gaping wound between her thumb and index finger. The water stung like acid and she hissed between clenched teeth.

  “Fuck!”

  Blood mixed with water creating a pinkish liquid that spiralled down the drain. She wrapped a towel tight around the wound and then went to turn the central heating down; she was feeling increasingly flustered and sweat started to bead on her forehead.

  Her shift, as a nurse at the Winding Memorial Hospital in England, had ended half an hour earlier. It had been a long and weary day; the morning had droned, completely uneventful (well, no more so than usual). To Hannah this was worse than the chaos the weekend usually brought in: drunks, car accident victims, drunks in car accidents. At least there was some excitement, something to keep her busy until home-time rolled by. Such days were usually welcome with her until, that is, she met Ryan Thomas.

  Ryan Thomas was a fifteen-year-old boy brought into Accident and Emergency by his parents, who had found him lying on the kitchen floor feverish and delirious. He had thrashed around, ranting and raving about things that made no sense, so they rushed him straight to hospital. Once there, his parents were ushered into a waiting room while Ryan was taken into a side room given to all emergency patients awaiting assessment. Hannah Longden was the nurse that took his blood pressure and temperature; routine tests for all new patients.

  Hannah, a 21-year-old petite blonde, was beautiful by anyone's standards; big brown eyes and had the body of a model. Not too thin or too fat; as a size 10, she fit perfectly in the middle. It was because of her beauty and her constant friendly smile, that she was popular with the patients. They commented on her smile more often than not, and many said her cheery nature could make even the sickest person feel brighter.

  She tried this smile on Ryan, knowing the usual effect it had on teenage boys, as she introduced herself and told him he would be just fine. Instead of smiling back at her, or even looking at her, he tossed and turned, sweat pouring from his face and neck. The blood pressure monitor beeped its results: 160 over 122. Not a good sign.

  As she began checking his temperature, the attending doctor walked into the room, smiling politely until he saw the results on the screen: the boy's body temperature was 103 degrees and still rising. Hannah wiped the sweat from the boy's head with a paper towel and uttered words of comfort to him.

  The doctor frowned as he watched the boy thrash around on the bed, covered in sweat and his face turning scarlet. He turned to Hannah and asked her to talk to the parents and find out if he’d had any bites or allergies, taken any drugs and so on. She nodded and hurried out into the hall.

  While the doctor was waiting, he checked Ryan's body for rashes or bites, anything that could cause him such pain. As he unbuttoned the boy's top button, something oozed from his shirt onto the doctors hand; it was a thick mixture that he recognized to be blood and pus. Intrigued, he unbuttoned it further—underneath was a large purplish lump right in the middle of his chest. Pus and blood oozed from it and the rancid odour that came from it made the doctor gag.

  Hannah walked back in and saw the doctor looking slightly nauseous. She looked at the lump on Ryan's chest and gasped, “What is that? A cyst?”

  “I'm not sure,” the doctor said. “It looks infected, whatever it is. Could you get me some gloves please?”

  She handed them to him and put on a pair herself. After the doctor quickly washed off the blood that had gotten on his hand, he pulled on the gloves. The doctor then asked her to help him undress the boy to investigate further, so she removed the boy's shirt while the doctor lifted him up. They found another three oozing lumps on his chest and at least the same amount on his back, though some of them were much more swollen, one at least the size of a tennis ball.

  “What are they? I've never seen anything like that before,” Hannah asked, looking at the doctor anxiously.

  The doctor sighed. “I'm not sure; it's not measles or shingles. Certainly not herpes. I'll need to do blood tests but first we’ve got to get that temperature down.”

  He turned to leave, but before he did so, he took one closer look at the sores. Something about them seemed vaguely familiar to him but he couldn’t place why. Covering his nose with his handkerchief, he touched one of the sores. His finger slipped straight in to it with no resistance from the skin at all and bloody pus oozed out, dripping down the side of Ryan’s body and onto the bed.

  “It looks like his skin is rotting. It certainly smells that way,” the doctor said more to himself than Hannah. He watched as the boy stirred in his feverish sleep.

  “I don't know if you know this but there have been some really strange admissions in a few hospitals around the county, I heard the other nurses talking about it as I came in. I wonder if it's the same thing,” Hannah asked rhetorically.

  “That would make it contagious. How strange,” the doctor said, looking at the mess on his gloved hands.

  “Is that even possible?” Hannah asked, trying to hide her nausea.

  “Anything is possible,” the doctor said, “I need you to go get one of the other on-call doctors, tell them it’s an emergency and we need to get his temperature down right away. There’s something I want to check.”

  Hannah nodded, but seeing the doctor bend over the boy, she froze in her spot, unable to look away.

  The doctor leaned forward and pulled the sheet that was folded at the base of the bed ove
r the boy’s body. Before he could do anything else, Ryan's eyes snapped open.

  “Hello Ryan, I am doct—”

  Ryan bolted upright before the doctor could finish his sentence. Hannah yelped in surprise. Ryan stared at her, his eyes wild and instinctively she hid behind the doctor, as if hiding from his glare.

  “I hope you're feeling better, I'm going to take a blood sample and give you some painkillers to make you feel—”

  Before he could finish, Ryan's lips curled back into a snarl. He leapt from his bed onto the doctor, screaming wildly. The doctor tried to move out of his way but the boy was too fast. Hannah screamed as the boy began clawing at the doctor's face like a feral animal. The boy screamed incomprehensible words as the doctor yowled in pain. He tried to push Ryan's hands away from him but the boy gnashed at his hands with his teeth; tearing chunks of flesh from his fingers.

  Hannah—seeing the boy's hands turn red with the doctor's blood—tried to pull the boy off of the doctor but he wouldn’t budge. She hammered onto the boy’s back frantically as he scratched at the doctor's face, ripping chunks of skin from his cheeks and forehead. Blood gushed out and poured into the poor doctor's open mouth.

  Hannah tried to pull them apart one more time, this time grabbing the boy's hair and pulling it fiercely backwards, away from the doctor. She felt an overwhelming burning pain in her hand as he turned and bit deep between her thumb and index finger. She screamed and pulled it away, tearing a little flesh from it as she did so. He growled deeply at her like a wild dog, his teeth red with blood.

  Realizing she couldn't do anything to help, she ran out of the room screaming for help and at that point, Ryan's parents rushed into the room to see what was happening. The first thing they saw was something a parent would never imagine seeing; their fifteen-year-old boy crouched over a screaming man, biting a gaping hole into the man's neck.

  Hannah Longden never returned to Winding Memorial.

  Chapter 1

  “Get up! Come on lady, we’ve got to go!”

  The frantic shaking of her body brought Sarah Carlisle to consciousness. She opened her eyes as she felt the coldness of the pavement beneath her back.

  “Yes! That’s it, wake up!”

  She winced at the brightness and blinked her eyes clear. A red-haired man towered over her, his hands on her shoulders, shaking her furiously. His mouth was opening and closing as though he was shouting something but she couldn’t hear him clearly. She looked around her at the tall buildings towering above her and realised she was laid on the cobblestones in the town centre. People were running around her in all directions, their faces a mixture of panic and rage. In her daze, she noted that some of them were covered in blood—it dripped from their mouths and hands. Her hearing was muffled but she could just hear the screams coming from all directions.

  She started to panic. What is going on? She looked back up at the man above her, as he was shouting frantically for her to get up. She grabbed his hand and he pulled her quickly and effortlessly to her feet.

  Her ears made a whooshing sound and the noises of the world came rushing back. Screams filled her head and she grabbed the man’s hand even tighter. He stood in front of her, shielding her with his back as people charged past them from all directions without trying to avoid each other.

  “What’s happening?” she whimpered from behind him.

  “Don’t know! No time to talk, we’ve got to get out of here!” he said and dragged her to the left, through the crowd.

  A young girl ran in front of them, her blonde hair covered in blood, she snarled and shouted something unintelligible at the people who ran around her. A balding, overweight man wearing a suit ran past her, screaming in terror and the girl, seeing her opportunity, jumped at him. He yelped in pain as the girl clawed at the side of his face, viciously ripping and tearing at his cheeks. He tried to push her off but it was too late and he toppled to the ground with her on top of him.

  “Help me!” he screamed, looking at Sarah and the man who she was with; his eyes pleading with them.

  “Oh my God!” Sarah shrieked and tried to run in front to help him.

  The red-haired man grabbed her arm and pulled her back and Sarah looked at him in confusion.

  “It’s too late,” he whispered, his face showing no empathy.

  Sarah turned back to face the horror in front of her and in the ten seconds that she had spoke to her rescuer, the young girl had sat astride her victim and had torn the right side of his cheek clean off. She put it in her mouth and spat it back out onto his chest, scrunching her face up in a look of disgust that would have, at another time, been comical. The man’s screams turned in to a gargle as she began clawing at his throat.

  The stranger pulled Sarah’s arm and she let him lead her down a small alleyway as she looked back towards the young girl and her victim in a state of shock. More people jumped on the now dead man behind them, tearing at his clothes and skin and laughing as they did so. Sarah cried out in horror.

  “Why are they doing that to him?!” she shouted as the man guided her through the maze of rubbish bins.

  “They’re infected with something. As soon as they bite you, you end up the same way. That’s all I know,” the man said without looking back.

  They walked out into the open and a road crossed in front of them, cars driving erratically both ways across it. The beeping of horns and screeching of tyres filled the air, drowning out the screams that could be heard from all over the city. In a split second, a blue BMW flew past and hit three people that stood in the road, knocking them over like pins in a bowling lane. The car swerved, its tyres screeched and it crashed into a building on the other side of the road. People were running into the roads screaming for help as men and women with sore-covered bodies chased after them at impressive speeds, spitting and shouting nonsense as they ran.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” the man whispered to her as she watched the chaos in front of her. “I’m meeting my friend, Simon, and my father there. Dad works there, he might know something more.”

  Sarah turned to face him, her mouth agape and shook her head as if trying to shake off what she was witnessing. “Okay,” she said with uncertainty. “What is your name?”

  “I’m Mark, what’s yours?”

  “S—Sarah.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Sarah. Sorry it was under these circumstances,” he said, giving her a small smile. He glanced down and looked at her left arm and the smile fell from his face. “Are you hurt?”

  Sarah followed his gaze and lifted her arm closer to her face. An arc of small straight lines had pierced her jacket on her upper arm and into her skin, leaving blood stained holes in the material. A trail of dark blood led down her arm and onto the back of her hand. She touched it gingerly, wincing as she felt the swollen cuts beneath her coat. It didn’t feel deep, but it was still painful to the touch.

  “I don’t know how I got that. It looks like someone bit me,” she said, her eyes searching his in fear.

  “Well, we’ll worry about that later. Come on,” Mark said and then they ran across the wreckage-filled road.

  ~

  “I love you, Sarah. I always will.”

  A man's voice; distant in the air called to her gently, it felt familiar.

  “Promise me we'll never be apart,” she said, aching to see him. The world seemed clouded in fog. She couldn't see him, the world was shrouded in blackness but she could hear his voice.

  He laughed quietly; a deep and gentle sound that she was used to. “I promise you, I will never leave you.”

  ~

  The ache of loss woke Sarah from her slumber. The pain was so startling that she shot in an upright position, covered in cold sweat. She struggled to open her eyes, they felt as though they were stuck together and when she finally did, they stung as they tried to adjust to the sudden light that flooded her vision.

  When her eyes settled, Sarah looked around her, confused as to her surroundings. Even with th
e limited vision she had, she knew she wasn't at her home. The bed she was in wasn't hers; it was a single bed with cold, metal bars on both sides. The grey sheet covering her was damp and smelled like sweat but most unsettling of all; she was naked underneath. She tried to remember what had happened and how she got there but her mind drew a blank.

  The room was dimly lit by a single bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Dust floated around the light like tiny orbs and the room smelled heavily of damp. There were shelves along the walls, stocked with jars and boxes labelled with chemicals like iodine, bleach or surgical spirit. The walls around her that had once been pale green were now extensively cracked and showing the brickwork underneath, the floor was covered in piles of the plaster’s dusty remains.