“I don’t know. I must have stepped on something in the snow. I didn’t feel anything.”
“Your foot was probably too cold to feel it. The fact that it’s still bleeding is good. I’m going to clean it. Hang on a minute.” Sylvie disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a first aid kit.
Minutes later, the wound cleaned and bandaged, Brian limped over to the glass doors. Mac turned and came inside, propping his rifle against the wall. He coughed, a deep, hacking cough he struggled to get under control then reached for the box of tissues on the side table and blew his nose. He looked tired.
“Glad you all made it and even happier you didn’t walk out into that crowd without calling Sylvie. I might have killed you.”
Bea stared down at the dark figures moving through the snow. They tripped over the bodies Mac had put down but were soon up again. They didn’t attack each other and she wondered why.
“Bea? I didn’t bring any extra shoes. What am I going to do about my shoe? ” Brian asked.
She emerged from her reverie. Of course he hadn’t brought another pair of shoes. Neither had she. Losing a shoe would have been a small thing a few days ago but now it could be a matter of life or death.
“We’ll figure something out. Maybe someone in the building has some your size. Or I’ll find a store. Don’t worry.” But she was worried. If they had to leave suddenly, lack of shoes could be a real problem.
Sylvie fixed hot chocolate for everyone and apologized that her coffee grinder was broken. Despite the circumstances, she was trying to be a gracious hostess. Typical Sylvie. Despite the slightly fluffy exterior Sylvie was an extremely knowledgeable artist and curator. Bea knew she had grown up in the south in an old house along the Natchez Trace where her mother had been a local beauty queen and her father owned and managed a phosphate plant. An art fanatic from a tender age, she had come north to school and never moved back. Bea wasn’t sure if she was divorced or never married. Once or twice in the past she thought something might be going on between Sylvie and Mac but if so, they were extremely discreet at the office. The fact that they were together here spoke loads though. Bea joined her in the kitchen, helping arrange a tray complete with cookies and cloth napkins. The china looked antique and was so thin it weighed almost nothing but the napkin rings were heavy enough to be solid silver. A glass-front hutch contained several other china pieces and a silver tea set.
“Sylvie, I printed off what you sent but left it at home. The infected broke through the gates and- we just ran. I have everything you sent on a flash drive though. You might want to talk to David; he seems to know something about the historical aspect of this too.”
Sylvie looked startled. “You told him? Who else knows?”
“No one else. You sent two complete documents, the one from Roman Britain and the Howard Carter/ King Tut excavation. Were there more?”
“Oh yes. I thought I sent all I had but maybe I didn’t send the complete file. Let’s sit down together and take a look. The part I really want to get from the Gallery are the Bergen-Belsen docs. There’s that mention of-”
“Infection and research?” Bea interrupted.
“Exactly.”
Bea carried the tray into the living room while Sylvie turned on her laptop. Mac and David were both outside on the balcony, discussing something animatedly and gesturing toward the dead filling the plaza. Brian took a handful of cookies and went out with them.
Sylvie, still at the kitchen table, scrolled through her files, clearly not finding what she wanted. “I know I had it. I just scanned everything in the file I brought home.”
“Where are the originals?”
“Some are at the Gallery and some are under my bed in a fireproof safe. I notified the Brits right away when I realized nothing like this was on the shipping manifest. I asked them if I should give them to the insurance people but apparently the insurance people don’t know about these. We all left in such a hurry the other day before I could finish scanning them and I thought I could just finish some here. Although now that I really think about it- Wait, I found it!” She scrolled through a few images and smiled. “Mac needs to see this.”
A door shut and they heard masculine voices in the living room. Sylvie closed the laptop and they joined the men.
“…not enough bullets to make a dent,” Mac said, making for the chocolate which was now cool enough to drink. He had a bandage that Bea had not noticed before on his hand.
“A dent in what?” asked Sylvie.
“The millions of dead in and around the city. The only way out now is by air. You’ve probably seen the helicopters.”
David agreed. “There are only a few helipads still functioning. The hospitals with them are completely overrun and the dead are roaming the White House grounds as well as the Pentagon. The whole eastern seaboard and all of Florida are toast.”
“What about the west coast?” Mac asked. “I heard it’s mostly infection free.”
“No, they’re not. In a situation like this there are all sorts of rumors. Mexico is safe because the dead decompose so fast in the heat or Canada is safe because they freeze stiff there. I don’t know about the decomposition but I think we can safely rule out the frozen stiff theory.” David gestured at the snowy scene outside.
Brian asked Dan, “Do they always stay dead if you shoot them in the head?”
Mac nodded. “So far, they all have. Cause enough trauma to the brain and they finally die.”
“What happened to your hand?”
Mac drained his hot chocolate and put the cup down. “I was home with this cold the day they made the announcement. My building is over on Corcoran, not far from here. There’s a drugstore at street level and six apartments above it. Mine is on the second floor.
I knew about the earthquake in Haiti of course and about the cannibalism going on down there but when hasn’t Haiti had all kinds of strange goings on? I thought it might be some kind of occult/voodoo thing they do.
Anyway, I’d been up most of the night before; I was congested and I couldn’t breathe so I slept most of the next day. I woke up around four that afternoon and got some juice and turned the TV on. I thought the cable was messed up because the only channels broadcasting anything were news stations. They all were discussing, speculating, reporting that a super flu was sweeping through the entire eastern half of the country. I was stunned and wondered if that was what was wrong with me.”
Sylvie moved over to sit beside him and took his hand, holding it in her lap. They obviously weren’t worried about keeping their relationship hidden now.
“There seemed to be a lot more people in the streets than usual but I didn’t pay all that much attention. I was still pretty sick and I had run out of cold medicine. One of the advantages of living over a pharmacy is that it’s easy to pick up whatever you need fast. I got dressed and was almost down the stairs when I heard the first gunshot.
I assumed it was a vehicle backfiring. D.C. has more than its share of violence but usually not in this part of town. Even so, I went back to my apartment and pocketed my Glock before going on down. Once I got down there I was glad I had.
The whole place was chaos. The store manager, Mr. Thackery, stood on top of a car holding a shotgun on the crowd. A ragged line of people stretched out of the store and around the corner. Many of them were elderly or were parents with small children. Everyone looked frightened but they held doggedly to their place in line, all of them needing presumably essential medication. Mr. Thackery, normally the nicest guy imaginable, kept the gun trained on the crowd and was shouting.
“One at a time! Your children may go in with you but they have to stay BY YOUR SIDE while they’re in the store. When the customer ahead of you comes out, only then may you go in. All medicines are dispensed on a first come, first serve basis. When we tell you we are out of medicine, that’s it, there is no more. Don’t try anything funny, you will be shot if you do.”
I joined the line. Progress was slow. The
woman in front of me said she was there to get as much medicine as she could for her husband’s at-home chemo treatments. Several people were waiting for their, or a loved one’s insulin. It struck me just how fragile life is and how willing people are to brave violent crowds and risk infection for those they love. The couple behind me had a baby crying in pain from an ear infection. I let them ahead of me. Then a man who needed his heart medication. Then another couple with a baby. Finally I just got out of line.
I had walked over to talk to Mr. Thackery when a pack of thugs showed up and muscled their way to the front of the queue. A scuffle broke out and an old couple got knocked to the ground. Mr. Thackery shouted and told the thugs to back off but they had already reached the doors. There was just no way for him to fire on them without hitting someone else in the crowd. Too much scatter from the shotgun. I told him I would take this one.
People in line backed away and let me through when they saw my gun. I shouted a warning but when the thugs turned I saw that they were injured. Two of them were limping and leaving a trail of blood in the snow and the other- he was missing an eye and the skin on the left side of his face was just hanging like someone had started to skin him then stopped.
I guess I hesitated because of that. I should have fired but they were wounded and it didn’t seem right until I saw them knock a kid down as they came toward me. I mean they just flat out slammed this kid, five years old maybe, down onto the sidewalk. He didn’t get back up and his mother sank to the ground and gathered him in her arms just sobbing and rocking him back and forth. I never knew if he was dead or what but that’s when I took the three of them out, before they could hurt anyone else.
When I fired, everyone scattered. The three men fell dead in front of the pharmacy door trapping the elderly customer trying to get out. Two men helped me drag the bodies out into the street. I stayed, waiting for the police. Who would imagine that police wouldn’t show up in Dupont Circle at the report of gunfire? Minutes passed and nothing. No sirens, no blue lights anywhere. So I’m thinking I’m going to have to find a cop somewhere and turn myself in when two of the dead bodies in the street started to twitch. More than twitch, they sat up looking dazed and got to their feet. The third one stayed down. I guess he wasn’t infected. Of course I didn’t understand that then.
They were up but moving oddly, lurching and staggering when a little girl started screaming. You know that incredibly shrill scream children can produce when they’re frightened? Well it was like a summons to those things. They locked in on it and went after her. First they tore into her father and after that-”
Sylvie put her arm around his waist and pulled him closer. “That’s enough. We don’t have to hear the whole story right now so-”
“No, let me finish. I’ve never seen anything so savage. Whatever motivates them, anger, hunger, I don’t know but whatever it is, it’s strong. There wasn’t enough of that child left to fill a shoebox. I shot one of them, again, and Mr. Thackery got the other. Then they got up again. A kid screamed at us to get the heads and we did. They stayed down after that. I asked the kid how he knew and he said it was common sense. Only head shots kill zombies.”
Brian asked, “Did they bite you?”
“Yeah, it was the little girl’s father. He reanimated and I was too slow in putting him down.”
They were silent for a moment. Sylvie put her head in her hands. Mac put both arms around her and held tight.
David asked in a carefully neutral tone, “How do you feel right now?”
“A little light-headed, very cold. My hand feels almost numb now and is cold to touch. I can’t use it to steady the rifle anymore.”
“What do you need? Is there anything we can try?” Bea asked.
Mac opened his mouth to respond but Sylvie laid a finger across his lips. “We need to get to the Gallery as soon as possible. Those papers we discussed could be crucial. Mac and I disagree but I’m right on this. We have to try everything we can.”
Mac spoke. “She’s a stubborn and bossy woman. I fought my way through a city of zombies to get over here to her and all she does is tell me what I can and can’t do. I don’t want to turn into one of those things and I think my best bet-”
“I don’t want to hear this again.” Sylvie gathered the empty cups and carried them into the kitchen.
Mac finished. “-is a headshot.”
Chapter Eight
“I put some water on for tea in case anyone wants something else warm to drink. But for now I want to brainstorm. Let’s share what we know about the virus.” Sylvie set her laptop on the coffee table and spun it around toward David. “This is all I have on the subject.”
He looked through her files but he had already read all of it from Bea’s flash drive. “Not too long ago I found a set of papers dealing with a 15th century Portuguese missionary to Africa and an account of an incident involving the Marines in Haiti in the early 1900’s. The missionary concluded (and if you read the account you can see why) that the disease comes directly from Satan. As for the Marines in Haiti, the two divisions involved were disbanded after the incident and not reinstated until several years later. Their official histories were scrubbed of anything zombie related.”
“Any mention of a cure?” Sylvie asked.
“No.”
“Well then, we just pursue the path the British documents seem to indicate. I wonder if they experimented and found a cure or if the Nazis did. There has to be an answer to this! Think of all the scientific advances made in medicine in the last few years. There have been outbreaks throughout history and it didn’t go pandemic. What did they do to stop it?” Sylvie’s voice rose in frustration.
Bea answered reluctantly. “Isolation. Quarantine that naturally occurred in a world where transportation was slow and laborious.”
Mac said tiredly, as if he had argued the subject before with no success. “Sylvie, there are indications but no guarantee of a cure.”
Sylvie didn’t respond, just set her jaw in a hard line Bea had never seen before. She mentally applauded her stubbornness. We never give up on the people we love.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a virus,” said Brian. They all nodded but Bea thought they were just humoring a precocious child and she cringed a little. At a recent teacher conference his English teacher let her know that Brian corrected the teacher’s grammar in front of the class. That evening Bea had a talk with him about respect as well as tact. She listened to and gave credence to almost everything he said but he was still just an eleven year old boy.
He seemed to think they were humoring him as well. “I’m serious. There is still a big debate about whether viruses are alive or not. They don’t actually grow or reproduce or do most things that we think of living things doing. But what they do really well is steal live, genetic material from their host and use it to make copies of themselves. That’s the only way they can spread around.”
David nodded slowly. “You know, that makes sense. They need something living to feed on and use to reproduce. The virus, inside an infected but dead individual, senses that their host is already decaying. They foster the hunger that makes them attack something living so they have fresh, living cells to replicate. It kind of explains why they seldom finish a meal, so to speak. They sense the life is gone or going and they need to move on to a fresh source of cells.”
“We can all agree this disease has been around for a long time. It’s probably highly adaptive to various environments.” Bea said.
“I’ll bet it’s loving its latest environment, the whole world. We did this; it’s our technology that sent it around the globe.” Sylvie said almost bitterly.
The crack of splintering wood echoed down the hallway outside the door. Everyone rose in alarm and scrambled for a weapon then stayed still, listening. Slow, dragging footsteps came down the hall and Bea found she was holding her breath, her whole body tensed and waiting.
Just at that second the tea kettle on the cooktop whistled, rising to a shrieki
ng crescendo before Sylvie could get in the kitchen to pull it from the burner. A slow banging on the door began almost immediately. At first it sounded like just one but the original fist was soon joined by more and in minutes the door shook in its frame. It was a sturdy door but who knew how long it would withstand the assault. They were five floors up with no back door exit.
“That apartment. There are two people on the lease but the building committee didn’t investigate them enough. People come and go night and day. There’ve been complaints but- anyway what it amounts to is I have no idea how many infected are out there.” Sylvie looked anxiously at the door.
“Don’t worry. We’ve got enough ammo to take care of them.” Mac hefted his rifle in his good hand but even that one trembled a little. He was growing pale and there were gray shadows around his eyes.
The attack on the door never let up and it was just a matter of time before they broke through. Sylvie disappeared into the bedroom and came out wearing jeans and a pair of leather, Prada boots. More practical than her previous outfit but the boots had spike heels. They were probably the most sensible shoes she owned, though. Bea realized with a jolt that Brian still needed boots. What was she going to do? Mac and David were waiting in the living room, holding their rifles at the ready.
“Here’s how we’re going to do this. When we open the door they’re going to come through but probably not more than one or two at a time so taking them down shouldn’t be a problem. Everyone needs to be ready to go.”
Brian said, “Bea, what can I-”
The door knob popped loose, the inside shaft was the only thing keeping it hanging. Fingers came in through the now open round hole, searching and probing, finally loosening the face plate enough for the door to swing free.
Their smell came through first, strong enough to make eyes water and stomachs heave. But even that was so much better than what came through next.
Two small, blond children in torn, blood-soaked blanket sleepers shambled eagerly through the door. They were followed by a teen-aged boy missing most of his throat and with no ears, nose, or eyelids. He was unable to moan or make any sound but the younger children emitted high-pitched, excited gibbering. Mouths open wide, with looks of vicious hunger that were obscene on the tiny faces, they zeroed in on Bea for some reason and she reluctantly kicked them away, unable to bring herself to shoot them. Undeterred, they crawled toward Sylvie next who, in trying to avoid them, accidentally stepped on the girl, spiked boot-heel penetrating the putrid skull and releasing a black, clotted mess onto the floor. The little body collapsed.
The Living Dead Series (Book 2): World Without End Page 10
