“Fuck me,” Hughes said. The thing that used to be Parker looked at him with inhuman malevolence and growled like a wolf ready to pounce and rip out his throat. “I ought to blow your head off right now.”
The thing that used to be Parker screamed. Crimson blood covered his teeth and his chin, the muscles between his eyes curled into a knot of aggression.
“Do it!” Kyle said.
“God!” Frank yelled.
Not yet, Hughes thought. How long did Annie say she lasted as one of those things? Shit. She didn’t know. The experience warped her sense of time beyond recognition.
A trail of drizzled blood led from Parker’s chair to the corner of the room where Frank sat moaning in pain with his chewed-up hand in his lap and Annie’s arm around his shoulder.
Goddamn it. Hughes was going to have to put down another one of his friends. It never got any easier. Maybe that was okay. Maybe it shouldn’t get any easier.
“Everybody out,” Hughes said. “Kyle, help Frank.”
“No one can help me,” Frank said.
Nobody said anything.
Kyle took Frank’s left hand, his good hand, and pulled him up. “Come on, man. Let’s get you out of here.”
The thing that used to be Parker screamed again. It sounded nothing like Parker and hardly even looked like him anymore.
“I knew this was a bad idea,” Frank said. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded defeated, resigned, as if he’d known for months he’d get bitten eventually.
Kyle and Annie each took one of Frank’s arms and led him out into the hallway. Hughes looked one last time at the thing that used to be Parker, shook his head, closed the door, and slammed home the lock.
“He is so dead,” Kyle said, referring to Parker.
Probably, Hughes figured. It didn’t look like Parker was coming back. In the meantime, Frank absolutely was going to die. They could try injecting him with Annie’s blood and hope for the best, but he was the only one whose blood type for sure didn’t match. And he’d never find out if the experiment with Parker would succeed or fail. Frank would never know whether or not he died for nothing. Perhaps it was better this way, since he probably would die for nothing.
He would be but the first. Hughes, Annie, and Kyle couldn’t last much longer, either. Just a few days earlier, eight people were holed up in the grocery store back on the mainland. Now they were just three. Kyle’s island was a bust. A nice idea, but a bust. Passing Annie’s immunity on to everyone else was likewise a bust. They were stuck on a remote island without any food while winter was coming. Where were they supposed to go now? How were they supposed to live?
Kyle led the way down the stairs. Annie eased Frank down one step at a time. Hughes took up the rear with his shotgun as if Parker might bust through the door at any second.
“Just shoot me,” Frank said. “Get it over with.” He didn’t sound anguished or even in pain anymore. He was just done.
“We’re not going to shoot you,” Hughes said.
They were back in the living room now. Hughes could practically feel the rotten stench of death on his skin like a sickening film. Kyle hurried forward and opened the front door.
“Fucker practically bit my thumb off,” Frank said. “It hurts. I don’t want to wait. What’s the point of living twelve more hours in this kind of pain?”
Hughes wouldn’t shoot Frank even if he were unconscious. He’d ease him out of this world the same way he eased his wife out of this world, and then Carol. By closing Frank’s mouth and plugging his nose after he went into his coma. It made no difference if Frank would feel pain or not. Enough violence had been inflicted on his body already.
“Hand me the shotgun and I’ll do it myself,” Frank said.
That was not going to happen. Hughes wouldn’t allow it. “Frank—”
“I have the right to die how I want.”
“Frank, honey, let’s sit you down,” Annie said.
“I don’t want to sit down!” Frank said. He sounded angry now. “Just give me the damn gun, Hughes.”
Hughes thought about it. The man did have a point. He should be able to die how he wants. Blowing his head off with a shotgun might make sense if he were on this island alone, but he wasn’t alone. Frank was with friends. Nobody wanted to look at his body with his head blown off his shoulders.
“None of you have to watch,” Frank said. “I’ll go into the woods.”
But they’d hear the shot, Hughes thought, and somebody would have to go into the trees and retrieve the shotgun from Frank’s hands.
Hughes could always let Frank have the Jennings J22 he’d pulled from the corpse in the grass. It was a bad gun. Hughes had no intention of ever firing it. He could let Frank take that one to his grave. And yet he still hesitated. Something deep inside him rebelled at the thought of Frank shooting himself. There was a right way to do things, and that was not it.
“Come on, man,” Frank said. “Show a dying man a little fucking mercy, why don’t you.”
Hughes looked his friend in the eye and exhaled. Frank was a brave man. Most people would suck up the pain if it meant they could live another half-day and avoid a violent death, but not Frank. Hughes admired that. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to do that himself.
“Bye everybody,” Frank said. “Take care of each other.” And he took off running down the hill toward the water.
“Frank!” Annie said.
Toward the cliff.
“Let him go,” Hughes said.
“He’s going for the cliff, isn’t he?” Kyle said.
“Probably,” Hughes said.
“The cliff Parker tried to throw me over,” Kyle said. “We should throw his ass over it, too, on top of Frank.”
Frank ran with everything he had, as if he feared the others were chasing him. He didn’t look back or even slow down, but he screamed when he went over the edge.
* * *
Annie couldn’t take it. She wanted to get off the island—to where?—and headed off into the trees.
“Where are you going?” Kyle said. She did not turn back to look at him.
“I need to get out of here,” she said. Her tone was final, uncompromising.
A faint trail covered in fir needles led into the forest. The path had probably been used, and was possibly even created, by whoever owned those two houses, but it was nothing like the trails in the national parks or even the national forests. This was more like an animal path. Wet leaves brushed against Annie’s pants as she walked, and she winced in pain when a thick branch from a low-lying bush jammed into her knee.
Carol was dead.
Frank was dead.
Kyle had been damn near pitched over the cliff.
Parker had turned into a monster. No, she and Kyle and Hughes turned Parker into a monster on purpose.
She tried and failed to force down the heat welling up in her chest.
How much longer could their little group last?
Not long. Not like this. There were only three people left now. Herself, Kyle, and Hughes.
She didn’t know how she felt about Kyle anymore, but at this point it hardly made any difference. If they lost just one more person, the group would not be a group. It would be a pair.
No way could two people survive in this world by themselves.
If Parker recovers, they’d need to keep him alive.
The forest was cold but beautiful, and it put her slightly at ease. She could hardly believe beauty still existed in this world. It seemed wrong somehow, impossible, but there it was.
The sky overhead was dishrag gray, so no sunlight slanted down through the trees, but that seemed fitting and right. Gray skies suited these dark evergreen woods. The deep greens softened the color of steel from the sky and were even enhanced by it. Moss covered the branches and trunks and looked almost translucent in the thin light of late autumn. The ground felt spongy and soft under her boots. If there was one advantage to being stranded in the Pacific Northwest at the end
of the world, it was the copious amounts of freshwater.
Annie followed the path and wondered how long they’d have to wait before deciding that Parker would never recover. She wasn’t even sure how long she took to recover.
Think back, Annie. How many days were you infected? How much time passed?
She remembered chasing people through a forest. She remembered attacking Lane’s earlier crew and killing one of his men on the front porch of a house. Were Roland and Bobby with him then? She didn’t know. She didn’t see them. Or, if she did, she couldn’t remember. It’s not like she could tell one human being from another when she was infected. To her diseased mind, all human beings were just food.
She did not remember sleeping when she still had the virus. Her sense of time from that period was fuzzy, off, as if she had been drugged or asleep. Yet she had some sense of time passing.
Three days. She couldn’t be sure, but that’s what her gut—or her subconscious—told her.
Three days. She lived for three days as one of those things, then woke on the forest floor with temporary amnesia.
Now she was in another forest, and her sense of time was slipping again. How long had she been out walking? How far did she walk from the compound and her companions?
Annie didn’t know. She could be on the other side of the island now for all she knew. Maybe too far away for the others to hear if she called out for help.
Maybe far enough away that the infected could be lurking in the trees without having any idea that healthy humans—food—were holed up a ways down the trail.
Cold fear took hold of her. She turned around and headed back, careful to make as little noise as possible, turning her body to the side as she passed between bushes to minimize rustling sounds.
She saw the houses through the trees ten minutes later. Her heart rate slowed. Ten minutes. She had only been gone for twenty then. Kyle and Hughes were still out front, standing right where they were when Frank took off down the hill toward the cliff.
“You okay?” Kyle said.
“Three days,” Annie said.
“What’s three days?” Hughes said.
“I was sick for three days,” Annie said, “before I came back.”
“You sure?” Kyle said.
“No,” Annie said. “But I think so.”
“So Parker needs two more days,” Hughes said.
“One day,” Kyle said. “He turned two days ago.”
“Parker needs two more days,” Hughes said again. “In case Annie isn’t remembering right. In case it takes longer for him to come back. Hell, we should give him a week just to be sure.”
“We’re not giving him a week,” Kyle said.
Hughes was right, but Annie was not going to stand there and argue with Kyle. Not less than an hour after Frank jumped to his death.
She went into the house. It wasn’t much warmer inside, but at least there was no wind. She shut herself in her room again, partly to get away from the others and partly because privacy and solitude were luxuries she hadn’t had in a while, and she didn’t know if she’d ever have them again.
How could she have been so stupid? She knew about the problems with blood type, but she was so blinded by the sheer awesomeness of making a vaccine. She could give it to her friends right away and later to others.
They needed professional help. They needed doctors. Even if Parker never recovered, they still needed doctors. If a blood vaccine doesn’t work, maybe something else would. But where on earth could they possibly find any doctors?
* * *
Twenty-seven hours later, Parker woke up. All the muscles in his body, including muscles he did not know he had, felt like they had been mashed against his bones in a vise. Even his eyes hurt when he tried to move them or blink. He felt a knot in his back as hard as a bowling ball, and it wouldn’t stop spasming. All he could do was endure it through clenched teeth.
He was tied to a chair with blood and gore on the floor in front of him. He was thirsty, so thirsty, and he tasted blood in his mouth.
Why …
Oh. God.
How long had he been tied up?
“Help!” he cried. “Help me!”
His entire body ached like it had never ached before. The pain felt like it had crawled inside him and subsumed his identity. He could hardly think about anything else. Nothing made sense.
He gasped.
Ignore the pain. Think. How did you get here? Who tied you up? Did your friends tie you up?
Who are your friends?
Hughes. Frank. Annie.
Kyle.
Shit. He had tried to kill Kyle. The others tied him up and—
Oh, God. One of those things. They had turned him into one of those things.
Did he bite Frank? Or did he dream that?
“Frank!”
He did, didn’t he? He actually bit Frank. He remembered it clearly now. The others had come into this room and he bit Frank. Was Frank okay?
No, Frank would not be okay. Unless they gave him the vaccine first. But why would they give him the vaccine? They didn’t know if it worked.
Then it hit him. The vaccine worked! Parker was immune just like Annie. They could all inject themselves with her blood and they’d come back if they ever got bitten.
“Guys! I’m back!”
The pain receded somewhat. It didn’t hurt any less, but he felt a rush of exhilaration that made him not care.
But then he realized, of course, that his friends were going to come upstairs and shoot him. They couldn’t let him live now. Not after he tried to kill Kyle and actually killed Frank.
He was the old Parker again, but the old Parker hit his wife. The old Parker damn near shoved Kyle over the cliff. The old Parker didn’t want to kill Frank, but it was the old Parker’s fault that Frank died.
He felt beyond exhausted emotionally, as if he had cried for a month without even stopping to sleep. But he cried anyway.
* * *
Kyle heard Parker yelling—in English. The sonofabitch was actually back.
Their little experiment worked. Annie’s immunity could be transferred, at least to somebody with the right blood type.
Amazing.
Too bad Kyle didn’t know his own blood type. It was too risky to chance it. Odds were sixty percent that his body would have an allergic reaction if he injected himself. He didn’t know what that meant. Would it kill him? Maybe, maybe not. But sixty-percent odds of something terrible happening were unacceptable.
In the meantime, Parker. The sonofabitch was actually back.
Kyle knocked on Annie’s door. “Parker’s awake!”
Hughes emerged from his own room. “I heard.”
Annie flung open her door. “He’s awake?” she said, a little too gleefully, Kyle thought. Things were about to get ugly again.
“You didn’t hear him?” Kyle said.
“I was asleep,” she said. She looked like she had been crying.
“Let’s go,” Kyle said.
“We need to get one thing straight first,” Hughes said.
Here it comes, Kyle thought.
“We haven’t decided what we’re going to do with him yet,” Hughes said. “So don’t fuck with him. Hear?”
“As long as you don’t let him go,” Kyle said.
“We’ll discuss that later,” Hughes said. “After we find out what kind of state he’s actually in. He might not remember what happened. He might not even recognize us.”
Right, Kyle thought. Annie didn’t remember when she recovered either. What if Parker didn’t remember?
Well, so what, Kyle thought. The man was dangerous either way. That’s been established. He can’t be allowed to go free even if he doesn’t know his own name.
“I’ll bring the Mossberg,” Hughes said. “Just in case.”
Outstanding, Kyle thought. Maybe that creep job will try something and we can end this once and for all.
They passed the corpses in the grass outside
and entered the main house. Kyle could hear Parker groaning in his room from the stairs.
Hughes pointed his shotgun at the door and gestured for Annie to unlock and open it.
She did.
Parker was still tied to the chair, his wrists still bound to his ankles. The side of his head was swollen. Blood drained from his split ear and onto his shirt. Despite himself, Kyle felt a flush of sympathy for the man. He looked like hell and must feel even worse. He deserved it, but still.
“Help,” Parker said.
So Kyle hadn’t been hearing things. Parker actually returned from the walking dead. Or in his case, the tied-to-a-chair dead.
“Look at me,” Kyle said.
Parker groaned, but managed to raise his head. “Kyle.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said.
“You remember what happened?” Hughes said.
“I don’t know,” Parker said. “What happened to Frank?”
“He remembers,” Kyle said.
“Did I—”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “You did.”
“Did you what?” Hughes said. “What do you remember?”
“Did I bite Frank?”
“You killed him,” Kyle said.
Parker moaned.
“The disease killed Frank,” Annie said.
“Like hell it did,” Kyle said.
“I attacked Lane’s people,” Annie said, “when I was sick. Was that me or the disease?”
Kyle said nothing. She was right, but so what? Parker was a murderous bastard whether he had the virus or not. Otherwise he wouldn’t be tied to that chair. Frank would be fine.
“What happened to Frank?” Parker said. “What exactly happened?”
“Threw himself off the cliff,” Hughes said.
“Oh God,” Parker said. “Just shoot me.”
“Oh, we will,” Kyle said.
“Later,” Hughes said.
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “We’ll shoot you later. Count on it.”
Parker groaned again. “I’m in terrible pain. Can you at least untie me for now?”
“In your dreams,” Kyle said.
* * *
Resurrection: A Zombie Novel Page 27
