by Smith, Aaron
All three kill shots, clean through their foreheads. He smiled, satisfied that the rust had been sloughed from his skills. The three bodies lay crumpled on the ground. They had been human, then they had been Empty Ones, and now they were just dead things, permanently dead. Trumbull knew he had done the right thing by stowing away on that helicopter.
The silence was awkward in Kacey Sherwood’s room. She sat inches from Doug, but he had stopped talking. He seemed nervous. Kacey was glad he was there, despite the odd circumstances that had led to his presence. She decided she had to break the ice.
“So what’s your high score on those old Pac-Man games?” she asked.
“I haven’t played a machine like that since I was a kid.”
“You haven’t?”
“No. I really don’t like video games so much anymore.”
“Wait a minute. You spend your time fixing old arcade games and you seem to be in demand and pretty successful at it. You get to mess around with games that should probably be in some kind of Eighties museum or something, and you don’t play them?”
“It’s a job.”
“It should be a fun job! You’re missing out! I wish I had a job like that. It beats bringing soup and salad to the same old people that come into that dump of a diner night after night, year after year and order the same shit every time. You should enjoy your work.”
“I do enjoy it.”
“But you don’t play?”
“I’m not interested in what’s on the screen,” Doug admitted, “as much as what’s behind it. It’s the way it works and the reason it works that fascinated me, not the surface of it.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” Kacey said, “but I still think you should have some fun with it. You’re missing an opportunity. Those things are supposed to be fun, and you spend all your time around them, and I think you should play. But that’s just me. Whatever.”
Kacey’s dismissive “whatever” bounced around inside Doug’s head like a rubber ball. The things she said struck an unexpected nerve. He knew what she was talking about, just the video games, but he realized that her words could just as easily have applied to the situation between the two of them. He forced himself to wrap his mind around the reality of what was happening to him there in that little room above the garage.
The facts swirled through Doug’s head; the facts, not his fantasies, not his scenarios, not his possibilities. At that moment, he was alone with an attractive young woman. She had brought him there of her own free will in an attempt to help him. She wanted him to stay, wanted to be with him. They were on a bed. It was night. She was close to him. He would be an idiot if he did not act on the opportunity.
But, he asked himself, what about the other part of him? His shadow-self was silent just then. Doug wondered if the impact to his head when he had fallen on the concrete had anything to do with that absence. It was not that Doug could not feel his inner desires or his fascinations, but he felt at that moment that perhaps, for the first time in years, he could keep those interests and urges in check and act not because of them but rather, despite them.
Did he dare? Now or never, now or never, his mind cried out. Could he play the game without acting on the impulse to understand the inner workings of the machine?
Doug made his move. He maneuvered his hand, placed it on Kacey’s. She reciprocated, turning her hand over and intertwining her fingers with his, her soft, warm palm against his. Her skin felt smooth and hot. As they touched, images flashed through Doug’s mind, pictures he had seen in anatomical texts: the bones in the hand, surrounded by tissue and muscles with nerves running through the flesh that caused the parts to move; signals shooting through the metacarpals to manipulate the phalanges; movement of the machine’s components.
No! Doug screamed within his mind, told his own brain to stop thinking that way. It’s a hand, the hand of a girl. It’s not a set of parts. The bones don’t matter. She matters!
He glanced down at their interconnected hands, his and hers. He looked up at Kacey’s face, saw that she was smiling at him, telling him with her eyes that he had done the right thing by taking hold of her hand. Those eyes were asking him to do more.
Eyes: Complicated systems of lenses, catching light and attached to the optic nerve which sends signals to the brain for interpretation …
No! No! No! Not the eyes, but the meaning behind her eyes, the message and the emotions and the desire.
He met her gaze with his own. He forced himself to think of her as Kacey, as a friend, as someone he had grown to care about. She was not a machine, not just the sum of her parts, but more than that. Doug was looking at a person. He kept telling himself that, over and over as he watched the expectation in her eyes, the hope upon her face.
He pushed aside his fears—fear for himself and fear for her and dove headfirst into an experience he had never had before and never expected to have. He leaned forward, closer and closer to the face that seemed to be inviting him, and kissed her.
He had done the right thing again, if Kacey’s reaction was any indication. Their lips met and pressed together and arms wrapped around each other and Doug could feel the heat radiating from her body as they held each other and both their hearts began to beat faster.
Doug went with it as it grew more spontaneous, more excited, and even feverish. Kacey’s fingers undid the buttons of Doug’s shirt as he ran his hands through her brownish-blonde hair as they both continued what had become one long kiss. He felt her tongue brush against his and for an instant he thought he could hear his shadow-self somewhere far behind him, trying to point out the nerves and muscles of that oral organ again but the voice was distant and went almost unnoticed.
Kacey broke away from Doug for a second to lift her shirt over her head and cast it onto the floor. She sighed back toward him and as she made contact with him he could feel the warmth of her now bare breasts, small and pert and smooth, against his exposed chest. Their hands instinctively went for each others’ pants buttons and the loosened jeans were soon pushed down to their knees, thighs exposed and underwear soon going down the same path. They could not have reversed their route now even if they wanted to.
Kacey started to turn to the side and bend forward to reach down and get her shoes off but Doug had lost patience. He could feel the long dormant part of him, lustful and driven by adrenaline, surging to action. He gently guided her to lie down and climbed on top, straddling her. She smiled, sighed, forgot about her shoes and let her thighs open just enough to admit him.
She is yours, the shadow-self suddenly roared out from behind Doug’s brain. Take her now, silence her, and you can see how it works!
Doug, doing what he had never thought he could do, heard and responded this time, his mental voice hollering back, the beauty is in the wholeness, in the completion and the actions. I can play the game without violating its structure!
And Doug did. He entered her and he remained there for a long time, fighting for control as long as he could. When he had gone to the point where his body exploded and his mind rode waves of pleasure, he withdrew and sat back for a moment, feeling a great sense of victory and knowing that he had, at least for now, controlled the demon within. But he was not finished yet. The game was good and he wanted it to go on.
Kacey giggled as she looked up at Doug and saw the relief on his face, the tiny drops of sweat on his brow, the ecstatic wideness of his eyes.
“Not bad,” she laughed. “We’re not done yet, are we?”
“No,” Doug told her. He had more exploring to do and he felt ready to do it. He was in a sudden realm of peace, of security, of confidence that he was not going to harm this woman. He saw her as a human being, not a machine, not a collection of components.
Kacey moaned as Doug went from place to place, his fingers moving across her body, his tongue touching here and there, caressing, probing, pressing invisible buttons that made noises of pleasure rise up from her lips and echo in the little room above the garage. S
pasms of volcanic joy shook her body at intervals and she cried out more than once in purring sounds that were not words but pure exclamations of glee.
“Get the rest of my damn pants off,” she murmured after a while. Doug obeyed, backed up to the end of the bed, untied Kacey’s sneakers, pulled them off followed by her socks, then slid her jeans the rest of the way off, tossing them down to join the rest of her clothes in a tangled heap. He discarded the rest of his own attire too, looking, as he did so, at the naked body of the young woman he had just made love to. So absorbed in the act had he been that it had barely crossed his mind that he had just cast off the virginity he had held onto for so long out of fear that it might unleash the monster within his soul. If anything, he realized, it had done the opposite.
Pouring his energy and passion into the act of sharing pleasure with another human being had soothed him and sent his shadow-self off to some unknown place, leaving him alone. He gazed at Kacey’s naked body, his eyes taking in the whole picture from the hair that sat, tussled by his fingers, atop her head, down to her knees, ankles, and small pale feet he had just unveiled. She was there, she was alive, she drew happiness from his company and he had been with her in an intimate way without giving in to the urges he feared so much. He gazed at the woman on that bed and, without realizing it, began to cry.
Kacey laid in the slight coolness of the evening air that came in through the window to brush against her naked body. It felt wonderful. She had been with a few men before, hometown boys, natives of the same old town she’d seen every day of every week of every year of her life, but they had all been clumsy, groping apes without finesse, without consideration, all rushed tumbling and no skill. Compared to what she had known in the past, Doug had been wonderful, as if he’d followed his instincts and let go of inhibitions. Kacey felt incredible and she wondered how he had learned to do the things he had just done. It was almost, she thought in her dreamlike afterglow of the mind, like he understood exactly how a woman’s body was put together. As she looked up to see him staring down at her, she realized that a tear had made its way halfway down his face.
“Are you crying?” she asked. “What is it?”
“It’s you,” Doug said, just managing to get the words out. “You’re too beautiful.”
Chapter 9
Lieutenant Klein glanced at his watch: five-fifteen in the morning. The darkness outside the window showed the first signs of dissipation. Day was beginning, but what, Klein wondered, would the dawn reveal? How much of the Chicago that Klein had devoted his career to serving and protecting was still undamaged by recent events? Zombies! Klein had no better word in mind to describe the things that had turned his city into a battleground. It wasn’t something he ever thought he would see. Five-fifteen and he hadn’t slept, not a wink. His blood, he thought to himself, sarcasm defending his mind against the horror, must be more coffee than water by now.
Colonel Peterson returned at five-thirty. He had left by helicopter several hours earlier to meet with the mayor, the chief of police, representatives of the federal government and various others. Now he was back, marching into Klein’s makeshift command post with intensity in his eyes, shoulders held high. He looked rested and fully alert, but Klein suspected it was military discipline and adrenaline reserves that kept the army officer going, as he could not have had any more time to sleep than Klein had.
“Well?” Klein asked, not bothering with a more precise question.
“The city will be sealed within six hours,” Peterson said coldly, professionally. “More troops are on the way. We’ll need the assistance of your men and the rest of the police force as well of course.”
“That’s impossible!” Klein’s mind could not compute what Peterson had just said. “You can’t just seal a city, Colonel. Chicago’s no island. You can’t just close it off from the rest of the world!”
“We have to try, Lieutenant,” the colonel shot back. “I know … it’s like a Band-Aid over a bullet wound, but we have to do all we can to keep the contagion and violence from spreading. It’s insanity out there.”
Peterson walked over to the window, looking out with his back to Klein. “People are leaving in mass numbers, traffic flowing out at a pace that will choke the roads if it keeps increasing. We have to minimize the potential ways out to make it possible to set up checkpoints to look for the infected among those making their exodus. It’s not just the Empty Ones we have to worry about, either. There have been suicides, at least a dozen of them, by people who couldn’t stand the fear of what’s happening out there or those who got some religious bullshit about the end of the world in their heads. And I’m sure you’ve gotten the reports of accidental shootings too, people blowing away neighbors out of fear or because they were so on edge they thought they saw things that weren’t really there. It’s going too far too fast.”
Klein nodded. “Did you just refer to those things as Empty Ones? Where did that come from?”
“It was something one of my men said to me when the reports started coming across before we left the base,” Peterson explained. “This man, this captain, claims to have seen something like this before, when he was stationed in Africa. There, the people of some still-primitive tribe called the infected people by that name.”
“Interesting,” Klein said. “So just how high up did this ‘sealing off the city’ idea come from?”
“As high as it goes,” Peterson said. “It’s straight from a desk in the Oval Office.”
“Claire, wake up!” Danielle stood over her roommate’s bed, her voice growing louder with each word. “Claire, get the fuck up!”
Danielle had sat awake on the couch all night, alternating between thinking and turning on the TV to watch the latest news reports, most of them confused repetitions of what had already been either confirmed, or continued speculation. With dawn about to break through the darkness, she had risen, taken a few minutes to change and clean up. Now it was time to get her two companions out of Chicago before it was too late.
Claire sat up, straight and fast, eyes opening wide in alarm at the tone of Danielle’s shouting. “What?”
“Come on, Claire, get up. Get dressed, pack a bag. We’re getting out of here.”
Claire pulled the blanket loose from where it had been tucked under the mattress. She wrapped it around her body from thighs to shoulders, concealing her nakedness from Danielle as she stood up. “Where are we going?”
“Out of Chicago, fast as we can. I don’t know where, but things are getting worse out there. If we don’t get out soon, we never will.”
As Danielle spoke, everything Claire had seen on the news and heard from Danielle before going to sleep came crashing back into her mind in all its horror. She forgot modesty and let the blanket fall to the floor as she began pulling clothes from her dresser drawers, stepping into underwear, donning a T-shirt, pulling on socks.
“What about the kid?” Claire asked, remembering Brandon.
“We’ll take him with us,” Danielle said, adding, “obviously” with a strong slant of sarcasm. “What kind of a question is that?”
“Hi,” Brandon said from the doorway just as Claire had pulled up her jeans. “Is it almost morning? Why were you yelling?”
Danielle turned to Brandon, walked over to him and took his hand, leading him out of the room to let Claire finish dressing. They went into the living room, sat on the couch.
“How do you feel, Brandon?”
“Hungry,” was his answer, which sent relief washing over Danielle. At least for now, the shock and grief of what the boy had been through were not at the surface.
“Okay,” Danielle said. “You sit here and I’ll get you some breakfast. And after you eat, we’re getting out of here.”
“Where are we going?”
“Well, Chicago’s kind of a mess right now, so I think we should head out of here for a while and go to someplace less crowded. Now stay here and I’ll go get you some cereal.”
Danielle went into
the kitchen, poured a bowl of Frosted Flakes. As she took the orange juice out of the refrigerator, she could hear the sound of the TV clicking on. For a second, she worried that Brandon would come unhinged when he came across the horrifying news reports. Her fears were dispelled as she heard him cry out in childlike wonder.
“Oh cool: zombies!”
Danielle could not help laughing as she heard Brandon’s innocent excitement. She carried the bowl of cereal into the living room and handed it to him.
“If that’s what they’re calling them,” she said as she sat down beside him, “I guess it’s as good a name as any. Doesn’t it scare you to think about those things walking around out there?”
“Nope,” the kid said through a mouth full of milk and crunchy flakes. “I’m not scared at all. Are you?”
“Maybe a little,” Danielle said, hoping her admission would make Brandon feel better about his own fear that he was so bravely trying to conceal. “But we’ll be fine. We just have to get past them all and get out of the city.”
“What if we have to fight them?”
“There are police and soldiers out there, Brandon. We’ll let them do the fighting. That’s no job for two college girls and a little boy.”
“But I bet I know more about those zombies than the army men do!”
“And why is that? A kid your age shouldn’t be watching scary movies.”
“It’s not from movies!”
“Then how do you know so much about the zombies, Brandon?”
The little boy fidgeted for a minute, swallowed his cereal, put the bowl down on the small table next to the couch, and looked at Danielle with a face that wore a mixture of innocence and guilt, wonder and dread.
“Because,” he said in a loud whisper, “I think I might have made them.”
“What do you mean, Brandon?”
