by Smith, Aaron
Kacey smiled. In a way, Danielle’s words had made her feel better, but the eloquence behind them had just proven her point as well. Still, there was no malice.
“Yeah, okay,” Kacey said, walking over and sitting on the edge of the bed. She kicked off her sneakers, slipped out of her pants, and swung her legs up onto the bed, reclining against her pillow, letting out a tired sigh.
Danielle bent her right knee, untied her shoe and pulled it off, followed by her single sock. She unbuttoned her jeans and wiggled loose of them, sat back too, yawned once.
Kacey looked down at the three bare feet at the end of the bed, made a smart-ass comment about Danielle paying her tuition with the money she must save on half-price pedicures. The two young women laughed, friends for the time being, chatted a while more, then each drifted off into mostly peaceful sleep.
Chapter 15
Lieutenant Klein, Colonel Peterson and the small group of police and military officers had spent the day and the beginning of the night struggling to keep track of the chaos in various sectors of the city as well as receiving updates on the plans of the government. The information pouring in came from all parts of Chicago and beyond. Yet those in the command center were unaware of what was happening in the lower floors of the building from which they monitored events elsewhere.
It came as an utter surprise when, some hours after nightfall, the staircase doors burst open and Empty Ones stormed the penthouse offices. The Ether-virus had steadily worked its way up the many floors until those affected by it had reached the summit of the manmade mountain. The officers fell fast in torrents of blood and blizzards of shredded flesh. Some would soon rise again as Empty Ones while others were mutilated beyond any chance of dark resurrection.
Colonel Peterson had no time to even react before death struck swiftly and decisively. Lieutenant Klein had a few seconds and his last conscious thought was of a woman he had met a week earlier and had thought he might take to a play one evening. That meeting had been only days before, but felt like a lifetime ago, long before the madness had taken the mundane world away. His blood mingled with the hot liquid of a shattered coffee pot as his body went to the floor.
From a rooftop less than a block away, peering through night-vision goggles, Terence Trumbull watched as many of the windows of the building shattered and several human bodies fell like acorns shaken loose to shatter on the street far below. He knew what had been in that building and that the loss of those within would make success even more unlikely for those fighting to save what remained of Chicago. The darkness was dangerously near to closing in permanently.
He knew that once all those souls had been emptied, those still mobile bodies would begin to spill out onto the street, in search of new prey. Trumbull quickly and methodically moved across the rooftops and down the outer walls of nearby buildings until he found a room with a window two floors up and directly across the street from what had been the command post. It would be a fine sniper’s nest.
He broke a window, balanced his gun in the opening and waited. They came. He began to pick them off, one by one. The count had reached seventeen when Peterson came out, eyes empty, uniform ripped and ribs on one side of his chest exposed to the open air, but still moving, prowling, hungry and contagious.
Trumbull felt wetness drip down his face, told himself it was sweat, denied the possibility of tears, and put a bullet in the brain of a man he had respected.
As he fired that shot, Trumbull felt his spirit break. He’d had enough. He wanted to quit, even considered throwing himself out the window and laying down at the mercy of the animalistic mob. But he could not surrender his life. He retreated into the building, hid deep in its corridors, and tried to figure out how to escape from the city. He would go AWOL, forget his name, forget his rank, try to wipe his slate clean and begin anew in some town that managed to avoid the devastation of the Ether-virus.
It was the warmest morning of the year so far, hotter than spring should be. Doug was the first of the group to wake after a restless night. Just after dawn he quietly stepped out of the cabin to breathe in the forest air. Anticipation surged through him like urgent hunger. The Doug part of his mind had begun to think of it as his shadow-self’s version of horniness.
He roamed around the village for a short time, listening to the sounds of the people inside the cabins and huts waking up. He sat down on a tree stump and tried to relax, waiting for the professor and the women.
“Oh shit!” Danielle said. She was awake, sitting up in bed, and using her phone’s Internet connection to scan the early morning news. Her expletive woke Kacey, who sat up.
“The governor’s made a statement,” Danielle said. “Basically, he’s declared Chicago dead. All military personnel are being pulled out of the city, along with anyone else still able to leave. The city will be surrounded and sealed in with walls. After noon today, no one else will be allowed out. They’re trying to keep the disease from leaking out any further than it already has. If they have to, the governor says, they’ll do the same to any other towns that show symptoms. People are protesting, of course, but the government, not even the president, seems to care. Even if my idea has some substance to it, we might be too late for too many people.”
Kacey sighed.
The cabin door opened and Irena walked in carrying a basin full of warm water for the women to wash away the night. “Do you need something else?” she asked.
Danielle handed her the car keys, asked her to fetch her bag and crutch from the trunk. Irina hurried off. She seemed happy to be given orders, as if her life consisted mostly of a quaint, willing servitude.
Thirty minutes later, the five non-natives of the secluded village were united in that same cabin. Irina had brought breakfast. Professor Harrison arrived shortly after with Brandon in tow. Doug walked in not long after, his clothes damp and his hair disarranged after a morning plunge into the swimming hole. Brandon hugged Danielle while Kacey kissed Doug. The five sat down and ate the pancake-like stuff that Irina had brought. There was coffee too, strong and dark.
Kacey had borrowed jeans and a green T-shirt from Danielle. They were a bit long, but would do.
Danielle had changed into a fresh shirt too, and shorts now instead of jeans. She stood leaning on her crutch after she had eaten, not bothering with the prosthetic yet. As she waited for the others to finish, she noticed Doug staring at her abbreviated leg a bit longer than people usually did, not trying to hide his interest. His expression was blank; it was hard to tell what he was thinking. She was used to people looking at the limb; it was not something most people saw every day, but the way Doug looked at it gave her a slight shiver. She shrugged it off. They were all in this together and their plan would depend on Doug’s help, even if he struck her as being a bit odd.
After breakfast, the five trekked outside and went to the spot behind the village where Professor Harrison kept his van. Doug and Kacey walked quickly with Harrison while Brandon and the crutching Danielle came up behind. The van was a decade old, Doug estimated at first sight, but looked like a well-maintained, sturdy vehicle. Opening the back doors after taking the professor’s keys, he was happy to see a solid wall separating the rear compartment from the front seats, perfect for storing the prisoner they hoped to bring back.
Danielle consulted her phone. “The closest town with signs of trouble is called Heavenport,” she said. “Professor, do you know where that is or should I GPS it?”
“I know,” Kacey said before Harrison could answer. “Shit, it’s not that far from Bellamy. I hope the thing hasn’t spread to my town! I can navigate once we get back to I-94. Come on, Doug, let’s go.”
Constable Fess came running into the picture carrying a large wooden crate. He dropped it onto the ground. Doug bent down and took the contents of the crate out, loaded them into the van: a shotgun with shells, rope, wire, the large machete Harrison had promised, a large roll of bandages and bottle of disinfectant.
Doug and Kacey were seated
in the van moments later. Fess crammed in, too; he would lead them back to the big wooden gate and would get out there and wait for the village’s next visitor, Dr. Bosc, to arrive for the other part of the plan.
Within thirty minutes, Doug and Kacey were alone on the road, speeding back the way they’d come on their initial arrival in the strange land of north Illinois, hoping the town of Heavenport had not come to too closely resemble Chicago.
Kacey fiddled with the radio as Doug drove but all the major stations out of Chicago had gone off the air. As she turned the knob back to silence she felt her fingers trembling.
“Doug, how can you be so calm? We’re about to go into a warzone, if it’s as bad as all those news reports say. We might have to kill somebody, or we could get hurt ourselves, and we’re supposed to drag one of those things back with us, and you don’t seem too worried about that.”
“It’s the adrenaline, Kacey. It’s keeping me steady. I hope your hands don’t shake like that if you have to use the shotgun.”
Dr. Raymond Bosc drove into the village not long after Doug and Kacey had left. Although he knew the way after having made more than a dozen trips into the strange archaic landscape, Constable Fess courteously guided him along the narrow road into the populated part of the forest.
Bosc got out of his small Hyundai and was greeted by the sight of three people sitting on chairs as if they were waiting for his arrival. Around the perimeter of the scene, the rest of the natives went about their daily chores. A few of them waved at the doctor.
Bosc walked over, shouting, “Morning, Donald!” On either side of the professor was a younger person. A little boy sat to the left, sucking on a piece of wood, probably, Bosc thought, a sliver cut from a nearby Birch tree. On Harrison’s right was a young woman in her twenties, a crutch lying on the ground in front of her, a serious expression on her face, and the bare stump of an amputated lower leg hovering above the village’s dirt floor.
As Bosc approached, Harrison and Danielle stood to greet him. Brandon, quite enthralled by the sweetness of the tree, stayed seated, his face painted with the joy of a city-grown boy discovering the wonders of the woods. Bosc carried a large bag, black leather like the traditional parcel of a physician, but bigger.
“Thank you for coming, Ray,” Harrison said. “This is Danielle Hayes, a former student of mine and a future doctor. So far, she’s not been affected by the bite she suffered at the jaws of one of those abominations that have climbed up out of Hades. I see you’ve come well equipped. Shall we go inside?”
As they rolled into the outskirts of the town of Heavenport—Kacey’s directions had been flawless—Doug thought it looked and felt a little like Bellamy, but more beat-up, not as well-maintained. It had the same old-fashioned aura as Kacey’s hometown, but looked older. Bellamy had been a step back in time in a spiritual sense, but Heavenport was heavy and rusted with physical age as well. This added to the foreboding feeling that went with the knowledge that there was plague there.
They passed the dilapidated houses on the edges of town, along with a few trailers and some parked cars and trucks, but saw no sign of human presence. Just how bad was it? The question hit both their minds simultaneously.
“Oh shit!” Kacey said, looking over at the side of the road where, as if in answer to their mutual but unspoken question, a human skeleton lay, picked clean of every hint of flesh. No skin, no clothes, no eyes, no hair: just bones and the spaces between them.
They kept driving. They hit the center of town. It looked deserted.
“They’re either all turned and gone wandering,” Doug said, “or most of them had the sense to lock themselves in and hide when it got bad.”
They turned a corner onto a street with a gas station, restaurant, accountant’s office, dentist, City Hall—all the generic Main Street fixtures, except it wasn’t Main Street in this case, but Center Street.
They saw movement.
“It’s the police!” Kacey said, pointing, not sure if that was good or bad. Good if they were keeping some kind of order in Heavenport, and bad if they took unkindly to two armed strangers rolling into town during a state of emergency.
The van rolled closer, slowly and cautiously. The tan-shirted, holstered men did not turn around. That was when Doug knew.
“They’re not police anymore,” he said. Kacey knew what he meant.
Doug hit the horn and the sour trumpet note cut the silence of Heavenport. It was enough stimuli to make the sheriff and his deputies turn around. Their faces, upon revelation, were unmistakably the masks of Empty Ones. The fat one on the left had an eye hanging limply halfway down his cheek, still attached by the slightest string of wiry flesh. The one on the right had the front of his shirt smeared with red and brown gore. The one in the middle had once been in charge, as was evidenced by the greater size of his badge. His face was a blank but hungry stare, his mouth hung open like a puncture wound with yellowed chewing tobacco teeth.
Doug spun the van halfway and stopped so Kacey’s window was facing the three Empty Ones. He had plans.
“I want the one in the middle,” he said. “The fat one’s too big to haul with us and the other one’s too much of a mess. I’m going over there and try to get him roped and restrained as much as I can. Get your gun ready and cover me, take out the other two if they threaten too much before I can kill them. Are you okay? Can you do this?”
“I think so,” Kacey said.
“Don’t think! Just do! And shoot for the heads!”
Doug was out and had slammed the door behind him before Kacey could speak another syllable. She watched him go, machete in one hand, coiled rope in the other, so changed from the gentle, almost shy man who had made love to her a million years and a different world ago.
Doug let his mind go blank as he hurried toward the three corrupted policemen. He ceased to exist as the man Kacey knew and let his shadow-self take command of the body they shared. No hesitation, no fear; he reached his targets and threw a kick into the chest of the middle Empty One. The sheriff reeled backwards and fell on his ass. The fat zombie, with his one good eye and one limply hanging one, took a reach at Doug with a mud-encrusted hand. The hand did not stay attached for long as Doug’s machete wiped it cleanly from its station at the wrist. At the same moment, Doug felt the claws of the other one grab the upper arm on the opposite side of his body. He shoved, trying to push it away.
Kacey raised her gun, looking through the open window. One zombie had a firm grip on Doug. The second had backed off after the brutal lopping of its hand. The third, the one with the big bright badge, was in the process of slowly and clumsily getting up after the kick that had toppled him.
Kacey wanted to take out the one that had grabbed Doug, put it down before it could bite or dig its nails into Doug’s flesh. Was it too close? Could she trust her aim or would she have an even chance of hitting Doug instead of her true target? “Stop the fucking shakes!” she ordered herself, out loud.
She pulled the trigger and it was good. The head of the one grappling with Doug exploded out the back after the shot went in the front. The zombie fingers went lax, the body fell away, and Doug kicked it in the ribs after it hit the ground.
The fat one came back now, reaching out with both arms in a perfect Frankenstein’s Monster pose, the fact that one hand was gone apparently not clear to its rotted mind. Doug was too fast. He ducked, sliced the machete across the abdomen, and backed up before the steaming, spilling spaghetti of guts could stain his shoes. A second shot rang out and Kacey laughed as that Empty One fell too.
The sheriff was on its feet again, throat gurgling as it came for Doug. He almost used the machete again; he liked the way his muscles felt as he exerted the force needed to bring the blade through the tissues of the body, but he remembered. They wanted a living specimen back at the village. So Doug ran, just ten feet or so to the right of the Empty Sheriff, and raised the rope like a cowboy in some old serial where John Wayne, slim and smooth-faced then, would ri
de past anachronistic telephone poles. He flung the looped end, trusting his instincts, and it fell like a noose over the head of the sheriff.
The Doug part of his shared mind was strangely disconnected from his body’s actions, but it semi-felt and semi-saw what was happening and understood how the scene was unfolding. His shadow-self had stored many strategies over the years in anticipation of the time when Doug would allow it to take control. Moves had been practiced mentally countless times, ways of capture, of tying, of restraint. Those methods came into practice now and the sheriff was soon held fast by rope and dragged around to the back of the van, struggling and groaning inhumanly but in futility.
The van doors swung open, the mobile cage awaiting its occupant. Doug took the wire out, added strength to the lines that held the Empty One harmless. A gag was shoved into the mouth, far enough to keep the teeth from threatening, but not so far that choking might occur; he supposed the thing still needed to draw breath.
