It glanced at the female next to It - the Other that had the belly. It would soon have a baby Other slide out of its fuck hole just like the one in its own arms. The females acknowledged the big screaming Fresh One on the roof, yearning to bite its fat fresh tongue, taste the blood gushing forth. Its breasts ached and it looked down on the infant Other. It had to make it feed so the ache would go away. While the Fresh One screamed on the roof, It lifted the dirty sweater above Its breast and coaxed the infant Other’s mouth to the swollen teat. The small one took Its focus off the Fresh One, which then immediately stopped screaming and started sobbing instead. The mother was able to make the connection that the Small One had this affect on the Fresh Ones, and it loved to observe them fall into confusion. It was frustrating that this one was out of reach, but more Others were close or on the way. It and the Other standing next to It would find a way in. They always did.
The male with the spiteful feelings stood behind the female that held the infant and stroked itself, thinking that it wanted to bend her over and…. It hated the infant Other. It hated the way it showed its sharp teeth and cackled as it made It eat the worst parts: the gristle and tendons, sometimes just dirt and sticks. It had broken several teeth on small rocks and Its mouth and jaw always ached, always a reminder of its tormentor. It hated when the infant was in its head. It waited and waited for the female Other that led them to put the infant Other down, turn her back. It would smother it, fuck it and bite its throat out. Oh how It longed to bite the throat out of the little one who enjoyed making It suffer so. But the female Other that led them never put the infant down. The infant wouldn’t let her.
As Tran came up through the roof hatch, he saw that Ben was holding his head and crying softly. The Fiends switched their gaze to the new piece of meat. Tran saw them at once and instinctively ducked out of sight. He whispered, “Ben…Ben, what the fuck?”
Ben glanced at Tran. “Don’t come up here. The devil will try to steal your soul.”
Tran took another glance. More began to appear through the trees, all stopping and looking up at the roof, then the building as a whole. The bulk of the building was probably only fourteen feet tall, the gym maybe twenty. It was too tall to climb up on, but with a little innovation a human would easily discover a way to overcome fourteen feet. Tran hoped that they weren’t smart enough to sort that out.
Almost as one, the group of Fiends looked to their left toward the South. Tran looked too and was dismayed to see more Fiends coming up the road. There were dozens of them.
“Ben. Look at me. Pull yourself together!” Ben stopped crying and looked at Tran, focusing only on Tran. “I don’t think the blind is working. We’re surrounded. I think you should come down, get out of sight and maybe they’ll go away.”
“They ain’t goin’.”
“How can you know? Come on. Come down.”
“Had one stand vigil outside our house for three days till we finally broke and ran, trying to get to the church. Thing drank the water right out of our birdbath when it got thirsty. Tackled my wife, Clare. I couldn’t stop. There were more. Had to keep runnin’.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sheriff Hill freed her of the possession.” He looked at the sky. “Clare, I best come see you soon. Can’t put it off anymore, God forgive me.”
Tran didn’t know what to do. He felt totally exposed - all those eyes watching him. They had approached in silence, but now a chorus of screeches, wails, and laughter was building and the assault on his ears was more than he could bear. He needed to get off of this roof.
Ben saw his hesitation, said, “I’m fine up here. You go back down and arrange a relay. Someone pokes their head up every few minutes or so and I’ll give ’em the news.”
“I guess that’s okay.”
“Go down now, before they try to steal your soul too. I’ve got God on my side. The two of us will fight this together.” Ben popped up for a quick scan using only his peripheral vision, his mind cataloging shapes, avoiding anything that might be another one of the devil children. He didn’t want to make eye contact with another one again and he quickly popped down.
Tran hustled back to the cafeteria. The sounds coming from the outside had been enough to inform everyone about the deteriorating situation. Their moment of lighter breathing was crushed as the weight of claustrophobia filled the room. On the positive side, the blood exchange was nearly complete. Nikki had the last of the stored O negative hooked up to her while Jon had moved on to the A.
Tran asked, “How are you guys feeling?”
“Other than a sore arm, I don’t feel much different,” said Jon.
“Same for me,” said Nikki. “Maybe a bit tired.”
Decker said, “In another hour or so, you should feel pretty good. You can get up and walk around. Well, not you, Jon. You’ll obviously have to remain strapped down until we’re sure you’re out of the woods.”
“I don’t know if we’ve got another hour,” said Tran. “There’s so many of them out there.”
They worked out a relay system: Tran would stand below the roof hatch and occasionally pop up to check with Ben. Christy would sit at a bend in the corridor between the janitor closet and the cafeteria, and Aaron would hang out by the cafeteria door. The others would try to nap for a few hours and then they’d switch. The children asked to be involved in the relay part and tried to treat it like a game.
The rest of the day passed this way; the continuing arrival of more infected. By dusk the refugees had lost count; the infected standing well back from the building. Experience had taught their leader that Fresh Ones sitting on roofs invariably meant guns.
The refugees ate their meals on an individual level. With appetites almost non-existent, eating was a job, solely for energy. At eight o’clock, Jon began showing signs of a fever. It had been eleven-and-a-half hours since he’d been bitten, and as some had feared, the vigorous exercise seemed to have sped up the process. Nikki had been up and around for a while, but only went as far as the cafeteria entrance to participate in the relay. Now she paced the room to the point of distraction.
Jon watched her worried movements and finally said, “You’re making me dizzy. Maybe you should read a book or something.”
“Sorry.” She sat and noticed her leg bouncing until she firmly put a hand on it.
The Fiendish howls, shrieks and laughter continued to fill the air and they sat in stony silence, trapped with it, their nerves under constant assault.
When Jon’s temperature reached one-o-five, he began to toss his head with delirium. Decker packed frozen pieces of meat around the man, trying to keep the fever at a safe level. He refrained from giving him aspirin; hoping that this time, the fever was a sign of the body’s defenses winning. They would monitor his temperature and remove the meat when it reached one hundred four.
By ten o’clock Jon’s fever had come down to one-oh-two on its own and he opened his eyes with some clarity.
Decker asked, “Do you know your name?”
“Jon Washington. I’m a reporter stuck in an elementary school cafeteria and I’m waiting to be eaten alive.”
At eleven o’clock Jon was suddenly, violently, projectile vomiting. He turned his head away from his friends to keep the potentially lethal liquid from them and heaved until yellow bile was all that he could produce. He was left exhausted and covered with chills as the temperature took hold again.
Susan said, “I haven’t seen this. Its possible that he is suffering from a secondary bug - from the transfusion perhaps. We can’t be sure of the validity of the blood that was in that fridge.”
“Oh for Christ sake,” said Decker, parting Jon’s sweaty head bandage with a latex gloved hand. “Look at this. The bite’s getting all infected.”
Christy said, “There’s Vancomycin with the other antibiotics. We know it won’t stop FND-z, but…”
“I say we try it,” said Decker, “Who knows? If Nikki's blood is giving the little bastards a fight they can�
��t handle, maybe a shot of the hard stuff will do them in; along with whatever else has got him. We’ve got to put him on saline anyway or he’ll die from dehydration.”
Nikki broke in, “Jon, you still with us?”
Jon nodded through pain and discomfort. “Hurt all over.”
An hour later, the howling outside stopped, the silence sudden and unnerving. A minute later, Aaron poked his head in the door, his eyes affright, his fists clenching and unclenching. “The word from the roof is that the infected are closing in.” His tenor became that of a frightened boy. “They seemed to be waiting for total dark. There was a moon, but clouds came and made it go away.”
Nikki let out a long breath. “I’m going up to have a look. You guys should do whatever you have to do.” She nodded at Jon. “It’s not like any Cain’s that I’ve seen.”
“She’s right,” said Susan, “He’d be incoherent by now, bordering on coma.”
Nikki passed Teddy at the bend in the corridor and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re doing a good job, Marine.” When she got to the janitor’s room and began climbing the ladder, Tran whispered, “We’re fucked.”
A breeze blew drying ash through the air as she climbed through the hatch, and she found herself squinting to avoid it. She could just make out Ben, who briefly pointed a powerful flashlight at the field behind the school. The beam caught the motion of several bodies running toward the school then disappearing from sight as they fell in next to the building.
Ben said, “They’ve been doing that for five minutes now. I’ve lost count how many. There’s no point in shooting. I wouldn’t hit the dirt if I was aiming at it. Afraid the time has come. Come at last.”
Nikki hefted the SCAR and quietly walked to the side of the roof and peered over the edge. What she saw made her new blood run cold. There was a dark mass of moving limbs and torsos. They were building a human pyramid. It was chaotic, but they were intentionally using each other to make a ramp of sorts.
“Shit!” She fired a few rounds into the pack and started running back toward the hatch. “Ben! They’re climbing up. Get the fuck over here! We’ve got to lock this door!”
The air was suddenly filled with cries and hollers. The monsters started hopping up on the roof near the front entry behind her. Nikki spun and shot one, but there were five more running in earnest, some tripping over and destroying the SOS made from sleeping-bags. More popped up on the roof from several different points. They would be overrun in seconds.
“Ben!”
She saw Tran climbing up out of the corner of her eye, shoved him back, “Get back down there!”
Ben spread his arms and yelled out, “Come to me!” And they did, vectoring right for him. He blasted one in the face, re-racked and winged another in the arm. He looked hard at Nikki and for a moment she was mesmerized by the intensity of his gaze, almost as if his eyes somehow got closer to her. “You are an Archangel sent by Him!” he yelled. Then, as he was about to be tackled, he put the shotgun under his own chin.
The shot coincided with Nikki slamming the hatch down.
“What about Ben?” yelled Tran.
“He’s with his God now.”
Nikki locked off the hatch and flinched at the sound of pounding fists. They heard glass breaking as they stepped out of the janitor’s room. A rock shattered a window down the hall, followed by another. Teddy squealed in fright.
“Run!”
They careened past rows of lockers. A classroom door swung open and Nikki slammed it back into the entering Fiend’s face. They made it back to the cafeteria with the sound of shattering glass echoing down the halls.
“Ben?” asked Steven, pulling his son through the door.
“Gone,” said Tran as he and Steven pulled the doors shut, tying them together with the same heavy rope that had held the gymnasium doors.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Assault
Storm and McNeil were at their wit’s end. They’d covered and recovered the area that any northbound people on foot could make it to. Outside the unlikely event that the scientists marched directly through the dense burned forests, they’d covered every road and expanded it as time went on. They saw lots of Fiends, but no signs of people holed up against them. There were no reports of any cars making it to the border in the last two days. The Armed Forces were in full assault, having progressed twenty miles across the fertile Saint Lawrence flatlands before getting bogged down in some of the larger towns and villages. The battle for Saint-Georges was sucking up a huge amount of equipment and personnel. Despite new tactics designed to bait and ambush the infected, just as often the soldiers found themselves being ambushed – and now there was some kind of mind control/ESP thing happening that was throwing the whole operation on its head. There were refugees; people who had managed to seal themselves off from attack, but they were extremely few and there was no word of the scientists. The only option the searchers had left was to keep covering the same territory or assume that the scientists had met a gruesome end. The odds of that were looking extremely likely. They had landed for the night at a forward air operations base near Sainte Marie where they could refuel, eat, and crash-out in the back of the helicopter for a few hours. They managed to get an Air Force mechanic to look at their bird, and discovered a nearly unserviceable fuel filter. The thing had been a ticking time bomb and could have resulted in a stall mid-flight.
While stuffing their mouths with a hot meal at the base’s mess, they poured over their maps again.
Kelly pointed to a line, “So what about this fire break south of the lake?”
“The fire would have stopped anyone from going that way.”
“Yeah, but the rain.”
“But why go south?”
“Look, if you follow it west it takes you over toward Stratton and the 27 north, but they would have had to climb these mountains to get there. Go the other way, it ends up at this place, Moscow. They could take the 201 from there.”
“We’ve been all over the 27 and the 201.”
“Maybe they’re holed up. Still south of the lake.”
“Well, Stratton is a no go. If they went that way, we know they’re dead.” Sam yawned and stretched her limbs. “I guess we could check out Moscow. Maybe they made it there and then got trapped. All I know is that if I don’t get some sleep I’m liable to fly us into a hillside tomorrow.”
“I know what you mean. I think my elbows are permanently locked from holding up binoculars.”
They finished their meal, headed back to their bird and stretched out on camp pads in back, falling asleep in minutes.
The assault on the cafeteria was immediate and intense. The moment that Aaron and Steven had the doors tied shut they were forcefully rattled and yanked from the other side. At the same time a barrage of rocks smashed through the windows, billowing the roller shades and careening off the furniture. Tran, Nikki and Decker took up a defensive position behind the built-in steam table. Everyone else moved into the windowless kitchen where the only other entrance was a large steel delivery door in the back.
To everyone’s dismay, Jon had fallen into a coma. His body lay still, his breath shallow, an IV still hanging from his arm. Christy nodded toward Jon, steeling herself against the racket outside, “Sort of wish I could trade places with him.”
Steven drew his sword and walked to the cafeteria door.
“Daddy, no! Don’t go!” cried Amanda.
“I can better protect you with this out there, Darling.”
Steven stepped out into the cacophony while Teddy drew his own sword and threw a comforting arm over his sister. The children made eye contact with Aaron, who was trembling with fear next to the walk-in refrigerator, dialing up the temperature. “Don’t want to freeze to death if we have to duck in here.”
Susan and Christy looked at each other, trying to get psyched up. Susan said, “This is nuts.” They drew their swords and stepped out into the lunchroom.
Nikki turned her head at the n
ew people coming from the kitchen and yelled, “Get back in there! If we have to run through that door, you’ll just get in the way.” She turned around again as Tran fired at a Fiend that had launched itself half way through a window. Tran’s shot missed it by three feet, blowing out another window instead. Nikki dropped the thing with a headshot, leaving it hanging on the sill.
She turned back to Steven as he herded the others back through the door, “Unhook that big industrial stove. Shove it near the door. We’ll block it with that.”
Decker fired at another Fiend smashing its way through. Then suddenly the entire wall of windows was under assault. The blinds were being ripped down, human bodies poured through as the safety glass harmlessly crumbled into pebble sized pieces. The tumbled furniture was an obstacle, but barely.
Nikki dropped one attacker after another while Tran and Decker did their best to do the same. The strength of the assault was astounding. Clearly these creatures were hungry beyond their last shred of self-preservation. Nikki slapped in her last clip of ammo; thirty more rounds. Decker took the top off a female’s head with the last round from Jon’s pistol, then pulled his sword. Tran used up the pilot’s second clip and pulled his sword as well.
Nikki aimed at a female then held up. The creature was pregnant; probably eight or more months. Her stomach was positively huge. She fell through the window onto the tangled furniture and then looked up with pure menace in her eyes. She shoved a chair out of her way and pushed forward through the tumbled furniture, a line of drool pouring from the corner of her mouth.
A large cleaver slipped between the tied up double doors. The Fiends on the other side were using it as a saw against the rope.
“That’s it,” said Nikki. “Into the kitchen.” Thank God it was a one-way door and not the double-hinged kind. She locked it with its flimsy latch, only to find Steven and Aaron still unhooking the gas line from the big industrial stove. Why didn’t I think to have it ready to go?
Of Sudden Origin (Of Sudden Origin Saga Book 1) Page 29
