by Morgana Wray
“You have got to look out for you. You can’t be slowed down with the heroic stuff. Besides, whatever or whomever is locked behind those doors could be extremely dangerous and a bit more trouble than you bargained for, Mack old boy.” I scratched my chin in a brief moment of indecision.
The faint groans soon became much louder and soon turned into what sounded like someone whimpering after being dealt heavy blows. How could I ignore that?
Part of me was already feeling a kind of guilt for considering walking away.
Curiosity was a devil that festered in my head. I couldn’t help but think of what the person on the other side of the green door was going through. I followed the squelching noise, holding fast to the stun baton in case of any unforeseen eventualities. I hated being taken by surprise. I had seen a lot of horror movies where something nasty jumps out of nowhere and slits your throat when you least expect it.
This was what the world around me was becoming-one big, fat show of horrors. We the people that were left standing were the stars of the freak show. I wasn’t one to overanalyse things but ever since people started chumping on other people I have recently become that way. Nothing is ever what it appears to be. I was beginning to learn that.
I was learning to apply caution. I was less interested in foolhardy heroics. I knew who I was. I knew what I was. I was a guy that didn’t want his neck bit by one of those undead things. They are calling them Risers now. I thought that was such a shitty name.
I just see them as monsters with an insatiable appetite for cuisine of the human variety. They only exist to binge-feed on what is left of the human race. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I thought they would most likely outnumber us by now given the rate at which the infection had overrun major cities.
The world was knee-deep in shit. Everything was starting to go to crap. The vested interests in high places weren’t really looking out for the insignificant middle-class or the drifters without fixed abode. They wouldn’t even send supplies to affected areas. They just walled them off and shut the gates on both infected and those without any symptoms.
I guess that is why I was brought to this dump to rot away in. A prison meant for hardened criminals was the ideal place to lock away people that you didn’t want getting out of the sandbox. The dead were dangerous. The survivors were feared. People didn’t know for certain if we were infectious. Maybe a touch or a sharing the same airspace could mean death for people outside the infected zones.
It was only going to be a matter of time before the government chose to get their hands dirty. Genocide might be on the cards when fear and selfishness is a driving force.
I had dragged my ass to the green door. I slammed the baton against the door to get a response from whoever was behind the door. I wasn’t going to open the door, till I knew for sure that whatever was behind that door was human and not a damn flesh eater.
“Hey! Are you okay in there?” I asked with a hesitant look plastered across my face. “You are not one of those bity nutters, are you?”
A faint hiss came from the other side. Then a couple of rather painful coughs. Risers don’t cough. I was certain of that. Whoever was behind that door was human and definitely dehydrated and starved. The poor sod must have been too weak to even utter a single word let alone string a short sentence together
Working with that logic, I shoved one key after the other into the keyhole. My palms were sweaty. I was getting so anxious that it got slightly hard to breathe. My heart felt as if it was climbing up my throat.
There was a girl with really dirty hair behind the door when I had finally managed to get the door open. She was emaciated and really thin. She was barely strong enough to hold her own weight. I guess that was why she was sprawled on the floor, not too far away from the door. She was barely breathing and her eyes were tired. They had turned dull blue, probably from malnutrition. There was barely much life left in the poor thing.
I felt a rush of human emotions flooding through me. If I weren’t a battle-hardened man, I would have shed a bucket full of tears. Who in their right mind lets a child get this way. The girl on the floor was definitely in a bad way. I couldn’t bear to look her in the face. So, I grabbed her hand to feel for a pulse. She wasn’t going to say much. There was no point in starting a one way conversation, anyway.
“Your pulse is really weak! You’ve been starving yourself, haven’t you?” I beamed a chastising look at the semi-unconscious girl.
She was barely responsive and could barely blink. Then I felt something warm and wet stream down my left hand. It was warm tears. She had just shed a tear. I was forced to look her in the face. Behind the bony, emaciated face that was looking back at me, I could recognize something familiar. Those eyes, I had seen them before. They inspired some feeling of warmth.
How could I have forgotten her? How could I have forgotten what the kid looked like? I guess being locked away for so long would do that to your memory. It was Diane. The kid was taken too. She was still alive and right in front of me.
“It is you, kid! They fucking brought you here!” I pulled Diane into an emotional embrace. “I hate to imagine what those animals in rubber suits have done to you. Don’t you worry, kid. I’ll get us out of here and we’ll fix you.”
Pushing Diane back, I looked her in the face, probingly. “Blink if you can understand me.”
With much effort, she batted her eyelids once. She was still in there. She was still fighting. More importantly, she wasn’t going to be a complete liability on our way out. My job of breaking us out was going to be slightly easier, or so I thought. I had the escape plan in my head. I had been dreaming of it for months.
“Miss Maple! Did you see her? Did they take her as well?” I asked Diane.
She said nothing. There was almost a vague smile forming on her face when I mentioned Miss Maple. I had to assume that was a good sign. I had to assume that somehow she had been spared the agony that I and Diane had been through.
“I am going to try to get us somewhere safe. We shall worry about Miss Maple later. If she isn’t out there somewhere then we shall have to come back for her when you are mended. Hopefully, with a good plan and some backup.” I winced, as I scooped Diane into my hands and tossed her over my shoulder. “Well, here we go again, kid! Just like old times, aye?”
I tried hard not to show my concern for the kid. Her sickly, emaciated frame was really very hard to overlook. Emotions of sympathy bugged me really bad. Yeah, I couldn’t shake that warm, fuzzy paternal feeling that was bubbling up fast inside my chest, even though I wasn’t her dad.
I had barely known the kid for long but I couldn’t help but feel some sort of unexplained bond. Guess maybe it was her unrefined and candid use of words. Her brazen sincerity was refreshing. She was as genuine as the bad stomach cramps that I got whenever I felt the urge to pass whiffs of pungent wind out of my backside.
“Hope you are comfy up there? You’re not going to go and die on me now, are you kid?” I nudged her arm, anxiously hoping for some sort of response.
I wasn’t keen on the emotional blowback that would overtake my entire system if something wrong were to happen to the kid. My mind wasn’t feeling so resilient lately. I was walking the tightrope when it came to holding my shit together.
“Are you okay up there? Seriously! This isn’t funny kid!” I raised my voice slightly, pushing the tip of my finger into Diane’s sides.
She was still for a minute or two. There wasn’t any reaction to my crude stimulus. I could not even feel the warmth of air rushing through her nostrils against my skin. Thoughts started to bounce back and forth in my noggin. Was she dead? Would she turn or not? Should I have taken care of her before she turned and became a problem?
Chapter 3
“No, this is not happening. No, not now, kid. This has got to be some big joke. You can’t quit on me, just like that. You wake up, you hear me.” I pushed both hands against an unresponsive Diane’s chest.
My desperate attempts
at reviving her seemed to be an effort that wasn’t yielding much success. She wouldn’t even blink. Her eyes were wide open and looking everywhere else but at me. My medical knowledge was limited to basic first aid. I was not a medical professional. I didn’t need to be one to know her heart had stopped though.
I was at the mercy of faith. Yep, that and a wing and a prayer. There was just that inane thought. That small glimmer of hope that things would improve for the kid. Diane would be terrible at sitting on a cloud with a harp playing orchestra, harping on about things she probably didn’t care for.
That crowd would be way to homogenous and uninspiring to Diane. She was full of fire and pizzazz. She was definitely one for living in the moment.
“One.. Two.. Three.. Four..” I muttered almost silently, as I pressed my hands forcefully against Diane’s chest. “Come on kid! You’ve got to come back!”
I wasn’t really a man of much faith but I had to have some glimmer of hope to hold on to. I had to have some sort of belief that the wheels of faith would somehow spin in the kid’s favour today. There was only this moment; this minute; this second to make a bloody bit of difference. I wasn’t ready to let Diane fade away. I couldn’t bare to lose another person in such hopeless circumstances.
Once again, I was numb and rudderless. Completely unable to do jack and shit to help the situation. Things looked pretty much out of the remit of my skill set. My tough manly hands just weren’t cutting the mustard when it came to reviving the unresponsive, frail body in front of me.
The hailstorm of feelings flooding my chest was way too much to bear. It felt as if my chest was going to crack open and spill its contents all over the floor. I was that nervous. I was that panicked.
I bowed my head in defeat. I was not sure I could take any more of this business of watching people around me die. It was like having to watch your favourite character in a movie die over and over again in slow motion.
“You know kid, this isn’t how it was supposed to end. I have been through so much. In my war touring days, I did something terrible. Or I didn’t do something terrible to whom I needed to do that sort of thing to, and people very dear to me paid the heaviest price for my fuck up. That horrible sin has been a crushing weight on my conscience all these years.” I pressed my palm on my forehead.
“This is why you can’t do this. This is why you can’t just drift off into the great white. There must be tons of shit you haven’t done yet. There must be some boy you need to have your first dance with. You probably haven’t even gotten your first cheeky kiss yet.” I spouted some emotional nonsense in the unconscious girl’s ears.
I hoped Diane could hear me. I hope something in her would be motivated to fight or cling onto life. Perhaps I had given her something to fight for? Perhaps she would pull through and wake up? Or perhaps she has found peace wherever she is drifting off to and doesn’t want to deal with the hardships of this dusty, old planet?
A slight gust of air blew over my face. I didn’t hear the door swing slowly over the tiled floor. The footsteps of someone walk up behind me was vaguely audible. My head was rested on my fist and my eyes were slammed shut. I was lost in thought. I was lost in grief.
There was no will to do anything other than stew in a cesspool of regrets and unfulfilled wishes. I was simply a hollow shell and my will to pluck myself from the floor where I had fallen to my knees was non-existent.
I prayed for the ground to split open and swallow me. I just wanted the weight of all the guilt I had been carrying for surviving instead of my men to be gone. I wanted every thought in my head to cease. I wanted the cries for help ricocheting in the depths of my nightmares to fade into blackness.
There were always dirty, mutilated faces screaming out to me in my darkest of dreams. My dreams in recent times were mostly the darkest kinds. It was hard getting any sleep without pills to subdue the overactive parts of my imagination. Those parts were definitely getting the better of me. It was only a matter of time before I completely snapped and gave in to them.
I did not want to be one of those people that ended up doing something unspeakable just to end the constant nagging of the voices gnawing at the very core of their brains.
“What are you doing out here? Nevertheless it will be fun ending you! You have always been a fucking pain in the arse to handle!” A gruff voice smirked. “I still have this bite mark that you inflicted on me. You bit right through my suit, you bastard.”
“Well, time for you to eat the dirt. They want us to get rid of the Guinea pigs before we evacuate our essential personnel from this facility. Been nice knowing you, you dick.” Pistol clicked ominously behind me.
I didn’t flinch. I was ready for whatever came next. I had nothing to cling to life for. No chance to redeem myself. I felt at my lowest. My hands were as heavy as logs and my feet were not inclined to do anything that involved movement.
My eyes were shut.
The cold steel of the pointy end of the pistol pressed hard against the back of my head. The bare skin on my scalp certainly felt the chills. I expected my brains to be scattered across floor in that instance.
“Ahhh!!” the voice of my would-be executioner bellowed behind me. He sounded as if he was a baby, getting his ass whooped by his Mama. I almost felt sorry for the sadistic son of a bitch.
“Where the devil?” I gasped in disbelief, turning around to focus on what was behind me.
Shockingly, Diane wasn’t stretched out on the floor in front of me, anymore. She had somehow climbed unto the back of the morbidly obese guard behind me, and was digging the sharp ends of her teeth into his right earlobe.
Her face was stained with blood, leaking out of the guard’s wound.
“Get off me, you little wretch! Get the fuck off!” the obese guard yanked on Diane’s hair in a desperate bid to remove her teeth from his skin.
She would not budge. His hands rolled into a ball. The fat prick was going to result to pummelling the kid’s face with his fists. That would definitely not be a good outcome for Diane. She wasn’t built to take punches.
Besides, the size of that dude’s fist was certainly large enough to knock her head, clean off her shoulders, without breaking a sweat. I couldn’t let him focus that punch on her. I couldn’t let that brute send her straight to an infirmary, or the morgue. Not that I thought that those strict guards out there would have allowed her access to any sort of medical care.
Those dark, dim eyes in his face. They were determined to inflict horrors upon Diane. They were vengeful.
Would you blame him?
A chunk of the poor bastard's ear was laying on the floor, and Diane wasn’t even halfway near being done with him yet. The damn piece of flesh she had bitten off looked a bit like road kill.
Damn, that girl could bite, and she wasn’t even a Riser yet.
“Ahhh! You are dead you little witch!” obese guard wailed, raising his fists to strike Diane.
“If you think that was bad, then you ain’t seen nothing yet!” Diane laughed mockingly, baring her blood stained teeth. “Wait till I go for the nose. You’ll be a lot uglier than you look now.”
She certainly intended to antagonize the already angry guard. He was in pain and he was becoming increasingly unstable emotionally. His cheek had turned to a rose-red colour and he was clearly frothing at the lips.
There was certainly deadly intent in his countenance. His pose certainly told the tales of what he intended to do. He had no intention of going easy on the kid.
He wanted to definitely kill her now. I didn’t need a damn crystal ball to know that.
“Don’t you even dare!” I thundered, smacking the obese guard in the face with my bare knuckles. I battered him with a right and then a left. The portly sod staggered clumsily to the right and then to the left, following the directions of my tirades on him.
I only eased up on him when it occurred to me that Diane had not dismounted from the back of the bullish guard. He could easily have collapsed on top of he
r, crushing her ribs or worse-he was that fat.
The guard sucked the blood from his nose. I had probably broken it. He was breathing with slight difficulty, now. I was certain that I had knocked him senseless with those quick succession of punches which I had landed earlier.
He should not have been able to stand properly on both feet, let alone attempt what he did next.
I did not see when, or how those stubby, sausage-like fingers of his, managed to curl around Diane’s neck. I honestly was blindsided by the fact that the guard was a bit pudgy around the edges.
Okay, he was really round around the edges. In fact, there were no edges on the fat guard.
He had his hands around Diane’s neck, and they weren’t on her neck because the guard somehow had grown a heart, and felt the need to give the kid a hug.
“Step away, and don’t you come any closer! Don’t freaking make any wise ass moves, or I swear I will snap her neck like chicken bone?” the obese guard grunted, as blood dripped slowly from his busted up nose.
“Now you calm down, Wayne. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to be a child killer. You don’t want that kind of blood on your hands. You don’t want them to throw you in a hole where your life won’t be worth living.” I threw both hands in the air, looking the unnerved man straight in the eye. “Child killers don’t exactly get an easy ride in prison, do they?”
“You must have been down in your little shit hole of a cell for way too long! It is a very different world out there now! You think anyone gives a shit if some runt kid bites the dust? You think the courts, or the police, or the damn FBI have any jurisdiction anywhere, anymore?” The obese guard shook Diane’s slender body in front of me, as if she was some sort of inanimate plaything.
