Innocence Ends

by Robinson, Nikolas P.

  He turns and gestures at the home around them before continuing, “Sure, I still have to travel to CDC headquarters down in Georgia or to various WHO facilities around the country, but I need to be able to work from here as well.”

  Neither Miles nor Mariah knows what to say. The silence stretches on for an uncomfortable length of time. These new details are difficult to fit into the worldview either of them had up until this point and something seems out of sync with the fact that they’re only now hearing about any of this. Miles stares at Gale, his expression betraying none of the confusion he’s experiencing.

  “I even occasionally have interns and lab techs staying here in my guest rooms, why else would I be living in a five-bedroom home like this? Until recently, this place was sort of a hive of activity with other people coming and going, living on my property and working there with me,” Gale continues when he realizes no one else is going to speak.

  “And this wasn’t something you thought to mention to any of us until now?” Mariah asks

  “I’m with blondie here,” Miles says. “This is exactly the sort of thing that comes up during the usual small talk, catching up with each other portion of the vacation. You know, the sort of thing a regular Joe would include in the conversation.”

  Gale looks taken aback. “Miles, you of all people understand how my work can be classified in nature. You deal with similar limitations in your own line of work. But the circumstances right now sort of dictate that I can’t bother with that sort of concern.”

  Miles shakes his head, having a difficult time accepting the explanation but not having any real arguments against it. “Well, let’s get the fuck out of here and get to this lab of yours. First things first, I want to grab something from the car.”

  Miles retrieves his keys from the bedroom he and Kateb had shared, changes into dry clothing and a windbreaker that will cut down on the moisture a little bit, and the three of them leave through the front door, watching the shadows for anyone waiting outside.

  From the front seat of his car, Miles opens the glove compartment and removes a Colt .45 as well as a second magazine, tucking these into his pocket. He hands the shotgun and the extra five shells to Mariah after Gale lifts his jacket to display the pistol he’s carrying at his waist. He feels much better with a familiar gun in hand and he wants to travel light, so there’s no sense in digging through the back just yet. Miles hopes he won’t have to worry about the things he has in the back of the SUV, but he has a sinking feeling that he’ll be back for the arsenal before this trip is through.

  Knowing the town as he does, Gale leads them on a parabolic arc around the edge of the town, mostly through the semi-wooded area and the edges of outlying properties. The people they do happen across are nowhere nearby and of no immediate concern. Miles finds himself wishing he had thought to take a similar route on the way to Gale’s house.

  They take their time, stepping carefully and watching all around as they go, but the progress is certainly better than any of them made when they were cutting through the town in the aftermath of Kateb’s murder.

  29

  Abraham and Ben are squeezed into a shadowed alcove in an alleyway when they hear the sound of a firearm being discharged. Three rapid percussions followed by silence.

  Sounds are tricky at night, in the best of conditions, but it seems to be coming from less than a block away and they had yet to witness any of the locals using guns during their nocturnal hunting activities.

  Abraham feels a surge of hope, wondering if this might be one of his friends.

  Friend or stranger, whomever it is could be in trouble.

  He taps his son on the shoulder and gestures the way they’ve both been peering, the direction he believes the gunshot came from.

  Ben begins slipping along the wall of the alley, the movements especially silent, the rain masking everything below a whisper.

  He pauses at the edge of the alley, allowing his father to slide past him. There’s no obvious movement in either direction as he peers through the shadows of the street. The few lights that haven’t been damaged and knocked out aren’t providing much by way of illumination on this particular street. He takes a moment to wonder why so many of the lights are gone, probably the locals throwing stones for one reason or another, but he wonders why they would want it any darker than he does.

  He’s about to dart across the gap to the opposite alley when he sees a shape emerging from the blackness to his left. Quickly he presses himself against the alley wall and Ben follows his lead.

  The figure he witnessed is moving silently but not particularly hurried, frequently checking back over his shoulders for some reason.

  It’s difficult to tell from the distance, but the man appears to be wearing a police uniform of some kind and Abraham stifles the instinctive urge to call out for help from an authority figure. This is no normal night in an average town and there’s no reason to think that a cop would provide the usual blanket of security under the present conditions.

  Besides, the man is alone, he thinks to himself just before he sees other faint forms showing up suddenly where the cop had previously come from. These people are not trying to exhibit any stealth as they race into the dim lighting of the street.

  The cop dodges into the alley where Abraham and Ben were headed only seconds before and Abraham almost missed it, being too distracted by the four new men showing up. It’s not difficult to figure out that the solo officer isn’t with this group. This is more of the same stalking and hunting behavior he and his son have seen all too much of already.

  Being hunted doesn’t make the stranger a friend, cop or not, though Abraham isn’t prepared to think of anyone in this god awful town as anything but an enemy after everything they’ve gone through.

  The cop is good. If Abraham hadn’t watched the man fade into the darkness of the alley, he wouldn’t see the guy at all. He hopes that he and Ben are as well shrouded in their position, especially as the angry group of locals gets closer.

  These new men sound angry. Everyone they’ve heard sounds like they’re enraged. The snippets of voices reaching Abraham’s hiding place are fueled by the same manic hostility they’ve been hearing all night. The cop may be another bad guy, for sure, but these men were monsters.

  They pause briefly, abreast the alley, peering left and right. Abraham feels Ben tense up and shiver beside him and he knows its not from the chill in the air that’s penetrated them both to the core. The way those crazed assholes are gazing into the deeper darkness of the alley, Abraham is sure they’ll be running for their lives all over again any second. He’s tensed in preparation for what he knows is a race he lacks the energy to run.

  He’s almost ready to bolt, refusing to wait until they come at him when they finally begin moving down the street again. He releases the breath that had been hurting his lungs.

  His momentary relaxation is devastated as he jumps at the sound of nearby gunfire. It’s been no more than a couple of seconds and he didn’t see the cop lean from his hiding place in the alley after the party had passed. The man is insane, but two of the four roving locals are on the ground. One is pretty clearly down and not getting back up but the other is trying to rise and follow his two uninjured friends as they speed toward where the cop is now standing.

  Another steady shot and the closest of the two predators is down.

  Fully a quarter of the man’s face seems to have disappeared in a flash. The man still approaching the cop doesn’t seem to care and he leaps the remaining distance to the officer, swinging wildly with what appears to be a large kitchen knife.

  Only a fraction of a second to think about doing something.

  If Abraham had more time to think things over, he might have reacted differently, but his better nature wins out and he runs from the alley, first toward the injured man finally regaining his feet and lurching rapidly toward the conflict in the middle of the street.

  His foot connects solidly with the side of the sl
ower man’s knee and he falls back to the wet pavement with a loud huff. The way the knee looks now, the local won’t be standing or walking again, perhaps ever.

  Abraham turns to face the struggle still taking place, the cop desperately trying to hold off the madman astride him, but he can’t compete with the lunatic’s strength and frenzy. It’s hard to tell in the middle of the commotion, but the officer appears to already be injured. The darkness and all of the motion make it a challenge to discern blood from water at the distance.

  He’s never been a weak man and he still works hands-on at many of his job sites, but he feels like he’s wrestling with a bear like some Russian circus performer as he grabs the man from behind and struggles to pull him from the cop on the ground. He’s praying the whole time that the cop keeps his hand locked around the wrist of the hand holding the knife, keeping the blade in sight and away from him.

  The officer uses the new shift in momentum and pushes with the last bit of strength in reserve to drive the knife into the chest of his assailant, holding it there until the man’s weight is finally removed thanks to Abraham’s efforts in pulling the dying man back.

  It takes the deputy a minute to catch his breath before he looks quizzically at the man who just rescued him and the boy now standing beside him and slightly behind. “You must be Hewitt’s friends. A couple of them at least,” he says in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t recognize you and I’m at least mostly familiar with the locals hereabouts.”

  Abraham doesn’t miss a beat, his excitement bursting forth in his words, “You’ve seen Hewitt! Where is he?”

  Deputy Weber laughs. “I left him up in the mine shaft, back that way,” he gestures behind him, the direction he’d come from only a short while before. “Straight shot from here to a gravel road. If you keep going back that direction, it’s impossible to miss.”

  He winces as he tries to stand, attempts to push through the pain, and falls back to the ground.

  Feeling around where his pain is located, his hand comes away wet, which doesn’t surprise him, but it also comes away dark with blood, which isn’t much of a surprise anymore either.

  “Fucking asshole actually did some damage,” he says as he looks down from where he sits at the man sprawled on the ground near his feet. “God damn it, Walter,” he continues, more amused and fascinated than anything else.

  Abraham and Ben lean down to help him up to a more upright position before dragging him off to the edge of the brick building to the same side of the alley where the deputy had been hiding only a couple of minutes ago.

  In the faint light available to them it’s still difficult to miss the way the blood seems to be surging, flowing with the rhythm of the deputy’s weakening pulse. Abraham’s never been great with biology or anatomy, but he’s seen plenty of injuries on the job and he recognizes a severed artery when he sees it.

  Father and son sit down beside Deputy Weber and they discuss the events of the last couple of days. With the deputy’s insight, it looks like things have been getting weird around town since before Kateb’s murder the evening before. Townspeople appeared to be going crazy in the days leading up to the insanity now manifested in town.

  Finally, after longer than Abraham believed he would last, the deputy slumps where he’s sitting in mid-sentence.

  He and Ben peek out at the street to make sure they’re unobserved.

  The directions to the gravel road leading to the mine are as easy to follow as Deputy Weber led them to believe. The distance isn’t great, but having to evade the occasional prowling locals slows them down.

  The road leading its winding way up the hill is ill-maintained and the uneven surface is treacherous in the dark. Twists and switchbacks as the elevation increases lead to a much greater delay than either of them anticipated.

  When the pitch black of the entrance appears, Abraham catches himself grabbing Ben by reflex and pulling him closer, suddenly certain that this is some kind of trap.

  If Hewitt is in there, he is surely dead, and his son will be dead as well if they go in there too.

  Deputy Weber had seemed earnest and sincere, even kind, but everything lately had been so topsy turvy. If it was a trap, Abraham figures after some quiet deliberation, there’s no sense in not walking right into it.

  The two of them slowly pass through the portal and feel immediate relief that there’s no more rain falling on them. It certainly isn’t warm inside, but it’s comparatively dry, at least in relation to outside.

  Abraham stops, uncertain, trying to penetrate the darkness with his gaze.

  “Hewitt?” he whispers, his voice carrying much better than he meant for it to.

  No echo.

  Only silence.

  A full minute passes and there’s a rustle somewhere up ahead. The distinctive scuff of something sliding over dirt and gravel.

  Sure that there’s another one of the zombies on the approach, perhaps dozens or even hundreds of them, Abraham prepares to run back the way they came.

  “Abraham, is that you?” Hewitt inquires, as he tentatively walks toward the entrance.

  “You’re damn right it is!” Abraham stumbles forward in the shaft, dragging Ben along in his wake, slowly making sense of the silhouette of his friend emerging from the surrounding shadows.

  “Thank fucking Christ!” Hewitt exclaims as he rushes forward the remaining distance to embrace his friend.

  Being sheltered from the rain, there is no mistaking that there are tears on Hewitt’s cheeks, but it’s too dark and he is far too relieved and grateful not to be alone that he doesn’t care to try and hide his emotional response.

  30

  The relief in the cavern is palpable as the friends compare their experiences since separating at the bar the evening before. Though it hasn’t been 24 hours since the events at the diner had transformed the vacation into a nightmare, it feels like they’ve lived through so much.

  Hewitt responds as if he’s taken a blow when Abraham tells him what happened with Deputy Weber and how he and Ben had remained tucked away in hiding, too uncertain of the situation to act until it had been too late. He and the deputy had bonded more than he’d realized until that moment, during the hours they’d spent together, relying on one another to survive. Hewitt winces as he hears the detailed admission from his friend that the man’s death had been avoidable, but he knows that Abraham made the right, probably the only, choice at the time. It was the only thing that made any sense for them to do. He had his son to worry about and with the lunacy unleashed within the town, the risk was too great.

  Still, it pains him to know the man is gone.

  Deputy Albert Weber had struck Hewitt as being a good man, someone he could respect and maybe even admire, and his death just meant that there was one less person to fight the rising tide of insanity threatening to wash them all away with the floodwaters.

  He finds himself shifting focus to the fact that Abraham and Ben are the only friends he’s seen since Kateb’s murder led them to striking out on their own. With the deputy dead, he worries that no one will find them here in the mine, assuming anyone else is alive and in any condition to search for them.

  Relief fades into defeat just like that, as he allows himself to consider the very real possibility that the three of them might be the only ones left alive.

  He knows these thoughts, the flickering voices in the back of his head whispering terrifying possibilities. It’s a concerted effort of willpower for him to even begin shifting the focus away from those awful thoughts.

  It’s difficult for him to imagine Miles falling to the violence out there while he somehow managed to make it through the night. Mariah was more suited to survival as well, he reminds himself, she’s certainly a more effective hunter than he is. Gale may be soft, but he’s sly and he knows the area, which has to give him some advantage. He was with Mariah the last time they’d seen each other as well, and she would keep him safe. They would keep each other safe.

  The only way he
won’t go mad with desperation and grief is to keep reminding himself that his friends out there are better equipped to the situation than he is.

  The whole thing had snuck up on them. It was a surprise for Kateb, for all of them, when that first incident had happened, but it wasn’t a surprise to any of them anymore.

  In the darkness of the tunnel, happy to be with his friend and Ben, he can’t seem to stop himself from feeling the fear and uncertainty eating away at him and all he can do is persistently fight the emotional turmoil that threatens to shake him to pieces.

  Abraham, to his credit and quite unlike Hewitt, is focused on how relieved he is that the three of them are together.

  Things may continue to get worse, and it looked like they probably would, but at least they wouldn’t be alone for whatever was still coming.

  His faith in their friends out there is as unshakeable as it ever was and it’s natural for him to simply assume that everyone else is back at Gale’s house, settled in and formulating a plan to get them all out of this awful place. For Abraham, there are none of the dark thoughts that haunt his friend. Gale knows the area and Miles knows combat scenarios, so it stands to reason that their stay in the mine will be a brief one.

  He had always been an optimist and the present circumstances, as dire as they might be, aren’t sufficient to erode that positivity in his nature. Having a child had only seemed to shore up the man’s inherent optimism, it was the perspective he wanted to instill within his children.

  The two friends, as close as they’d always been, couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed as far as their mental states were concerned. They had always been that way and they complemented one another well in most situations.

  In the present circumstances, Abraham’s proactive impulse reinforces Hewitt’s discomfort with remaining so close to the entrance as the three of them decide to risk exploring deeper into the mine just to be on the safe side. In case some of the locals make their way up the hill, anyone with a flashlight would see them where they presently are and that is simply not good.