by Brett Abell
Excited by all of the motion and spurred on by deeply buried memories of the thrill of the hunt, the shell of a human who used to be Charlie Noble found a second gear and rapidly cut the short distance to its prey.
Seeing the monster’s shadow—complete with outstretched arms and claw-like fingers—darkening the floor around him, Hal’s will to survive suddenly trumped his first reaction. Simultaneously he found purchase with the toe of his left boot, pushed off with his left hand and, in a strange display of muscle memory from his high school wrestling days, finished the move by whipping his head around to the left. And just like he had been taught two decades before by a coach whose name he failed to recall, those three actions, when combined, had him rolling away from the puddle and the overarching feeling of impending doom.
But he was no longer seventeen. He was thirty-seven and his fast-twitch muscles were that in name only. Plus, as he rolled over onto his back, the overhead fluorescent lights blinded him long enough—both literally and figuratively—to be ignorant of the fact that he was dead meat.
Upon leaving the realm of the living, Charlie Noble had lost all ability to reason or think or strategize. But that was no kind of advantage to the fresh meat writhing on the floor a yard away; the undead creature that currently locked onto Hal like a heat-seeking missile had three things working in its favor: forward momentum, gravity, and inertia. When put behind a hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight and delivered in the form of an unintentional head butt, it was more than enough to mercifully render the janitor unconscious. Which left the door wide open for Patient Zero’s first kill of the day.
Chapter 5
Nearing Oxford, Ohio
Riker opened his eyes and wiped a gossamer thread of drool from his chin. He stole another look at Cat Lady’s watch, did the math, and learned that he’d only been asleep for thirty minutes. Glancing out the window, he saw that the bus was still creeping along the back road behind a long line of vehicles full of people all in the same boat as him—almost.
“Why in the fuck is this cunt driving so slow?” said his seemingly Tourette’s afflicted neighbor.
Riker said nothing. He aimed his back at the annoyance and stared uncomfortably out the window at Middle America. There were farmhouses set back on large tracts of land. Behind gnarled post-and-beam fences he saw rusted farm implements, hand-painted sandwich boards hawking farm fresh goods, and old cars sitting on half-filled tires, most of them adorned with handwritten For Sale signs.
“At this snail’s pace, we’re never going to get to Oxford for my connection,” said the same woman, her voice several octaves higher this time.
A murmur went through the half-filled bus. Then someone in back implored the woman to Shut her pie hole.
Which only added fuel to the fire.
Her voice becoming shrill, nearly unintelligible, the woman asked, “Do you know who I am?”
There was silence. Not even the initial heckler added to his pie hole comment.
Which only emboldened Riker’s miserable seatmate. “I bet the black bitch up there gets paid by the hour and is driving like Miss Daisy just to make sure she gets her bonus.”
To that, Riker turned away from the window, looked down on the woman, and said sardonically, “Actually, in the movie, Daisy didn’t drive. And I bet your friend the driver gets paid whether you’re happy or not. And I’d bet she doesn’t know you from Adam. In fact”—he dragged out his wallet and extracted a crisp Andrew Jackson—”twenty dollars says you’re a nobody to her.” Riker pulled his ball cap low over his face, concealing the wicked smile, and waited for Vesuvius to erupt. And she did. The cat-smelling woman spewed words that’d cause a merchant marine to blush and told Riker to do things to himself in positions he doubted could be found in the Kama Sutra.
Eventually, the driver could take no more of the woman’s ranting and, again, the bus lurched to a stop amidst a grinding of gears and with a discordant keen of squealing brakes that was soon followed by yet another angry pneumatic hiss.
Mission accomplished. Riker tilted his Braves hat back to normal, gripped the armrests, and rose up from his seat. Over the other passengers’ heads, he saw the driver talking into a handheld microphone. He watched her for a short while longer under the white-hot glare from the waste of skin to his left, then sat back down and stared out the window. However, a couple of seconds after he fixed his gaze on the distant clouds and the bus began moving again, another burst of static emanated from the overhead speakers. In a singsong voice, the driver promised to have whoever was acting up put in the back of a squad car and delivered the rest of the way to the Oxford jail.
That did it. Instantly, the woman went silent and tried to make herself disappear into the ratty cloth seatback.
Checkmate, Riker thought triumphantly. Doing his best to ignore the holes being burned into him by the woman’s hate-filled glare, he kept his gaze fixed on the gray strip of asphalt scrolling by outside his window, where soon a long string of military vehicles, of which he possessed intimate knowledge, began passing them by. He saw a trio of camouflaged deuce-and-a-half troop transports painted in a black, green, and brown woodland scheme. Used mainly for moving soldiers and supplies, these vehicles were at the head of the column. Next came a half-dozen desert-colored Humvees, squat, slab-sided vehicles, the first four sprouting whip antennas, and turret-mounted machine guns. The two bringing up the rear had camper-like shells out back that were emblazoned on both sides and the roof with large, red crosses. Filled with specialized lifesaving equipment, the top-heavy looking rigs were used mostly for transferring badly wounded soldiers from CASEVAC—casualty evacuation—helicopters just arriving on a flight line to the trauma surgeons awaiting their imminent arrival in a nearby field hospital. Or, as in Riker’s case a dozen years ago, to a waiting Air Force C-17 Globemaster and a trip to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and then on to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center for skin grafts and other unspeakable operations. Just seeing the vehicles tooling the road right outside his large tinted window started a knot twisting slowly in his stomach and got him to rooting in his pocket for the roll of antacids.
Three chalky Rolaids went into his mouth and the remainder, he put back in his pocket. In the process, he accidentally brushed his elbow against his neighbor’s leg, starting a chain reaction he should have seen coming.
The vibration of her kick coursed up the leg but barely resonated in his stump; however, the loud clunk and flurry of expletives she spewed were heard round the bus.
What happened next was mildly amusing to Riker. Potty Mouth lifted her right foot off the ground, removed her canvas shoe, and staunched the blood flowing from her split big toe with the first thing she grabbed.
In seconds, the sleeve of her cat-hair-covered sweater was soaked with blood as she dabbed at the wound.
Suppressing a smile, Riker removed his ball cap, ran his fingers through his close-cropped graying hair, and uttered the words, “Bitch’s toe, meet prosthetic leg. Prosthetic leg, meet bitch’s toe.” Then, before she could answer or berate him, or anybody else, he was on his feet and pushing past her on a mission to find a seat on the opposite side of the bus.
Having seen the altercation as it happened, and clearly aware of the outcome, the man two rows back and to the left who had shouted the pie hole comment, said, “We have a bleeder.”
Settling into his new seat two rows behind the driver, Riker heard the comment and cracked a sly smile. And as he watched the sun break through the clouds and splash golden light on the fields to his left, the bus came even with the column of Ohio National Guard vehicles, and suddenly a Neil Young tune began sounding in his head. It was a song written in the time when Vietnam raged and students all across the United States protested and the Tin Soldiers Young sang about did unspeakable things at a college not far from where he was now.
Chapter 6
Middletown University
Hearing the constant ding and whoosh as the doors on the distant elevator ope
ned and closed, the thing that used to be called Charlie Noble placed one bloody hand on the janitor’s slack face, clumsily planted both feet in the growing pool of blood, and rose on shaky legs to full upright.
It stood there for a few seconds, listening to conversations between students on their way to the journalism wing a couple of hundred yards west across a glass sky bridge. Driven by a primal urge to feed and moaning softly, it staggered to the open door, bulling into the bucket and mop, and in the process, sending it rolling across the hall and against the far wall where it stopped, sloshing foul-smelling water onto the carpet.
Standing in the hall, the brain propelling Charlie’s husk was suddenly bombarded by stimuli. The jerking movements of the cars trickling into the lot below drew his gaze. Then, causing his head to swivel slowly left, the elevator bell dinged again far down the hall. But it wasn’t until he heard the high falsetto of someone singing in the opposite direction, to his right, that signals were sent from deep in his brain to the limbs that started him moving in that direction.
Jamming out to Bruno Mars, Savion Jones emerged from the stairwell, pleased with himself for having avoided a ride up in an elevator potentially filled with a dozen of his highly caffeinated peers. Head bobbing to the beat and causing the white wires attached to his earbuds to sway to-and-fro, he continued on down the back hall toward the media center, where he hoped the October issue of Filmmaker Magazine awaited him on the shelf.
With the last few bars of the peppy dance song fading, he plucked his iPhone from his coat pocket, thumbed it to life, and searched for something moody to carry him the rest of the way.
He thumbed the iPod icon, scrolled down through the available artists, and started an Imagine Dragons tune playing. One hundred percent moody, he thought, cracking a smile. How could a song called “Radioactive” not be? He slipped the phone into his pocket and, casting his gaze up, caught sight of the backlit silhouette of a person cutting the corner ahead.
The first jangling guitar chords were entering Savion’s ears when the overhead lights illuminated Charlie Noble from the front and it registered in the twenty-year-old student’s brain that the lab coat on the cat didn’t come crimson off the rack but was instead thoroughly soaked in blood that, at the moment, was dripping steadily onto the carpet.
As Savion jammed to a halt, his Adidas made a soft squelch on the carpet and the pallid, hunched-over figure to his fore let out a soft moan and took a stilted step in his direction. In the split second during which Savion was deciding which way to run, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons drew a deep breath and the music rose to a crescendo. In the next instant, a switch was seemingly flicked in Savion’s brain and his smile returned as good old normalcy bias shoved the primal urge to run aside and he became convinced he was seeing someone making a dry run in one hell of a kickass Halloween costume.
The apocalypse, indeed, thought Savion as he yanked the buds from his ears and fumbled for his phone.
“Duuude. That is some sick ass makeup,” Savion said, looking the costume up and down. “But if you’re gonna prank some fools and put it on YouTube … you had better be recording it.” He raised his phone and flicked through three pages of apps until he found the one with the cartoonish-looking black camera. Finally, with the zombified student trudging steadily closer, he started the video rolling and zoomed in on the dude’s pasty-white mug.
The shell that was Charlie Noble saw the meat moving and making sounds but was no longer able to comprehend the words. The inflection and nuances meant nothing. The hunger pangs, however, were back with a vengeance and something deep down in what was left of his brain assured him that eating the noisy thing in front of him was the only way to make them go away.
With the thoroughly made-up guy inexplicably remaining in character and his faux moans getting louder and carrying down the hall, Savion decided to go with the flow. Playing along for the camera, he backed up until he was adjacent to the stairwell he’d just exited. Then, placing a palm up, universal semaphore for halt, Savion said, “Stop there for a just a sec and be quiet.”
The dude kept moaning.
“Shhh,” Savion said. Are you a freakin’ exchange student? is what he was thinking as he tucked a stray dreadlock behind his ear, reached blindly behind his back, and took ahold of the door handle. “Shhh … someone’s about to be coming out.”
You’re a natural, thought Savion as the guy kept coming at him and the hollow-sounding footsteps drew nearer and grew louder, resonating down the stairwell from behind the closed door.
In a perfect moment of cinematic confluence—timing is everything, as Savion’s father liked to say—the dude in zombie makeup was nearly even with the stairwell door and the footsteps echoing behind it had just ceased. So Savion did what any aspiring filmmaker coveting a clip worthy of a million social media hits would do—he flung the door open and stepped aside, hoping for two things: an Oscar-winning performance out of Doctor Silence and an epic reaction from the unsuspecting mark poised to emerge from behind the door.
Chapter 7
Coming down from the fifth floor, expecting nothing more than to burn a few calories, Tiffany Jensen paused behind the second-floor door, hitched her pack higher on one shoulder, and reached for the handle. But someone had beaten her to it as the handle turned in her hand. Then, on its own accord, the door started swinging slowly away, and from out of nowhere, a form filled up the doorway.
Pissed at the prospect of having to step aside so that some asshat in a hurry could barge past her, Tiffany loaded up an expletive-filled diatribe and was backing up onto the landing when she was wrapped up in the arms of a snarling madman.
“You’re laying it on a little too thick, my man,” said Savion, jostling for a better camera angle. Wishing he had his Blackmagic video cam instead of the effin iPhone, he stepped partway into the stairwell with one foot wedging the door open.
The would-be actor snarled, gutturally, like an animal—an altogether too realistic a sound that started a ripple of gooseflesh coursing up Savion’s ribcage.
Struggling to break free from the man’s cold grip, Tiffany held her breath against his awful, vomit-tinged breath and brought her knee up viciously between his legs, connecting solidly with no noticeable effect.
“You’re pushing the envelope, man!” shouted Savion. Still filming, he put a hand on the guy’s shoulder and pulled back just in time to see him sink a picket of obviously brace-straightened teeth into the mark’s ivory-hued neck, causing a spritz of hot blood to splash the tiny camera lens and continue across Savion’s face and into his mouth. It smelled like a jar full of ancient pennies, metallic and strangely chemical. Spitting the sticky warm glob onto the carpet, Savion dropped his phone, saying incredulously, “This is not gonna fly with YouTube’s TOS.”
As Savion’s shouted words bounced about inside the stairway, three things happened. Tiffany fell backward onto the unforgiving cement landing, her head impacting with a sharp crack. The door leading out to the deserted hallway closed with an audible snick. And Savion leaped onto the crazy guy’s back, trying to wrap him up in a WWF headlock.
With the scream stuck in her throat and a flat fan of dark crimson pulsating rhythmically onto the wall and stairs all around her, Tiffany struggled to breathe with what seemed like a ton of cold flesh crushing down on her.
For all intents and purposes, Savion Jones died the second he caught the mouthful of saliva-tainted blood. But seeing as how he was oblivious to his fate, and was feeling like a massive douche for setting the girl up like he did, he fought tooth and nail to pry the silent dude away until her struggling stopped and the blood-drenched freak turned on him.
Flicking his gaze from the girl’s wildly fluttering eyelids to the crazy now easily overpowering him, Savion felt a flare of white-hot pain as his actor’s teeth clamped down on his exposed neck. Then, seeing his blood mingling with the girl’s on the landing, darkness began to close in on the periphery of his vision and the overhead lights started
dancing violently back-and-forth in front of his eyes. Drawing a final breath, Savion Jones witnessed through tearing eyes the freak rearing back and coming away with a mouthful of his own flesh. Trailing ribbons of tattered dermis, the glistening plug of meat jiggled as his killer worked it into his maw with both hands. The last sensations received by Savion’s brain before it switched off was the soft little patters of his own lifeblood raining down on his upturned face.
***
Less than a minute after dying the first time, Tiffany Jensen’s hands opened and closed, making ripples in the warm, sticky pool. A tick later, her body began to twitch and shake as the prehistoric part of her brain rebooted. In the next instant, her eyelids snapped open and the glassy vacant eyes started their never-ending search for prey. Already kneeling with her upper body pressed to the floor as if she had died praying toward Mecca, Tiffany Jensen’s reanimated corpse rose to all fours. With the lake of blood now encompassing the entire landing, the still warm corpse shuffled forward on hands and knees, nudged undead Charlie Noble aside, and buried its face in Savion Jones’s guts.
Feeding next to its killer, the ravenous creature shook its head side-to-side doglike and came away with a greasy rope of intestine clutched two-handed, working one end greedily into its mouth, the other dribbling partially digested Egg McMuffin onto the young African American victim’s khakis.
Chapter 8
Tara knew her day had just rocketed from bad to worse the instant the young male student with blood sluicing from a gaping neck wound stumbled from the elevator and landed face-first on the floor not thirty feet in front of her. Acting on muscle memory, while gaping past her customer at the gory spectacle, she popped the lid on the cup with practiced ease and pushed the coffee forward.
