Wolf Running

by Toni Boughton

  Jamie looked at Nowen.

  “Zombies.” she said.

  “Right.” Nowen replied.

  Now

  The storm had moved on in the night, leaving behind endless blue skies and a bitter cold. The wind had stayed, and it swept around the small house in a constant stream, prying at the windows and pushing inquisitive fingers under the doors. Snow covered the prairie from horizon to horizon. A small herd of pronghorn antelope stepped delicately across the front yard.

  Nowen stood in the kitchen and watched the herd move through. She chewed slowly on a granola bar. Crumbs fell unnoticed to the dusty linoleum as she thought. It was unusual for prey animals to come so close - the smell of wolf usually kept them away. As if hearing her thoughts the herd startled and bounded off. Puffs of snow danced in their wake.

  She turned away from the window. A spill of golden sunlight tracked across the floor and dust motes spun in the air. The house was nearly as cold inside as out. Later she would start up the generator; first though, she had something to take care of.

  Nowen walked into the living room, sidestepping a small cache of bottled water and canned food. The house was small, with only four rooms, and Nowen kept the one bedroom and the bathroom closed off from the rest of the dwelling so as not to waste heat. There was a small fireplace in the main room and that, coupled with good insulation and a couple of space heaters, could keep the living room and kitchen surprisingly warm. She drew back the heavy curtains on the east wall, exposing a large bay window that gave a stunning view of the snow-covered hills that rose up to become part of the Medicine Bow National Forest. Sunlight poured in and she blinked her watering eyes. Far overhead a hawk cut through the cold winter sky.

  She turned away from the view. The countryside had a stark beauty that could enthrall the unwary. The seemingly boundless prairie valley and the mountains that guarded it, the rare stands of pines and maples that survived and thrived in the unforgiving terrain, the horses and antelope and deer that dotted the whiteness like specks of ash - all combined in a picture of isolation and wildness.

  She shucked off the flannel shirt and jogging pants in which she had slept and began to dress for the harsh weather, layers of warm and weather-proof clothing. She tossed a couple of bottles of water in a backpack along with a handful of protein bars and headed out the back door.

  The intensely cold air wept through her lungs and stole her breath. She strapped on a pair of skis that leaned against the tiny porch railing and grabbed the ski poles nearby. She pulled on a set of ski goggles and set off through the snow.

  Nowen hit her rhythm of movement quickly, sliding across the powdery surface with ease. The sounds of her breathing and the snow crunching underfoot were nearly obscured by the wind. It swept around in a flurry of changing directions, now pushing at her back, now lifting veils of snow in front of her, now teasing long strands of hair out from the edges of her hooded parka. She continued on, undeterred, and finally the wind became her ally, settling in behind her and lending its energy to her own. She followed the wire fence that edged the highway.

  Nowen was in no hurry. What she had to take care of would wait for her. She paused now and then, sipping water and taking in the view. She broke open a protein bar and tossed crumbs at a wild hare that huddled under a juniper bush. The hare bolted as the wind carried her scent to it, and she packed away the food and returned to her trek.

  She thought about nothing except the job that lay before her. Faintly the bugle of an elk came to her, followed by the yipping of coyotes. The wind had left her now, and she moved in the near-silence of the empty world.

  The brick shed rose up before her. She maneuvered the skis awkwardly over the fence and slushed across the highway. The tableau was the same as yesterday - the truck, the rocks, the bodies. Nowen kicked free of the skis and approached the bodies, trailing a ski pole behind her. The other one she left standing upright in the snow.

  The dead man that had come after her lay where she had left him. The previous night’s storm had covered him under a light blanket of white. He was face down, but at the crunch of her boots he slowly raised his head, snow cascading down his head. The deep cold had affected him - he moved at a snail’s pace, the icy-pale marbles of his eyes trying to track her, his one good hand floundering through the heavy drifts. She could walk backwards and blindfolded and easily outpace him. But he still moved, and she walked up to him, nudging the dead man over onto his back with her foot. He came loose from the ground with a shattering of ice. She watched for a moment as his grey teeth gnashed the air, and then she raised the ski pole in both hands and drove the sharp point into his skull.

  The force of her thrust pushed the pole through until it met the ground. The basket above the sharp tip snapped in half. Inky blood oozed from the hole, and when she jerked the pole free black droplets flew through the air. The dead man’s body twitched, once, and then was still. Behind her came the sound of shifting snow, and she looked over her shoulder to see that the other two dead people were rising to their feet. She tightened her grip on the ski pole and walked toward them.

  When it was done Nowen headed back to where she had left her skis. The pole in her hand was splattered with dark blood. Wearily she strapped the skis on and left the dead behind.

  Chapter Five

  Then

  Nowen and Jamie sat on hospital beds in an empty room. They had barricaded the door with a heart monitor machine, and now they watched the news on the wall-mounted television, the sound off and captions on. Jamie had scavenged clean scrubs and food while Nowen had dragged the teen-ager’s body to the stairwell, tipping it over the railing and listening to the thumps it made on the way down.

  “How can you eat now?” Jamie asked, wrenching her blood-shot eyes from the TV. Her face was nearly as pale as the bed sheets. She had twisted her hair up into a messy bun that was on the edge of unraveling.

  Nowen forced down a mouthful of cheese and cracker. The remnants of a food tray from someone’s going-away party lay decimated in front of her. Jamie had taken a couple of crackers but mostly stuck to her water bottle. Nowen took a sip from her own bottle before answering. “I’m hungry.”

  “Yeah, but still. After everything we’ve seen tonight...”

  Nowen shrugged, uncomfortable. She had been not just hungry but starving, her stomach threatening to eat itself as she stood in the emergency exit stairwell and smelled the blood. Jamie’s uneasy gaze still rested on her, and she turned away to look at the TV again.

  All the news channels, both local and network, were covering the madness that was circling the world like wildfire. The same shaky footage, the same breathless commentary, the same unfounded rumors - the only thing that changed was the talking heads. Right now the set was showing the scenes recorded on someone’s smart phone. In the middle of a small park, under sunny skies and summer-green trees, a group of children devoured the corpse of a dog. They were so covered in gore and blood it was impossible to tell their race of gender. A scream came from just off camera, and the children raised their heads as one. A moment later they were on their feet and racing away. Almost immediately more screams, this time of pain and utter fear, echoed through the park. Just before the phone cut out, it tipped upward to show four helicopters speeding through the sky.

  Jamie blanched and turned the channel to a local station. From outside the hospital sirens rose and fell continually, interspersed with gunshots. The shrieks and moans of the undead and the cries of their victims came from outside, too. The lights were on in the building, and desperate people kept coming to the hospital, only to run into the hordes of zombies, or ‘Revs’ as Jamie called them, that circled the building like sharks at a feeding frenzy. Now Nowen, her crazed hunger sated, turned her attention to other things.

  Like the question of who she really was.

  “Jamie, can you tell me anything about, well, me?”

  The young nurse was staring at the screen. “Look, Ft. Collins and Denver are issuing e
vacuation orders. And the president’s supposed to speak in a few minutes.”

  Nowen tried again. “Jamie?” she spoke, raising her voice. “Jamie, can you tell me how I got here?”

  The other woman finally looked at her. “Um, I can tell you what I know. It’s not much. You were brought in by the cops yesterday. You were bloody, but we didn’t find any wounds on you. Oh, there’s a dog bite on your lower right leg, but it was pretty well healed. Um, you were almost catatonic, responding well to direct commands but otherwise uncommunicative.” Jamie sounded like she was reading from a chart she’d memorized. “You had a high fever, and you were slightly dehydrated. We put you on fluids. Your fever went down, although you remained unresponsive. The decision was made to move you to a psychiatric facility, pending review by a doctor.” The almost didactic recitation ended. Jamie looked thoughtful for a moment. “Something weird, though. On the inside of your arm, someone had written something in black marker.”

  “What was it?”

  “‘To save you’. Weird, huh? Does that mean anything to you?”

  Nowen concentrated, trying to force some knowledge, some hint of something familiar from her mind. “No. Where was I found?

  “Down by the railroad tracks. And there’s nothing you know about yourself, huh?”

  Nowen shook her head slowly.

  “Wow, I’m sorry. I don’t know much about amnesia. I mean, your memory could come back today, tomorrow, six weeks from now, or-” Jamie’s voice trailed off.

  “Never.” The word fell from Nowen’s mouth like a stone.

  The other woman nodded. She seemed genuinely upset, her emotions so visible in her eyes that Nowen had to turn away. Jamie looked back at the silent news, and Nowen turned her thoughts inward. Who am I? I don’t know, and anyone who could tell me is out there in the craziness. I’m unknown, even to myself. So, wait until my memory comes back. In the meantime, survive. “Well, what else can I do?” she murmured out loud.

  “Huh?” Jamie, startled, looked at her.

  “Just talking to myself. Is there anything new on the news?”

  “Not really. They just had a doctor from the W.H.O. talking about Flux and the Revs.”

  Nowen held a hand up. “Ok, stop right there. I don’t understand half of what you just said.”

  “Well, W.H.O. is the World Health Organization. And Flux is - ok, let me back up a little bit.” Jamie picked fitfully at a cracker as she organized her thoughts. “It started as a new type of flu virus. I mean, that’s the only thing that makes sense to me, but I can’t swear that it’s right or even accurate.” She looked up, embarrassment on her face.

  Nowen met her gaze evenly. “I won’t sue you if you’re wrong. I just want to know what’s going on.”

  Jamie sighed. “Ok, with what that doctor just said and what I saw here, this is my theory. Just over a month or so ago a new flu virus popped up. It was a particularly virulent and aggressive strain. Some talking head in the media named it Flu X, which became Flux, and the name stuck. There was some concern over how fast it spread, and how hard it hit people. Most people got the usual symptoms you get with the flu, like fever, aches, coughing, etc., but more intense. And there are almost always deaths with any flu variety that comes along, but this time it wasn’t just the very old or the very young that died, it was a lot of people from all different walks of life. And it was everywhere! There were reports of Flux in Asia, Europe, Africa...supposedly some scientists at one of those research posts in the Antarctic had it too. There was even talk that it was a terrorist act. And then, *poof*,” her hands spread open like fireworks, “it was gone. No new cases, everyone getting well, the world getting back to its business.” Jamie paused and looked down at her chipped nails.

  “And then?” Nowen urged.

  “And then last week people starting flooding hospitals and doctors’ offices with what seemed a reoccurrence of Flux, but with some new, additional symptoms. Rapid heartbeat, rapid eye movement, rapid brain activity - here in the hospital we starting calling them Revs, because every system was revving at full throttle. A lot of people’s bodies couldn’t stand the strain, and they died within hours of these new symptoms manifesting themselves. Others though, a smaller number, made it through this stage, but then became aggressive, violent, uncommunicative...they were almost like animals, attacking everything and everyone around them.” Jamie cocked an eyebrow at Nowen. “You can see why we would be wary of someone coming in, in your condition. So then, the violent Revs starting dying, generally close to a week after they first became aggressive. Or at least, that was the progression here in this hospital. I guess their bodies couldn’t keep up with the stress, either. But still more and more victims of either Flux or the Revs kept coming in, and it was like a never-ending loop. We were running out of room. We heard through the unofficial grapevine that in the bigger cities, the morgues were filling up faster than they could empty them.”

  Here Jamie paused again, her eyes distant, as if looking back on the last few hectic days when her main concern was finding enough beds for all her patients. Finally she continued. “And then things got out of control here, there were more dead people than alive, the dead people became zombies, and now you know as much as I know.” She sipped from her bottle of water and raised tired eyes to Nowen. “Any questions?”

  Nowen had a million, but only one that mattered at that moment. “Will anyone come rescue us?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Time will tell.”

  Nowen lay in the semi-darkness. The flickering light from the television set threw strange patterns on the ceiling. After three more hours of increasingly-hysterical news reports and a simultaneous increase in the sounds of violence outside the hospital, Jamie had turned off the room lights and lain down in her bed. Nowen could hear the other woman’s quiet sniffling and half-breaths; several times that night Jamie had tried the phone, getting no answer from whatever number she called. Nowen suspected she was trying to contact her parents.

  Jamie’s breathing was smoothing out as she fell asleep, and Nowen listened to the even rhythm as she watched the news reports. The continuously-running chyron across the bottom of the screen was a sober counter-point to the horrific images that chased each other across the screen. Aerial footage of streams of people racing through the streets of Dallas. Fires blooming in the tall skyscrapers of New York. Armed troops firing at hordes of Revs in front of the Taj Mahal. Dead and dying bodies piled up around the Eiffel Tower. Governments rattling their sabers as they blamed each other for the madness.

  And the high-ranking medical officials, brought on to mouth words of comfort that Flux would soon be under control, never seemed to look directly at the camera.

  Chapter Six

  Then

  “Drucilla.”

  “No.”

  “Dulcibella.”

  “No.”

  “Dymphna”

  Nowen gazed over her shoulder from her viewpoint at the fourth floor staffroom window. “Now you’re just making stuff up.”

  Jamie smiled, riffling the pages of the battered paperback she held. A sleeping baby was pictured on the cover. “Swear to God, it’s in here.”

  “No. It doesn’t sound familiar.”

  The other woman tossed the book on the pale orange table that held the crumbs of their lunch. “Ok, that’s all of the ‘D’s. We’ll start on the ‘E’s later. After several more exciting rounds of Old Maid and Go Fish.” She sighed and dropped her head to the table, resting it on her folded arms, before she raised it again. “You know, you look Native American. Or Hispanic. Maybe we should concentrate on those.” Jamie reached for the baby name book and then withdrew her hand. “Nope. Can’t do it right now. No more weird names.”

  Nowen looked out the window again. The view hadn’t changed since she had stood here a couple of hours ago, woken by a dream of being chased through a forest, and watched as the sun rose on a dying world.

  From this window she and Jamie had gotten a crash course in
how fast the affliction could spread. They had watched over the past five days as groups of fleeing people had passed down the street below, only to be ambushed by the Revs. Most of the Revs were slow, but when they came together in great masses they easily overwhelmed the refugees that became trapped in the endless traffic jam that blocked the street from one side to the other. The people that evaded the shambling Revs ran the risk of attack from the scattered fast-moving ones. These darted between the cars like cheetahs on the African plains, dragging down and devouring their prey. And about a third of those that were attacked rose up in hours to continue the cycle.

  On that first day of this new reality Jamie had turned away after an hour of the slaughter, leaving the staff room entirely and going elsewhere on the floor. Nowen, on the other hand, had found herself drawn back to the windows again and again. There was a fascination to be found in the hopelessness below. Survivors made the surely-terrifying trek to the hospital only to be met by hordes of the undead. At Jamie’s insistence they had scrawled a warning on a bed sheet and hung it from a window, but still people kept coming, and the outcome was always the same. And now the dead in the streets outnumbered the living.

  As Nowen watched a single Rev standing in front of a broken-windowed storefront, she thought again of Jamie’s words of nearly a week ago, when she had asked the young woman if rescue would come. “Time will tell.” Jamie had said.

  Time had let them know they were very much on their own. They had spent the hours waiting for a rescue that hadn’t arrived yet in securing the floor. Nowen and Jamie had worked their way methodically from room to room, checking every possible nook and cranny for other survivors or more of the risen dead. They had found none of the first and four of the second. These had been killed by Nowen and thrown out a window to land in the parking lot below. Jamie had theorized that the floor was so empty because the majority of patients had been Revs, and had chased the staff and other unaffected people into the emergency stairwells, where they had met a frenzied mob fleeing up the stairs. The result had been a deadly collision. A quick look into the western-most stairwell and the bodies piled up there had lent credence to her theory.