by Steven Novak
He moved me in front of him, hand on my shoulder, keeping me close. “Who were they?”
Andrew’s voice was steady, frustrated. “Breathers from the north. They’ve been attacking us for years, following us…won’t let up.” He stopped, paused, lowered his head and sighed. “I have a…history…with one of them.”
Blueeyes’ tone was similar. “Travis.”
Bloodboots?
Andrew seemed surprised. “Yes…how did—”
“Prick has history with a lot of people. Still…seems like a long time to hold a grudge.”
Andrew turned away. “Not for him.”
We entered a room at the end of the hallway and Andrew locked the door behind us. It was cleaner than anything we’d seen to that point. It seemed out of place. Wherever we were, it didn’t belong there. The countertops were white, freshly wiped, and covered with carefully placed glass tubes and needles in containers built to hold glass tubes and needles. On the wall to the left there were stacks of round containers, capped and labeled with words I didn’t recognize. Everything was organized. Everything was neat. I’d never seen anything so neat.
Andrew moved to the center of the room. He leaned against a table covered in stacks of paper and motioned toward a door at the rear of the room. “You can’t stay here, not after that. We are civilized, but only within reason.” His eyes moved to me and settled, unblinking. “They’re riled up. They’re hurt and hungry. They’re angry and they’ll smell her. They’re already smelling her. I’m already smelling her. It’s too much to ask of them.” His hand went to his neck and rubbed. He licked his lips. “I-I can’t—I can’t be held responsible.”
Blueeyes squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt, shoving me toward the door.
Andrew stepped away from the table and into our path, keeping his distance, tying his best to avoid eye contact with me. His attention moved to Blueeyes. “Before you go…I need to know.”
Outside the room I heard the whispers.
Blueeyes heard them, too. “Need to know what?”
“I need to know what you are. I need to know how you are…what you are.” His tone changed drastically, soft, almost pleading. His hands folded in front of him, palms mashed together, fingers pointed upward. I’d seen the gesture before. I woke up one night to Mother at my side making the very same gesture, whispering to herself. When I asked her what she was doing she placed her hand on my head and smiled softly.
Go back to sleep, princess. I loved my mother’s voice, her mouth, and her dimples.
I missed her dimples.
When Blueeyes didn’t respond, he continued. “I wasn’t always this…none of us were. You know it as well as I. I was a scientist, a doctor. I had a family, a wife…” For the briefest of moments his eyes drifted to me. “…children.”
He huffed and looked away. “I spent years searching for a cure. I went where they told me and did what they asked. I did everything, gave up everything. When things went bad, they went back quickly. Eventually it all went away.”
When Andrew took a step forward, Blueeyes snagged me by the collar, maneuvered me behind him.
Andrew was becoming more animated, hands gesturing, eyes wide. “I was close. I was always so close. Every time we thought we’d figured it out, there was something…always something missing. We needed something to base the equations against, something new to compare them to…something we couldn’t create in a lab.”
He was inches from Blueeyes’ face. “I don’t know what you are, but I know what you aren’t. You aren’t one of us or them. You aren’t like her. You’re something new. You’re exactly what I’ve been waiting for.”
It was a long while before Blueeyes responded, fingers drumming lightly against the machete hanging from his belt. I wasn’t sure what he’d do. A part of me expected him to chop Andrew’s head clean off, grab me by my shirt, and make a break for it. “I’m not what you think I am.”
“I saved your life.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Maybe not, but I saved hers.”
Blueeyes’ fingers stopped drumming. “What do you want to know?”
Of all the things I expected him to do, I never expected that.
13.
For the ten minutes we listened as Blueeyes told his story. He never sat down. He never moved or blinked. He just stood there, bleeding.
He was living alone when the gimps tore through the safety wall surrounding his city. It lasted longer than anyone thought it would. The world was a mess at that point, infested with monsters and getting worse. He made his way across town, staying one step ahead of the horde, through streets littered with bodies, solitary gimps feasting on the slow and unlucky. He found his wife at her apartment, locked in her room with their daughter at her side. He pounded on the door for an hour before she answered. Once inside he begged them to leave, tried desperately to convince his wife the city was no longer safe. They needed to get as far away as they could, quickly. She wouldn’t listen. She had stopped listening years ago. When he tried again, she told him to go. When he refused, she shoved him. When he grabbed his daughter and threatened to leave without her, she smacked him.
Daniel is coming back! She kept screaming it, kept saying his name. We’re not going anywhere until Daniel gets back. He hated that name.
Daniel was her new boyfriend, part of the reason she’d left in the first place. He was the one who’d saved her, rescued her from her loveless marriage, and gave her a reason to exist. He was the one who made her feel loved. She called Blueeyes a loser, a bum, told him it was too late to pretend he cared about what happened to them.
If anyone’s leaving, it’s you! That’s what she’d said, eyes soaked in tears, hands balled into fists. In the other room his daughter cried.
It had nothing to do with the monsters outside.
Unable to convince her, Blueeyes insisted that he stay, at least until Daniel returned. She didn’t want him to. He didn’t care. Day turned to night, night to day, and back again. The situation outside worsened. The power failed. Daniel wasn’t coming back. On the third day they heard screams from the apartment above them, animalistic, almost a howl. They lasted for hours. All day long fingers scraped the windows, clawed the door. When the gimps weren’t scratching and clawing, they moaned. When they began moaning, they never stopped. It was too late. There were too many of them. They were everywhere. The city was overrun. Escape was no longer an option.
Realizing this, Blueeyes boarded the windows and fortified the door as best he could. He constructed weapons, simple things with the little he had available. He didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t a fighter or a soldier. He wasn’t anything. The weapons weren’t very good, poorly conceived and constructed. He imagined escape scenarios, ways he could get both his wife and daughter from the apartment and through the city to safety. They were silly ideas mostly, overly optimistic.
Days passed, then a week. They were running out of food. His wife became more distant, irrational, and mean. When she wasn’t crying or cursing, she threw things. She rarely slept. Sometimes he’d find her with her ear pressed to the door, listening to the moans and the scratching. When he confronted her, she threatened him with a knife and managed to cut his arm before he wrestled her to the ground. It took an hour of screaming to calm her down.
Predictably, his daughter sided with her mother. For years the girl heard only the worst about her father, things he’d forgotten, mistakes he’d made. She knew what she’d been told. He was a loser. He was a bum. Most of it was true.
Most of it.
After fourteen days the food was gone, picked clean. The gimps remained. Blueeyes’ daughter was sick and getting sicker. A simple cough turned into a cough and a fever. Cold sweats and shivers arrived shortly after. The girl spent her days curled in the corner, her mother at her side, her father in the opposite room. Blueeyes wasn’t allowed near her, not anymore. It was his fault they were stuck there, after all. It was his fault they ran out of food, h
is fault they were going to die. At least according to his wife. She was partially right.
Partially.
Everything changed one morning. He wasn’t sure why his wife did it. The day before, she had started coughing. She coughed blood. Maybe she did it because she was sick. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she’d just had enough. Whatever the reason, one night she just opened the door.
The gimps were there, the same as always, waiting.
He heard her screaming from the other room, heard the moans and the shuffling feet. He heard their chattering teeth. It didn’t matter that he sprinted across the room. He wasn’t fast enough. It didn’t matter that he brought the weapons he’d made. They weren’t enough. It didn’t matter that he was ready to fight them all, to kill each and every one of them to save his daughter. His enemies were already dead. By the time he burst into the room, his wife and daughter were gone as well, smothered in a mountain of decaying flesh, torn to pieces. He saw his daughter’s intestines spread across the floor. She was inside out.
The last time he saw her, she was inside out.
At this point Blueeyes stopped talking. He didn’t cry, or break down, or choke on his words. He just stopped. In that moment he wasn’t there. He was somewhere, but it wasn’t in that room. It wasn’t with Andrew and it wasn’t with me. The expression on his face was something I’d never seen from him before, something I’d never see again. He was hurting.
Bits of his family still dangling from their teeth, the gimps turned their attentions to Blueeyes. The corpses advanced, desperate hands grabbing, machine mouths chomping mindlessly. He fought as best he could. He swung his arms, stabbed and punched and kicked. There were too many of them. They were everywhere. One of them bit his arm, locked down and removed a chunk of flesh. Another latched onto his leg, tore into muscle, teeth clanking bone. A third ripped open his side, stingy insides stretching to their limit before snapping. Suddenly, everything was bleeding from everywhere. It wouldn’t stop. His arm was soaked, torso saturated, his lower half a mess of drenched clothing and mauled flesh. Everything was slippery. When he tried to shove them away, they slid through his fingers. He wedged his knife in a skull. Unable to pull it loose, he lost it forever. No matter what he did or how hard he fought, they were winning. It was useless. They were eating him alive. The monsters shoved him backward, face to drywall, tearing flesh from his body, swallowing and returning for more. Teeth tore into his neck. When they pulled away, his neck stayed with them. He wasn’t human anymore. He was food, mauled meat, muscles responding on instinct alone. He was dying. He was dead.
By sheer luck, he managed to slip away from the groping hands and the hungry mouths. There was too much blood. The monsters couldn’t hold onto him any better than he could them. When he hit the floor, he hit face first, lost a tooth. Somehow he crawled through their legs and into the back room. Useless feet closed the door. He had no idea how he locked it. The gimps scratched at the wood for hours, tried to rip it from the hinges. They beat it with their dead limbs, gnawed it with their teeth. Nothing worked. Eventually they just stopped, probably forgetting why they wanted it to begin with.
Blueeyes remained there for days, torn to shreds, bitten in too many places to count, staring at the ceiling and listening to the moans. He couldn’t move. His arms were gone, legs useless. There was nothing left, nothing worthwhile. He was unable to do anything other than bleed.
Andrew was confused. “When did you die?”
“I didn’t die.”
Andrew was more confused. “What do you mean you didn’t die?”
“I didn’t die, didn’t stop breathing…no matter how much I wanted to.”
Andrew turned away and headed for the other side of the room, bony fingers scratching scalp. “You should have died. Even if you didn’t…the infection alone… Why didn’t you die?” He was talking to himself, words meshing together and transforming into biter-speak. It was clear he didn’t know what to make of Blueeyes’ story. Neither of us did.
When he stopped whispering, he returned to Blueeyes’ side and gently placed his palm against my friend’s chest. He felt something he never expected. “You have a heartbeat. You shouldn’t have a heartbeat.” His eyes narrowed. “How do you have a heartbeat?”
The whispers outside the room were getting louder. The biters were worked up, annoyed with our presence, frustrated with our scent. I had no idea what they were saying, but that didn’t matter. It sounded bad.
Andrew pointed to Blueeyes’ neck. “You said they bit your neck, tore it away?”
“It healed.”
“How? That’s not…”
“It just healed. Everything heals.”
Andrew’s fingers came together in a fist, twiddling anxiously below his chin. “Pain, do you feel it?”
“I feel everything…all the time.”
There was a high-pitched scream, a wail. Something pounded against the door, nails dragging along steel. The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention. We’d overstayed our welcome.
Blueeyes heard it as well, looked at me, and nodded. He was done talking and he grabbed my arm. “We’re leaving.”
Andrew didn’t seem to care. He was whispering to himself again, shaking his head, bony fingers rubbing temples. A sound I’d never heard before emerged from his mouth, half a hiss and half a yell. One of his fists slammed against the table in the center of the room. Suddenly, his breaths were labored. His head jerked upward, sniffing the air. Whatever amount of control he’d maintained was slipping away.
For a moment his biter-speak transformed into something recognizable, angry and low. He hit the desk again. “You have to go.”
Blueeyes dragged me to the exit on the opposite end of the room. When the door wouldn’t open, he kicked it. The room on the other side was small, less than ten feet across, a circular tunnel of stone leading nowhere but up. It looked old, patches of green moss growing from cracks, strange stains a hundred years old. I craned my neck back. Straight up there was light, far away, faint beams through grated steel.
Blueeyes pointed to a ladder on the wall across from us. “There.” It looked older than the walls, rusted and bent, barely holding to stone. “Go. Climb. I’m right behind you.”
The whispers had morphed into something new, something animalistic, more substantial. Another biter wailed. Two more joined in, a chorus of awful. I immediately forgot about Andrew, about the ancient ladder and the very real possibility of falling to my death. I just climbed. I climbed and didn’t stop climbing. I’d barely moved ten feet when the ancient thing began to creak. Something bent. Something cracked. Bits of stone crumbled from above, bounced off my back. I froze. All I could hear were wails, pounding and the cracking. There was a crash. The biters had broken through.
Blueeyes wedged his shoulder into my backside and shoved. “Move!”
Within seconds the wailing was upon us, below us and in the same room, echoing against the walls of the tiny chamber.
“Damn it, Megan! Move!”
I held my breath. I climbed quicker than I’d ever climbed in my life. My hands were soaked with sweat, every grab a slip, every slip a last second recovery. The ladder shook and wobbled, steel and stone stretched to the limit as the biters grabbed hold. I ignored it, ignored them, and kept climbing. I couldn’t look down; I knew what I’d see if I did. The biters were getting closer. I could feel them below us, hear their fingers scraping stone. They were climbing the walls. They wanted us so badly they were climbing the walls.
Blueeyes grunted, kicking at the beasts nipping his heels, knocking them away as they lunged from surrounding stone. I heard his machete, heard it swinging and heard it connect: wet thuds, definitive endings. By the time I reached the top of the ladder I was out of breath, arms impossibly sore, legs weak. I wedged my back against the steel grating and shoved. It wouldn’t budge. I shoved again, muscles straining, neck soaked in sweat. It was no use. Frustrated, I made the mistake of looking down. Below us was a sea of white, open m
ouths and grabbing hands. There were so many of them crammed into the tunnel and fighting for position. They weren’t a horde so much as a swarm, unorganized and violent, frenzied. As I stared, a hundred white eyes stared back. Fifty mouths screamed. The biters weren’t what I expected. They weren’t Andrew, or his lab, or his test tubes and papers. They were more than that.
They were worse than I could have ever imagined.
A biter below Blueeyes swung at his leg; bent nails tore fabric and nearly pulled him from the ladder. My friend’s boot connected with its head right between its eyes. It gushed blood. The creature fell twenty feet, limbs waiving, engulfed by the insanity below. Blueeyes was under me, moving upward, machete hacking and feet kicking. Suddenly, we were sharing the same space. When his palm slammed against the grating above us, it moved. Dust spewed from the edges, gravel and sand like smoke.
He hit again. “Push!”
I rammed my shoulder against the steel so hard it hurt, felt the pain down my side and into my legs. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry so badly.
“Push, Megan!”
Instead of crying I did it again.
It moved. A corner of the grating pulled away, lifted and snapped. A chunk of stone tore from the wall, clanked off the ladder and tumbled to the swarm. Blueeyes punched the grate so hard I heard the bones in his hand break. The next time we pushed it flew open. Daylight filled the tunnel. Instead of wailing, the swarm of biters screamed, covered their eyes, and dove for cover. As quickly as it advanced, the mass of snarling monsters retreated, scurrying for shadows. I snagged a handful of dirt, dug in with my fingers, and pulled myself onto land. Blueeyes was right behind me. When we were both out, he lifted the steel grating and dropped it back into place.
Blueeyes sighed, shook his head, and glanced at the sky. He shook his broken hand and grimaced. In the distance there were clouds, heavy and moving fast, black bottoms flashing. “Won’t have the light much longer. Have to go.”
A part of me wondered what would happen to Andrew. Another part didn’t care. We didn’t stick around to find out. I was okay with that.
