“The package we received was delivered to a small airport south of Riverhead. The two were inspectors there. We believe the man somehow infected himself with the viral DNA, maybe while cutting open the package.”
He stood up and went over to Cassie, who was sleeping peacefully on the couch. Her face was pale, her lips slightly blue. She might sleep for another twenty hours, or she could wake in the next heartbeat. And when she did, she would likely be even more agitated, more aggressive than before.
Drew turned to face Lyssa. “The men who are looking for me, this man they call the Colonel and the others with him, are extremely dangerous. I’m sorry I disappeared like I did, but they were on my trail. I tried to warn you to get away, but I guess it was already too late.”
CHAPTER SIXTY NINE
Cassie woke without warning. One moment she was lying there, her skin so pale it was almost translucent, the next she was sitting up so fast that the movement caused her head to snap forward on her neck with such force that her bones cracked. She jerked back and let out a loud, anguished wail.
“Honey?” Lyssa bent down. “Cassie? I’m here.”
The girl turned toward her and snarled.
“Get back!” Drew shouted, just as she lunged.
He flung Lyssa out of the way and reached for the girl. She growled and snapped her teeth at him, missing his hand by inches. “Shit! Jeremy! Get over here and help me out!”
Cassie tumbled from the couch, screaming and howling, thrashing her arms as if ants were crawling all over her body. Her hair was a tangled mess, covering her face. She threw herself against the couch, knocking it back against a table. A lamp tumbled to the floor.
“Grab her legs!” Drew shouted. He reached for her arms, but she snapped at him again and he pulled away.
“Cassie!” Lyssa shrieked.
“Get back,” Drew yelled at her. “Where’s the boy?”
Jeremy took hold of Cassie’s feet and tried to lift them to take away her leverage. Lyssa backed away, sobbing in horror. Drew had one of Cassie’s hands and was trying to grab the other, but she was beating at him, scratching his face and arms. Long, white welts rose on his skin and quickly turned pink.
“No!” Cassie screamed. “No no NO!” Her fist connected with Drew’s chin and he staggered back a step looking dazed.
Footsteps pounded toward them from the front and the boy appeared in the entryway, his eyes wide with fright. He stepped forward, but Lyssa held him back. What was happening with Cassie was terrifying, but she couldn’t let the boy get hurt because of her. “Stay back,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
She threw herself onto her daughter’s body, managing to trap Cassie’s arm beneath her long enough for Drew to snatch it.
“Watch her mouth,” he shouted.
They managed to get her back onto the couch, Jeremy sitting crosswise on Cassie’s legs and Drew still holding her hands above her head. She arched her back and writhed, all the while growling and snapping. She’d let out a snarl and look at them with murder in her eyes, then utter a screech of such volume and pitch that Lyssa’s skin crawled. She begged the girl to stop, but it didn’t help.
If Cassie could hear her, if she could understand what her mother was saying, it was only in the deepest recesses of her mind, far from reason, far from the place where she might exert any control over her actions. The rabies had taken full control now, and it was only a matter of time before it completely destroyed her.
They tied her up using duct tape the boy found in the garage, then wrapped her body into a sheet and taped that. To Lyssa, she looked like a giant cocoon, except that the thing trying to emerge from it was something she no longer knew.
She remembered Marion’s words to her earlier, back when they thought she’d been infected with reanimation virus, warning her that when Cassie came back, they wouldn’t recognize her then. But this was much worse. Cassie was still alive. She was still in there somewhere, probably scared to death and unable to communicate.
The truth tore at Lyssa’s mind. It broke her heart.
In between Cassie’s screams, the boy informed them that the men had called from the hospital. “They said it’s been taken over and they can’t get inside.”
“What do you mean ‘taken over’?” Lyssa asked, her voice rising in despair. “They just need some supplies! Can’t they just tell whoever’s there what they need and why they need it? They need to hurry up!”
“Taken over, but not by the living,” he explained. “It’s been overrun by infected.”
For a moment, nobody spoke. The only sounds were Cassie’s weakening struggles and her muffled grunts and cries.
Drew stood up and gestured at the boy for the phone. When he connected with Marion, he told them what was happening. “I’m driving over.” There was a pause, then: “Just stay put. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“What can you do that they can’t?” Lyssa cried.
He turned and looked at her for several seconds, as if trying to decide what to say. He took a deep breath, turned to Jeremy instead, and said, “Get back on the air. See if you can drum up some help. And hurry.”
He took another look down at Cassie, twisting and groaning on the floor. “You two,” he said to Lyssa and the boy, “stay here. I’ll be back soon with supplies. I promise.”
He took Lyssa by the shoulders and drew her to the side. “Do not leave the house. I give you my word I’m going to do everything I can to save your daughter.”
His voice was strong and reassuring, his words consoling. But the look on his face told another story. Lyssa knew that he didn’t believe Cassie had much longer to live. He wasn’t going to the hospital to bring back supplies. He was going to fetch Ramon back to say goodbye to his daughter before she passed.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
People, I know there are a few of you who are listening, who can hear me. The faithful few, or many, I don’t know how many anymore. I hope it’s a lot. I hope there are still a lot of you out there, alive, capable of turning the dial. Capable of listening and understanding this hot fucked up mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.
So it’s all come to pass, hasn’t it? I told you it would, months ago. I told you the dead were among us, walking among us, working among us. And now they are running rampant over our fair island, this long, idyllic land which has been home to many, a playground of the privileged few. The dead have woken, and they are now claiming this place as their own.
Someone miscalculated, badly. And now we are paying the price for that mistake.
The government will try and deny it. They will twist the truth so that it fits their agenda. I don’t know exactly what that story will be, but it will undoubtedly be fallacious. Do not believe their version of the events unfolding here. They will claim that this is all sudden, but that will be a lie. I’ve seen it first-hand. This disaster has been unfolding, not for days, but for weeks. Maybe even months.
Long Island, folks, is lost, and that’s how they always intended it to happen. Don’t you think it’s convenient that the outbreak would occur in a place which could be easily isolated, cut off from the rest of the world? Close the bridges and tunnels. Stop the ferries and ground the planes. How many people managed to get off the island before they closed it off? A few tens of thousands? I doubt even that many.
How many are still trapped here?
How many will die here in the next few days?
How many will rise again?
Millions would be my guess.
Fight back, people! You’re already dead! Come out of your hiding places! Take back what the government’s agents have stolen from us! The dead are giving us a run for our money, but we can stop them! We can turn the tide! We must fight to take it back from them! Take back the hospitals! Take back the police stations! Take back the—
Shit! Already? They’ve found me. I must move.
Listen, people, there is a hospital in Melville overrun by the infected. It’s in the middle of Long Island. Pe
ople, if you can hear me, go there. They need your help. There’s a little girl desperately in need of lifesaving medicine. Go there, people, and—
I have to go. Please, just go and help them. And don’t get bitten.
Until next time, this is Jay Bird signing off for now.
CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE
Drew was horrified at the numbers of infected on the streets. Never in his nightmares had he imagined it happening like this.
No, that wasn’t quite true. He’d known it was possible from the very first moment he learned the truth about Daniels’s work at the Pentagon, now five years past. He’d feared it. He’d envisioned a time when the world might become overrun by the dead, and it was that image which drove him every day to make sure it never happened. Two and a half years ago, he’d lost everything trying to stop it— himself and his family. Since then, he’d grown wary of fully committing again. Two and half years of hiding, of half-assed attempts while those people who had created the living dead continued to grow more and more powerful.
How many tries? How many failures?
You have the ability within you. You just have to trust yourself.
He listened to Jeremy give his impassioned speech as he weaved between the walking corpses, trying not to run them down. The man, an old friend from his academia days, was a natural communicator. This role fit him well.
There were two scourges overrunning the island. The first was manmade. The second, inherently natural, yet also unique to mankind: evil. Drew could see evidence of it all around, in the glow of the distant fires and the stink of burning metal and plastic and wood. But it was what couldn’t be so easily seen and sensed which terrified him, the raping and robbing, the destruction of humanity in the worst possible way: for sport, for pleasure.
He feared the living, not the dead. He felt no pity for them, the people who willingly and with full cognizance of their choices followed their paths of destruction. It was the infected dead he pitied. They were victims. They hadn’t asked for this. He understood the terror they experienced in their final living moments. He pitied them in their death throes. He’d witnessed firsthand the attacks. So often they were by loved ones lost to the disease— parents, children, neighbors.
What would it be like to die at the hands of a child you had given life to? A terrible nightmare bearing the mask of a beloved child.
This was why he had come out of his own hole, when Marion had called, when Jeremy had sent out his plea. He had wanted to save Cassie. He’d finally decided to try what he’d been terrified of in the past.
But then to discover that he was helpless anyway. This other sickness, this ancient virus, against which he had no defense. It was a terrible irony.
He would’ve given anything to save her, even his own blood.
Several of the infected had formed a knot at the end of the road. They cloistered together, as if in consultation, and turned to contemplate his headlights as he approached. He wondered what traces of their souls remained, if any. He wished he knew. He hoped it was none, though he feared he might be wrong.
He drew close to them, wary as they turned their black, dead eyes toward his window, sensing the presence of someone whole nearby to whom they could spread their disease. And then, not sensing that such a thing existed, they turned away, disinterested.
He turned the wheel and carefully navigated onto the sidewalk, knocking over trashcans and sign posts and fences to get past them.
So many now. So many more yet to come.
Jeremy was right. The island was lost.
He wondered what would become of it. He feared it might be much worse than the vilest thing he could conceive.
Playground for the privileged few.
For some reason, this phrase stuck with him, caused him such distress.
He came to the highway and saw the cars scattered upon it, many abandoned, their doors flung open, headlights piercing the night. A few engines still rumbled. He could hear the squawk of the dying radios, and he imagined the reporters out there, probably safe somewhere on the mainland, calmly hyping whatever falsehoods they’d been spoon-fed, spinning yarns that couldn’t hold a candle to the horrible reality. Claims of police exerting control. The military rushing in to help. Violence quickly squelched.
The misinformation he’d been hearing over the past few days deeply saddened him.
. . . isolated pockets . . . mostly calm . . . mind-controlling drugs . . . Laroda . . . .
He twisted the radio dial after Jeremy’s last words and tried not to think about the people going after his friend. Or how close they might be. He prayed for Jeremy’s safety, yet knew it was only a matter of time before he and all the rest of them were captured and killed.
Or worse. Almost certainly worse than murdered.
They would be reinserted, like cogs, into the machine. Like exchangeable pieces in some game.
All in the name of profit.
But as he flipped through the stations, he was surprised to hear not more of the falsehoods, but more and more of the truth. They were, for the first time, reporting about the spread of the new disease which killed and yet somehow didn’t. Could the rumors have been true all this time? they wondered. Has the government been dabbling in reanimation?
He felt strangely vindicated by this. The truth was actually starting to win out. People were starting to believe, or at least were beginning to openly believe. And all this despite the efforts of those who wished them not to.
But then he heard a new word being bandied about — neonecrotics — and he winced. “They’ve already given it a name,” he muttered darkly to himself. It was the first step toward accepting it.
He heard a scream and out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of white, a woman running, her shirt torn and bloody. He saw the gash on her arm and knew it was already too late for her.
You could save her, came a whisper from somewhere inside his head. Like you were planning to save Cassie.
“I don’t even know if it’ll work,” he answered himself.
You think it might.
Yes, he did. But he’d always been too afraid to try. “What if it only makes it worse?”
What does she have to lose now?
But it was too late for the woman. The injuries were too substantial. She was on the brink of death. And besides, he didn’t have the necessary supplies with him.
Get them. For the next one. And the ones after that.
“That’s what I’m doing.”
The woman stumbled and was quickly overtaken. First, by a slower, hobbling grandfather whose face dripped red, greasy chunks. His gut bulged from too many feedings. The woman screamed and Drew knew that her death would be quick, though not quick enough. Not thorough enough. He wished a pack of them would descend upon her while she still lived. He wished they’d feed so thoroughly that she would not come back. But only one other infected joined the old man.
He heard her screams long after he passed. Even long after she had passed away. They continued to echo off the bones of his skull, and not even the windows shut as tightly as they would go could make them stop.
CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO
She hated to see Cassie suffer like this, alternating between moaning in pain and being unconscious, expressing only fear and anger. Cassie, she whispered, brushing the dirty hair from her forehead, her own tears washing away the grime which had built up over the past couple of days. My dead, sweet, precious girl. And the tears fell for all of them, for the girl who was slipping away before her, for the son she’d lost two months prior, to her husband, who’d left her soon afterward. And for herself, who’d never left that hospital room. Soon it’ll be all over. I promise.
All that was left was the actual doing of it.
But like that day on the side of the road, the tiny furry body in her hands, already broken beyond repair, Lyssa couldn’t do it. She couldn’t finish the job.
Cassie struggled, her face purple from the exertion, her veins bulging on her neck an
d forehead. Her jaw strained against the tape, placed there so that the dead would not hear her cries and come to their door hoping to feed.
Soon, my dear. Soon you will be free from all of this.
She stood from her daughter’s side, because all that was left was the doing, and the doing needed to be done. Quickly, surely.
She called for the boy. He had in his possession what she needed to finish the job.
CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE
He found Marion’s car parked askew on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance of the hospital, bathed in the bright lights spilling from the shattered glass doors. Blood stained the concrete and the potted ferns growing alongside. One had been uprooted. Drew stared at it for a moment, wondering why. It was one of those things that just didn’t make any sense.
Bloody streaks trailed away on the sidewalk in a half dozen different directions, crisscrossing the vestibule and passing through the confetti of shattered glass. Among them were fragments of clothing, tissue and bone. A dozen of the infected milled about outside, but he could see at least a dozen more in the main lobby. As he pulled up alongside the car, he saw Marion and Ramon seated inside.
He pushed the button to open the passenger side window and gestured for Marion to do the same.
“Take Ramon home,” he instructed. “I’ll be close behind with what we need.”
“You can’t go in there,” Ramon cried. “Not alone.”
Drew nodded to Marion, who nodded back. “You still got your pistol?” Drew asked. Ramon nodded. “Good. Let me have it. I’ll be fine. But I think you two better hurry back.”
“How is she?” Marion asked, handing the weapon through the gap between the cars. It was too tight for a person to fit into, but that didn’t stop the infected from trying. They pawed at the cars, attempting to climb over to get to the open windows. Ramon cringed away from his own window, but Drew ignored the dead standing outside of his.
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