Bleeders

by Max Boone

  Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Bleeders

  Book 1: The Red Death

  By Max Boone

  CHAPTER ONE

  Of course it started on a Monday.

  As I sat on the 8:20 train for what felt like the millionth time, I looked around at the faces of the other passengers. They spent most of the ride staring forward, blank looks on their faces, shoulders swaying back-and-forth from the rocking of the train.

  Drones, set on auto-pilot.

  Like me.

  I showed up to work twenty minutes late because some jack-ass passed out on one of the platforms and fell right on the tracks. Apparently the next train couldn't stop in time and turned him into ground beef. It wasn't on the line I was on, but the MTA had to divert a few trains and it gummed up the whole commute. As if my morning needed a reason to be any more miserable.

  Luckily I was able to sneak in and settle into my cubicle before anyone noticed, especially my boss, Peter, aka King of the Assholes. The last email I got from him on Friday reached a new level of pissy, even for him. My plan was to keep my head down and coast until lunch, when Peter tended to duck out for business lunches and come back drunk or not at all.

  In the break room I sat down with my Chinese food and turned on the TV mounted on the wall. The news was talking about the only thing they'd wanted to talk about for a week.

  "By the time word of the Red Flu made its way across North Korea's border in late March," the concerned newscaster said, "so too had infected patients. The CDC quickly responded, teaming with local governments to control the spread, though they struggled to make any progress, due largely in part to the lack of communication between North Korea and neighboring countries, including South Korea, China, and Russia."

  I put my plastic fork down to change the channel, but it seemed every network was talking about the Red Flu. On Channel Six three talking heads argued about cutting off aid to affected areas. Someone said that wasn't enough, and recommended stopping all flights to and from Asia immediately.

  "Looks bad," Ernest said. He was short and pudgy and had a habit of looking over my shoulder while I ate.

  "It's all for ratings," I said through a mouthful of greasy noodles. "They need to scare you about something so you'll tune in."

  "I don't know, my mother says a friend of her neighbor came down with it. The whole thing was covered up. That's why we haven't heard anything about it."

  "Where?"

  "Queens Village."

  I scoffed. It was the same story every time, from Bird Flu to Swine Flu, SARS to Ebola. It was always someone who knew someone else. Always close but not quite here. "Have you seen Peter," I asked.

  "He's been in his office all day. No one's seen him since Friday."

  I threw out the rest of my food. "Maybe he has the devil's flu," I said in a spooky voice, wiggling my fingers. Then I added, "He does bang a lot of Korean hookers." Ernest just shook his head and turned back to the TV, not wanting to get any further involved in such a dangerous conversation. I left him there to gawk at the news and came back out to the fluorescent buzz of the office hallway.

  The difference between Ernest and I was probably hard to spot from the outside, but people who actually paid attention could see it night and day.

  I wore a shirt and tie. Ernest was a shirt and tie.

  As I glanced down the hallway that led to Peter's office, I remembered how much of a dick he'd been on Friday. He'd been trying to pick a fight with everyone he talked to, to the point where his cheeks were splotchy and red from his raised blood pressure. God, how I wished I could watch him have a heart attack right in front of me. Maybe a nice, crippling stroke.

  Standing at the head of the hallway, I decided to go see him. Whether it was to patch things up or quit I hadn't decided yet, but it felt good to move toward my problems rather than slink past them. Sure, I wanted to coast by, but I hated that a chinless loser like Peter Donaldson could make me turn tail with a single email. Corporate life made no sense in the Darwinian world.

  I knocked, softly at first. There was no answer so I knocked louder. I could hear him in there, eating at his desk, which meant no business meetings today. It also meant the rude prick was ignoring my knocks.

  Fuck it. I think I would be quitting today.

  Done with walking on eggshells, I opened the door and went in. The first thing I saw was a folder on the floor, papers from an account file spread across the carpet. It was so out of place in Peter's otherwise meticulous office, every unearned performance award in its place, I almost didn't notice the figure huddled behind his desk.

  There was a smell in the air I couldn't place, like a handful of pennies, and the sound of lip-smacking. If I didn't know any better I would have said Peter was eating his lunch off the floor, but that kind of behavior was insane, and even though Peter could be less than human in how he treated the people who worked for him, I couldn't believe he was that much of an animal.

  But still, there was his back, stooped over behind his chair, and from the noises coming from him he was definitely eating. It was surreal. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone else was seeing what I was seeing, but the hallway was empty.

  I was alone with this.

  "Uhh...Peter?"

  He froze at the sound of my shaky voice. Then his head cocked to one side and his ears perked up like a dog. He didn't seem to know where the voice had come from. His mouth worked as he listened, chewing and swallowing, and from my angle it looked like he had a bit of barbecue sauce on his face. I took a hesitant step forward to figure out what the hell Peter-goddamn-Donaldson was doing behind his desk, maybe to blackmail him. Maybe just to see.

  People always talk about curiosity killing the cat? Fuck the cat. Curiosity kills dumb-asses.

  As I took another unsure step across his office, a shape on the floor came into view. It was a sneaker, the orthopedic kind, something that couldn't have been more out of place if it grew horns and starting singing show-tunes.

  I took another step, then another. The shoe was on a foot, which was attached to a leg, which belonged to Melinda, the cleaning lady. She lay on the carpet face-up, her eyes cold and dead. There was a massive hole in her stomach which Peter was pulling wet intestines out of and sucking up like pasta. He absently chewed the bloody mess as he scooped out more from her gut. His face was absolutely covered in fresh gore.

  He froze when he spotted me.

  "Hey, Pete," I said. "I can come back."

  Peter jumped up from the woman's body and ran directly at me, screaming with blood and gore flying from his red tongue. I stepped back and put my arms up but he barreled into me, knocking me off my feet and sending me backward. I hit the floor hard and felt the wind get knocked out of me.

  Peter didn't give me a moment to recov
er. He fell on me and tried to bite my face with his blood-stained teeth. I pushed him back, the bite missing my nose by an inch, but his sudden violence was too fast for me- his mouth chomped down on my shoulder. I felt the teeth sink in.

  Reacting quickly from the pain I shoved him off me. As he scrambled to get back on his feet and come at me again, I got off the floor and moved around the other side of the desk, trying to put anything between us.

  He paused for a second. His face was deranged, and for the first time I saw just how different he was. His skin had gone pale, like a person about to throw up six shots of vodka. His eyes were red, not just bloodshot but like a hemorrhage, everything that should have been white colored red. The effect of the dark, red eyes set inside his pale skin was horrifying.

  Peter broke into a run again. Not bothering to come around the desk he slammed into it and climbed at me, clawing his way over. His lamp crashed to the floor and made a racket. I hoped it was enough for someone to hear, but I wasn't about to get my hopes up.

  He was momentarily defenseless. With only a second to act I did the only thing I could think of- I grabbed the hardest thing I could find on his desk and smashed it into the back of his head. He shouted, more angry than stunned, so I brought it down again and again. His shouts turned to gurgles, then silence.

  As the pool of dark blood spread across his desk, seeping into his papers, I looked down at the object in my hands. The framed picture was cracked, the glass shattered.

  Covered in Peter's blood, his family smiled back at me.

  I dropped the picture and ran to Peter's private bathroom, where I promptly threw up my Chinese food. A moment of clarity came to me as I picked my head up out of his sink. My shoulder was on fire, and my blood was soaking through my yellow work shirt in the shape of my dead bosses mouth. I stripped the shirt off and squirted as much hand sanitizer as I could into one of Peter's towels.

  The moment the antibiotic touched the open wound, I screamed, "Fuck!" from the goddamn pain, but I didn't stop scrubbing until I started to feel light-headed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I woke up face down.

  It would be a lie to say I've never woken up like this before, not knowing where I was or how I'd gotten there, usually because I'd had three too many drinks, but this time was different. Whose embroidered towel was this clutched in my hand? Why did my arm hurt so much?

  Who was screaming?

  I sat up and felt the room pitch. Nausea bubbled up in my stomach, and I did everything I could to keep it down there. Looking down at my legs, I could see I was wearing dress pants and shoes, so obviously I was at work, but I was down to my undershirt, and my dress shirt was crumpled in a pile by the sink. What was that on it? Ink? Was it blood? Was it my blood?

  And who the fuck was screaming?

  As I got to my feet, using the small sink to steady myself, images started to flash through my head. A long hallway. A cleaning lady on the floor. A framed picture of an ugly wife and three, ugly kids with their faces wet like they were crying, but not crying, something else. Something worse.

  "Someone made a mess in this sink," I said.

  Alerted voices came from the next room. The crying stopped, replaced by panicked hyperventilating. "Here, still, keep away, don't let him!" They were random, scared words in a familiar woman's voice. I stumbled toward the bright doorway and found my legs weren't working at a hundred percent, but I worked at it and got better with every step. Soon I was at the door and leaning out to see into the much brighter room.

  And that was when reality slapped me in the face like a big, spiked dick.

  Three of my co-workers, Alice, Ernest and Stan were there looking back at me. Alice was the furthest, backed into the corner with tears coming down her face. She looked at me like I was a monster from some horror movie. Ernest and Stan had shocked looks on their faces, the two of them crowded by Peter's desk.

  By his body.

  "Oh yeah," I said. "That happened."

  Stan came around to the front of the desk. He was a tall bastard, with a full head on me. "What the fuck happened here, Brody?"

  I tried to get a handle on the situation. The hardest part was explaining myself in a way that didn't make me sound insane. "You have to understand," I said, then stopped.

  "Understand what?"

  I pointed to Peter's dead body. "He started it."

  It was the best I could come up with. Alice started crying even harder.

  Stan put his hands on his hips. "Hold on- you're admitting you did this?"

  "Just Peter. Not Melinda, Peter killed her."

  "He has their blood all over him," Ernest said quietly.

  "No," I said, crossing the room. "Some of it's mine."

  "Just stop where you are."

  "He killed the cleaning lady," I explained. "I came in here to talk to him and I found him doing...something to her." I didn't want to come out and say he was eating her. I barely believed it myself, and I saw it happen right in front of me. "He ran at me. He tried to kill me, what was I supposed to do?"

  The three of them kept their distance. Every step I took, they took two toward the door. "It's okay, we believe you," Ernest said. Alice began to sob uncontrollably.

  "He was crazy! He fucking bit me!" I showed them my shoulder, the wound still bleeding, though not as bad as before with the blood beginning to clot. "Right here, look!"

  Stan tried to force a reassuring voice. "We believe you, Brody, okay? You just have to calm down so we can figure this out."

  "Fuck you, Stan, you don't believe me."

  "Yes, I do."

  "Oh, yeah? Then why are you still heading for the door?"

  The three of them looked at each other. Suddenly Stan broke into a run for the door. Others from the office had begun to crowd in the hallway, and they waved the three of them over frantically. Alice and Ernest followed right behind him, running from me like I was a goddamn murderer. I chased after them, if only to stop them and slap some sense into them, but before I could reach them they made it out of Peter's office and into the crowd of onlookers.

  Two assholes grabbed the door and pushed it shut just as I reached it. I crashed into the door so hard it rattled my jaw, and I tried to open the door but they held it closed. As I kept trying it I could hear them dragging a heavy desk over to barricade the door. "Stop," I shouted, "let me the fuck out of here! Don't leave me in here with them!" I banged on the door until I realized it was only making things worse.

  After a minute or so the shouting on the other side of the door started to die down, along with Alice's crying. It sounded like the whole building had gathered out there to see what was going on. Among the concerned murmurs and arguing, I heard the very distinct, very worrying voice of Ernest calling the cops.

  "Motherfucker," I whispered.

  There was no way, absolutely no way in hell the cops were going to buy my story. Oh, you say your boss was eating the cleaning lady? And then he tried to eat you? Yes, that's known to happen. What else could you have done but cave his skull in with a framed photograph of his family? An open and shut case of self-defense if I've ever seen one. Just sign here and you'll be on your way.

  I would spend the night in city jail for sure. If they even bothered to post bail, I wouldn't be able to afford it. I lived in New York City, for Christ's sake, I had four dollars in my savings account. And then, when my case eventually went to trial, I had absolutely zero witnesses to back up my whack-job story of corporate cannibalism.

  Character witnesses? Yeah, that'll go great. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm kind of an asshole. My last girlfriend broke up with me because she said I had a better relationship with a porn site than I did with her. My parents moved to California about ten minutes after I was legally allowed to fend for myself. The one friend I had left from college, the last time I saw him he called me "The worst thing about New York," which is, I think we can agree, pretty harsh.

  As I stared down at Peter's broken eggshell of a head,
I realized there was no happy ending in the cards, and that meant there was only one thing to do.

  Figure out how to open that vent over Peter's desk.

  His chair had been knocked against the wall in one of the struggles, so I wheeled it back over and used it to climb onto his desk. I tried not to step in Peter's blood, but I quickly realized it was a vain attempt to avoid it completely and just stepped in it as little as possible.

  It wasn't until that moment that I realized how warm I was. The cold air felt so good on my face that even with everything that was going on, I took a second to cool my sweaty skin. From this new height I could just reach the vent cover. There were four little clips holding it up, one on each side, that simply had to be moved aside to remove the face of the vent. Easy. They were stuck a bit, but it was nothing a little wiggling and prying couldn't fix.

  After I'd gotten two of them free, my fingers hurting from pushing on the thin metal, I paused for a second. It was quiet out in the office, too quiet after all the ruckus they'd been raising the last five minutes.

  Then I realized why.

  A new voice was addressing the people. It was no one I'd ever heard, in the building or otherwise, speaking in the kind of command presence authority figures were trained to use. Stan was answering their questions as if he were in charge, and not at all the guy who ran for his life ahead of the sobbing lady.

  There was no doubt about it- the cops were already there.

  Frantically I set to opening the vent again. The third moved easily, thank God, and I focused all my attention on moving that last clip. Through the door was the sound of a desk being pushed out of the way. I was almost there, damn it.

  "Mister Tate?"

  The cops were calling my name, but I ignored them and pushed on the last clip until I thought my thumb was going to slice open. Finally, it moved. I threw the vent down and felt the full blast of cold air hit my face as I reached up and clawed for a grip in the vent's aluminum insides, up on my toes and stretched as far as I could.