“How would a person know if they’ve been infected?”
“Unfortunately as of right now early detection is a moot point. The virus takes hold almost instantly after suffering a bite, and with the very limited number of subjects we’ve had the opportunity to observe, we’ve had no luck with any of the traditional treatments. That being said, we are early in the treatment phase and wouldn’t normally expect a response to any given treatment for at least a few days. For obvious reasons the process will be further hindered by our inability to obtain an adequate number of live infected subjects.”
“So is there any way for average citizens to recognize and avoid those who are carriers?”
Static disrupts the broadcast and Brooke teases the dial trying to retune the station.
She is successful and the broadcast continues, “…develop the disease emit a loud and extremely off-putting yell which we believe is caused by the virus’s attack on the nerve centers of the brain. It’s believed that this attack causes a moment of unbearable pain for the victim as the portion of their brain that processes pain (the hypothalamus) goes through a radical change. This yell should be considered a siren, warning all in that person’s path to get out of their way and as far away as possible. Furthermore, as a result of the incredible pain caused by the virus’s initial attack, the adrenal gland becomes stuck in over-drive as a fight or flight response. This could account for the eyewitness reports of seemingly superhuman strength and speed displayed by some of the infected and the difficulty that authorities have had in bringing them down.”
“Kind of like someone on PCP?”
“Exactly, or you’ve heard about a mother lifting a car off of her baby? Generally, this type of nervous system response, or malfunction as is the case with PCP, is a rare and isolated incident. What this virus has done is turn that level of strength and lack of fear on full time.”
“What about the disfigured faces and long nails that we’ve heard a few stories about?”
“In an autopsy performed on an infected elderly man it was found that the pituitary gland was another area affected by the virus. It basically begins to release the human growth hormone at an accelerated rate and can cause hair, nails, teeth, and in some cases even cheekbones to grow at an alarming rate. It’s not dissimilar to how steroids or a disease known as gigantism works. A healthy human adult has very little of this hormone in their system. When a large amount is suddenly introduced the results can be unpredictable at best.”
“So, what about the rage and the bitings? Are we dealing with some strain of rabies?”
“No, this disease has more in common with a few other diseases. One of which is a blood disease known as Propheria. It’s an affliction that causes anemia and photophobia (an increased sensitivity to light) among other things. Another would be Meningitis that can cause cerebral swelling and effect disposition. That coupled with the incredibly high metabolism as a result of all the changes that their bodies are going through could explain some of the more violent acts we’ve heard reports of.”
“Even the drinking of blood?”
“Yes, blood contains high levels of many minerals. To a person stripped of their human inhibitions and gag reflex, it would be a logical and convenient source for the nutrients they require to keep up with their increased needs.”
“Is there anything we can do to defend ourselves?”
“Certainly, stay inside and avoid anyone that you think may be infected, including those with bites or any kind of open wound. When encountering a hostile-infected subject you should defend yourself by any means at your disposal. Don’t expect to be able to outrun or overpower even those infected that appear to be non-threatening due to size gender or age. Consider every infected you meet to be deadly and act accordingly. Remember, just like someone on PCP they can be extremely difficult to stop. Without the sense of pain, the human body becomes something of a tank. If you don’t hit them in something vital they will probably just keep coming.”
“Now what exactly do you mean by something vital?”
“Stopping the heart is the most effective way of killing the infected, but remember, it’s not as easy as it seems in the cinema. The sternum (more commonly referred to as the breastbone) and the ribs, shield the human heart. Unless you’re using a high power weapon of some sort, it would take an incredible amount of strength, luck or accuracy to reach the heart with a hand-held implement. The alternative would be to cease all brain function, or more precisely, stop all nerve signals from reaching the body from the brain. A simple blow to the head will not suffice in most cases. The infected’s heightened awareness makes them less likely to be affected by a concussion so this method will probably only buy you seconds. The more desirable method would be severing the spinal cord or a complete separation of the host’s head from their body.”
“Wow Doctor, that all sounds very gruesome. Are we really asking people to dismember others? In some cases even their loved ones?”
“Make no mistake, without a forthcoming cure; the infected are a mortal danger to everyone around them.”
“Some people have been referring to the infected as ‘biters’ or in some cases even ‘vampires’. What do you think of that comparison?”
“There’s no doubt that the symptoms of this disease do bear a striking resemblance to the mythology of the vampire and may in fact be the original basis for those stories, but there is nothing supernatural about the infected and imbuing them with the label ‘vampire’ only serves to increase panic and hinder much needed understanding of what we’re really dealing with -an extremely virulent infection that could very rapidly become a global pandemic. In time, it could threaten our very existence. If the infection doesn’t kill us, the infected will.”
‘Click’, the radio snaps off with a push from Max’s finger. They look at each other and the magnitude of what they’ve just heard is too much for words.
***
Inside the sheriff’s station, Vinny has finally located the armory and is busy pack-muling his self with a collection of small arms and ammunition. He is expeditious about his task due to the occasional footsteps he still hears coming from down the hallway. After loading a backpack -that he was fortunate to find in a nearby office- he selects a .357 magnum for his waistband and again trudges deeper down the hall. Vinny has little experience with firearms but did have occasion to shoot an uncle’s revolver as a boy. The magnum’s beauty is its simplicity. In just four easy steps, almost anyone could become a dealer of death; open cylinder, insert bullets, close cylinder, pull trigger. Vinny takes a moment to feel the weight of blued steel in his hand before continuing. This time he feels ready for whatever he might encounter in the darker recesses of the station, but contrary to his inflated confidence, he soon finds that he is indeed unprepared for what silently awaits.
***
Max and Brooke sit wordlessly in the Audi, still struggling to come to grips with what they’ve just heard. The prospect that they could encounter others like Vanessa is too unspeakable to even digest, much less give words to.
“We need to get home,” Max says with a new sense of urgency. “I have to get to my grandmother. She’s all alone.”
Knowing and respecting Max’s relationship with his grandmother, Brooke realizes that to argue this course of action would be futile, “You’re right. We better get Vinny and go. If the streets are clear like this all over, and we drive like bats out of hell, then we should be able to get there in about an hour.”
Max swings his driver’s side door open, scrambles around the Audi’s long hood and releases the door latch on Brooke’s side of the car. The two of them bound up the steps to the sheriff’s station and push through the double doors, having never noticed the two yellow eyes that have been watching them unblinkingly from the shadows across the street.
***
Inside the front doors, they stand briefly peering into the dimly lit lobby of the station and allowing their eyes to adjust.
Brooke st
ates the obvious, “This place looks empty.”
Max, filled with a sense of foreboding, says nothing. He instead cocks his head to one side and listens.
“Do you hear that?” he asks in a low whisper, still straining to discern the sound.
Before Brooke can respond, a blood curdling shriek -akin to that of a barn owl on the hunt- cuts through the musty air of the station and envelopes her in pure dread.
“What the hell was that?” Max asks knowing the answer but not wanting to believe it.
Brooke stands motionless and focuses hard on the twilit room before them, “Oh God, someone’s infected.” She whispers.
Realizing that one way or the other, the shrill trumpeting of the infected probably means Vinny’s demise Brooke shrinks visibly. The weight of the thought is more than she can bear.
“We have to find Vinny,” Max says as he’s already begun to move.
“Wait!” cries Brooke, “Don’t you see that might have been Vinny!”
The words stop Max for a moment as he considers, “Go back to the car and connect the yellow and blue wires under the dash. If I’m not back in five minutes, I want you to leave. If Vinny comes out without me, then be careful.”
Brooke opens her mouth and prepares to debate but the look that Max gives her counters all of her points before she can make them. His expression tells her ‘Vinny’s my best friend and I’m not leaving without him’, and ‘I’m prepared for this in ways I can’t explain’.
She leaves him with a hug and the appeal, “Be careful.”
The words are soft and full of more meaning than their mere definitions allow. Her hand lightly brushes Max’s cheek as she separates from him and momentarily gazes into his dark eyes. She turns and exits the front door.
Out on the front steps Brooke cautiously looks up and down the street. Solitude still rules the night air and she finds herself guiltily grateful that the consternation that Max now faces is to some extent behind her, at least for now.
Max quickly and quietly searches the multi office complex for signs: signs of Vinny and Lisa, signs of anyone else –alive or dead. What he finds is a bramble of file cabinets, papers, desks and drawers everywhere he looks. It is evident that either something had gone on a rampage or someone was looking for something. Max is hoping for the latter.
He reconnoiters each office as he makes his way down the increasingly dark passageway until the sign above one door in particular catches his eye, ‘ARMORY’. If Vinny went this way then he definitely would have stopped here. Max finds the door to the armory unlocked and proceeds inward. All of the lockers are open and the guns have apparently been picked over. Max considers that this could be a good or bad sign. It means that Vinny is probably armed. If he isn’t infected then he has the means to defend his self. If he is infected then –assuming he possesses the where-with-all to pull the trigger- he is that much more dangerous. The prospect of facing his best friend as a deranged adversary is more than unsettling. He isn’t sure what he would do if it came to that, but he does know what he is capable of. His father had taught him things about himself that no one should ever learn. Max shakes off that thought and reminds himself of the doctor’s words, “If the infection doesn’t kill us, the infected will.” In addition, there were two very dear ladies counting on him and he isn’t going to let them down. Not this time. Not again.
Max searches the armory for a weapon that’s simple to use while keeping in mind the doctor’s prescribed methods of defense. He settles on a riot shotgun and finds it to be partially loaded with a single shell of buckshot in the chamber. It is compact enough for close-quarters battle but still packs the 12-gauge punch he needs to put down an infected. He surveys the ground for more double-ought buckshot and finds a mix of shells scattered about -some buckshot and some labeled ‘shredders’. He recalls from a course in criminal justice that S.W.A.T. officers sometimes used shredders to defeat deadbolts and various other locks when serving high-risk warrants. He loads the three loose shredders first and finishes off with two more buckshot for a total of six shells in the gun including the one in the chamber. He searches a bit more on the cluttered floor and finds a shredder box still half full and slips it into the pocket of his cargo pants. Now, with a slightly higher level of confidence he steps into the hall and continues his search for Vinny. He is beginning to fear the worst since no other sounds have followed the horrible shriek that he heard earlier. He treads silently, opting for the element of surprise, rather than calling out and possibly alerting someone unfriendly to his presence.
***
Vinny is now down in the temporary holding cells that occupy the basement of the sheriffs station. The scream he heard moments ago vaguely reminds him of the previous night’s events but he can’t put his finger on the meaning. He wishes he hadn’t drunk so much then. He feels the memory is important but can’t quite pull it together. He is still hoping to find someone –preferably Lisa- that is possibly searching like him but too afraid to answer his calls, perhaps even running from his calls. Who knows what had happened here. Given what he saw at the cabin he could certainly relate to being scared silent.
The scream is his only clue to the location of his quarry since the footsteps had subsided or gotten too far away for him to hear. Armed with a flashlight in his left hand and the .357 magnum revolver in his right, Vinny scouts one cell after another. So far, all are empty and most are unlocked, that is, until he reaches the last one. Like most of the others, the door is unlocked and hanging ajar. He pans the light from one side of the small cell to the other. It appears empty, but an upturned mattress that rests against the combination wash basin/toilet obstructs his view of the back-right corner of the cell.
Vinny slowly nudges the heavy-duty steel barred cell door with his foot and though it offers some resistance and a complaint in the form of a loud squeal, it opens just enough for him to get his tall slender body through. He steps in, being careful to keep the beam of his light trained on the unexplored corner of the cell. He walks methodically, sidestepping debris that’s been spread across the floor of the cell. He wants to be certain to keep a solid footing should the need to run arise. As he nears the excessively stained mattress, his heartbeat quickens to a drum roll in his chest. Once in range he reaches out with the flashlight and uses it to lever the mattress back toward himself.
Vinny cocks the hammer of the revolver back and raises the gun with an outstretched arm until it’s level with his shoulder. He makes one last tug with the flashlight and the mattress falls toward him hitting the floor with a dull wallop and kicking up a cloud of dust from the seldom-occupied cell. The filth fills the air and envelopes his face. He instinctively shuts his eyes but he is too late. He drops the flashlight and reaches for his eyes that are already filled with dust and beginning to burn. Fortunately his grip on the weapon remains.
“Shit!” he realizes instantly what he’s done and fights the urge to keep his eyes closed.
The plastic flashlight bounces on the floor and momentarily catches the image of a face. Dark hair hanging long in front of it disguises its features and gives it a ghoulish appearance. Even through the dusty haze, it is enough to make Vinny shudder. Reflexively his right hand tenses around the gun and he inadvertently pulls the hair trigger of the magnum. The hammer falls and a bolt of lightening complete with thunderous crack erupts from the muzzle and shines a split second of bright light on his unintentional target. In that brief moment, Vinny catches a glimpse of a yellow windbreaker and his stomach knots with dread. He hears Lisa fall hard to the floor with a thud and he reaches for his fallen flashlight. His light has rolled behind him and back to the cell door. It now shines back down the corridor that had brought Vinny to this cell. He couldn’t escape the irony of his location if in fact Lisa lies dead behind him.
“No, No, No God No!” his eyes –previously wet from the airborne irritants now begin to flow with guilt and despair.
He bends to retrieve his light, which begins to flicker appare
ntly damaged by the fall. Vinny returns the gun to his waistband to free his right hand and raps the flashlight a couple of times until the beam once again shines brightly.
Vinny turns to Lisa hoping it isn’t too late to administer some help but deep down knowing better. As he completes his spin, he discovers her standing on the fallen mattress nose to nose with him. The stench of death rises off of her like a slaughterhouse butcher after a full day of hard labor. He recognizes the look in her eyes as well as the yellow halos around her pupils as she stands so close to him now that the flashlight is no longer necessary. Lisa’s face bears a striking resemblance to Vanessa’s -post psychotic break. She had that same unhinged look that Vanessa did when she fed her freakish baby through her torn womb, the only difference being a missing three-inch triangle of scalp, skull and brain that had been blown off of Lisa’s head by the magnum revolver. Red, bloodstained teeth smile at Vinny, sardonically.
Vinny reaches for his waist with his right hand while his left brings the flashlight crashing to Lisa’s temple with such force the plastic shatters into pieces and the light is instantly extinguished with a hollow pop. Before Vinny can reach the gun in his waistband, he feels a beastly-strong hand grip his left shoulder and squeeze. Bright flashes of pain ripple through his left arm and up his neck like a red-hot soldering iron and he stumbles a step backward… Lisa follows. While Lisa –no longer standing on the mattress- adjusts her bone-crushing grip lower on his arm Vinny steadies himself enough to pull the .357 free from his waistband. He places it flush against Lisa’s gut and unloads the five remaining bullets with a series of muffled wet thwumps. Blood and bile erupt back at Vinny covering his hand and spraying into his face. By the third shot, Lisa has loosened her grip and Vinny manages to wedge his searing left arm between them, which he uses to push her backward toward the fallen mattress. As he’d hoped, the mattress catches the back heel of her right shoe and sends her tumbling to the floor. Her head –minus the missing triangular chunk- smashes against the side of the commode on the way down. Vinny waivers from the pain delivered by Lisa’s crushing grip. He turns and stumbles to the door. His eyes have adjusted to the darkness and through a fog, he now sees a crumpled sheet on the floor and wedged under the cell door. He heads for the sheet with the intention of turning it into a sling for his left arm. Given the haze of pain he’s under the few steps to the door are increasingly hard. He reaches for the sheet and pulls it. Again, the door squeals.
One Blink From Oblivion Page 7
