Of Sudden Origin - Part 4 The Crucible

by Harwood, C. Chase

  Ben had decided to remain on the roof to keep the first watch. He was uncomfortable with all of these folks anyway. His people were gone, and he found himself adrift in his own backyard. Staying focused on a mission was the only thing that kept him from deep depression. His faith had been deeply shaken, and he found that sitting on the roof with that big sky overhead gave him the time and the space to confront his merciless god.

  Nikki realized that she had dumped the pilot’s radio with the rest of her gear up the road. She cursed her haste and thoughtlessness. It was dumb things like that that got people killed. Everyone tried to offer forgiveness with the exception of Aaron, who just about had a fit. It was Susan who reminded him that they had all dumped their gear in haste. “It could have been any one of us.”

  “Bullshit!” yelled Aaron, “She started running off with practically no explanation! What were we supposed to do?”

  Everyone chose to ignore this melt down, cutting the man some slack, despite his annoying whine. After all, they were frightened out of their wits too. The anxiety was overwhelming, even for the most resolute among them.

  They had one logistical problem: the janitor’s room with the roof ladder was over near the gymnasium at the opposite end of the school. If there was a break in and they had to seal themselves inside the cafeteria, the person on the roof would be cut off. A solution didn’t present itself and they decided that there were only so many contingencies that they could handle. They had a blood exchange to do, with no time left to waste.

  Nikki and Jon were guided to lie down on separate cots. As the catheters were inserted, great care was taken to avoid exposure to Jon’s blood. They figured he had about nine hours left, tops, before he would start experiencing the fever. Of course he had been running around after Fiends, barricading the cafeteria - no way to calculate if the extra exercise had any negative effect, shortening the window. The one hope they held onto was the time it took for the bacteria to actually enter the nervous system. It was the last step in the infectious assault, when the brain began to be permanently altered. If they could arrest some of the onslaught by removing Jon’s infected red cells, perhaps what was left of his own immune reaction would jump in along with Nikki's, giving him even more time. The whole concept was throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what would stick, so they strapped Jon to the cot in the likely event that nothing did. Nikki promised that this time, she would be the one to end it if he succumbed.

  While they finished prepping, Aaron calmed himself by pedantically waxing on for the laymen in the room. “This process is also used to help patients with sickle cell anemia; where malformed red blood cells block blood vessels, cutting off the nutrient supply and damaging internal organs. Interestingly, sickle cell, so called for the C shaped red blood cells that are the hallmark of the disease, is an evolutionary reaction to malaria, which, as you probably know, is a tropical and subtropical disease. That’s why…”-

  “Burnbaum,” said Decker, “Give it a rest. Find a correlation between FND-z and malaria in your own head and save us the headache.”

  “Preposterous,” said Aaron, “FND-z is a straight case of genetic manipulation resulting in a bacteria. The two are mutually exclusive. I’m not one for smoking dope, Rick, but when you’re done, why don’t you pass me the pipe.”

  “Aaron, I’ll happily shove it right up your pompous ass.”

  “Alright, alright,” said Susan, “Let’s focus on the task before us.”

  It was decided that Steven would be excused from any further duty. His kids were quite rightly terrified to be out of his presence, even for a moment. After determining that Amanda’s scrapes were just that - scrapes, the family was allowed to huddle in a tent set up in the cafeteria. Steven found himself reading Black Beauty out loud to them by flashlight, and he was secretly grateful to be taken away by the narrator-horse’s tail of trial, tribulation and human goodwill.

  Ben saw the first movement just before the change in watch. He and Tran had set up a blind on the top of the gymnasium; the high point of the school’s roof system. With an air-conditioning unit on one side of him and an easy-up with a green tarp laid out over some lawn chairs on the other, he figured he was pretty well hidden and hoped that a passing Fiend wouldn’t notice his perch. So it was very disconcerting that one stepped out of the burned tree line and stared straight at him. It was yet another youth; a female this time and he could see it was pregnant. He watched its eyes scan the base of the school, searching for a way to get to him. Fortunately there were no exterior ladders, the architects knowing full well the curiosity of children and the liability issues thereof. Then another female stepped out of the woods. It was carrying an infant child. Something didn’t look quite right with the baby and Ben lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes. The baby turned and looked straight at him. Its eyes were huge and glowed at him like a hungry jungle cat. It had pointy overly large ears that turned and focused on him as well. Suddenly his mind’s eye saw his own image, perched atop the school. His senses became overloaded with sights, sounds, and smells. He could feel the arms of a woman holding him, a scratchy sweater against his side, and he dropped the binoculars with an involuntary scream.

  It glanced at the female next to It - the Other that had the belly. It would soon have a baby Other slide out of its fuck hole just like the one in its own arms. The females acknowledged the big screaming Fresh One on the roof, yearning to bite its fat fresh tongue, taste the blood gushing forth. Its breasts ached and it looked down on the infant Other. It had to make it feed so the ache would go away. While the Fresh One screamed on the roof, It lifted the dirty sweater above Its breast and coaxed the infant Other’s mouth to the swollen teat. The small one took Its focus off the Fresh One, which then immediately stopped screaming and started sobbing instead. The mother was able to make the connection that the Small One had this affect on the Fresh Ones, and it loved to observe them fall into confusion. It was frustrating that this one was out of reach, but more Others were close or on the way. It and the Other standing next to It would find a way in. They always did.

  The male with the spiteful feelings stood behind the female that held the infant and stroked itself, thinking that it wanted to bend her over and…. It hated the infant Other. It hated the way it showed its sharp teeth and cackled as it made It eat the worst parts: the gristle and tendons, sometimes just dirt and sticks. It had broken several teeth on small rocks and Its mouth and jaw always ached, always a reminder of its tormentor. It hated when the infant was in its head. It waited and waited for the female Other that led them to put the infant Other down, turn her back. It would smother it, fuck it and bite its throat out. Oh how It longed to bite the throat out of the little one who enjoyed making It suffer so. But the female Other that led them never put the infant down. The infant wouldn’t let her.

  As Tran came up through the roof hatch, he saw that Ben was holding his head and crying softly. The Fiends switched their gaze to the new piece of meat. Tran saw them at once and instinctively ducked out of sight. He whispered, “Ben…Ben, what the fuck?”

  Ben glanced at Tran. “Don’t come up here. The devil will try to steal your soul.”

  Tran took another glance. More began to appear through the trees, all stopping and looking up at the roof, then the building as a whole. The bulk of the building was probably only fourteen feet tall, the gym maybe twenty. It was too tall to climb up on, but with a little innovation a human would easily discover a way to overcome fourteen feet. Tran hoped that they weren’t smart enough to sort that out.

  Almost as one, the group of Fiends looked to their left toward the South. Tran looked too and was dismayed to see more Fiends coming up the road. There were dozens of them.

  “Ben. Look at me. Pull yourself together!” Ben stopped crying and looked at Tran, focusing only on Tran. “I don’t think the blind is working. We’re surrounded. I think you should come down, get out of sight and maybe they’ll go away.”

  “They
ain’t goin’.”

  “How can you know? Come on. Come down.”

  “Had one stand vigil outside our house for three days till we finally broke and ran, trying to get to the church. Thing drank the water right out of our birdbath when it got thirsty. Tackled my wife, Clare. I couldn’t stop. There were more. Had to keep runnin’.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sheriff Hill freed her of the possession.” He looked at the sky. “Clare, I best come see you soon. Can’t put it off anymore, God forgive me.”

  Tran didn’t know what to do. He felt totally exposed - all those eyes watching him. They had approached in silence, but now a chorus of screeches, wails, and laughter was building and the assault on his ears was more than he could bear. He needed to get off of this roof.

  Ben saw his hesitation, said, “I’m fine up here. You go back down and arrange a relay. Someone pokes their head up every few minutes or so and I’ll give ’em the news.”

  “I guess that’s okay.”

  “Go down now, before they try to steal your soul too. I’ve got God on my side. The two of us will fight this together.” Ben popped up for a quick scan using only his peripheral vision, his mind cataloging shapes, avoiding anything that might be another one of the devil children. He didn’t want to make eye contact with another one again and he quickly popped down.

  Tran hustled back to the cafeteria. The sounds coming from the outside had been enough to inform everyone about the deteriorating situation. Their moment of lighter breathing was crushed as the weight of claustrophobia filled the room. On the positive side, the blood exchange was nearly complete. Nikki had the last of the stored O negative hooked up to her while Jon had moved on to the A.

  Tran asked, “How are you guys feeling?”

  “Other than a sore arm, I don’t feel much different,” said Jon.

  “Same for me,” said Nikki. “Maybe a bit tired.”

  Decker said, “In another hour or so, you should feel pretty good. You can get up and walk around. Well, not you, Jon. You’ll obviously have to remain strapped down until we’re sure you’re out of the woods.”

  “I don’t know if we’ve got another hour,” said Tran. “There’s so many of them out there.”

  They worked out a relay system: Tran would stand below the roof hatch and occasionally pop up to check with Ben. Christy would sit at a bend in the corridor between the janitor closet and the cafeteria, and Aaron would hang out by the cafeteria door. The others would try to nap for a few hours and then they’d switch. The children asked to be involved in the relay part and tried to treat it like a game.

  The rest of the day passed this way; the continuing arrival of more infected. By dusk the refugees had lost count; the infected standing well back from the building. Experience had taught their leader that Fresh Ones sitting on roofs invariably meant guns.

  The refugees ate their meals on an individual level. With appetites almost non-existent, eating was a job, solely for energy. At eight o’clock, Jon began showing signs of a fever. It had been eleven-and-a-half hours since he’d been bitten, and as some had feared, the vigorous exercise seemed to have sped up the process. Nikki had been up and around for a while, but only went as far as the cafeteria entrance to participate in the relay. Now she paced the room to the point of distraction.

  Jon watched her worried movements and finally said, “You’re making me dizzy. Maybe you should read a book or something.”

  “Sorry.” She sat and noticed her leg bouncing until she firmly put a hand on it.

  The Fiendish howls, shrieks and laughter continued to fill the air and they sat in stony silence, trapped with it, their nerves under constant assault.

  When Jon’s temperature reached one-o-five, he began to toss his head with delirium. Decker packed frozen pieces of meat around the man, trying to keep the fever at a safe level. He refrained from giving him aspirin; hoping that this time, the fever was a sign of the body’s defenses winning. They would monitor his temperature and remove the meat when it reached one hundred four.

  By ten o’clock Jon’s fever had come down to one-oh-two on its own and he opened his eyes with some clarity.

  Decker asked, “Do you know your name?”

  “Jon Washington. I’m a reporter stuck in an elementary school cafeteria and I’m waiting to be eaten alive.”

  At eleven o’clock Jon was suddenly, violently, projectile vomiting. He turned his head away from his friends to keep the potentially lethal liquid from them and heaved until yellow bile was all that he could produce. He was left exhausted and covered with chills as the temperature took hold again.

  Susan said, “I haven’t seen this. Its possible that he is suffering from a secondary bug - from the transfusion perhaps. We can’t be sure of the validity of the blood that was in that fridge.”

  “Oh for Christ sake,” said Decker, parting Jon’s sweaty head bandage with a latex gloved hand. “Look at this. The bite’s getting all infected.”

  Christy said, “There’s Vancomycin with the other antibiotics. We know it won’t stop FND-z, but…”

  “I say we try it,” said Decker, “Who knows? If Nikki's blood is giving the little bastards a fight they can’t handle, maybe a shot of the hard stuff will do them in; along with whatever else has got him. We’ve got to put him on saline anyway or he’ll die from dehydration.”

  Nikki broke in, “Jon, you still with us?”

  Jon nodded through pain and discomfort. “Hurt all over.”

  An hour later, the howling outside stopped, the silence sudden and unnerving. A minute later, Aaron poked his head in the door, his eyes affright, his fists clenching and unclenching. “The word from the roof is that the infected are closing in.” His tenor became that of a frightened boy. “They seemed to be waiting for total dark. There was a moon, but clouds came and made it go away.”

  Nikki let out a long breath. “I’m going up to have a look. You guys should do whatever you have to do.” She nodded at Jon. “It’s not like any Cain’s that I’ve seen.”

  “She’s right,” said Susan, “He’d be incoherent by now, bordering on coma.”

  Nikki passed Teddy at the bend in the corridor and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re doing a good job, Marine.” When she got to the janitor’s room and began climbing the ladder, Tran whispered, “We’re fucked.”

  A breeze blew drying ash through the air as she climbed through the hatch, and she found herself squinting to avoid it. She could just make out Ben, who briefly pointed a powerful flashlight at the field behind the school. The beam caught the motion of several bodies running toward the school then disappearing from sight as they fell in next to the building.

  Ben said, “They’ve been doing that for five minutes now. I’ve lost count how many. There’s no point in shooting. I wouldn’t hit the dirt if I was aiming at it. Afraid the time has come. Come at last.”

  Nikki hefted the SCAR and quietly walked to the side of the roof and peered over the edge. What she saw made her new blood run cold. There was a dark mass of moving limbs and torsos. They were building a human pyramid. It was chaotic, but they were intentionally using each other to make a ramp of sorts.

  “Shit!” She fired a few rounds into the pack and started running back toward the hatch. “Ben! They’re climbing up. Get the fuck over here! We’ve got to lock this door!”

  The air was suddenly filled with cries and hollers. The monsters started hopping up on the roof near the front entry behind her. Nikki spun and shot one, but there were five more running in earnest, some tripping over and destroying the SOS made from sleeping-bags. More popped up on the roof from several different points. They would be overrun in seconds.

  “Ben!”

  She saw Tran climbing up out of the corner of her eye, shoved him back, “Get back down there!”

  Ben spread his arms and yelled out, “Come to me!” And they did, vectoring right for him. He blasted one in the face, re-racked and
winged another in the arm. He looked hard at Nikki and for a moment she was mesmerized by the intensity of his gaze, almost as if his eyes somehow got closer to her. “You are an Archangel sent by Him!” he yelled. Then, as he was about to be tackled, he put the shotgun under his own chin.

  The shot coincided with Nikki slamming the hatch down.

  “What about Ben?” yelled Tran.

  “He’s with his God now.”

  Nikki locked off the hatch and flinched at the sound of pounding fists. They heard glass breaking as they stepped out of the janitor’s room. A rock shattered a window down the hall, followed by another. Teddy squealed in fright.

  “Run!”

  They careened past rows of lockers. A classroom door swung open and Nikki slammed it back into the entering Fiend’s face. They made it back to the cafeteria with the sound of shattering glass echoing down the halls.

  “Ben?” asked Steven, pulling his son through the door.

  “Gone,” said Tran as he and Steven pulled the doors shut, tying them together with the same heavy rope that had held the gymnasium doors.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Assault

  Storm and McNeil were at their wit’s end. They’d covered and recovered the area that any northbound people on foot could make it to. Outside the unlikely event that the scientists marched directly through the dense burned forests, they’d covered every road and expanded it as time went on. They saw lots of Fiends, but no signs of people holed up against them. There were no reports of any cars making it to the border in the last two days. The Armed Forces were in full assault, having progressed twenty miles across the fertile Saint Lawrence flatlands before getting bogged down in some of the larger towns and villages. The battle for Saint-Georges was sucking up a huge amount of equipment and personnel. Despite new tactics designed to bait and ambush the infected, just as often the soldiers found themselves being ambushed – and now there was some kind of mind control/ESP thing happening that was throwing the whole operation on its head. There were refugees; people who had managed to seal themselves off from attack, but they were extremely few and there was no word of the scientists. The only option the searchers had left was to keep covering the same territory or assume that the scientists had met a gruesome end. The odds of that were looking extremely likely. They had landed for the night at a forward air operations base near Sainte Marie where they could refuel, eat, and crash-out in the back of the helicopter for a few hours. They managed to get an Air Force mechanic to look at their bird, and discovered a nearly unserviceable fuel filter. The thing had been a ticking time bomb and could have resulted in a stall mid-flight.