by Phil Maxey
Marina appeared at the other end of the room. “I checked out the wards, there’s a number of dead in there, but thankfully nothing else.” She nodded towards the dead man’s shoes. “Another one?”
“Yeah.” Anna looked around at the state-of-the-art blood analysis machinery, high-power microscopes, and refrigeration units and smiled. “This is perfect.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“Umm, sure, have you done any blood work before?”
“All I know is there are four types.”
“Actually eight, taking into account positive or negative.” The doctor clicked on her radio. “Joel, are you there? I need your help with something. Over.”
Marina looked confused. “Why do you need Joel?”
“I need his blood.”
Joel stood looking at a room within a room. The inner area was a large cage with rows of shelves. Most were empty, but there were still some semi-automatic rifles, and what looked like stun grenades. What he really wanted though was ammo. He walked along the narrow hallway, until he spotted a large unit up against the far wall, with various calibers printed on numerous drawers.
He turned and looked down at the door with a keypad entry system.
“Why couldn’t you had been a padlock. Oh well…” He took five paces back, aimed the Glock at the lock, and fired hoping the ricochet wouldn’t hit him. The blast briefly filled the air with more noise than his ears could reject, and he walked forward and tried the wire mesh door. It wasn’t opening.
“Great…”
Outside, a few hundred yards from the west wall of the armory, Claire, Kelly, Evan, and Hardin looked at two single-engine high-wing planes.
“Shame none of us know how to fly,” said Claire.
“Err… yeah,” said Evan.
“Maybe Joel does?” said Kelly. Her grandmother frowned at her.
About twenty yards north of them were two large empty hangers. To their west sat an expanse of runway and behind, to their south, was a single-story residence which looked as if it had been recently lived in.
“We should check out that place,” said Kelly, looking at the light gray walls and closed drapes which hung in the windows.
“Yeah, you do that, I’m going to have a look inside these hangers,” said Hardin marching off.
“I’ll go with him, you two see if there’s any food in that place,” said Claire, looking at the home.
Evan and Kelly nodded, then walked across the dry and cracked concrete, onto a brown dirt track which led up to a small garden, full of rocks and small bushes. They both raised their guns as they approached the white, paint-chipped front door.
Kelly used the barrel of her shotgun to knock on the wood. There was no reply. Evan stepped over the plants and tried to look through what gaps there were between the drapes.
“Can’t see shit inside. Too dark. I’ll look around the other side.” He walked off around the side of the house.
Kelly tried again, this time using her closed fist to hammer away at the wood, but the result was the same. She went to step to her left, to meet Evan halfway around the other side, when she realized something was out of place. A shadow was now being cast over her.
Turning, she went to scream, but before her lungs reached full capacity, the man with the baboon-like front teeth and black slits for eyes lunged forward, grabbing her by the neck, and sunk his teeth into her shoulder. The idea to fight back was fleeting, and only lasted a few seconds as her pulse started to weaken.
On the opposite side of the building, Evan looked through the window, and shook his head disappointedly. A noise, like something scraping came from back where he started. “Kelly? You got the door open?”
He sighed, then walked around the narrow path to the front of the house. There was no one there. He looked around. “Kelly?” He walked to the front door, and went to push on it, but before his hand could land on the wood, it opened and a claw grabbed his jacket and pulled him into the shadows. The door then swiftly closed behind him.
Bill watched Jess throw a stick into the bushes, and a disinterested Flint looking up at her, and laughed. He turned to the gray-haired woman next to him, expecting her to be watching the same scene he was, but instead she was looking in the opposite direction. He tried to hide his sigh. Even without him asking, he knew she was thinking about her husband. “Reg was a good man. I don’t know what Evan and I would have done without his help fixing up the old place.”
Mary turned and smiled but remained silent.
He looked back to the child trying to get the dog to respond. “She’s a remarkable young child. Reminds me that there is still hope for all of us.”
Mary smiled once more and nodded. She then opened her side door and got out. He sighed again, this time not holding it in.
In the distance, Joel appeared and walked across to him. “You got any wire cutters or any kind of acetylene cutting equipment?”
Claire’s voice came through Joel and Bill’s radio which they both ignored as the message was aimed at her granddaughter.
Bill pushed his door open. “I have both!”
As Bill walked to the back of his pickup, pulling the tarpaulin back, the tone of Claire’s voice made Joel pay more attention. He held the radio near his mouth. “Claire? What’s the problem? Over.”
“I’m not getting any response from Kelly. She went with—” She had to take breaths between words. “— Evan to check out that house.”
Bill stopped moving boxes around and looked up at Joel.
Joel turned around and looked at the mundane-looking flat building about a hundred yards away. Then spotted Claire running across the road towards it at roughly the same distance from him.
He ran back to his pickup and picked up the M4. Bill was already jogging towards the house with his shotgun in hand. Joel caught up to him, and along with Claire they all arrived at the door at the same time.
“Kelly? Evan?” shouted Joel at the front door. He pushed at the painted wood, but the door remained closed. He briefly looked behind. “Stand back.” Then slammed his shoulder into the door, making it break from its frame and fly into the room. He immediately smelled the blood, but before he could react a red-soaked individual flew out of the gloom, its claws heading towards his head. He fired the rifle, but due to the closeness of the vamp, the bullets missed, instead slamming into the far wall of the room inside.
The creature grabbed at the rifle, trying to tear it from Joel’s grasp as he fell backwards onto the dirt path. Gun blasts echoed out, narrowly missing Joel, but slammed into the creature’s torso making it fall backwards. It went to lunge forward again, but Joel moved quicker and put two shots into its skull, rendering it dead.
Before its body had hit the ground, Claire had run inside, screaming her granddaughter’s name.
Joel and Bill quickly followed.
Both Kelly and Evan were laid rag-doll-like on the floor of the living room, almost lost amongst rubbish. Claire was kneeling next to Kelly, trying to make sense of her granddaughter’s injuries, while Bill was doing the same with Evan.
“Has she got a pulse?” shouted Joel.
Claire slid her fingers around the moist blood on her granddaughter’s neck. “Yes, I think so.”
Joel then switched his attention to Bill, who nodded back to him. He clicked on his radio. “Anna? We need you outside, at the old house near the pickups. A vamp got to Evan and Kelly.”
*****
Kelly and Evan both laid unconscious on hospital beds in the medical wards. Both of their faces were covered in bruises, and dark red spots seeped through the bandages that covered their bodies. Nearby, Claire, Mary, and Bill were allowing their blood to be siphoned off into clear bags.
Joel looked out the windows to the airport in the distance, and the planes on the runway.
I should have watched them closer. This is my fault.
A noise made him turn around.
“Could I have a word?” said Anna. Joel noticed he
r skin was looking visibly grayer than the day before.
He nodded and they both left the ward and walked into the laboratory. He looked around at the expensive-looking equipment. “Better than the lab at Bellweather.”
“Unfortunately, most of this stuff requires a power outlet so it’s pretty useless. But I found an older microscope in one of the cupboards, and I’ve been able to study my own blood with that.”
Joel walked forward and sat on a stool. “What did you find?”
She leaned up against a counter. “What I’ve seen in a hundred other slides. My blood cells changing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, I did a lot of thinking when we were driving up here. Dying will kind of make you do that. And there’s something I want to try. It’s a long shot, but I got nothing left to lose.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to transfuse some of your blood into me.”
Joel wasn’t sure how to react. “But that could kill you?”
“Well you said you are O-negative, making you a universal donor. So, I’m fine on that front, but yes, if the virus in your blood doesn’t react the way I hope it does, then it will not go well for me. But the alternative is changing, and dying anyway, so…”
“Okay. And if it works…”
“Then the virus in me might mutate to be similar to yours, and the scourge will be slowed in me, like it is in you.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Roll up your sleeve.”
Joel did as asked.
“First, I want to take a sample of your blood and combine it with other infected blood and look to see on this old thing—” she rested her hand on the grime-laden microscope. “— Any reaction.” She pulled a new syringe from a packet and took a syringe worth of blood. She then placed a glass slide that already had a drop of blood on it into the microscope, and switched on her flashlight, with the beam pointing at the slides. She then put her head down and looked through the lens, introducing Joel’s blood into the droplet.
Silence fell across the room as she switched between different magnifications.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, while focusing the microscope.
Joel didn’t have to ask what she was referring to. “It’s my job to keep you all safe, and I’m doing a piss poor job of that.” He sighed. “Like I did from the start of this madness.”
“We now live in a world of probably millions of homicidal killing machines, and there’s one of you. The odds are not in your favor.” She looked up at him and smiled. “But we appreciate the effort.”
He smiled in reply, and she looked back into the microscope.
“What are Kelly’s and Evan’s chances?”
“They’ll both make it. I think the vamp wanted to keep them alive, so he could feed on them slowly.”
“Lucky them…”
“Yeah, but obviously, they are both infected and will change. The only hope they have, is this works with your blood. For now, though, they need normal non-infected blood. We need to replace what the vamp drained from them.”
“When will they wake?”
“They both received a lot of trauma, but their swelling is starting to go down, so hopefully soon.”
“Anything magical happening with our blood?”
She sighed. “No. I’m going to need some time to study this closely. I know you wanted to make it to Salt Lake City by sundown, but Kelly and Evan…”
Joel got off the stool. “Need to rest here. We haven’t searched all of this building yet, and there’s an arms room in the basement I need to get into.” He looked at the watch on his wrist. “Sunset’s in two hours. I better get started.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Joel looked across the large, mostly empty hall. Across his back hung a fully loaded M4 semi-automatic rifle, one of a few they salvaged from the room in the basement, as well as more than enough ammo. The light behind the windows, which were perched ten feet above the polished wooden floor, was fading, heralding the coming of night. Despite him having had hardly any rest in a few days, he started to feel invigorated. It was a sensation he was getting used to having around this time in the evening.
He walked over to one of five camping beds that was positioned against the nearby wall and bent over and picked up a dog-eared old paperback. From what he could gather from the blurb at the back of the book it was an end of the world tale, involving monsters and a group of people trying to survive. He wondered if whoever was reading it, saw it as a kind of instruction manual, or maybe it just took their minds from the real end of world event.
He dropped it onto a ruffled green sleeping bag and clicked on his radio. “How’s things looking? Over.”
“All the doors and windows are locked or barricaded. Heading back up to the first floor. Over,” said Marina.
Between them, they had explored the rest of the building and found no vamps.
By the time Joel walked into the medical ward, Marina was already there, and the others had made themselves comfortable on the remaining beds. All of the blinds across the windows had been pulled down, but he walked across the room and pulled one back slightly to look out to the vehicles which were now parked closer to the main entrance and the flat emptiness beyond. The highway they came in on stretched for miles into the approaching night, with just dirt, faded grass, and the occasional tree and shrub adding any detail to the farm land which enveloped it. There was nothing out there, yet he couldn’t help but feel something was coming.
He looked across to Kelly and Evan, both of which were conscious but sleeping, and Claire and Bill nearby who were doing their best to hide the terror of almost losing the people that meant the most to them.
The ward door opened and Anna appeared, beckoning Joel over and outside. Without talking, she walked back into the lab with him following.
“You got news?” said Joel.
“Not really. I’ve not seen any difference in the cells of my blood from the infusion of yours.”
“So, it has no effect then?”
“It might be having an effect, but it’s not at a level that I can see with the equipment I have.”
“So…”
She sat heavily on the stool and rolled up her shirt sleeve. “I’m going to need a fresh sample of your blood. Which I will inject into myself, and then we will see what happens.”
Joel walked forward, taking his jacket off. “You’re sure about this?”
She forced a smile. “Like I said, nothing left to lose.” She picked up a new syringe. “The worse that could happen is nothing happens.”
Joel sat on a stool next to her, and she took his blood again, and injected it into her arm.
She dabbed a bit of gauze onto the insertion, then held it there.
“That it?”
“That’s—” Her expression tightened, and her eyes became slits.
Joel held her arm as she almost fell forward. “What is it? What’s happening?”
Her head flung backward as her whole body convulsed. Joel fought with her arms and legs and lowered her to the ground. “Anna? Can you hear me.”
Her mouth opened and closed as if searching for air. Marina burst into the room and walked around the first counter to see him trying to keep the doctor on the ground. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. She injected herself with—”
Anna’s eyes turned black, and before Joel could reach, her hand sprung up and grabbed him by the throat. As he struggled to break her grip, she got back to her feet.
Marina pulled her gun and aimed it at the woman that now was almost lifting Joel off the ground.
Despite his attempts to get air into his lungs, he threw his left arm out, waving at Marina not to fire. With both of his hands on Anna’s one, he pulled her grip from his throat, but was unable to stop her thrusting her hands out and sending him flying backwards against the refrigeration units.
“I’m going to fire, Joel!” said Marina as the doctor’s
head whipped around to face her.
“No!” shouted Joel, picking himself up and walking forward. “She’s just turned, I got this.”
Anna moved her bottom jaw around, trying to find room for the larger canines in her mouth, she then looked firmly at Joel.
“Anna, you can control this.” He had no idea if she could, but if his blood did have any effect on her, he needed to know.
Bill and Claire appeared behind Marina near the door. Anna’s dark eyes flicked between them and Joel.
“Look at me,” said Joel. She did. “Your name is Anna Faraday, you worked at the Bellweather Medical Center.”
Her expression grew confused.
“I’m Joel—” He pointed behind him to Marina and the others. “— That’s Marina, she has a daughter, called Jess…”
The doctor shook her head as if trying to rid the pain of a headache from her skull, and her eyes and teeth returned to normal human versions. She fell back against the counter, spreading her hands out to stop her from falling further.
“I… I changed… I’m sorry, the urge to… it was overwhelming.”
Joel moved forward and helped her back to the stool. Marina tentatively put her gun back in her pants. Claire frowned, shaking her head and went back outside.
Anna looked up at Joel and across to Marina. “I wanted to kill you both…” She hung her head. “I can’t do this…”
Joel put his hand on her shoulder. “We don’t know what effect my blood is going to have. But first, we need to find you some animal blood.”
*****
Anna spread her arms into the air and swung around. “I’ve never felt so alive!” Her rifle knocked against her back.
