by Barry Napier
At the start of the second beer, he started thinking about his family in Florida. He was sure his mother was worried out of her mind and that his father was busy pontificating about who the US military should go blow up in retaliation for these heinous attacks. Without much enthusiasm, Ray checked his phone and saw that there was still no service. His battery was sitting at forty percent, so that, at least was good. Looking at the battery indicator, he then realized that despite the anarchy that had erupted in the airport, the generator did seem to still be working. That made him wonder if he would be able to maybe make a landline call. He could call his folks to let them know that he was okay. He could call the police and request help. He could—
The glass was empty again. Jeez, he thought. How long have I been sitting here?
He looked to the glass and then to his phone, which read 2:25. He wasn’t positive, but he thought it couldn’t have been any later than 11:30 when he started cowering behind the bar—noon at the absolute latest. And now that he thought of it, he was pretty sure he hadn’t heard a single noise from the other side of the bar since he’d started on his first beer.
Slowly, Ray made his way back over to the taps. He filled his glass for a third time and said, “Put it on my tab, would ya?” He snickered at this, and it was a noise that made him wonder if he might be going mad.
With a heavy sigh, Ray got to his feet. He looked out to the bodies, the woman still reaching blindly into the pub as if the answer to all of her problems had been inside. Ray slowly put the glass to his lips and sipped as he looked to the bodies beyond her. Yeah, the beer had calmed his nerves but his body still understood what it was being exposed to—what it was going to have to face. As he brought the glass away from his face, it was shaking slightly as his arms trembled.
With the glass still in his hand and the alcohol slowly muting his senses, Ray stepped out from behind the bar and entered the unreal tableau waiting for him.
***
For a moment, it was like looking at a literal sea of dead bodies. There were a few places where the bodies had fallen over one another, making a morbid pile. Before he started walking in search of a landline phone, he made himself take it all in. Maybe it really wasn’t as bad as he thought it was. Sure, there were thousands of dead people. But they were dead. This wasn’t some end of the world movie where everyone became zombies. None of these people were going to hurt him. And if he could just keep his eyes trained on the walls, looking for any signs that might point him towards a phone, he’d be able to avoid the grisliest sights anyway.
He took a shaky breath and took his first step; it took him around the woman that had fallen just outside of the pub. Beyond here, there were five other people. Ray started to look away from them, and that’s when the smell truly hit him for the first time. It wasn’t just the smell of vomit, but a smell that reminded him of sick days at home from school, the smell of the sheets he’d sweated on when he’d broken a fever—only multiplied by about a thousand. It was the smell of sickness, and it was so strong that it nearly knocked him over.
Gasping against it, Ray pulled the collar of his shirt up over his nose. He breathed through his mouth and while it helped a bit, the smell was still there. It was almost like a physical presence, a ghoul escorting him through this corridor of death. He took his second step and then his third. When he took his fourth, he had to extend his leg a bit further to keep from stepping on a man wearing a Philadelphia Phillies shirt. He was wearing a Phillies cap, too, but it had fallen off when he had collapsed to the ground. It lay a few feet away, tilted on its side in a pool of someone else’s sick.
To hell with this, Ray thought. Just get out of here. Go to the front exit and get out now…
He almost did, but he needed to find a phone. He figured there was a very good chance that even if he found one, there would be a dead line. The virus had come through Philly just like it had New York. The chances of active phone lines were slim to none. Still, he had to check. While he honestly wasn’t the sentimental type and usually didn’t care how much time elapsed between conversations or visits with his folks, he had to let his mother know he was okay. And he had to figure out a way to get out of this.
Wait, he thought. Why am I able to get out of this at all? Why didn’t I get sick? Why didn’t I die behind that bar, torn apart on the inside by the virus?
He had no idea why, but this thought scared him more than it relieved him. He wouldn’t allow himself to focus on it, though. He took another step forward and then another. The silence of the place was eerie. The only sound he could hear aside from his breathing inside the makeshift mask of his shirt collar was a slight dripping sound somewhere and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was.
Roughly twenty yards away from the pub, he came across a mother and her son, no more than seven years old, clutching at one another with dead hands. They’d both died sitting at the foot of a set of stairs leading up to the second-floor lookout. The boy’s face was very red and the woman had died with her head tilted and kissing her son’s head.
Tears stung Ray’s eyes and he habitually raised the glass of beer to his mouth, releasing his shirt collar. He drank deeply and then a gasp of sorrow came out of him. He dropped the beer and it thudded hollowly off the back of a dead man sprawled out at his feet. For a second, Ray thought he was going to puke but he managed to keep it down. He tore his eyes away from the sight of the mother and son and did his best to stick to his original plan.
Look at the walls, you idiot. These people are dead, not wax figures. They aren’t here for you to observe. Leave them peacefully and for the love of all that is holy do not look at them.
He did his best to abide by that good advice. Of course, he did have to look down every now and then to make sure he didn’t stumble over an extended arm or leg. About a minute or so after passing the mother and son, he came to another obstacle that he was unable to ignore. It seemed that a group of people had made a desperate attempt to keep the panicked military members at bay. Several civilians and a few men that looked to be airport security had pulled luggage racks and those little luggage-pulling carts across the concourse. A shootout had occurred here and Ray wondered if it might have been a strange sort of mercy to be taken out by bullets rather than the virus. At least five people had been killed during the gunfight. One of them looked to be one of the security guards he’d eavesdropped on in the Starbucks line just the night before. Another member of the battle, a young-looking man in military attire, was sprawled over the front end of one of the luggage carts with two holes in his forehead. The blood that oozed and trickled from the wounds was apparently the source of the dripping sound he’d been hearing.
Ray walked around the sad little roadblock, really wishing he hadn’t dropped his beer. In coming around the side of the barricade, his eyes went to the left and he felt instantly stupid. Up ahead, there was a gate that was partially clogged with dead bodies. But beyond them, just in front of the large picture windows that looked out onto the runway, was the kiosk that airport employees used to call flights and monitor the streams of people entering the jetbridge. He wasn’t sure how many he’d already passed, but he was pretty sure each of them had a landline phone.
He hurried over to the gate, tiptoeing over more bodies. When he came to the help kiosk and stepped behind it, he almost screamed. An elderly woman was behind the kiosk, flat on her back. She’d apparently gone there to be alone in her final moments. From the looks of it, her final moments had involved choking to death on her own vomit.
Ray shook his head as if trying to deny what he was seeing. He felt a sort of bending in his mind and a tension in his chest. He was breathing heavily as he looked away from the woman and to the area along the side of the kiosk. He spotted the phone and grabbed the receiver right away. He placed it to his ear and wasn’t at all surprised when he didn’t hear a dial tone. Rather than get immediately discouraged, he thought of the brief time he’d once worked in an office, editing promotional mater
ial for a computer company. Everything had been connected via phonelines for the office and if you wanted to call outside—say to order lunch or let a spouse know you were going to be working late—you had to dial 9 to get an outside line.
A brief flicker of hope blossomed in his chest, pushing away that bending in his mind and easing the tension on his chest. He pressed 9 on the pad and waited. A second passed, then two. Still, nothing. He pressed 9 again and got the same result. He then pressed it again and again, replacing his finger with a clenched fist until he was pounding at the phone’s cradle. In a fit of despair and anger, he picked the phone up and slammed it down on the kiosk. The back broke open and the receiver dropped to the floor, bouncing and swaying on the cord.
He stepped away from the kiosk and felt every emotion he’d ever imagined trying to rise to the surface. He rubbed at his eyes, willing himself to get a grip, to not break apart. There had to be someone here who could help him. There was no way he was the only one who had survived this. If he hadn’t caught the virus, surely there was someone else. Right?
He stepped away from the kiosk and looked around. He looked beyond the gate and the dead bodies there, to the concourse and the countless bodies there. There were dead people everywhere and there was no escape. Maybe he should have just stayed behind the bar. Maybe he should have kept drinking and drinking until he blacked out and then he could face this insanity later.
Well, you’re already out and about, he told himself. May as well get out of here. At least outside you’ll have fresh air and not be trapped in this huge freaking tomb…
He toyed with the idea for a moment. The only reason he did not jump on it right away was because he had no idea what he’d do once he got outside. He didn’t know the city well at all and if outside was in the same shape as inside…well, he wasn’t sure he was ready to face that reality just yet.
“One more round first,” he said quietly to himself. The sound of his lone voice in the large, vaulted spaces of the airport among so many dead was beyond creepy. It sent a shiver down his spine and made him cringe.
So then stop talking to yourself, you idiot, he told himself. Do you really think that’s going to make matters any bett—
“Hello?”
The voice came from behind him. It was soft and doubtful but it still made Ray jump. He turned so quickly that his right foot snagged on the underside of a dead man’s knee and he almost went falling down among three bodies. Had he fallen, he would have fallen right in the center of them, face to face with a man in a button-down shirt and tie. When he regained his balance, he looked back behind him. A woman was standing up among the rows and rows of the dead, about a gate’s distance away. She was wearing a purple tee shirt and a pair of stylish ripped jeans. Her face and dark blonde hair were splattered with blood.
“Hello…” she said again. “Are you okay? Are you safe?”
Ray wasn’t sure how to answer, so he did not filter what came out of his mouth. It was something he was usually guilty of and did not know it. “Safe, yeah,” he said. “Okay…far from it. You?”
The woman only nodded. She took a step toward him and then stopped. She seemed to think about something for a moment and then her eyes rolled into the back of her head. When she fainted, she went down in an almost whimsical way.
Before Ray knew what he was doing, he went running after her, dodging bodies as if they were hurdles on a track. There was someone else here, someone else alive. In that moment, that seemed far more important than the unnumbered dead all around him.
Chapter 21
Paul did not know what day it was anymore, but his watch read 3:37 p.m. the next time the door to his room came open. Right away, his knees seemed to fill with energy at the idea of trying to escape. The last time Dr. Jolly had come in, he’d more or less told him that the longer he remained here, the worse things were going to be for him. But he also recalled Jolly telling him how violent and desperate things were outside, as the whole operation was slowly coming apart.
Paul just happened to be standing when the door opened up. He’d finished up some basic stretches, a few sit-ups and push-ups less than five minutes ago and had been nervously pacing the room ever since then. He was standing against the rear wall as the door swung open. Two men entered, both dressed in protective suits. The man in front was Jolly and Paul was a little alarmed at how relieved he was to see the man’s face. He was carrying a small medical kit, the same kind that had been brought in on the occasions when his blood was drawn. The other man walked closely behind Jolly; he was taller by about six inches and the face Paul saw on the other side of the plastic screen looked tired and mean. His eyes were hardened and his mouth was drawn in a tight little line across the lower half of his face. When he stepped into the room, he closed the door behind him.
“How are you today, Mr. Gault?” Jolly asked.
“Fine,” he said. “Be better if I was out of here.”
“Based on the state of the rest of the East Coast at the moment, I doubt that’s true.”
“What do you want now?” Paul asked.
Jolly gave him a very brief smirk as the man behind him leaned against the wall by the door. He was carrying a smartpad that he was clearly having a hard time grasping through the protective gloves of the suit. Paul wondered how they typed anything in with those gloves on.
“Mr. Gault, are you going to be stubborn today?” Jolly asked.
That question told Paul everything he needed to know. The last time Jolly had been in when it had been only the two of them, Jolly had been very unofficial. Things had almost been causal between them and Jolly had admitted to his thoughts of somehow keeping an eye out for Paul and his travelling companions—maybe even trying to find a way for them to escape. The constant use of Mr. Gault and the putting on of an authoritative tone was an act…and a well performed one at that. Given that, Paul figured he should go ahead and play a part, too.
“Depends on what you need,” Paul said. He was still on his feet, eyeing the man on the other side of his little room. He seemed to be paying very little attention, as he was now doing his best to type something into the pad.
“More blood,” Jolly said, “And this will be the last time for quite a while.”
“A while? Why is that?”
“You’re going to be moved. Things here aren’t ideal anymore.”
“Moved where?” Paul asked. And now, though he knew Jolly was playing his part, he wondered if this was true. And if they did expect him to go along with being moved, did it mean any hope he had of going out on his own was a lofty dream at best?
“Tell you what,” Jolly said. “You give me the blood sample and then I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
“Sounds a little one-sided, doesn’t it?” Paul said.
“Mr. Gault, the man standing behind me is one of Ramsey’s top men. He’s with me to log some personal information to make your transfer easier. But he’s also been authorized to use physical force if he needs to. So please make this easy, okay? I personally don’t like the sight of violence.”
“You get blood, I get information,” Paul said. “That’s the deal?”
“Yes,” Jolly said. He set the medical kit on the edge of the bed. As he did, he looked to Paul. His eyes were wide and he spoke silently, really doing nothing more than moving his mouth in the hopes that Paul could read his lips. And Paul was pretty sure he was saying “Wait.”
Paul sat on the bed, making sure to sit closer to the edge by the door. He looked to the man with the pad and saw that he was looking right back. “I have just some very simple questions,” the man said.
“Fire away,” Paul said.
At the same time, he saw Jolly opening up the medical kit right beside him on the bed. There were syringes and cotton swabs and the usual things, but he also saw something else a little unexpected. There was a keycard—the same sort Jolly had used time and time again to enter and leave the room. The keycard had a woman’s face on it. She looked
somewhat familiar; he was pretty sure she was one of the original women they’d seen when they first arrived on site. The name was hidden by the other things in the kit. He tried to figure out why Jolly had it and the multitude of answers that came to him caused him to completely block out the tall man asking questions.
“Mr. Gault?” he said, irritated.
“Sorry. Repeat the question.”
“Your age?”
“Fifty-two.
“Are you currently on any sort of medications?”
“No,” Paul said. His eyes were back on Jolly. The doctor held his gaze and placed a hand on his arm, acting as he were swabbing the area off. If there was any doubt that Jolly was trying to aid him in an escape attempt, it was gone in that moment. He was not just acting in terms of personality, but in the reason he was there in the first place.
“Have you had the flu or any sort of upper respiratory infections in the past six months?”
The questions felt a little flimsy to Paul and he wondered what sort of strange comparative tools they were using to try to find a cure for the Blood Fire Virus. Still, he found himself answering the question, waiting for Jolly to tell him it was time to go. Paul quickly glanced at the tall man with the tablet again. Like a few of the other men Paul had seen while in containment—Hinkley and Ramsey came to mind—the man had a sidearm holstered on his right hip. It was fastened to the suit with some strange sort of attachment. The gun looked to be a basic M9, the gun he was pretty sure had been a basic go-to for most branches of the military for the better part of twenty-five years or so.
“I don’t think so,” Paul said. “I had the sniffles a few months ago. A cold, maybe. Not sure. Lasted about a day.”
Jolly was now continuing to go through the motions, pulling out a syringe and uncapping it. As he did, the tall man asked his next question.
