by Rob Horner
The clincher was the shot to center mass. A .380 wasn’t a .22 or a .25. There was real stopping power in the casing, enough to drive the round through bone and organs, even without a hollow-point tip. Supposing the bullet miraculously missed lungs and heart, there would still be splintered ribs and a shattered breastbone, all delivered with a force like being punched by Mike Tyson. The man should have been down, gasping for air, and wondering if the next painful breath was going to be his last.
But no, despite two gunshot wounds, he’d kept coming. It was the shot to the head—zombies, man, only a head shot will do it—which turned off little Bo’s lights and put him down for good.
So what? That doesn’t mean he was a zombie. The surest way to kill anyone was a bullet to the brain.
A thought started to form, a half-realized joke about how some politicians might survive because there wasn’t any brain in there to damage, but he let it slip away. Humor wasn’t his way of dealing with shock and it only served to make him more nervous rather than less.
His phone rang, startling him. It was Steve.
“Hey man, you didn’t decide to bail on me after getting my gun, did you?”
Jesse forced himself to breathe, just breathe, deeply and slowly.
“You there?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
It didn’t matter that Jesse Franks just had his personal world turned tits up, that he’d killed an American on American soil, or that said American might or might not have been a creature out of a nightmare movie. The bigger world still turned, and there was someone counting on him for help.
Three rounds. It took three rounds to bring down the man with the bad leg.
While Jesse tried to explain his delay to Steve, he fished three bullets out of his pocket to replace the spent rounds in the magazine.
“Oh my God!” Steve exclaimed. “Mark’s dead? He’s…he was my partner in here. He was with me until about four yesterday. Said he had to run to grab his lunch and never came back. I figured he got away. Like, until you showed up, he was my big hope. Maybe he got away. Maybe he’s going to call the cops or something and come get me out of here.”
“He said someone named Ray broke his back,” Jesse said.
“Well, the little guy you described sure as hell ain’t Ray. He’s a big ole boy, six and a half feet if he’s an inch. Built like a brick shithouse, too. One of the best damned mechanics I’ve ever seen. And don’t ever let his size or his job fool you. Boy’s smart as a whip. Only works here ‘cause he don’t need money. Be glad you didn’t meet him.”
“So, you don’t know who the little guy is?”
“If Mark said it’s Bo, I’d go on that. Bo was one of those guys you don’t know until you do, you get my meaning?”
Jesse did.
He’d known guys like that in the Army. Quiet, introverted types who might end up being the best friend you ever had, if you worked to build the relationship. Just don’t expect them to go out of their way to start anything.
Jesse felt better. Having someone to talk to helped. It centered him, restored his mental equilibrium.
Helped him face what was coming next.
“What am I looking at when I get to the terminal?”
Steve told him.
* * * * *
Jesse resisted the urge to sprint across the hot tarmac from the maintenance building to the terminal. It wasn’t necessary. There weren’t snipers on the roofs trying to draw a bead on him. This wasn’t a third-world war-torn country with enemies around every corner. This was still America, even though he felt his adrenaline up about as high as it had been since he last saw combat.
It shouldn’t be this way, he thought. It shouldn’t be possible for one night to change how he viewed the world and his place in it.
But it had and he did.
And now here he was, walking from one building to another with a loaded weapon drawn and ready, about to breach a location held by a hostile force to rescue a fellow combatant trapped behind enemy lines.
He had to think of it that way. Anything else was pure madness.
Zombies didn’t exist.
They couldn’t exist, not in the way the movies showed it.
There had to be another explanation.
But does it matter if there is? So what if it turns out that all these people were the victims of a mass hallucination? So what if you find out later that something was slipped into their drinks, like bath salts, which drove them insane and able to withstand pain?
If he didn’t treat them like monsters, if he didn’t shoot first, they’d tear him apart or spread their sickness into him. Then it wouldn’t matter what caused the issue. He’d be a part of the problem rather than the solution.
You were bitten already, and nothing happened. Mark was the same way. You’re probably not the only ones.
That might be true, but from what he’d seen in the Greenwood airport, there were a whole lot more people susceptible to…whatever this was…than there were immune.
The exterior of the terminal was glass and brick, a damn sight higher quality than the maintenance shack. Unlike at a larger airport, there were no rolling gangways or luggage carts. There was only a simple double door of glass inside a steel frame, with handles on the outside and crash bars on the inside. They would open out rather than in, while those at the other side of the building would be the opposite. Doors were a part of the design of a building and gave meaning based on their orientation. Your main entrances opened in to invite patronage, while these doors opened out to allow free passage to the waiting planes.
Muted forms of shadow danced and moved behind the tinted glass. He’d be much more visible to those inside than they were to him.
If they were watching.
If they had the mental capacity to still be alert for someone coming to help the hapless man trapped inside.
Jesse had to hope they didn’t.
He reached the doors and cast a last, longing look back to his Cessna, all fueled and ready to take him away from Nashville.
Then he reached for the handle and pulled one of the doors open.
* * * * *
With her body somewhere in the limbo between stretcher and CT table, Kim reached out with her arms, digging fingers like talons into the bulging forearms of the male nurses, using their support to leverage herself more upright.
“Look out!”
“Oh shit!”
With her nails gouging, their natural inclination was to drop the supporting sheet. Her feet weren’t quite set, but the fall was short. She gathered herself and lunged forward, darting under their reaching arms.
They had no idea that the damage had already been done.
The door to the control room opened and another man rushed out at her, maybe hoping to pin her between himself and her pursuers. She pinwheeled her arms as she came in, fingers still curved and splayed. The man fell away with a curse, one hand going up to a stinging scrape on his cheek.
The way into the control room was clear.
There were two men still in there. One was the doctor. The other was a technician, or CT operator. Neither Kim nor the voice in her head, the angel guiding her motions, knew.
Both could become.
She reached the door a second ahead of the pursuing nurses, yanking it open and darting inside.
They might catch her. They might strap her down again, but the goal wasn’t escape.
It was to spread. To make more become.
The doctor edged away as the technician pushed himself upright.
Two other rolling chairs blocked her. Kim grabbed them and swung them behind her, dancing between the large panel full of controls on the right and the shelves full of books and binders on the left. There was a curse from behind, one of the nurses tripping over the chair or temporarily blocking the other from catching up. She growled and swung. The technician dodged back, his well-padded ass landing back in his chair. The doctor scooted sideways toward a door. There was another door.
Another way out.
Kim leaped forward. The wound in her head didn’t matter. Nothing did. That was the beauty of becoming.
The pursuing nurses caught her around the waist as her hands closed around the technician’s beefy neck. Her fingers clenched, spasmodically seeking a hold, a way to resist being dragged back to the stretcher. Her nails dug into the poor technician’s throat, then peeled back. He screamed, but their pull was inexorable. Her nails dug bleeding lines on his neck.
She no longer wanted to hurt the nurses who held her, but it was that or allow them to restrain her again.
So she fought, kicking and screaming, clawing and biting, scoring several more minor injuries that didn’t stop them from dragging her back out into the CT room.
“Back on the stretcher, Kam. Lock her down, then call the ED. Tell them to send a big gun. She needs to be all the way out before we try this again.”
“Can we get some betadine and Band-Aids, too?” the second nurse asked. “Bitch cut me.”
“She got me, too, man.”
Kim fought until the straps were back in place, then she relaxed.
You did good.
* * * * *
The first man to see Jesse enter the terminal was tall, but not much taller than him, maybe six feet on a good day.
The day hadn’t been good to him.
He was dressed like a weekend pilot, Polo shirt over khaki shorts and Birkenstock sandals. All that exposed flesh had provided quite a meal to someone. His arms and legs were covered with human bite marks. None of them bled, despite that some looked raw and angry, with red and black streaks running up under the shorts or into the arm holes of the shirt. His eyes stared like he’d forgotten how to blink. His mouth gaped open, teeth barred in a rictus of aggression as he turned from a group of others clustered against the far wall.
Jesse called out to the man. He warned him to stop, that he had a weapon and was prepared to use it.
His voice, or maybe the use of words, caught the attention of the three other people pounding on a wall.
Just one. You don’t have enough to double-tap. Make every shot count.
He fired the first shot as the tall man reached the halfway point, still more than fifteen feet away.
As the man dropped, two others leaped on his back, more concerned with getting to Jesse than they were about avoiding the body of the downed man.
The first was another guy, grease-spotted coveralls marking him as an engine jockey. His throat was already torn open; pieces of gristle like stringers of fat dangling off a turning spit hung into the open cavity between chin and chest. Jesse swallowed a bolus of sickening saliva and put a bullet between the man’s eyes.
The second charging form was a woman, and long-held beliefs almost allowed her to get to him. Jesse shouted at her to “Stop! Please, stop! Don’t make me shoot you!” but it made no difference. She cleared the fallen forms and crouched low, gathering herself to spring. It was the look in her eyes, red-rimmed and glazed over, which finally convinced him to shoot. There was no humanity left in them.
That left only one—zombie—person, another woman, this one five-two and chubby, her hands beating a random tattoo against a plexiglass door which undoubtedly gave into the control room where Steve waited. Jesse moved into the room, eyes darting all around in case there were any more of the crazy people. His gun didn’t waver.
Her hair was a knotted mess of blood in the back. The redness stained her otherwise white blouse, running over the fabric in rust-dried rivulets which ended around her waist. Jesse didn’t call to her with any hope of an intelligible response. He called to try to pull her away from the door, afraid of sending an accidental round into the room and hurting the man inside.
She turned and he stopped. He took an involuntary step back. It wasn’t just the back of her head. Her mouth…
Oh God! Her mouth! Where is her…
…was missing. From below the nose to her neck was…nothing, like the hand of some monster reached inside, grabbed hold, and tore everything away.
That didn’t stop her from charging at him.
With one hand covering his mouth in a vain attempt to stem a sudden flow of vomit, Jesse fired as she closed. Her face fell apart at the point where the bullet entered. Blood and brains blew out the back and splattered out to the sides, and he couldn’t hold it in any longer.
Painful, wrenching spasms tore through his gut and he turned and knelt, bringing up everything he’d eaten in the past day in one long, horrendous belch of sound and liquid.
There was something big and red in front of him, but he barely noticed it in his own distress.
“Look out! That’s Ray!” came from behind him.
A sudden pain exploded along Jesse’s head as he was sent sideways, landing on his back amid the blood and brains and vomitus, sliding along the polished floor with fire in his face and darkness creeping in at the sides of his vision. The Walther slid from nerveless fingers, making a skittering sound as it spun away from him across the floor.
What? Who?
His blurred vision made out a mountain of a man in red flannel, hands the size of hams fisted at the sides.
He blinked, and the man was gone.
“No! Wait! Please!”
The screams were important, but Jesse had a hard time focusing. Something bad was happening. There was a man he needed to help.
Another slow blink.
The screams continued…
How can anyone scream so loud and for so long?
…and Jesse tried to rouse himself, but his limbs didn’t want to cooperate. The fire in his face was fading and there was only blackness waiting, as cool as the floor he laid on.
Shit. The floor. I’m on the floor! I need to…
Blink.
He opened his eyes as a storm of new motion and sound erupted. Men in digitized camo burst into the building. There were calls to stand down, another scream by the man…
Steve. His name is Steve.
…whom Jesse knew but had never met.
How’s that work? Mustn’t be important. If it was, I could get up…
Then the rifles came up and gunshots rang out.
Blink.
“We’ve got a live one over here, Sarge. I don’t see any of the runs on him.”
“Check his hand. Looks like it’s been bandaged.”
Someone was messing with him, pulling at his hand. Jesse tried to tell them he was all right. Don’t let the bite marks fool you.
But the blackness called him back.
This time when his eyes closed, they stayed that way.
Chapter 7
They used four strong men the next time, four guys to keep her hands locked tight to her chest and her legs from flailing. With one powerful lift and pull, they moved her from the stretcher to the CT table, then held her down while the simpering technician with little Band-Aids on both sides of his neck trapped her with large bands of blue Velcro. Kim would have laughed if she had the capability.
They thought she was sedated, but only because she allowed them to think it.
Their new drugs did nothing. There wasn’t anything in their arsenal capable of affecting her.
There were black lines spreading outside the bounds of the brown bandages on the CT tech’s neck.
Creepers of black sludge were crawling along the backs of the two nurses’ arms. Their friends were making comments, suggesting they let the ED doc take a look at them. More than one shot a venomous glance her way. After all, it was her fault.
She let them strap her down and didn’t wiggle or fight while the table slid in and the big donut powered up.
The old Kim would have wondered what the test showed. The old Kim would have been distressed at all the trouble she’d caused and mortified that she’d been responsible for hurting anyone.
That Kim was gone.
Now she was back in her little room with the little camera in the corner winking at her with its little red light.
T
here were noises in the emergency department outside her door, shouts and screams, the occasional gunshot as an armed security guard fought back against his attackers, men and women he shared cake with when someone had a birthday. There were no friends or allies left to anyone.
There were only the become and those about to be.
She didn’t know how long she lay on the stretcher, forgotten. With no window to the outside, she didn’t know if day had come, or if the sun had already made his pass and was back home resting.
The sounds of combat and chaos swelled, then ebbed.
Silence.
She didn’t wail or call out, didn’t waste her strength against the bonds restraining her. If it was her lot to lie here until a final death claimed her, then it would be what it would be.
Eventually, new sounds came, renewed shouting and gunfire. The voices raised were those yelling a challenge, rather than screaming in fear. Then only two noises remained: a voice asking a question and a gunshot after the voice.
It happened again, closer and louder. First the voice, then the gunshot.
Finally, her door opened.
An unfamiliar man entered. He was tall and dressed in green camouflage. A helmet like an inverted bowl covered his head. He carried a large rifle, what the men talked about buying whenever a politician talked about prohibiting their sale. An assault rifle.
“Ma’am, can you talk?” he asked. His voice was harder than his words, which sounded polite.
Kim raised her head as much as she could to offer a smile.
His eyes scanned her body, arm to arm and leg to leg, cataloging her restraints. Even if she hadn’t become, the look would have engendered no desire or feeling of objectification. It was a professional once-over without a hint of sexuality. His rifle stayed at his side, which could only be a good thing.