by Rob Horner
Bitsy was very different from her mother, now, capable of thought and planning on a level equal with an adult. She didn’t understand why that should be so. What about being eaten alive from the inside by a virulent disease should make her more mature in death than she was in life?
But even in questioning her change, she found an acceptance.
It was because it was, just as she was become because she was. That she was more than her mother was right, and all right.
The highways and byways of rural America weren’t lit at night; small reflectors hidden within the white lines separating the lanes kept travelers on a straight and safe path. A small median a few yards across kept eastbound and west from a tragic meeting, broken every two hundred yards or so by a small feeder lane to allow cunning policemen to stage a speed trap, or find a quiet place for a little nap. These little pass throughs were empty as Bitsy and her group of thirty stalked the road.
The lights of the checkpoint were once again ahead of them, only they didn’t blind. Rather the backwash from the spots gave good illumination on the force hunkering down by their Humvees. One and all, their faces were turned to the west.
Small bursts of sound like the squawking of a wounded duck issued from radios clipped to utility belts; occasionally, one soldier or another would raise a radio to their mouths to reply, their words inaudible. It was a metaphor for the world that was, where digital sound drowned out the noise of humans. As she grew in her powers, Bitsy’s inner voice would be able to cover any distance without the need for technology.
Bitsy kept Carolyn beside her as they closed with the soldiers, her thoughts guiding the become, alternating between the left force and the right, each group leapfrogging the other, moving into position. They were quiet as only the dead could be—no missteps, no sudden coughs.
Finally, they were close enough, and Bitsy ordered the attack.
From both sides of the highway came the silent strike of the become. The only sounds were the screams of men suddenly fighting for their lives, where a moment before they’d been involved in a conversation about a recent baseball game. The big guns on the vehicles were useless with the enemy upon them; the one soldier who broke to the sides found himself overwhelmed by four become, bitten in a dozen places and with his blood watering the ground before he could raise a cry.
Of the dozen soldiers, more than half fell in the initial assault.
And as the rest screamed, shouted orders, and pulled together in the center of the road, Bitsy ordered the retreat. Rifles were raised and shots fired into the night. Some of her become were hit, but none mortally. It took a lot to render a become motionless. Their only weakness were their brains, something Bitsy had inferred from seeing the first pathetic attempts at the unorganized become rushing the checkpoint just a few hours earlier.
She didn’t need to kill all the soldiers at once. The humans might not realize it, but this was a war of attrition. The dead could afford to be patient.
The remaining six gathered their wounded, applied bandages, and yelled into their radios for help. They were warned about the become, but were they told everything?
Bitsy waited, calling on her people to be calm. Remain still. Be silent.
The voices of the remaining guardsmen grew frantic as their injured fellows deteriorated rather than improved.
Bitsy knew the exact moment when they changed, their hearts slowing to a forceful, languid pace, just enough to keep the dusky sludge their blood had become moving. She knew when their minds opened to her. She was waiting.
And once again, she counseled caution.
Wait. Don’t move. Don’t get up. Don’t let them know you’ve become.
Once all six were hers, and the guardsmen began making plans to load their comrades on the vehicles and abandon their post, she ordered her force forward again.
The soldiers were ready, forming a firing line with rifles raised, searching the night.
Now. Arise. Feast.
The six soldier-become rose from their temporary places of rest, some struggling up from the hard concrete while two clambered out of the Humvees. They fell upon their former comrades, knocking weapons away, biting arms, throats, and faces.
An hour later, she sent most of her force back toward Greenwood, this time with instructions to enter every side street and subdivision and convert every person they found.
The rest turned to face the rising moon, following her to the east.
The remaining hours of night went smoothly.
Perhaps when Bitsy was alive, she might have complained about the lack of visual stimulus. No rolling farms with horses or cattle standing around, no rises in the land giving sudden vistas of low valleys with houses far enough away to appear small and magical, like a village of fairies. At night there was only the dark asphalt beneath their feet, the crunch of dry summer grass on the raised berm at the side of the road, the occasional whine of a mosquito as it swooped in, sensing a meal, only to pull away without biting. No insect would trouble the become; their blood was poison if ingested.
Somewhere in her mind, right alongside the growing awareness of her father, was a widening font of understanding, as if things seen and experienced by other become were flowing into her. One of those pieces of information involved domesticated animals. Dogs could become; cats could not. How she knew didn’t matter. She knew, and that was all.
As the morning of the second day approached, the sky to the east lightening with the incipient rising of the sun, Bitsy led her group off highway 82 and into the small community of Kilmichael, home to 850 souls, as proclaimed by the proud sign along the highway.
She wasn’t tired, and her eagerness to join with her father hadn’t abated. There was a drive to create more become, and the knowledge that more become meant fewer humans to worry about. Eight hundred plus men and women were just drops in the bucket when compared to the more than three hundred million people in the country, but that eight hundred could range in every direction, spreading the change. It wasn’t the basic math her teachers tried to push on her in school; she wouldn’t find this growth on a multiplication table. This was exponential expansion, where each of these eight hundred might be responsible for turning a hundred more, who would then go on to infect another hundred apiece. Eight hundred could become eight million very quickly, when looked at through those lenses.
Stealing quietly down the brightening street, Bitsy set her people to wait. A town like Kilmichael would have early risers, people off to work in another city, children kicked out of the house and told to entertain themselves for the day.
Her become didn’t break windows or smash down doors.
They waited on the porches.
And it worked.
Part 2
Second Day
Chapter 8
The night air still bore some of the heat of an August day. It had a heaviness to it which spoke of rain a hundred miles away, a humidity which would linger until the baking heat of a new day burned it off. A whisper of a breeze provided no relief but stirred an intoxicating mélange of smells and sensations that spoke of fear, sweat, blood, and death.
The hunter paused outside the back entrance of the Cherokee Upstate Regional Medical Center hospital in Gaffney, South Carolina, head turning this way and that, sniffing, tasting the wind.
A dog lay dying fifty yards away, neck torn open by a become. Beagle. Male.
A dozen people scents rode the air. Names floated into and across his mind as nose and brain identified, categorized, and prioritized without any conscious effort on his part: Buck, Caitlin, Brandon, Tina, Jessica, Jordyn…
The last one hung expectantly, standing apart from the others, a splinter from the larger block.
A half-dozen become, their scents stale like bread gone hard, mixed in a tangled skein, filled out the mental picture.
Most of the people smells were tainted by the fresh, acrid tang of exhaust.
They’d burst through the same Med-Surg employee door and j
umped into a vehicle. The become chased after but were too late to interfere and too slow to intercept. Having no immediate prey, the become spread out into the streets.
They would prove useful in bringing more become.
Some of those he’d been sent to find were already dead, wrecked and torn bodies lying in the halls of the hospital. Some had hungry become still chewing on faces, arms, and legs, like a swarm of flies feasting on the rotting carcass of a careless cat struck late at night by a drowsy motorist. One or two were just rising, black and pulsing veins of rot coursing along necks and up into the scalp, newly become ready to share their disease with others.
In the heat rising off the tarmac were the remnants of a dozen different vehicles, most internal combustion, one hybrid.
More recent was the smell of new exhaust. Large vehicle. Passenger van or minivan. Those smells ran out of the parking lot, a lingering scent trail as clear as a laser light across a foggy dance floor.
The hunter marked the scent of the van; it would be his next target.
But first, the woman, Jordyn.
Tall, willowy, brunette. In a walled-off portion of his memory were kind eyes, soft hands.
There was a scent of something twisted intermingled with her unique smell of woman. The pungent odor of fear spiked into a new level of stink.
Panic.
And something else, something…delicious and strange, burning to the nose yet beckoning, demanding to be found.
The Jordyn scent didn’t mix with the cloying combination of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, benzene, and soot which comprised the van’s engine exhaust.
It ran off in a different direction.
Spinning, the hunter’s eyes narrowed, black orbs squinted almost completely shut.
The trail of exhaust remained a beacon in his thoughts, but it was secondary now, a priority still, but one to be dealt with later.
The smell of the prey became his goal, the scent-trail a series of phosphorescent dust motes hanging in the air.
The hunter moved, and the ground sped by underfoot. He reached a running pace which far outstripped anything he could have managed prior to his becoming. Any onlookers would see an overweight man in a bloody police uniform running faster than his body should allow. The strength or weakness of his muscles prior to the change didn’t matter.
He was become. He was more.
Out the parking lot to North Limestone Street, feet pounding past the Midtown Grill, across 9th Street, the smell growing stronger.
Sounds reached out to him, classified and categorized then discarded as unimportant.
Footsteps running, one or two fleeing and more footsteps chasing after; harsh breathing, the sound of a forty-something man with a bad heart drawing air rapidly through lungs unused to such exertion. Quicker steps, lighter and softer, ran beside him. A small voice like that of a child issued pitiful mewling whines with each breath, interspersed with exhortations to run a little faster, Daddy, they’re catching up to us.
The hunter ignored it, cutting a corner onto Carolyn Drive, jumping the hedge rather than wasting time detouring around it. Like the running speed, his ability to leap and clear improved dramatically with his becoming.
She was just ahead, flagging as the hard work of a panic-induced sprint overcame the ability of her adrenal glands to provide adrenaline and impetus.
She didn’t know she’d been chased from the hospital.
The strangeness in her scent overpowered every other aspect.
Another second and she was close enough.
He reached out and grabbed her long brown hair.
She screamed as her feet ran out from under her, falling. Then he was behind her, catching her, the scent of her strangeness a heady concoction, intoxicating.
She fought as his support prevented a fall. With her feet under her, she twisted and writhed, finished one scream and started another.
It was hopeless. She was a child in his arms, with less chance of escape than a mouse in the talons of a hawk.
As a become, the hunter had only the smallest need for sustenance; the drive to bite and tear, chew and swallow, was more the human mind’s way of interpreting the instinctive urge to propagate the infection.
But like a fat man who eats second and third helpings out of a love for food rather than a need for satiation, the hunter lacked the willpower to stop.
Filling his nose with the scent of her difference, he opened his mouth against her neck. She stiffened and redoubled her efforts to break free, a new surge of adrenaline making her stronger than ever.
It wasn’t enough.
His teeth tore through skin and cartilage. Blood covered his face first in a trickle, then a spray, and finally, a flood, running over chin and shirt, spattering to the ground between their feet.
The blood was the source of the scent.
Her blood was special, powerful.
It protected her from becoming.
The taste filled his head even as the hot liquid flowed into his stomach.
The woman’s screams died away as life fled, running out on the red tide.
No lights flared in the dark houses along the street. No doors jerked open; no voices called out nervously, wondering if everything was all right.
There were become and those yet to become in the houses around him. Some become were restrained, waiting for a chance to break free. Some become hunted those who had yet to become, chasing them from one room to another, then out into dark yards where the dogs hunkered under the porches, afraid to emerge. And some were caught in between, bodies spasming uncontrollably as foul fluids leaked from one end or the other, a precursor to becoming for those exposed to the virus from a particle source, rather than a direct transmission.
There were others around with the same special sweetness to their scent, a rare oddity in the blood which made them immune to the virus, and thus a danger to those who had become.
There would be other hunters tasked with finding them.
This hunter, once a policeman known as Tim Reynolds, had been given a task by his maker. Jordyn was the first of those he’d been sent to find and kill. The rest were in the van.
Relaxing his grip, Tim let the body of the young nurse fall to the ground, one more sacrifice in a changing world. He turned and began the run back to the hospital.
He’d pick up the trail of the van there.
The hunt was on.
* * * * *
Joseph “Buck” Davis was the kind of man others counted on to know what to do, when to do it, and to stay calm while doing whatever it was that needed doing. He earned the nickname “Buck” in high school, when he bucked off a safety intent on preventing a touchdown. Since then, the moniker stuck, and it became a reminder of the things he’d accomplished in his life. He’d bucked the trend of dropouts among his peers, graduating with a 3.96 GPA. He’d bucked the stereotypes. There were no little Bucks running around until after he married his college sweetheart. He’d never been arrested and, despite being black and over six feet tall, he was one of the best known and most well-regarded people in the very Southern community of Gaffney, South Carolina, where a full third of all homes still sported Confederate flags right next to the more traditional stars and stripes.
So, when he asked Jessica to drop him off at the paramedic station a few blocks behind the hospital, the nurse readily complied. If there had been any of the crazy dead people—they’re zombies, quit pussyfooting around the name—lurking he would have said to drive on and forget it. But his car was at the station. It was their only vehicle. Well respected paramedic didn’t translate to well to do, and with Olivia at home with Jacob most days, there just wasn’t enough money to afford two vehicles. Maybe when the Fusion was paid off…
The station was clear. Like, absolutely clear. Ghost Town clear. His sedan was the only car in the lot.
Buck itched to run into the dispatcher’s office and find out where the other teams were, or if there were any t
rucks out and running. It was only luck they’d pulled their last patient in before the old man went face-biting crazy. That could have happened while they were checking him out on the scene. It seemed more and more likely that’s what happened to the other trucks.
There was a timing to all this he couldn’t ignore.
First that Austin fellow, but he’d been sick a long time. Then came the others, all people with similar abdominal symptoms, all progressing to violent acts of rage at about the same time. And the people they bit…
Nothing explained the secondary victims becoming just as violent but with none of the gastrointestinal symptoms.
The blue and black veins…
Well, there was that. None of the primary victims had those weird blue and black lines, like a lymphangitis but not red streaks, some evil, viscous witches’ brew of poison following the veins back to the heart, then to the brain.
Only the bite victims had those, and they originated at the site of the bite. Not him though. He’d checked his wound in the van. His ear was tender as all get out, but there weren’t any boggy wheals under the skin of his scalp. He didn’t have a sudden urge to bite anyone. What made him special?
There was something to his apparent immunity. There were more somethings in the timing and consistent presentations of the patients. If only he wasn’t so worried about his family, he might be able to put the pieces together.
The white-gold Ford Fusion was where he’d parked it prior to going on shift. God, was that only twenty hours ago?
“I’ll stick with you,” Caitlin said, jumping out of the minivan, pink pistol held ready.
The feisty RN was a constant surprise and a welcome wingman. Buck wasn’t sure what her story was, and he wasn’t asking. She had a steady hand and a good head on her shoulders. And she was an excellent shot with the .380 pistol she carried.
“I don’t plan on coming back around this way,” Jessica said. “I mean, I will if you need me to but—”
“You sure?” Buck asked.