Night Zero- Second Day

by Rob Horner

  The three who’d turned to track her were closing, arms not out like a classic horror movie zombie, but reaching with purpose.

  Still Libby pulled, and now the twins were allowing themselves to be peeled away, faces turning to look at their mother.

  Libby screamed as Adam fumbled in his pockets, looking for the pistol he’d had in the hospital…

  Buck. I gave it to Buck and he used it. Emptied it. He gave it back in the van, but I placed it on the center console.

  …but his pockets were empty.

  Their faces pulsed with gelatinous black ropes. Thick streamers of crimson dripped from their mouths. The body beneath them was a horror of torn skin, ripped cartilage and smeared gore.

  Buck. Buck was bitten, but he was fine. Rose was bitten, and she attacked me. Everyone else went crazy, too. The ones that were bitten.

  Their eyes sought the hands on their shoulder, then tracked up, seeking the face of the one who held them.

  Their eyes… Dull and lifeless, they were orbs used solely for sight, without the characteristic sparkle of mischief which gave a preview of the spirit inside.

  Maybe Buck’s the only one. My boys weren’t safe. Libby probably isn’t, either.

  And as their eyes traveled up, recognizing not the familiar face of a beloved mother but instead a person unlike them who should be attacked, Adam finally sprang into motion.

  But he was too late.

  * * * * *

  Dr. Crews’ only thought was to get to Libby, grab her before one of the monstrous children could scratch her or sink their teeth into her. Some part of his mind partitioned off the fact that two of the children were his. There would be time to mourn them later; right now, he had to concentrate on saving himself and his wife.

  He stepped into the home just as a low-slung, black form sprang at him, rushing from the back of the living space, where an archway gave into the kitchen. Its short fur gave an impression of sleek oiliness, something compact and fierce, though he couldn’t decide if it was more Rottweiler or Labrador. The dog didn’t bark or growl, just rushed in menacing silence. Adam cried out as it lunged at his feet, mouth opening to clamp on his left ankle, catching it on the upswing of his stride.

  He almost fell, probably would have if not for the couch to his right. Toppling, the dog a dead weight dragging his left foot backward, Adam saved himself by leaning and planting his elbows against the arm of the piece of furniture.

  The three bloody boys reached Libby. The two she had hold of reached up as well. Her scream of fear turned to one of pain as all five pressed their faces to her body, little mouths working.

  Adam’s world shrank to a single objective.

  Get away. Have to get away.

  Fresh blood spattered the soiled carpet as one of the twins, Chris, got his teeth into Libby’s neck. A boy Adam didn’t recognize caught the other side, the two children knocking heads with an audible thunk.

  There was pain in his ankle, but it was a dull thing, the pressure of a vice gripping, but not cranked tight enough to crush. Most of it came when the dog clamped down, stopping his movement.

  But now the dog began to chew.

  Crying out, Adam got his right leg centered and pushed away from the couch. He reached for the animal, right hand gripping at the back of the neck, trying to pull as much loose skin as possible into his hand. The fur was slippery with blood, unnoticeable until he got his hands on it. Patches of hair tore free, revealing black skin beneath lined with cords of pulsing tissue.

  Shit! The dog was infected. And whatever the infection, it was zoonotic, able to cross the species barrier.

  Libby’s scream continued, though its pitch was higher, like a large balloon with a pinhole puncture, air leaking out slowly. Her hands alternated between grabbing her sons and waving in the air, a desperate indecision—embrace or fight. In the end, it wouldn’t matter. Even if she was immune like Buck, the amount of blood pouring out of her neck argued for a mortal wound.

  Adam’s mind was in full clinical detachment, a useful method of dealing with the chaotic and emotionally wrenching world of emergency medicine.

  Disgusted by the slimy wet and sloughing skin but determined to free himself from the dog before the monsters inside could turn their attention on him, Adam struggled to grip, pull, and wrench himself free. The animal made no noises; no grunts to produce fluffs of air against his leg; no growls to indicate fear, aggression, or determination; no squeals when one of the fingers on Adam’s hand crested the dog’s brow and pushed into the jellylike substance of a large eye. It was the eye socket which gave him leverage. Ignoring the wet slip of his finger sliding over the orb and into the cavity behind it, he gripped the thick ridge of brow bone, pulling on the head as he worked his leg the opposite direction.

  The dog wanted to chew, not hold, something wholly alien in his experience. Dogs didn’t chew while something moved; they latched and held and, in the case of the bully breeds, worked only to cement their hold and squeeze tighter. But this one squeezed and relented rhythmically, like whatever the infection did robbed it of some of its basic behavior. So with one hand gripping the dog’s head, one finger in an eye socket for a more secure grip, Adam timed the animal’s chewing motion, waiting for a moment when he could pull with his hand and slide his leg away at the same time.

  The dog immediately tried to reestablish its grip, but he was able to hold it back. Again, there was something wrong with the animal’s motion, as if it didn’t know how to focus forward progress through all four legs. It allowed itself to be held, pulling gently, snapping on empty air.

  Libby’s scream stopped, and Adam knew his time was gone. A quick glance inside showed the children now aware of him, turning from the facedown body of his wife and moving his direction. More movement from the kitchen resolved into larger silhouettes, most likely Paul and Jody Carpenter, whose Better Homes and Gardens house now looked more like a drug dealer’s hideout after a standoff with the police.

  Keeping hold of the dog, Adam backed out of the living space, subtly working his hand so the animal was facing back into the home. Strangely, it didn’t fight the turn, just as it didn’t fight what must be a painful grip on its head. It was all he could think to do. Back away one step, then another. If he moved too fast his left leg might give out, or he could lose his grip on the dog.

  Or I could trip on the doorjamb or slip on the concrete. Really. Let’s focus on what we need to do to get away and not everything that could go wrong. The situation is already more fucked up than a soup sandwich.

  Another step.

  Libby began to stir, body moving feebly behind the advancing children. The husband in him wanted to stop his retreat—she was still alive and needed help—but the clinical part of his brain knew the explanation. Libby had died, and now she was returned.

  A soft mewl of grief escaped him before he could cut it off, but that was all.

  He crossed the threshold and didn’t trip. His left leg throbbed where the dog gripped him, but nothing seemed damaged and it didn’t wobble when it made the half-step down to the short, flat porch.

  The two adult monsters were closing, now even with the children.

  With a strength born of desperation, Adam half-lifted and half-slung the dog into the house, like the animal was an oddly shaped bowling ball. His left arm twinged when he reached for the open door, but the pain wasn’t enough to prevent him from grabbing the knob and pulling it closed, cutting off his view of the carnage within.

  * * * * *

  Dr. Crews didn’t wait to see if the creatures inside the house would continue the pursuit out into the night. He had no reason to think they wouldn’t, except that no one had followed them out of the hospital. Maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe whatever strange intelligence remained after death drove them to remain secretive, unwilling to risk exposure to the greater public.

  Try explaining that to the crazy people in the hospital lobby. Remember those?

  Adam shook his head, ste
pping off the porch and moving quickly back to his car. His left leg held up well; movement didn’t make the pain any worse. The dog might have only grazed the skin, more interested in holding rather than biting through.

  The question of whether the creatures would follow was answered just as he reached the Accord. The front door of the Carpenter home jerked inward. Like a solemn parade, the husband and wife marched out, followed closely by the ranks of the undead children. The dog rushed out as well, more clearly a Labrador than a rottweiler in the bright porch light.

  “Shit,” he muttered, taking the last two steps, yanking his car door open, and dropping inside.

  The thumps of questing hands started immediately as pursuers both large and small banged against the vehicle. The dog moved up to the driver’s door, jumping up to plant its front paws on the window, staring in at him.

  “Shit,” he said again. Not bothering with the seatbelt, he jerked the gear shift into Drive and peeled out into the residential street. His inertia pulled him to the right, a product more of how he’d left the wheel when he backed in than from any conscious thought. A left wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but it would have taken him deeper into the subdivision rather than out and back to the main road.

  There was more movement in the yards and on the porches, more lights on and people running, screaming, being chased by others. Some waved at him, throats already raw from sustained terror, voices rising, cracking, breaking, trying to get him to stop.

  It wouldn’t matter, he told himself. Their pursuers were too close. More dogs were visible now, running silently, pulling victims down from behind.

  He barely tapped the brakes as he approached the intersection, aiming to turn left but still unable to focus on a destination, just wanting to get away.

  A large vehicle, some kind of SUV or van, raced by in front of him, running right to left, and he cursed, twisting the wheel right.

  The van squeaked by and Adam plowed into the side of a sedan parked along the road. The front airbags exploded, neatly stopping him before he’d risen more than an inch or two out of his seat. The expanding force pushed him back and up, forcing his head into the ceiling, though not hard enough to do much more than stun him. The windshield became opaque as fine cracks filled the surface, held together by luck and the magic of shatterproof glass. The car revved for a second before Adam could get his foot off the accelerator, then the engine sputtered and died. Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t be able to drive with the windshield spiderwebbed.

  His chest ached from the airbag impact almost as much as his left leg did, and he found the first few breaths painful to draw.

  He couldn’t let it delay him. He had to get out of the car.

  Those things were probably still behind him, still chasing him, unless something distracted them. Shoving, Adam managed to open the driver’s door.

  The van had stopped only a few dozen feet down the road and, as he watched, the white backup lights came on.

  The screams from the residential neighborhood followed him, a damning tirade from the souls he’d left behind.

  If you’d stopped just once to help one person, the van would’ve been gone before you got to the intersection. There would’ve been no accident, and…

  “Dr. Crews? Is that you?”

  The voice called him out of his thoughts. The van looked familiar.

  But that’s impossible.

  It was Jessica driving, waving her arm out the driver’s window and yelling for him.

  A quick glance into the neighborhood showed more bodies coming at them, not shuffling like The Walking Dead but running, desperate to close the distance and get to him before he could get away. The screams had stopped. There were only the dead chasing him, and the dying, waiting for their chance to join in.

  “It’s me,” he croaked. God, his chest hurt.

  He moved to the right as the van backed closer, feeling the injury to his left leg more keenly now. Maybe the crash hurt it worse.

  Jessica stopped the big vehicle and unlocked the doors. Groaning, he pulled himself into the passenger seat.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Just go. Drive,” he said, pointing at the running monsters.

  “Oh, shit. Hang on.”

  Chapter 15

  The trail of the van led to an apartment complex where the smell of death and the become was overpowering. The vehicle hadn’t entered the twisting streets, circles, and cul de sacs, but had disgorged a passenger at the entrance to the community. It was the tall one, Brandon, who left the vehicle and continued on foot, eventually climbing three flights of stairs to a small apartment. The hunter stopped on the third-floor landing, peering across a small expanse of hallway at an open door and two large, wide-shouldered forms shuffling out. One of them was his prey, but he was prey no longer.

  Brandon had become.

  Smiling to himself, the hunter turned and raced across parking lots and small patches of grass to where the van had idled for a few moments.

  The trail led further away from the heart of the city, with its decaying Mom-and-Pop shops rubbing shoulders with service franchises like Pep Boys and a Walmart Neighborhood Market, past blinking traffic lights and closed and barred ABC stores and laundromats.

  Some people might think of a small city like Gaffney as nothing but a feeder, a suburb of a larger place like Spartanburg or Charlotte. But even small cities have suburbs, a place for the solidly middle class to repair to and think they’re doing better than those forced to live within the city confines. It was only a matter of perspective. People were encouraged to strive if only for the chance to feel they were doing better than someone else.

  It was to one of these suburbs that the van led him, a place of large, single-family homes set on small parcels which might measure out to an acre.

  The spread of become hadn’t reached this far yet, though he sensed a few—originals sickened by the poisonous debris carried on the wind, dying or already dead and arisen, but trapped inside their homes by terrified family members who didn’t understand that Grandma wasn’t just having another “senior moment.” They would escape eventually, and the become would spread. Their escape wasn’t the hunter’s responsibility.

  The trail led to the home of the one called Adam Crews, but the hunter knew, without entering the home, that his quarry had already left.

  Setting aside the scent of the van, the hunter focused, picking the doctor’s unique smell out of the mélange in the air. Not as deadly as the paramedic but still a danger to the become for his knowledge. He had to be caught and killed.

  Turning, the hunter followed a new vehicle out of the suburb, down a few streets, and into another housing community.

  He stopped in the middle of the road, sniffing.

  A small sedan, dark red or black, lay nose-in to another vehicle, the driver door hanging open. There was no doubt in the hunter’s mind; this was the same car the doctor drove when he left his house. And the van he’d been chasing…somehow it had been here, too.

  Closing his eyes, the hunter could almost visualize the chain of events.

  The doctor crashed. He staggered out of the car. The van arrived, driven by…Jessica. The doctor got in the van, and it drove away.

  It might be leading him away from the others, might be heading out of town. In which case, he wouldn’t be able to catch it. He was fast, but not fast enough to run down a car; he’d learned that earlier.

  He didn’t think there was anyone else in the vehicle. Which meant there was still one of his original prey unaccounted for.

  For the first time since he’d awakened to his new life, the hunter was torn.

  Should he chase this new scent or return to the doctor’s home and follow the van to its next stop?

  So far, all he’d gotten from blindly following the trail was a mounting sense of frustration, always one step too late. Maybe this convergence was a chance to short circuit the chain of stops.

  If he was wrong, he c
ould always return and pick up the trail again.

  That decided, the hunter set off after the van.

  * * * * *

  Bill tried to push Tina for details while the coffee brewed, but she resisted him, stating a desire for a quick shower and a change of clothes. She made a surreptitious check on her sons, William—who refused to use Bill as a nickname and who had a different middle name so he wouldn’t be a ‘junior’—and Bradley, both dead to the world and probably dreaming about something young, blond, and tan. She stood in each doorway for a moment, savoring their strong profiles. For all that they tried to act different, both of her young men were good hearted, strong willed, and seemed to have a very similar eye when it came to choosing girlfriends. Except for the past summer, when Bradley went for the goth girl next door.

  The hot water sluiced away the sweat and invisible grime of her hospital ordeal, some collected while wrestling with crazed patients and the rest a product of several hours operating just below the line of panic, but it couldn’t wash out the things she’d seen and experienced.

  The way Rose looked when Buck shot her in the head.

  How Grace ran back into the hospital to avenge her friend.

  The radiologist, hobbling on a broken leg yet somehow insensate to any pain, driven only to attack.

  Even after scrubbing herself, Tina stood beneath the driving water, as if the heat could scour clean a soul stained by circumstance and proximity. Nothing in her training prepared her for this. Death? Yes. Illness? Of course. But an illness which leads to death, first causing an insane need to attack, which in turn leads to a spread of the insanity and…

  …and a lack of vital signs while still vitally alive, thrashing and snapping despite the absence of breath sounds and the lack of a heartbeat.

  Sighing, Tina turned the water off and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. It was four in the morning; she should be making ready for bed. Hell, she should have been in bed long hours before.