Brew

by Bill Braddock

  "Well," he said, "now what?"

  Jimmy saw Brent shrug. The guy’s eyes shifted to Jimmy. Jimmy shrugged, too, adding, "I just work here."

  The guy’s wife offered a pitiful laugh then put the back of her wrist to her trembling mouth and started crying again.

  "That does a hell of a lot of good," the red-haired guy said.

  She just cried harder.

  "So does that," Brent said to the guy.

  The guy let the lighter go out. In the darkness, he said, "Why don’t you do me a favor and shut your mouth."

  "Get fucked, asshole," Brent said.

  "Knock it off," Jimmy said. "You guys can kill each other later. Right now, I think we ought to keep it quiet." Erika squeezed him, and he rubbed her back in the darkness. For a long time, everything was quiet, save for the muffled weeping of the woman.

  Then the guy’s lighter came on again, and he went to the door.

  "Bill," the woman said.

  "Hold it," Brent said, grabbing hold of the guy’s sleeve.

  "Take it easy, kid," Bill said, pulling his arm free. "I’m just checking if I can hear anything. He leaned against the door, scowled and shook his head. "Not much. This door’s thick, and that fan’s too loud."

  And too cold. Jimmy was shivering, too.

  "Here we go," Bill said, and bent, holding his lighter over a stack of beer boxes. With his free hand, he pulled a pair of bottles. "Who’s up for a beer? They’re on me."

  "I’ll take one," Brent said.

  Bill handed him a beer. "Janice? Beer?"

  "What the hell," Bill’s wife said, taking a beer.

  "Miss?"

  Jimmy felt Erika shake her head.

  "Here you go, buddy," Bill said, holding one out to Jimmy.

  Jimmy took it and thanked him, not really wanting the beer. It was cold. He was cold. He wanted out of here, wanted a warm shower, and wanted this shivering girl in it with him. There was a thought. Beer, though? Not now. He wanted to stay sharp, because he was sure, sooner or later, the lunatics would get around to checking the cooler, and then…oh, Jimmy, then it was on.

  "Cheers," Bill said. "Here’s to getting out of here alive."

  He reached out, and they all clinked bottles. Then Bill cut the lighter and all went dark again. Janice was mumbling concerns over someone named "Suzie", probably a daughter, Jimmy figured. His own mind drifted into a sea of questions. Just what was going on? When would it end? Just how widespread was it? Why weren’t they affected? And, always, behind all other questions: Would they survive?

  "Gaaark!" someone—Brent or Bill, Jimmy thought—yelled.

  Someone else bellowed in return. Glass shattered on the floor. Someone slammed into the boxes with a muffled thud, and something toppled from the shelves, shattering more glass and filling the cooler with the smell of vinegar. Brent and Bill roared and grunted, and Jimmy heard the unmistakable sound of punches being thrown. Janice shrieked in the darkness then laughed. She’s lost her mind, Jimmy thought. They all have.

  "Stop!" Erika yelled. "They’ll hear you, you assholes!"

  Something whistled through the air, ending in a wet whack, and one of the men bellowed again. The cooler filled with noises: the crack of knuckles on bone, growling, snapping, a scream, and a sound like a dog shaking dying prey.

  "Stop!" Erika repeated. "Stop!" Then, to Jimmy she said, "Make them stop. They’re going to get us killed."

  Putting himself between Erika and the others, Jimmy pulled his own lighter, struck it, and wished he hadn’t.

  Bill brought the cleaver down hard, whack! And again, whack! then pulled away the severed arm of Brent, who lay sprawled across the floor and boxes, staring blankly at the overhead fans, his own mouth oozing green. His body still shook lightly, and jets of blood sprayed from the stump, steaming in the cold air. Janice was crouched down on all fours—You hit him high, Honey, and I’ll hit him low!—teeth locked on Brent’s Achilles tendon. Like a wolf at the kill, she shook her head, growling, and Jimmy heard a gristly snap.

  Erika cried out behind him as Bill brought the cleaver down fast and hard whooshthwokk! burying it in the skull of his wife. She toppled, taking the weapon with her. Bill turned and faced them, grinning, a long strand of green slime hanging from his smile. He held Brent’s severed arm in both hands, smacking it against his palm like a meaty ball bat.

  Jimmy pitched his untouched bottle. It was a hell of a throw. The bottle smashed against Bill’s face, and he staggered, tripped over the body of Brent, and went over backwards onto the floor. That’s when Jimmy saw the knife handle jutting from Bill’s thigh. They don’t feel pain like us, Jimmy noted, moving now, tugging at the cleaver stuck in Janice’s head. It wouldn’t give.

  Bill regained his feet, laughing.

  Jimmy tugged harder. No luck. He didn’t dare use both hands. That would make it dark again. No thanks. He wanted no more darkness.

  Bill yanked the knife from his own leg and a jet of blood sprayed from the wound.

  Jimmy pulled again, and the cleaver came free, but it was too late. Bill was already moving toward him, raising the knife.

  A box tumbled through the air, striking Bill in the chest. It wobbled him. Another bounced off his head. Erika was buying him time, pelting Bill with boxes, Jimmy realized.

  Bill laughed, throwing out an arm to deflect another box.

  Jimmy dipped low and swung the cleaver, taking a lesson from Bill’s dead wife. The blade angled down and chopped into Bill’s ankle just below the cuff of his khakis. Jimmy yanked the cleaver free, and Bill squealed, and Jimmy swung again, coming out of his crouch. The cleaver hacked into Bill’s shoulder. Bill stumbled, and Jimmy swung again and again hit the shoulder, opening a gaping wound, blood spraying everywhere, closing one of Jimmy’s eyes. Bill’s back hit the cooler door, and Jimmy swung again and again, no longer aware of where he was hitting him, for he’d dropped his lighter and it was dark, completely dark, and he kept swinging and hitting, swinging and hitting, and Erika cried his name, and then he felt Bill punching him in the stomach, over and over, matching him, strike for strike, and Jimmy felt crazy now, too, determined to finish this fucker off, and then his cleaver really sunk in, and the gut punching stopped, and through the cleaver, up his arm, he could feel Bill’s final shudder.

  Jimmy yanked the cleaver free, and Bill spilled backwards.

  A thump, a click, and light.

  Bill’s body slid to the floor, pushing the door further open.

  Jimmy doubled over.

  Oh no. No, no, no.

  It wasn’t the light he was protesting, even though he heard the crazies coming, close now, he was thankful for the light—it was his gut. Those hadn’t been punches, he realized. In his rage, his adrenaline-fueled mania, he hadn’t felt the blade jamming again and again into his body, into his guts. Now those same guts, sliced to ribbons and leaking awful smells, spilled between his fingers, steaming and slippery, and he fell with them, onto the cooler floor, vaguely aware of Erika screaming his name over and over behind him.

  The last thing he saw before the darkness closed over him forever was the feet…the bottom of the door swung wide open and the feet—so many feet: sneakers, dress shoes, heels—flooded into the cooler.

  Chapter 12

  By the time Joel found himself driving across campus (and "found" did seem the operative word here, following his negotiation of a dozen involuntary twists and turns as he hurried from the fraternity across a world gone absolutely insane) his mantra had changed from Dean or you to a simple yet heartfelt echo: You are so fucked. You are so fucked. You are so fucked…

  He’d hit people, for Christ’s sake, plowed right through them. And in turn, they’d cracked his windshield. Someone had thrown something, too—a brick or stone, Joel thought—and it had popped the glass in his rear passenger window.

  "Compromised" is the word, he concluded. You’ve been compromised. And now… now you are so fucked. It was that sense of being compromised, vulnerable to a
ll these crazy bastards—what the hell was wrong with them, anyway?—that led him to make all those bad turns. After hitting the kid in the striped shirt, he’d kind of lost it, he guessed. From that point forward, whenever he saw people in the street, he turned. A quick left here, a jagging right there, whatever he could do to get away, he’d done it, and now, maybe ten minutes later, all those turns had compromised him in a big way. While he should have been out of town, heading north at a hundred and ten per, he was somehow here on campus, doing his best to maintain that twilight speed that was too fast for runners to catch him and slow enough that he wouldn’t accidentally commit to the wrong one-way street.

  He turned right on Jefferson, punched it a little past some crazy looking bitch holding a rake, hit the brakes to avoid a mob down the street, made a left onto Parker, and plowed into a wall of bodies.

  The car lurched, angled, popped the curb, struck something that snapped and clattered, and stopped. Crazies swarmed the car. They pulled at the doors and pummeled the hood and trunk, the windows and quarter panels. So many of them, too many, blocking out the streetlight, laughing and screaming and gibbering.

  They scrambled onto the hood and kicked the windshield, which crunched, smashing but holding together to sag inward with each stomp. Joel jerked at the stick shift and worked the pedals, but he couldn’t seem to get the thing into gear—You are so fucked!—then heard someone growling through the broken back window. He swiveled and saw the sneering, bloodied face of a girl, the mouth smeared in green ooze, the eyes locked on him. She clawed at the air between them, straining, and a foot stepped through the trashed windshield inches from Joel’s face.

  He gave up on the stick and fought with his seatbelt, tearing at its catch with both hands, barely feeling his fingernail rip away as he clawed at the metal clasp.

  Gunfire exploded to the left. Joel pitched himself across the seat as he realized bullets were thunking into his car. It continued in a steady roll, raking back and forth, and Joel thought, That’s a machine gun! One of them has a machine gun!

  He heard bullets striking crazies and lay with his eyes shut tight, feeling the warm spray of blood across his face and arm and hand. The car shook as bodies flopped and flailed overhead. A bullet shattered the rear window. Joel struggled forward into the foot wells so that the stick shift jammed into his gut. It was a horrible feeling, having his back turned to all of this, a terribly compromised position, but the girl in the back had stopped growling, and the crazies had stopped kicking and howling, and a moment later, the shooting stopped, too.

  Joel lay still.

  The shooter fired again, a short burst. The firing stopped again.

  Through ringing ears, Joel heard the engine hissing and, closer, something drizzling onto the floor mat near his face. He risked a peek and saw the blood pooling there, draining down from overhead.

  You are so fucked, his mind told him. So fucked.

  Footsteps crunched across broken glass in slow, measured steps, coming close.

  The door opened.

  Joel squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to move. He heard the shooter breathing, felt him standing there.

  Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t even think…

  The gun exploded over him, so close and loud that he pitched involuntarily forward. He curled into a tighter ball, throwing his hands over his head, and his mind shrieked at him, You moved, you stupid son of a bitch! You moved and you are so fucked!

  Another gunshot popped overhead. Joel screamed, waiting for the pain.

  "Two for flinching," a voice said.

  Joel opened his eyes and saw a skinny, dark-haired guy grinning down at him with a gun in each hand. The guns were not pointed at Joel, and though the eyes and smile looked every bit as crazy as those of the girl who’d been crawling into the back of the car moments ago, the mouth was not green.

  Joel breathed, and his muscles slackened with relief. "You’re not one of them."

  "I congratulate you on your firm grasp of the obvious," the guy said, and let out an awful, high-pitched giggle.

  Chapter 13

  The girl paused just outside the window, staring at the thing she held. Then she turned, looking up at the face of the dorm, and Jessie stifled a scream.

  It was a hand. The girl outside Jessie’s window had been staring at a hand… her own, dismembered hand. Jessie saw that the girl’s other wrist terminated in a stump, which, at this distance and in this lighting, looked like it had been dipped in molasses. Thin, fast running molasses, though, by the way it drained from the severed wrist.

  The girl jerked her head sideways and stared directly at Jessie. A green grin spread across her face. She took three rapid steps forward, then spilled face-first onto the lawn. There she lay, still as a broken toy.

  That’s it, I have to get out of here.

  But how?

  It didn’t matter.

  Out in the hall, horrible things were happening. She could hear girls fighting out there, growling and shouting and laughing. The laughter was the worst, worse even than the deep animal sounds that made Jessie think of the little possessed girl in The Exorcist. The laughter was pure madness, so insane that it tugged at the shoestrings of Jessie’s own sanity, made her feel like laughing.

  We did this…

  No. She didn’t know that. Not for sure. And besides, even if it was the serum that caused this, she hadn’t made the stupid stuff. It was that weirdo, Garrett’s friend, the chemistry freak. He was the one. The genius. It was his fuckup, not Garrett’s, not Green’s, and certainly not hers.

  Garrett had made it clear to everyone, right from the start. We’re not going to hurt them, and we’re not going to smash their shit. We’re going to wake them up!

  Tears blurred her vision.

  No, she told herself. Don’t cry. Get the hell out of here. Out the window, dark shapes flashed by. Runners. Crazy.

  We did this…

  I did this…

  Glass shattered nearby. Where? Next door? Charlotte and Lacecia’s room?

  If I stay here, I’m dead. They’ll come through the window, and they’ll kill me, no matter what I say or do. They’ll…

  A face appeared at the window. A boy’s face, heavily freckled, pressed against the glass. He grinned at Jessie, his teeth glowing green, and even as he raised a fat fist into the air, she could only stand and stare, thinking, Those freckles aren’t real; they’re made of blood...

  The window smashed.

  Jessie shrieked, threw open her door, and ran screaming from the room. She screamed afresh when she saw the bodies in the hall, and screamed louder still when she saw the boy at the far end of the corridor dragging someone—Carrie?—across the well-lit lobby, the handle of a knife jutting from her chest, straight and centered as a shark’s fin.

  Jessie turned in the opposite direction, sprinted past an open door where unseen combatants raged, jumped over a girl—Katie?—who lay dead in the middle of the hall, and reached the far end of the hall and the stairwell there.

  The basement, she thought. The secret passageway. Yes, of course!

  "Wee-hoop!"

  The sound came from behind her. Turning, she saw the boy who’d come through her window running clumsily her way. He ran with his arms bent, the hands held up, fingers splayed, in what looked like an awkward expression of surprise, laughing as he closed on her, his enormous belly bouncing crazily.

  "Fuck off!" Jessie snarled and shot through the door. She thought she heard him fall—he must have tripped over Katie!—but she wasn’t going to hang around to verify her suspicion. She had to hurry, had to get to the basement, find the key, and get through the old door and into the secret passage, where she’d be safe. She’d sit this all out and then call the police and tell them everything she knew.

  She jumped, clearing the last of the steps, and landed with a jolt that snapped her teeth together and shot twin pins of pain up her bare heels. She pushed through the fire door and into the oddly-lit basement. It was e
mpty. At least the corridor was.

  She hurried down it, hating the sour, damp smell of the place and the buzz of the lights overhead, listening hard for any noise, any sign of someone down here in one of the several rooms flanking the hall but heard nothing. Sprinting, she passed the music room, the door to the sci fi club, the boiler room, and at last reached the end of the hall, where she entered the laundry room. It was bright. It was empty. Driers hummed, mindless.

  She hurried along the bank of washers, wove between empty boxes and racks of long-discarded cast-offs, and dipped into the shadows at the back of the room. Hurry, she told herself, hearing sounds in the hall, the fat boy still following…

  Jessie crouched, patting the darkness beneath the rearmost clothes rack. Where was the key? Had someone already thought of the tunnel? Had someone already taken the key?

  The boy’s laughter drew closer. He’d almost reached the room.

  Her fingers closed around cold metal. Yes—the key! She pushed boxes away, stealth and silence be damned, until she’d uncovered the door which stood old and heavy, its metal scabbed with rust, looking a better fit to a medieval dungeon than the wall of a dormitory basement. With shaking hands, she worked the key into the keyhole.

  "Weeeeeeee!"

  The boy! He was in the room now, coming for her…

  The key grated, old metal screeching against old metal, but the tumblers did turn, and the door opened. Jessie yanked the key free and hurried inside, the boy clamoring through the boxes, laughing, so close now…

  She slammed the door shut and threw the bolt.

  Pounding started. Pounding and a mournful howl.

  "Fuck off," she said again, panting hard in the total darkness.

  The pounding and howling kept on.

  Jessie laughed. She cried. She shuddered. Thank God Garrett had shown her the passage.

  Oh, Garrett, we did this.

  But there was nothing she could do about that now. For now, all that mattered was that she’d made it. She’d made it, and she was safe.