The Plague Runner

by Burgy, P. J.

Meredith leaned forward. “What is your name?”

  “She asked you a question!” The ones who had carried Kara were still standing behind her, and the bigger of them, a male, grabbed her by her arm, pushing her down. The other, a female, took hold of Kara as well, her grip painful.

  Again, Kara did not answer. The Infected holding her down on her knees, their arms entwined through her elbows, gave her a shake. Kara may as well been held by thick ropes of wrapped steel wire for as good as it did her to struggle.

  When they shook her again, the girl stopped them with an upraised hand, her eyes narrowed. They obeyed immediately, releasing Kara.

  “Please,” Meredith said, her smile unwavering, her mad eyes focused on Kara again.

  “Where are they? The citizens of Fort Pleasant Tree?” Kara asked.

  “Oh. You aren’t going to ask about your friend Russell?” Meredith tilted her head.

  Kara licked her lips, dropping her head. The floor was lined with different colored rugs, trampled down and worn through to reveal another layer of fabric underneath. She studied the patterns for a moment before looking up at the girl. “Where are they? What did you do with them?”

  “Tell me your name and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  “Kara,” she said, lost in those black eyes.

  “Hello, Kara.” Meredith smiled at her again, much more enthusiastically this time, a heat in her gaze. “The one beside me, this is my beloved, my beautiful brother, Michael. I will answer your question now that we've all been formally introduced. Your friends from Fort Pleasant Tree, I am sorry to inform you, are not in any salvageable condition by your standards, those who made it will not remember you. Most of them died during their transformation. One, our new mother, she lives, of course. Will that answer suffice?”

  “What?” Kara felt a sickening lurch in her stomach. “They’re all dead? You killed them?”

  “Some lived, I told you, and they are our feral children. This is our purpose, Kara. This is our mission,” Meredith said. “You’ve done us a great favor, eliminating the Purgers. Father Isaac and his followers had been a thorn in my side for a very long time.”

  “I didn’t-” Kara stammered.

  “I am sorry that you have had to endure so much suffering.” Meredith reached out a slender hand toward Kara’s face, her fingers stopping just short of cradling her jaw. Meredith drew her hand back and placed it on her own chest. “You came all this way to find them, and that is brave and admirable. I am humbled by your dedication to your friends. Although I am sure that you hate me, and I do understand why you would from your perspective, please rest assured that those who died did so peacefully and those who lived are well taken care of.”

  Kara leaned forward, her advance only halted by the guards as they took hold of her once again to restrain her. “Fuck you!”

  “I understand your confusion and grief,” Meredith spoke softly. “Your rage too. You don’t understand what I am doing. You don’t know. How could you?”

  “I know you killed them. I know you took them, and you killed them, you murderer,” Kara hissed.

  “And you killed the Purgers.” The madness behind Meredith’s eyes crept into her facial features, twisting her smile. “I suppose that makes us both murderers, doesn’t it? I saw what you did. I was there that night. Father Isaac caught you, caught you up, and stole you away to his glass nest, his church of his murderous ministry. I had heard of the human female who had been saved by one of the Kindred, Russell. Saved by the Kin that kills his own. He killed his own to save you, didn’t he? And then, you killed your own to save him. How poetic. Romantic even.”

  Kara hung her head again, limp in the guards’ grip.

  “Russell is safe, Kara. I am sure you wanted to know,” Meredith stated, leaning back. “You will see him again very soon, in fact. He must pay penance for his crimes against his own people, against the Kindred. You, Kara, while I am certain that you have slain your fair share of my people, have earned my respect, believe it or not. What tenacity, what strength of will it must have required to come all this way and to choose one of us over your own? As broken as he is, he is still ours, our sweet Russell. I do not wish to kill him. It would be a waste. And you, I cannot waste you.”

  “Just kill me,” Kara muttered.

  “How defeatist! No, no!” Meredith sat up straight in her throne. “Don’t talk like that. You didn’t fight your way out here just to give up that easily! I can tell just by looking at you that there is a fire in you. I need you to hold on tightly to that fire, because I want to bring you over into our fold. That is my mission, you see, to create more of us. That is why I brought them here, and why it was so sad that none turned. I sense you are different. I sense you will be Kindred. Not the feral children, but Kindred, like them, the ones who hold you, my people, few as we are, and Russell. Our precious Russell.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re going to infect me?” Kara asked.

  “I am not, no.” Meredith stood up. The pale boy she had named as Michael looked down at her with his black eyes and she ran her hand across his thick, upper arm, looking up at him with pure and honey sweet adoration. “We had discussed this, and it seemed to be the most fitting and appropriate penance possible. Did we not, Michael?”

  Michael nodded.

  “I’ll kill myself,” Kara said.

  “We wouldn’t allow you to do that,” Meredith said, passing by Kara as she walked to the end of the tent. The guards picked Kara up, turning their little procession around and dragging her toward Meredith once more. Michael came up alongside Kara and reached Meredith first, opening the flap of the door leading out into what appeared to be a collection of hovels built on marble and frayed rugs. More candles burned outside of Meredith’s tent. “Let us go visit our friend, shall we?”

  “If you’re going to have Russell do it, he won’t.” Kara tried to struggle again. She gave up and let the guards drag her, staring down at the ground and at their bare feet. “He would die first.”

  Meredith and Michael were at the lead, walking through the ‘town’ on the wide platform ahead of them. This was part of the underground subway system, the trains that ran under the city long ago. In fact, she saw a very old, hollowed out husk of a long train car not too far off to the left. They had painted it and stuck bones into any crevice they could find.

  Kara couldn't help but glance around as she was taken across the platform. The cracked pillars, sets of two every thirty feet, had been decorated too, and ropes ran from tent to tent, from hovel to hovel, connecting their homes like a vast spider web. They had hung rugs, colored fabrics, and animal skins on the thick twine. The candles left out to burn had been placed away from anything dry and flammable, some of the flames put out by the soft winds rushing through the tunnels.

  It stunk of the Infected out there, and Kara saw more than a few of them standing around as if having a conversation about the weather, or asking how the family was. Their manner of dress was haphazard and mismatched, but they were indeed wearing clothing, right down to a button down shirt on one of the males. Kara could not imagine the thing buttoning its own shirt, but there he was, looking at her and tilting his head, his black and red eyes burning with the spark of awareness, like Russell. The other one was smoking a cigarette. When they saw Meredith, the smoker dropped his cigarette and crushed it with the ball of his bare foot into the marble floor. They bowed to her as she passed.

  They continued onward until they reached the end of the platform. A small flight of uneven steps led down to the tunnel floor, the rails in the center rusted to an orange hue. More candles flickered on the ground near the walls, but most had been blown out by now. Above her, Kara could see the round arch of the ceiling.

  “Have Cecil relight these,” Meredith called back to the guards. “Our mother is still afraid of the dark, and we will need to come this way later.”

  “Who is your mother?” Kara tried to get a foothold to walk, not caring to be dragg
ed across the stony, hard ground any longer. The guards lifted her up, allowing her to find her feet.

  “A special one, a chosen one. Immune. Gifted,” Meredith sang in response. “And of age to bear children, blessed be our fortune. Destiny has smiled upon us and given us an angel. Our beautiful Eve, the mother to our next generation...”

  Kara snorted. “Your kind can’t have children, you know that, don’t you?”

  Meredith eyed her. “Why would you think that, silly little girl?”

  “It's science. Your bodies can't support a child. Everyone knows that, going back years and years. There's no Infected children, unless a kid gets exposed.” Kara shook her head.

  “Why, that is so wrong. We surely can, my dear.” Meredith paused their procession and turned back to look at her, Meredith's smile small and her eyes filled with mirth. “Not as easily, granted, but we can.”

  “That is a lie,” Kara said. “You are crazy. The fever burned out your brains. You were Infected. That is where you come from.”

  Meredith laughed, looking pleased before she turned forward once more. “My dear, I wasn’t Infected. My brother Michael and I, we were born.”

  Kara scowled. “That’s impossible.”

  Struggling as she was pulled along again, Kara fought to stay on her feet as they made their way down the poorly lit tunnel. She felt a warm draft and had a feeling that there were different tunnels up ahead leading to the surface.

  On the right, Kara could see the bars of a cage built into the tunnel wall. It had been crafted by hand, built by the Infected, and inside Kara saw the dead eyed stares of even more Infected glinting in the candlelight. These ones lacked the spark of awareness and began to make noise as soon as they smelled Kara and got her in their sights. One or two wailed weakly before Meredith hushed them, whispering sweet words to calm the things before she continued to lead with Michael at her side.

  They reached a service platform up on the left. Another set of uneven steps led up to it and a cage had been built into the wall here, similar to the one holding the mindless further back, though this cage was larger. They hadn’t bothered to put candles near this cage, but the little flames from the tunnel behind them threw just enough light to allow Kara to see the movement behind the metal bars.

  Meredith and Michael climbed the short staircase and stood to the right as the guards pulled Kara up. She heard the sound of labored breathing and saw the hunched form of a man in there, buried in the shadows of the far left corner and pressed against the wall and facing away. She knew it was Russell.

  Michael stepped forward after Meredith handed him a key, and Kara silently wondered where Meredith had pulled it from. The gated door to the cage was unlocked, opened, and Kara was thrown in.

  She landed on her feet, staggering around and sprinting back to the door just as it was closed. Fingers wrapped around the bars, she spit on Michael as he locked the door. He looked up at her, indifferent to the glob of spit dripping down his chest, and backed away to rejoin the guards. Michael gave Meredith the key back and she slid it into the cloth at her chest, between her breasts.

  “He won’t infect me. You know that.” Kara tried to shake the bars of the door. They were solid. She backed away, palms out. “In fact, Russell is strong enough that these bars, these bars are nothing to him. I’ve seen him bend metal thicker than this. This is a joke. Russell, show them.”

  “Oh, Russell is in no shape to do any of that.” Meredith chuckled.

  Kara narrowed her eyes. “What did you do to him?”

  “Me? Nothing.” Meredith held her hands up. “He’s starved himself, by the look of it. My guess is that he didn’t want to put you off. Did he eat while you were together? A frog here? A rat there? Maybe he caught a bird?”

  Kara stared at the girl, the little candles behind Meredith playing tricks with the shadows, and Meredith looked like a demon for a few, terrifying seconds.

  Meredith continued, “My sweet, the Kindred are voracious carnivores. You know this. In one day, he would eat his weight in meat, twice if he could. Has he eaten like that in front of you?”

  Kara licked her lips, backing away from the bars until her shoulders touched the wall far behind her. As far away from the girl as she could get, she stared forward at Meredith, brows knit. Meredith’s little smile was visible as she touched the bars of the cage and then walked to Kara’s right. Meredith was trailing her fingertips across the metal. When she was directly across from Russell, who was still huddled into the corner, Meredith called to him as though he were a dog, and then laughed.

  “Russell, I’ve brought her for you,” Meredith cooed, “As I promised. For your acts of violence against us, this will be your atonement. All will be forgiven, my child. Expose this one, begin her transformation, and we will remove you from this cage, and welcome you. We will feed you, share our bounty with you, and call you brother. Finally.”

  “No,” Russell managed to speak, shocking Kara.

  Meredith giggled. “Ah, I see. Or, we can leave you in there with her, and you’ll eat her. Your choice.”

  Kara clenched her jaw. “He wouldn’t eat me.”

  “Russell wouldn’t, I am sure, but soon there won’t be much of Russell left.” Meredith shrugged, and then gripped her own upper arms, swaying in place on the other side of the bars. “I would think if he were fond of you, he would want to offer a kinder fate. He knows what we become when we are allowed to go hungry for too long. We become the feral children again, screaming in the night at the smell of flesh, howling for blood. Running toward it, letting nothing get in our way, unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling. Joining the horde, bodies against bodies, our scents mingling, forming the hive mind of the feral hunters. Didn’t know that, did you? They think with one mind somehow, when they horde. Inexplicable. It’s almost spiritual. I have never felt that connection, and neither has Michael, for we are different. Cut off. I’ve heard of it, over and over. Isn’t that right? Eustace?”

  One of the guards nodded, sullen and stoic.

  “I envy them,” Meredith mused. “To feel other minds alongside yours. To become… legion.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you are crazy,” Kara said. “Everything you’ve said is crazy. You can’t have children. You can’t be born like, like you are. It’s all wrong. Your mission. This. What you’re doing right now to me, to Russell. To this... mother from Pleasant Tree, whoever she is. This is all crazy. But you can’t see that, can you? No, your brain was toasted by the fever. You’re mad.”

  “Oh, Kara. You will see.” Meredith sauntered back over to Michael, wrapping her arms around her brother, her right palm resting against his chiseled stomach. “My mother was a woman of faith, and thought we were angels that the Lord had gifted unto her. Our father was a mad Infected, or so she said, killed soon after by her brother with his trusty shotgun when he’d seen what had happened, what he had been too late to prevent. And while she survived and did not become Infected herself, blessed by her God, those around her all became ill and perished as she grew large with child, our new lives within her.”

  Kara could do little more than listen, transfixed by the way Meredith swayed while holding Michael, causing the pair to move back and forth with the flickering candle light behind them.

  Meredith continued, “Our mother, she was not well. Her mind was broken. Her faith was the glue holding her together. She was strict, taught us the Word, taught us to read and write. Hid us from the sun when we burned, and blamed it on the Devil for hating such purity. Besides the mad man who had fathered us, she had seen no other Infected that could speak. And even while our eyes leaked the same black water as the feral ones, we were so, so different. You saw that instantly, didn’t you, Kara? Our eyes. Our skin. We are the perfected form of the merging of our DNA. That is all a virus is, you know. DNA.”

  “I know what a virus is,” Kara stated.

  “Our mother was immune. Her body had formed antibodies to the virus upon exposure, she was u
nchanged, but our father’s DNA was laced with strands of altered genes and codes. Not even the virus itself, but the changes it had made to his body, to his genetic composition. That is what it does. You have seen the transformation, haven’t you? Well, we were the result of that merging, of that union. The children of a mad Kindred, as the fever can take in cruel ways, and a Lowly woman.” Meredith’s lips parted as she showed teeth, her grin unpleasant to Kara. In the far corner, to Kara’s right, Russell made a low wailing sound.

  “Okay, then why can’t the Infected breed among themselves then?” Kara stood up straight, hands on her hips, tuning out the sounds Russell made in the shadows while still keeping him in her peripheral vision. He cried out, ramming his head into the wall. The resulting crack of the tile as it snapped on impact sounded painful.

  “The Kindred cannot breed with the Kindred. Something about the altered DNA and the existence of the virus in both bodies. None of the pregnancies have been viable,” Meredith replied. “Stillborn, if born at all, too soon, not developed enough. Most end in miscarriage very early on. The metabolism is wrong. It isn't conducive to life.”

  “But you’re different. You two.” Kara swallowed, hearing Russell whine a moment later.

  “As I said, we are perfection.” Meredith laughed. “Stronger than our brothers and sisters. Smarter. Faster. Less governed by our hunger, less constrained by our bestial needs. Kara, we are the next step of evolution. You do know what that is, don’t you? Evolution.”

  “I’m not an idiot. I was taught,” Kara snapped.

  Meredith nodded, apparently pleased at Kara’s answer. “We didn’t learn about evolution from our mother. That wasn’t in any of her books. When she died, having wasted away from her sadness, we were left to wander alone. Ten years old, we wandered during the night, hid during the day. We found libraries, found books. We found all kinds of books. We learned about science, about the stars, about machines and mankind, wars, medicine, cultures and society, fairy tales and adventures. God could exist alongside science. He made this. He made us. He has guided us. His angels. We read, filled our minds with all of the forgotten information that your people took for granted and abandoned.” Meredith smiled from ear to ear. “We learned so much in those years, and then, we began to find others like ourselves. The Kindred. There were very few at first, hiding in shame in the shadows. But we coaxed them out, and we built our home here, under the city. I have brought many into the fold, teaching them about what we really are. Some were more resistant than others, and turned away from our welcoming arms. They shall find their way home. It is inevitable. Father Isaac believed in God, but his God did not believe in him. No. The God of this world has chosen us, Kara. And, I hope He will choose you.”