by James Bierce
"You tried to kill me, Curtis," the girl says, taking the clip out of the gun and looking at the bullets that are still left. "You tried to strangle me with your bare hands, when you could've simply shot me and ended it right there. Why did you do that?" Slapping the clip back into the gun, she tosses the entire thing out of the broken window, then drives her knife across the back of a chair, tearing a large hole in the upholstery. "Why didn't you put me out of my misery quickly instead of trying to choke me to death?"
"Amanda, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that…" He sits up, then starts to stand up, but she takes a quick step forward and backs him onto the floor again. "We can both go our own way, there's no reason to kill each other."
"Where are the others?" she asks, her tone suddenly more threatening. "Where is Ben?"
"Ben is dead — they're all dead…" he answers back, suddenly conscious of the fact that his family's lives will be decided in the next few moments.
"I know they aren't dead, Curtis — they're probably somewhere close."
He slowly starts to stand up again, knowing that her reaction will be to attack him again — and when she does, he swings his arm at the knife, unfazed by the pain caused when his forearm hits the tip of it. The blow knocks the girl down, and sends the knife flying across the room where it lands next to the wall of windows that look out over the city. As Curtis glances at his newest wound, Amanda struggles back to her feet and rushes toward the knife — but just as she extends her arm and begins to bend down, he runs up behind and picks up her small, lightweight frame and throws her through the window opening and onto the roof below, then falls back onto the floor in exhaustion.
He lies there for a minute, wondering if his sudden weakness is a sign that he's bleeding more severely than he realized, and whether he has enough energy to get out of the hospital by himself. Hearing raindrops against the windows, and feeling the spray of mist coming through the jagged opening above him, he grabs onto a nearby chair and pulls himself to his feet, then staggers into the closest exam room along the hallway. With his head finally beginning to clear, he feels his way through the cabinets and manages to find some bandages and tape, then he walks back to the waiting room and sits down in front of one of the intact windows, intending to use the fading sunlight to help him cover the wounds that are still actively bleeding — but after trying to soak up enough blood to see the lacerations more clearly, he ends up just wrapping the areas with gauze and taping them tightly to his body.
Standing up again, he starts to walk over to the window that Amanda was pushed through, to convince himself that she's actually gone, and that this nightmare is finally over — but after only a couple of steps he hears a knocking from somewhere down the hallway, a knock that sounds friendlier than the aggressive pounding that they normally hear from the infected. He limps down the hallway, flinching every time his swollen ankle makes contact with the floor, and wishing that he still had a radio to find out whether this mystery person is Larry. When he reaches the end of the corridor and enters the reception desk where the stairwell door is located, the knocking suddenly stops, and the only sound that can be heard is a light scratching from somewhere on the other side of the room.
"Larry?" he calls out, standing still for a moment. "Larry, is that you?" Hearing nothing else, he takes a few steps forward again and kicks something with his right foot, sending whatever it is tumbling ahead of him in the darkness. He feels around on the floor with his foot, too afraid of what he might find to use his hands — and eventually finds the object again. The moment he touches it, he recognizes it as the flashlight he'd dropped earlier — and much to his surprise, it still works when he pushes the button and illuminates the room around him.
Besides the dead woman on the floor beside him, he also sees a man lying face-first on the other side of the room, a man that he's quite certain he unknowingly shot — and next to him is yet another woman, her body still moving slightly as she hopelessly grabs for the desk in front of her. As he shines the light back at the door, he hears the knocking continue again, this time somewhat more forceful than before.
"Christine, are you there?" he yells out, grabbing onto the handle and feeling no sign of movement from the other side. Seeing the light growing dimmer by the minute, he braces himself against the floor and then slowly turns the handle, opening the door just a couple of inches. "Larry, Christine, is that you?" he yells at the gap — but instead of hearing a response, he sees an arm thrust through the doorway and hold onto the jam, then feels someone pushing hard as they try to force the door the rest of the way open. Whoever is on the other side is either inhumanly strong, or there's more than one person — and as his feet begin to slide backward, he sees another arm reach through beside the first one, this one badly scarred from a fire sometime in the past. He looks around the room frantically, searching for something within reach that he can use to push the people back through — and then he suddenly feels himself flying through the air, as a rush of hot gasses and flames enter the room and ignite some of the furniture and papers lying around on the desks.
Against the wall next to the hallway, with his body pressed up against a file cabinet, Curtis squints as he looks through the smoke and haze that have filled the room, and he sees several people coming through the open doorway from the stairs — all of them entirely engulfed in flames. After quickly checking himself over, he stands up again and starts backing away from the room. The fire is still burning in the stairwell, but it's beginning to die down — but the same can't be said about the reception area. Seeing no other way out, Curtis turns around and hobbles quickly down the corridor until he's standing in front of the broken window, feeling the crisp, cold outside air against his face. He was hoping to find some sort of escape route fastened to the side of the building, but he sees a strange mixture of both good and bad news instead. While there is no platform outside, the drop is only about fifteen or twenty feet to the next rooftop below — and while that's good news for his escape, it also means that Amanda didn't fall nearly as far as he hoped that she would, and he doesn't see any sign of her body that would prove her demise. He does see a few others that have obviously been there for a while though, each of them riddled with gunshot wounds.
Since the edges of the window frame are still lined with broken pieces of sharp glass, Curtis breaks away as much of the debris as possible, then takes a cushion from one of the couches on the side of the waiting area and places it onto the bottom of the frame. The heat from the raging fire behind him is becoming uncomfortable, and by the time he steadies himself into a seated position on top of the cushion, the flames have already begun to spread across the floor along the hallway, and he can see smoke billowing from the air vents in the ceiling — something that he's quite certain is from another part of the building. With the flashlight in his hand, he takes a few deep breaths and then slides off of the window frame, landing much more softly on the tar-covered roof than he anticipated.
As soon as he gets back to his feet, which are becoming increasingly sore, Curtis looks around the nearly flat rooftop for any signs of Amanda, but the only thing he can find besides the other corpses is a small trail of blood that leads over to the western edge of the building — and a small black shoe that's lying only a few feet from his own landing position. He can see smoke rising from the window that he just jumped out of, and even more smoke from a building just down the hill from the hospital — but when he looks to the east, past the blackened ruins of downtown Aberdeen, he can see a massive amount of smoke and ash rising into the sky from far away. It's hard to judge exactly what distance it is, but it doesn't appear to be close to the city, or possibly even the county. The area of the sky that it takes up is immense though, stretched both north and south for miles.
Not seeing his gun anywhere in sight, he turns toward the west and follows the blood to the edge of the roof, then climbs down a ladder that leads to a fire escape, seeing drops of blood on the steel steps all the way down to the pavement
below. Once his feet are on solid ground, he loses any trace of blood from his victim, which has been diluted in the wet asphalt and deep potholes of the pavement. What he can see though, is a trail of muddy footprints on the other side of a flower bed, which he follows down to the entrance road of the hospital — where he can also see, still several blocks in front of him, a small figure limping along a sidewalk at the bottom of the hill.
Feeling aches and pains throughout his entire body, he walks down the hill as fast as his legs and feet will allow, never losing sight of the girl until she turns to the left and heads east toward Olympia. When he reaches the same intersection, with the rain now pouring down on his already-soaked coat and bleeding scalp, he looks to the east where Amanda was headed, and catches just a glimpse of her as she disappears behind a dip in the road. For a moment, he actually considers following her, since he knows that part him won't ever be able to fully rest until she's put down for good. Then he thinks about his family, who are still waiting for his return — and Larry, who he hopes got out of the hospital with Christine before the fire broke out.
He watches for another few minutes, seeing her reappear several blocks away, a tiny speck that's only barely visible to the naked eye — then he turns and starts walking south, toward the bank that's hopefully kept his family safe for the past several hours.
CHAPTER 24
Aberdeen: March 31st
Although it's now completely obscured by a mass of black clouds rolling in from the west, Sarah can tell that the sun is beginning to fall quickly toward the Pacific — and that makes the chances of finding Curtis before nightfall that much more grim.
After a mostly sleepless night, she woke up this morning with a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she somehow knew that her life at the end of this day would be unrecognizable from when it started. She tried to explain the apprehension to Curtis before the family left South Aberdeen, telling him that she wasn't at all in favor of the family splitting up if that's what Larry had in mind — but she also knew that it was highly unlikely that he would listen to a word of it, especially if he thought the belief was somehow tied to psychic powers on her part. Both of them are skeptics of the supernatural in general, but while she believes in such things as instinctual presentiment, where people have a certain level of intuition that's programmed into our DNA from birth — Curtis believes in absolutely none of it, instead choosing to believe that life is a random set of circumstances with no possible way to predict the future.
As she stands in front of a living room window, looking across the street at the smoke and flames spreading rapidly throughout the hospital, she can't help but feel anger toward Curtis for not listening to her, and for leaving her and the boys to fend for themselves in this godforsaken world. Part of her wants to believe that he's still alive, that he somehow escaped his encounter with Amanda — but the rest of her is already becoming numb, a parental instinct that somehow finds a way to move forward despite the unpleasant hardships of life. Thankfully, the boys didn't get to witness the hysteria that she unleashed on Larry when he and Christine emerged from the hospital — and even now, distracted by Rachel in one of the bedrooms, they still have no idea just how dire the situation is.
Even from here, separated by two large parking lots, she can hear the roar of the inferno as it fills the surrounding neighborhood with a thick layer of smoke and raining embers. The house they've chosen has a direct view of the hospital entrance, and is located in a housing community that looks virtually untouched. Food is still sitting in the cupboards and pantry, the beds are tidily made in each of the three bedrooms, and there's a dining room table that has a full setting arranged for a family of five — including one chair obviously meant for a baby or small toddler. Something else they found useful was a pair of shoes in one of the bedrooms, which are only a half size bigger than what Ben normally wears.
Pictures are also hanging on the walls, leaving nothing to the imagination as to who once lived here. They looked happy, and healthy, complete with unexceptional sports trophies hung proudly on the fireplace mantle for everyone to see — and yet their fate was the same as everyone else. When they first arrived, Rachel found all five members of the family lying flat out on their backs on the back lawn, every one of them badly decomposed and picked apart by birds and rodents. Glancing at a family portrait that's sitting next to her on the window sill, Sarah reaches over and places it face-down and out of her sight — thinking of it as a painful reminder that she had that same happiness only hours ago.
Behind her, she can hear Larry snoring on the couch as he sleeps through his possible concussion. Christine is sitting beside him, looking worried as she watches every movement that he makes, even going so far as to check his breathing whenever his snoring stops for more than a few seconds. In Sarah's eyes, it would make sense for her to be upset with Christine, considering that it was her that Curtis and Larry were trying to rescue when all of this happened — but for whatever reason, she can't help but like the girl. It might be the fact that she's alone, just like her daughter might be somewhere — or it might be that she seems perfectly normal despite the horrendous things that she's already experienced in her young life. Whichever it is, she seems to have formed a bond with Larry, and looking at them now, you'd swear that she was looking after her own father.
"I think he'll be okay now — why don't you get some sleep yourself…" Sarah whispers to Christine.
The teen stands up and stretches, then slumps down into a chair beside Sarah and looks out across the parking lot. "Do you mind if I sit here? I'm not really tired."
"No, I don't mind — but you look exhausted."
"Have you seen anybody out there?" Christine asks her, ignoring the comment.
"No, just a couple of cats." Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah looks over at Christine and notices the incredibly short and mangled hair on her head. She would never say anything, but it looks horrible, although it's probably no worse than her own — but she also wonders how long it's been since the girl has had a bath or a decent meal, and not something out of a cold soup can that she consumed without any utensils. "Have you been on the road since the beginning?"
"My dad and I stayed at home until my mom died," Christine replies.
"She died of the virus?"
"No, she had cancer."
"I'm sorry to hear that — that must have been difficult…" She sees her simply nod in agreement, as she continues to stare out the window. "Did your family isolate itself from the virus early on?"
"Not really — I kept going to school until they closed it. We didn't really see any sign of it in our town until it was too late."
"Did anyone else live through it?"
"Yeah, some people lived through it, but they became like all of these others."
"Kind of like zombies, huh?"
"No, they're worse than that — zombies aren't real." Christine spots another pack of dogs on the far side of the parking lot, heading north and away from the burning hospital. This one looks smaller than the last, but all of them are large breeds — which is probably the only size of dog that's survived all of this. "What about you? Did you stay away from everybody?" Christine asks.
"No, we didn't — but somehow our entire family managed to stay healthy. That seems like more than just a coincidence, doesn't it?"
Christine can hear the dogs barking in the distance, and notices that Sarah heard them too. After hearing what they just went through, she can't blame her for being wary of the noise, especially when her husband is still out there somewhere. "With all of these dogs running around, it's a wonder that there's any infected left in the city."
"Were you there when Beth died?" Sarah asks her quietly, her voice barely audible.
"Both of us were."
"That must have been horrible for Larry…"
"Yeah, but it was bound to happen eventually," Christine says coldly, drawing a curious gaze from Sarah. "This world isn't right for everybody — and especially n
ot for someone like her."
Sarah is taken aback by the comment, and her first instinct is to defend the person that she grew so close to over the past several months — but she also can't entirely disagree with her. Beth seemed strong-willed and even callous at times, seemingly unaffected by the cruel injustices around them — but she also knows that the tough exterior that she displayed to everyone around her was beginning to show some cracks shortly before she died, and her lapses in judgment were growing more frequent with every passing day. All of them have their breaking point, where the constant stress of surviving the plague, while at the same time being hunted by the infected, strips them of their sanity — and Beth, having already lost her husband, was already closer to the edge than the rest of them.