by Jason Durman
Prologue
Savannah, Georgia: October 22, 2009
The smell of burning city filled the air.
There were screams; the screams of timber falling, buildings crumbling, of metal twisting from the heat, bent into forms it was never intended to take.
And there were screams of... other things, cries that drifted from the city and mixed with the smoke.
Certainly no humans, the soldier reflected, from his safe spot off the shore. They'd all been evac'd out, right?
Only things on fire in there were buildings and monsters, he thought, their wailing rising to the sky with the ashes.
Burn em' all and scrub the world clean, he figured, do them and us both a favor.
"They're bombing the place after they torch it, you know," said the soldier's companion, gazing over the flickering, orange-tinted sea. The first soldier shrugged.
"Let 'em."
"Pity about the mall," sighed the second soldier. "Heard Jimmy Gibbs Jr. was doing an appearance before the 'flu hit."
The first soldier shook his head. "Damn shame. You think he got out alright?"
"Eh, celebrities are always the first ones out," the second man said, waving it away. "Heh. Probably hightailed out in that racecar of his."
"Yeah."
There was silence between them, and the sounds of fire, screams, and water hitting the sides of the boat filled the gap, for a time being.
Then:
"Y'know..."
"Yeah?"
"You think there might be..somebody in there? Still in Savannah, alive?"
There was a pregnant pause.
"Nothin' worth saving, Al.
Nothin' worth saving."
? ? ? ? ? ?, Ohio
"Russ?"
"What is it, Skip?"
"Maybe we can take a shortcut."
" What?"
"Y'know, off the beaten path."
"No."
"Look, I know it's crazy, but… hear me out. It's hitting dark. And the last thing we need is to trip over a Savage or something because we can't damn well see what's in front of us."
"I know, but…"
'C'mon, bro! We need to get to the safehouse. It's just an alley."
"Don't bro me. I know perfectly goddamn well we need to get to a safehouse. It's just-"
"What?"
"Something about it… something in my gut tells me it's not a good idea. We should stick to the plan."
"Plan, schpam. We don't have any time. And your gut? Really? What now, old man, are you getting holy revelations in that bean-stuffed stomach of yours?"
"Ok, old man is going a little far, it's only 5 years between us!"
"Whatever, oldster. Let's just take it as it comes. It'll cut it in half,and Eve n' Trav can't go for much longer. We've kicked zombie ass before. It should be a no-brainer."
"… Fine."
"I knew you'd come to your senses!"
"...That back-slap wasn't necessary."
"Totally was. And you know what? If something jumps us, we'll just fill it with lead. Watch out for eachother, deal with whatever they throw at us…"
'We just need to be careful, Skip."
"Russ, it's an alley, ferChrissakes. We'll be out and in the saferoom before ya know it!"
"If you say so..."
"It'll be fine, What's the worst that could happen?"
? ? ? ? ?, ? ? ? ? ? ?, ? ? ?
There was nothing but pain.
Blinding, burning, twisting, and even flowering, almost, if the thing feeling it could think poetically. But it was always there.
It wasn't sure where it was. Sometimes voices spoke over it, far-off, and sometimes to it, but it could only scream in response.
It only huddled in the corner of the white room, while the voices spoke.
Sometimes they could come, with biting little sticks, putting things in its arms that only made it burn even more, holding square things and wearing white coats and always, always watching.
Some dim little part of its mind would spark, occasionally, somehow fighting back. and it would say, quietly, over the pain,
I didn't sign up for this.
Why?
Chapter 1
There are some weird stories out there, and there are weird stories out there.
Not not weird ain't bad. Frankly, I prefer weird to the other paths of life.
Take my dad, fr'instance.
Most dads can be boring at best, embarrassing at worst. I think dad basically went the whole way and turned up all the knobs to 11. I dunno which knobs it was he turned up, whether they were labeled crazy, irrational, loving, maybe even embarrassing, but, whatever they were, by God, he turned them up, all the way, until they snapped off and got stuck to the setting they were on, which was the Max.
Not that I minded. Like I said, I prefer weird to anything else. Building a nuclear fallout shelter in the middle of the Northern Maine woods, for the sake of building a fallout shelter in the middle of the Northern Maine woods, certainly doesn't fit within the parameters of normal, but who am I to complain? It ended up saving my life, more than once. (It wasn't due to nuclear fallout, I'll tell you that much.)
And then there's Denver, for that matter.
It's not like his weirdness is defined by his name. Sure, Denver is a pretty damn odd thing to name a kid, but I'd like to think that whoever his parents were named him something more everyday and sensible, and less taken-from-the-torn-and-bloody-sweatshirt-he-was-wearing-at-the-time. Nope, the name Denver was fairly normal compared to the rest of it.
His tendency to chase ground squirrels (or anything small, squeaky, and susceptible to running in terror) was less weird and more unnerving. Mostly this was because he would actually catch them.
Oh, sure, he'd be stealthy about it, and he didn't scream when he pounced anymore (which does the nerves a favor) so he'd would get them nearly every time, and he could usually get at them quickly if they ran, even when they went down burrows.
He'd let them go afterwards, too, 'cos he said that they left a bad taste in his mouth. He'd only really do it to burn excess energy, in any case, or else he bounced off the walls and drove me nuts. Really, though it was pretty odd to see him going after 'em, I preferred him chasing squirrels, and not people.
He'd still get nightmares from that, poor bastard. Sometimes he'd grow in his sleep, and I'd get a chill down my back and watch him, carefully, and wish fervently that the sunnuvabitches in the CEDA hadn't taken my gun.
But then he'd wake up, and while he'd be terrified out of his mind, he'd still be sane, and not woken up as the monster he used to be.
I highly doubt either one of us would like to repeat the time he woke up (sort of) and wasn't sane, but the past is the past, I suppose. He's alright now, which I reckon is what counts.
Well, as sane as a former zombie could get. Chasing squirrels is just the tip of the iceberg.
His claws, for another thing.
Gatling called them 'keratin-enforced ossified fibrous appendages' (whatever the hell that meant) but no matter what he called them, they weren't going anywhere. Den would sharpen them against trees, but they kept regenerating. Whatever the the hell Green Flu did to his system messed it up in ways only God knows.
Like how he could jump to the roof of a building, in one go, or how he could smell me opening an MRE from across the building, or the way he could make his way across a pitch-dark room without a flashlight.
Or the fact that he tried to kill me.
Twice.
Granted, he'd been under the influence of a raging virus that that not only badly mutated his eyes and and legs and hands and nose, but his mind as well. And, also granted, I'd been trying to kill him at the same time. (Mostly because he was trying to kill me,
but what's a girl gonna do?) Three times. I'm one over him on that, though the fact that I nearly succeeded the third time makes it all the more unsettling, to both me and him, but mostly me.
That fact that he nearly succeeded unnerves him (more than me, I think) as well.
We both avoid the topic as much as possible. Imminent death at eachother's hands doesn't make for fantastic small talk, or any sort of talk for that matter. We've settled it, and we really prefer not to dig up any skeletons that probably need to stay buried.
Call him a monster, if you want. I certainly would have, had you told me about him, just two months ago. Then I would've sent you to a mental hospital, because only a complete nut could make up a story like that.
And yet here we are.
Is he a monster? By traditional conventions, certainly. Personally, I think that he's a whole lot less monstrous than most men I've met, though sometimes I get the nagging doubts in my head.
Is he my friend, despite this?
Hell's Bells, yes.
You could ask me why on earth I could be friends with someone who nearly tore my internal organs out, or that I nearly shot in the head because of the aforementioned internal-organ tearing, or who I had to teach to tie his shoes because of a virus that ate his brain. (And half of the country, for that matter.)
And yet I am.
You could also wonder why he'd still stick around with me, someone who taught him to drink from a cup , and who was the (technically indirect) reason for him getting his leg caught in a bear-trap.
(Long story.)
And yet he does.
Maybe ours is the weirdest story of them all.
But, again, it's not like I have anything against weird.
Despite all the weirdness. the past month'd been oddly...normal.
Filled with burning resentment, yes, and revenge-plotting, and some more resentment, and soul-crushing boredom when the resentment ran out, but filled with normality.
As normal as being a guinea pig/blood bank/backup/research subject for the government can be.
We spent most of our time reading whatever they throw at us (mostly army propaganda, but I'd take anything at this point) and spying on the whitecoats. They'd pretty much put us in entire barracks of an off-use military base (Now being repurposed as a research facility/prison/what was probably closest to home sweet home in a 50 mile radius)
The resentment part comes mostly from the guinea pig part, since the only reason they're keeping me around at this point is because of some antibody related crap that's currently running through my veins. Why the hell they haven't found another person in the goddamn country that's immune to the
'flu at this point is beyond me, but apparently carriers aren't good for anything but spreading the disease around, so the whole reason the world hasn't gone to hell (yet) is because of my life juices.
Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.
And of course, they can't have me going around and spilling/misplacing/generally not being there to donate said life juices, so, here I am, in Middle of Nowhere, Arizona, transferred from Middle of Nowhere, Canada, after being transported from Bear Cave, Middle of Nowhere, Maine.
(Long story. Go read it.)
At this point, nowhere sounds like a place to go.
I suppose I should be thankful for the security, being in a nice facility with (fairly) livable cots and running water and slightly fresher MRE's than I'm used to, as opposed to being torn apart by zombies. (Or pummeled, or strangled, or burned in acid… did I mentioned how fucked up the Green flu is?) ' May you have interesting times' is a curse, after all.
Still, it'd be nicer to have normality on my own accounts.
Though it wasn't that much of a change of state. Just a month ago, I was counting MRE's and assuming anarchy was ruling the country. Now, it's more or less the same thing, but with them drawing blood from me at regular intervals (Again: Whoop-dee-fucking-doo) and less MRE'S.
Anyways, here we are now, sitting in what was formerly a common room in the barracks, on a couch that isn't so much Hideous or Floral, and more a Nauseating Army Green. Denver is napping in his own, weird way (which is to say, curled up like a dog. Don't ask. I don't know why, and neither does
he.) and I'm re-reading the Green Beret Survival Manual for the umpteenth time. I've practically memorized the entire thing since I first read it at the age of 7, but, hey, gotta go back to old favorites.
right? I'd tried to read it to Denver, but he rather felt more like a power nap at the time.
Apparently his ridiculous metabolism ( 4,000 calories a day, or something stupid) was because he: a) Could heal a broken leg in a couple of weeks (apparently because of 'accelerated cellular replication, enhanced telomere length' blah, blah, science makes my head hurt) b) Could leap a building in a single bound (Well, if it was a short building. And if he wasn't too tired.) c) Kept a temperature of about 103°F and a pulse of 120 (Which gave the doctors a damn good scare the first time they took his readings)
d) Ate like and slept like a bear, if that bear was also Olympic swimmer on Lunesta.
Which is to say, maybe times were interesting enough with him around.
Now he was waking up (surprising, I know) and stretching, like a cat (Again, don't ask. Even Gatling's baffled, and Gatling is seldom baffled).
He still kept his hood up, which he claimed was because it kept the sun out of his eyes, but I think he did it out of habit, and keep people from staring. Who can blame him? Every sonuvabitch whitecoat that sees him, first thing they gawk at are his eye scars. They are pretty damn impressive, but you'd think that someone'd get tired of people asking. ('Specially considering he'd made the scars himself.
Like I said, long story. Read it.)
Anyways, he was up and at it, blinking muzzily and glancing around the room, I suppose to make sure it was still the same room as when he went to sleep. (Which, again, you can't blame him for.
Let's just say waking up in the same room as we went to sleep in is a pleasant surprise nowadays.)
"Mornin', lazy bones," I said, while I halfheartedly skimmed the section on smoke signals. "You've been out a good two hours."
He shook his head. "Only two? Wish it was longer."
I glanced up. "Bored?"
"Just hate this place," He said, flopping back on the couch. "Maybe if I sleep more-"
"We're here shorter?" I finished for him. He nodded.
I grimaced. "Hate to pick apart your logic, but I'm having my doubts on whether they're ever gonna let us go."
He heaved a sigh. "I'm just sick of it. Sitting around, chasing squirrels, waiting for something to happen-"
I shrugged, trying to hide the same resentment I held. "You did that at The Cabin, too."
"Yeah, but at least I was there because I wanted to." He paused.
"And because there wasn't anywhere else to go." He added, quietly.
"Not like there's anywhere else for us to go around here, either." I said, gesturing around the room.
"Nothin' but desert around us, and unless we manage to hijack a chopper, burn the place down, and fly our asses out of here, it looks like we're stayin'."
He seemed to ponder this for a moment.
"Well, maybe if we-"
I shook my head. "Prospect's tempting, I know, but security's too tight around 'em. I wouldn't risk it."
He sighed again. "We can't fly one, anyway."
I smirked. " You can't. I can."
"Really?"
"Yeah." I paused, thoughtfully. "Dad believed in a... well rounded education."
"Well rounded?"
"Covering all aspects." I defined for him. Den's vocab had increased exponentially over the past several weeks, though he still had a few fuzzy spots here and there.
"Well rounded as I am though, ain't gonna do us much good," I sighed. "It's not like we have anywhere else to go, even if we got past the desert."
"Back to the Cabin? He asked, hopefully.
I shook my head again. "No can do.
It's under custody, remember?"
"Oh. Yeah." He looked crestfallen then, which depressed me even more.
"Suppose this ain't too terrible," I reflected. "They leave us alone, and it's either this or zombie territory."
"Zombie territory can't be that bad."
"Considering the state you were in when I found you? I doubt it."
"We could survive."
"We could." I said mulling it over. "Question is, what's worse? Zombies, or whitecoats?"
"Well, they get mad when I attack the whitecoats."
I snorted. "True. That, and zombies don't go on rants about government funding."
He shrugged. "Maybe we can try and go Westside-"
"I doubt it." I cut in. "Even if we manage to escape, they've got CEDA posts all over the borders, now that they've managed to get their act together. Even if we stay out of their sight, we can't mingle with society, not with those on your hands." I said, gesturing to his claws.
He gaze darkened, and he looked down. A pang of guilt stabbed at my chest.
"Look-" I said, biting my lip as I tried to phrase it.
"We can't go and live with normal people, not until we've built up some sort of trust. You're as human as they come, trust me, but…" I paused again.
"People won't stop and think that. If they find out what you are, exactly, well, the reception ain't gonna be real friendly. Old hate dies hard, and fear runs deep. They won't stop and think. They'll just act. That's what I did, and I can't blame 'em for doing the same." I swallowed.
"But if anything happened to you, I'd never be able to forgive myself."
He seemed to mull over it for a moment. "Yeah." He said, finally. His voice was heavy, almost resigned. "You think we'll ever get out of here?"
I stared past him, at the wall, not willing to speculate the possibilities.
"I don't know."
Denver
I scare myself.
Sometimes I'm running. Chasing something small and squeaky, because my legs itch and it only goes away when I chase. Sometimes I'm sleeping, or Mar is reading something to be, and then the noises in my head come back.
The smell of blood. Screaming, Yelling. Falling. Hurt. Burning.
Then I wake up feeling hot and smelling salty, and I don't know here I am or who I am or what I am, and I have to think to know that I am Dever, I am here, and not there, where I was, and I will never hurt anyone again.