by Megan Hart
“They went to one of the medical labs.”
Maddy knew where those were. She made it there in ten minutes even without her skates, though she didn’t bother trying to get inside. She found the janitor’s closet she’d discovered in her first few days here, ducked into it, then into the access corridor nobody else seemed to know about. From there she followed the sound of voices until she found the lab they were in. From the access corridor she could see right through the air vents.
“It’s still a person,” Mr. Sylvan said. “A sick person.”
“It’s a dead person, risen from the dead. A zombie or something, for God’s sake.” That was Mr. Kunis.
Dad shook his head. “We don’t even know for sure how the infection is spread. I mean, they shoot that stuff out of their noses and mouths, but what about before that? What about after? How did it start? None of us here are doctors. What if we’re infecting everyone? We should’ve killed it.”
“It was already inside the front doors. Was it trying to get back inside because it remembered? Are they intelligent enough, or was it just a accident? What if it told others outside before it died about what we have down here? What if it was just the one left behind while the rest went for…I don’t know, an army or something. What if they’re rallying?” Mr. Kunis shook his head.
Mr. Sylvan liked to wear colorful sweater vests. He’d been a third grade teacher. He liked to listen to classical music during reading time. Now he said, “I say we kill it. Again.”
“And then what?” Dad asked.
“Burn it,” Mr. Kunis suggested.
They couldn’t. That would totally ruin it, and Maddy hadn’t seen it up close yet. So she did what seemed the most natural thing. She pulled the fire alarm.
Watching the men scramble would’ve been fun enough without the bonus of sneaking into the medical lab after they’d run out and finding the monster. But there it was, a man about her dad’s age, wearing a torn and dirty suit. They’d tied his hands behind him to the chair. Also his feet.
Maddy stood in front of him. “Hi.”
He didn’t answer, just snapped at her like a dog on the end of a chain. Then he went still. Maddy watched him for a minute or so, well out of his reach.
His nose holes were black and ragged. So were the corners of his mouth and eyes. That was from the stuff that came out of him, like that preacher guy on TV.
Maddy moved closer, looking for any signs of dandelion seeds or whatever that stuff was, but couldn’t really see anything. This guy smelled bad, but still like sweat and dirt. Not like something dead. Dead things smelled much worse.
“My name’s Madison.”
The man twitched so the legs of the chair rocked, but even though his eyes were looking at her, she could tell he wasn’t really seeing anything. Closer, she bent to look. Something moved across his eyeball, something small like a tadpole or one of those things they’d learned about in health class. A sperm. It wriggled, tiny and black, in the whiteness before disappearing.
“I’m gonna figure out what makes you work,” Maddy said.
The man lunged forward, teeth going for her throat, but she had a pencil in her pocket and it slipped into his eye without a problem. Goo oozed out, but Maddy didn’t care. That was part of the experiment.
The man’s head fell back. She studied the stuff on the end of her pencil, but couldn’t see any more of those little swimming things. “Hmmm.”
She’d never been in any of the medical labs, mostly because there were so many other cool places to explore and she already knew about scalpels and needles. It was a pretty small room, connected to another one. It had a sink, a metal table. A few chairs, one of which the man was tied to. A cabinet, inside of which she found packages of sterile suture kits.
Perfect.
47
Not their first kiss, but definitely the last either would ever have.
Her mouth slid along his throat, her teeth tearing at the flesh so that by the time she got to his lips she already had a mouthful of him. His hands dug into her waist, pulling her closer. His tongue thrust inside her mouth, seeking the punishment of her teeth.
He worked his fingers deeper into her as heat rose between them. Her arms went around him, her mouth back to his neck to feast there. His knee slid between hers, pressing upward.
Once she had melted into his embrace, but this time a different sort of passion took over. Her decimated foot hooked behind his, jerking, and they tumbled onto the sand with a cracking of bones. She landed on top of him, his skull thudding on the sodden sand. Their teeth clashed and cracked; she spit out the shattered pieces and used the sharp edges to slice away at the curve of his shoulder.
He yanked one hand free from the prison of her flesh, and she let out a long, low noise of mourning at the loss of him inside her. Then she was the one on the bottom as they rolled in the sand, her hair tangling in his fist as he pulled her head back so far the tendons creaked and muscles tore. His teeth found her throat, pressing and digging, and she offered herself up to this invasion.
Their clothes were already threadbare and torn from their journeys, the fabric easier to tear even than the skin beneath. He stripped her naked in a minute while she did the same for him. No lingering looks, no adoring gaze. There was nothing of love in this.
Only hunger.
Her fingers raked runnels into his back when he fucked into her. He put his hand over her mouth, clutching until his fingertips punctured her cheeks and she opened for his kiss. She pushed upward, hard, and they rolled again. Over and over, sand and shells slicing into each of them in a way that couldn’t begin to compare to the damage they wrought with their teeth and hands.
On top of him, she broke both his wrists as she pinned them above his head. He didn’t stop moving inside her, every thrust harder than the last. Something tore deep inside her.
Pain had left her a while ago, but now it returned as pleasure and everything else began to slip away with the force of it. No more thought. There was only beautiful agony and calamitous desire.
They ripped and gouged and bit and fought and fucked. They tore each other apart. Bit and swallowed until their stomachs bulged.
They devoured and consumed each other and still weren’t sated, but there was no more to be had. What remained of his hand cupped the ravages of her face. The rest of them had become indistinguishable, one from the other, every part of him mixed with every part of her. Darkness edged what remained of her every thought, the relief of it like fire even greater than this passion that had set them upon each other, and just before everything went black forever, one last word centered itself in her consciousness. One last thought to send her on her way to wherever it was she was going.
My name, she thought, is Kathleen.
Then the water came up and took away all the bits and pieces of them, until only the sea was left.
48
He fought her, of course. Apparently even dead things clung to life when they got a second chance at it. Maddy didn’t care. He was tied up and couldn’t really move, no matter how much he struggled and snapped and bit out at her, though honestly, she had needed to fix the dumb set of knots her dad and the other guys had used. If she hadn’t, this thing would’ve been loose an hour ago.
It would’ve been better if she could’ve strapped him down to the table, but it wasn’t really set up for that and he was too big and heavy for her to move to another of the rooms where they had tables that were. She’d had to be satisfied with pushing the chair forward until his forehead smacked the table and using duct tape to keep him still.
It had to have something to do with their brains, she figured that much. All the science shows she’d ever watched made it real clear — you could live for a while if something pumped your heart and lungs for you, circulated your blood and stuff, or put a tube into your stomach to feed you. But if your brain was dead, the rest of you was dead too.
These things were dead and came back, so it had to be something in their
brains. Besides, anyone who’d ever seen a zombie movie knew it was a headshot that killed them, though the common idea that zombies all loved to eat brains had come from some mid-80s movie and hadn’t been there since the beginning. But she’d seen videos of these things being shot in the head and it didn’t stop them, so there had to be something specific, something in there hidden good enough to make it really hard to find with a random shot.
He screamed a little when she cut into him, but it was from anger, she thought, because when she poked him with needles he didn’t seem to notice. So maybe it didn’t hurt, but it sure made him really, really mad.
She wasn’t sure how much time she had. The fire alarm had stopped blaring pretty quickly, but they had drills often enough she knew what they’d be doing. Looking for her, probably, when they assembled in the fireproof safe room and she wasn’t there. Maybe Mom would tell them where to find her. Maybe not.
Either way, she didn’t have the time to spend cutting him for fun, which sort of bummed her out. But it was more important to discover than to play, that was an important lesson. Maddy concentrated working fast, paying attention.
She peeled away the back of his skull, all the way down his neck to the bones of his spine. With a screwdriver and hammer from the janitor’s closet, she cracked him open like a crab leg. Boy, did she miss crab legs. The kind that came in a tin weren’t the same. The best part of eating crabs was breaking them open and digging out the meat.
No, she thought, studying the mass of brain she discovered beneath the bone. The best part of eating crabs was throwing them in the pot while they were still alive. Sometimes they screamed, and that was pretty cool.
“Sit still,” she told him as he bucked and wriggled. The duct tape kept him in place, but she rapped him on the back of the head anyway, on the part still covered with bone.
She took the two edges of the hole she’d made and pried them apart with the screwdriver until a bigger chunk came away. Brains were pinkish gray like ground turkey, at least all the ones she’d ever seen, which were sadly only two.
The brains inside this guy were alive with black, moving threads that shrank away from the light and dug further into the pink meat. She cracked his skull open more while he struggled against her. Duct tape tore along with the skin it was attached to, but Maddy didn’t give up. She dug the screwdriver into the base of his neck, opening a gash in his brains.
The flower grew up and out super fast. Long red vines, pretty blue and purple flowers. Maddy covered her mouth and nose at the smell of it, which made her feel like she wanted to stuff her face and puke at the same time. Petals unfurled like fingers saying, “come here. Come here.”
She grabbed it at the base of the flower and pulled as hard as she could. If you didn’t get the roots of the dandelions, they always came back, so when the flower came all the way out of the man’s head without the roots at the bottom, she dug her fingers in to make sure she pulled them out, too.
She didn’t find any sort of roots, but instead a hard, smooth something that fit neatly into the palm of her hand. It wouldn’t come all the way out of his head — when she pulled it, the whole bunch of feather threads attached to it tugged it back toward his skull. She played tug-o-war for a few seconds before she let it go. It smacked back into his head with a low, dull, thud.
The guy stopped moving.
Maddy slipped her fingers into what was now pretty much nothing but a mushy mess. She cupped the hard thing, like a stone…no, not a stone. More like an egg. She took the egg thing out of his head again, or at least she tried, but the harder she pulled, the more the threads wound themselves deeper into his brains.
Now he twitched and jerked against the tape and the ropes, hard enough to rock the chair. Hard enough to break free. With the egg thing still in her fist, Maddy refused to let go until with one hard yank, it sucked itself back inside the guy’s head just as he busted all her special knots and shoved backward in the chair.
Maddy got out of the way as fast as she could, which was faster than the guy in front of her, what with his skull broken open and his brains starting to slide out. He tried to grab her, but she easily ducked his swinging arms. She kicked him in the knee, then the other one. Both cracked and he went down. Then she hit him over the head with the hammer she grabbed up from the table.
“Hey,” she said to the back of his head. “You in there. Whatever you are. That body you’re in is a mess.”
The man didn’t move, but his brains sure did. All those black threads wriggled up to the surface, weaving around the egg thing. Maybe to protect it, she thought as she bent closer.
She spoke gently and stroked her fingertips along it the way she’d done to those baby bunnies whose mother had abandoned them. Dad said she shouldn’t have touched them, that’s why the mom wouldn’t come back to take care of them. Maddy’d wanted to raise them, but Dad said it would be too much work and they’d probably die anyway, but Maddy had insisted on trying. One died, but the other one didn’t. Well, not until she let it go in the back yard when it got big enough, and Ev ran it over with the lawn mower.
“What are you?”
It didn’t answer her, and she wasn’t surprised. She stroked it again, soft touches. Love hands, her mom had called it.
Touch the baby with love hands Maddy. His name is baby Jameson.
This time, when she pulled out the egg thing, all of its little black threads let go and got sucked, not back into the dead guy’s brains, but into the egg thing. It sat in her palm, smooth and grey. It didn’t make a sound, it didn’t move.
Maddy held it at eye level, no longer worried about the man at her feet. He was really dead, now. She stroked the egg thing again. This was what had made him get up and walk after he died, and it was what had made him sick and killed him in the first place. It had made him super strong.
Whatever it was, it had a lot of power.
She cupped it in her two hands, studying it. The flower she’d plucked off it had already shriveled up and died. The wriggly tadpole things and the black threads were gone, inside the egg thing. The surface was sort of rubbery feeling. She turned it over and over in her hands, trying to figure it out.
It reminded her of one of those puffball mushrooms that grew up in the yard. Small, round, brown, usually with a tiny hole in the top — and if it didn’t have one, you could just tear one. When you tore it open and squeezed it, a burst of powdery stuff shot out. You had to be super careful to wash your hands, because mushrooms were poison.
What would happen if she cut this open to get at the stuff inside? Was it poison? There was only one way to find out.
With the sharp tip of her fingernail, Maddy cut a slit in the surface of the egg thing. She squeezed it, a little like one of those old plastic coin purses you could win for a few tickets at the carnival, so the hole gaped open. Then she squeezed it harder, the way you did those puffball mushrooms.
What flew out wasn’t powder. It was those little black wigglers, now each with one of those black threads attached. They shot out of the egg thing as she squeezed it, a cloud of them. Maddy’s head filled with the sound of a radio tuned to the wrong station.
She breathed.
She breathed.
She breathed it all in.
NINE
49
Kelsey had never known her father. According to her grandmother, may she rot in hell, Kelsey’s mother had been such a whore she’d been impregnated by the spunk of a dozen men and spawned a genetic abomination. Not pretty on the outside, even uglier on the inside. Kelsey knew that was a biological impossibility, obviously, but she’d also long ago stopped wondering who might’ve fathered her. It hadn’t mattered…and now she supposed it never would.
“She met him at work,” Dennis explained in a low voice. “She was in research and development, he was in another department. They both had top secret clearance, that’s what she always said.”
Kelsey’s brows rose. “Sounds like a real love match.”
“Oh…she never loved him.” Dennis laughed. “She said he was a motherfucking bastard, a useless waste of oxygen. Umm…she liked to call him a suppurating pustule on the ass of a syphilitic hermaphrodite.”
“Oh, she loved him,” Kelsey said after a second. “At least long enough for him to make her hate him.”
Dennis blinked at that and scrubbed a hand over his hair before cupping the back of her neck. “I never met him.”
“But you know what he looks like. Even like…that.” She pointed toward the vision on the monitor.
The guy’s head lolled, tongue hanging out, but eyes bright and fixed on the camera like he was looking straight at them. It gave her the creeps worse than anything she’d seen so far — and Kelsey had seen a lot of stuff. The guy was dead, but there he was, standing outside like he was waiting for someone to open the door.
“Pictures. She had some pictures.”
Kelsey glanced at him with a small smile. “She loved him.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Dennis frowned.
She thought hard for half a minute before answering. “Maybe?”
He looked at her. “Why?”
“Well.” Kelsey chewed her lower lip for a second. “At least she loved him and she didn’t just screw him. Or get knocked up by someone she didn’t even care about.”
The figure in the monitor swayed. The ones behind him had been standing motionless for the past half an hour. Now one fell down. Flat on its face, arms and legs sprawling. The sound of it must’ve been like a pumpkin hitting concrete, she thought, recoiling.
Dennis shook his head. “They can stand out there forever, I don’t care. Eventually, they’ll all fall down.”
“What do we do?”
“We’re safe in here,” Dennis told her. “Even if he is somehow smart or something, even if he remembers about the traps and defenses, look at him. Dude can barely walk, much less get past any of that stuff.”