by Perrin Briar
“If we help him, the other people on the street would see him enter,” Steve said. “Then they’d start pushing and shoving to get inside. It would become chaos, like the hospital. They would get inside, eventually. The cure would be exposed, and there would be no way to protect it.”
“We can’t just sit here!” Susan said.
“That’s exactly what we’ve got to do,” Steve said. “The cure is more important than him, or his kid.”
The man approached the research center and leaned in close to peer through the windows. The soldiers ducked down and hid out of sight.
“Hello?” the man said. “Is there anyone in there?”
The survivors were silent. The man moved away from the windows and banged on the front door.
“Please,” he said, voice full of sadness and fear. “Let me in. I have a little girl. She needs help.”
The look on the man’s face was distraught. Susan understood. She imagined herself in the same situation, cradling Amy in her arms, but quickly slammed the door on it. Otherwise, she would have pulled the door open and gestured for him to enter.
Susan wanted to shout out to him, to tell him to go to the hospital, but knew he would only press all the harder to get them to let him in. Finally, hope lost, the man turned away. He stumbled down the ramp to the main hospital entrance. He pushed into the crowd, fighting for position.
Susan relaxed, letting out a sigh. The others did likewise. Susan peered through the slats again.
The people at the hospital’s entrance were shouting something. A couple of fistfights broke out. It was a disaster waiting to happen. That many people, jammed together into a space that small, it was only a matter of time before the virus spread like wildfire.
Susan felt guilty relief they hadn’t opened their doors to the man and his daughter. But what were they becoming when they wouldn’t even help each other in their most desperate time of need? Even chimps extended the arm of friendship to those in need of aid.
Susan had to remind herself that they were doing something more important than helping a single man and his daughter. We’re trying to save the world. We’re doing something greater than any of us. She would tell herself that for years to come, she knew, but it wouldn’t lessen the sting when she recalled the man’s heart-rending cries, desperately clinging to his child, who might have been dead for all the blood that drenched her.
Susan thought of Amy. What if it had been her daughter at the door? She knew in a heartbeat she would have opened it, no matter what state she was in – infected or not, whether it doomed the world or not. She was her everything. Perhaps it was motherly nature. She would have put them all in danger. She didn’t care.
Susan knew then she wasn’t to be trusted.
Z-MINUS: 5 minutes 12 minutes
Archie’s twin robotic arms whirred as they turned and spun in intricate movements, plucking chemicals from the wall behind it and adding them to its concoction. It could do the job of a dozen scientists. Richard was watching Archie as Susan entered.
“How’s it going?” Susan said.
“It’s at fifteen percent,” Richard said.
“Fifteen?” Susan said. “Is that all?”
“I know,” Richard said. “Feels like it should be a lot farther along than that, doesn’t it? So much has happened in such a short time.”
The circular counter ticked to sixteen percent.
“Any word from Rosario?” Richard said.
No. But there should have been. The thought had been running around Susan’s mind for the past hour. It was all she could think about. She checked her phone every couple of minutes, but as yet there had been no correspondence. That was a good thing, she told herself. It meant they were busy, getting away from Charlotte and out into the countryside. But she was still worried. How long did it really take to send a message? Having said that, she couldn’t remember a time when she’d seen Rosario send a text message, or used it for any other purpose than checking the time.
“None yet,” Susan said.
“I’m sure she’ll be all right,” Richard said.
He didn’t need to refer to who ‘she’ was. Despite their divorce, Susan felt a sliver of calm. She nodded.
“Do you think Archie will be successful?” she said.
“He has to be,” Richard said. “If he isn’t, what’ll we do?”
A silence followed, a silence that drove a wedge between them. Such silences never occurred when they were married. They’d always felt comfortable in one another’s presence. But now it was just another reminder of the love they had lost.
“I’m going to get something to eat,” Susan said.
“All right,” Richard said, a tinge of sadness in his voice as he turned back to look at Archie.
Susan walked down the stairs one at a time, always seeming to make the mistake of thinking there was one more step when there wasn’t. She stumbled and gripped the railing tight. An apocalypse was meant to bring people together, wasn’t it? Was meant to make them realize the limited time they had was precious, finite.
She looked up the set of stairs to the floor above. She should go back up there, grab him, and tell him how she still felt about him. The time for subtlety was over.
She turned, but took no step forward. She couldn’t force herself to do that, even then. He had given up their daughter because of her condition, had left them, left her, to deal with it herself. She would not go begging back to him. She wouldn’t allow it. She turned and continued down the steps to the second floor.
Taylor was already eating by the time Susan got there. Susan picked up a couple of sandwiches they’d lifted from the canteen and joined her. They ate sitting on the floor, the rest of the furniture having been removed and used as barricades.
Steve had set up a lookout facing each direction. Currently, Steve stood at the window, keeping watch on the road leading to the hospital entrance. Oaks would be watching the opposite direction. They would all have their turn.
“They’re taking this defense thing pretty seriously aren’t they?” Phil said.
Susan jumped. She hadn’t heard him creeping up behind her. For such a big man, he moved very quietly.
“It’s in their nature,” Susan said. “They probably feel more at home here now than they have since they got here. They’re no longer patients, but soldiers again. Plus, I bet they can’t wait to put some of their robot limbs to work.”
“I didn’t think about it like that,” Phil said. “They’re used to warzones. I guess this time the war came to them, didn’t it?”
He grinned, but it wasn’t really filled with mirth.
“Oh, I thought I’d do some experiments to see how this virus works,” he said. “You know, when it comes in contact with us. Better to know as much about our opponent as possible, right?”
“That’s a good idea,” Susan said. “What have you come up with so far?”
Phil shuffled closer.
“Well, I put some of the virus Archie made in a petri dish with some human tissue,” he said.
“What did you find?” Susan said.
“Do you want to see?” Phil said. “It’s only early stages, but it’s already pretty exciting.”
He pulled out a tablet computer and tapped the screen. It showed a video of two sets of colors. It could have been a low-budget video game. In actual fact it was the viewpoint of a camera mounted above a petri dish on the fifth floor. Nothing much was happening.
The virus was inanimate. The tissue jittered, alive with energy. Phil hit fast forward. The red virus dye made contact with the blue human tissue. Phil pressed play, and the video played out in normal time. The virus latched onto the human tissue and spread through it, turning the blue dye red. The human cells stopped moving, dead, upon contact.
“I’ve been looking over the virus information,” Phil said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean?” Susan said.
“Look at this,” Phil said. “The virus
kills our cells. No one should still be alive after contracting it.”
“So what are you saying?” Susan said. “We know they’re still alive when they contract it. We’ve seen them wandering around.”
“I know…” Phil said.
He spoke in the tone of voice Susan always hated, a doubtful tone, that suggested he knew more than she did.
“What?” Susan said.
“Maybe they aren’t still alive,” Phil said.
“What are you talking about?” Susan said.
Phil pointed to the microscopic battle taking place on his tablet.
“See here?” Phil said. “It takes over our cells, killing them. At first I thought it worked like a strain of Ebola. But then, after a while, the cells reanimate again. Look.”
Phil was right. The human cells were jittering with life once more. But they had been dead.
“That’s impossible,” Susan said.
“It might work a bit like Ebola at first, killing the carrier from inside, but it’s much faster,” Phil said. “By my calculations the person would be fully infected within eight hours.”
Eight hours! Ebola usually took days or weeks to kill its host. Susan suddenly felt very weak.
“Are you sure?” Susan said.
“Positive,” Phil said. “I’ve run the calculations several times. It’s right.”
Susan shook her head. This was unbelievable. Eight hours to turn into one of those things… Eight hours for Archie to create the cure… Life was full of coincidences.
“Maybe just their brain functions are destroyed, unable to reanimate, and that’s why they’re acting like cornered wild animals,” Phil said.
The image sunk in. A human with no consciousness, no inner voice, no humanity. They would be little more than animals with the basest of urges. To hunt, kill, feed… Exactly the kind of thing they’d seen on the news earlier.
Steve approached Taylor, who was just finishing off her meal. He whispered something in her ear. Taylor nodded and stood up. She left, limping on her prosthetic leg. Something was happening.
Susan got up and approached Steve.
“What’s up?” she said.
Steve looked down at her, his eyes distant and haunted. He seemed to be thinking something through. To lie to her? To be honest?
Finally, he said: “They’re here.”
Z-MINUS: 4 hours 51 minutes
Their arms swung in lazy arches, pushing their momentum forward, their feet barely able to catch them before they fell. Heads lolled to one side on clearly broken necks. Other bodies were stiff and bolt upright. But all the infected were easy to identify with their unnatural gait, if you were paying attention. If you weren’t, they could creep up on you without your knowing, and that was exactly what was about to happen to the hospital crowd.
The crowd had swelled larger over the past hour, until people were queuing up down the street, their loved ones lying on the pavement. A low murmur of sadness and despair pervaded. Doctors and nurses rushed from one patient to another, administering help to those they could, ignoring those they couldn’t.
“The crowd’s making noise,” Steve said. “It’s attracting them.”
“With those things out there, wouldn’t you be making some noise?” Susan said.
“Not if I knew it attracted them,” Steve said.
The infected ambled down the road toward the crowded entrance of the hospital. They circled like wolves approaching grazing sheep.
The patients hadn’t notice them, too concerned with their loved ones to care.
And then a scream went up.
Movement. A lone figure turned to run. The other patients, confused, looked from the screaming girl to what she was screaming at.
“No!” they screamed. “No!”
They grabbed their loved ones and ran, bumping into one another in their haste to get away, tramping over the badly injured and sick. Some tripped, hitting the pavement hard. The infected fell upon them. They weren’t coordinated, acting more by instinct, descending from all directions at once.
One infected grabbed a man – he looked to be the same who’d knocked on their door earlier. Once he was within the monster’s clutches he couldn’t seem to pull away. He was pulled into the wide open jaws of the infected, who bit him on the cheek. He cried and screamed, pummeling at the undead with his fists. It did no good. The infected tore his face apart, blood spraying in a fountain over them both. It was more horrendous than any gory horror movie Susan had ever seen, their victim’s cries more heartbreaking than any actor. Sensing an easy meal, a pack of infected fell upon the fallen man. They pried at his body, digging out his entrails and fighting for the scraps like wild dogs.
Even the wounded soldiers made gasping sounds, the fear and shock catching in their throats.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Susan whispered, in case the creatures outside the hospital could hear her.
Steve didn’t answer. When Susan looked over at him, she found he was deathly pale, his eyes wide with anger and fear. His remaining hand gripped his combat knife tight in its holster. The other soldiers looked the same.
This was no cult. This was a virus, a vicious one that stripped all human consciousness from its host, returning it to the guise of a prehistoric ancestor, where violence was king and the only way to survive.
The crowd scattered, most people managing to slip between the creatures like a giant game of tag. Some were on the street, bleeding out, some already unmoving, others clutching their insides, trying to force them back into their bodies.
It was the worst thing Susan had ever seen. She felt sick. She wanted to throw up. Oaks turned away and concentrated on his breathing to stop himself from hurling. The worst was over.
Those who managed to escape would be heading away as fast as their feet could carry them. The infected, hunger sated, at least for the moment, wandered from place to place, often standing in place, gazing at nothing in particular, their mouths moving like they were chewing cud.
They wandered around aimlessly. They were horrific, and yet there was something mesmerizing about them, something that drew the eye so you didn’t want to turn away from them. Or show your back. Like prey toward a predator.
These things, whatever they were, were no longer human, but animals. It was hard to have any kind of feeling for the beasts, beyond pity. But now they were their new natural enemies, and they had to be beaten.
Z-MINUS: 4 hours 40 minutes
It was another ten minutes before they got a good close-up look at one of the beasts. Something about the facility had attracted his attention. Half his face had been chewed off.
The creatures appeared to have a natural curiosity, to investigate their surroundings, no doubt in their endless search for food. But perhaps it was something more than that, some lingering aspect of their humanity that peered about their surroundings in an attempt to better understand it, to better survive. But as the man drew closer, and Susan could make out the expression on his face, she knew that wasn’t the case.
His expression was vacuous and faraway, like he was constantly looking at something in the distance. A sudden noise, to his left, grabbed his attention. He approached it, getting close, and poked and probed at the object. His face was pale white. If Susan had seen his pallid expression on a live patient she would have made him lie down and inserted a drip into his arm. He’d been badly injured, worse than she’d first thought. Blood stained his pants and had turned his shirt crimson red.
Steve whispered to the other soldiers. They were moving into position at the entrance, forming up on either side. They began to take down the reinforcements.
The wood snapped in their fingers as they tore it from the door, the nails wrenching and shrieking free. The infected man on the outside grunted, his attention taken with it. Taylor seized the door handle, bore its weight and prepared to pull it open.
“What are you doing?” Susan whispered to Steve.
“We need to se
e what we’re up against here,” Steve said. “If we can get one of these things in here, subdue it, we might be able to see what we’re dealing with.”
“Sounds risky,” Susan said.
“Riskier not to know,” Steve said.
It made sense, though Susan didn’t much relish the idea of having one of those things inside the research center.
Steve stood beside the door. Taylor held the door handle. Oaks stood in the middle of the room beside the garden and fountains.
“You’ll want to stand back,” Steve said.
Susan did. Taylor peered out the window and nodded. The coast was clear. Steve tensed his body. He nodded. Taylor turned the door handle.
Steve began to move before the door was even fully open. He seized the infected man by his shirt and pulled him inside, flipping him over like an empty sack. The figure hit the floor, but rolled to his feet with a surprising smoothness. On his feet, he stumbled back and forth like a master of drunken boxing, his movements odd, constantly trying to stay upright.
Taylor shut the door immediately and began piling the furniture up again. At the fountain, Oaks said, “Hey! Hey!”
The infected man turned, slowly, on the spot, like he was on a turntable, to face the noise. But the figure was confused, his attention diverted between the noise Oaks was making with his voice, and the movements of Taylor and Steve as they hastily worked to rebuild their barricade defense.
Oaks tapped his metal arm on a fountain, making a tinging sound that the man seemed to find mesmerizing, cocking his head to one side like a dog at an interesting new toy.
The soldiers piled up the last of the furniture, turned, and formed a circle around the figure, a gang of bullies surrounding a weakling. It peered at them, one by one in turn.
“Its skin’s hanging from its bones,” Taylor said.
“He’s not a pretty thing, is he?” Oaks said.
The figure, as if aware of the name-calling, attacked, falling with its arms out straight, right for Steve, who caught it. The creature wrapped its teeth around Steve’s metal arm, saliva dribbling. The point of Steve’s blade sliced through the creature’s cheek. The creature didn’t even seem to notice. In fact, it only seemed to press itself further onto the blade. It was moaning, groaning. The sound wasn’t loud, but vibrated low in the air and traveled far.