by M. D. Massey
Strange. The epidemic in South America was said to cause violent symptoms, exactly like what I’d seen today.
Maybe I should’ve worried.
Today had started as a typical Thursday. I’d listened to the radio on the commute to work. There’d been more talk on the growing epidemic, but local news overshadowed talks of the epidemic. At Prima, gossip ran wild all morning about last night’s attacks on joggers and walkers in nearly every southern state west of the Mississippi. Several paranoid employees had called in sick today.
Then, two cooks in the cafeteria got into some kind a brawl just before lunch. One left in an ambulance, and the other had been taken away in handcuffs. The news was reporting similar attacks across the Midwest and Western United States. With all that, would Prima close for the day? Hell, no.
Several worried employees had already left for home to pick up their kids from school. And now, not even three hours after lunch, half of the office was going ape-shit crazy on each other. Whatever was going on, it felt like I was caught in the middle of Ground Zero for some seriously screwed up shit.
I focused on breathing in and out. I reached for the radio and fumbled with the knob. I wrung my shaking hands, wiped them on my black pants, but they kept shaking.
Alan cranked up the volume, and I noticed his hands were shaking even worse.
“Reports are coming in from Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis of a fast-spreading pandemic. Seek shelter immediately and avoid contact with anyone infected. The infected will display violent tendencies and attack without provocation. They do not respond to reason,” an unfamiliar even-toned woman reported. “If you or a loved one is infected, you should quarantine yourself immediately so as not to spread the virus. Do not go to the hospitals as they are at full capacity. Stay tuned for more information.”
“That’s it?” Alan asked. “That’s all those idiots have to say about this thing? Nothing like how it’s transmitted, or what we can do to protect ourselves?”
“Give it time,” I said. The news last night had shown footage of random people attacking others without provocation, but I’d assumed the attacks were the result of some new illegal drug gone bad. The idea of a pandemic made my jaw clench.
My dad was a doctor. My mom was a nurse.
My parents, early-retiree snowbirds, lived in a southern suburb of Des Moines. With me as their only child, they kept their house in town for the warmer months while moving to Arizona every winter. I prayed that they were safe at home, that they didn’t think to go help out at the hospital. I had to believe they saw the news this morning and knew better than to get caught in the middle of some off-the-charts violent pandemic.
I wanted to call them to make sure they were all right, but my phone was tucked into my bag, which was still sitting in a drawer at my cubicle. I looked over at Alan. “Can I use your phone?”
He felt his pockets and then frantically swerved around a fender bender before shooting through a red light. Sirens blared as a police car sped past us.
“I think it’s still on my desk,” Alan replied in between panting breaths.
“This is crazy,” I said. “Everyone’s gone crazy.”
“It’s got to be a terrorist attack,” he said. “Chemical warfare or something that’s making people go nuts. It’s like they’re jacked up on serious shit like bath salts or something. Damn it!” He swerved again. “This traffic is insane.” He turned to me, his glasses slipping down his sweaty nose. “You live on the north side, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah, why?”
“I’m way out on the east side. Mind if we hit your place until the roads open up?” His voice cracked and he wiped his face.
“Sure.” I scrutinized him. “Are you okay?”
He grabbed the wheel with both hands. “No, I’m not okay! What about today would make you think that I’m okay? That anything’s okay? It’s World War III out there. No, it’s worse than that. It’s like the end of the world out there!”
I got it, I really did. The proverbial shit had hit the fan, and the rational part of my mind had decided to curl up in the fetal position. “We got out early,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. “Hopefully we can beat the worst of the traffic.”
As though on cue, a car veered in front of us and rammed into the concrete separating the lanes. “Watch out!” I shouted as Alan cranked the wheel, nearly sideswiping the vehicle. I could’ve sworn the driver looked in the same bad way that Melanie had. The SUV behind us wasn’t so lucky because it rammed into the jackknifed car and started a domino-effect pile-up behind us.
Alan and I stared at each other, and he stepped on the gas.
In the background, the radio station had switched to interviewing people outside one of the hospitals.
“I thought the kid was lost. I bent down to help, and the little bugger bit me! Can you believe that? The kid damn near took my thumb clean off! He went nuts, like he had rabies or something. And now they won’t let me into the hospital. They’ve got barricades in front of the doors, and cops are in full riot gear, just standing around everywhere. I’m stuck outside bleeding, and no one is telling us what’s going on. We have a right to know!”
“You think you got it bad?” another male voice chimed in. “You should’ve been downtown. This old bum attacked a woman. I saw it all. He was stumbling around all drunk-like, and then he just attacked. He went straight for that poor gal’s throat like he thought he was a vampire or something. A couple guys tried to pull him off her, but he wouldn’t let go. I jumped in to help, and he tore a chunk out of my arm. He wouldn’t stop. Some guy had to shoot him. Can you believe it? It was insane, man. What’s the world coming to?”
My heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest, and I found myself on the verge of hyperventilating. I punched in another radio station, only to find the same barrage of stories. No one had any useful information, just more of those horrific tales. I leaned back, tried to tune out the radio, and focused on the traffic outside. With every mile, the number of vehicles on the side of the road increased. Some cars were in pileups, others looked like they had stopped haphazardly, as though their drivers had decided to simply stop driving.
I sucked in a deep breath. “I think I killed Melanie,” I said quietly.
“Melanie Carlson?”
“What?” I glanced at Alan. “Oh. No. The other Melanie.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “Did she try to hurt you?”
“Of course she tried to hurt me. She tried to eat me.”
Alan was quiet for a time. “I bet she could eat a lot.”
I belted out a laugh. Not because it was funny but because my adrenaline high was coming down, and with it, my shock. Alan laughed, too, though the stress was getting to him. He wiped his sweaty forehead with his arm and kept driving.
I’d killed someone today. The truth really hit me just then, and I let my head fall against the headrest. I hadn’t even thought about the repercussions. Would I go to jail, even though it was an open-and-shut case of self-defense? I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. I’d lose my job. That was a given. How the hell would I pay the bills?
And then there was Melanie. That poor woman’s final minutes were in a bathroom of all places.
“No, no, no, no,” Alan chanted.
Startled, I glanced up to find a massive pileup of cars dead ahead. Vehicles were mashed together, filling up every inch of open space in the four lanes in front of us. An ambulance and two police cars were on scene but no tow trucks yet. Concrete prevented us from getting into the lanes of oncoming traffic, and a deep ditch prevented escape off to the right.
“Can you turn around? Take the last exit?” I asked.
He was staring in the rear-view mirror. “I don’t think so. It’s getting pretty crowded back there. Maybe we can find a way around this mess.”
Doubtful, I scanned the wreck as we drew closer. People were running away, but not everyone. One cop was handcuffing a man who kept twisting
his neck, trying to bite him. Several others were standing by cars, helping free the drivers and passengers. I narrowed my eyes.
Hell. They weren’t helping free the people still in cars. “Oh, God,” I whispered.
“What is it?” Alan asked.
“We have to get out of here,” I said, staring at the crazies attacking the people in cars. It was like the entire world decided to go cannibal at the same time.
He frowned, pointing ahead. “Exactly how do you think we are going to get past this mess?”
“I mean now, Alan.”
A man jumped out of his car and started firing his pistol into the mob. The sound must’ve finally registered what was underway because Alan’s eyes widened, and he yanked the car around. Something slammed into our car and an explosive force threw me against the seat. Dazed, I blinked to see that we were now facing another direction.
Powder from the airbags sent dust flurries in the air. I shoved at the deflating white bag. The driver of the car that had t-boned us was still hidden behind his airbags. I glanced back at the horde of crazies to find them looking in our direction.
I unlatched my seatbelt and tugged on Alan’s arm. “C’mon. We need to get out of here.”
He muttered something, and shook his head as though to clear it.
“Stupid idiot!”
I looked outside to see the other driver climb groggily out of his car, shaking his fist. He stepped up to Alan’s door, and pounded on the window. “Moron! What were you thinking turning around in the middle of the road like that?” he yelled.
“Fuck off!” Alan growled right back.
Alan was not a large man. He was my height and had maybe thirty pounds on me. To see him yelling at a pissed off guy only added fire to a tinderbox. Then I saw them coming our way. “Uh, Alan?”
“What!”
I pointed at several crazies with pallid skin stumbling toward us, their jaundiced sights homed in on the man standing outside our car. Their faces and chests were blood-soaked, and a few sported violent injuries of their own. One hobbled along with a broken leg. Another was missing an arm. Still another looked like half her throat had been ripped out. They moved slowly and jerkily but were relentlessly closing the distance. Alan looked and gasped.
The man outside continued to yell until he realized Alan was no longer paying any attention to him. He followed Alan’s gaze. He cried out and took off running back to his car but was too late. All of the crazies attacked him at once. The driver screamed. It was an awful, bloodcurdling scream, but I couldn’t see what was happening under the pile of writhing flesh and gushing blood. Not that I wanted to.
I glanced at Alan, and then opened the door and ran.
2
Tires squealed as cars rammed into the bottleneck. Gunshots rang though the air. With Alan at my back, we sprinted away from the crazies and into the oncoming traffic.
I headed straight for the midnight blue eighteen-wheeler just rolling in, with an American flag painted on its trailer, dwarfing the vehicles around it. Even though the truck was still moving, I jumped up on the driver’s side step, pulled on the locked door handle, and pounded on the window. “Please let me in!”
The driver scowled. His eyes were covered by aviator-style sunglasses, and I couldn’t see if he was watching me, the crazies, or something else. His lower lip bulged with chew, and with a wave of his hand he motioned me away.
I tried the handle again. No luck. I risked a quick glance behind me to see that, sure enough, the group of crazies that had been huddled around a small truck was now headed this way. I swung back to the truck driver. “Please!”
After a long second, the window opened, and the barrel of a shotgun pressed against my chest.
I didn’t fall back. I didn’t jump to the side. Instead, I stood there as though waiting for him to shoot me. “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” I said weakly.
He scowled even more, causing lines in his five o’clock shadow. He kept the shotgun level at my chest. “You bit?”
I gave my head a fervent shake. “No.” Then I frowned, confused. “Why?”
He seemed satisfied with my answer, though he also didn’t seem in the mood to elaborate. He cranked his head around mine and nodded toward Alan, who was hanging on right behind me. “How about you? You don’t look so good.”
I glanced back to find a sweaty, pale Alan.
“I’m f-fine,” Alan replied with a stutter. When the trucker didn’t respond, Alan threw up his hands. “I was just in a freaking car accident, man!”
The crazies were less than thirty feet away and quickly closing in. I snapped my gaze back to the trucker, pleading. “Mister, please!”
He moved his head slightly to check out the crazies closing in. He spit off to my right and pulled in his gun. “If you want to live, you’d better climb in.”
I heard the pop of the door unlocking, and I stepped to the side to open it. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I murmured as I crawled over him, knocking his cap askew, on my way to the passenger seat. Once there, I fastened the seatbelt as fast as I could in case the trucker changed his mind and tried to shove me out. Alan came in right behind me, only he collapsed in the cab behind us. The driver slammed the door shut, set the gun between him and the door, and grabbed the long shifter. Air shot from the brakes.
A crazy rammed the door and clawed at the now-closed window. The truck lurched forward, and the man in a bloodied business suit tumbled off the truck.
“Damn zeds,” the driver muttered, his hat still crooked.
“Zeds?” I frowned, recognizing the term. “You don’t mean…”
He pointed outside where several crazies stood literally dead ahead of us. “You know damn well what they are.”
What the trucker had said made perfect sense, but it shouldn’t be possible. Yet, not only did one of the infected try to eat me less than an hour ago, they moved like zeds—zombies—clumsily and relentlessly. No different from the crazies in front of us now. With no regard to their well-being, they kept shambling toward the truck barreling down the road on its way to meet them.
“I guess you’re right,” I said softly as the realization of fiction becoming reality hammered at the tension headache already pounding behind my forehead.
The driver stepped on the gas, and I sucked in a breath. The heavy rig rammed through the group of crazies like a bowling ball, only these pins left behind goo and flecks of skin.
“Holy shit,” I muttered as the trucker ran over zeds like they were nothing more than small speed bumps. The windshield wipers smeared brown streaks across the glass. He kept picking up speed, setting us up for a bull’s-eye approach to the roadblock. I braced my legs against the dash the instant before he rammed into a small car jackknifed between an SUV and a minivan. Something heavy slammed against the back of my seat, followed by a muffled moan.
I looked back to find Alan crumpled on the floor. “You okay?”
“Nnnh, yeah.”
The truck shoved the car to the side with metal-on-metal screeching. As we carved our way through the wreckage, the rig knocked around the sedan the zeds had swarmed earlier. The driver, still strapped inside, reached out to us with his only remaining arm. Even though he no longer had a face, the man watched us with unblinking eyes while his mouth opened and closed.
I shivered and turned away.
Once we broke through the bottleneck and put distance between us and the zeds, the road opened up. In the distance, a few cars entered from the next ramp, but most of the traffic was headed in the opposite direction.
I grinned. “Hot damn! We got through!”
In response, the trucker glared. “I’d be surprised if I didn’t bust something,” he growled out. “She’s not made for this sort of abuse.”
I glanced in the side mirror to see a line of vehicles following us, though the zeds were closing in on the cars on both sides. The woman in a convertible never stood a chance. I snapped my gaze straight ahead to the open highway. Aft
er a moment, I found my voice again. “What you did back there…thanks. I mean it. You saved our lives.”
He grumbled something under his breath.
The open road looked like freedom, and for the first time since getting mauled by Melanie I let myself relax. I felt halfway in control again even though I knew it was a false feeling. Too much had changed since this morning. I loved routines. I hated chaos.
Five days a week I sat in a small mushroom-colored cubicle in a sea of mushroom-colored cubicles, at the same desk I’d sat at for over five years since college. I was an actuary, which my parents thought was a pretty big deal, but really it just meant I ran a lot of reports and analyzed spreadsheets.
Two years ago, I’d saved up enough money to make a decent down payment on a fixer-upper in the Gussdale district, and most of my free time went to renovating the old bungalow. Well, to that, and flying. My Piper Cub was the one splurge I’d allowed myself after college. Dad had been a pilot, and I got my pilot’s license the same week I got my driver’s license. I rubbed my bare arm where the Cub logo tattoo—a fuzzy teddy bear—looked up at me.
After today, I’d probably never get the chance to log another hour in the Cub. The entire world had fallen apart before my eyes. After running a finger wistfully over the teddy bear, I looked out the window.
Startled, I pointed to the sign. “My exit is the next one coming up.”
A small nod was the only acknowledgement I got before the trucker picked up a soda can from a cup holder and spit in it.
Another grunt from the back seat reminded me that I wasn’t the only passenger. I turned around. Alan was lying on the floor, his face covered by his arm. “How are you holding up back there?”
No response. I frowned. He hadn’t hit the back of my seat that hard. “Alan?”
Still nothing.
“Alan,” I said louder.