by M. D. Massey
In the second drawer, he found a Phillips-head screwdriver. That’ll have to do.
The only plan he could think of was to try and make it to his boss’ office near the front of the building. He knew there was a gun in there because his boss, a forty-year old outdoorsman named Andrew, was a card-toting member of the NRA, and had often bragged about keeping a gun at the office. If Will could make it there, he would at least have something tangible to defend himself with, assuming it was still there. If he could make it.
Will slid the desk away from the door, making as little noise as he possibly could. Andrew’s office was only about thirty yards away, but Will had no idea what he might encounter when he left the small office.
He closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. Put his hand on the door handle, pushed down, and pulled it toward him.
When he poked his head out the door, he looked to the right first and immediately brought his hand over his mouth to keep from yelling out.
Two more of his co-workers were on the ground with their entrails pouring out and hanging over their ribs.
He turned back into the room and emptied his stomach all over the carpet. After a few moments, he gained back his composure. Wiping the vomit from his lips, Will stood, hinged at the hips, facing the ground for a few moments before he remembered he needed to move.
His eyes went straight to Dean, his friend whom he’d watched get eaten alive just minutes before.
For a moment, he stood over him. Stared into his eyes. They were still open, even though he knew that Dean’s soul had left.
Will picked his head up and stepped over Dean.
As he did, he heard the snarl and stopped.
A hand grabbed a hold of his ankle and he fell face first to the ground, letting loose of his screwdriver in the process. He clawed his hands against the floor and looked back to see Dean resurrected. Only it wasn’t really Dean. His eyes had grayed, and intangible noises came out of his mouth. He squeezed Will’s leg, chomping his jaws.
Will kicked his legs and turned back to look for the screwdriver. He could feel Dean spitting at him. He saw the screwdriver, but it was just out of his reach. Stretching as far as he could, he still couldn’t quite reach it.
He felt his shoe come off and looked back to see Dean trying to pull his foot toward his mouth. In a panic, sweat dripping down his cheek, Will kicked his feet as hard as he could toward Dean. The grip on his ankle tightened.
Again, he reached for the screwdriver, and his fingertips brushed the edge of it.
He looked back and saw his foot moving closer to Dean’s mouth.
At last, one of his kicks connected. Will’s foot hit Dean square in the forehead, and the grip around his ankle loosened enough for him to crawl forward and grab the screwdriver.
He flipped over onto his back, sat up, and drove the screwdriver into Dean’s left eye. Dean let out one last growl before the grip around Will’s ankle became nonexistent.
Will lay flat on his back then, fighting to catch his breath. His stomach moved up and down like a flaying heart.
Down the hall, he heard a collection of howls echoing from the showroom.
“Shit,” Will mumbled to himself.
He jumped to his feet and headed down the hall towards Andrew’s office.
Behind him, he could hear the small horde tearing into another one of his co-workers, and wanted to move as far away from that as possible.
Without thinking, he went into the main part of the office. It was a very large room that extended to the exterior wall at the front of the building, with eight desks that the company’s sales reps used lining the wall to his right. The middle of the room was wide open, and there were two additional large offices to the left, one of which was Andrew’s. Will came to an abrupt halt as he realized the mistake of entering the room too quickly.
In the middle of the office, three figures were on their knees, mounted over a quivering body. He recognized their tattered clothes. It was three of the sales guys he’d worked with.
One of them, who Will recognized as having been Roger, looked back and hissed as he saw him. This got the attention of the other two.
Without hesitation, Will ran over and jammed the screwdriver into Roger’s temple. The slimy sound it made as he pulled it out almost made Will throw up again. He held in what remained of his turkey and cheese sandwich and turned to jab the screwdriver into the next body. It was a new guy that Will barely knew. His first name was Ryan, but Will couldn’t remember his last name.
The third one came at him and they tumbled to the ground together.
Flat on his back, working to push the weight off of him, Will was face to face with yet another co-worker, Emanuel.
He screamed, inches from Will’s face, as saliva dripped down to Will’s neck.
Right as he was about to bite into Will’s cheek, he jammed the screwdriver into Emanuel’s right temple. The thing became limp on top of him and his darkened blood dripped down onto Will’s face.
He couldn’t hold back his gut this time, and spilled it all over the floor once more.
Andrew shared his office with three other employees who held various operational positions within the company. A shape that almost resembled a human body, twisted and mangled, lay in the center of the office. While the smell made his empty stomach turn, the person was already torn beyond the point of coming back to life to attack him. It amazed Will how, in moments of survival, he had quickly adapted to seeing the dead. How he could move past them without blinking an eye.
Will ran to Andrew’s desk and dug through all the drawers until he found the handgun. It had been a few years since Will had hunted deer with his father, and the weapon now in his hand reminded him of cool winter mornings, sitting in a treestand with his old man. He checked to make sure it was loaded. Of course it was. Andrew would never have had an unloaded gun at his side. What was the point?
Before walking away from Andrew’s desk, Will picked up the phone.
“Damn,” he said, as he put the dead phone back down on the receiver.
The next step was to clear the building and look for any survivors. The latter chance seemed grim, as no one so far seemed to have had the luck he had. Being lazy on his lunch break may have been the only thing to save Will Kessler’s life.
He knew that a small group of at least two of his sick co-workers were in the showroom. He left his boss’ office and headed back down the hall toward the rear of the building.
It was hard not to look down at Dean’s body as he passed by it again. He knew that he had only been defending himself from the thing his friend had become when he’d jammed the screwdriver through his head, but it didn’t make it easier.
As he continued down the hall, he passed the break room on his left. He looked inside and saw blood covering the table, the floor, and some more splattered on the wall. But there were no bodies.
At the end of the hall, he heard the rustling still coming out of the showroom.
Will put his ear to the door. As he’d suspected he would, he heard barking on the other side.
He held the gun up next to his face, drew in a deep breath, and swung the door open.
Three of them looked at him as he stepped through the doorway.
They stood less than ten yards away, and Will began firing rounds without paying attention to their faces. He didn’t want to make it any harder than it had to be to put them down.
After he took all three of them out with consecutive head shots, he looked into their faces to confirm who else was lost. He was fighting to hold in his sadness, regret, and anger, but made a mental note: Danny, Robert, and Jeremy.
In the middle of the room, there was a large table that was used for meetings. Another one of his co-workers, David, lay on the table half-eaten. Will pushed his body off of the table, watching as his arms and legs landed, twisted through one another.
The room had two more doors. One of them led out of the office and into the warehouse while the other led outs
ide, behind the building. Since he still didn’t have a complete grasp on the situation, Will decided his best chance of survival was to clear out the building and hold things down here. So, he moved the large table in front of the door that led outside and then made his way through the one that went to the warehouse.
As the door swung open to the 30,000-square-foot warehouse, Will found himself alone. He could hear groaning and inhuman vocalizing off in the distance, but nothing in the corner of the warehouse where he stood.
He pulled another clip out of his pocket and popped it into the pistol, putting the gun under his shirt to mute the click.
With the gun now drawn in front of him, Will began to creep through the warehouse. Fifteen-foot-high racking running from the front of the warehouse to the back separated the space into eight aisles. The orange, steel racking that housed pallets filled with Element’s products began twenty feet from the front of the warehouse and ended fifteen feet from the back wall, leaving an open, well-lit path along the back of the warehouse. And if things went south, he would have a quick path back into the office through the showroom door.
When he approached the first aisle, he looked around the corner.
Nothing.
As he moved further along the back of the warehouse, he heard more snarls in the distance. The tongue of the inhuman, an adopted language of the new world.
The next few aisles had puddles of blood and matter on the floor, but nothing moved.
Will had to walk past four more of the eight aisles before he came across more of the dead.
Three people who had been his co-workers stood in front of him, their faces hardly recognizable now from the sudden change. These were men that Will had eaten lunch with almost everyday. But now, all of them were gone, their bodies left behind only to hunt him down.
Their backs were turned until the gun went off, which sent one of the creature’s vacant brains all over brown boxes stacked waist-high on a pallet behind them.
The other two came at him and he pointed the gun at the one to his left. It was Jay, one of his fellow warehouse workers. Jay was only twenty-three, had gotten married four months prior, and had a child on the way. Will thought back to the day Jay had told everyone in the office that he was going to be a father. He’d been elated, going up to each of his co-workers individually to tell them about it. Now, as Will raised the gun to Jay’s head, he couldn’t help but remember the cheerful face of the father-to-be from that happy day, which now seemed so long ago.
He took a few steps back and looked into the other’s eyes. His name had been Rick. He was the company’s accountant, an awkward fellow that Will had never really gotten to know. Rick had been an introvert and kept to himself most of the time. They’d pass each other in the restroom from time to time, but didn’t have to deal with each other much on a day-to-day basis, as their jobs rarely called for it. The fact that Will had almost no relationship with the man didn’t make it any easier to look into his eyes and put a bullet between them.
After Rick’s mangled body hit the concrete floor, an echoing shrill came from the front of the warehouse.
Will ran toward the sound and saw one of the creatures straddling someone.
Someone who was screaming.
Fighting back.
Someone who was alive.
The identity of the person was hidden by a pallet of boxes.
Just as Will drew the gun, the creature got the upper hand in the struggle and dug its face into the stomach of its prey.
The person behind the pallet sat up, screaming, and Will saw the face. It was Jordan, a fellow warehouse worker who had become one of Will’s best friends over their time working at Element. They hung out a lot on the weekend and spent many evenings after work drinking beers together at a bar down the street called McKinney’s Pub.
“No!” Will yelled out.
The creature looked up and, even through the blood spread across its mouth, Will knew the face instantly.
It was his boss, Andrew.
Andrew stood and came at Will, who didn’t hesitate to point the gun and fire a single shot into the head of his former boss.
As Andrew’s body hit the ground, Will thought of every time his old boss had been an asshole to him. Will thought of one specific time when he had shrink-wrapped a pallet of boxes too loosely, and when he’d moved it, the pallet had tipped over and the boxes had fallen all over the ground. Andrew had called all the employees to the front of the warehouse, pointed out Will’s mistake, and demonstrated to the whole crew how to properly shrink-wrap a pallet. It had humiliated Will, and he had no remorse for the man lying dead before him.
His attention shifted as he looked down and saw Jordan’s stomach open, his intestines letting go and beginning to pour over his ribs.
“Oh shit, Jordan,” he said.
“Kill me,” Jordan said through the blood coming out of his mouth.
Will just stared at him.
“Kill me.”
Jordan turned his head to the side and looked away. His eyes welling, Will pushed the hammer down with his thumb. He still hesitated to pull the trigger, wondering how he had been put in the middle of this.
“Do it,” Jordan mumbled.
Will saw Jordan close his eyes and begin to move his lips. He couldn’t make the words out, but he assumed that Jordan—a well-devout Christian—was praying to God in his final moments.
“I’m so sorry,” Will said.
The echo of the gunshot harmonized beautifully with the heightened cry from Will’s lungs.
2
Gabriel
Austin, TX
* * *
Laying on the desk on the other side of the room, the cell phone began to vibrate, startling Gabriel Alexander.
He rubbed his hair with a towel as he walked from the bathroom to the desk to grab his phone.
As Gabriel saw the name across the tiny screen, he smiled. “Hey, sweetie,” he said to his wife, putting the phone on speaker so that he could continue to dry off and get dressed.
“Hey, honey. Are you still coming home today?” Katie asked.
Gabriel grabbed his brush and started running it through his black hair.
“I was planning on it. Is that okay?” He presented the question with sarcasm.
Katie sighed and Gabriel could hear the smile through the phone. “Of course it’s okay,” she said. “We just can’t wait to see you.”
The Alexanders lived just outside of Washington D.C. in the town of Alexandria, Virginia. Gabriel was a pharmaceutical sales representative and a large portion of his job was spent traveling. Katie was a stay-at-home mom to their twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah. His wife home-schooled Sarah and kept things running smoothly around the house since Gabriel had to travel so much.
“How’s Sarah?” Gabriel asked.
“Good. She misses you. She was going to stay at Lindsay’s tonight but I think she’s going to stay home now. She really wants to see her daddy.”
Gabriel smiled. Sarah was nearing the age where she would be too cool to hang with her parents. But she was a daddy’s girl, and that would be hard-pressed to change.
He looked down at his watch.
“Look, honey, I gotta run. I don’t wanna miss my flight,” he said.
“Okay. I love you, Gabriel.”
“Love you, too.”
Gabriel hung up the phone and rushed to finish getting ready. He was already running late.
The tires of the taxi screeched as it came to a halt in front of the Departures area at the airport.
“That’ll be $32.14,” said the driver.
Gabriel reached into his wallet and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill.
“Keep the change,” Gabriel said.
The driver’s eyes widened and he stuck his thumb up.
“Thank you, sir! That is so gracious!”
Gabriel shot him a smile and a quick wave before hurrying out of the taxi. He grabbed his bag out of the trunk and jogged through the fron
t door of the airport.
When he finally made it past security, Gabriel looked at one of the monitors to check the status of his flight.
Flight 3427, Gate D, Washington D.C., Now Boarding
“Shit,” Gabriel said.
He sprinted through the terminal with his coat over his left arm and his bag in his right, banging his shin with every frantic step.
In a dead sprint, he took a peek at his watch to check the time. When he looked up again, he saw a stout man standing in his path and it was too late to pivot and dodge him. Gabriel went shoulder to shoulder with the guy, tumbling to the floor. The man, much heavier than Gabriel, barely moved.
“What the fuck, asshole?” the man said.
Gabriel looked up, smiled, and waved as a way of apologizing.
The guy flipped him off and turned back to the woman he’d been talking to when he’d nearly been run through like a brick wall.
Gabriel hopped up and continued his marathon, running as fast as he could to catch his flight home.
The airline associate, a woman in her mid-thirties, was closing the gate as Gabriel barreled toward her, waving his ticket and boarding pass in the air.
“Wait!” he shouted.
The disgruntled woman looked to him, tapping her foot on the ground and sighing.
“I’m sorry, sir, the plane is about to pull away from the gate.”
Panting, Gabriel shot the woman a desperate look.
“Please,” he began. “I need to be on this flight.” He pointed out toward the plane. “Come on, it’s right there.”
She sighed.
“Please. A beautiful woman like you isn’t going to ruin this for me when I came this close, are you?” he asked, using his charm to woo her.
Gabriel was a good-looking man. As good as he looked in a suit, he could woo any woman with his business professional sex appeal.