A dozen more people must have been bitten and infected in the next two minutes alone.
Parker sat on one of the tables with his feet on the bench and buried his face in his hands. His hands were covered in blood—he could smell it—but he didn’t care. Everybody was doomed.
The virus spread like a fire, and the sounds of violence and mayhem sounded like a stadium roar.
A cell door slammed shut. It would not open again.
Parker plugged his fingers in his ears, but he couldn’t block out the sounds.
Screams.
Howls.
Clangs.
“God help us.”
Crying.
Bangs.
Shrieks.
“It’s fucking Biblical, man.”
And it was. The cellblock had been quiet just thirty minutes earlier, but now hundreds of people would die within an hour because one person was infected with that godawful virus.
Parker walked toward Betty’s cell. He knew where it was. She’d spent enough time kicking the bars before she went silent.
“Betty!” he shouted over the din and the roar.
Betty said nothing. At least she didn’t scream. She’d apparently passed out and hadn’t awoken yet with the infection.
“Thank you, Betty,” he said. “You saved me.”
Betty said nothing. She was gone. For now. Parker wished he could save her too, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t save everybody. He couldn’t save anybody.
“Hey mister.” A woman’s voice in the cell next to Betty’s. “Come inside and I’ll close the door.”
“You’ll be trapped,” Parker said.
“I don’t want to die in here by myself,” she said.
“We all die alone,” Parker said. It was a stupid thing to say. They were all dying together.
“We’ll be dead in five minutes if we don’t lock ourselves in,” the woman said.
He thought about killing himself. Betty had saved him, yes, but she’d saved him from his own mind. She couldn’t save him from this. And he’d go out ugly. He couldn’t even kill himself. It was impossible. If he had a gun, he could swallow a bullet. If he had a rope, he could hang himself. If he had a cyanide capsule, he could eat it. If he had a knife, he could ask someone to slit his throat, ghastly as that would be.
He had none of those things.
He could not hold his breath until he suffocated. He could not strangle himself. He could not bash his own head into the wall until it killed him.
There was no way to commit suicide, no way to take himself off the board before those things found him and ate him to death.
Because unlike everyone else in the prison, he wouldn’t turn if he got bit. He’d have to wait to be eaten alive.
“Mister. Come on.”
That woman, whoever she was, could lock herself in her cell and escape a violent death, but then what? Wait to die from dehydration? A few minutes of pain might be better than the long and slow and tortuous agony of death by thirst in a building teeming with shrieking infected.
“Mister!” the woman shouted above the roar of the howling prison. “Come on!”
If Parker went in there with her, she’d end up drinking the water in no time. Every time she did, the odds were one-in-twenty that Parker would have to kill her.
“I’m counting to three!” she yelled.
They’d surely agree that neither of them could drink anything after dark.
“One!”
They might get lucky and freeze to death peacefully.
“Two!”
Or even luckier and get rescued.
“Three!”
“Okay,” Parker said and stepped into the cell.
They slammed the door closed together.
It would never open again.
“Thank you,” the woman said.
For what? Parker thought.
An infected hurled itself at the cell bars. It screamed with the rage of hell and threw itself again and again at the door.
The woman cried and hugged him and buried her face in his chest. Parker wondered if she was pretty.
37
Kyle dreams about fire.
He is standing on the balcony of his loft condo in Portland and watching transfixed as the towers downtown explode into columns of flame. The air is hot and black and tastes like ashes.
Annie is next to him. She is naked and does not seem to notice or mind.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. Her eyes reflect an orange and red glow.
“It won’t last,” he says.
“We can build a new city in the forest,” she says. “A city just for us.”
“Can I screw your brains out when we get there?” he says.
“God, yes.” She smiles. She kisses him on the neck and wraps her arms around his waist. He likes her naked but they can’t leave until he finds her some shoes.
“Then we’ll have to move on. To the other city,” he says.
“Why?” she says.
“Because this can’t go on.”
“Why not?” she says.
“There won’t be anything left to burn,” he says.
Then he sat bolt upright on the floor of Andy’s room.
Kyle heard no sound except Andy’s snoring. Outside was silent. No yelling, no screaming, no breaking glass, no gunshots, no nothing.
He went back to sleep. Back to his dream. Back to Annie, her nakedness and his hardness.
This time he’s with her in a dripping green forest awash with the sounds of rushing and gurgling water. She isn’t naked this time. He wants to take her clothes off, but they’re on their way somewhere. He can’t remember where they’re going, but wherever it is, it’s important.
“When do you suppose we’ll get there?” she says and takes his hand as they walk.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But it’s far, isn’t it?”
“We’re going to the place where I come from,” she says. “This is the place where you come from. But we don’t have to walk the whole way.”
“How else can we get there?”
“We can just close our eyes.”
He remembers now. They’re traveling to Atlanta. Is this path through the forest the way? He doesn’t think so, but he’s not sure he cares.
Kyle has never been to Georgia before, never been anywhere in the south before, but if he can imagine it, he can go there.
He wraps his arms around Annie’s waist. He wants to unbutton her pants. Heat stirs in the lower part of his body.
“Kyle!”
Not Annie’s voice.
Parker’s voice.
Kyle opens his eyes.
The forest is gone. Annie is gone. Kyle is standing in the middle of an intersection on a freezing gray day facing a gas station and a boarded-up strip mall. Heavy clouds move double-time across the sky. He hears wind whistling through empty buildings with broken windows and, somewhere far off, the moaning of a child in pain.
“Kyle!”
He turns around and sees Parker with a golden amulet on a leather string in one hand and a blood-stained hammer in the other.
“Stop fucking around,” Parker says. “We need to go.”
Annie woke feeling heavy and gray like fatigued metal. Cold sunlight lit the bedroom but didn’t warm her. The very idea of getting out of bed and walking into the bathroom filled her with dread. She could see her breath when she exhaled and had no idea what time it was.
The door into the hallway was open.
“Doc?” she called out to Nash.
She saw the truth about him now.
“Coming!” he said.
He ran into her room like he couldn’t wait to get there, and she hated him for it.
“You’re awake,” he said when he appeared in the doorway a little out of breath.
“What time is it?” she said.
“Nine,” he said.
“You let me sleep too long,” she said and wondered what on earth he’d been doing all that t
ime.
“You need rest,” he said.
Because of you, she thought. You and that bastard you call a mayor.
A window shattered several houses away and a woman screamed.
She forced herself to sit up.
“We can’t stay here,” Nash said.
Annie knew he was going to say that, but where did he think he was going to take her? Some “safe” place in the desert where she’d finally vanish forever?
“Where are my friends?” she said.
Nash looked surprised by the question. “I have no idea.”
“Or course you do. Even I have an idea where they are.” They were at a motel somewhere in town. How many could there be in a place as small as Lander? Three?
She put her feet on the wood floor and shuddered at its coldness.
“Take it easy,” Nash said. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”
“I don’t need your help in the bathroom!”
Nash flinched as if she’d just slapped him.
She heard a gunshot outside. A pop from a pistol maybe six blocks away.
“We need to move you,” Nash said. “But you need to use the bathroom first.”
“You want to go now?” she said. “Where?”
“Upstairs,” he said.
They were in a one-story house. “There is no upstairs.”
“Into the attic,” he said. “I pulled the ladder down. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling.”
She was not going up there.
“The infected are breaking into houses,” he said. “They weren’t doing it yesterday, but it’s happened twice on this street in the last fifteen minutes.”
Sure, she thought. The infected were always going to do that, but it took them a couple of days to work that out in Seattle. They didn’t seem capable of learning much. She’d never seen them use weapons or tools, and they certainly couldn’t drive, but they eventually figured out that food hid in houses. She did need to move up into the attic then.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Annie, what’s wrong? You’re different today.”
“You damn near killed me,” she said.
“The mayor—”
“You could have refused.”
Nash didn’t bother to argue.
“I’m better like this for you, aren’t I? I do what you tell me and I can’t run away.”
“I don’t want you to run away, but—”
“Of course you don’t. I’d be even better for you if I was comatose. You could take as much of my blood as you wanted and I wouldn’t complain. You could fuck me and I wouldn’t even know.”
“Annie!”
She regretted saying it. “Sorry,” she said. “I just—”
She didn’t know what she wanted to say. Nash had always been a gentleman, but she saw the way he’d looked at her last night now that they were away from the hospital and other people. She was all his now and she couldn’t do anything about it. He could make her his sex slave or slowly torture her to death and she couldn’t stop him. Not in this condition.
“I’m sorry,” Nash said.
“For what?” she said.
“For everything, Annie.”
She heard a board splintering somewhere.
“How many of them are out there?” she said.
“Too many,” he said. “We need to get you upstairs. If one of them gets in the house…”
She nodded. She did have to use the bathroom first, though. It would take her at least five minutes to get up a ladder, another five minutes to get down again to the bathroom, and five more to get back up. And she wasn’t going to piss up there in a pot.
“Why did you let me sleep so long?” she said.
“It wasn’t this bad until a couple of minutes ago. I prepped the attic and was about to come get you.”
“Are there blankets up there?” she said.
“A few. And pillows from the couch in the living room. It’s dark and cold, but you should be comfortable enough.”
“Are you coming with me?” She figured he would, but she hoped that he wouldn’t.
“Do you want me to?”
He looked pathetic, like a child in trouble with one of his parents. Perhaps she was being too hard on him, but fuck. “I want you to take me to my friends.”
“I have no idea where they are, Annie. I don’t even know who they are.”
“They’re at a motel. Steele’s men said so when they grabbed me. You were there. They told me I could join them. They lied. Fix it.”
“They were putting refugees up in the Holiday Inn, but it filled up a while ago.”
“Not a hotel. A motel. How many are there in Lander?”
Nash looked pained. “Just a couple.”
“Okay, then. Take me.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. Like you said, I can’t stay here.”
“And then where will you go?”
“I’m supposed to go to the CDC.”
Though she wouldn’t be treated any better when she got there. She might even be treated worse, held not by the mayor of a cowtown and his bumbling doctor but by a powerful government bureaucracy.
“Let’s talk about this in the attic,” Nash said.
“I thought you weren’t coming with me.”
She didn’t know why she was being so mean. He was looking out for her. He got her out of the hospital and away from Steele. He hadn’t touched her inappropriately, hadn’t said anything rude, and genuinely seemed like he was sorry. She was in an epically shitty mood, and it would take a great deal of energy to pull herself out of it. Energy was something she just didn’t have.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Just let me use the bathroom and help me up the ladder.”
Nash hovered outside in the hall while she used the toilet. God, she hated it when people did that. She wanted to get up and run the faucet to make a point, but she was too exhausted to bother.
She heard a car drive past the house at top speed. Somebody fired gunshots at something.
She’d feel safe with Hughes and Parker. They’d faced worse together.
She flushed the toilet and got up. She wanted to wash, but she might get virus on her hands and she didn’t want to infect Nash.
He was lurking in the hallway when she emerged.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows and gave him a dubious go-ahead.
“What was it like?” he said.
“What was what like?” she said.
“When you were infected.”
One of those things screamed somewhere outside.
“It was pretty much like that,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
The hallway connecting the living room and kitchen to the bedrooms and bathroom was shaped like an L. Around the corner and in the dead center of the house was the ladder leading into the attic.
Annie didn’t have the strength to climb up there on her own. Nash would have to pull her up from above or push her up from below. He looked like he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.
“Why don’t you go up first?” she said.
He nodded and went up. It only took him a couple of seconds. He disappeared into darkness. Then he lay down on his stomach and lowered his hand. She took it. His grip was surprisingly strong. He pulled as she climbed, and with his help made it to the top much faster than she expected.
The attic smelled like dust and dead insects. She couldn’t see anything. It was colder up there than downstairs, and downstairs was cold enough. She hugged herself.
“I put some couch and chair cushions over here,” he said, “along with some blankets.”
She slowly made her way toward his voice in the darkness.
“You’ll be able to see better up here in a couple of minutes,” he said.
She found the bed of cushions and wrapped a blanket around her shivering shoulders.
Nash pulled up the ladder but left
the trapdoor open. It was the only source of light in the attic.
“We have peanut butter and water,” he said. “I also brought two knives from the kitchen.” He patted them with his hand. She couldn’t see them, but she heard the handles knocking against the floorboards. “The infected won’t be able to get up here, but…”
She understood. They couldn’t let those things get between themselves and their weapons.
Neither of them said anything else for a couple of minutes. Annie’s eyes began to adjust. She could just barely see Nash. He looked hunched over and uncomfortable. They’d be warmer if they huddled together, but she wasn’t that cold yet.
“It was like a bad dream,” she said and stared into the blackness. “Being infected.”
Nash said nothing.
“You know how when you wake up and it’s hard to remember what you were just dreaming about? Like if you don’t memorize it right away, the dream will vanish into a fog?”
“Sure.”
“That’s all I have left of it now. I remember attacking a group of people on the front porch of a house. And for a while, when I came out of it, my mind felt jagged and I had some violent thoughts.”
Nash didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure he really wanted to hear this.
“I thought about biting people,” she said. “I once thought about licking blood off a knife. Mostly I just remember what it felt like to be infected. I was consumed by a terrible rage that I could not understand. I wasn’t trying to understand it. I was just experiencing it. Like I’d stuck my finger in a wall outlet and was along for the ride. There was nothing else there. Just this incoherent rage and hunger for violence. I couldn’t remember even that much for a day or two when I came out of it. I had amnesia, I guess. I’d lost an entire month of my memory. The world ended, and I couldn’t remember any of it. You’d think it was impossible to forget something like that, but I did.”
“It was your mind’s way of protecting itself,” he said.
She nodded.
“Did anyone try to talk to you or reason with you when you were infected?” he said.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 36