Project Pallid

by Christopher Hoskins

  So, as I pull onto campus for only the second time ever, I hope she made the right choice in staying behind. I never heard back from the frantic voicemail I left her, and I don’t know if she knows anything about Dad. Had she seen the news, too? Either way, and no matter what, I won’t tell her about what happened in the basement—not yet. Not when we still have so much left to do. Not when I need her strong. If Nicole knows nothing, I’ll keep it that way for as long as possible.

  By the time I get up the rising lane that leads to the campus’ main entrance, I’m convinced I’ve got no idea where I’m going. Had I ever imagined I’d be driving here alone, in post-apocalyptic fallout, I would’ve paid more attention to where we were going when we first dropped her off.

  Rolling along, I survey the bodies that line the road. I weave through the ones I can, and I cautiously roll over those that I can’t. I inspect what remains of faces, and I hope to not see hers among the dead. The campus map, billboard style, sits just ahead and to the left, and I know I’ve got to stop. I remember Androscoggin Hall, but that’s it. I can’t begin to guess where it sits on the sprawling acreage of campus; and it’s with great hesitancy, but necessity, that I throw the car into park, leave its engine to idle, and step from its creaky door to find her dorm on the map.

  It’s like standing in front of one of those mall grids—the type that says “You Are Here”, with a glaring, red “X” to mark your spot. I’ve got to check the bottom for her hall’s letter and number coding, then cross-reference it with the map on the top. From bottom to top, and from top to bottom, my eyes shift back and forth to decode the puzzle. All the while, I try to maintain constant awareness of everything around me—listening for the slightest sound that breaks the deathly silence.

  Finally, after what must be minutes, maybe hours, I find it. It’s not far from where I’m standing. It looks like it’s just around the corner and a couple side streets up the road. But when I turn back to my car, I’m no longer alone. Silent but hurried, there are three of them there: one’s moving in fast, and only yards from my car; two more scramble quickly-in on flurried hands and feet from the far side of the parking lot, just beyond my car.

  I dive to get its door open, and I lean-back on my spear just in time to catch the closest one, mid-air, as it leaps over the roof of the Marquis and comes down hard on the point of my upturned stake. With its blunt-end positioned firmly on the ground, the sharp tip slices through its palate, then the top of his skull, like softened butter, and I step aside as the union falls to the pavement—it’s a lifeless sound, like a sack of flour dropped from five-feet up.

  There’s no time to pry my weapon of choice from its skull, so I resort to my backpack that rests on the seat. Unzipped, its contents empty on the ground. There’s no time to waste. No time for selective discernment. And I grab the next longest stake I’ve got, choosing distance instead of a close-range, knife attack with either of the two—now only a car-length away.

  By the time the spear’s in hand, the first lands on my side of the car. Seeing only Mr. Laverdier, I jam the two-foot stake into its empty eye and reach to arm myself with another, as the second one lands square on my back. I feel her nail-less fingers grab at my skin; they latch onto me like eagle talons, and I worry she might spring away with me still in her grip. My elbow kicks back to knock her aside, and she rolls to the ground, but moves quick to her feet. They’ve been engineered to fight.

  I’m upright again, armed with two knives, and she’s on the attack. Arms whirling, her few, remaining teeth snapping, she’s coming in for the feed—like a starving animal without restraint.

  I lash out with a lunge and try to catch her in the face like I’d done the rest, but her spinning arms cast mine aside, and the blade flies from my hand. It clangs across the tar as her mouth closes around my shoulder, and I can feel the power of her bite. It tightens onto my clavicle, and it threatens to snap the bone in two. The blood only fuels her frenzy, and with more power than I’ve ever mustered before, my free arm swings up, hooks round, and the point of my remaining blade juts out the other side of her head.

  The vice-like bite she has on me instantly eases, and her teeth retract from my skin, as I push her semi-lifeless body away. It falls to the ground: heavy, empty and lifeless now, too.

  That’s it.

  I’m done.

  It’s over.

  Everything I’ve worked for.

  Everything I’ve protected and hidden myself from.

  It’s all for nothing.

  And now, like everyone else, I’ll be one of them, too.

  Four days.

  Four days from infection to sickness.

  Four days from sickness to death.

  It’s fact.

  And now, Damian Lawson, forgotten freshman of Madison High, will finally be like everyone else.

  May 11th: 12:04 P.M.

  My shoulder leaks with warm blood. It runs between my fingers and coats my hand in a thick layer of crimson goo that’s become one of the most highly sought commodities around. I might as well shoot up flares to let them know I’m here. My eyes can’t stop shifting between wound, parking lot, and the campus’ surrounding fields. Is this really the end for me? Should I just throw in the towel and end it, here and now? A wave of emotion rattles me. Each one suggests its own course of action, contradictory to another, and I don’t know what to do.

  I want to cry, but I can’t.

  I want to throw myself on my sharpest knife, but I can’t do that either.

  And I want to jump on the sunken, pallid face of the woman—the thing—whose red-ringed mouth marks my demise, but it won’t achieve anything, and I hold myself back.

  And then my shirt’s up and over my head.

  I use my knife to cut it up the middle, and with the two, long pieces at my disposal, I wrap the first under my armpit and around my shoulder, again and again, until I secure it in place and repeat the process with the second.

  The bite’s not so deep, and I’m not too worried about bleeding-out, but it’s not the blood-loss I’m worried about. It’s what’s invading my body that’s most damning. It’s the microscopic infection that’s undoubtedly made its way into my bloodstream that’s leaving me defeated—like giving up might be the only option I’ve got left.

  I try to think of everyone who could still be out there, and as difficult as it all was before—when I was uninfected and strong—it feels almost impossible now that I’m as much a detriment as I am of help to anyone. They’re better off without me at this point. Maybe it’s time I finally accept my life and world for what it is, instead of what I’ve been clinging to. Maybe it’s time to let someone else take care of me again—or just let them find me when it’s all said and done. To bury me alongside my dad. Or my sister. Or my mom. Maybe even Catee.

  And the thought that if I go, there might be no one left to do that—to reunite us, even after death—is what reinvigorates me. It brings my knee to my chest and sends the heel of my shoe crashing into the face of the nameless pallor that lies in front of me. My sole strikes the butt of my knife and drives it downward until it clears her weakened skull and clangs into the tar below. White mush fans around my foot, but I hardly mind, and I kick my sneaker out to splatter the pale goo across the lot.

  My hard-set expression has returned. I can feel it in my clenching teeth and shaking jaw—they’re glued so tight that my teeth could crumble like chalk under the pressure of my angry determination.

  I will not go down like this.

  I will finish what I came for, and I will not relent until Catee’s dad has paid for it all with his life.

  My makeshift bandages are nagging reminders of my pit-stop ambush as I climb back into the Marquis and slam its door behind me.

  Pedal to the metal, I’m off to Androscoggin Hall.

  I’ll grab Nicole and then we’re out of here to finish what I’ve started.

  But swooping in on white horses—or in grey Grand Marquis—is the stuff of dreams. The
carefree ease with which it’s portrayed in books and movies doesn’t translate so well to reality. And the imagery of dilapidated castles and dried-up ivies is a thing of fantasy that’s incomparable to the disparaging realities of my sister’s dorm.

  The Common, once lush and green, is speckled with white, dried-out bodies. Its victims are gutted and strewn-out like fallen leaves—dried-up and forgotten. I can’t even get my car into the lot of her building, but the mound of stacked bodies at its entrance suggests there’s life here, somewhere. It’s not a natural placement of corpses, and it’s not one I’ve seen anywhere before, until now. They’re mixed: the sick and the Whitened, the mangled and gnawed on. It’s like a pile of firewood that’s been haphazardly stacked for disposal.

  Naturally, I wonder who did it, and I look for Nicole’s face as I creep by. But I don’t see her there.

  The main door of her building is propped open by its kickstand, and I get the sense that I’m walking in on something: a cleansing of sorts. And as sickening as the picture is, it gives me satisfaction to know that someone else is still alive. That someone else survived the infection, and that they’re doing whatever they can to purge its victims, infected or otherwise.

  “Hello?????” I ask of the empty stairwell, one foot inside and looking up into the vastness of its six floors. I hope for a response, but I’m accustomed to none.

  “Hello?????” I loudly repeat. “Is there anyone up there?”

  My voice echoes, but it’s the only response.

  I can’t just leave though. Not when this is the last place Nicole was at. Not when I’ve got concrete evidence, just outside, that someone else survived the infection—at least long enough to start cleansing the dead.

  “Can you hear me??!!” I yell even louder, and I hope for anything that will bring closure to the mysteriousness of the situation. Still, there’s nothing.

  And so I start my way up the short, concrete steps that lead to the first floor landing: twelve in total—I count them. And then I turn left for the second, and the answer to my question stares me in the face. There are three of them there: two white, one not. The maimed is a boy—his clothes tell me that much, or what’s left of them do. His shirt is mostly gone; his stomach is, too. Turned almost completely inside out, I can see the grey of the stairs through what remains of his torso. His dried-up innards spill in all directions. Some still cling to their bodily connections, while others lay nearby in dried and darkened pools, four-steps away, on both sides.

  The two infected have torn each other apart—mostly likely in competition for him; haunting images of my pantry prison return, and I cringe.

  One’s head is barely connected, and it clings to its body by loose tissues at the neck, while the other looks more mangled—sliced and spliced all over, with chunks of flesh missing and dried splotches of white covering most its body. Ironically, the pallid pair has collapsed in what looks like a loving embrace that’s landed them a few steps below their collegiate meal, and I can’t stifle yacking at the gore of it all. I splay a puddle of bile to my feet. It tastes acrid in my mouth, and it burns my throat, but it doesn’t slow me down.

  From what I remember, my sister’s room is on the fifth floor. No. I know it’s the fifth floor. I distinctly remember my mom complaining about walking the flights on her bad knee when we first moved Nicole in, last fall. I step and side step around the initial gore, but the rest of the stairwell’s the same.

  Lit only by shafts of light that shine through its arbitrarily dispersed and irregularly shaped windows, the noontime light is plenty to illuminate the walk to her floor. The smell of rot is intense, like forgotten meat in the trunk of a car, and I can’t help but gag again as I make the turn to tackle the third flight. It’s thankfully barren.

  And at my next turn, there are legs. But just legs.

  They’re still in jeans. Shoes, too.

  But they’re dismembered from the rest of their body.

  Torn completely away, they don’t even belong to the closest one that’s steps ahead: a whited-out one. Hairless, sunken, toothless, and gaunt, it likely died in a fight for the leg meat.

  And around the next bend, I see Nicole. She’s looking back at me, and her eyes are desperate and pleading. Her arms reach out for me, like she knew I was coming, and she’s asking for my help. But she can’t, because she’s only half the sister she once was. She’s only half the sister I built cabins with and fought over the most tedious crap with. She isn’t, and she won’t ever be again, the same girl I used to torment by jumping from her closet in scary Halloween masks, or the older sister who’d make me cry when she beat me down to put me in my place. Good or bad, she’ll never be any of those things again, and I crumble. To scratched knees and on concrete steps, I crumble.

  Nicole’s entirely gone, and there’s nothing that I or anyone else can do to bring her back. Nothing can reunite with her separate half, and nothing can make her whole again. I’ve dealt with the passing of my dad. I’ve come to terms with it—as much as that’s possible. But this … this is something else entirely. And it’s another thing I wasn’t prepared for. It’s something I don’t know if I can handle. Everything we were, everything we’d experienced together, it’s all been handed-off for me to carry alone, and it’s too much weight, and it’s too many memories to bear alone. I can’t carry everything we were—those things unseen that struck at the core of who we were, and who we’re supposed to become. And now I’m left to carry the burden of my entire family history, and I don’t think I can do it alone. Tears press from my eyes in uncontrollable torrents of salt.

  I’m bawling, and my sobbing cries echo through the open stairwell. They reverberate from its walls and amplify in its open corridors. And they can draw whatever ears they want; I just don’t care anymore.

  I can’t handle it.

  I’m not strong enough.

  And I quit.

  May 11th: 12:30 P.M.

  I roll on the stairs and relish in the aguish of my own self-despair until the crinkle of paper brings me back. It’s my pocket, and it’s the letter, and it’s the reminder of Catee, my mom, and what could still be out there, that resurrects the reality of the moment. If I lay here to drown in my sorrows, I’m as good as dead.

  I read it again and focus solely on its end:

  . . . I hope you find this letter and that we find each other before it’s too late. I’ll always remember you.

  I love you.

  Catee

  And it brings life to my soulless body, still collapsed on the stairs. I’m as much a victim as those around me, and it’d be easy to succumb to the evils of her dad, but I’ve got too much to avenge. I’ve still got people to defend. And I can’t cave so easily when I’ve still got time. Four days, I think.

  Onto my feet, I dry my tears with the back of my hand and brush away gravel that’s become embedded in my bare chest. My compress has slid from my wound, and I push it fully aside to gauge the damage done.

  The bleeding’s stopped, but the bite’s deep—not quite perfect, but close enough. A row of teeth punctures the front, and with a contortion of my neck, the back of my shoulder, too. Seeing it makes my stomach turn. I’m not sure what good it’ll do, but I’ve got to clean it out.

  Careful not to disturb her final resting place, I step around Nicole’s remains and make my way to the next landing of the fourth floor door. Even though I should hightail it out of here, I’ve got to take my chances if I’m going to regroup and get to Damariscotta in fighting form.

  The bar of the door is cold under my hand, and I push it as gently as possible until it clicks and comes loose from the lockset. With my breath held and my stake gripped tight by my side, the door creaks behind the weight of my good shoulder until I can cock my head through its opening and take a look around.

  A narrow beam of light illuminates the hall through its one, far window, and it grows thinner and darker as it moves my way. The overhead lights, like those in the stairwell, are out. I can make out the
silhouettes of bodies … three … four … five … six … slumped against walls and strewn across the floor. It’s too dark to tell if they’re white or not, but the difference is negligible—unless they’re alive.

  Wiser with each encounter, I look around the landing for a loose rock or anything like it. I spot a beer can, tossed carelessly under the backside of the next flight, and I release the swinging door to retrieve it.

  With a reaching, underhanded lob, it lands midway down the hall’s length with a rattling clang. It bounces and spins before it clanks to a stop. And, breath held, I listen and wait. For anything, really. A movement. A sound. Anything that disrupts the dead of the empty building. But there’s nothing. The bodies are lifeless and the air, untenanted. And I move in, uncertain of my end, and totally ignorant to what I’ll find when I reach it.

  As much as I try to avoid looking at the corpses that litter the hall, I can’t take my eyes off them, and I can’t avoid the red and white stains of the sick and the maimed.

  Door one’s closed and locked.

  The one across from it is, too.

  The third one down is open, though—held that way by what’s left of a boy who wasn’t fast enough to get inside before he was taken down; his neck’s torn almost entirely away, and his rotting tissues are savored by swarming flies.

  Over him, I step into what I assume was his room. Two empty beds rest on opposite walls, and a desk faces the window—its blinds are open, and the space is untouched by the surrounding fallout. A laptop sits open on the desk. Pictures frames of what I assume were family members, cluster at one side. Books and papers stack in disarray, and they threaten to topple under the weight of assignments, undone.