by Ryan Casey
Jonny saw it in a flash, right in front of him. The man—Adam, he was called. The one whom Donna Carter had bitten. He’d bitten Doctor Harvey, a short, thin-haired man with a gingery beard. He’d bitten him, and then Doctor Harvey had been locked inside a room and left to fend for himself while Turnstone grew stronger and stronger inside of him.
But it wasn’t the image of the doctor that stayed fresh in Jonny’s mind. It was the image of the man, Adam. The gaping wound on his neck. The blood, painted across his pillow. He looked to be in a room just like they were. White tiles. Silver metal doors.
Adam’s eyes opened.
Bloodshot. Bright whites.
“I can hear you too,” the man called Adam muttered. “I can—I can fucking hear you too. I can fucking hear you and I want to get out. I want to fucking destroy them. I want to fucking consume every last fucking piece of them.”
Jonny did his best to return to his own thoughts but he couldn’t quite believe it. Not only was Doctor Harvey communicating with Donna and him via telepathy, but so too was the man named Adam.
There were four of them. They certainly weren’t alone.
And if there were four of them, it meant that they were twice as strong.
“We can get out of here,” Donna said. “We know a way. We can get out of here and we can reach out to the others like us. We can—”
“I’m not interested in fucking reaching out, I just want to eat,” Adam said, growling like a rabid dog. “I just want to fucking eat and eat and eat—”
“And you will,” Donna said. “But to do that, you need to concentrate with me and Jonny. You need to focus, both of you. Doctor Harvey, are you in?”
Silence.
“Doctor Harvey, I asked if you are—”
“Yes,” he said. His voice—or his thoughts—sounded uncertain, shaky. Funny how thoughts had their own sounds, too. Then again, there was such a thing as the “voice in the head,” after all.
“Stop daydreaming, Jonny,” Donna said, intruding his mind once again. “Are you ready to do this?”
Jonny calmed himself. He let all of his external thoughts—his thoughts about his parents, his friends, how he’d managed to get himself all the way fucking here somehow within the space of a few days. This wasn’t happening to him. It couldn’t be.
“It is,” Adam said. “Now let’s fucking get the fuck out of here so I can eat eat eat eat eat.”
“Just focus,” Donna said. “Make sure your eyes are closed, and make sure you focus on the image in your heads. We move towards the door. Then we move out of the corridor. With four of us, I don’t know how much stronger we’ll be. But we have to try.”
“Let’s just get on with it,” Adam said.
Jonny saw the image in his head almost immediately. The metallic door, so rich, so much shinier than before. The tiled walls, so clear that he could see every little reflection of light shining off. He felt a lightness inside him as he drifted towards the door, like a balloon pumped full of helium. He was moving faster this time. In fact, he was so light that he felt like he was going to fly up and through the ceiling.
Keep it calm. Keep it steady.
He passed through the door without any effort on his part. Nothing like the first time, or even the second attempt for that matter. Maybe this four-person thing was going to work. Maybe somehow, with the slightest bit of fucking hope, they were going to find a way out of here, as crazy as it seemed to even be thinking that.
“Where now?” he heard. It was Donna’s voice. More distant, as they floated in the corridor, staring down to the right, and more muffled, but definitely her.
“Mr. Belmont’s office is directly above us to the left,” Doctor Harvey said. “If there’s any locations of the potentially infected, assuming he knows, then there will be information in his office. But do you really think that this is going to—”
“We have to try,” Donna said, and Jonny felt himself turning to the left and floating upwards towards the ceiling.
When they turned to the left, however, he noticed something peculiar.
There was a man approaching the room on the left at the end of the corridor. He was dressed in a suit and wasn’t wearing gloves or anything of the like, and didn’t look like any of the doctors he’d seen in here up to now.
And then he knew. In an instant, he knew.
Donna’s voice: “What is Mr. Belmont doing down here? And why is he heading to…”
The door to the end room opened and Jonny saw it in Mr. Belmont’s hand. The baton. The biggest and thickest solid metal baton he’d ever seen in his life, right there in his hand.
And the tears in his eyes. The redness on his cheeks.
Something bad was about to happen.
Something very bad.
“Wait, did he just—” Doctor Harvey started.
But he didn’t get to finish, because a huge screaming sound replaced his words, like a pig being slaughtered. A scream that felt like blades and daggers sliced through Jonny’s head and into his brain. The vision started to shake. Blackness crept into the corners of his eyesight.
A few seconds later, he was back in the hospital bed.
Sweat dripped from his head. His teeth were deeply clenched into his tongue. Blood dripped from his nose.
“Doctor Harvey?” he heard Donna saying, thinking. “Doctor Harvey?”
But Jonny knew there was no point calling for Doctor Harvey, because he’d seen it, just before he’d been transported back to his body.
The blow to the head.
Then the next blow. Then the next.
Doctor Harvey was dead, and they were next.
41.
Beating the shit out of Doctor Harvey’s head with a large, metal baton had been easier than Mr. Belmont expected.
He looked down at the bloody mess in front of him and felt no attachment to the scene whatsoever. No attachment to the caved-in head, no attachment to the mass of blood pooling across the floor, squelching under his black shoes. No attachment to the baton itself in his hand, or the damp splashes of blood across his arm.
It had been the only way to do it. The heart was too technical, too precise. It was the only way to make sure he was dead.
And he was going to have to do it again.
And again.
And again.
He could hear Sarah Appleton behind him somewhere. Or maybe he had heard her at some point, screaming out and protesting, but she was gone now. Her voice still echoed in his ears, though. “Don’t do it. Please, don’t do this, Mr. Belmont.”
But he’d carried it out. He’d walked into the room, walked right up to Doctor Harvey, who was leaning against the wall with his eyes tightly closed, and he had buried the heavy metal baton in his skull.
He wiped the baton on his shirt. Something dropped from the edge of it and clicked as it hit the floor. He looked down and saw a tiny fragment of skull, amongst the mess of brain and blood.
Such a mess, and yet nothing compared to what would be when Turnstone reached its peak. When it spread to everyone. Parents. Children. Animals? Possibly. It affected the rat that Sarah Appleton had tested on, so who knew?
He sighed and turned away from Doctor Harvey’s body. Nourishment. Containment. What a joke. He’d seen what this thing did. How fast it spread. It turned people into bloodthirsty cannibals. It made them invincible, with nothing but the destruction of the heart or the brain to help. It would spread. And spread. And spread. He couldn’t stop it. He had to ride it out, just like everyone else—like the peasants below him, only from a much more comfortable seat.
But he couldn’t have TCorps held responsible for the outbreak. Not after everything he’d worked for. Not after all the sleepless nights, all the passed-up social opportunities. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
A true leader had to take measures into his own hands.
He took one final look at Doctor Harvey’s body. Funny thing, really. He’d been completely still as Mr. Belmont had entered th
e room. Completely still, but definitely awake. The way his eyes were flickering and the corners of his mouth were twitching as he rubbed himself up against the wall. What was all that about?
He wiped the metal baton on his once-perfect white shirt again, then opened the door of the first locked room.
One down, three to go.
Sarah Appleton could not believe what she’d just witnessed.
She stood at the opposite end of the corridor to where Mr. Belmont had just entered a Quarantine room. Entered it, with that large, police-type weapon.
Entered it, then brought it down on that poor man’s head.
Fuck. What had she done? What had she involved herself in?
She turned to look inside the room to her left. Her heart pounded. Her throat was dry. Doctor Ermenstein, he was called. He was still in there with Donna Carter. Not by choice—it certainly didn’t look that way. But he was in there. And fuck knew what other crazy action Mr. Belmont was going to take.
She had to talk to this other doctor. He was the only one who could help with whatever was going on.
She reached for the handle of the door when she heard his footsteps to her right.
She looked up and she saw him. Blood was splattered over his cheeks. Sweat dripped down his messy hair and onto his face. In his hand, the weapon he’d used was covered with blood and pieces of meat.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked. Not in a sinister, horror movie way, but in a genuinely inquisitive way. Like he couldn’t understand what she was doing.
Her bottom lip quivered. She gulped down the lump in her throat as dread mounted. “I… I don’t understand. I need to speak to… I need to—”
“You’re right. The nourishment isn’t going to work,” Mr. Belmont said. He walked in Sarah’s direction, twirling the weapon around like it was nothing more than a walking stick, or something like that. “Well, it might work,” he said, stopping by the second door, “but we don’t have the time to find out. Not anymore.”
He lowered the handle of the second door. The room with the security guard, Adam.
“Please,” Sarah said. She couldn’t believe that all of this came as a result of her stupid fucking behaviour. All of this because she’d put a drop of Turnstone in a cup of mocha for an HIV-ridden boy. She’d only tried to help.
Help herself, perhaps a little bit. But she’d lost her job. She’d needed something. She was desperate.
“This doesn’t have to end here—” Sarah started.
“It does, I’m afraid,” Mr. Belmont said. He looked a completely changed person now that he was covered in blood. “Turnstone is spreading much faster than I expected. People are going to want answers. They’re going to want somebody to blame. And after Mr. Ainsthwaite dealt with the man we had on his trail, that very man will be out there somewhere, full of rage, full of hunger. Not only that, but think of the number of inspections and investigations. They will lead back here. Right back here, to this quarantine ward. To your…” His cheeks flushed as his voice rose. “To your misguided ambition. I can’t allow TCorps to fall. I just can’t.”
Before she could even respond, he was in the second room, the door was closed behind him, and she heard the thumps—one, two, three. The next victim. The next wasted opportunity to find a Turnstone cure. She couldn’t let this happen. She couldn’t stand here and allow this.
A few moments later, the second door opened. Mr. Belmont was covered with even more blood. His hands were drenched in it. The weapon had a piece of skin drooping down from its side. He looked at her with absolute detached sincerity, and he half-smiled.
“I’m doing what I have to do, Miss Appleton. For TCorps.”
“But what about everybody else?” she said. “What about—about the people on the outside with Turnstone? Don’t you think they’re more important? Aren’t they the… the ones we should be trying to save, instead of ourselves?”
Mr. Belmont stopped outside the penultimate room. He gripped the top end of the bloody weapon in his hand, disregarding the clumps of flesh that were clinging to it. “Oh, we will find a cure. Some day. But believe me—if I have to put off finding a cure for a couple of months or years to keep this company standing, I will. It’s… It’s in my blood. It’s my Turnstone. TCorps makes me. I need it and it needs me.”
He lowered the handle of Jonny Ainsthwaite’s door.
“Mr. Belmont, please,” Sarah begged. She thought of Stuart Ainsthwaite. She thought of his tears, his masculine attempts to hide the concern in his voice when he spoke of his son. “There has to be something we can do for these two people. What about Doctor Ermenstein? Can’t he help? Is there nothing he can—”
“You should do it,” Mr. Belmont said.
Sarah frowned. Mr. Belmont was staring at her. Right into her eyes. “I should… I should do what?”
He stepped closer to her. The blood that he had walked through the corridor squelched under his feet. He kept his eyes on her. Kept close focus on her, until he was metres away, feet away, inches away.
He stood there for a few moments just staring. She could feel his breaths on her face. Feel the heat radiating off his body. She should do what? What did he want her to do? Go away? Die? Test out Turnstone?
“You should be the one to finish off Mr. Ainsthwaite,” he said. As he spoke, he opened up Sarah’s fingers and slipped a penknife into her hand. Then, he closed her fingers, and patted her hand, offering a not-so-reassuring smile. “Heart or brain. You found him. You started this. You end it. I’ll deal with the others.”
He walked around her, the detached, emotionless smile painted on his face. Thoughts swirled around her head. Her? Kill Jonny Ainsthwaite? How? Why? No. She had to leave. She had to—
“And I’d do it fast,” Mr. Belmont said, as he stood outside the door to the room where Donna Carter and Doctor Ermenstein were. He tapped the weapon against the door. “I’d do it fast before… Well. Let’s just say I’d hate to have to clean up all the evidence of what went on here. Especially such… such pretty evidence.”
He lowered the handle and disappeared into Donna Carter’s room.
All Sarah Appleton could do was stand there, completely rigid, with the penknife in her hand.
It was kill or be killed.
That’s what it had come to.
42.
Donna Carter understood the screeching noise and the silence that followed because she saw it—experienced it—too.
A sharp thud to Doctor Harvey’s head. A blast of energy.
Then another thud.
And another.
And then blackness.
She opened her eyes but she couldn’t tell the difference anymore. She was on another plane of consciousness completely. She was as close to death as she possibly could be, she understood that. The hunger, it was in complete control of her now. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t feel. All she had was her thoughts.
And right now, even they were going wild.
“What the fuck just happened?” She heard Jonny. His thoughts were fast. Panicked. She could see him—a picture of him in his bed, panting, sweat dripping down his head. He’d felt it too.
But she didn’t have to answer his question. She assumed that was why Adam the security guard wasn’t answering, either. They knew. They both knew what had happened. Doctor Harvey was dead.
And something within her—something deep inside her—told her that they were next.
All of them.
“I’m not fucking dying without a fucking meal,” Adam said. “I need to eat. I need it. I need to fucking bathe in it and swallow it and eat and eat and…”
On and on he went, his thoughts never silencing, getting more venomous with every word. The hunger had hit him bad. She figured it probably affected some more than others. Herself? She was hungry. She needed nourishment. She needed it more than anything. But she understood the situation she was in. Trapped, arms tied down on a bed, Mr. Belmont gone mad. She understo
od, and she realised that she had to be patient in order to get her reward.
But right now, with Doctor Harvey’s death, she wasn’t even sure if patience was on their side anymore.
“There has to be another way,” Jonny begged. “We can’t give up. Not after everything. We can’t just give up.”
Still, Adam went on and on and on.
“We can still do this. The three of us, if we’re quick.” Jonny’s thoughts were sounding more and more idealistic, more and more unlikely, the more he spoke. “We—we can get out of here. I don’t—my mum. My dad. Please. I can’t. I can’t.”
And still, Adam went on and on. Eat, eat, eat. Feed me feed me feed me.
Donna opened her eyes again. Still nothing but blackness and colours swirling in her vision. She knew the doctor—Doctor Ermenstein—must be in the room somewhere. She knew he couldn’t go ahead with this, not if he knew. She tried with all her strength to remember where her hand was so she could lift it up and tap him on the shoulder and beg for help. She tried and tried to open her chapped lips and let out a silent, desperate word, but she couldn’t even make her lips flinch.
So hungry. So, so hungry.
“Maybe if I shout. Maybe if I—we, all of us—maybe if we shout,” Jonny said. She could sense his desperation. Poor kid. Poor kid, thrown in the middle of this against his will. It was partly her fault. She should have taken Sarah Appleton seriously all along when she said she had an HIV cure. If she had, they might’ve been able to learn about this Turnstone formula way before it got out into the open.
She’d had the power to stop the spread, and she’d made the wrong call.
Something was different about her thoughts. At first, she couldn’t place it. Was she thinking louder? Faster? Clearer?
Then, as she focused, she realised what it was.