by SD Tanner
Sucking on the straw, a cool liquid filled her mouth and she felt it run down her throat. Lifting her arm, she collided with something and groaned. “I want…I want to sit up.”
“Okay, I’ll adjust your bed.”
Her body slowly bent until she was leaning rather than lying, and she felt more in control of herself. “What happened?”
A warm hand rested on her arm and Dayton said gently, “You were in a car accident and they brought you to this site. You had a head trauma and were severely dehydrated. Your brain swelled, but this place has one of the best neurosurgeons in the world. She put you into an induced coma and inserted a tube into your skull to drain the buildup of fluids.”
Lifting her hand to her head, she felt the back of her neck until she found something that didn’t belong there. It didn’t hurt, but when she turned her neck it pulled oddly against her skin, making her feel queasy. “Get it out.”
“We will,” Dayton replied soothingly. “But I need to ask you some questions.” When she didn’t reply, he continued, “What’s your name?”
Dayton kept calling her Ally, and she replied uncertainly, “Ally?”
“Is that what you remember?”
She began to explore her thoughts. Beneath her, the bed was soft. There was something covering her body. She wasn’t cold or warm. The room smelt faintly of chemicals. Somewhere near her was a machine that pulsed like a steady heartbeat.
“What do you remember, Ally?”
She didn’t remember anything. When she tried to access her memories, there was only a blankness. The pulsing noise next to her began to beat faster, and she nervously plucked at the blanket covering her. “I…I…I…”
The warm hand gently stroked her arm. “It’s okay, Ally. Don’t panic. You’re safe.”
His words so clearly meant to calm her had the opposite effect. Why wouldn’t she be safe? What had happened? Who was she? Why did he keep calling her Ally? Gasping for breath, she drew her knees up and tried to move.
“Ally,” a new voice said. She felt another hand under her chin and a warm breath on her face. “You’re okay. I promise.”
In her mind, she saw tarmac and smelled dust. She remembered feeling angry, and associating the voice with the moment, she asked, “Who are you?”
“My name’s Bill. I found you on Route 178 and brought you here. Do you remember crashing your car?”
She didn’t even remember having a car and she shook her head. “N…no.”
“Do remember the man who was with you?”
“What man?”
“Do you know where you live?”
Searching her mind was like trying to find her way in a dark room, and she shook her head again. “I don’t remember anything. I don’t even know if Ally is my real name.”
“Is this normal?” Bill asked.
Dayton replied, “One-of-One said the brain swelling was extended. If the only damage she has is amnesia then she’s been very lucky.” A hand touched hers again, and he asked, “Can you count from one to five for me?”
“One, two, three, four, five.”
“Do you know what country you’re in?” When she didn’t reply, he asked, “Do you want to try to stand up?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
The bed jostled and she heard something clunk next to her. Steady and strong arms wrapped around her shoulders, and they gently moved her legs from the bed. Her feet touched something cold and she slowly straightened her legs, leaning on the arms around her for support. It felt strange to be standing without being able to see, but her legs supported her and she took a small step.
“That’s good, Ally. You’re doing very well.”
Exhausted by the one tiny step, they gently laid her back on the bed, and she felt herself eased into a lying position. “Get some sleep, Ally. We’ll come back later.”
Her mind drifted away and then she became aware of voices talking quietly. The machine was still pulsing, but now it was slow and steady.
A voice she recognized as Dayton said, “We need her permission to do that.”
The man she recognized as Bill replied, “I don’t think we have time to get her consent.”
A woman’s voice she didn’t know said coldly, “We either do it now, or the optical nerves will degrade until they will no longer be viable for the orbs to transmit data.”
“You can’t just remove her eyes without her permission. It’s a form of assault,” Dayton said angrily.
“No, it isn’t. She’s blind and the orbs will allow her to see,” the woman replied tonelessly.
Bill said confidently, “She’s in no condition to make her own decisions and she’s blind now. If One-of-One gives her orbs, at least she’ll have the option to use them. If she doesn’t want them then they can be replaced with prosthetics later.”
“Be honest, Bill, it also furthers your plan.”
“Only if she chooses to become a nav. If she doesn’t then it furthers nothing, but if we don’t do it now she’ll be blind forever. At least this way she’ll still have a choice.”
She didn’t understand what they were talking about, but she trusted the man called Bill. He’d saved her life, and feeling confident he would protect her again, she drifted back to sleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Twilight flight (Shirley)
“But I don’t want to go onto the roof,” she complained.
“It’s the only way we’re gonna get out of here, and we’ve got no food left,” her husband, Clark, replied firmly.
She really wished she hadn’t chosen to go into the city to have lunch with him the day it was attacked, but the marriage counsellor had said they needed to make time for one another. At fifty-two years of age, she felt too old and well used to find another husband. If she didn’t try to make it work with Clark then she would have to join a dating site. Her friends had warned her of the dangers of becoming single at her age, and she had reluctantly taken their advice by booking them into marriage counselling.
It was really all Clark’s fault. He was the one who’d had an affair with some young missy at his office. The management had taken his indiscretion poorly, particularly after the missy got herself knocked up, and Clark had told her to get rid of the baby. Missy went off and had the abortion as ordered, and then took an overdose of prescription painkillers. Her subsequent hospitalization and trip to the nuthouse had brought the sad story to light, and the company demoted Clark by banishing him to their much smaller satellite office in Albuquerque. She’d been forced to move with him, leaving their two adult children in New York to finish their postgraduate studies.
She didn’t like Albuquerque. It was small and the shopping was abysmal. As if the parochial nature of the place wasn’t bad enough, they’d all started killing one another three weeks earlier. An infestation of enormous cockroaches had appeared, and they were eating anything that was rotting. She supposed it helped inasmuch as it got rid of the corpses, but it was disgusting to watch from their window on the tenth floor.
He was now dragging her up the stairs of the building they’d hidden in for three weeks. They’d been having lunch in a small Italian bistro on the ground floor, when the patrons had begun using the cutlery to murder one another. Clark had immediately pulled her up the stairs of the ten-story building. She hadn’t known it, but on the top level, there was a penthouse apartment. They’d stayed there in relative comfort for the past three weeks until they ran out of food. Clark kept telling her help was coming, but it obviously wasn’t.
“How are we going to get down?”
“We’ll use the sheets to climb down each balcony.”
Clark had made a rope of sorts from the sheets they’d found in the apartment. It sounded like a terrible plan to her, but the building was crawling with oversized cockroaches. The penthouse had a security camera and, until the power had failed, she and Clark had watched them patrolling the corridor. Even without the cameras, sometimes they could still hear them clattering outside their front door. From th
e safety of the tenth floor, they’d both seen enough to know what happened to anyone they caught. The cockroaches would tear into people until they were dead or too injured to move. Once their bodies had rotted, they would attack them again in frenzy of feeding.
She was scared, but as the daughter of a diplomat, she’d been taught that showing fear was a sign of weakness. Remembering her training, she sniffed haughtily. “This is your fault.”
“Don’t start this again, Shirley.”
“But you’ve never apologized.”
He was shining a flashlight on the door to the roof and checking the wide metal bar. “The only person I owe an apology to is Teresa, not you.”
“Why don’t you think you owe me an apology? I’m your wife.”
“Because you’re a terrible wife. I love you, and you were a good enough mother, but you’re completely self-obsessed.” After jiggling the bar a few times, he handed her the flashlight. “Hold this steady on the bar, it’s stuck.”
Absentmindedly doing as he requested, she asked, “How can you say I’m self-obsessed? What does that even mean?”
Grunting with the effort, he pulled and pushed at the bar with both hands. “You’ve spent your whole life doing nothing. You had one nanny after another for the kids, and you spent your days at the spa or shopping. You’ve never done a stroke of housework in your life. You didn’t even raise money for charity. I honestly don’t know what you did all day.”
“I went to the gym,” she replied indignantly.
The scuttling noises were growing, and she shone the light down the stairs only to see they were empty.
“Shirley!”
Returning the light to the door, she said sulkily, “I heard something behind me.”
“Of course you did. There’s cockroaches crawling all over this building.”
“If you hadn’t screwed that girl we wouldn’t even be here.”
Clark was pushing his entire body weight down on the stubborn bar. “My mistake wasn’t screwing her, I should have let her have the baby.” When the handle still didn’t budge, he turned to face her. He looked eerily pale in the harsh light and had deep rings under his sunken eyes. “It was my baby too, and I wish I hadn’t been so stupid. That was your fault.”
When he turned and continued hammering at the bar with his fists, she replied angrily, “How was that my fault? I didn’t screw around. You did!”
“If I hadn’t been so worried about what you’d do, I would never have told her to get an abortion. You’ve had me so screwed up I forgot what I care about. I’m not like you, Shirley. No one gave me a free ride. I paid for my education. I’ve worked hard all of my life.”
The scratchy rustling grew louder and her heart began to beat faster. Rather than acknowledge her fear, she said bitterly, “If I’m so worthless, why didn’t you divorce me?”
He gave a cynical snort. “You would have taken me for everything I had and more. I was good to Teresa. She got an apartment and spending money. I figured we were both getting something we needed. It just went badly wrong.”
“Clark, they’re in the stairwell,” she said quietly.
“I know,” he replied softly
With a strength she suspected was driven by pure panic, the door gave a loud crack, and suddenly sunlight shone into the stairwell. As he pushed the door open with one hand, he grabbed her arm and roughly dragged her into the light, slamming the door shut behind them. While they both leaned against the door to hold it closed, it began to move as bodies hammered at it from the other side.
“It’s a bad day when discussing our failed marriage is the easier choice.”
Straining to hold the door closed, he grunted, “Yep.”
They might be safe from the cockroaches for the moment, but they couldn’t hold the door for long, and there was nothing on the empty roof they could use to secure it.
Showing fear was a sign of weakness, as was apologizing, but she didn’t want it to end this way with Clark. With a slight roll of her eyes, she said firmly, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Feeling the door hammering against her back, she said quickly, “I’m sorry for whatever I did that made you need someone else. I didn’t mean it.”
Still pushing his full weight against the door, he turned his head to look her in the eye. “It’s okay, I forgive you, and I’m sorry about Teresa and the whole Albuquerque thing.” When her eyes filled with tears, his face softened and he said, “I know this is a crappy option, but it might be easier on us if we just jump.”
“Off the roof?”
“Yeah.”
The ledge was only twenty feet away, but as soon as they took their weight from the door, the cockroaches would burst through it and kill them.
Nodding, she smiled at him. “Shall we?”
Grabbing her hand firmly, he said, “On my count.”
Once Clark counted to three, and still holding his hand, she ran as quickly as she could to the ledge. Together they leapt at the two-foot high wall, stepping on it in unison, and then she was flying through the air. The wind whipped her hair, covering her eyes, but she didn’t let go of Clark’s hand until she felt it ripped from hers.
Using her free hand to pull the hair from her eyes, she realized the ground wasn’t getting any closer, but was pulling away. Far below her, a figure was lying crumpled on the hood of a truck, and something was digging into her shoulders and hips. Raising her hands to her chest, she felt a band around her breasts that was making it hard for her to breathe. Something was vibrating through her body, and she twisted her head to look above her.
Flying across the city, the blackened, rubbery body of a cockroach was holding her in a vice-like grip.
CHAPTER TWELVE: Lucky Lady (Jonesy)
Las Vegas was burning. Grey billows of smoke were drifting across the skyline away from the city. Eager to avoid dealing with the critters in the dark when they arrived, they’d driven continuously at a slow steady speed, and dawn had broken over a sleepless night. It was only three hundred and twenty miles to Vegas from Johnsondale. They’d driven along the I-15 at no more than thirty miles per hour, sharing the driving and rarely stopping. High in the sky, dark creatures were circling like vultures over the burning city, and if he hadn’t known better, he might have assumed they were birds.
As they got closer to the city, the I-15 became even more clogged with abandoned vehicles. The wide eight-lane road was filled with cars and trucks parked at all angles. Jas was slowly negotiating the cruiser around the crashed and dusty vehicles. Other than the circling critters, nothing was moving and the region was deathly silent.
“What do you make of this?”
He shook his head. “I dunno, but I don’t suggest we go to the strip.”
While focusing on a sharp turn around an abandoned truck, she gave a small snort. “I went there once and I swore never again.”
“Let’s just hope Lady Luck is smiling on us now.”
“What was your daughter doing in Vegas?”
Miranda had always loved the bright lights and Albuquerque had never rung her bells. She’d moved to Vegas hoping to become a blackjack dealer, but ended up working as waitress in a restaurant. Meeting a casino dealer through her job, she’d quickly fallen pregnant and they’d married in a chapel in Vegas without telling them. It had been a huge deal three months earlier when she was only two months pregnant, but now he realized they’d lost sight of the bigger picture. All he wanted now was to find Miranda and to keep her and his unborn grandchild safe.
Not wanting to explain the complexities of his relationship with his only child, he replied, “She’s young and thought it would be fun.”
Miranda’s home was north of the city and they drove past the airport, finally reaching the tall casino buildings. Hanging from balconies, sheets were fluttering in the breeze, and he peered through the passenger window trying to read what was written on them.
“HELP TRAPPED”
“S.O.S.”
> “ALIVE INSIDE”
Sounding wounded, Jas said, “Oh no, people are still trapped in the hotels.”
“We don’t know how old these signs are. The people might be gone.”
Even as he said it, he didn’t believe it. They already knew the critters were holding people prisoner in the cities, and they were unlikely to have killed them all. What he’d seen taking place in Albuquerque would be happening here too.
Still sounding upset, Jas asked plaintively, “What are we really gonna do? CaliTech can’t take care of everyone, but can we really stay there knowing everyone else out here is dying?”
She’d put into words a feeling that was growing inside of him. He wanted Miranda and his grandchild to be somewhere safe, but could he really sit by and watch the world die? At fifty-five years old, he felt he’d lived a good proportion of life. If he died now, he’d only lose the worst years, and he didn’t value them enough to cover his ass hiding in CaliTech. His first responsibility was to Miranda. For as long as she needed him, he would do whatever it took to keep her safe, but once she was behind the walls of CaliTech, could he really ignore the suffering of the people he’d sworn to protect?
“I need to take care of Miranda. Jenny would want me to.”
They cleared the I-15 and took a slip road to the suburb Miranda lived in. Using a map someone at CaliTech had printed for him, he guided Jas to a small house with a waist high chain link fence. The street was quiet, and other than the usual abandoned cars, everything looked tidy.
Pointing ahead, he said, “This should be it.”
A red Toyota Yaris was parked in the driveway. He and Jenny had bought it new for Miranda’s twenty-first birthday, and he smiled at the memory of her delight at finally becoming fully independent.
“How do you want to handle this?” Jas asked.
If they had a Navigator with them, it would have been be easy. Without one there was a very real possibility they could die. He might not care about his life, but with her sincere commitment to him, Jas was quickly becoming like a second daughter. Eyeing the house critically, he was aware the critters would be attracted to any noise they made, and he wondered how he might get Miranda’s attention if she was inside. The front window was covered by a white lace curtain and he thought he saw it move.