by Tim McBain
It lifted its head and shrieked. Without a word, and at precisely the same moment, they each silenced it with a gunshot.
They waited for more to come, and after what seemed like an eternity, Phillip spoke.
“I think we did it.”
Chloe mustered a weak grin that quickly turned to a grimace when she put weight on her wounded leg. Phillip's eyes went immediately to the crescent-shaped gash on her leg.
“You got bit?”
Chloe nodded.
“Me too.”
Chapter Twenty Two
October 31st
12:37 AM
Chloe walked away from the blazing squat. Away from the stench of charbroiled clown. Away from the heat that prickled over her exposed skin and the smoke that stung her eyes.
She didn't know she had a destination until the spire of the rusty playground rocketship came into view.
The hushed sound of their feet on sand filled the night. Chloe fell back into one of the swings, gripping the chains with both hands. The metal was cold on her fingers, and she pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down to create a barrier between the chain and her skin. In the distance, a siren wailed.
“You know what we have to do, right?” Phillip said.
“Yeah,” Chloe answered. She sighed, long and hard.
This was all a dream. Yeah, that was it. A nightmare. A very realistic – if you counted flesh-eating clowns as being realistic – nightmare. That spanned the course of several days. She'd had dreams like that before. Dreams that had a very real sense of time passing.
She remembered her psychology teacher saying that, though they often felt longer, dreams only really lasted a few minutes. Chloe wondered how that was possible. How could all of those feelings and conversations that sometimes seemed to span hours happen over the course of five minutes?
OK, so she was dreaming. Time to wake up. She pinched her tongue between her teeth, biting down until her eyes watered.
Wake up, wake up, WAKE UP.
She stopped before she drew blood. If pain was going to bring her out of the dream, then that clown taking a sloppy bite out of her leg would have done it.
No, this was no nightmare. This was real.
Tears formed in her eyes, this time out of anger instead of from the smoke. This was totally unfair. They'd saved the whole damn town from those psychos, after no one would listen to them. They were heroes, goddamnit. They weren't supposed to die.
And why should they kill themselves? To save the rest of humanity? Their townsfolk and peers? The people that teased them and spat on them and acted like they were dirt? They weren't worthy of that sacrifice. She wondered if her parents would even notice that she was gone.
How long did they have? She didn't know. She remembered one of them speculating that the length of time it took to turn depended on the severity of the bite. It struck her that the conversation would have taken place tonight, only a few hours ago. That seemed wrong. It seemed like days must have passed between then and now.
Maybe they were wrong. Maybe it wouldn't happen to them. She glanced over at Phillip swinging beside her. His face was smudged with soot and blood. She could just see the edge of the bite mark on his shoulder, the barest hint of scabbed over flesh. He'd been bitten hours ago and hadn't shown any sign of turning.
Maybe it was something that could be treated at a hospital. A new form of rabies or something. They'd get a few shots, maybe be kept for a few days of observation. She imagined them there, side by side in matching hospital gowns, watching bad daytime TV, and eating Jell-o off a TV tray like when she'd gotten her tonsils out.
But no. They'd seen it. With Rick and the old lady with the dog and Tommy Dickface. And this wasn't something that could be treated at a hospital. This was something that could only be treated with a sacrifice of flesh.
This was it, then. She'd never graduate. Never go to prom, as if she would go anyway. Never go to college. Never go to London or Japan or any of the other cool places she thought she might visit some day. Never fall in love. Never have kids. Never have another best friend.
The thing she resented most of all was that she'd never get out of this shitty town. She'd spent the last three years telling herself she would get away from this place. It was how she put up with all the bullshit. Endured the bullying and harassment. When she woke up in the morning and thought of another day in that school surrounded by people that loathed her, she would look in the mirror and say, “Hold on one more day.” And then she'd think about getting in her car and driving up to the school, but instead of taking that left turn into the driveway, she'd just keep going. And she'd drive and drive until she was somewhere new. Somewhere no one knew her.
It had all been a lie, though. She was going to die here.
“Do we really have to do it, though? I mean, think about it. This whole town is just filled to the brim with jerkoffs. We don't owe them anything.”
Phillip angled his face around the length of chain between them. “Of course we have to do it.”
Would she feel it? She tried to imagine the change. Her hair going wiry. Her skin getting that pasty white texture that somehow looked both chalky and oily at the same time. She thought about the hunger. The craving that must drive them toward violence and bloodshed.
“I know,” she said and sighed again. “It's our civic duty.”
Chapter Twenty Three
October 31st
1:12 AM
The fumes shimmered in the air around them like heat distortion blurring all things above the desert sand. Phillip liked the smell of gasoline, though, even if it bordered on smothering for the moment. He didn’t know why. He’d never even driven a car or anything. Not once. It just smelled clean to him. Cleaner than almost anything in the world.
His eyes flushed with tears and his nostrils stung on the inside, the fuel burning the wet places on his face. He blinked rapidly, water draining from his eyes and trailing down his face, but he couldn’t keep up with his tear ducts. He saw all things through that filter of water rushing to wet his irritated eyes. A blur that morphed and shifted constantly, his eyelids like fudged up windshield wipers that only moved the smudges around instead of removing them.
The hinges above squawked when he shuffled his feet to adjust his position in the swing, and little clouds of dust kicked up where he’d unearthed some dirt that hadn’t been saturated with fuel. Not completely, anyway.
Chloe flicked her lighter, and he gasped as the flame burst from the shadow of her hand, but then he saw that she was lifting it to her face to light a cigarette. The fumes alone, apparently, weren’t quite enough to ignite – a fact that relieved him, even if he would burn soon enough.
In the flashes of clarity after each blink he could see that water drained from Chloe’s eyes as well, black makeup smearing down onto her cheeks. She looked so sad. She looked, in fact, like a sad clown. He almost laughed at that turn of phrase. Almost.
He wanted to tell her that they were doing the right thing. That he was sorry for it, but it was the only thing they could do. And that above that, he was thankful for how kind she’d been to him over the past few hours, even if it meant nothing in most ways. That he almost couldn’t believe how kind she’d been.
Instead he said nothing.
She pulled the cigarette from her lips, turned the filter toward him and offered it to him. He took it, looking at the smoldering red end for a long moment before he brought the thing to his mouth and inhaled. The cherry flared brighter, and smoke swelled into his lungs, some strange thick feeling roiling in his chest, a sensation he found interesting, almost mysterious somehow. It tasted like dog shit. A thrill crept into his scalp as he exhaled, though, the hair follicles at the crown of his head tingling like mad.
He retracted the cigarette from his mouth, but he could tell by her body language that she didn’t want it back.
She nodded at him and then gestured by flicking her head toward the ground. He knew what she meant.
; Again he stared at the burning red tip of the cigarette, the smoke spiraling off it in slow motion. It shook just a little in his fingers. His carotid artery throbbed like a garden hose in his neck. He could feel its tremor in his jaw.
He took a breath, almost gagging on the gas fumes.
With a flick of his wrist, the tobacco tube delivered that smoldering ember to the ground. Sparks burst everywhere as the cigarette hit cherry first, and there was an incredible whoosh as the flames erupted, the fire’s great musk was everywhere, and then the brightest flash filled the empty space all around, engulfing them all at once in a fiery gust.
The fire trembled. It spat and fluttered and exhaled endlessly.
And it turned all in its grip to ash.
Chapter Twenty Four
October 31st
The Morning After
Police lights twirled over the grass, the red and blue shimmers reflecting back from all of those leafless trees that formed a kind of wall penning one of the many crime scenes in. Yellow police tape formed a more formal perimeter to match the natural barrier.
The police scuttled over the wreckage, spiraling around the dead bodies like carrion birds ever circling and circling until they found dead meat to sate their hunger. And there were bodies to be found. Many, many bodies. The forensics team would be working these cases for months, perhaps longer in some instances. Many of the dead were damaged beyond recognition, beyond hope for even dental identification. Even figuring out who these people were would be an incredible undertaking, let alone gazing into the smears of congealed blood on the ground and teasing out exactly what the hell had happened here.
It was a tremendous loss of life. A shock. An outrage the people of this city would talk about for years and years to come.
And yet life went on. The sun came up. The people rose and brewed coffee and went to work. The buses weaved crooked paths through the city streets to deliver children to school. It was like any other day in so many ways.
Even with all of the commotion, all of the trouble, all of the police streaming and scouring and cordoning off chunks of the city, Halloween proceeded, to some degree, as usual.
When the evening set in, trick-or-treaters came out in droves. They swarmed up and down the streets in clusters, filing along the sidewalks, clogging crosswalks, curling into cul-de-sacs, bounding up and down the stairs in the various apartment complexes.
Their bags grew fat with their hauls. Plastic wrapped chunks of chocolate. Wads of peanut butter candy clad in orange and black waxed paper. Individually wrapped fruit chews whose artificial flavors bore no resemblance to actual fruit or anything in nature at all. The least popular houses gave out apples and homemade popcorn balls that were somehow suspicious and off-putting in their lack of a sealed plastic sheath. The most popular houses gave out full-size Snickers bars in lieu of the much smaller fun size. An embarrassment of satisfaction.
This was the night when the sugar flowed like wine, when the nougat cups runneth over, when the little witches and ghouls reigned supreme.
And when the night went fully dark, fully black, the clown crept out of the woods to join the endless flow of costumed foot traffic, his smile swelling to fill his face, revealing the braces on those top front teeth. Nobody recoiled at his injuries or even noticed his limp. Not tonight. He fell in step with the teeming mass of humanity, totally undetectable from all the rest.
Also by Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus
The Scattered and the Dead
With 99.7% of the Earth's population dead and gone, the few who remain struggle to survive in an empty world. The scattered. The leftovers. These are their stories.
Keep reading for a preview of The Scattered and the Dead series.
Rex
Panama City, Florida
68 days before
Rex ripped the IV needle out of his wrist, machines tattling on him with shrill whoops and cries. He didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t going to die in some hospital room by himself. Hermetically sealed in a plastic shrouded death box even though there were thousands of “ebola-like” cases in Florida alone, the number growing by the minute? No thanks.
He rose from the bed, his legs wobbling beneath him for a second. His vision swam along the edges, so he put a palm on the mattress to steady himself. He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths. It seemed to get better.
Still, wobbling legs and dodgy vision comprised the least of his problems. His head felt like a swollen watermelon about to burst. It hurt like nothing else he’d felt in his life.
He was 43. He knew pain. This was un-fuckin-real.
Throw in the periodic projectile vomiting of thick, red blood, and you’ve got the makings of a serious problem. It was almost comical to have a doctor weigh in on this. Pretty straightforward diagnosis, he thought: You’re fucked.
He knew he didn’t have long, had known so for a while. In some ways, his fever rising to the point that his consciousness faded out into madness had been a mercy, had protected him from the worst of the suffering as he disconnected from reality.
But for the moment, at least, the fever had died down some, and his thoughts were clear. He had a last meal in mind, a final resting place. It’d involve hard work, but his life had been full of that. It might as well end on a familiar note.
He prodded at the plastic sheeting cordoning off his bed from the rest of room, fingers searching for a flap or a slit or some opening to get to his things in the wardrobe. This wasn’t a normal isolation room. Those were long full by the time he was admitted. Hospital workers employed plastic sheets here to convert this normal room into a quarantined one. He figured this was for the better anyhow as it increased the odds that his keys were still around. If he could find a way to get to the other side of this damn plastic anyway.
The only opening went toward the door of the room, the opposite direction of where he needed to go, but he guessed it would work well enough. He turned himself sideways, trying to make his barrel chest as svelte as he could. He sidled between the plastic and the wall, found the wardrobe, opened it. His hand fished around in the dark. There. His shorts, and in his pocket, the keys.
After a moment’s hesitation, he slid the shorts on, but he didn’t bother with the t-shirt, leaving the hospital robe to adorn his upper body. Fashion matters little to the dying, but he didn’t like the idea of pressing his bare ass into the leather seat of his truck.
Hot leather pressed up against his sweaty taint? Fuck that noise.
He kept moving between the plastic and the wall, reaching the window and sliding it open. Here was the perk of being on the ground floor. He could pop out, cross a bed of flowers and some grass and be in the parking lot without passing a single nurse. The thought made him smile. If they knew, they would surely try to detain him under the guise of preventing the spread of the disease. What a joke that was. The world was already fucked. You weren’t going to unfuck it by keeping him in a room with plastic sheeting for wallpaper. It didn’t take Dr. Oz to diagnose that shit.
He dangled his legs out the window, lost his balance a little on the edge and tumbled down into the reddish mulch surrounding the flowers, his hands and knees jamming down into the wood chips. His head felt like swollen tectonic plates were crashing into each other just under the surface, threatening to rupture the shell of cranium surrounding them.
Everything went black and silent, and reality filtered down to only the pain. It just about knocked him out.
Un-fuckin-real.
Once the hurt passed, though, he chuckled. His hands retracted from the mulch, and he stood and brushed away the red bits clinging to his shins. The sunlight made him squint his eyes, but the heat and humidity wrapped themselves around him like a toasty blanket. He’d lived in Florida his whole life. This sticky, hot-as-balls air felt like coming home after all of that time in the air-conditioned plastic nightmare.
He staggered over the grass and into the parking area, his legs tottering under him, shaky and weak. No damn clue where his
truck was, but he didn’t mind looking around a bit. Being upright and ambulatory felt good as hell. The blacktop scorched his feet, but it didn’t bother him. He’d walked over the hot sand on the beach since he was little.
After wandering up and down the rows, he spotted the truck and closed on it. If walking around felt good, opening the door and sitting down felt better. He was winded already, his head had that swelly feeling, and the world was just faintly blurry along the edges. Still, he made it.
Inside, the truck was stifling. This was beyond a toasty blanket. He liked the heat, but the sun beat down on the windshield all day. This was dog-killing hot. He started it up and put the air conditioner on.
And suddenly the victory of his escape seemed much smaller. His life would still end the same way: He would die alone, unable to visit his family for fear of infecting them, unable to walk more than a couple hundred feet without getting the brain bloat headaches or whatever the shit that was all about.
It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. He’d planned for this, had a fallout shelter stocked to the brim with food and water and weapons. He had two bug-out vehicles. He had caches of supplies in strategic locations. He was a prepper, an intelligent and thorough one.
Unfortunately, the disease cared not. It killed without prejudice, whether you feared and respected it or doubted and ignored it.
He was supposed to make doomsday his bitch, and instead he was going to be among the first to go.
He reached into the glove box and pulled out a can of Skoal. It felt empty, but he was relieved to find a little left in there. He packed a wad into his lip, felt the nicotine tingle through the membrane and into his system. He leaned back and reveled in one of the few pleasures he could still enjoy. The final meal would come soon enough, but for now he would close his eyes and feel the tobacco in his lip and feel the stimulant enter his bloodstream and feel the temperature inside the truck return to something reasonable.