by Welker, Wick
“Oh,” Stark said, his enthusiasm diminishing. He looked down at the green tile and went silent.
Don continued, “After the Medora outbreak, the government got involved real fast, took over the whole clinical trial and packed us all up into a huge plane. It didn’t matter what we had to say about it. We were going wherever they wanted us to go. They completely trampled on whatever personal freedoms we thought we had.”
Stark stood up, paced to the other side of the laboratory and leaned against a lab bench. Looking back across the lab towards the kitchen, he watched the two eating in silence. They seemed muted to Stark, as if they had already used up every emotion during what had happened to them the last month. Their brains had switched to survivor mode and the only thing occupying their minds was a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Of all the questions bubbling up in his head, there was one that was repeating itself over and over again with increasing intensity.
“Do you know how far away New York City is from Medora, North Dakota?” Stark shouted out to the kitchen.
“A long freaking way?” Eli responded.
“Seventeen hundred miles.”
“Why would you know that?”
“I looked it up.”
“Great,” she said sarcastically while opening the refrigerator.
Stark walked back over to them, “Do you know who Dr. Beckfield is?”
Eli looked at Don and threw her head back with an exasperated breath. “Uh, yes, we know exactly who Dr. Beckfield is.”
“He’s the most worthless son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” Don said, turning from a swivel chair that he had found.
“Yeah, I know him too and I’m beginning to understand why he acted a little too dumb around me.”
“Wait,” Eli interrupted, “so you did work with this asshole? What the hell, man?”
“Yes, but not in the way you think. He worked under me as we tried to figure out what the virus was but…”
“Uh, he knows exactly what the virus is, sir,” said Don. “He’s the one who gave me the Virulex injection.”
“That son of a bitch…” said Stark. “He must’ve been trying to… stop me. The guy acted like a total buffoon around me, like he had no idea what he was doing. I bet Rambert knew this whole time too. Just another attempt to cover up what was really the cause of the virus. They’re all just covering their own asses.”
“Rambert?” Eli questioned.
“Don’t worry about it.” Stark found a lab stool and sat down. “I’ve been a complete tool this whole time. I can’t… I mean, I can’t believe this.” He began speaking out loud to himself, “I bet they were trying to do this same stuff back in England with the whole Mad Cow fiasco.” He paused for a moment. “Hey, do you know a Doctor Crimmel?”
“No, doesn’t ring a bell.
Stark stood up again and walked back across the lab, thinking quietly to himself.
After a small pause of silence in the lab, Stark heard the squeak of a shoe on the tile and a kitchen drawer slam open with silverware spilling to the ground. He turned quickly and saw Eli repeatedly thrusting a long bread knife into Don’s belly. In a matter of seconds, she had buried it into him a dozen times with large spurts of blood that followed the movements of the knife.
“What are you doing!” Stark screamed at her as he lunged back towards the kitchen. Don had fallen to the kitchen floor and Eli made one last slice, deep across his throat with the knife.
Stark approached the kitchen, lifted his leg, and clumsily kicked the knife from her hand. He grabbed both her shoulders from behind and thrust her small frame to the ground. She began to laugh as Stark kneeled squarely on her back, pinning her to the ground. “Oh my gosh! What have you done? What’s the matter with you?”
He looked at Don’s motionless body, which was doused in blood. A thick pool of foul smelling black fluid had collected all around him. His eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling above the jagged open wound that had been torn into his neck.
Eli was crying and laughing at the same time. She let out long and hysterical breaths into the kitchen tile and coughed under the weight of Stark. “You’ve got to kill me!” She finally cried out. “But I don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to die like that, please.” Her breath was momentarily choked as she vomited up several mouthfuls of macaroni and cheese onto the green tile.
“You killed him! He’s dead!” Stark applied more pressure to her back as she gasped for air.
“I’m the last one,” she sobbed, “the last one.”
After a moment, Stark moved away from her and stood up. Eli continued to lay with her belly facing the ground, crying. A putrid smell began to engulf the kitchen.
“He was turning, wasn’t he?” Stark asked.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at him, “Yes.” Her crying turned into silent sobbing. “It’s going to happen to me and it’s going to happen to you.”
After a moment, she got to her feet and put her hand on Stark’s arm. “I don’t want to turn into that. I don’t want it. I know it’s going to happen to me.”
“You can’t ask me what you’re about to ask me.” Stark put her hand down by her side and walked out of the kitchen.
“But I don’t want to feel any pain. Is there any way you could do it with something for me in the lab here? Please?”
Stark wanted to start another metaphysical crisis in his mind. He wanted to torture himself endlessly with ethical paradox and moral indignation at the prospect of killing this young girl. However, something deeper in his mind shut it all down and turned the ignition off. One way or another, she was going to die and he didn’t want her to go like poor Don who was now rotting on the kitchen floor.
“This is the way it’s got to be,” she said as she walked over to him. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while.” She touched his hand.
Stark took off his glasses and sat them on the table. Looking down at the impossibly young girl, he decided. “Hold on a minute,” he said and turned to a desk in the corner of the lab.
“Okay.” She sat down at the grey metal lab bench.
Stark returned with a single piece of paper and a pencil. “Write down what you want the world to know about you.”
She looked up at him and slowly took the pencil and paper.
Stark then walked across the laboratory floor into a small room at the other end where a small number of mice were kept. He flipped on the lights and after searching for a moment, he found exactly what he was looking for: a small metal canister. Coming back from the room, he saw Eli staring down at the piece of paper with her thin arm holding the pencil motionless above it. He then walked to another long shelf full of darkened glass bottles and began searching through them until he found a bottle of potassium chloride. Unscrewing the cap, he inserted a long hypodermic needle into the bottle and drew up the colorless liquid.
Walking back to Eli, he spoke softly to her, “Do you know what you’re going to write yet?”
“I already wrote it, here.” She handed the paper to him.
“Oh. Who do you want me to give it to?”
“My life’s goal was to be poet laureate. I don’t think I’m going to live that long and I don’t think my poetry was ever really that good.”
“Do you want me to give it to your parents?”
“No, they died along with my brother in Medora. Why don’t you just take it? But don’t read it now. Wait.”
“Okay.” He folded the paper in half.
“Is it going to hurt?” She asked with furrowed eyebrows, motioning to the metal canister and syringe that Stark had set on the table.
“No, you’re just going to have surgery. This here is halothane, which we use to anesthetize mice. It’s going to put you right to sleep, so just remember to take deep breaths. You won’t feel the surgery at all.” Stark could feel his voice quiver as he spoke.
“Surgery. Okay.” She looked at him and smiled with tears.
“Let’s have you lie down right her
e on this table.”
She brought one leg up to the table and lay on top of the metal surface with her knees together and feet sticking straight to the ceiling.
Stark started to open the metal canister. “One time, on the radio, I heard about this guy who walked across the US. Took him like a year to do it. He said that on his very last night that he was camping in the woods right off the freeway in California. He thought of how if he were riding in a car on that freeway, those woods would’ve looked really scary to him, but now that he was in the woods, he could see that there was nothing to be scared of. He understood the woods and he wasn’t afraid of them any more.”
“Yeah, I see what you’re saying, doctor. I’m not scared anymore.”
He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “Are you ready, Eli?”
“Yes, before it’s too late. Um…” She looked up at him. “Is it okay to tell you that I love you? I just really feel like I need to tell someone that I love them right now.”
“Yes, it’s okay.”
“Okay, I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Stark brought the nozzle of the metal canister to her mouth and squeezed the trigger, releasing pressurized air with a colorless gas. Eli breathed deeply as Stark held the canister open. She looked straight up at him with her mouth open. Slowly, her eyelids closed and she fell asleep. He took the syringe and gently placed it in her arm. Pausing for a moment, he looked at her sleeping eyes and pressed down the plunger. Placing two fingers on her neck, he felt her pulse rise rapidly and then sink down until it was gone.
It was difficult through his blurred vision to see what she had written on the paper. After he wiped his eyes, he finally read: “My life is as it were a rose; fleeting with life but eternal with beauty.”
Chapter nineteen
Fluffy, orange turrets of smoke billowed up into the twilight sky while screeching jets continued to pummel the surrounding area with thunder and metal. Keith and Ellen stood motionless, watching the crowds below. They both knew what they were looking for without communicating it. They were watching for patterns. Patterns in the flow of movement of the horde that drifted back and forth across the now muddied school grounds. There would be tiny eddies of movement in response to a nearby missile that was dropped, but it would quickly fill in again as the crowd was drawn to another explosion in the opposite direction. The randomness of the flow was like leaves in river water where some might flow in between a group of rocks and another would go around it without any particular cause.
They waited for the perfect pattern to align, but so far, there wasn’t a single large enough distraction that would leave a vacuum of space in the field for the two of them to escape through. Too many opposing distant bombs and too many explosions created enough randomness in their movements that prevented a single path out.
“How do we do this? How do we do this, how do we do this…” Keith repeated under his breath as he focused his eyes on every movement of the horde below.
“See that truck?” Ellen pointed to a dark truck that was parked in the middle of the field. It was buried inside the crowd of the infected.
“Yes,” Keith nodded.
“I think that’s our winner.”
“Maybe. Maybe…” He squinted his eyes. “What’s our back-up if there aren’t any keys?”
“I think just beyond it there,” she pointed again. “See?”
“Oh, yeah, looks like a little Honda or something. Yeah, that could be our plan B.”
“And did you look down there on the side? Two dumpsters are right up against the wall. It’s still quite a drop but I really think we could just land right on top of them without getting hurt.”
“Yeah, it’s really the only way down on this side of the roof.”
Behind them, the crowd of teachers was yelling and squirming around the roof door, attempting to keep it shut against the horde. Keith knew he needed to go help but his mind was taken over by a small calculating machine that was sifting through the different flows of movement beneath him.
Ellen touched Keith’s crossed arms. “Keith, what’re we going to do? We’ve got to make a move.”
“I know.”
“Let’s go help secure the door.”
“You’re right. Wait, you stay here and watch for an opening and I’ll go help.”
Keith turned towards the huddled people and heard a long sustained squeak as the door leaned outward, breaking from the hinges. He wondered how many of them had to be pushing on the door to make it snap free of steel hinges. It must have been a hallway full of condensed human parts with an ever-increasing tail of the sick coming into the school from the street. One after another, adding their weight to a long snake of pressurized body mass leading up to a single door.
“It’s broken!” One of the teachers yelled out.
Keith paused, unsure whether he wanted to be involved in the brunt of the flow of the infected as they were probably about to breach the rooftop.
“Keith!” Ellen cried out.
He looked back and recognized the same worried expression he had seen many times on her. As he turned to head back to the door, his body was lifted into the air and thrown forward into the gravel rooftop towards Ellen. Opening his eyes, he saw a glowing orange color reflecting from the ground. Quickly, he ran his hands from the top of his chest down to his knees, examining any possible damage. Feeling intact, he looked behind him and saw a towering cloud of smoke that had erupted at the opposite end of the rooftop. The teachers had been scattered across the roof along with several of the sick that had blown through the doorway from the pressure of the explosion beneath.
Getting to his feet, he ran to Ellen who had been pushed back against the knee-high wall that lined the edge of the roof.
“Hey, hey, are you okay? That one was right next to the school.” He kneeled down and touched her shoulder.
She lifted her head and nodded. “We need to get out of here.”
“I know, I know, what…” he stopped talking as he looked out at the crowd below. The pattern was finally there.
“Hey! I think there’s a clearing that’s showing up out there.” Keith helped Ellen to her feet.
Looking out, she saw a swift movement of the sea of heads as they separated into two large bodies. One force began pushing its way around one side of the building while the other half was heading towards the opposite side, creating an empty space in the middle of the school grounds.
“The explosion! They’re all attracted to it and are trying to get around to the other side of the school,” Keith said, walking along the side of the roof.
“Keith!” Ellen yelled at him.
He looked over at the door and saw them coming out. Slowly and drunkenly they were stumbling out over their fallen comrades.
“Okay, I’m jumping down. You let yourself slowly down with your arms and I’ll catch you.”
“Go!” She yelled at him.
He grabbed the side of the building and peered over at the dumpster beneath. Swinging on leg over the edge, he sat with the railing in between his legs and quickly brought his other leg out. He lowered himself until he was only holding on with his hands and his legs were swinging down as low as possible. Resisting the urge to look down to see how far the drop was, he let go. In what felt like a long second, he crashed, legs first, onto the plastic top of the dumpster. Nothing hurt, he thought.
Getting to his feet, he looked up to yell at Ellen to jump but she was already hanging from the edge of the building with her bare feet swinging in the air. Keith was about to yell up at her, but she let go and her small frame came crashing into his chest, knocking them both backwards off the dumpster and down onto the asphalt.
Keith grabbed at his chest while struggling to breathe, but Ellen was already on her feet, trying to lift him up by his shoulders.
“We have to run right now. They are everywhere.”
Keith got to his feet. His diaphragm was stunned and he began to stumble towards
Ellen. Surrounding them was a wall of the infected that was slowly receding away as they struggled around to the other side of the school building, drawn by the explosion.
He produced a single cough and finally sucked in a long breath. Putting his arm over Ellen, he ducked his head and they started to move down a wide corridor of thick mud, flanked by crowds of the infected. Their movements made sucking noises as they lifted their feet while running, but any sounds that came from them were overpowered by the constant, organic cacophony of decrepit human drones all around them.
They ran awkwardly, lifting their feet from the mud while keeping their eyes forward searching for any sign of a car but saw little else other than a long corridor of infected people like they were lined up for a presidential motorcade but facing the wrong direction. Keith felt Ellen fall next to him and stumble forward over a gigantic plastic gold fish rocking back and forth on a large steel spring. Lifting her to her feet, they continued forward as the crowd around them slowly stretched further away.
A flash of something embedded in the side of the horde caught Keith’s eye and he stopped Ellen.
“Hang on. I think I see a wheel.” He stopped her by the shoulders and lowered her until they were both kneeling down in the grassy mud. “Wait,” he said.
A few dozen yards off, the metal rim and rubber of a car tire was showing through the crowd. The car was currently embedded into the mass of infected people. They swarmed around it, facing the direction opposite of Keith and Ellen, crawling and sluggishly jumping over one another.
“Keith,” Ellen whispered, “we have to run. One of them is going to see us and they will be around us in two seconds.”
“No, no, just wait a second. Look…” he pointed. “See? They’re moving away.”
Looking up, she saw that just in the time they were talking that over half of a small Honda civic had been exposed from the crowd.
Keith grabbed her by the shoulder. “Let’s move up to the bumper.”