There was a streak of blood on the fourth floor, like someone who’d been bleeding heavily had been dragged across it. The blood started in the middle of the landing and streaked under the door that led to the fourth floor hallway. It was then that Brandt started to get nervous.
He stepped into the hallway, letting the door clang shut, hoping that the sound would draw any dangers out into the open so he could take care of them as necessary. A door halfway down the hall shook in its frame, the doorknob rattling as if someone was trapped inside. Brandt took a step forward, then heard a low growling. He turned away from the door and resumed scanning the hall, trying to remember which was Olivia’s dorm room.
Most of the doors on this floor had been decorated with colored paper and photographs and drawings; a few doors even sparkled with glued-on flecks of glitter. Halfway down the hall, three doors down from the one that had rattled, he found a door papered over with hot pink paper, the names “Olivia” and “Tasha” stenciled on it in purple. Several photographs were stuck to the door, of Olivia with a slender black girl that Brandt assumed was Tasha, and of Olivia with several other girls that he’d never seen before. Near the top left of the door, he spotted a photo of him and Olivia with their arms around each other, her in a pair of black shorts and a red t-shirt, him in his U.S. Marine Corps service dress uniform. If he remembered correctly, it had been taken on the day he’d graduated from boot camp, a day that seemed like a lifetime ago.
He tore his eyes away from the picture and gently tapped a knuckle against the door experimentally. As he did so, he looked up and down the hall. Nothing was coming his way, so he knocked again, harder than before.
“Olivia!” he hissed through the door. “For the love of Christ, tell me you’re in there.”
There was a scrape on the other side of the door, and then someone whispered, “Mike? Is that you?”
Brandt’s knees went weak when he heard his sister’s voice from inside the room. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “Open up. Let me in.”
There was another scrape, like something being dragged across the floor, and the locks unfastened on the door. It flew open, and Brandt found himself with his arms full of his sister as she flung herself at him, throwing her arms around him in a tight, desperate hug.
Brandt returned the hug and said, “Come on, we need to get inside. It’s not safe out here.”
Olivia grabbed his arm and dragged him into her dorm room, then slammed the door shut and locked it again.
“Don’t make so much noise,” Brandt told her. “They’re drawn to loud sounds.”
She was moving one of the beds close to the door, and he guessed that that was what he’d heard scraping on the floor before she’d opened the door. He grabbed the foot of it and pulled the bed back across the door to block it once more. “What happened here?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Olivia’s voice was shaking, and she dropped down onto her bed with a sniff. “I’m not sure when it started, but it must have been about two, maybe three, days ago. People on campus started to get sick. There were a lot of rumors floating around about some bad flu outbreak or something, and a bunch of people just stopped showing up for classes. They’d be in their morning classes, and by that afternoon, you wouldn’t see them again. Dr. Rivers was the first professor to cancel all of his classes, and that’s when I knew something had to be going on, because he never cancels classes.”
“What happened after that?” Brandt asked.
Olivia waved a hand toward the windows. “That happened. Me and Tasha were here in our room when something started happening out in the hall. There were military guys all over the place, dragging people out of their dorms and outside onto the lawn. They…they shot everybody. Michael, why would they do that?”
“Because it’s a virus,” Brandt answered.
“Yeah, I figured that much out,” Olivia said. “Virology major, remember?” She pushed off the bed and went to her desk, shoving a binder and a couple of notebooks aside to tug a legal pad free from the pile and bring it to him. “I’ve been taking notes, mostly observations and rumors I’ve been hearing. I don’t know how much help it will be, but…”
“No, no, this is great, Liv, really,” Brandt said, skimming her neat handwriting. “This could be a huge help. The more we know, the better.”
“The only thing I haven’t figured out is the common denominator,” she said. “They were killing people who weren’t showing any symptoms. I don’t understand it.”
“Some of them were bitten,” Brandt said absently, reading her notes.
“Bitten?”
“Yeah, they had bite marks on them,” he said. “On their arms or their shoulders or legs. Human bite marks. I think those came before the bullet holes in their heads.”
Olivia took the legal pad from him and flipped to a fresh sheet, starting to scribble on it. “Anyway, Tasha left,” she said. “She made a run for it while the military guys were busy shooting a bunch of people outside. I never saw what happened to her.”
“How come you didn’t run?” Brandt asked.
“Because I didn’t want to not be here if you came looking for me,” Olivia said. “If you hadn’t shown up by tomorrow evening, I was going to try to figure out how to get to your house.” She paused, and then asked, “Why weren’t you answering your phone? I tried calling and calling, and you never answered. Then the phones stopped working. Even before all of this, though, you weren’t answering. Where have you been?” She hesitated, then added, “You weren’t in jail or anything, were you?”
“What? No, no of course not,” Brandt said. He wasn’t sure how much to tell her, but he guessed that, considering the circumstances, the NDA didn’t really matter. “I got a new job. Sort of. I’ve been helping Dr. Rivers with a medical project, and he’s paying me for it. Was paying me for it,” he corrected. “That’s over now, and I’m here to get you out of here.”
“Where are we going to go?”
“Away from Atlanta,” Brandt said. “With what I know of this disease that’s going around, it’s highly contagious, and we’d be better to stay away from highly populated areas until things die down.”
“Yeah,” Olivia said, “anytime there’s an epidemic, crowds and people you don’t know are definitely to be avoided.”
“I think between your knowledge on illnesses, epidemics, and viruses, and my military training,” Brandt surmised, “we should be able to make it through this okay.”
“God, I hope so,” Olivia said.
Chapter 14
Brandt and Olivia waited until the next morning before they left her dorm. Olivia carried a backpack full of easy to make foods like peanut butter, ramen noodles, and instant macaroni and cheese. Brandt had his Beretta and a baseball bat that Olivia had scavenged from Tasha’s belongings.
Standing in the center of the mostly empty parking lot in front of Olivia’s dorm, he wished he had more. Maybe he could scavenge more weapons from a dead soldier somewhere, though he wasn’t counting on it; the first soldier he’d come across had been stripped of all his weapons.
“What now?” Olivia asked, her voice low so it wouldn’t attract any unwanted attention. “I’m assuming you have a plan for getting out of town.”
“Obviously, we need a mode of transportation,” Brandt said. “We have to get back to my truck. It’s parked that way.” He pointed across the parking lot and down the street in the direction he’d come the day before. “I left it parked down there on the other side of the barricades.”
“Barricades?”
“Military-erected barricades,” Brandt said. He motioned to her and started walking, drawing his pistol from its holster. “Lots of barbed wire and concrete and Humvees. More bodies, too, mostly of people who appeared to have been bitten before they were shot in the heads.”
“Maybe that’s what we need to do,” Olivia suggested, hurrying to keep up with his longer stride. “Shoot ‘em in the heads.”
“I would imagine that an
y shot to any part of the body could potentially be fatal,” Brandt said.
“I don’t know,” Olivia replied. “Yesterday, I saw somebody run at the soldiers who were doing all of this,” she waved her hand to indicate the dead bodies littering the campus grounds, “and when they shot him in the chest, he got back up and kept going at them until one of them shot him in the head.”
“Huh.” Brandt glanced back at his sister to make sure she was sticking close to him. “I suppose a bullet to the head will put down anything that moves.”
There was movement in the corner of his eye, and he turned in that direction, raising his pistol to aim it in front of him. There was a dumpster sitting near the corner of the parking lot, and a bit of trash had been stirred up by a breeze.
Brandt lowered his pistol, flashing Olivia a self-deprecating smile. “A little jumpy,” he said.
“Not that anybody can fault you for that,” Olivia said. “I feel like my nerves are going to crawl right out through my skin.”
Brandt felt the same, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. There was no sense in worrying her unnecessarily. She was stressed out enough, and the last thing he needed was for her to be concerned that he didn’t know what he was doing. He kept his mouth shut and continued on, leading her in the direction he’d left his truck.
They walked through the deathly still and silent campus unmolested, and Brandt retraced his path from there down the street toward the Humvee and tank that backed up the concrete barricades. They made it halfway down the street before the first figure stumbled from the dark spaces between buildings and out into the open. He raised his pistol again, but he didn’t fire right away, taking a moment to examine the form before him, hoping to glean some information before he killed it.
It was a woman maybe in her mid- to late-thirties, close to his own age, judging by the lines around her eyes and mouth. She was dressed in a pair of snug jeans and a flowing green top that was probably too thin for this time of year, and she stumbled along on a pair of black high heels so tall her ankles looked ready to snap. She staggered toward him, lifting her hands and baring her teeth, her blonde hair wild and tangled around her face.
Brandt didn’t have many bullets, only the ones in the magazine that was already inside the pistol, but he had to know how accurate what Olivia had told him about killing these things was. “Liv, don’t look,” he said, and he aimed the pistol and squeezed the trigger, putting a bullet into the woman’s chest. The shot echoed against the buildings, and she fell backward, unbalanced by the bullet’s impact and her high heels. She crumpled to the pavement, making no move to catch herself to blunt her fall, and her head banged against the pavement with an audible thunk. She laid there, motionless, blood oozing from the bullet hole in her chest.
“You sure they get back up?” Brandt asked Olivia after a long moment of staring. “She isn’t making a move to get up again.”
Olivia sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know what I saw.”
“Maybe so,” Brandt remarked motioning for her to start forward once more. “Come on. The truck isn’t too much farther.”
“Where is it?”
“Other side of the barricade. We have to cut through a bookstore to get around the barricade. It was clear when I came through it earlier. Hopefully, it’s still that way. Just stick close to me. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
The narrow alley running alongside the bookstore was still empty, a condition he was able to assess by the beams of the rising sun that broke into it to illuminate the alley for several feet past the bookstore’s door. He tried the door and found it locked, which wasn’t how he’d left it the day before. He jerked on the handle a few times, then cupped his hand against the glass and squinted inside, trying to see into the store.
Everything was almost the same as it had been when he’d left the bookstore the day before, but there were signs beyond the locked door that someone had been in there in the intervening time. The radio on the counter had been disturbed, the mic hanging on its stretchy cord down the front of the counter to bump against the floor, and the drawers behind the counter had been rifled through. It was no real surprise that someone had been there. In a large city like Atlanta, someone was bound to have come in after him. But that someone had now blocked his immediate path to his truck on the other side of the barricades, and if he expected to get to it, he was going to have to find another route.
“Shit,” he muttered, turning away from the door and looking out to the street again.
“What is it?”
“I’m going to have to find us another way through,” Brandt huffed. “This door wasn’t locked when I came through here yesterday. Someone’s been here since then.”
“Is that bad?” Olivia asked.
“It certainly isn’t good,” Brandt replied. He took her hand and tugged her back toward the alleyway’s opening. “Come on, let’s go find another way out of here.”
At the end of the alley, he stepped out onto the sidewalk, then drew up short when he caught sight of the figure coming toward them. It was the same woman in the loose green top, her front now blood-covered, the hole he’d put in her chest barely visible through the blood and torn fabric. It should have been a fatal shot, a wound that would have put anyone down, but here she was, coming toward them and verifying everything Olivia had said she’d witnessed the day before from her dorm room window.
“Shit,” Brandt said again. He pushed Olivia backward, deeper into the alley, and lifted his pistol. “I guess you weren’t kidding about them getting back up,” he said. He adjusted his aim, centering it on the woman’s forehead. Before he could get the shot off, though, the sound of more running and shuffling feet met his ears, and he tensed, sensing that something was about to go bottom-up in a hurry.
Not seeing any other choice, though he knew there was a chance the noise would attract more attention than they’d already gotten, he squeezed the trigger.
The blonde hair at the back of the woman’s head billowed as the back of her head was blown out by the bullet, and she fell backward to the pavement for a second time.
Brandt grabbed his sister by the wrist and yanked her out into the street, bolting toward the first obvious path available to them: the tank.
As he ran, he looked down the street back in the direction they’d initially come, and saw at least ten people coming in their direction. He jammed his pistol into his pocket, swung Olivia around, and cupped his hands into a stirrup.
“On top of the tank, now!” he ordered, and she didn’t hesitate to step into his linked hands and let him boost her up onto the tank’s treads. “Climb as high as you can get, and be careful,” he instructed, and then he drew his pistol again and turned around, weapon raised, just in time to go on the attack as the closest group of people closed the gap into arm’s reach of him.
Careful to keep the tank to his back, Brandt lifted his pistol and began to fire into the group immediately around him. A quick head count revealed that there were seven people around him, all blood stained, all visibly wounded, some with bite marks, and some with bullet holes. The people around him reached toward him frantically, grasping at his clothes, trying to drag him in closer to their bared teeth. Brandt didn’t want to know what would happen if they managed to sink their teeth into his skin, and he fought desperately to prevent that from happening.
“Michael!” Olivia yelled from above him, her shout almost drowned out as he fired a bullet into the head of a man in a business suit.
“Not now, Liv!” Brandt shouted back. He shot another one in the head, and it tumbled to the ground. “Kind of busy here!”
The sound of her shoes on metal met his ears, and then rifle fire joined his shooting, taking out two more of his attackers before Olivia yelled, “Get up here! Come on!”
Brandt shot one more of his attackers to buy himself more space, then holstered his pistol and turned to the tank. Olivia was perched on the tank above him and to his right, a military-issue
d rifle in her hands, shooting down into the crowd. He started to climb onto the treads, grabbing for anything that would serve as a handhold, scrambling for the top of the tank.
“Aim for their heads!” he shouted to her as he reached the top and started toward her.
Olivia stopped shooting when he reached her, and she promptly passed him the rifle. He examined the scene below. Most of the initial group of attackers lay on the pavement dead, but more were coming up the street to supplement their numbers. Brandt didn’t like their odds against the group that was coming their way.
“We need to go,” he said, tearing his eyes away from the gathering crowd to the path ahead of them. “I don’t think I want to know what would happen if they managed to get up here.”
“Me either,” Olivia agreed. “Do you have a plan?”
Brandt didn’t answer her right away. He was too busy examining the gap between the tank and the Humvee parked in front of it. “Where did you get this rifle, by the way?” he asked distractedly, calculating the distance between the vehicles and wondering if Olivia would be able to jump it.
“There’s a dead soldier hanging out of the tank’s hatch,” Olivia told him. “I kind of took it off of him.”
Brandt turned to look in the place she described and focused on the soldier who looked as if he’d died trying to get out of the tank. He climbed up to the body, hoping to find something useful. He searched the corpse’s pockets and belt and came away with a second Beretta and a spare magazine for it. He checked the pistol, discovered the magazine was empty, and snapped the spare one into it, pulling back the slide to chamber a round. He worked the soldier’s coat off his body, then climbed back down to his sister and handed her the pistol. “Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.”
Olivia nodded and tucked the pistol into the waistband of her jeans. “So, plan?” she asked, raising her voice to be better heard over the sound from the crowd massing below.
Origins (The Becoming Book 6) Page 9