by COE 3. 1. 0
“I thought we called a truce.”
“Only for the night.”
Feeling mutinous, she handed him his shoes.
“Thank you.” He put them on, and then he dangled both his arms through the hole. “This is gonna be tough, but I’ve been weight-training. So grab onto me and I’ll haul you up.”
“Are you sure you can manage my weight?” she said caustically.
“I’ll try not to break my back.”
She caught hold of his forearms, as he did hers. With effort, he lifted her through the hole and she clambered thankfully to the top of the elevator. He had already prized open the doors on the floor above them.
Don’t look down, she told herself, balancing her feet on the roof.
“Come on,” he said.
“Wait,” she said. “What if that mad escaped prisoner is still out there?”
“Don’t worry. I know kung fu.”
He was already at the opening before she could protest. She had no choice but to follow him. It felt good to be outside the cramped elevator again. No one was around, and the wall clock showed seven o’ clock.
“OK, Marks,” Oliver said. “It’s been fun but all good things must come to an end.” He held out his hand. “I’ll be claiming the thousand dollars from you at the end of the semester.”
“Don’t you think we should stick together first until we find Maintenance or someone else?” A sixth sense told her that all was not that well even though everything was calm on the surface.
He hesitated. “OK,” he said.
“I need to go pee,” she said.
“So do I, and I need to go to the ladies’ toilet upstairs where I probably left my phone.”
This time, she didn’t argue. “OK, let’s stick together.”
“But don’t be too sticky, OK? It’s already morning, and we really shouldn’t be telling anyone we spent the night together. I have to maintain my reputation,” he deadpanned.
“You’re such a dick.”
“Touche.”
They took the stairs. Still no sign of anyone, which was weird.
“That crazy guy really got you spooked, huh?” he asked.
“Aren’t you spooked?”
“Maybe a little,” he admitted, “but I’m generally a tough guy.”
“With a dick for a brain.”
Oh yeah, they were getting back into the regular hang of things.
They arrived at the floor above where the entrance of the library was.
When Felicity saw what was behind the glass doors of the entrance, she screamed.
5
Felicity could not tear her eyes away from the body slumped across the library reception.
“Oh my God.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “It’s Sam!”
“Sam?”
“The night librarian. He’s – ”
She rushed towards the doors and they slid open for her.
“Wait, Felicity,” cautioned Oliver, “it mightn’t be safe – ”
Felicity? This was the first time he had called her by her first name. She was stunned by the simultaneous events but she had already bludgeoned her way into the library.
It was eerily quiet. Sam lay face down on the reception desk. He was very still. Maybe he was sleeping.
Her heart thudded against her ribcage.
“Felicity,” Oliver said again. He was right behind her.
She crept around the reception counter to Sam’s moribund body. He wasn’t breathing, that much was certain.
“Sam?” she whispered. When he didn’t reply, she gently prodded him and turned him over.
Sam’s eyes were stark and staring and vacant, and he was clearly dead. Both his eyes had bloodstains streaked from them, as did his nostrils and mouth.
“Oh my God,” Oliver said.
“What happened to him?” she cried.
“I don’t know, but it’s either poison of some sort or some kind of infectious illness, like Ebola.”
“Ebola?” She didn’t know much about Ebola, but she had heard about it before and it did involve bleeding from all your orifices, she believed, which sounded frankly vampiric. Whatever afflicted Sam, she was sure that it was connected to the events of last night, involving that strange clawing and growling man-animal. Maybe that thing had killed Sam!
“We have to get out of here and report this,” Oliver said.
“Yes.” She was shaking.
They got out of the library.
“I’ve got to get my phone first.”
“OK.” She still needed to pee.
They made their way to the ladies’ on the same floor. Oliver cried, “Found it” from what Felicity would come to refer to as his ‘fucking stall’. They did whatever they had to and came out to wash their hands at the sink. She was experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu.
“I’ve got six missed calls from my mother in Tennessee,” Oliver said tersely.
“What?”
“Wait.” He dialed a number and waited. Felicity could hear the phone ringing on the other side.
“No answer?” she asked.
“Let me try the house phone.” He dialed again, but there was still no reply. “That’s strange. Wait, she left me a few voice mails.”
He hurriedly punched in a few buttons and put the phone up to his ear again. As he listened, his handsome face paled.
“What is it?” she said, her heart sinking with dread.
He pressed the speaker and let her listen for herself.
A woman’s voice: “Oliver? Are you all right? Something’s happening! Are you watching the news? I get so worried about you sometimes. Please call me back and tell me you’re OK.”
Blip.
Then:
“Oliver, things are going crazy here. Your father is not well. I have to get him to a hospital. Please call me back.”
Blip.
“Oliver? Please tell me you’re OK. Your father . . . he died. I couldn’t get him out of the house. I’m sorry . . . but the virus . . . I’m really sick as well. I love you, Oliver. I love you. Always remember that.”
The messages stopped after that.
Oliver stared at Felicity.
She said shakily, “I’m so sorry. What’s happening out there? A virus? How can it spread so fast?”
“We’ve got to get to a TV,” he said.
“There’s one in the library.”
They scrambled to the library again. Felicity did not want to look at Sam’s body.
“If it’s a virus, it’s infectious,” she said. She remembered touching Sam. “I touched him.” She swung round to Oliver. “Maybe I’ve got it too. You’d better stay away from me.”
He stared at her. “Maybe we’ve both gotten it already and it’s only a matter of time. How do you feel?”
“OK. What about you?”
“So far OK.”
“I know.” Her entire body was shaking. “But we’d better keep our distance from each other until we’re really sure what this thing is all about.”
He hesitated. Then he said, “Fine. But we’ll stick together for the time being until we know for sure what’s going on.”
No one else was in the library. The TV room was in an enclosed space, with several TV monitors hooked up to headphones. Oliver turned one of them on. Static came on.
He flipped the channels. More static. And then he found a news channel. The anchorwoman came on.
“The unprecedented contagion is still spreading very rapidly across the country and the world. Authorities say they have never seen anything like this in history.”
Behind her was a map of the world. The different countries on it were highlighted in varying colors ranging from yellow to orange to red. Most states in America were already marked with RED.
“Most areas are now in the red zone. Do not panic. Stay in your homes and do not be in contact with anyone with the symptoms of infection. The CDC and the Pentagon are doing everything they can to contain this. We will continue
to report for as long as our ground staff is healthy, although many of them have been taken sick already.”
Images flashed. People were running in the streets, smashing store windows and looting grocery stores. Bodies lay on pavements. Cars were bumper to bumper on highways. Emergency wards in hospitals were chaotic.
Both Oliver and Felicity were glued to the TV screen, unable to believe what they were seeing.
The anchorwoman continued:
“If you have the following symptoms – fever, difficulty in breathing, bleeding from your eyes, nose and mouth – seek medical attention and go to a hospital immediately. If you cannot go to a hospital, confine yourself in a room and stay away from your loved ones.”
Another set of images – this time showing a wild-haired man launching himself and attacking a screaming woman on the street. He dove for her throat and tore the cartilage out.
“The virus, which authorities are now calling a H4N17 variant, seems to do either one of two things to you. You either get the symptoms as described within hours – ”
Cut scene to a patient on a hospital bed, bleeding from his eyes and mouth.
“ – or you turn into what the authorities are now calling the ‘fast mutants’, on account of their accelerated mutation rate.”
The scene showed the feral man raising his head and looking directly into the camera. His eyes were yellow and very wild and his mouth was streaked with blood from the woman’s throat.
“If you see a fast mutant, even if it is someone you once knew, like a family member or a friend, don’t attempt to engage him or her in conversation. Just run away or try to contain him, such as locking him in a room. The fast mutants no longer possess cognitive ability. They have descended to what scientists are describing as an animal state.
“No one knows what causes a person to evolve into this state instead of the other one, but it is estimated that the ratio right now is a hundred to one. Meaning that for every one hundred cases of the typical H4N17 virus symptoms, one fast mutant is created. Scientists are now working around the clock to find a cure for both conditions. But as of now, there is no cure. I repeat . . . no cure.”
Felicity’s stomach turned.
“That was a fast mutant who tried to get at us in the elevator yesterday,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Maybe. And maybe that was why Maintenance never answered us. It’s because they are either at a hospital or they’re dead.”
“Or they have turned into fast mutants.”
“Do you think we should get to a hospital?” she said. “Get ourselves checked out?”
“They’re probably crazy over there now and we might get infected instead.” Oliver’s knees suddenly buckled and he collapsed to the floor.
“Oliver?” She was panicking now. Her instinct made her run to him to help him up instead of staying away from him because of a possible infection. “Oliver, are you OK?”
He was breathing hard.
“I’m OK,” he said, feeling his own forehead.
She felt his neck. He was warm, but it was not an unnatural warmth – like that of fever.
He said weakly, “I’m just shocked that both my parents have died, that’s all.”
Her heart went out to him despite herself. Of course! He had to be hurting.
“You don’t know that. Your Mom could still be alive.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Her thoughts flitted to her mother. Her poor, kind mother who tried so hard to put her through college.
“My mother,” she whispered.
He nodded and gave her his cellphone. “You want to call her?”
She took it, her eyes suddenly tearing. She punched in the numbers she memorized by rote. She didn’t think her mother would be home and her mother didn’t have a cellphone either.
As expected, there was no answer.
“It doesn’t mean she’s sick or dead,” Oliver said with feeling. “She could have gone to a hospital. Or she could have barricaded herself in somewhere.”
She nodded to convince herself.
“Just stay here a while, OK?” he said. “Let’s watch more TV until we get a better sense of what’s happening. Then we’ll go out and explore. If we’re going to get sick, it’s going to happen anyway.”
Of course. He made perfect sense.
So they both sat down and watched more of the news. The same scenario was being repeated throughout the world. Pandemonium. Chaos. Widespread panic in the streets. People fleeing the cities but getting nowhere in their cars because of the roads which were jammed up from here to eternity, thanks to the collapse of drivers at their wheels. Fast mutants attacking people and police officers pumping bullets into them to bring them down.
And luckily, they went down and stayed down.
Oliver said, “You know, there’s this crazy guy outside campus who wears an oversized army jacket. He always carries this poster. ‘REPENT. THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH’. I used to laugh at him or ignore him.”
“Yes.” She knew the guy.
“I think this is pretty much close to the end of the world as we know it.”
She didn’t reply. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“Hey . . . Felicity . . . ”
She didn’t want to turn. Didn’t want Oliver to see her crying.
“You’re not sick yet,” Oliver continued, though there was a break in his voice. She had never heard him so shaken before. “If we do our homework and keep away, maybe by sundown, they will have already found a way to beat this thing. Things will get better They have to. And your Mom might be OK too. She might just be a bit busy right now, you know what I mean?”
This made her turn. He was the one who had lost his father. He must be bleeding inside by now (no pun intended), and here he was – at a critical moment – trying to comfort her. He must be made of sterner stuff than most.
And then she saw his face. His eyes were red. He had crying silently all this while, only she hadn’t noticed. If she had known him better, and if he hadn’t been such a jerk to her for the past four years, she might have gone to him and hugged him for mutual comfort. But there was still too much between them for her to do that.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” she said.
He wiped his eyes and looked away. “Thanks. I was just thinking . . . about all the times my Dad brought me out on the boat. We have this house on the lake, and Dad and I would go fishing on it most summers. Mom used to think we were crazy because we always caught more fish than we could eat, and we would have freezers and freezers full of fish. More fish than we can eat all year. By the end of each summer, I was thoroughly sick of fish.”
He leaned back against the wall.
“I’d give anything to go fishing with my Dad again.”
Something painful flowered in her chest.
She said, “Your Dad . . . and Mom . . . would have wanted you to be OK. That was why she kept calling you.”
He turned away from her. “I know,” he said quietly.
She couldn’t watch this. Oliver was so confident, so smug. And now he was reduced to this. They were both reduced to this.
She got up.
“Where’re you going?” he said. “It isn’t safe.”
“I’m hungry. I have to find something to eat.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then he said, “I need something to eat too. And drink. A nice cold beer right about now would be nice.”
“There’s a vending machine downstairs. I’m going to take the stairs.”
“OK. I’ll come with you.” He looked around. “We need a weapon.”
6
They made it cautiously down the stairs. Oliver was holding up a broomstick which he had broken off to make a sharp end. It was the only thing he could find.
They reached the first floor.
“Ready?” Oliver said as he put his palm against the EXIT door of the stairwell.
“Yes,” she said, more bravely than sh
e felt. She held a rusted pipe.
“On the count . . . one, two, three . . . ”
He pushed open the door slowly. It creaked.
The lobby of the building they were in was not empty. Far from it. Several dead bodies were strewn upon the floor, the blood congealing on their faces.
Felicity’s stomach churned.
“They must have succumbed to the virus right there, just like the librarian,” Oliver said. “Come on. We’re going to survive this.”
The vending machine was at the corner. Oliver inserted several coins and a dollar note.
“We need to recharge. What do you want?” he said.
She knew he was right. Even though the eyes from the bodies were looking at them, she was still hungry enough to eat the entire vending machine.
“A little bit of everything,” she said.
He laughed. It was nice to hear him laugh after all this time. “Would a Coke do?”
“Yes.”
He got them two Cokes and two packets of Rice Krispies. “These will tide us over until we get more substantial food.”
“Where are we going to get more substantial food?” She knew the answer before he replied. “Oh right. The cafeteria.”
He turned to her as he tore the tab off the Coke can. “You ready to make a trek there?”
No.
Yes.
Hell, whatever.
She lifted her chin resolutely. “Lead the way,” she said.
*
There were several cafeterias on campus, but the one nearest to them was two buildings away. Oliver and Felicity stepped out of the library building entrance. The sun was bright in the sky and a light and cool breeze blew in from the east, rustling the leaves on trees.
At first glance, the area was deceptively calm, except that it was a Tuesday morning and things weren’t supposed to be calm on campus. Students were supposed to be bustling around, hurrying from one class to another, or at least, giving the appearance of hurrying to class.
But there was no one about. No one but a few bodies strewn on the grass and pavements. Some cars were parked – or maybe stalled – on the roads weaving around the buildings. Felicity could see their drivers slumped over their wheels in apparent death.
She could just imagine what happened. If you got sick and you had no one to fetch you to the clinic or hospital, you packed yourself in a car – if you had a car, of course, unlike her – and tried to get there yourself. But if you started bleeding from your eyes and nose and mouth and your vision was occluded, or if you got too sick, you’d just crash your car somewhere and it would roll to a stop. And you would lie there, slumped against the wheel, until you died.