Hissers

by Ryan C. Thomas

  “How?” Amanita asked. She took out her cell phone again.

  “Armed Forces can jam that shit,” Seth said. “It’s a radio wave, goes out over the whole town and causes interference. Few years ago there was a game on Xbox—Spy War IV—that supposedly used the same equipment the real army uses. They made a big deal out of it on the gaming blogs. You could get this Tactical Response Jammer that would stop the enemies from calling into their base. Supposedly it was real at the time. And that was five years ago. Probably they can just do it from a satellite now. Bigger question is why aren’t they transmitting on encrypted frequencies. Special Ops—all military units—transmit with encryption.”

  “Maybe they don’t care,” Connor suggested. “Or maybe…they did it on purpose in hopes someone was listening.”

  “Who?” Seth asked. “Who would even know enough to scan for it?”

  “The jerkoff we left in the field,” Amanita said. “That Davis dickhead who’s to blame for all this. Bet you that’s who. They knew he was on the plane. It makes sense.”

  “I still don’t get why they’re blocking the phones,” Nicole added.

  “Because someone called in a Mayday,” Connor said. “And someone on the other end knew what they were dealing with, so when the plane went down they cut communication into and out of Castor. Think about it. The plane had a top secret bio weapon on it, right? Look what it did to everyone. They want this all contained.”

  “Assholes.” Amanita turned the scanner off.

  “They know something,” Nicole said. “Not everything. They don’t have the data they need to really figure out what happened. Maybe it can be stopped.”

  “Stopped? You can’t reverse this,” Seth said. “These people got killed and came back as something else. They’re not human anymore. All you could do is return them to…being dead.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Connor said. “You heard what they said. They’re gonna fire bomb the town in the next hour. We have to get the hell outta here.”

  “Couldn’t we just, like, go up on the roof and paint ‘We’re Alive’ on top?” Nicole asked.

  “Sure,” Connor said, “if they plan on flying planes overhead first. But we don’t know that. They could be launching missiles at us for all we know.”

  “What about my parents,” Seth asked. “I mean, we still don’t know what happened to them. To Nicole’s, to Am’s. We can’t just let them bomb this place. There have to still be people alive.”

  “You heard them talking. There’s nobody left. We saw what was happening before anybody else. We kept running. Nobody else knew so they just got attacked.”

  “I’m telling ya I think my parents might be alive,” Seth said, a hint of anger in his eyes. “I’m not gonna leave until I find them.”

  Amanita turned to him. “Seth, I have to tell you something.”

  Sunday, 9:30am

  Normally, Amanita didn’t mind being the bearer of bad news, because usually she didn’t give two shits about the person she was bringing it to. Telling some stupid boy he was ugly, telling some dumb bitch she was fat, and a day ago she wouldn’t have minded too terribly telling Seth about his parents. Now she found herself suddenly hesitant to explain what she’d seen outside of Seth’s house the previous night.

  The way he looked at her—already guessing at her words, already expecting bad news—made her want to shrivel up and die. Maybe it was because of the way he stayed still all night while she slept on him, maybe it was the way he had revealed himself to be a little smarter and quicker on the draw than she’d expected, or maybe it was just that she knew these people were all she had left right now and to cause them pain might cause them to turn their backs on her. Any way you cut it, she was not looking forward to this.

  Yet she had to tell him. He deserved to know.

  “I saw your parents. When we were at your house. They were outside, near that guy with the gun. They were…they’d been changed. I’m sorry.”

  Seth took a step back, leaned against the wall. His eyes met hers but she knew he was not looking at her so much as through her, trying to comprehend what he’d been told.

  She walked up to him and put a hand on his chest. It was the first time she’d just let herself feel another person breathing, knowing she could take his breath away with words.

  Slowly, she leaned closer and hugged him. “Sorry.”

  Seth said nothing in return.

  She backed up. “I couldn’t tell you. I figured you’d break down and we’d be screwed. I mean, we were in a pretty bad spot right then.”

  “You knew the whole time?” he asked rhetorically.

  Reluctantly, she nodded.

  “Maybe you just saw them wrong. Maybe they were running away from—”

  “They were eating someone, Seth. Did you want to hear that? Do you want to hear it now? I couldn’t tell you. I don’t want to tell you now.”

  “Then I have no one left,” he said. “I let Jo get taken and my parents are dead. What am I supposed to do?”

  Connor squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “Just keep doing what you’re doing right now, just worry about getting out of here alive. It’s what I’ve been doing since last night. It’s about the only way to stay sane. Trust me.”

  Soon, Nicole threw her arms around him as well. Amanita found herself hugging the group before she even knew what she was doing.

  They stood there in the empty school, arms forming a ring around themselves like some magical protective spell, trying hard to understand the new family they had become.

  Eventually someone started crying and Amanita wasn’t sure who it was until she tasted her own tears.

  Sunday, 9:33am

  “Seth, you good?” Connor asked. He let his arms fall away from the group.

  Seth shook his head no, because rightfully who would be okay with such news.

  “Well you’re gonna have to suck it up right now because we have to get the hell outta here fast. C’mon, man up. Like Master Chief would do.”

  “I’m only level 18.”

  “In the game. Be a level 50 in real life, man.”

  Seth finally nodded. Arched his back and stood straight.

  The circle broke and Nicole wiped the tears from her eyes. Like everyone else, she’d joined in the collective crying session. It didn’t make things better per se, but at least she knew she wasn’t alone. “They said they’re blocking the exits, shooting anything that comes close. How the hell do we get out now?”

  “We have to convince them we’re human.” Connor scratched his head. “We could put a white shirt on the car’s antenna or something. You know, like a truce flag. Those undead things wouldn’t do that.”

  “What if they think it’s a trick?” Amanita said. “I think they kinda want to shoot at stuff. They sound like they mean business and I don’t feel like getting shot.”

  “We could try to bust into the shelter again,” Seth said, no signs of his grief-stricken trance remaining. “We can see in here now with the sun. There’s got to be a key somewhere in the school.”

  “We’re forgetting something else important,” Nicole said.

  “What?”

  “There’s data in that plane wreck. Somebody is gonna need it to figure out what they’re dealing with.”

  Amanita shook her head in protest. “What are you, Spiderman? Who cares?”

  “She can’t be Spiderman,” Seth said, “she’s a girl.”

  “Well I don’t know any superhero girls, Seth.”

  “D’oy! Wonder Woman. Batgirl. Elektra. Harbinger. Actually…there is a Spider-Girl, now that I think of it—”

  “Ohmygod! I don’t care. My point is who gives a crap about their data. They must have backed it up wherever they created it anyway. Let’s just get going!”

  Nicole felt her hand reaching toward her thigh and quickly curled it into a fist instead. She squeezed until her knuckles were pearl white and she could feel her nails digging tiny smiles into her palm. It was no better tha
n cutting herself, the pain was still necessary to relieve the stress, but it was an easier way to hide the affliction. “No, that General guy said the bio-geneticist lady realized the error of the formula on the plane. Remember? It might still be there, in one of those cases she carried on board.”

  “Are you crazy,” Seth said. “Nothing survived that crash. Any data they had is burned to a crisp.”

  “The general survived.”

  “Through the act of a sadistic god. And besides, the Army can deal with digging through that crash site. We’re frigging teenagers for Christ’s sake.”

  Way to be myopic, Nicole thought. How the hell did she explain to them that even if they got out of here it meant nothing if the virus could still find a carrier beyond the containment zone? If that happened every town would become Castor in a few days.

  Her mother was surely dead, her town was under attack, her high school career was pretty much postponed. This was the new course life had handed her. This was what she needed to do. Solving problems was what she excelled at.

  She turned to Connor. “I’m going to the plane. I’m at least going to see if I can get close. If I can’t, then fine, I’ll head to the bridge. But think about it. What if the only answer to this whole problem is in that wreckage?”

  She watched his eyes as they glazed over, no doubt thinking about a future where man fought wars against entire continents of hissers. A world engulfed in flame or tainted with radiation from nuclear bombs.

  Okay, it was a tad theatrical to assume this was the end of the world, but she knew it was serious enough to warrant reflection.

  “Ah, crap,” Connor said. “I’ll go with you. Seth and Am, get to the bridge and don’t get shot and tell them we’re not far behind.”

  Seth threw his hands in the air. “Are you fucking nuts? Has everyone gone insane?”

  “Well she has a point. It’s not like I’m thrilled about it.”

  “Hold up,” Amanita said. “First things first. I’m not going to the bridge. We already discussed this…they’re gonna shoot us. They said so on the radio: anything they see moving is getting shot first and questioned later. They’ve written off the whole town. We need another way over the riverbed. Then you two can play superhero or whatever it is you want to do.”

  “That’s just it,” Seth said.

  “What’s it?” Amanita asked.

  “Over the riverbed. We’re trying to get around it on roads but we just need to get over it. We can just climb down the cliffs, cut across the bottom of the Jefferson River ravine, and climb up the other side. Like I joked about earlier. Voilà. We’re out of Castor.”

  “We could cut up over the mountains to the West, too,” Connor said.

  Seth shook his head emphatically. “No way. The Marine HQ is across the river bed. If we cut across it, circle around the back of their HQ they’ll just assume we came from Victorville. We saunter in safe and sound.”

  “I can’t scale a cliff wall,” Nicole said. “Sorry. Girl.”

  “Ditto here,” Amanita said.

  “Yeah,” Seth added. “Me, too. I mean the climbing the wall thing…not the girl part.”

  All three of them looked at Connor, the athlete of the group.

  “Don’t look at me. I’m not a rock climber. And even if I was I can barely stand on this leg. I suppose we could just get some rope, tie it around a tree and climb down. How hard can it be?”

  “We don’t have any rope,” Nicole said.

  Amanita snapped her fingers. “The hardware store, next to Jefferson Liquors on Adams street. They’ve got to have rope.”

  “Okay,” Nicole said. “Then we split up. Connor and I hit the plane, you get the rope.”

  “We’ll meet at the fort,” Connor said, “before the hour is done.”

  “I kind of feel like a Jedi,” Seth said.

  “Don’t forget all the Jedi were killed.”

  “Yeah, in Revenge of the Sith, but I don’t count that movie…it sucked.”

  “We are so dead.” Amanita took out her cigarettes. There was one left. She said fuck it and lit it up inside.

  Sunday, 9:40am

  They stood outside the school, shaking hands like combatants off to war. Nobody actually said the word goodbye, but Amanita and Nicole hugged and Connor and Seth bumped fists. Now was not the time to go soft.

  Another mortar fell into the woods east of the park and made the ground tremble.

  “I hope they keep their aim where it is,” Nicole said.

  It was agreed that taking the SUV now would be a bad idea. There were no cars on the street still moving besides possible military Jeeps, and they’d heard what happened to those guys. Any roving cars in the open would alert the town’s undead, who were currently—eerily—nowhere to be seen.

  But they were out there, waiting and hungry. They all knew it. The screams from the dying marines still echoed in their heads. The four friends could feel the weight of the undead’s numbers even if they couldn’t see them.

  They were hiding, ensconced, geared up for an ambush.

  Connor readjusted the bandages on his leg. The blood had seeped through and his ankle was severely swollen. Nicole thought infection had definitely set in and was currently eating away at his cells, but that was something to worry about after they got away.

  The wind carried subtle hints of smoke and decay, most likely from the plane and numerous car accidents, but also the fresh summer aromas of dandelions and dewy grass. On any other day the latter scents would make it a marvelous morning to be living in Castor. But not today. Maybe not ever again.

  A dog barked from the yard of a nearby house, low and guttural. Could have been a warning bark, the kind to ward off an intruder. Could just be that the poor mutt was hungry and wanted someone to fill its bowl.

  It’ll die in the bombings, thought Nicole. They’ll all die. All the dogs, all the cats, all the people in hiding who had no idea what was coming. She could try and stop it when they got across the river, but she had little hope of convincing the authorities to hold off. And so, like the way they’d left the general in the park to die, she once again faced her own culpability in other people’s deaths, and cursed herself for her lack of a soul.

  She didn’t deserve this, nobody deserved this.

  Seth and Amanita broke away from the group and began jogging toward the running track, intent to cut across it and into the back yards of the adjacent street, which would spill them out one block from Adams.

  Connor leaned in and kissed her. The first move he’d made on his own since this mess began.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “My pleasure.”

  “I mean it. Especially for understanding my…” She looked down at her thighs. “Fucked up issues.”

  “Don’t sweat it. We’ll talk later. Besides, that’s not fucked up. That can be mended. What’s fucked up is that we have forty-five minutes to get to the plane crash, look for something we have no description of, and then scale up and down the sheer rock cliffs of a ravine without any rock-climbing experience…all without getting eaten alive or blown to bits.”

  “No problem, we just let Aunt Sally guide us.”

  “Huh?”

  “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, the basis for solving any variable equation. Certain parts of a problem must be solved before others. Parentheses, exponents, multiplication—”

  “Right, I remember, from Pre-algebra.”

  “We just go in the proper order, which in this case if fairly linear. Right now Aunt Sally is on the plane.”

  “Well, I hope she has a bazooka, because we’re gonna need one to get out of this whole mess by 10:30.”

  “After you.” They took off running, staying behind trees and bushes and fences and whatever else concealed them.

  Sunday, 9:44am

  And now we’re back to the running, thought Seth. I hate this part. Always have, always will. Running is as much fun as getting smashed in the nuts with the claw end of a hammer. Racin
g around in the car was pretty messed up, but at least we had wheels. This? This sucks.

  Ahead of him, Amanita hopped over some railroad ties that had been erected as a barrier separating the field from a strip of dirt that ran along the back side of some fences. Beyond the fences were the backyards of the houses on Felton Street.

  He hopped the railroad ties, caught up with Amanita. He had to stop to catch his breath. “Hold up. I’m fat. I can’t run unless there’s a Twinkie at the end of the race.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. A funny joke. Something the soccer team used to say about me.”

  “We can’t stay here. We’re exposed. We can get over that fence there to that house.”

  “I know. I see it.” He sucked in a big breath. “Okay. I’m good, let’s go.”

  They jogged to the small chain-link fence and looked into the yard beyond. An above ground pool, a ten speed bike, a barbecue grill, lawn chairs, flower pots. Pretty nice place, he thought.

  They both got over the fence without too much trouble.

  The familiar dog bark kicked up once again, a few yards away, across Felton Street.

  “Maybe it sees someone nearby,” Amanita said. “Maybe we should go a different way?”

  “I don’t know another way from here. All we have to do is get across the street and cut through those yards onto Adams.”

  They ducked down as they walked, scanning the windows of the house before them. Seth expected a bloodied visage to appear at any second and roar at him. It would be followed by a wave of undead spilling out from a mid-morning tea party to feast on his intestines.

  Thankfully no faces appeared.

  Amanita reached the gate to the driveway, reached up for the latch and began to push it open.

  Seth grabbed her hand. “Hang on, Leeroy Jenkins.”

  “Leeroy who?”

  “Do you even own a computer?”

  “Yes. I mean, my dad does. Did.”

  “Never mind. I’m just saying we can’t run out there like this. The street’s too open.”