by Lora Powell
The two of us just sat there staring at each other. What were we supposed to do now? If Evie would have been mad over an unplanned trip to her doctor, she was going to go into orbit if we suggested a visit to the ER.
"I don't think we have a choice," I told Austin. "We're going to have to take her to the ER."
I had dialed the 9 and a 1, when a loud thump from upstairs rattled the whole house. Both of us were out of our seats and bolting up the stairs without any thought.
The first to reach the top of the stairs, I encountered Evie as she struggled to walk down the hallway. Swaying on her feet, she trailed one hand along the wall to steady herself as she tried to make it back to her bedroom from the bathroom.
"Evie, are you ok?" I took another step closer to her. Hearing my voice, she turned drunkenly around to face me.
What I saw had me pulling to a stop in the middle of the hallway.
Glazed over eyes swung around wildly, not seeming able to focus on any one place. "I threw up." Her voice was a nearly unrecognizable rasp and held a detached quality, as if she wasn't really comprehending our conversation.
A thin trail of blood was leaking from the corner of her left eye. More blood covered her lips and was smeared across one cheek.
THREE-DAY 2
"Evie!" Alarmed, I stood rooted to the spot as I watched my friend sway sickeningly on her feet, face smeared with blood.
"What happened?" From behind me, Austin came forward and reached for his girlfriend. I'd forgotten for a second that he was back there.
Just as Austin reached her side, Evie's eyes rolled back into her head. Crumbling boneless to the carpet, she began to convulse violently. "Evie!" He yelled as he dropped next to her, trying unsuccessfully to support her jerking limbs. Still frozen, I watched a dark puddle grow under her twitching body. "Call for help!"
The order jolted me back to awareness. I bolted back down to the living room. My phone lay where I had dropped it just a minute ago. Fumbling with it, I punched the bottom button. My earlier aborted attempt to call for help lit up the screen. Pushing the final 1, I turned and ran for the stairs.
In my panic, I almost couldn't comprehend the drone of the busy signal.
"They're not answering!" I dropped to my knees next to my seizing friend. Austin had rolled her to her side and was doing his best to support her head. The pungent smell of urine hit my nose at the same time that I registered the warmth seeping into my jeans.
"Try again!"
My shaking hands botched the job. Too many 9s. Hyperventilating, I tried again. The drone of the busy signal was loud in the sudden silence of the hall.
Evie had fallen utterly still, her limbs all falling limply to the floor. The only sounds were my harsh breathing and the frustrating buzz from the phone.
"Evie?" Austin gently allowed her to roll onto her back. "Evie, can you hear me?"
I looked at the chalky complexion of my friend. Her eyes were closed, the streak of blood that had come from her eye had smeared all over her jaw line. Red tinged froth dribbled from her slack mouth.
"She's too still." That last observation was said out loud as I leaned in closer to her chest.
"Evie?" Voice reduced to a near whisper, Austin leaned over her face. Turning his face towards me, he placed his ear close to her nose. I watched as his already wide eyes filled with horror. "I don't think she's breathing."
"What!" It came out as a shriek. Grabbing one of Evie's limp hands, I felt her wrist, looking for a pulse. I couldn't find one. "No no no no," I chanted under my breath as I dialed the phone again.
Screaming in frustration, I threw the useless phone away from me. Even from the far end of the hall, the busy signal mocked me. "We need to give her CPR. "
Looking shell-shocked, Austin had been lightly patting Evie's bloodstained face. Hearing my suggestion, he nodded determinedly and tilted her head into what I hoped was the right position.
It had been a few years since my obligatory high school first aid class. Praying silently that I was remembering correctly, I clambered into position. I waited for Austin to pinch her nose and blow into her mouth before starting compressions.
Beneath my hands, her body still felt alarmingly hot. Somewhere in my fourth set of compressions, I felt the sickening crack of a rib giving way under the force of my hands. Bile rose up the back of my throat, but I forced it back. I didn't have time for any of that now.
Clinging to the faint memory of the first aid instructor telling the class that broken ribs were to be expected when giving CPR, hoping that it meant that I was doing this right, I kept going. I kept going until sweat dripped into my eyes and my arms burned with effort. I kept going even when sobs started to steal my breath.
My quivering arms were verging on collapse when I saw the glimmer of hope that I had been searching for. In my peripheral vision I saw one of Evie's fingers twitch. "There!" I gasped to Austin, who turned his grim gaze in the direction I was looking. I knew the moment he saw it too, because an incredulous grin spread across his face.
"Evie, can you hear me?" We watched as the finger twitched again, followed by the flexing of her whole hand.
"Evie?" Leaning down, Austin pressed his ear close to her nose again. "I still can't tell that she's breathing..." He looked at me with a question in his brown eyes.
Any doubt that we had seen her hand move was erased as Evie's limbs all began to slowly come to life. She drew one leg up, arms searching along the floor until her hand connected with Austin's. Folding her hand in both of his, Austin stayed close to whisper, "Evie, it's ok. Bri and I are both here."
Evie's eyes suddenly snapped open. I sucked back a gasp. They were completely bloodshot, to the point that the whites had been taken over completely by bright red. She rolled her eyes before focusing on Austin hovering over her. Struggling to sit upright, she tugged at the hand held in his grasp, eyes focused on his face with an intensity that sent a tendril of unease down my spine.
"Evie, maybe you shouldn't sit up yet. I think you might have a broken rib." I tried to convince her to stay down, but she gave no indication that she heard what I had said.
Her mouth worked, but no sounds came out. Straining to lean closer to Austin, she finally managed to lever herself higher on her arms that didn't quite want to work. Her lips moved again. "What is it?" Austin leaned down to get his ear closer to her mouth.
Watching the exchange from less than two feet away, that flicker of unease bloomed inside me. The intensity of her gaze locked onto his face, plus the workings of her mouth that were starting to look less like an attempt at talking, reminded me of a dog eyeing a tasty bone. "Austin," a warning tone escaped me. "Something is wrong."
He flicked his eyes in my direction. Just at the moment he was focused on me, Evie made one final lunge. I watched in horror as she sank teeth already stained with traces of her own blood into her boyfriend's face.
Yelping, I shot to my feet as, yelling out at the sudden pain, Austin shoved Evie back to the floor and stood up. "What are you doing?" He looked at the blood that covered the hand that he had swiped across the wound. Still staring with that predatory look in her eyes, Evie scrambled to her feet with none of her usual grace.
Without hesitation, she launched herself at Austin. In the confined space of the hallway, he had nowhere to escape her attack. Evie crashed into Austin, biting into the arm that he had tried to hold up in front of him. Growling an animalistic sound that should never have come from a human throat, she released her bite to his arm. Clinging to his front, she dragged herself closer as he tried to lever her away from his body. Evie proved impossible to dislodge, seeming to not notice what had to be extreme pain as he shoved against her ribs, as she brought her teeth closer to her goal.
Unable to react, either to help Austin, or to run, I watched in shock as Evie bit deeply into her boyfriend's neck. In a trance, I watched the horrific amount of blood that immediately covered both of their fronts. Sinking to the floor under the ferocity of her attac
k, before long Evie was crouched over the unmoving body of Austin.
Guttural growling broke the silence. Putting one foot behind the other, I started backing away from the scene at the end of the hall. When my foot found the creaky floorboard, I froze.
Hearing the noise, Evie stopped whatever she was doing. Going still for a moment, she slowly turned her body so she could see me standing frozen down the hall. She cocked her head slightly to the side and watched me with dead eyes. Afraid to move for fear of provoking an attack, I stayed perfectly still.
Evie stared at me for the longest seconds of my life before opening her mouth and screaming a scream that raised every hair on my body.
Bolting toward the nearest door, I catapulted myself into the bathroom. The room was not all that large, and offered no escape route, but at that point all I wished for was a closed door in between myself and the creature that Evie had become.
Hitting the tile floor, my feet slipped in something slick. I crashed to my hands and knees hard. Flipping over, the red of Evie's eyes blazed at me from just feet away. Mouth open wide mid scream, blood stained spit flew. Reacting on instinct, I kicked the door shut just in time for Evie to crash headlong into it.
Scrambling around, I slammed up against the door, simultaneously reaching to turn the lock.
FOUR-DAY 3
I was fairly certain that I had gone into shock at some point. Curled up in the bathtub, clothes stiff with dried blood, I had lost a significant amount of time.
When I had slammed the door shut and closed Evie on the other side, the flash of relief had been brief. Registering that my hands were covered in a cool, thick liquid, I had looked down. I was covered in blood, a lot of it. The slick substance that had caused me to fall turned out to be a huge pool of the stuff.
My shirt was covered, front and back. The ends of my long brunette hair were clumped together and stained red.
When Evie had said she threw up, she must have meant the pool of blood. Wiping my hands on my jeans didn't help much, they were already soaked in urine and spotted with blood. With Evie just on the other side of the locked door, screaming and banging like a crazed animal, I had wanted to escape the filth on the floor. Unfortunately, the pool was large, and had only been smeared around further when I slid and rolled in it.
The only clean space to be found was the tub. So I had crawled in there and held my hands over my ears to try to block out the sounds coming from the hallway.
The light that filtered in through the tiny window had slowly changed. At some point, when the glow of the setting sun had lit the bathroom up in hues of orange, Evie had stopped her assault on the bathroom door. Terrified to make any noise that would remind her that I was still there, I stayed curled up in the bottom of the bathtub all night.
In the dark of the night, sounds always seemed somehow louder. The muffled footsteps pacing the upstairs hall reached me through the closed door. A crash came from her bedroom, sounding like the lamp on her nightstand meeting the floor. But the sounds Evie made as she wandered our home weren't even the worst of it.
Inhuman screams echoed outside the house. The screams had the same animalistic quality that Evie had been making, and there were the terrified screams of people under attack. Tires squealed on the pavement, once I was sure I even heard gunshots. My normally peaceful neighborhood sounded like a scene from a horror movie.
Through it all, I stayed pressed to the bottom of the tub.
By the time the sun drove the nightmare inducing darkness back, I was stiff and sore all over. A day and night spent in a bathtub takes it's toll. I estimated that I had been crouched there for at least 17 hours. I couldn't stay any longer, and was becoming increasingly glad that I was hiding in a bathroom.
When I pushed myself unsteadily upright, my bloodstained clothes peeled from the tub with a startling amount of noise. I froze, waiting for any indication that Evie had heard. After a few seconds in which the indistinguishable sounds coming from the far end of the hall stayed constant, I gratefully slid from the tub to the toilet.
My next order of business was getting my hands on some water. Turning the sink on to barely more than a drip, the job of cleaning dried filth from my skin was torturous. Only once every trace of blood was clear from my hands did I use them to hold water to drink.
Stomach full of water and hands relatively clean, I began to feel slightly human again. Whatever Evie was doing at the end of the hall, she had been at it for some time. Outside the house, the chaos from the night before continued, though I thought that the screaming was slightly less frequent.
Edging my way to the window slowly, careful to stay silent, I pulled the ruffled curtain aside. My first glimpse of what had been happening outside of the house was horrifying.
A pair of bloodstained teens walked down the middle of the street with quick, almost birdlike movements. Their heads jerked this way and that. Down the street, almost out of my view, a house was engulfed in flames. No firefighters were battling the fire. Instead, at least a dozen more people who moved in jerks wandered dangerously near to the flames.
A dark stain covered a significant portion of my neighbors driveway. A similar stain spread out over the sidewalk. Sticking out from in between a pair of parked cars, jean clad legs and men's workbooks lay still on the ground.
Another of those haunting screams tore through the morning air. Bringing my gaze back to the teenage duo, I watched as they poised perfectly still in the street. Their sudden lack of any movement after their odd gaits from before, somehow seemed to only add to the creep factor. I felt the hair raise along the back of my neck.
In a burst of flying white fur and furiously running legs, a small dog catapulted into view from the direction they were watching. The shorter teen screamed again as the pair took off with frightening speed in pursuit of the poor animal. Attention drawn by the commotion, the others who had been circling the burning house also gave chase, a chorus of screams filling the air.
An answering scream from the hallway made me jump. Pulled from God-only-knew-what she had been up to in the hall, Evie began pacing again. Her excitable sounding steps passed the bathroom door. I held my breath and begged silently for her to just keep going, to ignore my hiding place.
Heart pounding in my chest, I listened to Evie pace the length of the hall several times. Now that she was riled up, she seemed inclined to stay that way. She bumped into things in the bedroom, skittered from one room to the next, and let out several short but hair raising screams.
What had happened to my friend? I didn't understand the events of the past 24 hours at all.
Sinking to the edge of the tub, I tried to come up with a plan. I couldn't just open the door and walk out into the hall. Evie had attacked, and I was pretty sure killed, Austin. By biting him. I shuddered at that thought. I did not want to experience that for myself. And if what I had witnessed outside was anything to go by, there were a whole lot more people out there who had been afflicted by whatever was making Evie sick.
I was going to have to wait until Evie left, or find some way to convince her to go, before I was escaping from the bathroom.
I was trying to think over the thumps and screams, to come up with a way to get Evie out of the house without getting myself murdered in the process, when an unexpected noise made my blood run cold.
A second voice joined Evie's as she screamed from the end of the hall.
FIVE-DAY 4
There were two of them out there.
Two distinct sets of footsteps, two separate voices, two people bumping and thumping their way through the upstairs of the house. I had no idea how a second sick person had gotten in, I was positive that I had locked the door behind Austin when he came over.
But a whisper of a voice in the back of my mind told me that I knew exactly who was out there with Evie. The same whisper that had been telling me for a day now that Evie had died. She had been dead, and then suddenly, she wasn't. And her first act upon getting up was to bite someone.
Evie had died, and then come back as a bloodthirsty monster.
As much as my mind fought making that leap, a part of me couldn't deny what was right in front of my face. And it wasn't just Evie. My frequent peeks outside the tiny bathroom window proved over and over again that my neighborhood had descended into madness. I had no idea how to cope with the thoughts that were whispering through my mind.
An angry rumble from my stomach reminded me that it had been two days since I ate anything. At first, terror and drinking copious amounts of water had kept my mind off of thoughts of food. But nothing was stopping me from wishing for something remotely edible anymore. My stomach cramped painfully. I had developed a headache that pounded mercilessly inside my skull.
It brought into stark reality the fact that I wouldn't be able to wait in this bathroom forever. I was going to have to leave sometime, or would slowly starve to death. But if I had been afraid to leave the dubious safety of the bathroom with Evie roaming the halls, I knew beyond any doubt that I couldn't leave with Evie-plus-one out there.
Caught in that conundrum, I had waited out my second night in the bathtub. Exhaustion finally caught up with me, and I slept a few hours, before jolting awake from nightmares. By the time the sun was fully up in the sky the next morning, I had come up with a plan. It wasn't a good plan, but it was the only one I could come up with.
I took a last look around the small room for anything that may be useful. There wasn't much. I gripped the hair cutting scissors in my hand, but couldn't imagine actually using them on my roommate, even if the whispering in my mind insisted that she was already dead.
I'd stuffed the small bottle of painkillers in one pocket. Other than those two items, the bathroom hadn't yielded anything that I thought would be worth carrying with me. I couldn't see how a bath poufy or nail clippers would help my situation any.
Now that I was about to implement my plan, I felt my heart begin to pick up speed. Everything hinged on the first part going exactly right. If I miscalculated, or if it just plain didn't work, I didn't want to think too hard about the consequences.