Danielle broke into a light jog now, the rifle flat across her chest, her index finger resting lightly on the trigger, ready to finish the mission.
But she barely made it twenty yards when a dull groaning sound came from somewhere in the dark, stopping Danielle cold. She held her breath and lifted her chin, listening. She presumed the noise had come from James, but the modulation of the sound brought with it the aura of dread.
James’ name was on the edge of Danielle’s tongue, but as she prepared to call it out, the groan from in front of her rang again, and this time it was accompanied by another noise. It was the familiar sound of scuttling again, the lifting and shuffling of feet, the huddling of bodies.
Danielle’s mind spooled back to the forest inside the cordon, beside the tributary, when she stood in the pouring rain and watched the crabs feed like hyenas on the mutilated buck.
But the sound she was hearing now was louder, wider, and Danielle knew instantly there were far more crabs standing in front of her now than there had been earlier in the forest. And it wasn’t just their movement she heard; although the crabs were essentially mute, they clicked and snorted and cleared their throats like every animal, and the noises from the group ahead suggested a throng of ghosts—double the bodies, perhaps—were just a few yards beyond.
Where the hell did this group come from? Danielle thought. There had only been a dozen or so outside the lab.
“Danielle?” The voice was a whimper; James.
Danielle couldn’t see him, but she knew by the intonation of his voice that his situation was dire, and she imagined the poor man surrounded by the chalky horde, their smooth, bony hands already upon him, perhaps.
“There are so many,” he cried. “Oh, god.”
Danielle felt her heart sink now, James’ desperation sapping the new energy from her entirely. He had acted so bravely on the roof of the lab, a true hero, but this was the James she had known since the diner, a scared boy who wanted nothing more than to survive.
“Where...where did they come from?” Danielle asked.
“I...I think they’re the ones from the lab.”
“No. What? The lab? But...we were inside the lab. Only one came inside, and that one left without noticing us.”
Several seconds passed with only the sound of heavy breathing until finally James spoke again, his voice weary now, defeated. “No. You got lucky.”
“What?”
“I...I went outside, after I saw the massacre of the doctors in the back room, I walked back outside, and just as I was leaving, I could see this horde, dozens of them—the ones around me right now, I guess—passing by the lab. They were heading away from the camp. They were leaving the base for the outside world.”
These were the ones Danielle and Dominic had released from the cordon. Danielle knew it to her core. They had shown them the way to freedom. They had released them upon James. Upon the world.
“So, I waited. I waited until they were gone. I waited as long as I thought it would take for them to pass by the lab. And then I drove the jeep around to the back to pick you up. But...I don’t know, I guess I left too early. I guess maybe they heard the sound of the engine or the tires on the gravel. But they heard it. As soon as I was around back, I could see them turn. First it was just one, turning and sprinting, and then they all started racing back to the building. One entered, and then they all followed like lemmings. I called to you, to warn you, but you were already gone.”
“We went out the front. We must have just missed them.”
“It was a miracle. Right when you were leaving, they were coming in.” James paused and took several heavy breaths, trying to stay composed as the white killers circled around him. “Anyway, I hid from them and then shut the door behind them, and then as long as you shut the front door—which you did—we had them trapped inside. I...I didn’t think they would be able to get out.”
Danielle had forgotten about the bulging door in the front of the lab, and she hadn’t really thought about where that inside group had come from in the first place.
And then another thought emerged: they’ve learned to open doors.
Or maybe they had just broken through, she reconsidered, the sheer weight of the bodies having been too much for the door to hold.
It didn’t matter now, of course; they were out, and Danielle took three more steps in the direction of James’ voice, and then three more, until finally she could see the dull outline of James and the mass of bodies around him.
They were circling him like hyenas, swaying and bobbing in their usual way.
“Danielle, go.”
Danielle ignored him. “I’m not going. I’ll shoot as many as I can, and while I’m firing—”
“No!” James interrupted, and then he instantly settled his voice. “No, Danielle. And you have to stop talking. They’re focused on me now but that won’t last if you come closer. There’s nothing you can do for me now. You know I’m right. If you can see them right now, if you can see how many there are, you know. Please go.”
“I can—”
“No. It’s okay. I never planned to leave this place alive anyway. It wasn’t meant to be. I gave up Dominic. I betrayed him. And Tom. And you.”
“You didn’t betray me.”
James ignored Danielle’s correction. “This was always going to be the way it ended for me. But not for you. Your fate is to escape. To survive. The fact that you’re still alive after all this time is proof of that. You have to feel that deep down, right?”
The circle began closing and Danielle raised the rifle, clicking the round into place as she aimed.
“If you do that, you’ll end up dead too.” James paused. “They’ll be on me before you get two shots off, and then they’ll come for you.”
“James—”
“Did you find him? Did you find Scott?”
Danielle hesitated, reluctant to concede to the change of subject. “Yes,” she answered, and with that she saw James’ figure stand tall and proud. She could almost see the smile form on his face.
“Thank god.”
“I’m so sorry, James. I thought—”
“I know. Just find Tom now. Dominic knows where he is. And then get away from here. As far away as you can.”
Danielle sighed. “Okay,” she said, fighting the crackle in her voice.
“And one other thing, Danielle.”
“What is it?”
“Find the people who did this? The ones at the top. The ones Stella talked about.” He paused for a beat, and then the stern advice melted into a whimper. “Oh, god.”
The crabs’ arms began extending now, their fingers fondling James’s chest and neck, his thighs and hair and face, and then the first one stepped forward in a wild lunge, its teeth latching onto James’ right shoulder.
James screamed in pain and terror, and with that, the rest of the crabs swarmed on him like piranha.
Danielle closed her eyes for a moment and then looked to the ground, avoiding the gruesome finality to James’ life, praying the screams from her companion would end.
She waited until they did and then turned and ran toward the river where the boat with Dominic and Scott and Michael was approaching the coastline.
She stood on the bank of the river and thought of James’ request for revenge, and then, to no one, she said aloud, “It’s already on my list.”
Epilogue: Kill the Bastard
The Bastard could very well have been a woman, of course, but Danielle had liked the term when she’d added it to her list months ago; the stinging sound of the word de-personalized the goal somehow, reducing the villain she sought from person to monster.
But the person’s gender was beside the point; all Danielle had cared about was finding and killing the mastermind behind the destruction of her home, her community, her life.
And now, quite possibly, as the news was beginning to break everywhere, the world itself.
And, it turned out, the person with whom they had
made an emergency appointment and were only minutes from seeing was, in fact, a man, Lucas Maes, CEO of the Bern Group, the innocuously sounding name of the parent company that owned D&W.
Dominic and Danielle were early for their appointment and both sat casually outside of the CEO’s office, Dominic reading a newspaper, Danielle reading over her list one more time.
Goal 1. Map the Cordon
Goal 2. Find a Rifle
Goal 3. Kill a Crab
Goal 4. Kill a Soldier
Goal 5. Escape the Cordon
Goal 6. Find Dominic
Goal 7. Kill Stella
Goal 8. Kill the Bastard
Goal 9. Rescue Scott
She folded the paper again and tucked it into her purse, a thin clutch of a bag that Danielle had bought at the airport not more than an hour before their flight to Europe.
Tom was safe, and he and Scott and Michael had remained at the hotel while she and Dominic headed into the city for their meeting. During the four or five hours they were estimated to be gone, Tom’s job was to find a house to rent in the country, available immediately, somewhere the five fugitives could stay for a while without too many questions being raised.
But those arrangements would last a week or two at most, functioning only as a place of brief respite while America exploded into chaos. After that, they would have to move underground, and then across the border to The Netherlands or Germany, or perhaps south to Luxembourg.
They were lucky to have made it out of the United States, of course, which they had done by way of a six-thirty flight on the morning following their escape from the military siege of Maripo County.
Tom and Dominic had quietly renewed their passports during their time underground (Dominic under his military pseudonym), as if always knowing this day would come. As for her and the Jenkins, it was lucky for them Michael had insisted Danielle grab the emergency bag from the safe room. Just as he’d mentioned, it was supplied with passports—his and his father’s—as well as over forty thousand dollars in cash. And, it turned out, Scott Jenkins had been married to a white woman, one who looked enough like Danielle that she could pass for Donna Jenkins in a pinch. So, using her passport, Danielle, too, had a way out of the country.
At the airport, they had purchased five tickets to Brussels (roundtrip, so as not to raise eyebrows), and were completing the sale at the very moment news of violent murders just outside the now famous cordon began to break. By the time they landed in Belgium, the news was everywhere, and the full effort of the American military was engaged.
Danielle doubted even a full-scale war would be enough in the end, though. The army hadn’t been able to control the ghosts inside the cordon, and now that the monsters were scattered over dozens and possibly hundreds of miles, their capture and killing seemed nearly impossible.
Danielle had made a call to her parents in the cab on the way to the Bern Group headquarters—it was the only phone number she’d remembered by heart—and had told them without cushion that the country and continent were no longer safe. If they had the means, which she prayed they still did, they needed to leave immediately.
But truth told, she doubted they were still alive, and as she uttered her warnings into the phone, the words sounded brittle to her ears, benign, as if they were landing in a void, prepared to be extinguished forever somewhere in the infinite space of digital oblivion.
And then another thought arose, one even more existential than that of her parents’ demise, and an itch of guilt began to percolate in her mind.
Had she abandoned her country? Her fellow citizens? Knowing the danger that was now flooding toward schools and synagogues and stadiums and shopping malls, had she done enough to inform the people that were in its path?
She’d done nothing, of course, so the answer was ‘No,’ but whatever feelings of responsibility she had assumed released their grip on her conscience almost immediately. It was an impossible task; she had no means by which to communicate such peril to a mass audience, and now that she was a cordon fugitive—and future illegal immigrant to Belgium and beyond—she was destined for a life of silence.
All she could do now was the next best thing.
“Mr. Gerard?” The secretary behind the desk stood and removed the headset from her ear.
Dominic dipped the paper and glanced up nonchalantly, legs crossed, ankle resting on his opposite knee.
The secretary smiled. “Mr. Maes will see you both now.”
The smile was a nervous one, Danielle noted, and it was obvious that concern was now simmering in the office like soup on a stovetop. That was fine, though; it had to be that way. A man like Lucas Maes would have never seen her and Dominic on such short notice. Not unless the end of the world was the topic and he was the one who stood to answer for it.
“It’s actually just my partner who will be meeting with him,” Dominic replied, walking toward the reception counter as he spoke. When he reached the high lip of the desk, he gave a wide smile. “I’m just here as a consultant.”
The secretary tilted her head, her face wrinkling into folds of confusion. “Oh, I see. Very well.”
She smiled again and nodded, resetting her demeanor, and then pressed a button below her desk, unlocking Mr. Maes’ door with a concise buzz.
Danielle was already waiting at the door, and at the rumbling sound of the lock unbolting, she gripped the office handle and turned it, keeping the door closed but disengaged. With her access to the office now secured, she nodded to Dominic, who quickly walked behind the reception desk. From there, he reached across the secretary’s shoulder and ripped the phone cord from the wall.
“What are you..?”
“Your choices are as follows,” he said, his voice stiff, low. “You can sit in that chair and keep as still as a desert mountain, or you can speak again, at which point I cut you with one of those letter openers there and pour this into the wound.”
Dominic held up a small vial that could have been anything, but was, in fact, apple juice, heavily diluted.
“And then you’ll know what it feels like. You’ll know what all those people had to feel when they became the monsters that you and your company created. Then...then you’ll understand why we’re really here.”
The secretary’s face curdled slowly as Dominic spoke, finally ashing over to a color as white as the crabs themselves. Any doubt that had lingered in Danielle’s mind about The Bern Group and their role in the felonies unleashed on her home was all but smothered now.
“And for good measure...” A phone suddenly appeared in Dominic’s hand, and he presented it to the secretary like a magician, holding it out in front of his face. “Smile.”
He snapped off several pictures and then immediately began bouncing his thumbs onto the screen, typing. “And now my associates know your face. Your name. Which means we know everything about you and your family. So, an hour or so from now, when people begin to ask, I’d be very careful about how much you remember from this incident.”
The woman couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, and she simply nodded.
“Is my appointment here or not?” the muffled voice from beyond the door shouted. “Lina! There’s something wrong with the phones!”
“May I borrow one of those letter openers?” Danielle asked, staring harshly at the secretary, her voice low and calm.
The woman quivered her head a few times and stared with terror at the two letter openers that lay in perfect order beside a metal file organizer. Dominic grabbed one and tossed it to Danielle who stuffed it into the small of her back.
“We’ll have to be quick,” she said to Dominic. “And they’ll have our pictures on camera. We might not get out of here at all.”
Dominic nodded, his face alert, anxious. He then said, “You don’t have to do this. You know that, right?”
Danielle frowned. “I do.”
She turned toward the office now and opened the door, glowering as she took in the face of Lucas Maes, who sat like a king at a
large, oak desk that sat at least ten yards from the entrance. His was the face of malevolence, she thought, though she couldn’t have identified what characteristics, exactly, displayed the quality.
She would ask a few questions first, of course, just to be sure, and if by some twist of the story it turned out he wasn’t The Bastard on Danielle’s list, she had no doubt he would know the name of the man or woman to whom the moniker applied.
But to her core, Danielle knew he was the one. There was something in the dip of his head as he stared up at her, the glare he shot her for just an instant before dropping his gaze and smiling as he looked down at the coffee on his desk. It was a look that was both eager and condescending, dismissive and disgusted.
Danielle focused again on the thin metal blade pressing against her skin, and she played out in her mind the sling she would make on it with her right hand as she reached across the desk and pulled Lucas Maes’ head forward with her left. That would be the moment of truth, she knew, the last move before she jammed the steel fin into the back of his neck. Perhaps she would picture Stella’s face as she twisted the blade inside his skull, seeing as she’d been robbed the pleasure of accomplishing that goal personally.
Danielle suddenly felt the urge to pull the list from her handbag, to feel the crinkle of the paper in her fingers, to read the words one last time before she completed the final task.
But she resisted, and instead walked confidently into the expansive office that overlooked downtown Brussels.
She closed the door behind her.
“Mr. Maes?” she said smiling, her eyes stinging with the burn of revulsion. “I’m Danielle. It’s so very nice to meet you.”
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