by Mark Lukens
The cart rolled right at the man. He stopped the rolling cart and turned it over right in the middle of the aisle between the parked cars.
Kate screamed and tried to run. She wouldn’t be able to get inside her SUV, but maybe she could get away, get to the store, and then eventually circle back to her truck. These thoughts sped through her mind at lightning speed. She thought about her shoes again, how these were not the best shoes to run in. But she would run. She jogged around her neighborhood five times a week. She wasn’t a sprinter by any means, but if she could just get far enough away from this man, she knew she had the wind to outlast him in a chase.
She felt the man’s hands on her before she even got halfway down the space between her SUV and the pickup truck next to her. The man’s hands were impossibly strong, his fingers digging deep into her flesh; it felt like he was going to pull the muscles right off of her bones, snapping the tendons and ligaments like they were rubber bands.
“Bad moon!” the man yelled. “Bad moon!” It seemed to be the only thing he could say. It seemed like he was trying to say other things, but these were the only two words that would come out.
“Get off of me!” Kate shrieked, pushing back against the man. She kicked him in the leg as hard as she could. She tried to aim for his crotch, but only managed to catch him in the knee. She’d heard that you could break a man’s knee with just one properly placed kick no matter how small you were compared to your attacker, but she was sure now that it wasn’t true. The man didn’t seem to even notice that she had even kicked him.
The man turned with one violent twist and she was flying in the air for just a moment. Her back slammed into the side of the vehicle next to hers, the older pickup truck. Her head slammed back, her hair flying. She heard a cracking in her spine, and for one second she was sure the man had snapped her neck when he had slammed her against the truck. A burst of pain shot through her neck, tingling pain running up into the back of her head, and then down to her lower back as he held her against the side of the truck.
This was it. The man was going to kill her. She didn’t know how to fight back, and even if she did, the man was too strong, fueled by an insane rage. He was slobbering; his breath smelled like he’d feasted on roadkill for breakfast. His eyes were lit up with insanity. He opened his mouth wide, like he was about to bite her.
Oh God, he’s going to bite me!
“Get the fuck off of her,” a man growled.
It was a blur of movement, but Kate saw something out of the corner of her eye, then she heard the thunk of metal against bone a split second before she saw the aluminum baseball bat slam down onto the man’s head.
The man’s hands became lifeless in a nanosecond, his fingers loosening on her arms. He dropped to the ground like invisible strings holding him up had suddenly been snipped.
Kate scrambled away from the collapsed man, moving toward her driver’s door. The movement hurt her neck, but the pain was an afterthought at the moment; right now all her thoughts were on survival and escape.
“You okay?”
She stopped and looked back at a bear of a man. He was at least six foot six and well over three hundred pounds. His face was all bushy beard and wild eyes. He wore flannel and jeans, an aluminum baseball bat in one big hand, the end of the bat spotted with blood.
Kate wanted to keep running, keep going to her driver’s door, dig her keys out of her pocket and unlock her door. But for some reason she stopped. She couldn’t help staring into the man’s eyes. For the bear of a man he was, for the giant monster he seemed to be, his soft brown eyes were so gentle. And she swore she saw tears in his eyes.
Finally, Kate nodded.
“Your groceries,” the man said, nodding back at the tipped-over cart in the aisle. A car had just sped past the cart, driving at least thirty miles an hour in their escape from the store. “You forgot them.”
She shook her head no. “I don’t want them. I . . . I just want to leave.”
The bear glanced down at the man he had probably just killed with the baseball bat, then he looked at Kate, taking a step toward her. A step for him was like two steps for her. He turned the baseball bat around in his hands so that he was holding it by the business end, stretching his arm out to her, offering her the handle.
For a second she didn’t know what he was doing.
The bear seemed to sense her fear. “Take it,” he said in a soft voice. “Do you have something to protect yourself?”
She shook her head no, fear still strangling her voice.
“Take this, then. I’ve got another one.”
She didn’t want to take the bloodstained bat, but she saw her hand reaching for it. She grabbed the handle and the bear let it go. The bat was heavy in her hand.
The bear turned around and went back to the aisle to right her cart, taking the two bags of groceries out. “You sure you don’t want these?”
“No,” Kate told him as she pushed the button on her key fob to unlock the doors of her SUV. She opened the driver’s door and threw the bat inside onto the passenger seat; it slid down to the floorboard, the handle of the bat resting against the center console. There was probably blood on her floor mat now from the bat.
The man turned to leave.
“Thank you,” Kate finally said, but the man was gone.
CHAPTER 5
Kate backed out of the parking space at the supermarket. She wasn’t sure if she was going to run over the man who had attacked her—he was slumped down somewhere between her vehicle and the bear’s pickup truck. Who cared if she ran him over? He was most likely dead now.
God, she had just watched a man kill another man right in front of her and she had the murder weapon in her truck.
Somehow she missed her shopping cart while backing up, but then she thought that the bear had probably pulled the cart out of the way for her. She couldn’t remember looking for other people or cars when backing up, but she must have, she just couldn’t remember it. A moment later she was driving toward the exit from the supermarket parking lot with both hands on the wheel, her fingers gripping the steering wheel as tightly as the man had grabbed her. She looked down at her hands. The latex gloves hadn’t ripped. Her dust mask was still on, and she adjusted it a little, making sure it was still tight against her face. Maybe she was still protected. Maybe she was safe. Maybe she hadn’t been infected.
The man who had attacked her was infected—she was sure of that. He was a ripper. He had touched her sleeves. Breathed on her. The bear had killed the man with a baseball bat and that blood was on her and inside her SUV now. She wasn’t going to drive this truck again. She had her Honda at home in her garage. She would use that vehicle if she went anywhere.
Her mind was racing. All she could think about was that she was infected now. She shouldn’t have stopped at the store. Tarik had warned her; he had told her to just go home. She should have listened to him. She might even be at home right at this moment if she hadn’t stopped at the store.
She needed to get her breathing under control. She felt like she was going to pass out. She was a scientist, and she needed to think about things rationally. Yes, there was a probability that she was infected with whatever ripper virus was roaming around out there. She couldn’t be sure of how it was transmitted, but the reality was that she might be infected. What could she do? Go to the hospital? She was sure the hospitals were overrun now with people who were either infected or scared they were infected. There was no chance she would be able to see a doctor there.
Her thoughts returned to the videos that Tarik had shown her on her own laptop. She remembered the police rounding people up and shoving them into military vehicles. Were those people infected? Or were they suspected of being infected? Obviously whatever this plague was, intentional or not, there was no cure. If there was, people would have been notified about it by now. Wouldn’t they?
The traffic was still heavy, and there seemed to be even more stalled or abandoned cars and trucks in the r
oad that other vehicles had to go around. She turned down a side street that wasn’t blocked off, hoping to skirt around the major roads.
Adrenaline still coursed through her veins. She was still shaky and nauseous. She stopped at a stop sign and glanced at the rearview mirror as she grabbed her cell phone out of her purse. She dialed 911 and waited, listening to the ringing of the phone. She would call the hospital. Tell them that she thought she might be infected. Find out what the proper procedure was.
After three rings a message played: “This service is temporarily disconnected. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
911 disconnected?
She drove forward, looking all around. She turned on the radio, pressing the scan button so it would scan through the stations. She listened to snippets of news reports, music, emergency signals, a man preaching about the End Times. The man’s voice brought her back to her childhood and the countless fire-and-brimstone services she had endured.
When she came to another stop sign, she dialed her mother’s phone number. She hadn’t talked to her parents in months, and she hadn’t been out to western North Carolina in over two years to see her family. They had asked to come to her house, but she had always come up with excuses why they couldn’t come—she was always too busy. But now that the end of the world seemed to be happening, now that she thought she might be dying, she wanted more than anything to talk to her mother and her father, her sister and her brother. She’d tried her whole life not to be like them, tried her best to distance herself from them, and now at this moment, she just wanted to hear her mother’s voice. Her mother would tell her everything was going to be okay. She would tell her to come back home and they would all take care of her, all look out for each other in town, like they had done for generations.
She put the phone on speaker so she could talk and drive.
The phone rang three times and then a robotic female voice apologized about the temporary lack of service.
“Damn,” Kate muttered.
She only looked down at her phone for a second to turn it off. When she looked back up a man stood right in the middle of the road.
Kate hit the brakes and cut the steering wheel to the right at the same time to avoid hitting the man. She felt her vehicle slide to the right on screeching tires, and then she was up and onto the sidewalk. Her truck came to a stop. Miraculously she hadn’t hit any other vehicles. She realized that she still had her foot jammed down on the brake pedal, her gloved fingers still gripping the wheel. She was breathing heavily into her dust mask.
The man was pounding on her driver’s window. He had a big kitchen knife in one hand, the blade already stained with shockingly bright red blood. The man was saying something, but it was beyond gibberish; they didn’t even sound like words, more like growls and barks. He raised the knife up, ready to stab it down onto her window.
Kate’s BMW was still in drive, her foot still on the brake pedal. She moved her foot and stomped down on the gas, still gripping the steering wheel. Her SUV shot forward. She heard the knife strike the truck somewhere near the back window, but she didn’t hear any glass shattering.
She was back out on the road, speeding past houses with small yards and vehicles crowding the driveways.
That man had been another one of the infected ones, one of the rippers. If the infection was in the air then she had been breathing it in this whole time, even through the paper mask she wore. If this was an airborne virus, then she already had it. Everyone did.
Her vision was blurry. She realized that she was crying, but she was afraid to wipe her eyes with her hands.
I’m already infected. It’s too late.
All she wanted to do now was go home. If she was going to die, then she wanted to do it there. She would rather die at home than be murdered in the street.
Two cop cars were parked at the corner of the next intersection, where the smaller road Kate was on ran through a more congested street. She pulled right up next to one of the cop cars and parked in the street. She rolled down her window.
“Hey!” she yelled at the cop standing in the street next to his car. “A man down the street just tried to stab me.”
The cop standing by his car didn’t move a muscle; he just stared at her through the respirator strapped to his face. “Go home.”
For just a second Kate was at a loss for words. “There’s a guy back there,” she said again, pointing out her window, yelling through her paper mask in case the cop hadn’t heard her correctly. She thought about pulling the mask down so he could hear her better. “He has a knife. It has blood on it. He was in the street.”
“I said go home!” the cop shouted.
Kate stared at the cop. The eyes behind his mask looked vacant, like he was detached; he was looking at her like she was some kind of insect.
“Why are you wearing those masks?” she asked, her eyes darting to the other cop sitting in the car. She looked back at the other cop.
“Martial law has been declared,” the cop said. “You need to get off the streets or you’ll be detained.”
Detained? He’d said the word detained. Not arrested. Not read your rights, but detained.
“What’s going on?” she asked, shouting through her mask over the sound of the cars and trucks going by on the busy road just beyond the cop. “Is there some kind of disease?”
Two more helicopters flew by. The world seemed to be in motion all around her and the cops at the edge of this intersection, like they were in the center of a whirlpool.
“Go home!”
“I have the right to know if I’m breathing in a disease. I’m . . . I’m a professor at—”
“Lady,” the cop said, walking toward her. “I don’t give a flying fuck who you are. If you do not go home right now, you will be detained.” He dropped his gloved hand down to his service pistol on his hip.
Was he going for his gun?
Kate wanted to shout back that she had rights, but she clamped her mouth shut underneath her paper mask. She rolled up her window and pulled out into the traffic. Her body seemed to be moving on its own while her mind still struggled to understand why a cop was threatening to detain her, cussing at her, laying his hand on the butt of his gun. She wasn’t a person to that cop anymore, not even a human being.
A car behind her laid on the horn, but Kate ignored it. She kept low in her driver’s seat as she joined the flow of traffic, afraid the angry driver behind her might have a gun, afraid he might shoot her.
She tried her mother’s number two more times as she sat in the traffic jam, but she got the same robotic voice telling her the number she had tried to reach wasn’t in service at the moment. She tried her sister’s number, and then her brother’s number, but she got the same message. She gave up and turned the radio back up. It was still scanning radio stations, the computer blindly following programming until she selected a radio station. But she didn’t select one, she let the dial keep scanning, the radio stopping every so often on a minute of music or an emergency signal or dreary newscasts.
Go home, the cop had told her. And that’s what she was going to do. What else could she do?
CHAPTER 6
When Kate got home, she parked her SUV in the garage next to her car. She took the baseball bat to the sink in the garage next to the washer and dryer and washed the bat, then she sprayed bleach cleaner on the bat, soaking the entire thing. And then she washed it again. Was it disinfected? Had the bleach killed the virus? She couldn’t be sure, but at least she had some kind of weapon with her. She didn’t have anything else in the house except a set of kitchen knives.
After the bat was relatively clean, she took the bat, the roll of plastic, and the tape into the house. She unloaded her bags of groceries onto the kitchen counter, but she didn’t put any of them away—none of them needed to go into the refrigerator. Right now she wanted to take her gloves and mask off and take a shower.
She went back out into the garage and threw the gloves and mask away in
the garbage can. She stripped off her clothes and threw them into the garbage can with the gloves and mask. She spent fifteen minutes under a hot shower, scrubbing her body over and over again, crying as she saw the crazy man attacking her every time she closed her eyes. She wanted to stay in the shower longer, but she was getting the creeps being in there even though she had made sure the doors were locked before taking her shower.
After her shower, she got dressed and slipped on a new pair of gloves and a new dust mask. She went back out to her garage and sprayed the inside of her SUV with the bleach cleaner. She didn’t bother scrubbing anything. She just closed the doors, trapping the fog of bleach inside.
Next, she used the plastic sheeting she’d gotten from Tarik and taped up all of her windows after checking to make sure they were locked. Then she taped the edges of her front and back door, then along the bottom of it. It felt a little claustrophobic to be sealed into her own house like this. She had sealed the garage door, too. But she would eventually have to go back out there to get to her vehicle if she needed to leave.
Leave? And go where?
She thought of her mom and dad again. She couldn’t believe she was suddenly so homesick for them. She tried a few more times to call them, but her landline was already dead and the cell phone kept spitting out the same robotic message to her. Maybe it wasn’t her family’s phones that were having the trouble, maybe it was her phone.
It was already getting darker outside, already late afternoon. She wasn’t hungry, but she made herself eat a bowl of soup and some crackers. The electricity had flickered a few times, but it hadn’t gone out. The internet was spotty, and she couldn’t get back onto the dark web like Tarik had done. She tried looking up information about the rippers online, but she was running into the same messages on different search engines and social media pages that her student Scott had mentioned earlier in the day.