by Matt Hart
The man who helped the old man came out and asked, "What's going on? What happened?"
"It's him," I said, "the man from the accident! It's him!"
Then he grabbed my arm again and grabbed the other guy too. "Both of you, in the truck.” He probably could have just picked us up and thrown us in, he was so big. We both were pulled along. I was too scared to scream, and the other man looked pale, too.
The old woman from the accident was already in the truck, sitting in the driver's seat. "Here you go, Mom," said the huge man, handing her the keys. "You," he said, pointing at the other man. "In the back seat. And you, pretty lady, you can sit up here with me."
I couldn't protest, I could only squeeze in between the fat old woman and the huge man.
"Now," he said, "We're going to go on a little scavenger hunt, in that we're going to hunt the bastard who killed MY SON!" He punctuated the sentence with a yell and brandished a tire iron.
I flinched and whispered, "I don't know where he is." He slapped me and I looked at him, completely shocked, and started crying silently.
"Hey," said the guy in the back seat. "What do you want?"
The huge man leaned back and thrust the tire iron hard into the guy’s chest. The reluctant passenger gasped and wheezed, his breath knocked out. "Shut up, I'm having a conversation here, and I don't like interruptions."
"Mom," he continued, "head back to the highway." He looked back to me and I shrunk away from him, as much as the little room between these two allowed me.
"Now, where were we? Oh yes, you were about to show us where you dropped off our friend, now weren't you?"
He paused as though it was my turn to talk. I guess it was, because he grabbed my chin and pointed it up to his face and said, "Weren't you!"
"It was, it was just before, uh, uh..." I couldn't remember.
"It was 70," gasped the man in the back. "Route 70. He walked north from there. You don't have to hurt us, just let us out. I told you where we last saw him."
"Yes, perhaps you did," said the big man. "We'll see."
We headed out to the highway, going back to where we dropped off the hero guy, as I thought of him. I was afraid for him, but especially afraid for myself.
"Please," I said, "why are you doing this? Just let me go."
The man looked at me again. He raised his hand and slapped me again. I couldn't believe it! What is this, the Dark Ages? I sobbed quietly and remembered what the hero guy had said, how he had warned us. He told us to be careful at the hospital, but I didn't really believe it was this bad already, despite what had happened at the accident.
I'd never imagined they would follow us here.
"Now where were we?" said the big man again. "I suppose introductions are in order. I'm Richard, but you can call me Rich. This is my mother. My dead son, murdered by that other guy—oh, what was that guy's name?"
I didn't say anything.
"I said, what was his NAME?" he yelled, raising his hand to strike me again.
"He never said!" answered the guy in the back seat. "He never told us."
I silently thanked our hero for never telling us his name, although I had been a bit put out at the time. "I asked him," I said, "but he just told me he'd rather not say."
"Hmmm, I believe you. Now, what else did he tell you?"
I thought about the gazebo, and looked down at my knees, trying to look like there was nothing else said. Obviously I failed miserably.
"Interesting," he said. "Clearly he said something. Now what was it?"
I looked back at the man in the back seat. He looked confused, so maybe he didn't hear about the gazebo. I looked back at my knees. Richard—I was going to call him Rich—looked at me, then at the guy in the back seat. He smiled an evil grin and lifted his hand. I shrunk back, but he didn't hit me. Instead, he hammered the guy in the back seat right in his temple.
The guy cried out, then moaned and leaned over in the seat, wobbling back and forth. Richard looked back at me, still grinning. "What. Else. Did. He. Say?" Then he reached over and punched the guy in the gut. His breath whooshed out and he vomited.
Richard glared at me and stopped grinning. I'm not sure which was worse—the evil grin or the evil not-grin. "Tch, tch, now look what a mess you've made," he said to me. "I'd hate to add blood to that. Vomit is easy to clean up, but bloodstains, now they're tricky, ain't they, Mom?"
"They sure are," replied the old woman, who I'd practically forgotten about. "I remember it took quite bit to get that stain on the front rug when that Witnesses fellas came back the second time. And we didn't even get a quarter for the tooth he left!" she cackled.
"Now where were we?" asked Richard. "Oh yes, at the part where you start talking or gimp there starts bleeding."
"A gazebo," I blurted. "He ... he said he'd check at a ga-gazebo in a park seven or, uh, so miles from where we dropped him off. Every, uh, few days, in case we needed help."
Richard laughed. I swear he almost sounded like Sideshow Bob, but without the "Hah HAH!" at the end. I cringed and my skin crawled where it touched his jeans.
"Sounds like a date then. We wouldn't want you to miss that!"
We drove in silence for a while, then came to the Route 70 exit. "Here we are, son," said the driver.
"Alright, exit and go north. Maybe we'll get lucky and can just run him over a few times with the truck. Wouldn't that be a hoot!"
I was appalled. I couldn't have imagined people like this really existed in real life. Two hours ago I'd been driving home from my job at an accountant's firm, where I did the books for non-profits. They almost never had enough money, but they helped people. Groups like the Salvation Army and various churches; Meals on Wheels was one of our clients. Wonderful people, taking very little pay for themselves.
That's who I dealt with on a regular basis. Not murderous psychopaths bent on a revenge killing after a justifiable act of defending an innocent old man.
Is the world truly this evil under a veneer of civilized society, ready to rear its ugly head when the veneer crumbles?
"We're getting low on gas, dear," said the old woman. "I'm going to stop at this convenience store and see if we can get any gas. Perhaps you can go in and get some water and food. It won't be long before lean times."
"Alright, Mom. If nothing else, we can hold up here in the store until heading for this gazebo. There's bound to be gas cans in the store, and we can raid the cars that aren't running for theirs if the station don't work."
"Good thinking, Rich," she said as she pulled the truck in to the pumps at the store. "Get me a mug of coffee too, if you would. And get yourself an extra tire iron or two, I'm going to keep the lady here company until you get back." She reached down to her left side and picked up the iron she'd placed there earlier. It still had bits of hair stuck to it.
I gagged, but held it in.
Richard opened his door and got out. "Why don't you put on your seatbelt, miss?" he said. "Safety first," he added, grinning. He got out and shut the door, then walked to the store.
I did as I was told, buckling my seatbelt. Just as it clicked, the guy in back moaned, then sat up, looking paler than ever. He clutched at his head, then surprised us both by grabbing at the old lady's head, clutching her hair. It was real hair, not a wig, because he yanked so hard some of it came out in bloody bundles, the scalp still attached.
She screamed, I screamed, the guy in the back moaned and grabbed at her again. I fumbled for my seatbelt, unclipped it, then felt someone grab my hair, too. I grabbed the door handle and tried to push the door open, but didn't have the right leverage because of whoever was holding my hair. Then whoever it was let go and I stumbled out of the car. I looked back to see the the guy in the back seat climbing over and clawing at the old lady.
Was he doing it to help me get free? I didn't know.
Then I heard another moan and a THUD as one of the guys who’d been in the truck bed fell out. He got up and shambled toward me. I didn't stick around, though. I
ran across the street toward some truck business.
--- --- --- --- ---
"I ran around the building, and was about to sneak back and take a look toward the store. That's when I ran into you."
He was pretty handsome. I think about my age.
I shoved those thoughts aside. The poor guy just lost his dad.
He shook his head."Man, the apocalypse isn't a day old and I already have a nemesis."
We sat quietly for a minute. "So," I said, "what is your name?"
He looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then shrugged and said, "Mark."
I laughed a bit, and he looked hurt. "No no, it's just that I was expecting something like Abbie Normal since you wouldn't tell us."
"Nope, just plain ole 'Mark' Frau Blücher," he said, smiling.
I laughed. It was such a relief and a surprise to find him. I hoped he'd let me go with him. I didn't have much to go home to anyway, just a cat who roamed the neighborhood most of the time.
He seemed safe and "together,” if anything could be in this whacked out world of the past few hours.
I noticed the ring on his finger. A wedding band. Seems odd—he’s way to young to be married.
Then I remembered. I saw him getting stuff from his dad... I couldn't finish that thought.
"I'm sorry about your father," I said. He looked at me with big beautiful eyes, then down at the ring, twirling it with his thumb.
"Thank you," he whispered. He was silent for a bit, then took a deep breath.
"So," he said, "this Richard guy is probably at that store right now, and he knows I'm around somewhere, and he was planning on some kind of ambush at the gazebo. Maybe stake you out as bait."
I shuddered. I hadn't even thought of that, but yeah, it made sense. "Maybe, sounds like him. He's a complete whacko."
"Is that a technical term, Jen," he asked.
"I don't know, I'm an accountant, not a psychologist. But it adds up that way."
Mark smiled.
Chapter 8
—————
Interlude—USAMRIID—Frederick, MD
"I don't understand this," said Dr. Allison Brovina. She was looking through an old fashioned microscope at a slide. "It's breathing. You can see the skin contracting and pores pulling in air."
"And we can assume from the tests that it's actually getting oxygen from the air and distributing it directly to the tissues," added Dr. Tell Charles. "It's part of the reason it's so hard to kill them."
Dr. Brovina sat back in the stool and swiveled around to face Dr. Charles. "But is it a virus or some other agent? We sure didn't create it, at least not to my knowledge. And the EMP didn't cause it either." She paused and shook her head. "Without an SEM or a tunneling microscope, we might never know."
"But it's gone, why is it gone? The original vector seems to have disappeared!"
"Which points even more to an artificial agent. It's certainly widespread, at least as far as we can tell. Without communications, we can't even talk to the CDC—or anyone else, for that matter."
"I thought our gear was hardened against this," said Dr. Brovina, shaking her head.
Tell put his hand on her shoulder. "Allison…" he said, but didn't know what to say. He wanted to tell her it would be alright. He wanted to tell her that she would be able to get back to her children. That her ex-husband was fine and the kids were too. He wanted to tell her about his feelings for her, even though she was his subordinate.
Maybe that didn't matter anymore.
He sighed.
"Allison," he repeated, "tell me again the symptoms and what we've learned so far." It was the typical way they worked—talking through what they'd done. Often a problem solved itself just by talking about it.
"Okay…" she said. "People began showing some of the symptoms of a typical cold virus, such as coughing, at apparently the exact same time as the EMP."
"Exact same?"
"Well, no, more like an hour afterwards. The EMP hit at 5:25in the evening, and the first ... full blown infected ... appeared almost exactly one hour and ten minutes later. We have seen that from the time of the first coughing symptom to dementia-like activity is about five minutes, and full blown infection is five minutes after that."
"What about the initial vector of infection?"
"Absolutely no correlations between the infections we've seen here, but it's obviously a very small sample size."
"And how many infections here?" asked Dr. Charles.
"At least seven initial vectors, and twenty-five secondary infections. Three initials are still in quarantine, and seven secondaries."
Dr. Charles shook his head. "An unknown agent that modifies the biology of a human, and only a human as far as we can tell. None of the experimental animals here have been affected. There's no differentiating factor, such as ethnicity or age. It modifies at the cellular level, creating vast quantities of various Vitamin K compounds, hardening the cell walls of almost all organs, creating a brand new network of capillaries that deliver oxygen through the skin."
He paused, then added, "We assume it re-wires the brain somehow, given the behavior patterns of the infected."
Tell removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "We know that bites are a vector of infection. It's like a tailor-made zombie virus, deliberately spread here, and who knows where else."
"But that level of bio-chemical knowledge is beyond the U.S.," protested Dr. Brovina. "Who could have created such a thing?"
"Only a highly technological society, or else it is some sort of natural system in our bodies that was realigned by the EMP. Some kind of high-electron atomic structure we've never seen?"
Allison laughed. "That we've never encountered after tens of millions of MRI’s? Surely those would have affected such a structure in the same way."
Dr. Charles shrugged. "Maybe. We haven’t done full body scans. And unfortunately we have no way of correlating scans to infected to see if the initial infection is only in people who've never had an MRI scan." He paused. "Seems pretty unlikely."
"What if we—" Allison stopped at a banging outside of the lab door.
Tell walked over and turned the knob. "Sounds like something fell out..." He didn't get a chance to finish. The door swung open and a man fell into Tell. As the man looked up at Tell, who was trying to pick himself up, he hissed and bit his arm. Tell yelled out and fell backwards. Allison screamed.
The man turned his attention to the scream and saw Allison scrambling backwards, knocking over the only manual microscope in the entire facility, shattering it on the floor. She turned and tried to climb onto a counter, but the creature grabbed her leg and bit her.
She screamed again and yelled for Tell, looking back to him for help. When she saw what was happening to him, she screamed again.
Chapter 9
—————
Interlude—Boreling Empire—Plannel 6
Grodge the Merciful kicked his doglard and grumbled as he watched another's pick get moved into a top spot. It had a caption underneath that said “Highest Tech Nation-Group, Biology Warfare Center ‘USAMRIID.’” It was super funny and ironic. If only it had been his pick.
He grumbled and kicked again at the doglard, who had scrambled out of the way, and looked away from the feed as dozens of the bio-creatures began eating the two humans in white smocks. They didn't bother to kill them first.
He just had to find something to move him up. Even one level would be the start of his induction into the Planners. He wanted to be in the boardrooms, laughing and chewing down drinks while females brought them stimulants. Just one level would put him into the lowest level meetings.
Or, he thought to himself, I could replace Pactain the Virulent … if he messed up.
Grodge flipped through the channels deftly, looking for anything he could exploit. He saw a triple red flash zip by as he was fast forwarding several channels, so he halted the play and zoomed back until he spotted what had happened. A red bar was placed in a
production assistant's playback whenever there was an unexpected technical glitch in the active or passive infiltration systems. In this case, it was a very interesting development indeed. Some human had a working set of medical equipment and was examining one of the bio-creatures.
That shouldn’t be possible. The tiny machines should have disabled all medical equipment in addition to simulating the EMP. He recalled a report that the humans had some bio-research facilities that the regular solderbots could not penetrate due to pressure differentials. Those facilities had been targeted with enhanced nanomachines that could penetrate the pressurized rooms.