“Stock your fridge and then go out and get your fat ass infected! Quick and easy cure for the epidemic of American obesity. LMAO!”
“It would fix the economy too. I’m buying stock in McDonald’s! ROFL!”
Sarai clicked on a news article about a prostitute who’d been burned in a fire and received a skin graft. She’d been caught with the cannibalized bodies of a dozen tricks in her basement. Below that was a story about a cab driver in Austin who’d been placed in police custody after his employers found the remains of a local businessman in the trunk of his car. All the flesh had been gnawed from the man’s bones. The cab driver died of starvation after one night in jail.
She scrolled through news report after news report, each more ghastly than the next, and below each were hundreds of comments from people speculating about a zombie apocalypse to wondering how they could get infected themselves.
“What have we done?” Sarai whispered. She looked up from the computer just as Dr. Trevor Adams walked in. She wanted to strangle him. Behind him, Dr. Vivaan stood, looking like he wanted to strangle her.
“Where’s Ebersol?”
Trevor looked at Dr. Vivaan, who gave him a stern, unsympathetic glare. “He’s handling a little problem. We had to chain down our two special patients. They kept breaking through their restraints. Their overactive adrenal glands have made them unusually strong. I’m afraid one of the nurses was severely bitten,” Trevor said.
“She’s dead. Her throat was ripped out by the model, Lelani Simms,” Dr. Vivaan added, sweeping the room with his baleful gaze.
Sarai felt her stomach drop like she’d just fallen off a cliff. She swallowed hard, sucking down bile that scalded the back of her throat. “Where is she now?”
“On her way to the morgue, and I’m going back to India.”
Sarai sighed and shook her head. “You may want to wait. I have something to say that may change your mind.”
“What could you possibly say to me that would make me want to be a part of this insanity you’ve created here?”
“The virus has mutated. It’s infectious.”
The room fell silent.
“A-are you sure?” Trevor asked.
“Has anyone even bothered to look at the news today? It’s everywhere,” Sarai answered.
“Have they-have they traced it back to us?” Trevor asked.
“Not yet, but they will. Right now, they think it has something to do with AIDS.”
“AIDS?”
“They think the HIV virus mutated, and that’s what’s causing the disease. I guess they traced the origin of the virus back to a guy who was HIV infected. I checked, and he wasn’t a client of ours, but he’d recently received a new kidney from one of our clients who died in an auto accident.”
Dr. Vivaan looked at Dr. Adams and shook his head. “And none of you ever thought of this possibility?” he asked.
Sarai was confused. “What possibility?”
“Tell her! Tell her what this virus of yours has done!” Dr. Vivaan was shaking with rage. Dr. Ebersol walked in and looked from the angry little Indian man to Trevor. They were all looking at Trevor, waiting for him to explain it all.
“Most likely, our retrovirus piggybacked onto the HIV retrovirus. That’s how it’s spreading.”
“Spreading?” Ebersol asked.
“Yes, spreading. It’s all over the news. And you knew this could happen?” Sarai asked, turning back to Trevor.
Trevor shrugged and held up his hands in surrender. “I didn’t really think about it. We screened everyone we treated for HIV before we injected them. If that chef hadn’t gotten himself killed and then donated his damn organs, the virus would still be contained.”
“But it isn’t contained anymore, now is it?” Ebersol snapped.
Screams came from beyond the door, down the hall. An alarm sounded. More screams. The doctors all looked at each other, hollow-eyed, the terror they felt etched plainly across each of their faces. Ebersol peeked out the door and looked down the hall. More screams echoed throughout the building, accompanied by guttural snarls and growling. It sounded like people were being slaughtered.
Ebersol looked at his watch. “What time were the other patients supposed to arrive?”
Sarai checked the time on her Smartphone. “They should have been here twenty minutes ago.”
They all looked back toward the open door and slowly crept toward it, joining Ebersol and peering down the hallway. More screams filled the halls.
“Did you tell them to keep the patients restrained and sedated?”
“I-I don’t know. I don’t remember,” Sarai replied.
“Well, it sounds like your patients have arrived,” Dr. Vivaan said.
They retreated back into the room and closed the door. By silent agreement, Ebersol, Trevor Adams, and Vivaan began moving furniture. They slid Sarai’s big oak desk in front of the door, and seconds later something struck it hard and began scratching at it, snarling like a wild beast. Everyone fell silent. The snarling sounds increased as others joined the party, slamming into the door, growling savagely, trying to claw right through the solid oak.
“Call the police,” Ebersol whispered.
Sarai reached for her cell phone and punched in 060, the police emergency number in Cancun.
“Hola, policía de Cancun. ¿Cuál es su emergencia?”
“We’re trapped in a room at the Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic Resort. There are people trying to kill us! We need help!”
“¿Que?”
“Hay canábales tratando de comer! Estamos en la Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic. Prisa! Por favor! Ayuda!”
She hung up.
“What did you say?”
“I said there were cannibals trying to kill us.”
“Are they coming?” Trevor asked. His eyes were wide with terror, listening to the things scratching at the other side of the door, things that had once been his patients.
“I think so.”
There were more screams outside. Trevor and Ebersol walked over to the window. Dr. Vivaan hesitated and then joined them.
“Jesus Christ!”
Despite her reservations, Sarai joined her colleagues at the window and peered out. There were bodies strewn across the parking lot, body parts. White lab coats, nurses’ shoes, the green jumpsuits worn by the gardening staff, the gray jumpsuits worn by the janitors, and a few civilian clothes, sundresses, khaki shorts, gym shoes, jeans, and T-shirts lay in bloody rags in front of the building. Some still had limbs inside them. One of the jumpsuits still contained a dismembered torso, the chest ripped open and hollowed out. Disembodied heads lay strewn about like a destructive child’s discarded doll parts. Two bodies still looked relatively intact, and people were feeding on them.
Sarai recognized one of the assailants, the little girl, Star Mourning. Her teeth jutted out of her mouth, hanging down below her bottom lip like a saber-toothed cat. Her face was painted red with blood. She was on all fours, clawing at a man Sarai recognized as one of the orderlies, pulling out his insides and greedily feasting on them. Beside her, two other creatures Sarai didn’t recognize tore the man’s limbs off and casually stripped them of flesh, gnawing at the bones like a rack of barbecued ribs, smacking their lips and licking the blood and gore from their fingertips. Sarai turned away.
There was a loud crack, and everyone turned to look behind them at the barricaded door. It was starting to splinter. It wouldn’t hold much longer. For the first time, Dr. Vivaan’s face held an expression other than anger and disgust. He looked terrified.
He turned to Trevor, his mouth hanging open in shock. “You’ve killed us all, you dumb sonuvabitch. You’ve killed us all.”
“We need to find something to arm ourselves with.”
Everyone began looking around the room. There wasn’t much. Sarai grabbed the letter opener. Ebersol hefted a wooden chair. It was too heavy to swing effectively. He smashed it against the floor several times unt
il he had something small enough to work with, a chair leg with part of the armrest still attached. Trevor grabbed a piece of the chair, and so did Vivaan.
“Shit, I almost forgot!”
Sarai walked over to the desk, opened the drawer, and removed a large black semiautomatic pistol. “I’ve never used it. I forgot I had it in there.”
“Glad you remembered it,” Ebersol said. “Why do you have it anyway?”
Sarai shrugged. “You never know.”
“Never know what? When a bunch of cannibals mutated with pygmy shrew DNA will come busting through your door?” Vivaan asked.
Sarai ignored him.
There was another cracking sound, and a thin brown arm thrust through a sizeable hole in the door and began scratching at it from the inside, gouging huge rents in the wood.
“That ain’t gonna hold much longer,” Trevor said.
“Really? Because I feel completely fucking safe!” Vivaan replied.
“You don’t have to be a dick about it. We’re all in this together.”
Vivaan took several quick steps toward Trevor until he was practically chest to chest with the man. At five foot five, he was a few inches shorter than Trevor and didn’t have the young Dr. Adams’s hormonally enhanced muscles, but Trevor took a step back and dropped his eyes, unable to meet the man’s accusatory stare.
“We’re all in this because you were stupid and irresponsible enough to think cross-species genetics was a good idea. Because you would use something this dangerous for the vanity of fat wealthy Americans!” He spat at Trevor’s feet.
Ebersol stared at the thin brown arm trying to claw its way into the room. It was familiar.
“Lelani?” Ebersol gasped.
Sarai stabbed the arm with her letter opener. There was a howl of anguish, and then the arm quickly withdrew back through the hole. Another arm, this one bony and ghostly white, thick spidery blue veins pulsating beneath the pale skin, reached through the hole. Sarai stabbed that one as well. Finally, the sound of sirens filled the air. Everyone rushed to the windows again, except Sarai. She remained, aiming her gun at the door as it began to give way.
“One car? They sent one fucking car!” Vivaan yelled, banging on the window in frustration.
“Up here! We’re up here!” Trevor yelled, banging on the window as well.
The door cracked again and someone crawled through the hole, someone with long oily hair and thick claws like a badger. Sarai shot it twice as it lunged for her. One bullet went in the thing’s shin, crippling it but barely slowing it. The thing crawled forward on bony, spidery limbs, growling and hissing, baring long, crimson-tipped fangs. The second bullet went through the thing’s neck. It fell to the floor, gargling its own blood but still reaching out for Sarai, still desperate for her flesh. Sarai shot it again, silencing it for good.
Someone-something-else crawled through the hole in the door.
“Help! Guys, help!”
“We’re right here. Give me the gun,” Ebersol said, lifting it from her hands as the emaciated thing with the tan skin and natty afro scrambled to its feet. Ebersol immediately recognized her. He’d loved her since the first day she’d walked into his office. It was his fault she was like this. He’d been blaming Trevor all this time, but the reality was he had brought her to him. He had recommended Trevor and had failed to protect her.
“They’re attacking the cops! They’re tearing them apart!” Trevor screamed. He was trembling, and urine stained the front of his pants.
Lelani shambled forward, and Ebersol lifted the gun. He aimed it at her forehead. “I love you, Lelani. I always have.”
She paused and cocked her head. Ebersol’s finger hovered over the trigger. Two more patients crawled through the crack in the door. The hole was no more than a foot wide, yet their emaciated bodies squeezed through easily. Ebersol heard Trevor scream, followed by ripping sounds and the sound of feeding. Vivaan cursed in Indian, followed by the sound of wood-splitting bone, a sound that repeated again and again.
“Shoot! Shoot!” Sarai cried out in a panic.
Ebersol gazed lovingly upon Lelani’s once-beautiful countenance, now ravaged by starvation and soaked in the blood of his murdered coworkers. There was something sad in her expression, something desperate and agonized. He could only imagine what she was feeling as her body burned more calories than she could ever possibly consume, driven mad with a hunger she could never assuage. A tear spilled from the corner of his eye when she bared her red-tipped fangs, snarling.
“I love you, Lelani. I’m so sorry.”
She roared and charged forward. He had the gun aimed right between her eyes.
But he never pulled the trigger.
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