Which led her here, to this moment.
She slipped inside the outsider’s room unseen. It wasn’t that hard. Yesterday, it would have been impossible considering he was the main attraction, but today—as all the attention was on the lost Dr Carter—the room was left unguarded.
Her heart thumped in her throat as she approached his bedside. The last time she had seen him was back at the underground laboratory, covered in chunks of ice. She looked down at the bruises on her wrist, healing but still visible. He had been awake then, wide awake and wild. He looked much of the same now, except his hair appeared to be growing back, leaving a golden brown fuzz, and the blue had dissolved from his skin, replaced by a warm, luminous glow.
Softly, his chest rose and fell, rippled in muscle beneath the white sheet. A series of machines beeped beside him.
“I know you can hear me,” she whispered. “And I know what you did.”
She waited, watching his face, but it remained still, absent. This was crazy, she knew. Accusing an unconscious stranger of such treachery was way beyond unmoral, and yet, here she was.
“Wake up,” she said. “Come on. I know you’re in there. Wake up.”
He didn’t budge, not a muscle.
She reached over and pinched his arm, leaving a tiny red welt on his skin. For a second, she felt bad, but it only lasted for just that, a second. It wasn’t mean considering the bruises he left on her wrist. But if he was faking, he was doing hell of a job pretending; the outsider didn’t stir. There was only one thing left to do. She peered over her shoulder for good measure and leaned in. Hovering over him, she pinched his nose closed and slipped her hand over his mouth. In about thirty seconds she would know for sure.
“What are you doing in here?” a voice cried out.
Karma spun around and found Nurse Bertha standing in the doorway, hands on hips. She took one look at Karma’s hands and the outsider’s face.
“What is this?” she barked. “What are you doing to him?”
“I’m sorry,” Karma stammered. “I was—I was just—”
The words bounced around her brain. She tried to grasp them and weave an answer out of them, one that was plausible. She considered telling Nurse Bertha the truth, but she didn’t give her a chance.
“Get away from him,” growled the nurse. “I’m disappointed in you, Harper—”
Suddenly, something dripped from above and splatted on her plump cheek. Nurse Bertha reached up and wiped it away. A gooey substance saturated her fingers, clinging to them in tresses.
“What the . . .”
Something moved above her. She looked up to see a Flesh Rotter, clinging to the ceiling with its massive clawed hands. It was the most hideous thing Karma had ever seen, worse than the stories or any nightmare her imagination could conjure. Its limbs were long and spider-like, its eyes black and beady. It was completely hairless and covered in blisters and dark flesh, as black as ink. It had no nose, no lips, no ears, no clothes, and nails as long and sharp as razors—
Nurse Bertha opened her mouth to scream and the thing shrieked, opening its jaws wide, revealing a display of jagged teeth. Chunks of sheetrock crumbled to the floor as it dropped from the ceiling, knocking the old nurse to the ground.
Karma fell backwards, tripping over her own two feet, and tumbled to the floor, crashing into the bed on her way down, knocking it over. A Flesh Rotter. It couldn’t be. She had to be dreaming, but she wasn’t. She watched in terror as the Flesh Rotter sank its teeth into Nurse Bertha’s throat, silencing her scream and tearing a hole the size of a crater in her neck, spraying blood everywhere.
She screamed at the top of her lungs, crawling back on her hands until she hit the wall. The Flesh Rotter, blood streaking down its chin, whipped its head in her direction, craning its long neck toward her. Bertha gargled from the floor, drowning in a pool of her own blood. A guttural growl rose from its throat as it crawled off the dying nurse and crept toward Karma like a predator, her petrified reflection gleaming off its black eyes. That’s when she saw it: The creature only had four fingers on its left hand, claw, whatever it was. Dr Carter. No, no it wasn’t true. There was no way.
Tears streamed down her face.
“Doc?” she uttered.
A wicked smile grew across the creature’s twisted face; its black tongue lapped across its teeth. She had to get out of there, she had to get help. It crawled towards her on all fours, scuttling after her like a spider. She bolted to the left and the thing shrieked, threatening to pierce her eardrums, and blocked her off. She dodged to the right, but it cut her off again. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to go. She was trapped and Nurse Bertha was dead, her eyes staring blankly from the floor.
“Please, Doc. Please don’t do this,” she whispered, praying that a piece of her old mentor was still somewhere in there, but if she was, she was too scared to come out or too far gone to care.
The creature swayed from side to side, a strange clucking sound rising from its throat, and sank back on its back legs, leering at her. Karma locked eyes with it, pleading.
And then it lunged—
She screamed, throwing up her hands in unyielding anticipation, shielding her face, waiting to feel the warmth of her own blood as the creature tore her apart with its blood-stained teeth and razor-sharp claws. She waited and waited . . . and waited. Several seconds passed, and no teeth, no claws, no tearing of any kind came.
Am I already dead? she wondered.
She lowered her hands and looked: The Flesh Rotter was dangling off the floor like a rag doll, hissing and flapping its limbs helplessly. Something had it by the throat. It was the outsider. He stood behind it, clutching the creature in his fist. He raised it several feet off the floor. It growled and clawed at the air, trying to free itself. The outsider’s head tilted to the side, trying to make sense of the monstrosity clamped between his fingers. And then he snapped its neck. The creature’s head lolled to the side, its esophagus crushed. It gave one final shudder and all its limbs went limp; its growls went silent.
She cursed under her breath as the outsider opened his fist and released the dead creature, watching it crumple to the floor. His eyes weren’t wild or afraid like before. They were sad. He turned his glum gaze from the creature to her; his brows creased with recognition.
“You,” he said. But then something struck him in the neck. The outsider reached up and pulled out a dart. He turned around, where a watchman stood in the doorway. Jax.
“Stop! Don’t hurt him,” Karma started, but the outsider was already on his feet, charging toward him. Jax stumbled back, loaded another dart into his gun, and fired. The dart zipped through the air and struck the outsider in the chest. It barely deterred him. Again, Jax loaded his gun, fiddling with the dart, as the outsider came barreling towards him, but before he had a chance to fire it, the outsider was on him. He pushed Jax to the ground and raised his fist—
Something stabbed the outsider in the back. It was an electrical prod, the ones the watchmen used to patrol the Nest. Malik grasped the prod in his tightened fist, sending over fifty thousand watts of electricity through the outsider’s body. He tremored as the current ripped through him, shuddered and stiffened, and seconds later, he struck the floor with a sickening thump, out cold. And just like that, it was over.
Karma pulled her knees into her chest, too in shock to say a word.
Malik patted his son on the back, who was as white as the walls, and grabbed his radio. “Fifteen, come in . . .” He looked down at the Flesh Rotter crumpled on the floor. “I think I found Dr Carter.”
Chapter Thirteen
The room was empty except for a single chair in the center of the room, where the outsider sat, as still as a statue. His dark eyes squinted at the fluorescent lights and the sleek, white walls, taking in this strange new world.
A tiny camera in the corner, zoomed in on him.
"What is your name?" The voice came from a speaker planted in the ceiling. He turned away from the lig
hts, rubbing the stars from his eyes. Where was he?
"What is your name?" the voice asked again, louder this time. Bolder.
"I don’t know,” he murmured.
His voice felt foreign to him, strange and unreal, like he hadn’t used it in ages. Other voices came to him then—people screaming, crying, begging for mercy—the voice over the loudspeaker silenced them—
“Where did you come from?”
The answer remained the same.
“I don’t know.”
And he truly didn’t.
He looked up at the camera. “Where am I? Who are you?”
“The tank,” said the voice, ignoring his questions. “Can you tell us why you were in the tank?”
What kind of question was that? A tank? Why would he be in a tank? But then the images came, hundreds of them, racing through the darkest recesses of his mind: Men in green with assault rifles, raging fires, people running for their lives, dogs in cages, gunshots ringing through his brain like church bells—
He grabbed his head in his hands and screamed . . .
From the observation room, Arlington watched the spectacle on the big screen, a large monitor that covered half of the wall. Malik stood beside him, eying the outsider guardedly.
“He’s mad,” said Malik, shaking his head. “Completely off his rocker.”
Arlington watched the young man sob into his hands, the camera catching every tear.
“How do you suppose he did it?” he said. “How do you think he infected Dr Carter? His tests revealed no sign of infection. They still don’t.”
Malik shrugged. “Maybe it was on him; on his clothes or something.”
“He was stark naked when they brought him back,” Arlington stated boldly. “And if he did have it on him, hiding somewhere, the sanitizing stations would’ve washed it away. It doesn’t make sense.”
For once, Malik agreed with him. He was just as stumped as Arlington. “Whoever he is, I say we get rid of him.”
“Get rid of him?” Arlington scoffed. “But we don’t even know who he is yet—”
“Exactly,” said Malik. “He’s dangerous, too dangerous. He’s already infected the doctor. Lord knows who else. Trust me, Arie, he’s no good. I watched him take two darts like nothing, darts strong enough to take down a horse, and kill a Flesh Rotter single-handedly. At least from what the girl says. She thinks he’s been playing us all along, ever since he got here, and I’m starting to believe her.”
Arlington stepped closer to the monitor, studying the outsider’s delirious image as he went from screaming to crying to rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself.
“The girl, where is she now?” he asked.
“Being tested for infection as we speak,” Malik told him. “Her mother’s been demanding to see her. You better pray she’s clean, too, because if she isn’t, I’d hate to be the one at the end of that woman’s wrath.” After a moment, he said, “She already lost a husband and a father, Arie. The woman’s suffered enough.”
Arlington sneered at him. “Now’s not a time to develop a conscious, Malik. You know why we did what we did.”
Malik said nothing. He was the only one who knew the truth, that half the jumpers weren’t really jumpers at all, but men and women ordered to death by the secret hands of their noble leader. The devastation would be unrepairable if it ever got out, he knew. But it wasn’t his undying loyalty to the patriarch that kept his lips sealed and his secrets secret. It was the safety of his son, and as long as Jax was alive, he had to keep the wheel turning, the ungreased machine going—painting a pretty picture over a graveyard of deceit and betrayal. No matter how ruthless the measures may be.
“I want to see the girl,” said Arlington before he departed. “Bring her to my office, but if she’s infected, you know what to do.”
Malik’s lips tightened. “Yes, sir.”
Arlington called out to him before he reached the door. “Malik, one day you’ll understand, some secrets are meant to be kept secret, and some secrets are bound to be revealed, but none of us are innocent from having them. Not one.”
He turned back to the monitor. The outsider sat in his chair, hunched over his knees, crying like a baby.
“Your name . . .” he asked the young man for the umpteenth time, pressing his lips to the microphone.
“What is your name?”
Chapter Fourteen
Above the dry Nevada desert, a full moon hung in the black sky, slipping in and out of dark clouds. The earth quaked and shuddered as a league of clawed feet and hands thundered across the land like a herd of wild buffalo. Thousands of Flesh Rotters swarmed from every direction, charging through the night; their black skin glowing iridescent beneath the moonlight. Like a massive black wave, they crushed everything in sight, heading toward a cluster of buildings in the middle of the desert, trampling over the chain link fence with the same warning sign ignored by Talon and his men.
Black, shiny, hairless bodies clawed their way through broken windows and doorways, snapping at each other and fighting to get inside, flooding the old buildings and tearing them apart, sifting through garbage and abandoned junk. Down below, inside the laboratory, they crept over rubble and slithered over walls, slipping in and out of shadows like spiders. An empty tank loomed in the darkness. Pieces of broken glass and melted ice covered the floor. They sniffed at the air, the tank, the shards of broken glass—
Outside, beneath the silver moon, a Flesh Rotter approached a set of tire tracks, embedded in the dirt. Its clawed-feet crushed the ground as it lowered its head, sniffing at the trail with a stubbed nose. Its nose twitched, its eyes narrowed.
A scent, it caught a scent.
It threw its head back and howled. A symphony of howls sounded all around it as the creatures emerged from the building and joined their kin. The herd moved on, racing across the desert, following the tire tracks into the night.
* * *
Karma was taken directly to the decontamination chamber, numb to the process as she was hosed off and steamed clean like a dirty dish. Her clothes were taken and burned, and she was given new ones, a basic white tee and a pair of sweatpants, two sizes too big for her tiny frame. And instead of shoes, she was provided with slippers that left her feet cold and shivering. After a long line of blood tests, saliva swabs, and hair samples, she was denied access to any and all visitors and thrown into a cell, where she awaited her sentence in silence. During this time, all she thought about was her family. If she was infected, she would never see them again. She would never see anyone.
Several hours later, her cell door opened.
“Get her up,” she heard someone say. She was too exhausted and weak to look.
She felt hands on her arms, as cold as ice, driving her to her feet. Malik’s rugged face floated in front of her. He propped a hand beneath her chin and lifted her face to meet his gaze. He took in her appearance and grimaced.
“Clean her up,” he said to the others. “Bring her when she’s done.”
Into the shower she was thrown, but this time she was given soap and shampoo, and after she was finished, some food for her belly. She didn’t feel like eating, not after seeing Nurse Bertha’s throat being ripped out by a Flesh Rotter, but her belly, rumbling in protest, begged to defer. She forced it down, the water, too, and was taken directly to the offices of Arlington Greenwood to hear his verdict. Only once had she seen the patriarch’s headquarters and that was when she was a child, when her father was still alive. It looked much the same, bland and simple. The only significance was a grand fireplace that blazed against the far wall, filling the room with a soft, golden light. A picture hung above it. It was the only picture in the entire room, an enormous portrait of his father, the old ruler of the Nest, Mortimer Greenwood. He was a spitting image of his son, white-haired and stone-faced with far set eyes, and jowls that hung like pancake batter, sitting tall in a black suit.
Karma was just a baby when he passed away, but the rumors claim he was
a callous man, who held grudges like silverware and ate people alive for breakfast, banishing entire families into the Dead World on a daily basis. From what her grandfather told her, Mortimer Greenwood was the only jumper he never mourned. A blessing, he called it. It was a blessing when they found his crippled corpse at the bottom of the stairwell, but that was before their dad took the great leap to join him. After the death of his son, their grandfather never talked about Mortimer again.
“I suppose you’re too young to remember him,” said Arlington, finding her standing before the portrait. He came up behind her, the flames from the hearth dancing in his eyes. “He was the forty-seventh president of the United States. If it wasn’t for the outbreak, he could’ve been the greatest president that ever lived.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at the ghostly image and the dark blue eyes that seemed to follow her wherever she stood.
“And yet he was a complete imbecile,” he said, surprising her. She never heard him talk ill of his father before. But then again, she never had a heart to heart conversation with the patriarch of the Nest until now.
“He could have had it all if he would have allowed himself,” Arlington went on, caressing his chin in deep contemplation. “But he let his arrogance get in the way. I guess in some way, we all do. Like the old saying goes, we are our own worst enemy.”
He offered her a seat. They sat by the fire, the flames warming their faces, turning their cheeks cherry red. Arlington looked like a lobster in the orange glow. His skin was so thin she could see his bones.
“Good news. Your results came out clean,” he said. “Everyone else in the ward has been tested as well and it appears the Black has been contained for now. You’ve all been very lucky considering the circumstances.”
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