by Smith, Aaron
“Does it hurt?” Brandon asked.
“Nope, I’ve gotten used to it. It just gets tired sometimes, but so does my real foot, so it’s no big deal.”
Fresh socks in place, she felt refreshed and relaxed and just about ready to get on with the journey. She was about to ask Brandon if he wanted to piss in the bushes before they were on their way when a bus came screaming into sight, went about a hundred feet past them, and took a sudden left, crossing the opposite lane, and slammed into a bank of trees with a tremendous crash. The trees bent and splintered and the leaves fell down like slow, heavy rain, and the bus stopped with the sound of some of its windows breaking.
Danielle’s medical student instincts came rushing up and she fished in the trunk for the small first aid kit she knew was in there. She grabbed it, told Brandon “Stay here! I mean it!” and went running toward the scene of the impact.
She did not see it right away, did not understand. Her eyes saw only the strange blank stares upon the faces of those who crawled through the shattered windows or emerged from the door that had sprung open at the instant of the crash. She saw the blood and the torn clothes and the jagged bone sticking out from the remnants of severed limbs and she wanted only to follow her heart and help ease the agony of such terrible injuries. By the time she heard the snarling and saw the vacancy in the eyes and realized that all who had been aboard the bus were now Empty Ones, she was already too close.
Brandon, who had done as told and stayed put, understood before Danielle did. He did not run to her, for he was too scared and too smart to do such a thing, but he did call out to her, tried to issue a warning before he lost the only person he had left in the world to watch over him.
“Danielle … they’re zombies!”
She heard him, but they were coming too fast, too furiously. She dropped the first aid kit and the cheap plastic box split open as it struck the hard tar of the rural road, spilling Band-Aids and gauze rolls as it broke. At least a dozen of the Empty Ones had already come from the bus and Danielle almost froze, but she forced herself to stay in motion, tried to turn away and run, hoping the hollowness in her attackers’ eyes was a sign that they were mindless and clumsy, inept at pursuit.
They were faster than she thought. She felt a wet hand, blood-covered, grab her by the wrist; she was spun around to confront a foul breathed, Sphinx-faced man whose nose had been bitten off leaving two gaping, jagged nostrils flat against the center of his face. She brought a hand up and slammed it, closed-fisted, against the side of the Empty One’s head. Mercifully, it released its grip on her arm. She tried again to run, was grabbed once more and thrown to the ground, the wind knocked out of her harshly, suddenly. One of them fell on top of her, groping, clawing, teeth coming closer to her neck. She tried to hit it, tried to struggle free. She could see from where she lay, that more were coming, at least three walking toward where she was pinned down. She thought it was over and she worried about Brandon.
If she heard the car coming, she was not aware of it. She certainly did not see it. But it came and it arrived at a speed that was probably illegal on any highway in any state and it took out the three approaching Empty Ones in one splattering shot. They burst like extremely ripe melons as it hit, tossing them aside and throwing them into the air as heads and limbs exploded in all directions. Danielle may not have heard the car coming, but she certainly heard it hit. The next thing she heard was the screeching of the brakes as the new arrival came to an abrupt halt. A part of her mind wondered what was happening, but most of her thoughts concerned the mouth of the Empty One who still held her to the ground and was inches away, despite her struggling with all her strength, from tearing into her.
The car door opened and Douglas Clancy stepped out. He had no choice but to stop as the bodies his car had just destroyed left a mess on the windshield that no amount of wiper fluid could hope to clear. But he’d had to hit them; he couldn’t just drive by and allow a woman to be taken by her attackers, and he saw the little boy too, knew the child would be next. Still well over an hour from Chicago, Doug had found some of what his morbid curiosity had sought. As he stepped out of the car, he grabbed the heavy, red metal toolbox that sat on the passenger seat in one hand, a long flathead screwdriver in the other. As Doug strode toward where the woman was about to be torn by zombie teeth, he felt his shadow-self reaching up to take control. Now, for the first time in his life, Doug allowed it to happen.
It was as if all the chains had broken, all constrictions were no more. Conscience vanished and Douglas Clancy felt stronger, more alive, and more real. He felt as if he had been reborn, and the resurrected had no mercy.
He ran and lifted the toolbox high as he moved. He reached the spot where the woman was trapped and he brought the toolbox down hard on the head of the Empty One and relished the sound and feeling of the skull caving in under the weight and the impact. The Empty One fell aside, truly dead now.
“Can you run?” Doug shouted.
“Yes,” Danielle said, stunned by the sudden save.
“Then run!”
She got up and ran in the direction of the boy who waited by the car across the road. Doug turned his eyes back to the things coming from the crashed bus. More of them rushed at him. He was ready for them, feeling like he had never felt before, feeling as if thought and action were one and the same; free of any potential remorse, lusting for violence, Doug had no hesitation. Machines of flesh and bone and nerve and muscle like those he had so long been fascinated by and longed to take apart surrounded him. But these were rabid, soulless versions of such machinery and no moral code held him back from doing the damage he so wished to inflict. They came at him and he reacted.
The toolbox splintered bone and the screwdriver, guided by his hand, sliced through flesh, destroyed eyes, even slid upward through shattered eye sockets to touch the brains of the semi-dead and disrupt the electrical communications that controlled the movements and instincts. He tore them to pieces and they did not touch him despite their lust and clawing and thrashing. Everything seemed to slow down and Doug spilled blood and shredded skin with a joyful abandon he had not known before that moment of war.
Those who were near him now lay upon the ground, still and lifeless and utterly dead. From the bus came the sounds of more Empty Ones emerging. Too many would come now, Doug knew, and he would be overwhelmed. He thought, still with his shadow-self in command. He looked at his car. It had spun when he had slammed on the brakes and it now faced the crashed bus. Lightning ideas flashed like ethereal blueprints through his mind. He ran to the car, the door still open and the engine still humming. He reached in, put the car in drive, and threw the heavy toolbox down onto the accelerator pedal. He stood and watched as his car shot forward, slammed into the bus, and both vehicles erupted in a huge ball of fire and smoke and burning flesh as the Empty Ones were cooked in one instant of manmade hellfire.
A few pieces of debris flew into the air but mercifully missed any of the three living human beings present. Danielle and Brandon watched in awe, feeling the intense heat from many yards way, coughing a bit from the sudden stench of so much burning.
Douglas Clancy smiled, and then he laughed, a roaring gleeful laugh that was somewhere between the joy of a god and the gloating of a devil. And then a great peace came over him and his shadow-self slithered back to its cave inside Doug’s mind and the young man felt the calm that comes inevitably after the most intense and exhausting of orgasms. He let the screwdriver, its end caked with gore, fall from his hand to the ground, and he turned and began to walk to where the woman stood with the boy.
Sweating, panting, but unharmed, Doug reached them.
“That was awesome!” Brandon shouted; his face aglow with the same look a kid of his age might show after a summer blockbuster. Only the popcorn was missing.
“Thank you,” Danielle said, as awed by the spectacle as Brandon was, and curious and still in shock.
“You’re hurt,” Doug said.
Da
nielle realized he was staring at her shoulder. She reached up and touched it. She felt a spark of pain and her hand came away red with blood. She pulled her shirt back from the wound, twisted her head to see the area as well as she could at such an angle, and recognized a bite, not deep, not bleeding badly, but horrifying just the same. She knew what it would probably mean.
“Shit, shit, shit, fuck, shit!”
She started to walk slowly away, toward the tree line at the edge of the clearing, away from the road. “Come with me,” she said, nodding at Doug. “Brandon, just stay here for a sec … and stay right here. Don’t go near that fire.”
When they were out of the boy’s earshot, Danielle started the talk.
“I’m Danielle.”
“Doug.”
“Where were you headed? Sorry about your car. We were going … someplace safe.”
“You should clean that wound.”
“Why? What would be the point? Listen, take the car and take Brandon, please. I’ll give you directions to where I was going. It’s out of the way and I have a friend there who’ll make sure you’re safe. Please, you have to keep Brandon safe.”
“What about you?”
“Part of me wants to ask you to kill me now … but not here, not in front of Brandon. I’ll be one of those things soon now; that’s how it works. Just leave me here. Take the car, take Brandon, and please just keep him safe.”
“How do you know for sure that you’ll change?”
“That’s what happens when people are bitten or scratched by one of those monsters. That’s been all over the news.”
“I’ve seen as much news as you, Danielle, and it’s all been chaos, guessing, nothing definite at all. How do you know that everybody becomes that way if they get bitten? What if you don’t? I can’t just take your car and strand you here … and I have no idea how to take care of a kid. We’ll all go.”
“And what if I do change?”
“Then I’ll kill you. You saw what I just did with that busload of them. Do you think I can’t do one more?”
“Okay,” Danielle agreed, feeling some small hint of hope, but an almost overwhelming amount of fear. “Then I’ll clean my shoulder, and we’ll go. Can you drive for a while? I’m shaking.”
“Sure. Come on.”
Forty-five minutes later, they were many miles north of the site of the bus crash. Doug was driving, Brandon sat in the front and Danielle lay across the back seat, half-asleep but too scared to drift into full slumber, too afraid she wouldn’t wake up human. Having lost the first aid kit in the fight, she had rinsed out the bite with some bottled spring water and covered it the best she could with a piece of cloth ripped from an old T-shirt from her bag. It only hurt a bit, not enough to cause her to dwell on the wound itself, though its potential effects worried her beyond words.
It would still be a while before they got to where they were going. Doug had slowed his driving down a bit, as per Danielle’s request, and Brandon at least seemed to be enjoying the ride, not understanding the dread the two adults felt so heavily.
“Are you really sure this place we’re going to is safe?” Doug asked after a period of silence.
“I’m positive,” Danielle answered. “It’s so isolated that I find it hard to believe those mindless things, no matter how much they multiply, could ever find their way there.”
“Good,” Doug nodded. “If that’s the case, we’re making a stop on the way. There’s someone else I really want to keep safe.”
Chapter 13
Kacey was in tears for a good three hours before she pulled herself together. She called herself stupid about a thousand times and finally resolved to put Doug out of her mind. She went into the shower for the second time that day and stayed there for an eternity, until the hot water ran out and the cold shocked her back to reality. Afternoon had arrived and she decided to report to work at the Mirage early, hoping being around people would distract her enough to dull the pain of Doug’s abrupt withdrawal.
She got dressed and muttered a few choice profanities as she fumbled for the keys she had carelessly dropped when she had come home crying. She found them under the bed beside a flip-flop and grabbed her bag and apron and hurried out the door. The radio’s volume was cranked up almost intolerably high as she drove to the center of town; the louder the music, the more distant her thoughts seemed to be, so the volume worked anesthetically.
“Can I turn the news on?” Doug asked after they had been riding for an hour. “I need to know.”
“Yeah,” Danielle said drowsily from the back seat.
“How do you feel?” Doug asked before activating the radio.
“So far,” Danielle answered, “I think I’m okay.”
Doug pressed the ON button and scrolled until a reporter’s voice came through.
“No one is being allowed to leave Chicago as of this hour. The death toll has still not been revealed by authorities. But there is one glimmer of hope to come out of Chicago so far. Some are calling it a miracle, while others describe it as a scientific or medical mystery. One man is known to have been unaffected by the bite of one of those infected by the so-called Chicago Zombie Plague. Morris Lightner, a sixty-six year old auto mechanic from the north side of Chicago was bitten by his nephew, who had been affected by the plague, more than twelve hours ago. Mr. Lightner is the first person known to have avoided contamination. One of our reporters interviewed Lightner an hour ago. The fortunate mechanic said to our correspondent, “I guess I’m just lucky … or maybe the Lord is on my side. You know, they told me liver cancer would do me in five years ago, but I’m still around. Now this happened and I think I’m gonna be all right. I’m just counting my blessings and smiling.”
Doug switched off the radio. “See, Danielle? Maybe it is possible. And that’s the one they know about. How many more are okay after being attacked?”
Steve Klein had walked away from the conference room and found a small janitor’s closet. He locked himself in among the mops and buckets and rolls of paper towels and bottles of Windex and embraced the solitude he knew would be painfully temporary. He wanted a drink. His poor city! He had been born in Chicago, grown up in Chicago, sworn to defend Chicago, and done his best to keep that vow through his whole career in law enforcement. Now it was falling apart and he felt more lost than ever before. And it was just getting worse.
The government had a plan now. Klein wasn’t supposed to know about it; Chicago’s cops were to be kept in the dark, but Colonel Peterson had confided in him. The plan was ruthless and coldhearted but, with deep regret, Klein could see how it might be necessary. They were close now to letting no more people leave the city. They had even begun the evacuation of the outlying suburbs and closed the ports on Lake Michigan. Soon the city would become as isolated as a major American city could be. Just beyond the borders of the city, the Army Corps of Engineers would begin erecting high concrete barriers, walls that would seal the fates of all those left inside. The hope—and it seemed strange to associate the concept of hope with such a strategy—was that the virus that was turning men into monsters would burn out by feeding on itself until there was no one left in Chicago. A terrible plan, but he could hardly see any other way. Short of a miracle, his city was doomed.
“Shit,” Kacey said as she looked up to see Doug enter the Mirage Diner. Why did he have to come back? She was just beginning to think of the last twenty-four hours as nothing but a dream, starting to accept the status quo of Bellamy, Illinois again. Now there he was, back in the place where the whole damn thing had begun.
Doug glanced around, saw that the afternoon hours had brought few customers in, and walked over to where Kacey stood with mouth open and order pad a centimeter short of slipping from her fingers.
“It’s not busy,” Doug said. “Can you come outside for a minute? I want to talk to you.”
“Lloyd, I’m taking a break!” Kacey bellowed, and she followed Doug out. “Where’s your car?” she asked, looking around but not
spotting it.
“It blew up,” Doug answered.
“Blew up? How? What the fuck happened?”
“I … used it as a bomb … to kill zombies.”
“Oh,” Kacey said. She was shocked by his words. She felt the weight of the past day’s strange events piling up on her mind, heavy and uncomfortable. “Then how’d you get here?”
“I met some friends.” He waved over to Danielle and Brandon, who stood leaning against the car.
“Oh … I see,” Kacey said. “You’re gone a couple hours and you’re back with your new girlfriend and a kid even! That’s real nice, Doug.”
“Kacey, just shut up, stop jumping to stupid conclusions, and listen to me. Things are getting worse in Chicago and that … disease is spreading. The zombies I ran into and killed were pretty far outside the city, closer to here than to there. I’m going somewhere safe, someplace Danielle—the woman over there—knows about, and I want you to come with us.”
“I can’t just pack up and leave,” she said. “I have a job and parents and … stuff.”
“Kacey,” Doug pled his case, “you told me you wanted to get out of here, wanted to see more than just this town, said—and I remember how you put it—that you hoped I’d be your own personal twister and whirl you off to someplace more colorful. Now’s your chance, Kacey, and it’s not just for fun. It’s for your own good. I guess I … couldn’t forgive myself if I went somewhere safe and something happened to you while I was there. You saved me last night, now I want to return the favor.”
She was silent for a moment, then she smiled, then she suddenly pushed up onto her tiptoes, grabbed him by the back of the head and kissed him hard.
“Fuck it,” she said after their lips parted. “Why shouldn’t I? You know what? I’m not even going back inside … and I’m not going home either. Bellamy can take care of itself.”