The BIG Horror Pack 2

by Iain Rob Wright

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered softly to her.

  She smiled and went still.

  Nick looked back at the truck and shouted. “Go! Get the hell out of here. More will be coming and you won’t get another chance to leave.”

  They all stared sadly for a moment, but then Anna got the truck moving. She took it slowly at first, but eventually sped up and bounded into the woods. The sound of the engine was the last thing to go, leaving only silence in its wake.

  Nick sat down on the grass alone. He was going to miss them all, but it wouldn’t be for very much longer. Soon he would be back with Deana and James. There would be nothing to regret.

  He lay back on the grass and gazed up at the stars, wondering what Heaven was like, glad to finally be leaving Hell.

  Epilogue

  Nick had needed to work fast to get all of the animals free in time. A moment longer and the dead would have swarmed. They had finally made it up from the surrounding areas and taken the park for themselves.

  The various animals had run wild as soon as Nick had let them loose, but the undead ignored them. It was as if anything other than a human being was invisible to them. Hopefully, the animals would find a way to survive. The world was there’s now to reclaim. At the very least the world would now at least be better for the animals; no more humans to round them up to slaughter in their droves.

  Once he’d finished opening up all the enclosures, Nick had climbed up onto the roof of the orang-utan exhibit where the dead could not reach him. Now he sat at ease, watching the dead men and women wander around aimlessly while he waited for the end.

  He could already feel himself changing. A deep exhaustion had fallen over him and his vision had taken on an unnatural orange tint. His internal organs felt heavy in his chest and abdomen, as if all movement inside of him had ground to a halt. He felt dead already, and that his mind was merely slow in catching on.

  Above all else, Nick felt at peace. He could finally stop running, stop fighting, stop surviving. Truly, his life had ended the moment James had died in his arms. Now he could finally move on to whatever fate had lined up for him next.

  Thud!

  Nick turned around. He didn’t flinch or even worry. Nothing could frighten him anymore. Fear only existed with a possibility of loss. He’d already lost all he could.

  Sitting on the roof behind him was Lily. She’d leapt from a nearby tree and hooted at him now as she shuffled closer. Nick saw that she held a carrot in her hand, which looked suspiciously like the ones he’d seen at the greenhouse.

  Lily reached out and offered the vegetable to him, but he laughed and shook his head. “No, thanks, Lily. It would just be wasted on me. You eat it.”

  As if understanding, Lily sat beside him and took a hefty bite out of the carrot. Nick reached over and patted her fur.

  “You can’t stay here for long, Lily. I’m sick, and eventually I’ll become dangerous. I think you understand that. For now, though, I’m glad you’re here. I hope you make it out of this mess better than me.”

  There was silence for a while, Nick staring at the horizon. The sun was beginning to rise. It was his last morning on Earth and he was feeling pretty damn good. The very notion was absurd, but it was true. Death wasn’t so bad when you embraced it. It was a relief to see the end in sight. The line at the end of a marathon.

  “You think they’ll be okay out there?” he asked Lily. He was thinking about Eve and the others. Their chances of finding safety seemed pretty slim, but at least there was a chance. “You think they’ll keep on surviving?”

  Lily hooted.

  “Yeah. That’s what I think, too.”

  With a smile on his face, Nick lay back and watched the sun rise. A few minutes later, he rose with it.

  The End

  Path of Infection

  SEA SICK

  Daniel Houser staggered into Southampton General hospital and found his way to reception. A weary-looking nurse peered back at him from behind an ancient CRT monitor. Her spectacles were lopsided, which may have been because her ears were not level.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, quite obviously forcing a smile.

  Houser cleared the fiery gravel from the back of his throat and nodded. “Something’s wrong with me. I think I have the flu or something…but worse.”

  The nurse gave him a curious look, as if silently pitying him for assuming he could possibly make a correct diagnosis of himself. “Okay,” she said. “Fill out this form and I will have someone come see you shortly.”

  Houser took the form and selected a seat in the waiting area. He was glad to see that the form was only a single page long, but even the thought of filling that out felt like too much. He was so…weak.

  What on earth did I catch?

  He plucked the stubby pencil from the top of the clipboard and began filling out the questionnaire. His hand was frustratingly unsteady.

  NAME: Daniel Houser

  DOB: 05/12/198

  RACE: White British

  Houser filled out the rest of his details, including his parent’s address where he could be reached, and then got down to a box marked: SYMPTOMS. With blunt pencil marks, he wrote: headache, blocked nose, sneezing, itchy eyes, aching joints, stomach pain, throbbing ears, dizziness…

  Before Houser had chance to write down more of his symptoms, a slender woman in a doctor’s coat entered the waiting room. He struggled to his feet to catch up to her before she left. She turned and smiled when she spotted him approaching. The name on her badge read: Clark.

  “Hello, sir. Can I help you?”

  “I…I need to see someone.”

  The doctor looked past Houser, at the chairs behind him. No one else seemed to be waiting for the moment, so she nodded. “Okay. Is that your information?”

  Houser handed over the clipboard.

  “Come this way.” Dr Clark led Houser into a nearby examination room. She pointed to a treatment table in the centre. It was lined with recycled paper from a roller at one end. “Hop on up,” she said. “Let’s take a look at you.”

  Houser failed to get himself up the few inches onto the table and it took him a second attempt to climb up onto its surface.

  So weak.

  The doctor headed over to a cluttered desk in the corner of the room and examined the clipboard he had given to her. After a few moments of checking his information, she turned to face him and tutted. “We are feeling quite under the weather, aren’t we?”

  Houser nodded. “I’ve never felt this bad in my life. I feel rough as hell.”

  “Well, my name is Dr Clark. Let me see what I can do for you.” She pulled the stethoscope from around her neck and placed the receiver against his chest by going up under his t-shirt. “Hmm,” she said. “Your heart rate is a little fast. Have you taken any drugs or alcohol in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “I…smoked a bit of weed to take the edge of my headache.”

  She nodded. The admission of guilt was obviously uninteresting in her line of work. “That could explain it,” she said. “When did you start feeling ill?”

  “Couple days ago. Some of the guys I work with started feeling bad, too. We assumed it was a bug going round. You get sick a lot living on a boat.”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow at him. “You live on a boat?”

  Houser nodded. “I’m a merchant sailor. We just docked in Southampton after a salvage operation in the Med.”

  “You…you weren’t involved with that cruise liner, were you?”

  Houser nodded. “Yeah, we were one of the boats involved in the rescue attempts. There was no one to be saved, though. We spent a day running nets and picking up debris, but eventually we were ordered back to the mainland. It was all a bit strange, if you ask me.”

  Dr Clark was shaking her head and pursing her lips. “It’s terrible what happened there. More than a thousand dead, I heard.”

  Houser nodded. “Nobody has any idea what happened. They’re saying it could have been a
terrorist attack. A suicide bomber in the engine compartment or something.”

  “I don’t understand this world sometimes,” said the doctor. Then she seemed to refocus on what she was doing. “So, you say you and your colleagues started feeling ill back on the boat, in the Mediterranean Sea? Were you docked anywhere prior to that?”

  Houser shook his head. “We made a drop off in Civitavecchia the day before, but no one left the boat. We just dropped off some shipping containers with the crane and then set off again. I suppose one of the officers could have stepped off briefly to fill out some paperwork.”

  Dr Clark nodded her head and seemed to run a few things through her mind. “Well, there hasn’t been any health warnings. It’s probably safe to assume that you just have a nasty case of flu. Not a lot I can do for you, unfortunately. I’ll give you something to help the headaches, but you just need to get a lot of rest. You’ll feel better in a day or two.”

  Houser nodded weakly. “I really hope so. I can’t take much more of this.”

  The doctor patted him on the back. “Just get some sleep and try your best to battle through it. I’ll be back in a minute with your prescription.”

  “Thank you, Dr Clark.”

  Houser waited on the table while the doctor headed out of the room. He was relieved to hear he just had the flu. He’d suspected as much, but had also been supressing a gloomy concern that it could be something worse. He knew flu was bad, but he didn’t know it could be this bad.

  Feels like my whole body is turning to lead.

  Houser felt his nose run for the hundredth time that day and wiped at it with back of his hand. He blinked his eyes a couple of times as they began to itch.

  Dr Clark re-entered the room with a prescription in her hand.

  “Take this to the pharmacy on the ground floor and-” Her words trailed off. She gawped at him.

  “What?” Houser said. “What is it?”

  “Your nose!” She hurried over to the corner desk and pulled some tissues from a box in the drawer. She handed several to him in a clump.

  Houser took the tissues from her and noticed the blood which covered the back of his hand. It was almost black it was so dark. “Wh-what the hell?”

  A wracking cough exploded in his chest and blood spurted from his mouth, covering Dr Clark from her face all the way down the front of her jacket. She seemed shocked by it, but wasted no time in leaning him forward and placing the stethoscope against his back.

  Houser continued to hack and splutter and more blood leaked from his mouth and nose. Through the sounds of his own agonised heaving, he heard the doctor’s panicked voice.

  “You’re lungs are filling with blood,” she said frantically. “We need to get you into surgery.”

  Houser tried to catch his breath and make sense of the situation, but his mind was a raging blur. Surgery? But I just have the flu.

  Then he collapsed off the table and landed on the floor.

  DOCTORS AND NURSES

  Dr Clark sat in her office and examined the patient’s preliminary test results. Daniel Houser was currently in surgery where efforts were being made to control his internal bleeding. She couldn’t deny that she was worried. The blood coming from the patient’s mouth had been thick and arterial. Most of it still stained her coat.

  From some sort of internal injury or…

  I don’t know. Something crazy, like Ebola or Lassa?

  That’s insane. If the patient had just gotten back from third-world Africa, perhaps there could be the remotest chance of him having haemorrhagic fever, but he said he’d just gotten back from the Mediterranean. The worst he should have been exposed to there is sunstroke and dysentery.

  She had a growing desire to contact the disease control unit which covered her district, but she forced herself to hold off until the blood results came back. Medicine had to be practised on a factual basis. She wasn’t about to make assumptions with so little information at her fingertips.

  He could be a nut, for all I know. Swallowed a bunch of nails as a way to kill himself. God knows it’s more likely than someone bringing Ebola into the hospital.

  There was a knock at the door and she immediately said, “Come in.”

  It was one of the nurses from diagnostics. She was carrying a folder.

  “Do you have the haematology reports?” Dr Clark asked the woman.

  The nurse handed over the folder. “Just partial results so far. The blood tests seemed to be contaminated by a foreign substance. We’ve compared the markers we could find against the database of diseases, but nothing came up. Dr Besser is getting more samples now and will be working on them as a priority.”

  Dr Clark looked over the blood report that was inside the folder. She scanned the page quickly and located what she was looking for. “It’s not Ebola.”

  “No,” said the nurse. “Nor Lassa, or anything similar.”

  Dr Clark sighed. “Then, if not for this foreign body you mentioned, I would assume internal injuries. Maybe the first blood sample was compromised. Maybe Dr Besser will find the new tests to be normal.”

  “Maybe so,” said the nurse. “I will let you know if anything changes, Doctor.”

  “Thank you, nurse.”

  The nurse departed. Dr Clark continued looking through the blood reports.

  Foreign substance? What on earth could that be? Did he poison himself with something?

  She let her eyes scan the numerous lines of data, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing seemed to jump out at her, until…

  Silicon?

  Why on Earth would there be silicon in Houser’s blood?

  She examined the rest of the results and located several unknown proteins. There was a chance that those proteins belonged to some kind of virus. She wouldn’t know for sure until Besser did a full workup.

  But the silicon…

  Silicon was a substance used mainly in electronics, and also for some cosmetic procedures. Daniel Houser did not seem like the type to get breast implants.

  So what? He has computer chips running through his blood stream?

  Dr Clark knew experiments were being done that would produce machines and computers made from silicon that would be small enough to exist on a cellular level, but the technology was still in its infancy. Even getting something down to the size of a pinhead was a vast challenge to most of the scientific community. Nanotechnology was still closer to a pipedream than a reality, but for some reason it was the thing she was thinking of now.

  Aren’t they looking at ways of bonding silicon-based machines with bacteria? Trying to find a way to combine biology with technology to make self-replicating, self-sustaining robots that can fight cancer cells and seek out infection?

  Science fiction.

  But Daniel Houser had silicon in his veins.

  Dr Clark scratched her chin. She wasn’t about to believe in nanotechnology just yet, but the presence of silicon in her patient’s bloodstream, along with the unknown proteins, made her wonder if it was something manmade that had caused his condition. The patient had mentioned a possible terrorist attack, after all. It might be time to get someone else involved. She picked up the phone on her desk and dialled in the number for Disease Control.

  Someone on the other end answered immediately.

  “Oh, hello,” said Dr Clark. “My name is Dr Clark. I am calling from Southampton General Hospital. I have a patient that was complaining of flu-like symptoms about ninety minutes ago, but his condition has suddenly progressed to internal haemorrhaging.”

  “Did you run blood tests?”

  “Yes. Negative for Ebola and other conditions that would present similar symptoms.”

  “Then what is your primary concern?”

  “I found silicon in his blood.”

  “Silicon?”

  “And some unknown proteins.”

  The voice on the other end of the line suddenly seemed more interested. “Has the patient been exposed to anything?”

&n
bsp; Dr Clark thought about things and then nodded into the phone as she replied. “The patient is a merchant sailor. He was involved with the rescue operation for that cruise ship which sunk in the Mediterranean last week. He also said that some of his colleagues-”

  “Isolate the patient and anybody who has been in contact with them.”

  Dr Clark rocked back in her chair as if the person on the other end of the phone had punched her. “What?”

  “We’ll have a team on site within the hour. You must enforce emergency protocols immediately.”

  “What is going on? Who is this man? What does he have?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the phone, then… “Dr Clark, there have been dozens of cases in the last few hours of people who were involved in the Mediterranean clean up operation becoming very sick. We have quarantined several ships already and the French Navy have currently closed all shipping lanes in the area. Your patient must have fallen under the radar somehow.”

  Dr Clark felt the blood leaving her cheeks and making her face pale. “What does he have?”

  “We…don’t know. The attack on the cruise ship may have been down to terrorists. They may have released something.”

  Dr Clark’s mouth fell open. “I…”

  “Just isolate that patient, Doctor, and stand by for our arrival.”

  The line went dead. Dr Clark just sat there, holding the phone against her ear in stunned silence.

  Then she leapt to her feet and raced for the door. She had to get the situation contained. God only knew what Daniel Houser had brought into the hospital, but she had a duty to contain it. She quickly headed towards the emergency department and made her way to the operating theatre.

  We need to quarantine the patient.

  Oh God, oh God. What does he have? His blood is all over me.

  Houser was still in surgery. Dr Clark pushed through the heavy double doors and entered the theatre. The attending surgeon, Dr Bryce, looked up at her from behind his mask. Both of his gloved hands were covered in blood.