by B. T. Wright
“I’m not going to let that happen,” Jake finally said to her. “No one is going to hurt you.”
Amy looked deep into his eyes, searching for comfort. But she didn’t find it. How could she? He was just one man. And no matter his level of skill in combat or otherwise, there was no way he could stop them. Not with the numbers the aliens had. All he could do was try to keep her alive long enough to get to Virginia, where they might actually have some help.
“Amy.” Jess rubbed the back of her head. “Do you have any sense for who, or what, They are?”
The confidence with which Amy responded surprised them all. “I know everything about them now. That’s why they want me dead.”
The words hung in the air like a like a cloud of thick smoke, choking them all into silence. The hairs on the back of Jake’s neck stood on end. Not because he was afraid—that ship had sailed—but because for the first time since he’d watched that crazed man chew on the throat of the little boy on the baseball field four days ago, Jake had hope. If Amy knew everything about them, then they could find a way to fight. And he knew that if there were enough uninfected humans left to put together something remotely formidable, they might just have a fighting chance. Especially if Amy was truly their weakness. What that meant, and how it made the aliens weak, would take some exploring.
Tyler started to ask a question, but Jess asked him to give Amy a while to rest. Jake knew his friend was chomping at the bit to know more, because so was Jake. But Jess was right. Amy had just been through a lot, and she really needed time to get some of her energy back. And they really needed some new clothes. Amy’s white T-shirt was soaked in the blood from her nose. Jake’s was bloodied from the gash on his back, and everyone else was going to smell soon. But on the scale of things that mattered, clothes were about as low on the totem pole as something could get.
Jake took the moment of quiet to check on the dry ice in the bag of Beritrix vials. It seemed as though it was staying cold. All of their food and water was still back on the boat. That was the more immediate concern. Other than staying alive of course. He slid back up from the floorboard and sat in the back seat. He looked out the window. He could see the Ohio River in the distance across the lanes of abandoned cars. He’d made this drive thousands of times when he was a kid. His parents would take him and his brother to visit their grandparents in South Shore, Kentucky. A tiny little town only twenty minutes in the opposite direction they were going.
They were headed toward Ashland. It wasn’t a large town, but with the metro population, there would be hundreds of thousands of potential infected. There was a pit in his stomach. Not because of the situation they were in, but because he was thinking about his childhood. Driving down that road brought hundreds of memories down on him, most of which hadn’t touched his senses in over a decade. After moving away from Ashland, Jake had managed to compartmentalize his childhood. He’d been able to almost forget about it altogether––not because it was bad––because it was so great. Thinking about his life with Colt and his parents made him sick with longing when he thought about it. But a longing feeling was almost an escape from the desperate feelings the last few days had brought.
He wanted so badly to go by the neighboring town of Flatwoods—to the house he’d grown up in. But it was out of the question. Life wouldn’t be yielding any time for side-trips down memory lane. It might not yield much time at all, for that matter. The horrors they would face in the days ahead, if they made it that long, would be unimaginable, and Jake knew it. Just like every day since society had collapsed under an alien virus had been. It was hard to fathom how it could get worse, but one glance over at Jess behind him told him it still could. He could lose her.
Jess had her eyes closed and her head leaned back on the headrest. Even through all the horrible things they’d just seen, nearly dying more than once, she still looked beautiful. And it wasn’t just that she was fit and gorgeous. Jake saw much more than that when he looked at her. Though this new world was as unromantic as it could get, he still thought romantic thoughts when he looked at her. He saw her in a white dress, laughing as a photographer snapped pictures and Jake smashed cake in her face. He saw her with a round belly, beaming with pride as she carried their child. And he saw her old and gray, rocking away on the front porch, watching their horses frolic in the green grass-covered field.
All of those romantic thoughts were gone in an instant when his mind stuck on the thought of horses. His brain froze on the fact that not only were there no horses around at the moment, but he hadn’t seen an animal, not one, since this entire thing broke loose. And before he knew it, his thoughts were vocalized.
“Where the hell are all the animals?”
13
Karen and John One had almost completely stopped screaming while they struggled to break free of the restraints on their chairs. But as Emily hovered over Elaine, trying to wake her up, she noticed that big John Two was more than making up for it. His rage had gone up another level after taking a chunk out of Elaine’s arm. One strap was broken, and he had begun tearing away at the one holding down his right wrist.
“David, we have to get out of here! John Two is going to break those restraints!”
The veins in John Two’s neck were bulging, and so were his eyes. Emily couldn’t help but think of the Incredible Hulk when he was turning from Bruce Banner into the big green monster. And she couldn’t help but feel like John Two would be able to bust those restraints the same way the Hulk would, too.
“The restraints will hold. We need to sedate him!” David answered.
“What?” Emily couldn’t believe what he was saying. The complete lack of common sense in his words threw her off entirely. “He’s gonna break those restraints. We have to leave this room!”
Emily watched David look back over his shoulder at John Two. He had turned just in time to watch him pull his right arm free of the second restraint. A bolt of fear flashed through Emily. If he managed to get his feet free, the two of them were dead.
John Two turned toward them, and with one kick of his right leg, the strap broke free. It occurred to Emily that they had made a massive mistake the way they had gone about the injections. But at the same time, she realized that it might not have been a coincidence. Maybe the docile way the three infected had been acting was just that . . . an act. Maybe all this time, the aliens had been biding their time, waiting to pounce when their captors’ guards were down. If they had been hostile the entire time they’d been prisoners, more stringent measures would have been taken to secure them. Something more than a few leather straps and a chair fastened to the concrete floor. Either way, it didn’t matter. Emily, Elaine, and David were all dead if they didn’t move, right then.
“Get the door!” David shouted. He put both hands inside the back collar of Elaine’s lab coat and began to turn her so he could pull her through the door. Emily jumped up, and as soon as her hand hit the handle of the door, John Two snapped the restraint on his left ankle and lunged at David. It happened so fast that by the time Emily had opened the door and stepped through, John Two had bitten down on David’s neck and blood sprayed all the way to the windowed wall.
Emily screamed. It was pure reflex. She had never seen something like that in all her life. A man so easily snatched up and in one chomp, dead. David hadn’t even had time to scream. Emily’s second reflex was more productive than the first. She ran four steps back inside the room and grabbed the first thing on Elaine she could, her ponytail, and pulled it with her left hand as she managed a grip on the right shoulder of her lab coat. As soon as she began to pull, David’s lifeless body dropped in a thud to the floor, and when Emily looked up, her eyes locked onto John Two’s alien-black-eyes. He was ready for his next kill.
With a surge of fear-ridden adrenaline, Emily managed to pull Elaine all the way to the opening of the door, but it wasn’t going to be enough. John Two rushed forward. He was going to take Elaine, and there wasn’t a damn thing Emily could
do about it. The infected monster reached down and wrapped his oversized hand around Elaine’s right leg. All Emily could do was scream. John Two lifted Elaine up like a rag doll and as he went to sink his teeth into her thigh, his head exploded.
Bang! Bang-Bang!
Three more shots followed into the alien’s chest. Emily rushed forward when Elaine dropped to the ground and pulled her out of the room. Two armed men moved into the lab where John Two was now a lifeless body on the floor. Emily laid Elaine on her back in the hallway, but she was distracted by the men inside.
“What do we do?” one said to the other. Both of their pistols were aimed toward Karen and John One in the chairs.
“I think we shoot them. If they break loose, it could be a disaster.”
“No!” Emily shouted. “You can’t!” She rushed into the room. “Put your guns down. They are sedated. Don’t shoot!”
Both men looked at Emily, then looked down at David’s bloody body. Neither of them put his gun away. The moment was so intense that Emily’s heart was pounding. She was drenched with sweat and shaking all the way to her toes. Between the pressure of injecting the rabid infected, Elaine getting bit in the arm, David’s slaughter, and these men about to shoot dead the only viable options they had to possibly find a cure, she was completely overwhelmed.
“Ma’am, are you okay?”
The room began to spin. Karen and John One had become completely still. “Please,” Emily managed. “Please don’t shoot . . .”
Emily tried to take a deep breath, but one wouldn’t come. The last thing she saw was one of the armed men rushing over and grabbing her by the arms. Then everything went dark.
14
“Animals?” Tyler said from the driver’s seat. “We have an army of alien humans chasing after us, communicating through the heavens, with the one goal of killing us all, and you’re worried about animals?”
Amy instantly began to cry.
“Nice,” Jess said. “Mister Sensitive.”
Jake watched Tyler roll his eyes in the rearview mirror.
Jess consoled Amy. “It’s all right. None of this is your fault.”
Her blue eyes were red with tears, and her face flushed. “Yes it is,” she cried. “It’s all my fault.” She looked at Jake. “If you hadn’t saved me from those things outside your house a couple days ago, none of you would be in this situation.”
“Bullshit.”
Jake’s response caught Jess off guard. Jess eyed him with a confused stare. He knew she was worried he’d say something to make things worse. He had never been much of a sensitive man. That was especially true when it came to kids, because he was never around them. Amy looked on, inquisitive.
Jake continued after a short pause. “Amy, if it wasn’t for you, every single one of us would be dead. Regardless of if you were with us or not, we would still be trying to make it to Virginia. But if you weren’t with us, what happened back there, they would have killed us. All of us. You are the only reason we are even in this truck having this conversation. You stopped them from killing us all.”
Jess’s face was half bewildered, half infatuated. Jake was sure she was surprised he hadn’t fumbled that up. Because he too was surprised he hadn’t. He could tell it had hit home with Amy as well by the half smile she was wearing on her face.
Amy sniffled once and let out a sigh. “You mean it?”
“I mean it.”
He held her eyes for a few seconds. He had finally given her the comfort she’d been searching for over the last few days. And then, just like every other time he’d tried to talk feelings with a woman, something went wrong. Amy began to cry.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Jess asked.
Amy glanced at Jess, but looked back at Jake. “Jake? What is wrong with me?”
Before he could answer, Amy wriggled across the seat and buried her head in his chest. She began to sob. He looked up at Jess and watched as she began to cry as well. If either of them were hoping for a round two of comforting words from Jake’s mouth, they were going to have to wait a while. He had nothing left in the tank. But he did manage, this time without a nudge from Jess, to wrap his arms around Amy and just let her cry. He didn’t ruin the moment with words. He knew the only way it could go after his last statement was downhill.
By the grace of God, Jess spoke for him. “Nothing is wrong with you, Amy. Nothing at all.”
Amy looked up. “Then why is this happening to me? Why can I understand them? Why do they want me? Why do they keep calling me Element Zero? Am I one of them?”
No one in the SUV had an answer for any of those questions. Not one. And Amy knew it; that was why she was so upset. Jake had been wondering all of those same things as well, along with several others. Was Amy one of the aliens? How far back did this thing go? Had the aliens been monitoring humans since the day she was born? Was this how they knew they could survive here on earth? Was watching her and living through her how they came to know they wanted to take earth over?
Jake was a man who was used to getting answers, so not being able to get them had begun to drive him mad. That was why he’d pushed all of those questions aside for the last two days and focused on something he could control—their attempt at making it to Virginia. But now that was completely out of his control as well. After what happened by the dam—after Amy said that all the aliens now knew where they were—any plan they had was rendered useless . . . wasn’t it?
Jess finally ended the silence. “I don’t know these things, Amy. But you do, don’t you?”
Jake’s entire process of doubt shifted. How had he not thought of that? Amy just said she knew everything about them now. Wouldn’t that mean she knew the answers to those questions too? He waited for Amy to respond.
“I—I . . . I think so.”
“Didn’t you just say you knew everything about them?” Tyler snapped from the front seat.
“Relax, Ty,” Jake snapped back. “You think this is easy for her?” Then to Amy, “What do you mean, Amy?”
She thought about it for a moment. “I mean, you know how sometimes when you are talking about movies with someone, and someone asked who starred in the movie, and you can see the actor’s face, but can’t quite recall his name?”
“That happens to me all the time,” Jess said. “So frustrating.”
“It’s like that with this. Like I can see those answers, but I can’t explain them . . . even to myself.”
Amy seemed much older to Jake than thirteen as she tried to explain what she was going through. He couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling. To know she was quite possibly the only person in the world that had some sort of connection to what was happening had to be scary as hell.
“Listen,” Jake said. “Let’s just take a break from this. We’ll be in Russell in just a few minutes. The town that butts up to Ashland. There is a grocery store there. We can get some food, some water, and then we can all figure this thing out together. That sound okay?”
Jake didn’t know where this sensitive side was coming from. But judging by the look on Jess’s face, he was doing okay at it.
Amy nodded.
Bryan spoke up. “You think that’s a good idea, Jake? I realize we need food and water, but so close to where these aliens caught a glimpse of our location?”
“You’re right, it might be too soon. But I know that shopping center like the back of my hand. We can pull up around back and get in and out in just a few minutes.”
“If you say so.”
“Look, this isn’t a dictatorship. If you think we should do something else, say so.”
“No . . .” Bryan softened his tone. “You’re right. You know the area. That gives us an advantage over anywhere else we might stop.”
“So,” Tyler said. “Back to the animals. Now that you mention it. I haven’t seen any. Not a single one.”
“Not even a bird?” Bryan said.
“I mean, my attention has been elsewhere for the last few days, but I
can’t remember so much as a fly. Can you?” Tyler looked in the rearview searching for eyes. “Any of you?”
“I can’t say I have,” Jess said.
“So what does that mean?” Jake asked. “Amy, you have any ideas?”
“Maybe they’re scared?” she said. “Maybe their instincts were better than ours, and they went into hiding.”
It was as plausible as anything Jake could think of.
“Maybe so.” Jake found Tyler’s eyes. “We’re almost to the grocery store. I’ll tell you when to turn. It’s right up here at the Taco Bell.”
“Good lord I would kill for a Cheesy Gordita Crunch right about now,” Tyler said.
“You’re more likely to get killed while you are trying to get one these days, my man,” Bryan laughed. “Whole new world, brother.”
Tyler took the turn and everyone was quiet. The prospect of food gave them visions of grandeur. The definition of luxuries had changed in a hurry. A can of soup was worth a thousand times more than a diamond ring now.
15
Jake had Tyler pull the SUV around the back of the shopping center. Kroger was the anchor store in that section of the center. It was your typical suburban shopping area: A big box grocery store, a tanning salon, a Chinese restaurant, a nail salon, and the Dollar Store. At the other end of the parking lot there was a Lowe’s. Across the street was a Shoe Sensation and a Hobby Lobby, and it still looked the same as when he last was there with the exception of a few restaurant changes. There wasn’t much in the small town, but in a family-oriented place where time with loved one’s was the top priority, Jake always figured not having a lot to do wasn’t as big a deal.
TW followed around to the back side of the store in his SUV. Jake knew it would be smarter to go around back because there was only a wooded area behind the shopping center. He remembered roller blading back there as a kid, doing jumps off the ramp used by the delivery trucks. Before he exited his SUV, he told everyone but Bryan to stay in the car. And he told Bryan to shut the door as if a sleeping baby were inside. They needed to take every precaution to keep from alerting the aliens. Jake made it over to TW’s SUV and was able to tell him, Mark, and Jason to keep quiet as well.