by Tim Curran
“Boy, am I glad to see you guys,” Terra told the half-dozen soldiers watching him through the goggle visors of their protective hoods.
“Are you?”
The soldiers wore no insignia, so Terra didn’t know if he was talking to a private or a major. Didn’t matter, he figured.
“Johnson-12,” he said, saluting. “Bravo Company, 1st Platoon.” He swept his hand towards his trio of new-found friends. “These ones are okay. Norms.”
The soldiers stood there with weapons raised. They muttered amongst themselves.
“Where’s your hood, Johnson?” another said. “You know the rules.”
And he did: anyone without full protective gear was to be considered infected, as was anyone found within the city limits of Cut River.
He knew that.
He hadn’t forgotten.
He couldn’t help it if his hand casually (or not so casually) drifted up to his face and then slid down again. “Creepers tore it off me,” he explained. “But I drilled ‘em all. I’m okay.”
“Are you?” the first one said again.
“Course I am.”
Lou felt like he was stuck in a maze.
A maze full of crazies—some that way by accident, others by training.
He said, “We’re just survivors. That’s all. We’re not foaming at the mouth. Our eyes aren’t lit up like Jack-o-‘lanterns. So cut the shit for chrissake. We’re taxpayers. Now do your duty and get our asses out of here.”
Johnny watched them. He expected the worst and kept his mouth shut.
Lou lowered Lisa to the floor because she was getting too goddamned heavy to lug around with his busted-up shoulder and aching leg. She started to tremble and gag, writhing around like she was about to swallow her tongue.
They were all watching her then.
How thin she was.
The sweat beaded on her face.
The bubble of snot in her left nostril.
They were watching her and although nobody could see their eyes behind the visors, it was obvious what was going through their little minds.
“What about her?” one of them said stepping forward. He carried a H & K submachine gun.
The others inched forward. Including the guy with the flamethrower strapped to his back.
“She’s just sick,” Lou said.
“She looks it.”
Terra shook his head. “No, she ain’t got it, man. She’s an addict. She’s strung out.”
Another of the soldiers said, “The town’s burning. It’ll get here soon enough. We should be gone by then.”
“So let’s go,” Lou said.
“We will. Soon enough.”
He whispered something to the other soldiers.
They drew their weapons and formed a defensive perimeter.
“Here’s how it works,” the soldier said. “You and these other two drop your weapons and step away from the girl. She’s infected. She’s gotta go.”
Johnny’s hands tensed on his rifle. “I don’t think so.”
“Then you all burn.”
A tongue of flame licked out of the end of the flamethrower two or three inches. Just enough so all present could see it was primed and ready to do some damage. The guy carrying it stepped forward.
“She’s not infected,” Terra maintained.
“Don’t tell me my business, soldier. I know infected when I see it.”
Terra turned away and then came back with his M-16, sprayed a volley of rounds into the soldiers chest. He stumbled back, pissing red, and went down.
The other soldiers didn’t move.
Nobody moved.
Except the rabids.
A howling, screeching pack of them came flooding down the corridor, bringing the stink of death with them. There had to be nearly twenty of them. Some running, some hopping like insects, others barrel-crawling on hands and feet.
The soldiers didn’t care about Lisa or the others then.
Terra opened up on them.
Johnny and Lou hit the floor, both trying to cover Lisa. A spout of flame whistled over their heads, singeing Lou’s hair.
The rabids ran right into it.
It barely slowed them down.
A few were thrown into a deranged mania as flames swallowed them up. They ran right into the ranks of the soldiers, throwing themselves madly into the walls, the floors, dancing and jumping and shrieking, looking like flaming puppets with clipped strings.
The soldiers were overwhelmed instantly.
They kept shooting, but it did little good.
Some of the rabids dropped and died, but the main force—many of them lit up like Guy Fawkes effigies—fell on them.
The air was putrid with the stench of scorched flesh and hair, gunpowder and blood. There was smoke and tumbling bodies everywhere. The floor was littered with spent brass.
Terra felt teeth bite into the nape of his neck as he smashed his empty rifle down on the head of a rabid. He wheeled around, got hold of his assailant and flipped him through the air. He slipped through the grasp of the others, shoved a whimpering soldier into their midst, and threw himself down the stairs.
Johnny and Lou dragged Lisa away through an open doorway and into a conference room.
A naked woman decided to come with them.
Her hair was smoking, blasted away from the side of her head.
Lou tried to knock her back with his fist, but she absorbed the punch and took hold of him. Her anemic face darted to bite at his throat and he blocked it, trying to elbow her in the mouth. She bit down on his forearm, her yellow sepulchral eyes blazing with delight. He cried out and managed to throw her back out into the hallway, back into the haze and smoke.
He slammed the door shut after her and instantly fists began to hammer on it.
It began to buckle in its frame.
He locked it almost casually, studying the blood welling from the wound in his forearm. It hurt much worse than his shoulder or leg. He stood there looking at the bite marks, the torn tissues, the blood dripping from them. The snotty mucus all over his skin.
It didn’t matter now. Any of it.
Because he wasn’t getting out alive.
34
Tony Terra stumbled blindly down the stairs, lost in an unreasoning panic.
He was infected.
He could feel the burning wound at the back of his neck. God, yes. The virus, Agent-X, Laughing-fucking-Man, was in him now, too.
He tripped down the last three steps and landed on the body of a dead rabid.
Her head was blown open by gunfire. She was a big fat woman. He pulled himself off her. Fat…no, not fat. Her belly was a huge, hard mound.
She’d been pregnant.
Terra started to weep.
He ran a hand across the hill of her abdomen. Wasn’t there any end to what this shit could do? Even expectant women. My God, my God, my God—
The flesh under his palm undulated with a slow, sudden movement. The baby. The baby was still alive in her.
Terra thought of things he could do, might do in a sane world. But not here, not in this awful, hellish place.
The woman was dead. Her flesh was cold.
But her belly…it was hot, waves of heat emanating from it.
The baby couldn’t possibly be alive.
Her belly began to shudder and palpitate with obscene life; the flesh literally began to squirm with a fluidic motion.
He watched, transfixed with terror.
Her body was rocking back and forth as her progeny raged within, a caged animal.
Terra screamed and jumped to his feet.
He didn’t want to see what might chew and claw its way out.
He ran down the corridor, vaulting the bodies of dead rabids and soldiers alike. He saw a restroom door and piled through it. The door swung closed behind him and he was lost in limitless blackness. His fingers pawed the wall, found the switch. Overhead lights buzzed into life.
There was another body on the floor.
Another dead woman.
Maybe a rabid, maybe just some poor civilian caught by them. Didn’t matter one way or another because she was stone cold dead. Dead as a squashed woodchuck on the interstate. Her skirt was hiked up to her flat belly, nothing on beneath. He refused to speculate what that might mean.
He paid her no mind.
Frantically, he went to the row of sinks. He splashed water on his face, all over his neck. He kept dousing the bite until the skin there began to cool slightly. Then he took a handful of pink disinfectant soap from the dispenser and scrubbed it liberally into the wound. The pain it caused brought tears to his eyes, but he kept it up until the bite was numb. Then he doused it again with water. He repeated the entire process three times.
He let the water continue to run.
He put his face in it. God, it felt so good.
As he splashed water onto his face again and again, he told himself that what he needed here was a plan. Any plan. Somehow, he had to get a hood for his suit and link up with one of the units. If he had a hood, he might be able to pull it off. If not, they wouldn’t even show him the courtesy the soldiers upstairs had—they’d shoot him on sight.
Okay.
Maybe, just maybe he’d be okay.
He stood up, rivulets of water running down his shoulders, his back, making their way into the suit. He was going to survive this. He’d show them all. Then maybe when this was all over with (if it ever was), months from now, he’d tell them he’d been bitten. Maybe. Maybe not.
He looked at his haggard reflection in the mirror.
There was someone standing behind him.
A soldier in a protective suit.
The suit was filthy, soiled with patches of dried blood, soot, and dirt. There was a huge tear in the sleeve.
Terra’s heart hitched in his chest.
What bothered him the most was that this soldier had no weapon.
Terra turned and faced him. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “My unit got wiped out upstairs.”
The figure waited there, face veiled behind the visor.
Terra licked his lips. He remembered the knife on his web belt, the 9mm Smith & Wesson. His hand drifted slowly toward it.
The soldier moved now.
Terra brought out the knife because it was quicker and jammed it into the rip in the suit, felt it find flesh and bisect it. The soldier came on regardless, took Terra in his arms, slammed him up against the sink.
Terra tore the hood away. Easy enough: it wasn’t attached.
What he saw came out of a nightmare.
The sunless face was the embodiment of black, barren hatred. Nothing with a soul could look like that. The face was ashen, the mouth hooked in a drooling, noxious grin.
With the sweep of one arm, Terra was thrown to the floor.
His attacker came on like some relentless wind-up toy. His luminous graveyard eyes were merciless and unforgiving.
Terra tried to speak, but all that came out was a dry croaking.
No matter. This thing was not human. The only thing that propelled it was cold, flat hunger and the lust for blood and killing.
The soldier fell on Terra, fingers like icicles digging into his throat. His breath stank of morgues, teeth drawn back, toxic tangles of drool swaying from his cracked lips like braids.
Terra found the 9mm Smith.
As the rabid made to bite him, he put the barrel alongside the maniac’s head and splashed his brains all over the stalls.
He had to pull the fingers from his throat.
Then, gun in hand, he stumbled back into the corridor. He started running to the left, then the right, finally sliding down the wall and whimpering. He put the barrel of the 9mm into his mouth…but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Tears rolled down his face. He stayed that way for some time, listening to distant screams and gunfire, explosions and howling sounds.
Finally, he got to his feet.
He dragged himself down the corridor, towards the stairs. He felt empty, deflated, and hopeless. He wanted out. He wanted it to end. He wanted—
He went down into a crouch as he heard a strange, sloppy sound.
He inched forward, his heart thudding.
He heard a loathsome, wet mewling noise that reminded him of the squeal of a newborn kitten, but blasphemous somehow, degenerate. It set his flesh to crawling like there were worms knitting his skin.
He saw the corpse of the pregnant woman…saw the blood everywhere, the grisly smeared path of something black and oily.
It went up the wall.
Right up the wall and he followed it with his eyes…
Oh, Jesus, I forgot, I forgot.
There was something up there clinging to the ceiling like a pink and gray fleshy spider, an eyeless and pulsing mass that dropped down onto him, fell over him in a squirming, writhing horror.
It was flabby and warm, like being caressed by a placenta.
It forced itself into his eyes and down his throat, up his nostrils and through his pores. Wherever he was open, it surged and flowed and consumed. It was the first true citizen of the new Cut River.
And for Terra, it was an unspeakable death.
35
It was time to make a run for it.
Out in the corridor, they could hear battle being waged—soldiers screaming and dying, rabids falling on them like animals. There was the constant report of rifles and submachine guns, the acrid stink of flamethrowers. The occupying force was intent on cleaning out the municipal building which had become something of a hive.
It was here that the end would be played out.
That much was obvious.
The door was under constant barrage as the rabids tried to get in.
Lou, Johnny, and Lisa were in a conference room. Its primary features were the long, polished oak table and the windows that looked down on the burning city. Other than that it was unremarkable. There was a pegboard on the wall with various civil announcements and the minutes of previous city council meetings.
There was another door at the far end of the room.
The one they came in was buckling in its frame. It was a big heavy job or it wouldn’t have even lasted this long. The one at the far end seemed unmolested…so far.
“It’s death to go out there,” Johnny said, “but we can’t stay here.”
Lou said, “Then let’s do it. I don’t have shit to lose now.”
Lisa, who swam in and out of her fugue, made a few grunting sounds which they took as assent.
Lou stood before the door. He had Lisa’s .357 now. The shotgun was empty.
Johnny, holding Lisa at his side, said simply, “Ready?”
Lou nodded.
The other door burst in and two or three rabids fell in with it, along with a lot of billowing black smoke and the nauseating stench of burning flesh and blasted wood. No sense in discussing it any longer.
Lou led the way out into the hall.
The corridor was hazy with smoke.
As Johnny and Lisa slipped by, Lou watched the far end. There was no more shooting. Just a lot of moaning. Cries for help. The slithering, hissing sound of the rabids as they mutilated and possibly devoured the soldiers. Lou could hear violent thuds, wet ripping sounds, sucking and tearing noises. The smoke, thankfully, blocked his view. Tongues of flame licked up the walls. The smoke made his eyes burn.
“Come on,” Johnny said as he led Lisa away.
And Lou had every intention of doing so, except that out of the smoke three forms came walking. Rabids. Three men. One of them had several bullet holes in him, but he came on regardless. Demented eyes swam in bleached faces, a moldering stink of sick wards drifted off the trio.
Lou shot two of them in the head and they fell back into the wall of smoke, spraying blood. The third simply snarled, went down low and disappeared the way he’d come.
“You okay?” Johnny asked him when he caught up.
“Fine,” Lou said. “Let’s go.”
&n
bsp; The soldiers, it occurred to him, were losing this battle.
The dire army of rabids were overwhelming them by numbers and sheer ferocity. How could you hope to fight savages like that by conventional means? And that got him to thinking that if this went on any length of time, Terra’s Emergency Response Group would start using more lethal means to control and crush the good citizens of Cut River.
No matter.
He wouldn’t live to see it.
They moved up the smoky corridor, coughing, eyes watering. The fog of smoke was good and bad—it helped to hide them, but it also concealed the forms of their enemies. Lou kept seeing the faces of his ex-wives and lovers and wished to God he would have had the chance to say good-bye to them. But such a thing was far beyond the realm of possibility now.
They moved around a bend in the corridor and right away found more bodies. There were holes punched into the walls—literally hundreds of them—from gunfire. Great areas were scorched from the flamethrowers.
And bodies.
Dozens.
Rabids and soldiers.
Many locked in death embraces. The hallway looked like a litter pile from an extermination camp. The smell of smoke was overpowered here by the corrupt and polluted stink of mass death.
Johnny lowered Lisa to the floor and stripped a flamethrower and a 9mm sidearm from a soldier.
Lou, following his lead, took a gun off a corpse, too. They’d need everything they could get.
“There’s a doorway up ahead,” Johnny explained. “It leads into a maintenance corridor. The stairs to the roof are in there.”
“If we make it.”
“Sure, if we make it.”
Johnny led the way again.
Lisa was still lost in her narcotic dreams (or the lack of them), but she was able to shuffle along if she had an arm to hang onto. Lou figured she was the lucky one. She’d been out of it for hours now. With any luck, he figured, maybe she’d die without truly coming to her senses and, really, what else was there to hope for?
And that’s when the woman stepped out of the murk.
Lou saw her and cringed.
She reminded him vaguely of the rabid police woman he’d fought earlier that evening downstairs. She was equally as lovely—tall, elegant, completely naked, a sweep of blonde hair falling down one shoulder. She had a knife in one hand and something in the other. A head. The head of man which had been decapitated crudely, dripping meat hanging from the stump like confetti. She offered Lou a sardonic, hungry grin, a skullish rictus really, and a single rope of glistening drool ran from her mouth, oozing down the cone of one perfect breast, pooling at the nipple.