by Joe McKinney
He thought they might, and he was ready.
When his dad peeked through the blinds and said, “Oh shit, Nate, what the hell did you do?” Nate didn’t stay around to answer. He ran out the back door and jumped the fence. But when he landed on the other side, his left leg curled under him and he went down. All the cops had to do was follow the sounds of his screaming. By the time he made it to county later that night, the knee had swollen up like a watermelon. He didn’t get treated till the next day, and by then it was too late. The knee was never the same after that.
A man in a white-and-blue jogging suit ran by, the soles of his shoes slapping on the wet pavement. The whole town seemed to be shaking itself apart getting ready for the refugees they were talking about on the news, but not this guy. He had the calm, faraway look in his eyes that Nate remembered from his own days as a runner.
Nate had run cross-country his freshman and sophomore years in school, before a combination of academic and disciplinary probation got him booted off the team, and he had good memories of running.
Once, they’d gone up to Gatlin to run in a district meet. Gatlin was surrounded by pine forests, and their cross-country course took them through two miles of dense tree cover, the dirt trails beneath them red as baked brick. A senior from Gatlin had managed to stay pretty much even with him for most of the course. Nate could still remember hearing the note of exhaustion in the older boy’s breathing as they rounded the last bend two hundred yards from the edge of the trees. It was another half mile after that to the finish, and Nate had been pacing himself, saving his strength for the last hard push to the tape. But when he heard that older boy’s breathing start to falter, he began to chant to himself You’ve got more than this. Turn it on. Burn him up. And when he broke through the trees and into daylight, he was running better than he had ever done in his life. It was the one time he could truly say, without question, that he was better at something than anybody else around him.
That had been ten years ago, yet it seemed like another lifetime now.
Now, he was just another of life’s losers, sitting on a bench, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no purpose.
And then Jessica Metcalfe came out of the bank. She was holding the strings to about a dozen pink and white balloons in her hand. Watching her, studying her, he realized that she was more than just a nice ass. She was all around smokin’ hot, like that girl Bellamy Blaze, whose movies he had in his shoebox back home. He wiped the moisture from his lips as he watched her long black hair, tied back in a ponytail, bouncing playfully between her shoulder blades. She wore a thin white shirt, and even from across the street, he thought he could trace the outline of her bra underneath. His eyes flicked to the hint of bare midriff at the top of her low-rise jeans, then followed the curve of her hips down the length of her legs to where her black high-heel shoes clicked on the pavement. He imagined what it would feel like to peel away the straps of those shoes and stroke her bare feet.
Something flared up inside him, something that felt like hunger, and before he knew it, he was on his feet and walking across the street toward her.
She was already at her Jaguar, the driver’s-side door open. She was bending into the car, her perfect ass pointed at him as she wrestled the balloons into the car.
He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back from the car. She let out a grunt of surprise—not a scream, but an oddly feminine grunt that almost made him laugh. With his free hand, he threw open the van doors and, before either of them knew what had happened, tossed her inside.
She still had her legs out of the van, but they were off the street, swinging free like a little kid in a big chair. Jessica looked at him, her eyes wide with fright, and said, “Nate, what the hell are you doing?”
She knew his name. That surprised him, and he stopped.
Her question surprised him, too. He didn’t really know what he was doing. He hadn’t planned on this and didn’t know what to do now that he’d done it.
Her eyes darted over his shoulder.
He turned briefly and watched the balloons she had been carrying drift down the street. It was an odd sight, those pink and white balloons floating sluggishly down the wet, dreary length of Brockton Street. They were beautiful, bobbing just above the pavement, trying to take to the sky.
“Help!” Jessica shouted, and the piercing shrill tone of it split Nate’s thoughts like a razor.
“Help me!”
“Stop it,” he said.
She kicked him, catching his chin with her heel. The blow surprised him, but rather than clear his head it had the opposite effect, and his mind went red.
“Get the fuck away from me, you creep. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He knocked her foot away, took a step closer, and slapped her across the cheek.
She cried out, not a word, but a weak little yelp. She had her hand on her cheek, cradling it, but gingerly, almost like she didn’t dare touch it. Her eyes were wide with fear and panic, and it made him feel really strong, and angry, and somehow vindicated.
He raised his hand again, and she shrank up into a ball, cringing from him, backing up, farther inside the van.
Feeling oddly blank inside, he closed the van door.
He looked around. No one was watching him. No one was looking. He took a small length of baling wire from his pocket and slowly started wrapping the wire around the door handles, murmuring to himself as he worked.
“Oh, Nate, you did it now. You’re so fucked. You’re so very fucked.”
He parked the van behind his dad’s house and got out and walked around to the back of the vehicle, staring at it, thinking about the woman inside. What in the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t just strip her, look at her, then let her go. Could he? That was all he wanted to do, just look at her. Maybe touch her breasts, pinch the hard little eraser tips of her nipples, maybe get her to turn around in her panties so he could lock that image in his mind along with the daylight at the edge of those trees. Nate Royal’s greatest hits.
He undid the baling wire from the door handles.
He was still murmuring to himself, but he felt good, strong. Even the knee felt strong.
He opened the doors, threw them wide, smiling, and got a heel in his teeth.
He staggered backward, his hands over his mouth.
Still doubled over, he took his hands away. They were bloody. He touched his front teeth with the tip of his tongue, and one of them was loose.
“What the hell did you do that for?” he asked her.
But she was already scrambling out of the back of his van and running past him with everything she had.
He turned, tried to snag her blouse, didn’t do it.
He watched her run. She turned back and looked at him for just a moment, her face lit with fear. She whimpered, stumbled, then took off again.
God, she was fast.
The thought thrilled him, and once again the adrenaline was pumping. One more big run, he thought. Catch her. Catch her. Catch her now.
He took off after her, and all the strength, all the grace, all the power that had been his so long ago was back, and he felt great.
She ran over the railroad tracks and across a muddy, weed-choked field before turning up an alley and running parallel to the tracks. He stayed with her the whole way, even gained on her. They were both running for their lives, and he could hear her panting. She was tiring already, and he still had more. Turn it on, he thought. Burn her up.
Jessica turned one more time to look at him, and in that moment he knew he had her. He was closing fast. Nate reached out a hand, his fingers playing at the fabric of her blouse, and then everything went black. He fell. He tumbled forward, hit the ground, rolled and rolled into a cluster of trash cans and loose garbage and mud.
Something had tripped him up.
Stunned, but unhurt, he looked around.
For a moment, he had no idea what he was looking at. Then it hit him. Jessica was fighting with someb
ody. The two of them were rolling in the mud. She was screaming. The man beneath her, now on top of her, now side by side, like lovers in a cuddle, was Darnell Sykes. He lived two houses over. Nate had gotten drunk with him about a million times, traded pornos with him. But now he was all fucked up. His face was anyway. His arms, too. His clothes were smeared with blood and dirt and mud.
“What the hell did you do that for, Darnell?” Nate said.
But Darnell did not acknowledge him. He was fighting with Jessica, pulling her arms apart, forcing them down by her side.
He was snarling.
He lunged forward and bit her mouth, caught a corner of it and pulled until her cheek tore open. She screamed, and it was such a hideous, gut-turning sound that it instantly cleared Nate’s head.
“Get the fuck away from her,” he said.
He put a hand on Darnell’s shoulder and tried to pull him back from the writhing woman underneath him.
Darnell turned on him.
Nate’s forearm was in front of Darnell’s face, and Darnell took a bite of the soft flesh just above the elbow.
Nate screamed. He stepped back, crashed into a trash can, but managed to keep his feet by grabbing ahold of the fence.
He looked down at his arm, and that’s when it hit him.
Zombies. The infected. He’d been infected.
He could feel the wound screaming at him, pulsing like somebody had stuck a live electrical cord through it.
“No,” he said aloud. “No. Not me.”
Darnell rose to his feet. His eyes were milky white and vacant. There was no recognition there. No feeling. No Darnell behind those eyes.
“Dude,” Nate said. “You fucked me, man. You fucked me.”
Darnell moaned. His hands came up, the fingers opening and closing.
Nate turned and ran.
And that’s when the knee went out. He dropped to the ground and screamed.
Behind him, Darnell was lumbering forward, getting closer.
“No,” Nate said.
He rose to his feet and hobbled away. Darnell’s mother’s house was just around the corner. Nate went to it. He limped through the front yard, got close enough to the wooden steps to see blood on the doorway.
Darnell moaned behind him.
“No fucking way,” Nate said. “No. No fucking way.”
Nate limped on, forcing himself to move.
He managed to get a good amount of distance on Darnell, even with the pain in his knee. He looked behind him, didn’t see Darnell, and decided to turn in to a space between two houses.
Another neighbor, Mr. Hartwell, had a lawn mower shed behind his house. Nate could see it from where he stood. He limped toward it, slid inside, and closed the door behind him.
He was in darkness now. He listened for a long time, but heard nothing. There were gaps in the sheet metal. He peered through them, and saw nothing.
The knee was killing him. So, too, was the pain in his arm.
“God, I fucked up so bad,” he said. “Oh, God, I don’t want to be like that.”
He slid down onto his butt, his back against the thin metal siding of the shed, and waited.
What was it the man on the news had said? You get bit, you got four, maybe five hours at the most.
It wasn’t much time, Nate thought.
God, not nearly enough.
CHAPTER 19
Kyra Talbot was in her kitchen, one hand on her throat, listening to the news out of Odessa.
“…been no word as of yet from authorities with the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority as to the extent of the outbreak, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt about earlier reports that the quarantine line has collapsed.”
Kyra drew in a sharp breath. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat and couldn’t quite do it.
The man on the radio said, “Deputy Director Richard Haskell gave a press conference earlier this morning at the Shreveport Headquarters of the Quarantine Authority in which he said the situation appeared grim.”
The voice on the radio changed to that of Deputy Director Richard Haskell. It was a smooth, slow voice, not deep, but very clear, and in her head Kyra pictured a tall, bald, slender man from somewhere in the South, his accent obscured by an Ivy League education, though not completely gone.
He said, “I can confirm that the quarantine line has collapsed around the Houston area. Initially, we directed reinforcements into the area, but it appears that our efforts there have been compromised, at least for now. We already have personnel moving into that area to try to shore up the breach. I spoke with Wade Mitchell, Director of Homeland Security, earlier this morning, and he told me we can expect significant reinforcement from military personnel as early as tomorrow night.”
A woman’s voice interrupted him. She sounded distant, like she was raising her voice to be heard from the back of a crowded room.
“Is it true, Director, that the outbreak coming up from Florida and Georgia was caused by escapees from the quarantine?”
“That seems obvious,” the director said. “Yes.”
“But how could that happen? Isn’t it your agency’s responsibility to stop this kind of thing?”
“It is,” he said. “And that’s a trust we stake our lives on every day. But the outbreak in Florida seems to have originated from a group of refugees who used a fishing boat to escape along the Gulf Coast. As you know, that is the responsibility of the Coast Guard”—he paused there for the briefest of moments, just long enough to give his next words added weight—“not our agency.”
More finger pointing, Kyra thought angrily. They’re so busy shuffling off the blame, they won’t tell us what’s going on.
Another reporter asked, “What’s being done to stop the spread of the infected?”
“That is the responsibility of the United States military,” the director said. “As I understand it, they have been moving troops into the affected areas for the last two days, but what their specific plans are, I can’t tell you. You’d have to go to them for that.”
“But what are you doing to stop the spread of the infected in the Houston area? We’ve been getting reports that this latest outbreak has already spread as far as Dallas. And there are reports of cases as far away as Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Boston.”
Now the director sounded angry, put upon. He said, “I have not heard any confirmed attacks in the Dallas area. The best information we have available—and this is not the rumor mill, mind you, this is confirmed information—is that the outbreak is so far contained within the sparsely populated region just north of Houston. Right now, we are redeploying our command around that area and we hope to have the threat contained within the next twenty-four hours. As for the other cases you mentioned, those again are not confirmed, and I won’t comment on unsubstantiated rumors. However, I have been told that the Director of Homeland Security is suspending all commercial airlines until further notice. Should any infected persons be found outside of the quarantine zone, we obviously want to prevent them from flying and spreading the infection to other cities.”
“Director,” another reporter said. “What do you have to say to those families who, in the meantime, are caught up in the path of these zombies?”
“The infected,” the director said, and Kyra could hear the inflection he gave the word, suggesting his distaste for the word zombie, “are extremely dangerous. We saw that in San Antonio two years ago. They can spread at an exponential rate. For that reason, we are asking people to remember their training. Remember the public service announcements we’ve posted since the quarantine was established. Stay inside your homes. Secure your residence the best way you can. If someone you know has been bitten, isolate that person. Complete depersonalization can occur in minutes, so make them comfortable if you can, and then isolate them. Do not attempt to care for them or transport them to a hospital, as this greatly increases your chances of being infected as well.”
“So you’re tell
ing people who have been caught up in the outbreak to stay in their homes?” a female reporter asked.
“That’s correct.”
“What is the incentive for doing that, Mr. Director? If your agency is attempting to re-form the quarantine wall, won’t those people who remain in their homes be shut up inside the new quarantine zone the same way residents of the Gulf Coast were two years ago? That would be suicide, wouldn’t it?”
A long pause.
Kyra had already heard the director’s response four times that morning, but she still found herself leaning forward, holding her breath, waiting for him to say the words.
“Our hopes and prayers go out to everyone caught up in this disaster,” he said, carefully controlling the anger he felt for being put so roundly on the spot. “But these are dire circumstances. Some people will have to make terrible sacrifices so that the rest of us can continue to live in safety. I don’t expect anybody to like it, but that’s the way it’s going to have to be.”
Kyra gritted her teeth with a gathering rage. His hopes and prayers, she thought. What a ridiculously empty sentiment. The man wouldn’t lock himself up behind the quarantine line, and yet he had no trouble doing it to others. The thought made her face flush with renewed anger, and she snapped off the radio.
Her fingertips glided over the counter to the special clock that Uncle Reggie had bought her for her fourteenth birthday. There was a large spongy button on top. She pressed it, and a vaguely feminine robotic voice told her it was 4:12 P.M. The voice always overaccented the p in P.M., the pitch climbing to a sort of mousy squeak, making it sound like there was some kind of bathroom humor there.
It used to make her laugh as a little girl. In the last few years, it had still managed to make her smile, but today she couldn’t even do that. It was getting late, and Uncle Reggie had been gone for a while now, since before noon. She was starting to get worried.
More than worried actually. She was downright terrified. They were a long way from Houston, nearly at the opposite end of the state, but that didn’t mean a whole lot when they were dealing with the infected. The infected spread at an alarming rate, and despite what the Deputy Director out of Shreveport was saying, she had already heard plenty of reliable reports of outbreaks as far away as Los Angeles and Seattle and New York. People screaming and dying in the streets made for pretty believable reports, confirmed or otherwise.