by Alex Apostol
Dr. Hyde threw himself down onto Ronald with his mouth wide open.
“No!” Liam screamed, hunched over as his fingers pulled at his ginger hair. “Ronnie!”
Ronald reached out to Liam from down the hall as Dr. Hyde’s jaw clenched the back of his neck. There was a blood curdling scream. Ronald’s mouth opened and closed with silent gasps. Dr. Hyde tugged at him until he was on his back, face up, to watch the horror he would behold. Nails dug into the helpless doctor’s face and shoulders and ripped the skin and muscles from the bones as his body jerked. Dr. Hyde groaned, his glazed eyes rolled back, as he shoved the flesh into his mouth. He chewed at it vigorously.
Liam couldn’t move. He sobbed, repeating Ronald’s name in a whisper as he watched in disgust and terror. His friend had just been torn apart before his eyes and he’d done nothing to stop it. What could he have done?
Once Ronald fell still, Dr. Hyde no longer dug into him. His head raised as his shark-like, dead eyes stared right at Liam. He pushed himself up off the ground and shambled down the hall towards the only live prey left.
Liam couldn’t take his eyes away from what used to be his best friend lying broken and bleeding on the floor. He gurgled blood through his ripped throat and then, against all odds, rose slowly to stand up. Liam squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. He was sure he had to be seeing things. Ronald stood in a pool of burgundy blood that dripped freshly from his wounds and down his pale blue button up shirt. As he turned his gnarled face up to the ceiling, he let out an appalling shriek.
Ronald started forward and passed Dr. Hyde as Liam ran for the door. He pushed on it and moved the handle up and down to no avail. Somewhere in the depths of his memory he remembered he had to pull the door in order to open it. He shoved his way through just in time to miss the superhuman grip of Ronald’s cold, dead hands.
Liam’s breathing was labored as he ran at full speed out of the building and to his car. He let out gasping screams to the beat of his pounding feet. He felt his pockets for his keys and pulled them out, but the sweat in his eyes prevented him from seeing which button unlocked the doors. He pushed them all at random until he finally found the right one and heard the click as the locks popped up.
Meanwhile, Ronald and Dr. Hyde were closing in on him at a hauntingly slow pace. Every time Liam looked over his shoulder they were a few paces closer, their mouths open and stained with black, dried blood.
There was no one else around to help Liam. He was far into campus and students weren’t permitted to go near the labs unless it was for class. He was all alone. He yanked open the door, shut himself inside, and slammed the palm of his hand down on the locks.
The thing that used to be Dr. Ronald Conrad made it to the car first and pressed itself against the window, pounding its fists into the glass. With each strike the window became streaked with dingy, darkened blood. The corpse of Dr. Hyde made its way over and followed Ronald’s relentless attack on the car to get to the meat inside.
Liam’s hands shook violently and he struggled to put the key into the ignition while jaws snapped at the air. Putrid eyes locked onto Liam’s.
“This can’t be happening,” he repeated as he sat in the car, his eyes squeezed shut, the sound of dead fists beating against the window a distant sound in the background. Somewhere, he mustered up the strength and courage to step on the gas and drive away from what used to be his boss and friend. He looked over at the blood streaked window and noticed a spidering crack. The sight sent a shiver down his neck and arms. He moved his eyes forward to the road as breathing in became harder for him to do.
V.
Christine heard the front door open and close from the bedroom. “Honey?” she asked, though she knew it was Liam. No one else had access to their apartment and she’d locked the door behind him when he left for the university that morning. “How’d it go? Why’d he call you in so early?” she asked with a fire in her voice over their ruined Sunday morning.
She froze when she saw Liam standing in the middle of the living room, his back turned to her. His shoulders moved up and down intensely as he heaved breaths through his parted mouth. The back of his grey button down shirt had a bloody handprint smeared on it.
“What have I done?” he whispered just loud enough for Christine to hear. He whirled around to look at her, his normally thin eyes wide. “What have I done?”
Christine walked over to him slowly with her mouth agape. She touched his chest lightly with the palms of her hands. “Liam, what happened?” she asked. “Please, tell me.”
Liam just stood there, lips trembling, as he explained what happened at the lab with a vacant look in his red-rimmed eyes—Dr. Hyde’s hungry expression as he shuffled after Liam, the shreds of flesh hanging from Ronald’s throat and Dr. Hyde’s teeth, the way Ronald stood back up despite his bloody, torn face and ragged windpipe.
Christine’s large, blue eyes welled with tears as she gaped at Liam, who was consumed in what he’d seen, his face frozen in permanent horror. She didn’t know what to say. It didn’t sound real. It couldn’t be real. There was no way it could be real…but how was she supposed to tell him that? She hadn’t been there to see what it was exactly that Liam saw. Maybe Dr. Hyde had a severe nosebleed and it got all over Ronald and Liam thought it was something that it wasn’t. Even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. All she did know was that Liam’s version couldn’t be true either.
Liam Scott slowly moved his head to focus his tear soaked eyes on his fiancée. “I’ve killed us all,” he said, low and steady. “I should have stopped them when I had the chance.”
“Please, stop, Liam. You’re scaring me.”
“I should have killed them. Why did I run away like that? I’ve killed everyone.”
They both stared at each other in desperation. The only sound to fill the silence was the whir of the air conditioning that blew from the vents.
All at once, as if a switch went off in his head, Liam snapped out of his daze and grabbed Christine by the shoulders, shaking her as he spoke. “We need to prepare,” he said with wild eyes. “We need to stock up on everything we can and barricade ourselves in.”
Christine looked back with narrowed eyes and a crinkled nose. She put her hands ontop of his and slowly pushed them from her shoulders. She spoke in a soothing, calm tone. “Liam…it’s OK.”
“No, it’s not OK. Don’t you get it? The world as we know it is going to end and we need to be ready!” Liam paced the room, brushing his unruly ginger hair with his hands so it stuck up on its ends.
“What we need to do is call the police.”
“Already called. They’re probably at the university now, getting their faces ripped apart by…” He trailed off, unable to bring himself to say their names. “We need to go to a supercenter of some kind.”
Christine looked up at Liam with a furrowed brow, unable to follow his train of thought.
“Yeah, we need to go and buy everything we can and get back here. Let’s go. Right now.”
It was all too much for Christine. She rolled her eyes and sighed. Was she supposed to call the police on him? Was he crazy? Was he dangerous? Deep down, a loud voice shouted that it was Liam, the same man who nursed a fallen bird with a broken wing for weeks until it could fly again. Something had happened. Liam believed his boss and his friend had died infront of him and rose up again to try to eat him, for some reason. Was he having a breakdown? Was the pressure of working tirelessly to create a flu vaccine getting to him? Her shoulders relaxed as she closed her eyes. When she opened them she was staring into Liam’s pleading face just inches from hers. She flinched back involuntarily.
“So, you think this is what? The zombie apocalypse?” she asked, hoping he would laugh and say he was joking the entire time. Anything was better than him actually believing in what he said.
He nodded his head, face steady, lips pursed, and eyes more serious than ever.
“O…K…” Her voice was drawn out and skeptical, her
head tilted to the side. “Let’s say we go and buy the place up, stock up our tiny apartment with thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies. What happens if you’re wrong?” He opened his mouth to protest, but she knew what he was going to say and held her hand up to cut him off. “Or you’re right, but they put a stop to it before it can ever spread further than Ronnie and Dr. Hyde.”
Liam flinched at the sound of their names.
Christine softened her glare, but still shrugged her shoulders with her hands in the air. “What do we do then?” Her shoulders fell and her hands slapped against her jean covered thighs.
Liam’s face was unfaltering. “We keep the receipts and take it all back. Walmart will take anything back. Remember when we returned those used tenny-shoes because you said they squeezed your pinky toe too hard?”
She let out a breathy laugh and looked up at the ceiling. “Yeah, I went power walking in them for a week straight, too.”
“We won’t use any of what we buy until we absolutely have to,” he assured her.
Still unconvinced, but unable to say no, Christine sighed. “All right. Let’s go, then.”
They raided the Walmart next door to their apartment complex. Five hours, eight shopping carts, two trips in Liam’s Jeep and Christine’s BMW, thousands of dollars on the Capital One credit card, and countless times hauling bags up to the second floor to their apartment, they were finally done. The place looked like it belonged to one of those people from the TV show Hoarders.
“And this is just a month’s supply?” Christine asked after she collapsed onto the only small portion of the couch not covered in bags and boxes. “I don’t think we could use all of this in a year let alone a month.” The adrenaline rush from spending an excessive amount of money and then the following exercise of carrying it up the stairs made Christine forget all about why they raided the store in the first place. She no longer had the energy to wonder if her fiancé was insane.
She watched as Liam took to organizing all they had bought in order to make more room in their five hundred square foot apartment. He was no longer in a panic. His eyes weren’t wide and wild anymore. If she wasn’t mistaken, he seemed at peace, or was it relief? She let her head fall back against the couch and closed her eyes.
Once the initial scare was over in a day or two and Liam realized there was no end approaching, she would convince him to go talk to someone—a shrink or a therapist. But at that moment, she couldn’t even get off the couch to help him put stuff away. She huffed out an exhausted laugh, but Liam was halfway immersed in a box full of canned foods and didn’t notice. If it was the zombie apocalypse then she was fucked, because she was obviously out of shape.
Liam dug around another box with tools and pulled out the battery powered drill. He set to work on installing the extra deadbolts on their front door and patio door.
VI.
Christine stared at the television as the newscaster wept, trying to get out what she had to say about the horrifying attacks around town. As she continually sniffed back her tears, she rambled on about the outbreak that had taken over the entire northwest Indiana in twenty-four hours. Mascara dripped from her eyes like the black blood of the infected.
Liam had been right.
Christine dialed her parents’ number again, but there was still no answer. Each time she got their voicemail her stomach sank and she thought she would be sick. She’d been trying to call them since they got back from shopping the day before, but even then there was no answer. Her eyes burned from sleeplessness.
She let the phone drop from her hands to the floor where she sat with her back rested against the couch, her knees curled up to her chest. The woman on the news was hysterical. She cried into her cell phone and then the screen turned to snow.
Somewhere in the apartment, Liam dug through more boxes. He stayed up all night to organize everything. At eight in the morning he was only halfway done and the living room was the one place where they could walk through or sit.
Christine stared ahead at the fuzzy screen in a daze. It felt best to feel nothing at all, to check out for a minute and turn her brain off completely. She jumped when the phone rang by her feet. Her hands grabbed for it in a panic and she fell over trying to reach where it lay. Her long blonde hair fell over her face and into her mouth. She spat it out.
“Hello!” she yelled desperately, “hello?” Everything inside her hoped the sound of her mother’s voice would greet her from the other end as she brushed her messy hair back.
“I see how it is,” a woman said. “The plague breaks out and you can’t even bother to show up for work.”
Christine let her body slump against the couch again. “Oh, hey, Allison. I’m surprised there’s anyone even at the firm today.”
“You know Shale. He wouldn’t close the doors if his own wife was on her deathbed,” Allison Murphy said with bitterness.
“What are you doing there?” Christine felt more like herself with the distraction of Allison’s call. It felt good to talk to someone who wasn’t panicking.
“I don’t know. Things seem pretty normal over here. There’s only been like a few cases of this thing in the city so far so I figured why not? Get out of the empty house. My husband’s out of town for the next two days anyway,” she said as she sat at her desk, legs propped up and crossed at the ankles, her black high heels clicking together. She twirled a strand of her short, brown bob around her finger as she threw her head back and stared at the ceiling. “There’s only ten of us here in the office total. It’s like a ghost town. When Shale calls the first meeting it will just be me, Calvin, Maria and that weird new lawyer.”
Christine listened without interruption. It was a great escape. She tuned out the sounds of Liam shuffling things around in the bedroom.
“I should just leave. Go to the gym or something. Buy a huge tub of ice cream and watch chick flicks all day in my pajamas.”
Christine actually laughed. When the sound escaped her lips she stopped in disbelief that she was even still capable. Maybe things weren’t as bad as she thought. Maybe the media was blowing things out of proportion. Wouldn’t be the first time.
“So, what’s going on with you?” Allison asked as Maria Sanchez walked by her door, peeking in only to point a finger gun to her head and pull the trigger before walking on to her own office next door.
“I’m held up in the apartment right now,” Christine said with a sigh. “Liam won’t let anyone in or out. He’s put like a hundred extra locks on both doors and is getting ready to board up the windows if necessary.”
“When would that ever be necessary?” Allison chuckled, letting her legs fall to the floor when someone’s office door slammed shut. There was yelling next door.
“I don’t know…”Christine trailed off. “I don’t know that I want to know. This is all so surreal. I still can’t get ahold of my parents. I’m really starting to freak out, cooped up in here. We had this huge fight last night because I wanted to drive to their house to make sure they were OK and Liam went on this rant about how if we left the apartment we would die. He actually said that. We would die if we left.” Christine huffed from her nostrils.
“Wow. I told you he was nuts,” Allison said as she stood up and walked over to her closed door.
There were multiple people yelling and their shouts rose high in panic. She placed her hand on the doorknob and let it rest there, deciding whether she should open it or not.
“What’s that?” Christine asked, the faint screams echoing through the phone.
“I don’t know,” Allison replied. “Let me find out. Maybe someone finally went crazy and tried to murder Shale, not like we all haven’t thought about it.”
Christine let out a breathy laugh. She remembered all the times she wished she could’ve kill the senior partner. But all at once her face tightened as she realized what her friend was about to do. “No!” she yelled as her back stiffened. “Stay there!”
Allison was already in the hall though an
d Christine heard the shrill cry of her friend. Reflex told her to pull the phone away from her ear before the drum burst, but she couldn’t move. Her body was rigid.
“Allison!” she cried out, her voice high and shrill.
Liam came running from the bedroom. He tripped over a box and caught himself on the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. When he saw Christine on the floor with the phone to her ear, tears streamed down her cheeks, he didn’t say anything. He rest a hand on his hip, turned on the spot, and ran his other hand through his unkempt hair.
Christine sobbed, choking on her every breath. “Allison?”
There was no answer.
She hung up the phone and threw it to the floor. Her shoulders shook as she bawled into her hands.
Liam paced in a circle before he doubled over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. He removed his red-rimmed glasses and wiped at his face. Pull it together, he told himself in his head. Your fiancé needs you. He walked over and bent down into a squat to wrap his arms around her. He let her cry into his chest as he stroked her hair.
“We have to go…we have to go to…my parents’…” Christine said in between sobs, her words muffled by his navy blue t-shirt.
Liam continued to pet her hair, squeezing her to him. “We can’t,” he said in a steady voice. “I’m sorry. We can’t.” He held onto Christine as her body jarred violently.
It was the first time his accent didn’t make her swoon. She wanted to punch him. Her best friend was dead. She thought about the last time she saw Allison at work and her eyes burned with tears.
VII.