The Hours

by Robert Barnard

  “Holy shit,” Hannah said.

  “Yeah,” Fuller said, and he folded his hands behind his head. “It isn’t looking pretty fucking good, I can tell you that.”

  “Why is this happening?” Hannah said. “During NYVO…they said it was some virus, brought up through the harbor. How could it be happening everywhere, all at once?”

  “Maybe the deep-sea virus story was bullshit,” Fuller said. “Do you believe everything you’re told? Either of you? I doubt it, or else I wouldn’t have hired you.”

  Chloe shook her head, leaned back in her seat, checked her watch. On any typical night, the suicide cult and subsequent fire would result in a ten hour shift of nothing but paperwork. But with things falling apart around the country, and with the unreliable phone lines in Colorado, she was sure she’d be hitting the street again at any moment. If no one could call for help, it’d be up to road patrols to dispense their service proactively.

  “I have a theory,” Fuller said. “This is a virus that—somehow—practically runs like clockwork, right? During NYVO, those that were infected died around their twenty-third hour of infection. Here we are, almost two years later. I’m sure there’s plenty of folks that slipped through the cracks. That were truly infected but went undiagnosed. What if they’ve been ticking time-bombs this whole time? What if, two years after their moment of infection, that’s when they turn?”

  Fuller grinned. Hannah and Chloe were already hurrying out the door, side by side. He flicked at the piece of cardboard Chloe had been playing with, laughed, and said: “Just a thought.”

  Jim woke up in a strange, unfamiliar living room. He was disoriented. He didn’t understand where he was or what had happened.

  Whatever home he was in was dark. He’d been sprawled out across the cool, wooden floor. There were small slivers and bits of glass stuck to his forearm, but they caused him no pain.

  He heard footsteps from upstairs, then the sound of a light clicking on. The stairwell across from him illuminated.

  The footsteps grew closer.

  “Please,” Jim croaked. “I need help. I need—I need to be locked away.”

  “Who is that?” a firm voice shouted. “Who the hell is in my house?”

  “My name is Jim Whiteman,” Jim said, and he coughed. “I’m a ranger at Seven Lakes Park. I live on Hemming. I’m not armed, but I am very, very sick and I need help.”

  A figure appeared at the top of the stairwell. Tall, brooding, wrapped in a bathrobe.

  “I know you,” Jim said. “My daughter’s boyfriend talks about you all the time. You’re a professor at his college. Holbrook, right? Steven Holbrook?”

  The figure at the top of the stairs tightened his robe, then outstretched an arm. Clutched in his hand was a gun, and a heavy looking gun at that.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Holbrook hollered. “I don’t care to know who you are. You’re in my home unlawfully, and it’d be wise for you to leave.”

  Jim stumbled to his feet, shambled towards the base of the stairs. “Didn’t you hear me? I said that Ineed help. I blacked out in my garage trying to suffocate myself for crying out loud. I have no idea how I got here!”

  Holbrook cocked his pistol, steadied his aim on Jim.

  “Then fucking do it,” Jim screamed. “You’d be doing me the fucking favor. You’d be saving us all.”

  “Not one more step,” Holbrook said. “Or I’ll fire.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you to do, you idiot!” Jim was frothing at the mouth. “I’m a fucking killer, I’m infected with EV1, I—”

  Holbrook fired one shot, and then another. The first glanced Jim’s abdomen. The second pierced the top of his shoulder, splintered the bone beneath.

  Curiously, Jim didn’t feel a thing. He’d been shook by the impact of the bullets, sure. But they didn’t hurt. They didn’t so much as sting. He wasn’t even positive they had landed on him until he noticed the small rivers of blood trickling from beneath his t-shirt and down his arm.

  Holbrook went to fire again, and the gun jammed.

  Jim paused, looked at the growing pool of blood forming at his feet, then up at the panic-stricken professor at the top of the staircase. His vision blurred, and he lost consciousness once more.

  And though Jim would never—could never—remember a single moment of what happened next, it didn’t change the fact it had happened.

  Jim bolted up the staircase, a rabid dog. He skipped two, sometimes three stairs at a time. Holbrook was shocked at how fast the man he’d just shot could move. Before he had the time to register what was happening, to turn and run back into his bedroom, Jim was at the top of the stairs, clawing at the professor’s bathrobe.

  Holbrook let out a little whimper before Jim stood upright, grabbed his head with both hands, and bashed it against the wall. Holbrook’s head smashed against the plaster with a deafening thud and the wireframe glasses perched atop his nose shattered.

  The professor flailed his arms to the side, desperate to stop Jim, but Jim was strong. Unnaturally strong. Jim shook Holbrook a few times—the way a lion shakes its kill—and then tossed him down the flight of stairs.

  Holbrook tumbled end over end until he hit the base of the steps. Three vertebrae in his back crushed to powder, and he let out a sickening howl. In an instant, all feeling from his waist down vanished.

  Jim shuffled back down the stairs, then knelt atop his prey. Holbrook faced up, tried to punch his attacker in the mouth, but his arm had broken and the blow landed softly.

  “You fuck—you fucker,” Holbrook murmured, but it was no use. Jim didn’t seem to hear a word of it.

  Jim ripped at Holbrook’s bathrobe until his bare chest and abdomen were exposed. His soft flesh was milk white in the dimly lit living room. Jim reached down, pressed each hand on either side of Holbrook’s naval, and continued to press until his fingers pierced the doughy flesh.

  Holbrook let out an agonizing scream, and Jim dug harder. When both hands were deep in Holbrook’s abdomen, he pulled them apart, a surgeon’s forceps. Holbrook’s insides bunched and protruded from the wound. A lake of blood boiled up and out of the ripped flesh.

  Jim clutched a piece of intestine, brought it to his mouth, and ate it greedily. Holbrook’s screams were silenced by the blood that filled his mouth, and his body slipped into shock.

  Jim ate, and ate, and ate. When he’d swallowed nearly a fifth of Holbrook’s lower intestine, he paused, reeled back a fist and slammed it against the side of Holbrook’s lifeless head. His skull splintered with a crack, and Jim plowed his slender fingers into the fresh wound, scraped out a small section of brain, brought it to his lips, and, without even bothering to chew…

  Swallowed it whole.

  THIRTEEN

  Chloe marched out of the police station at such a fast clip, Hannah found it difficult to keep up with her. Towards the end of their brief meeting with Sergeant Fuller, a call had managed its way into the station. Someone’s phone had kept connection long enough to dial 911 and report a vehicular crash. When Chloe was told the address of the incident, she nearly fainted.

  It was her own.

  “Hold on,” Hannah called. The night was wearing long. A stitch had splintered across her stomach. She was dehydrated and had been moving nearly non-stop since the night began.

  “There’s no time,” Chloe said, and she clapped her hands. “Come on.”

  “There’s closer units, Chlo’—”

  “I don’t care who’s closer,” Chloe screamed. “That’s my home. And something awful has happened.”

  Chloe dove into the driver’s seat of the Crown Victoria, started the ignition, threw the car into drive and slammed on the accelerator before Hannah even had a chance to buckle her seatbelt.

  “It won’t matter how fast we get there,” Hannah said, “if we careen right off the fucking road along the way.”

  Chloe bit her lip, focused her eyes on the dark streets ahead. “How fast would you drive, Han, if it was yo
ur home?”

  Hannah shook her head. “Just be careful.”

  The cruiser blew around the bend on Pritchard at breakneck speed. It hopped over the hill between Dewitt and Hemming at nearly one-hundred miles an hour, sirens screaming and motor roaring. Faster than any other patrol car, Chloe had made it back to her home.

  Chloe was first out of the cruiser. Hannah paused, thought of all the suburban homes they’d just passed. Lights were dimmed. Streets were empty. People were staying inside, and an official curfew hadn’t even been enacted yet. Their was a collective knowing that something outside had started to go wrong, had started to turn foul, and that knowing hung in the air like electricity.

  “Follow me in,” Chloe begged. She took little time to inventory the damage on the front of the garage. Her father’s Suburban was missing. It looked as if it’d driven clean through the garage door. The driveway was littered with broken splinters of wood and warped pieces of metal.

  “What the hell happened here?” Hannah asked, and she chugged her legs to keep pace behind Chloe.

  Chloe burst through her home’s front door. It’d been left unlocked. She scanned her eyes once over the kitchen, and then back again. All across the tiled floor were red stains in the shape of large feet.

  “Nolan!” Chloe screamed. “Dad!”

  The house was silent, save for the quiet chatter of the television in her father’s bedroom.

  “Check my dad’s room,” Chloe said, and she pointed across the living room and down the hall, “and I’ll check mine.”

  Hannah did as she was told and the two parted ways.

  Chloe jogged down the darkened hallway, turned into the bedroom she shared with Nolan. There was a dining chair sitting, inexplicably, in front of his door. The door had been shattered. Whoever was inside had burst their way out.

  “What happened here?” Chloe stuttered. “What the fuck happened here?”

  She carefully stepped into the bedroom. Empty. Quiet. A standing lamp in the corner had been left on. The blankets atop the bed were a mess. Nolan had left his laptop open. But there was no one inside.

  “Nolan,” Chloe gasped. “Where the hell are you?—”

  “You better get in here,” Hannah shouted from across the house, “and fast.”

  Chloe pivoted on one foot, jumped back out into the hallway, nearly tripped over the dining room chair that’d been left there.

  “What is it?” Chloe hollered. “Is it my dad? Is he okay?”

  Chloe sprinted towards her father’s room. When she turned in, Hannah was standing in the corner, a hand cupped over her mouth.

  “Do you know this woman?” Hannah asked.

  Chloe stared at Sherri’s lifeless body. She’d been injured, badly. There were lacerations across her arms and neck that indicated she’d been chewed on.

  “It’s—my—uh—it’s,” Chloe stuttered. She clasped her hands together. “It’s an old friend of my father’s. She was in town, visiting.”

  “Chloe,” Hannah said. “Do you have any idea how this looks?”

  “I know exactly how this looks,” Chloe said. “And that’s not what happened here. Not at all. Impossible. So don’t you dare say it.”

  Hannah shrugged. “It’s not up to me to say it. We have to call this in. Anyone who walks into this room will take three seconds to connect the dots.”

  “He would never do this!” Chloe screamed. “My father would never do this!”

  “You have to calm down,” Hannah said.

  “The fuck you’ll tell me to calm down,” Chloe said. “Was there anyone else in here? Did you see him? Anyone?”

  “No one, Chlo’,” Hannah said. “House is empty. Except for your dad’s friend, here.”

  “No one can know about this,” Chloe said. “At least not tonight. At least not until I find Nolan and my dad and figure out what’s going on.”

  “We can’t just refuse to report this!” Hannah said. “The woman is dead!”

  Chloe shook her head, pointed at Sherri’s body. “Not just dead,” she said. “Infected. Whoever did this to her turned her EV1 positive, let her come back to life with the infection, and fucking killed her again. This room has been touched by EV1.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Hannah asked.

  Chloe studied Sherri’s face: the yellowed eyes, the pulled taught skin. “I just can,” Chloe insisted. “I saw all of this firsthand back in New York. It’s EV1. No denying it.”

  “Then we definitely have to phone this in,” Hannah said. “Where could your dad have gone? He could be infect—”

  “Don’t,” Chloe said. “Don’t even say it.”

  “Okay,” Hannah said. “Then someone—whether it was your father or not—was in this bedroom with his friend and was infected. It’s here, now. Right in our own backyard. The quicker we inform the higher ups, the quicker we’ll get a response like what you saw in New York.”

  “Not yet,” Chloe begged. “We can’t call this in yet. Please. You don’t understand. We have to find my father first. We have to find Nolan. If we report that we were in this room, we’ll spend at least the next twenty-four hours chained to some hospital bed, unable to visit anyone, while a million different people run a million different tests on us. It happened to my father in New York. I saw what it was like. We’ll be stranded in that hospital, and depending on what they find on us, we may never leave it. Do you understand?”

  Hannah’s face had turned ghost-white. “I understand.”

  Outside the home, an SUV screeched to a stop.

  “We have to get out there,” Chloe said. “It could be my dad.”

  Chloe hurried out of the bedroom with Hannah, and the two closed the door behind them. The living room had flooded with flashing red and blue lights.

  “Shit,” Chloe said. “Not my dad. Backup.” She paced towards the front door. “Follow me out. Let me do all the talking.”

  The two stepped outside and Chloe locked the front door behind her. Sergeant fuller was already stepping out of his gigantic SUV.

  “What’s going on here?” Fuller said, and he pointed at where the garage door used to be.

  “Everything’s fine,” Chloe said. “Some idiot drove into the door, destroyed it, then drove off. The neighbor who called it in said that’s what she saw.”

  “That’s a damn shame,” Fuller said. He shined his flashlight on the front of the garage, noticed it was empty. “Say—doesn’t your dad drive a black Suburban?”

  “Sure does,” Chloe said. “He left to get gas. Said with everything happening on the news, it’d be foolish not to.”

  “And that little four door?” Fuller said, and he pointed at the rental car parked out front.

  Shit, Chloe thought. Sherri’s car.

  “It’s my boyfriend’s,” Chloe said.

  Fuller laughed. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Chloe said. “He bought it last week.”

  Fuller shook his head. “If your boyfriend drives a Malibu, then you have a girlfriend, not a boyfriend.”

  Chloe smiled, for nothing less than the sake of pretending her sergeant’s joke was funny. She opened the door to her police cruiser, said, “Better get back on patrol, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Fuller said, and he nodded. Something felt strange, felt peculiar. “Chloe,” he called. “Are you sure everything’s all right here?”

  “Right as rain,” Chloe called back, and she started her Crown Victoria and pulled out onto the street.

  Nolan peddled off of Hemming and on to Lakeview, blissfully unaware that if he’d stayed at home just an hour longer, his and Chloe’s paths would have crossed.

  His legs were tired, sore. The police department felt like such a short drive away from the comfort of the passenger seat in Chloe’s Challenger. By bike, it was a tiring quest, but he was thankful for it. The thought of how much worse it’d be if he’d had to walk was enough motivation to keep him pedaling.

  Nolan turned on the bend of Lakeview. Up ahead, barely visi
ble in the shade of night, he saw the most peculiar sight: a black SUV, maybe a Suburban, not unlike Jim’s, had ran over a fire hydrant. The hydrant was spraying water up into the chilly night air.

  He pedaled harder, realized the lights of the SUV had been left on. The thought crossed his mind that, if someone had left keys in the car, he could take it. Just hop right in and drive off. He didn’t think about whose vehicle it might be or why they’d probably need it, just that it’d be the fastest link between him and getting to Chloe.

  Then, the thought that maybe he wouldn’t have to steal it entered his mind. Maybe whoever the vehicle belonged to wouldn’t mind giving him a lift. He raised his hands and hollered, but the driver of the truck didn’t seem to hear him. Maybe he was too far away.

  The SUV backed out onto Lakeview and zoomed off down the road. Its taillights vanished into the dark night.

  He gave his pedals three hard bursts of cycling and coasted down the road, enjoyed the slight dip that it took. Not as exhilarating as riding downhill, but a nice rest all the same. When he was near enough to the busted fire hydrant, he stopped to investigate.

  The front window of the house behind the hydrant had been smashed to bits. There was glass everywhere. The hydrant geysered into the air, rained globs of water that slapped against the pavement when they fell.

  Nolan squinted, was sure he could see someone standing in the doorway of the home. The streetlights were soft and dim. The figure shuffled backwards and forth.

  “Hey,” Nolan called. “Are you okay?”

  The figure stepped forward but didn’t reply. It inched out into the light, and its form looked increasingly familiar.

  “Professor…Holbrook?” Nolan said. “Is that you?”

  Holbrook groaned, shambled out onto the driveway in front of the home. Near enough to Nolan and the streetlight, Nolan could now see a most horrible sight: as Holbrook shuffled along, he was tripping over the two to three yards of guts that hung out of his stomach. They danced along the pavement as he walked, left an oily trail in their wake.

  “Holy shit!” Nolan screamed.