by Bryn Roar
“Wait…. You got all this from seven pages?”
Bill checked his watch and stood up from the table. “Let’s talk while we make the rounds. I have something to show you in the cellar. I don’t suppose you still have that Smith and Wesson you were telling me about?”
Bud remembered the revolver on his bed. “Shit! I left it in my damn room again!”
“Relax. The shotgun should be sufficient for now.”
“Should be?” Josie said. “Aren’t we safe in here?”
“Just a precaution,” Bill assured her with a smile.
Josie saw the uncertainty lurking behind it, though. The thought that the Rabids might find their way inside the museum had barely occurred to her. As soon as they’d locked the front door behind them, she’d instantly felt safer. It’s the lights, she thought, looking up at the buzzing fluorescents. The lights which lull you into that false sense of security. The lights which keep the Boogeymen at bay.
Yeah, Tits, but lights can always be turned off!
As they passed through the apartment and into the museum, Josie couldn’t help but notice all the ideal hiding places. The dark shadows giving shelter to the things that go “Bump”in the night. The Dark Side of the Moon now seemed to take on a more literal connotation.
They checked the front doors. Bill peered out into the street between the plywood sheets.
“See anything, Pop?”
“Just Robbie all by his lonesome. Street seems quiet. Remind me to bring him in later. I want to recharge his batteries in case we need him again. I have an idea on where to go if this place is breached tonight.”
“I need to talk to you about that, too.”
They made their way down the hall. “Yeah? Don’t tell me you’re still thinking about getting a boat and sailing off to the mainland, son. Cause there’s no way the Coast Guard will let us off this damn island. They’ll sink us before we get halfway across the river.”
“I know that, Dad. Hell, I’ve been dreaming about this awful night since I was nine years old!”
Bill stopped as if thunderstruck. If not for the circumstances, the look on his face might have been comical. “You have, haven’t you? You know, up until this second I hadn’t connected your old dreams to what’s been happening here. They’ve all come true, though, haven’t they? The red-eyed things…the insanity involved…the Cave, where we’d all hole-up until the crisis was over. Jesus, son! The museum! Is this the Cave in your dreams?”
Fascinated, Josie looked from one to the other. She felt like she’d just stepped into one of her favorite author’s novels at a pivotal juncture.
Bud shook his head. When he was younger he used to run to his father at night and tell him about his nightmares, of a mysterious cave where the “Red-Eyed Men” would chase him and his friends down a steep and slippery hole. Of fire, blood, and death. As time went by, Bud could see that his visions worried his dad. His father would try to reassure him, tell him it was just a bad dream, meaningless figments putting on a late-night horror show. Nothing more than his fevered imagination, hard at work.
Eventually, Bud realized his father couldn’t help him and ceased running to him. Leaving Bill to assume his son’s nightmares had in fact ceased to be a problem. A fact that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Then Bud discovered the bomb shelter out by Lizard Lake. The Cave of his dreams! The underground sanctuary that would save the people he loved most in the world. He’d never told his dad of his discovery. Why, he wasn’t quite certain. Probably so as not to worry the old man any more than he already had. But Josie knew.
“The Bunker.” She said it so softly that Bill barely heard her. “What’s that, Josie? Bunker?”
As they checked the back door again, Bud told his father about the safe haven that awaited them out in the Pines. A place they could hole-up indefinitely, until the virus burned itself out above them.
“There’s two months’ supply of food, and believe it or not the plumbing still works down there! There are enough guns and ammo to hold off a small army. And it’s certainly comfortable enough for the five of us.”
“So that’s what you’ve been spending all your money on,” Bill chuckled. “I won’t ask you how you got those firearms, since you’re too young to have purchased them on your own. I know I wouldn’t like the answer.” He sighed. “But desperate times, and all that. You say there’s room for five of us, Buddy boy?”
“It’ll be cozy, Pop, but sure.”
“How about eight?”
Bill led them down the cellar steps, into a series of partitioned rooms, the drop ceiling low over their heads. His dark room opened up into Bud’s makeshift gym, where the large emergency generator chug-a-lugged in a shadowy, cobwebbed-filled-corner. Nearly lost in the dusty shadows was the door to their workshop. Entering the cluttered workshop, Josie backed up in fright.
Handcuffed in one corner of the room, his left wrist latched to one of the steel-legs supporting a heavy workbench, lounged the lab rat, Mr. Clean!
Josie pointed at the man. “What’s he doing—”
“Look who’s here,” said a voice, nearly right beside her. Already on edge, Josie screamed.
“Easy, Joey. Easy,” Bill said. “It’s just Garfield.”
Bud swung the 12 gauge around and pointed it at the owner of Moon Man’s.
“Don’t shoot me, Tex,” said Tim Garfield, who was armed himself, a .22 rifle held tight in his hands. He tried to smile but his twitching lips couldn’t pull off the trick. He was slouched next to another person, sleeping on the floor. The dozing gent was facing the wall and had a blanket wrapped about him, though the room was stuffy and hot.
Bill gently pushed the shotgun barrels towards the floor. “That’s Mr. Pete, asleep. I found him and Tim on the beach this afternoon.”
“The beach?” Josie laughed humorlessly. “What were ya’ll doing down there? Working on your tans?”
“Pulling my leaking rowboat ashore, my dear.”
“Damn, Timbo! Were you trying to row all the way to the mainland?”
“If that’s what it would’ve taken, Bud…But no, I’ve got a motor on it now. At the time, Mr. Pete and I were just trying to get away from those Firehouse fiends. After sitting offshore, watching Lonnie and his boys rape and kill indiscriminately, we knew we had to find some help.”
He saw the look in Bud and Josie’s eyes. The judgment. Branding him and Mr. Pete cowards for not doing more. Or maybe he was only projecting what he felt deep in his heart. “I know what you’re thinking! But you didn’t see those fucking things!”
“You’re wrong, Tim,” Josie said. “We did see those things, and I assure you, Bud and I aren’t judging you.”
“Damn straight,” said Bud. “Hell, It sounds like you guys were lucky to get out of there alive.”
“Thanks for saying so,” Tim sighed, his heart clearly unconvinced. “Anyway, I had a tank full of gas. Plenty enough to reach the mainland. We got about halfway across the river when a Coast Guard ship came up alongside us. At first we thought they were going to rescue us. Only the crew didn’t offer any assistance. The Captain asked if we were coming from the island, and naturally we said yes. Before we could get another word out, they ordered us to return to shore. Mr. Pete tried to reason with them, tell them what was going on, but it was pointless. We saw the scared looks on those sailors’ faces. They thought we had the same disease as those monsters out there! They towed us to within sight of the West Side beach, and then, just to make sure we didn’t try leaving again, they raked my bow with a machine gun, which forced the fucking issue. We thought once we got to the beach, Lonnie and the others would attack us again, you know? But instead of coming after us, when they saw our boat returning to shore, they just went back into the Firehouse! If you ask me, those red eyed fuckers are scared of the water.”
Bud realized Garfield was speaking in what must have been his natural speaking voice. Gone was the Stewie Griffin inspired inflection, which
had been around since the inception of that animated show. It had been a long time since he’d heard Tim’s actual speaking voice. He wondered at the terrors Tim and Mr. Pete had witnessed in the past two days. Terrors enough to change the way a man spoke.
“How’d you get past the Coast Guard, Buddy boy? Has the blockade been lifted?”
“That’s a good question,” Bill said. “Just how did you sneak past them, son?”
“Sneak? We didn’t sneak past anybody. In fact, I didn’t even spot them until we were nearly in the harbor. We radioed in a distress call but all we got was dead air.”
“Bet they heard you,” Bill said. “Loud and clear.”
“Yeah.” Bud said. “That’s my thinking, too.”
“You keep saying that,” Josie said testily. “But it doesn’t make sense! The Coast Guard not offering any assistance, I mean. That’s their feckin’ job!”
“That’s why they didn’t stop you from entering the harbor,” Mr. Clean said, in a calm, friendly tone. Being handcuffed to the workbench didn’t seem to faze him at all. “And offering assistance was the last thing on their mind, I can assure you. They want to keep this outbreak isolated to one location if at all possible. That’s standard procedure in the event of an outbreak of this magnitude.”
“What’s the deal with the lab rat?” Josie asked Bill.
Bud scowled. “He’s from the Center?”
Bill sat on a steel stool. “This,” he said, smiling down at the bald man, sitting on the floor across from him, “is my other source of info you were wondering about.”
“Howdy,” Mr. Clean said with a salute.
“Why the handcuffs, Pop? He wasn’t bit, was he?”
“Not exactly, Bud.”
“Is this your son, Bill?”
“Yes, this is my Buddy boy. And this pretty little girl beside him is Josie O’Hara. Bud, Josie, this is John Cutter. He was Clint Bidwell’s top assistant at the Center.”
“Second assistant,” John said. “Brian O’Rielly was Bidwell’s top man. We worked with Clint at the CDC.”
“Was that the douchebag I saw you speaking to, along with Bidwell, in the cemetery?” said Josie, startling everyone. “The day you were out taking potshots at Bud?”
Cutter blushed. “You were there? I didn’t see—”
“I was hiding. Answer the question, arsehole!”
Bill cleared his throat. “Better tell her, John. You didn’t tell me you took a shot at my boy. That pisses me off almost as much as it does the young lady.”
“Yeah, it was us…Bidwell, O’Reilly and me. But I was the one doing the shooting. In my defense, though, I didn’t know Who it was we were chasing! I assumed it was another infected agent! I was a mess that day, you see, scared out of my mind. I knew the chances of successfully containing this virus were slim to none.”
“Then why didn’t you do something about it?”
Bill answered for Cutter, now withering under Josie’s glare. “He did, hon. John was the man who contacted the CDC, to tell them things had gotten out of hand here. But he wasn’t in any position to stop Bidwell.”
“Fat lot of good that did,” Bud said, ignoring the fact that he’d intended on doing the very same thing, had the radios worked. “If the Coast Guard wasn’t out there, ready to shoot any islander on sight, then maybe we could get out of here before anyone else gets hurt!”
Garfield leveled his .22 at Cutter. “Hey, that’s right! I hadn’t considered that!”
“Put that gun down, Tim,” Bill admonished the nervous man. “As jumpy as you are, it’s likely to go off. And for your information, Bud, if John hadn’t made that call, then the virus would already be on the mainland.”
“Oh, my call didn’t prevent a damn thing, Bill. RS13 has in all likelihood spread to the mainland by now.”
Bill seemed horrified at the suggestion. “I’m sure by now they’ve quarantined everyone from Moon who fled to the mainland. It…it just stands to reason.”
“That’s highly doubtful, since the warning didn’t go out until today. My guess is the virus began spreading on the mainland two days ago. If not sooner.”
“You don’t know that,” Bill argued. He thought of his daughter, safe and sound, he prayed, in the Blue Ridge hills of North Carolina.
“You’re right. It’s all speculation at this point,” Cutter shrugged. “Besides, that’s not our problem anymore. Our task is simply to survive. If we can make it through the next three weeks unscathed, then we should be home free.”
“Three weeks?” said Josie. “Why three weeks?”
“Because that’s how long I figure the virus has before it burns itself out on an island this size. There’s only so much fodder here for the disease. Anyway, I’m sure that’s what the military is thinking in its blockade.”
“John, maybe you better tell these kids what you told us earlier. They need to understand what we’re facing. So they can survive this thing.”
“Very well. Let me see if I can nail it down for you. This virus, I mean. Unlike your standard human rabies, which has an incubation period anywhere from two weeks to six months, the RS13 strain has an incubation timetable of 24 to 48 hours before the first symptoms sets in. Except for the initial symptoms: headache, fever, irritability, and anxiety, this bug barely resembles the rabies virus of old. For instance, human-to-human rabies is extremely rare. Not so with this vicious bastard. Human-to-human is what it’s all about! Once the typical incubation period is over, the virus burns through its host in a matter of days. Dehydration seems to hasten the process.”
“Typical? You mean the incubation varies?”
“Most certainly, Bud. The virus is unpredictable in victims who are very young, old, or infirm. At least that’s what we learned through limited animal testing. As far as humans go…I really can’t say for certain. We didn’t have enough time for reliable research. For all intents and purposes, though, let’s keep to the standard timetable. Once the typical RS13 incubation is over—and again, that’s what I’m basing our timetable on here—the disease lasts for a period of five to eight days before the victim slips into a deep coma. Day or two after that, the victim expires, usually from a massive stroke—unlike typical rabies, mind you, where death is usually linked to respiratory failure. Again, I can’t stress this enough, RS13 is a mutated form of rabies. It’s a much stronger, much deadlier form of the Lyssavirus. So if you know anything about typical rabies, don’t make the mistake of equating it with this nasty bug! For example: rabies typically has three basic stages: the first, the Prodromal Stage, is characterized by behavioral changes. The second, the Excitative Stage, often referred to as furious rabies, is when the victim is hypersensitive to external stimuli. Charging and biting at anything nearby. Extremely agitated and aggressive! The third phase is the Paralytic Stage, when damage to the motor neurons causes all sorts of recognizable symptoms: staggering or motor incoordination, due to partial paralysis of the limbs, and, of course, the obvious foaming at the mouth—or drooling. Caused again by paralysis of the facial and throat muscles. Each stage lasts from two to four days. Not surprisingly, these three stages in RS13 are far more compressed. In fact, they all seem to appear at once. The Paralytic Stage, however, is less injurious to RS13 victims, assuring a much longer and destructive Furious Rabies phase. And therein lies our predicament. Because RS13 carriers are so determined to spread this mutated virus, they won’t rest till they’ve shared it with every living soul on this island…or killed us in the process. So, by what I’ve seen today, I figure—conservatively mind you—that eighty percent of the remaining population on Moon now has the illness. At the most I believe there are only twenty percent of us left on the island for the infected to hunt down. And unless those other poor souls out there are as safely holed-up as we are, I think by this time tomorrow night all of Moon will be mad dog rabid. Minus us, God willing.”