Bestial

by William D. Carl

Then the smell hit her, and she knew why the truck was swarmed with flies. She could see a man, his face battered and crushed, his guts trailing out the crack at the bottom of the driver’s-side door.

  In the truck bed, there was another body, that of an older woman. Her head had been torn from her neck, and her corpse lay between paper bags and spilled groceries. Long strips of meat were missing from her nude, wrinkled body. A bright red apple had been placed in her mouth.

  Wrapping her arms around Cathy’s throat, the girl pulled backward. Cathy couldn’t breathe, and she spun, dragging the thin girl.

  “We couldn’t never afford no meat,” Beth Blue cried gleefully as Cathy twisted beneath her. “Now I got lots of meat. Hold still, why don’t ya? It won’t hurt.”

  Spots like solar flares passed across Cathy’s vision. She needed to throw off her attacker, or she was going to pass out and end up another meal for this crazy child. But the girl was deceptively strong, and her arms were latched together as she pulled back hard.

  Turning, Cathy faced away from the old truck. She rushed backward, slamming the girl into the side of the cab. Beth Blue’s head flung back, and it shattered the window, forming a jagged halo around her face. The truck must have been so old it predated safety glass.

  “Hey! Bitch, there ain’t no cause for that! I was just hungry. You’re only making it harder on yourself.”

  Her grip on Cathy strengthened. Cathy shoved backward, harder this time. She was beginning to see tiny green flares of light. Most everything else was going black.

  She didn’t have much time left.

  Several figures emerged from the shadows. Men and women with torn, stained clothing and the eagerness of hunters glowing gold in their eyes. They were still fifty feet away, but they seemed to move as a pack, with a young, muscular, shirtless man in the lead; the others followed him, skirting outward to frame the highway.

  Cathy rushed toward the truck, putting Beth Blue’s head through the window. When Cathy moved back and forth a few times, the glass lodged in the skin and sinew of the girl’s neck. Her hold on Cathy loosened, and her hands fluttered to the gash. Cathy could hear a gurgling sound behind her, loud even over her own coughing.

  The shambling figures were thirty feet away, and the young man in the lead, obviously some kind of alpha dog, sniffed the air and motioned for the others to spread out farther.

  “Goddamn you,” Beth Blue cried out. “I was just … hungry. Goddamn you.”

  Cathy pulled loose, and the girl slumped to her knees, pressing her palms to the wounds, unable to contain the gushes of bright red blood. When the girl’s hands dropped to her sides, the arterial spray shot out of her like a mist, spattering the side of the white truck, creating odd pop art patterns. The girl fell gracefully onto her side, one hand beneath her cheek as though she were sleeping.

  The pack of crazies was at least twenty strong, and they had bloodstains on their chins and cheeks. They’d been at someone recently.

  Cathy hurried to her bike.

  A teenage boy emerged from the shadows and ran to Beth Blue, sinking his teeth into her ruined throat and slurping at the blood. The others grew jittery, excited by the sight of so much gore spattered across the road. They shot nervous glances at their leader.

  He was staring at Cathy. The skin on the back of her neck crawled beneath his empty gaze. His lips curled into a snarl. She threw a leg over her bike and took a seat, shifting one foot to the pedal.

  Three more members of the ragged crew joined the teenager, surrounding Beth Blue’s body like hyenas, snapping bones, sucking at the marrow.

  Cathy pedaled south again, slowly, trying to stay on the edge of the highway. The pack leader tossed his curly-maned head at her and issued a growl to the others. He didn’t speak, just grunted at them after he howled. They responded as if he’d given them orders.

  The group of bloody crazies blocked the shadowed area under the overpass, and more emerged from the darkness. There was a hill on either side, and Cathy biked farther off the road.

  The pack leader ran toward her, twelve of his followers behind him. They ran close to the ground, their backs hunched over, their noses guiding them.

  Cathy ran into a fence just past the ditch and close to the hill. She leaped off her bike, tossed it over the chain-link fence, and started climbing. She didn’t dare turn to see how close the pack was.

  When she dropped to the other side, Cathy barely noticed the pain in her legs as she landed. She grabbed her bike by the handlebars and scurried to the top of the hill, into the middle of the railroad tracks. Behind her, the fence rattled as the crazy people scaled it. They dropped on the other side, crouching on all fours. The leader was already heading up the hill.

  Ahead of Cathy, a few members of the shabby army stepped into the light from beneath the overpass. Behind her, one of the crazy people laughed and huffed like an animal.

  She knew it was now or never. Cathy jumped on her bike and pedaled furiously down the other slope of the hill. Luckily there was no fence on this side. When she hit pavement, she lowered her head and steered between the wrecked cars.

  The crazies leaped at her, but she’d gained enough speed that they soon fell far behind. Cathy didn’t slow down.

  She had been stupid and careless, and she couldn’t afford to repeat that mistake. She wondered if the members of the pack had gone crazy because of something they had done in their primitive state, or if they had embraced their new, dark side.

  Shuddering, Cathy nearly lost her balance, but she recovered, her determination overcoming her terror. She vowed to pedal until she reached the Bio-Gen building. Stopping again, even for only a brief respite, was too great of a risk.

  Who knew what other dangerous things hovered just out of sight, hiding in the shadows, waiting for prey? How many other packs had formed, forging tenuous alliances in order to attain fresh meat?

  She headed south again, steering between the cars until she was at the side of the highway. It was more difficult to bike through the grass, but there were fewer obstructions. And it kept her away from the things lurking amongst the vehicles.

  38

  SEPTEMBER 18, 12:30 P.M.

  Chesya showed Christian to the break room, where she had discovered the television set. Even though she had checked it once, she turned it on again, but with the power failure no picture showed on the screen. Sighing, she dropped into one of the three overstuffed chairs in the room.

  Christian immediately stepped over to the snack machine, which remained as untouched as the rest of the room. For some reason, the creatures hadn’t destroyed this small area, and he realized just how lucky this had been for them. Using his elbow, he struck the glass front of the machine several times before it broke. He reached inside and retrieved several treats.

  “Well, at least we won’t go hungry,” he said. “We’ll have to take some of these to Andrei.”

  Chesya eyed the rest of the room. “You see a radio anywhere?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Me neither. There’s got to be one in the building. I mean, even the banks have radios for the tellers to listen to while they work. I’d think it was pretty much standard everywhere.”

  Christian filled his pockets with candy bars, granola bars, and other snacks after eating a couple. Chesya plucked a couple of Snickers from the machine. She devoured them quickly, then grabbed a box of Junior Mints.

  Munching on their candy, they checked out the other rooms. The last room in the hallway was a rat’s maze of cubicles, each with its own computer and several with portable radios. They searched several stalls before they discovered a radio with batteries in it, an older model, well-used.

  Christian hesitated before turning it on. “What if there’s nobody out there?” he asked.

  “It’s worth a try.”

  He flipped the switch, and the air was filled with loud static, hissing, and popping. Christian turned down the volume, then spun the dial to search the airwaves for a
signal. He had no luck on the FM dial, but when he turned to the AM setting, he stumbled upon someone talking almost immediately.

  “Let’s take it back to the lab room,” Chesya said. “That way we won’t have to repeat everything to Rick.”

  Nodding, Christian followed her, carrying the radio on his shoulder and listening to the hearty male voice that emerged from the speakers. The voice sounded calm and paternal, that of a wizened, old anchorman sitting in a booth somewhere, relating the news as it came off of the AP wire.

  “United States armed forces have surrounded the infected area, sealing it off along every road and placing armed guards every hundred feet or so. Bridges across the Ohio River have been partially destroyed to maintain the contaminated population. It still appears that only the immediate area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and its surrounding suburbs is affected by the strange disease, and authorities say the contamination area has a radius of about forty square miles. As far as we can tell, nobody knows where the disease came from, but people are turning into beast-like creatures and wreaking havoc. No traffic is allowed in or out of the infected area, and any people attempting to escape from the guarded area are being shot and killed.”

  “Sweet Lord,” Chesya whispered.

  As they entered the laboratory, they noticed Andrei unconscious on the floor of his cell. “What happened to him?” Christian asked.

  Looking up from his stack of papers, Rick said, “I’ll tell you everything later. He’s safe now, and so are we. Hey, you found a radio. Good work.”

  Nodding, Chesya put a finger to her lips. Christian placed the boom box on the desk next to Rick, who was still perusing the notes he had discovered in the wall safe. Then Christian dropped several candy bars and bags of chips into the slot in the cell. He shoved the food forward into the confines of the Plexiglas prison.

  Christian said, “Looks like you found something.” He acknowledged the hidden safe, whose door still hung open. “That the serum in there?”

  “I think so.”

  “Will you two hush a minute?” Chesya said. “Listen to what the man’s saying. This is important.”

  The radio announcer droned on. “Authorities aren’t sure how long the quarantine will last. Scientists are studying the virus, but we haven’t heard whether any progress is being made. Our station news manager spoke with Captain Taylor Burns of the U.S. Army’s twenty-third brigade, who’s stationed in Newport, Kentucky.”

  Chesya said, “That’s just across the river! They’re waiting right across the Ohio River.”

  A low-pitched, authoritative voice said, “We’ll stand our ground until we find a way to eradicate this disease. Last night, we eliminated a couple … um, hundred of the things trying to cross the bridges from the Ohio side. They were monsters. That’s all I can say. Monsters. But we secured this area when the disease first struck, blew the bridges, and got rid of anything that looked at us sideways. Everyone under my control’s wearing biohazard suits, so none of us change like those things. I’m pretty certain we got the ones that were already over here on the Kentucky side, and the fire crews have gotten the blazes under control. We have effectively contained all of the other infected people—I use that term loosely—on the Ohio side within our established boundaries, but a lot of them want to cross what’s left of the bridges. We got ’em last night.”

  “Captain Burns, what’s happened to all the bodies?”

  “Well, when we terminated the beasts, they turned back into people, like they were before they turned into these creatures. The bodies are contaminated, so we’re leaving them on the bridges, and we’re taking care of them there.”

  “Setting them on fire?” the reporter asked.

  “Yes, sir. We have flamethrowers, and their range is over twenty feet, so we can effectively extirpate the bodies and lower the risk of contamination to my men. We have the biohazard suits, but you never know. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Isn’t it true that some of the troops have changed into monsters?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “It’s documented. . . . And how can you be so certain you’ve contained the disease? Surely a few of the contaminated people got through your security someplace. What about people who were infected and got onto airplanes?”

  “This interview’s over. We’re doing our job, keeping the rest of you people safe. I don’t need to hear crap like that.”

  The fatherly anchor resumed speaking. “An interview with Captain Taylor Burns, one of the men in charge of guarding the containment area. Many of our questions remain unanswered. Once again, no one is being permitted to leave or enter the greater Cincinnati area, where this mysterious virus has been …”

  Christian lowered the volume, so that the anchorman droned softly in the background. “They’re right across the river,” Christian whispered. “If we can just communicate with them, we can get to safety.”

  “Didn’t you hear the man?” Rick asked, placing his finger in the journal to mark his place. “They’re shooting anyone on what’s left of the bridges. I don’t think I wanna risk it. We only have one more night to get through.”

  “They don’t know that. They probably think it’ll just keep going on and on. We need to find a way to contact them.”

  Chesya asked, “How? Unless we find another cell phone—”

  “Wait a minute,” Rick interrupted. “You found a cell phone that actually worked?”

  “Yeah. I used it to call my mom. She’s on her way here now.”

  Rick raised his eyebrows. “You found a working cell phone, and you called your fucking mother?”

  Christian nodded. “It’s dead now, though.”

  “Jesus Christ …”

  Chesya said, “Rick … watch it with the language.”

  “Bite my ass, Chesya. This little prick finds a cell phone that works, and he uses the battery up calling his mommy! We could’ve used it to, oh, I don’t know, call the goddamned military.”

  “I’ve warned you about the blasphemy, Rick,” Chesya said, her voice low. “I won’t abide it.”

  “Fine! Fine! Then I’ll just take the ‘goddamn’ serum and go across the ‘goddamn’ bridge and get ‘goddamn’ shot.”

  Chesya started to walk from the room. “Now you’re just being unkind.”

  “We can talk about being kind when we’re fucking safe. Jesus, you … you waste this invaluable opportunity, and you worry about my fucking language?”

  Chesya looked at him, and he could feel the pain in her gaze. “You want to cuss and moan about what could have been, then fine. Just keep me out of it. It’s just common courtesy.”

  “Courtesy?”

  “Yeah, and that’s what separates us from those creatures. We can be kind to each other. They don’t know anything about being kind. They don’t know anything about being considerate of other people. It’s something we share because we’re human beings. Rick, it’s just plain, good old-fashioned respect.”

  Rick mulled this over for a moment. “Sorry. Guess what the kid did was irrational, but I can kinda understand it. I just thought … just thought about what we could have done with that cell phone.”

  Christian looked like he was about to cry. “I’m sorry, guys. I … I didn’t think.”

  “Damn straight you didn’t think,” Rick said. “But I guess we need to work together. If you find another cell phone that works, would you mind sharing this information with me? If it isn’t asking too much?” To Chesya, he said, “I’ll try to restrain myself from cursing, but I want a little assurance that we can all work together to get out of this mess. We still have another night to get through, you know.”

  “I keep screwing up,” Christian muttered, leaning against the wall and looking away from the others. “I had a gun we could use, the one Jean shot himself with. I lost it during the chase last night. That could’ve helped us a hell of a lot.”

  “I lost a gun too,” Chesya said. “When you’re running for your life, you just don’t thi
nk about things like that. You’re just trying to survive.”

  Christian shrugged. “I’d feel better with it.”

  “You know, when we found the radio,” Chesya said, “it was inside a whole room full of stuff. It looked untouched, but there were dozens of cubicles.”

  “Looked like Dilbert used to work there,” Christian said, rubbing his eyes. “There could be more stuff, maybe another cell phone.”

  Rick nodded. “Let’s give it a look-see. Then maybe we can get hold of the military … or the media. Someone who can help us out.”

  Andrei moaned, stirring on the floor of his cell. He shook his head, then looked over at the three people watching him from the other side of the Plexiglas. For a moment, he seemed confused.

  “You shoot me!” he shouted, propping himself up on his elbows. “I help you, and you shoot me … you son of a bitch!”

  “I couldn’t trust you not to turn,” Rick said.

  “I get serum for you, and you betray me.”

  “Listen,” Chesya said, “let’s give him the shot. If it works, we have one more person on our side. If it doesn’t, he’s safe locked in there.”

  “That’s what I was doing,” Rick said.

  “I no think I trust you.”

  Rick said, “Well, Andrei, I’ll have to pass the syringe into the cage, and you’ll have to administer the shot yourself. So it’s not a matter of trusting me.”

  The Siberian grinned. “You a son of a bitch … but maybe all right after all.”

  Rick took one of the syringes from the safe and one of the sealed beakers marked with a big scarlet A. He laughed, reminded of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel he’d been forced to read in high school. Pushing the needle past the seal, he filled it with 300 cc’s of the serum; then, after withdrawing the syringe, he tapped the side of it a few times and squirted out about 50 cc’s of the solution. Chesya and Christian looked at him in wonder and awe.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I used to always watch E.R. What? You think I was a junkie or something?”