by JL Bryan
Seth rolled over so that she was underneath him.
“Oh!” Allegra laughed. “Want to go old-fashioned, huh?”
“I have to go.” Seth jumped to his feet, dragging the rope behind him, since it was still noosed tight around his left hand. He pulled on his jeans and shoes, grabbed his shirt, and ran for the door.
“Wait!” Allegra screamed after him, sitting up on the bed. “Come back! I need you, Seth!”
Seth dashed through the sitting room and into the hall, and then the hotel's fire alarm began to scream. When he reached the railing, he glimpsed the backs of two people, a young man and a young woman, rushing out the fire door all the way down on the first floor, despite the EMERGENCY ONLY sign warning about the alarm. They slammed it behind them.
Seth started down the stairs, but then something snapped his left arm and hauled him backward, right off his feet, and he sprawled out across the deep-piled rug. He looked up to see Allegra standing over him, stark naked, holding the other end of the rope that was still tied to his left wrist. The rope smeared his blood all over her hands, but she didn’t seem to notice.
She wagged a wet, red finger. “Don't you run away from me.”
“I have to go!” Seth stood up and tugged at the rope. “Come on, this is crazy.”
“Oh, Seth, I love you so much.” She tried to kiss him, but Seth turned his head. “Let's get married and have babies. We can go sailing with my parents every summer. Oh, and you can go to the dog shows with my mom! We have a champion Sheltie, Lady Tinkerbelle’s Lace.”
“Well, all that sounds like it sucks,” Seth said. “But I’m in a big hurry here, and you really need to… let go!” He jerked the rope as hard as he could, meaning to wrench it free from her hands, but instead she held tight and stumbled up against him.
“Oh, Seth!” Allegra said. “You could play golf with my dad at the country club. He’d like that. You’re a good golfer, right?”
“No,” Seth said. “Not even on the Wii.”
“You’ll learn.” She nibbled at his chin. “Sethy-seth. Sethykins.”
“Okay,” Seth said. “I give up. Let’s go back to the room and make out.”
“Really?” she chirped. “Yeah, let’s go!” And then ran back to the room, dropping the rope in the process.
Seth flung the rope out over the railing, out of her reach, and ran down the stairs.
“I’m waiting!” she cooed behind him. Seth put on speed, paused at the bottom of the steps to pull his pants all the way on, and then ran out the front door of the hotel.
He rushed outside and found himself in the middle of a huge riot. People were punching and kicking each other all over the street, parked cars were overturned, shrubbery was on fire.
He struggled to press through the dense crowd, toward Meeting Street, where Jenny must have parked. It was the only direction he knew to go.
Random strangers punched at his face, and one of the old ladies who’d been protesting the music festival bit Seth’s hand.
“What the hell?” Seth backed away from her. The crowd surged like a tidal wave and pushed him back in the opposite direction, past the hotel, and crushed against the side of an empty taxicab. Beside him, a girl of twelve or thirteen got her face slammed against the hood of the taxi’s window by an angry fat man. She came up screaming, with a bloody nose.
“Hey, don’t do that!” Seth shouted at the guy assaulting the girl. Seth put a hand on the screaming girl’s head and quickly healed her face.
The big guy came after Seth, but instead of fighting back, Seth took a chance, seized his arm and pushed his healing power into the guy.
The big guy paused with his fist in midair, looking confused. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Fuck if I know,” Seth said, and he pushed past him.
Seth pressed forward through the crowd, but every few feet saw somebody with a broken finger or deep cuts across their face, and he had to reach out and touch them briefly to give them a little healing help—without them noticing, hopefully.
He slowly advanced through the dense, terrified, angry mob. Seth began to fear he might never find Jenny again.
The crowd crushed in around Jenny, and they kept slapping at her head, so she knew she was infecting some people. She lay with her eyes closed and waited to die.
She couldn’t understand why everyone had turned on her, but it seemed natural that they would. She was a killer. She didn’t belong among good people.
Then the hands jabbing at her turned icy and cold. And these freezing hands weren’t punching and slapping, either, but just brushing across her face. Fingers that felt like popsicles jabbed under the wrist of her sleeve and the collar of her shirt, as if specifically seeking out her flesh.
Jenny opened her eyes and found herself looking up at woman in a pantsuit with a partially crushed head. Jenny could actually see fragments of the woman’s skull and brain. The young man next to her had a huge red stain on the front of his shirt, and a bullethole.
She was surrounded by cold, gray-skinned people who all looked very dead, and very intent on getting under her clothes and at her flesh.
Jenny screamed.
All of the dead-looking people turned their backs on her, forming a jumbled ring that kept out the attacking mob, though some people could still reach in to give Jenny a poke or a slap.
Each of the walking corpses—Jenny didn’t know how else to think of them, without using the word “zombies,” which seemed too freaky to contemplate—each one of them dragged what looked like a full-size black body bag in one hand, as if they’d all just unzipped and marched out of a morgue somewhere, but held on to their bags just in case. It was surreal.
A young man who looked a couple years older than Jenny passed through the wall of zombies, who shuffled back and forth to let him pass. He had shaggy brown hair and dark eyes that seemed to glow. A smile twitched his lips.
“Poor girl,” he said. “Look what they’ve done to you.” He dropped to a knee beside her, and reached a hand toward her face.
“Don’t touch me,” Jenny whispered. “I’m poisonous.”
“Not to me.” He lay his fingers on her bruised, bleeding cheek.
All around them, the slouching zombies straightened up. Each one reached inside its body bag and withdrew a long, slender object. Some of them had wooden mop or broom handles, some had strips of metal, one or two of which had lamps attached at the end, as if they’d been ripped from some operating room ceiling. Some simply had two by four boards.
“What’s happening?” Jenny asked.
“Phalanx,” he said. “Old Greek formation. Still pretty effective, huh?’
The zombies draped the ends of the body bags over their left arms and grasped the bags’ side handles with their left hands. Then they raised the body bags in front of themselves, creating a thick plastic barrier as wide and tall as a person. They weren’t exactly bulletproof shields, but they deflected most of the fists and debris thrown by the crowd.
Through the narrow gaps between the body bag shields, the zombies swung their blunt objects, batting back the crowd. They swung in unison, and stepped forward, pushing the crowd back.
All the while, the strange young man was simply looking into Jenny’s eyes and lightly brushing her cheek with his fingers. His eyes looked familiar to her.
“Are you doing that?” she whispered.
“Doing what?”
“You’re controlling them.”
He looked around at the expanding ring of zombies, who were pushing their way into a square formation. “I certainly hope so. I’d hate to see what would happen if they ran wild. They might eat your brain!” He rubbed her forehead and temples with his fingertips. “Kidding. Are you remembering me yet? I know you woke up a few weeks ago. I could feel it like an earthquake, and I was thousands of miles away. Those fuckers in that little town, they tried to kill you, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “They did.”
He laughed. �
�Stupid rednecks! Come on, let’s get moving.” He stood up and held out his hands to her.
Jenny kept looking at his eyes, trying to figure out how she knew him. Every inch of her body was screaming in pain, and she felt like she would collapse any moment.
“Okay,” he said. “I get it. Guy shows up with a band of zombies swinging brooms. You don’t know what to think. But you should know two things. First, this mob will eventually tear my deceased friends apart, and there goes your security team. Second, there is an army of state police and federales on their way to collect you, and I can get you out of here.”
Jenny took his hands and stood, but she was wobbly on her feet from her beating. Every part of her ached.
“So, what’s your choice?” he asked. “Live or die?”
Jenny looked at him. “Are you Archidamus?” she asked.
“You do remember me.” He pulled the glove from her left hand and took it in his own, skin to skin. It was a strange, dangerous feeling to Jenny, touching anybody like that, except for Seth.
“What about Seth?” she asked.
“The healer? He’s safe. You’re in danger. Come on, we have to hike a few blocks.” A wall of flashing blue lights approached from the far end of the street. “Not that way.”
He supported her with one arm as they walked, and the phalanx of zombies moved with them, walling them in from the mob.
Those at the front of the square alternating between knocking on people who approached and jabbing their long weapons forward to push people back out of the way.
The zombies on Jenny’s left and right simply held up their body-bag shields and only struck people who tried to reach inside. Behind Jenny, zombies walked backwards, holding up the body bags and ready to strike if necessary.
“This is so fucked up,” Jenny whispered.
“You get used to it. I’m Alexander in this life, by the way. But you can call me whatever you want. Do you like Euanthe better?”
“Call me Jenny,” she whispered.
“We have to move faster, Jenny.”
“I can’t.” Jenny’s legs wobbled beneath her.
“That’s fine.” He picked her up in his arms and began to jog. The zombies sped up with him, and the front line fell into a wedge to pry apart the crowd. The rioting mob seemed to be losing their focus on Jenny, now that the person with the megaphone had shut up, and Jenny had gained a dozen or more scary-looking, somewhat armed protectors. The people who’d been intent on attacking Jenny started attacking each other instead, or bashing in car windows.
“Why's everybody going crazy?” Jenny asked.
“Tommy. The fear-giver. He can make a crowd panic.”
“Ashleigh's opposite,” Jenny said.
“He wanted you to hit them all with a plague,” Alexander said. “It was a trap, but we've wrecked his plans. He didn't have any idea I would show up.”
Jenny slid an arm around Alexander's shoulders. It was such a strange feeling to be carried like this, and the strangest part was how comforted and protected she felt. She remembered from her dreams how she had felt in his presence, knowing she'd finally found her place in the world.
She was starting to feel that way again. And it didn't really hurt that he was handsome and strong and had just saved her life.
Jenny laid her head on his shoulder, her face close to his sun-darkened cheek and neck. He wore only a T-shirt and jeans, but the jeans seemed perfectly tailored to fit him, and the black shirt was as soft as cashmere.
He carried her up a side street, into a neighborhood of huge old houses. The crowd didn't follow, and this street was relatively peaceful, with just a band of teenagers throwing rocks at the streetlights. The zombies spread out a little, giving them some breathing room.
Alexander brought them to the driveway of a big Greek Revival-style house, with a black SUV parked in the driveway, nose out as if someone were planning a quick getaway.
“Is this your house?” Jenny asked.
“This house belongs to Wells Fargo bank,” he said. “It's for sale. Nobody lives here. So I borrowed the driveway for a couple of hours.” He opened the passenger door of the SUV and set her down in the seat. He even buckled her seatbelt before closing her door.
He climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“Somewhere no one will be looking for you.” He pulled out of the driveway.
“I have to get back to my dad. He's pretty messed up right now.”
“What happened to him?”
“Ashleigh's opposite—Tommy?—hit my dad pretty hard with that fear thing.”
“He’ll be fine,” Alexander said. “The fear wears off after a few hours.”
Jenny thought about the time Tommy had attacked her and Seth. They'd had a night of confused terror, but they'd eventually been fine the next day.
“The only person in danger is you,” Alexander said. “And I'm taking care of that right now.”
He accelerated down the street.
In the rearview, the zombies all fell down at once, like a group of kids playing ring-around-the-rosy. Their pole weapons and body bags littered the street around them.
“Ashes, ashes,” Jenny sang under her breath.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.” On top of the deep calm he inspired, Jenny was starting to feel something else—nervous, embarrassed, giddy. She was a little afraid of those feelings...but she liked them, too.
They took back streets through residential neighborhoods, avoiding the swarm of police, Homeland Security and federal agencies that were searching the city for Jenny.
Chapter Forty-Six
Heather rode from the Charleston International Airport in a Homeland Security car. Red flags were already up all over the city. Some kind of riot had broken out at the Southeastern Funk Fest, and local and state police were working to calm things down. The National Guard, already on alert, had been activated and would be rolling into the downtown area momentarily.
Local police had also identified an incident that required CDC attention. A couple dozen bodies had just been found in a big pile in a neighborhood not far from the festival, cause of death unclear. Heather worried that Jenny might have already gotten started on her apparent plan to kill ten thousand people or more. If so, more clusters of bodies would turn up before long, if not a massive-fatality incident.
The Homeland Security vehicle arrived at the incident scene, where police, fire, EMS and a small crowd of onlookers had already gathered. Heather jumped out of the car and joined Schwartzman, who'd been driven by another Homeland Security officer.
“We need to get these people out of here,” Heather whispered as they approached the scene.
“Let's see what's happening first,” Schwartzman replied.
“It would be a pretty big coincidence if she wasn't involved.”
“Shit happens,” Schwartzman whispered.
A gray, balding man in a suit approached, looking tired. He glanced at their badges.
“Y'all the CDC folks?” he asked. “I'm Cordell Nolan, county medical examiner. Spoke to you on the phone, I think.” He reached a hand towards Schwartzman, who hesitated a moment before shaking it.
“This is Dr. Reynard,’ Schwartzman said. “She’s one of our best epidemiologists.”
“Well, we got us an epidemic of something, but I can't say what.” Nolan shook Heather's hand. “Whole damn city's going up in flames. Anybody with any sense knows you let a few thousand kids run loose in the streets, with music, everything's gonna get wrecked. Mayor was hell-bent this was going to mean money for the city. Now look how much it's gonna cost to fix it back.”
“We're a bit more concerned about these bodies,” Heather said. She looked at the pile of corpses in the street. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their age, race, sex, socioeconomics, but they were all barefoot and wore toetags, which was more than a little odd. Body bags were scattered among them, alo
ng with random objects like mops and brooms, and what looked like the metal arms of overhead lights from a surgery bay.
None of them had the boils, tumors and pustules indicative of Fallen Oak syndrome.
“Are you bagging them already?” Heather asked.
“The bags were already here,” Nolan said. “Mine are still in the truck. We ain't touched nothing.”
“They came with their own cadaver pouches?” Schwartzman asked. “That's convenient.”
“We ought to take 'em into evidence, though,” Nolan said. “Still gonna use fresh ones to cart ‘em off. Looks like these bodies was already checked in at the MUSC morgue over the past week or so. They still got the toe tags.”
“I'm sorry?” Heather asked. “You're saying these came from the hospital morgue?”
“Yep.”
“How did they get here?” Schwartzman asked.
“Still trying to get somebody from the morgue on the phone,” Nolan said. “Ain't nobody answering down there tonight. Real strange.”
“So...these are stolen bodies,” Heather said. “Some kind of, what? College prank?”
“Take a lot of doing,” Nolan replied. “Need a lot of people to carry this many bodies. Somebody at the morgue had to see something, but like I said, nobody's picking up the horn. Hospital administration's supposed to get back to me any second.”
Heather squatted for a closer look at the bodies. It looked like an assortment of bodily injuries and disease, as well as a few elderly people who might have passed from natural causes. They were all barefoot and hung with toe tags.
“This doesn't make any sense,” Heather said. “You'd need a truck to carry all these. There must be witnesses.”
“There must be,” Nolan agreed. “But the police are spread a little thin tonight, with all the crazy hippies tearing up the city. Thank the Lord we have so many state and federal folks here. Almost like somebody knew a big mess was coming.”
Schwartzman looked at Heather with a slight smile at the corner of his mouth.
“Do we have any more incidents like this?” Heather asked.