Outbreak: Tales from the Quarantine Zone

by Robert Van Dusen

  Helen rushed out of the shed as Victor fell to his knees over the policeman's body and slammed the door. She was crying and it took her a couple tries to get the shackle of the lock in place... Helen backed away from the door her hands going to her face. The late morning air shook with a blood curdling scream that seemed to make Helen's teeth rattle that she felt right to her very soul... It felt like she had grown roots. Very faintly she could hear this wet smacking sound like somebody eating something soggy with their mouth open.

  Helen threw up in the grass then went over and picked up the policeman's belt. She slung it over her shoulder and started back towards the house on wobbly legs. If this worked she could...Helen crashed into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Could she really do this again? That girl in the other room was what...twenty? Twenty five? She had seen her around town a few times as well as Officer Peterson... If it helped Vic then it would help Joey. Joey was what was important now. It was Vic's fault that Joey was sick anyways. He had gone out 'hunting' when what he really meant was he went out into the woods to drink himself stupid and come back with that bite on his forearm. He didn't want to go to the hospital. Then he coughed up that black shit into Joey's face when the boy sneaked into their bedroom to check on his daddy.

  After a few more minutes to collect herself she down the hall and into Joey's room. Officer whatshername was still right where Helen had left her though she was starting to come around. The policewoman was tugging on her restraints and trying to use the radio clipped to the epaulet of her uniform shirt. The whole thing really was stirring Joey up something awful. Helen scowled at the young woman. “You stop that right now.” she scolded as she came a little closer “You stop that right now!”

  Helen yanked the hand mike of the policewoman's shoulder scowling at her. She tugged harder pulling the wire from the radio which was still in the carrier on the officer's belt. “Really.” Helen muttered as she tossed the mike onto the top of the dresser. “Some people.” She put a foot on Julie's side and half rolled her over and dug the radio itself out of its holder. After putting the radio next to the mike Helen stood with her hands on her hips as she tried to think about what to do.

  Helen realized that the police car was still in the driveway out in front of the house. This was a big problem... It would have to be moved. She could have kicked herself for being down in the basement when they got here. Who was driving? She hurried out of the house and sprinted to the police cruiser hoping against hope... “Well poop.” Helen muttered under her breath. There were no keys in the vehicle's ignition. Who had been driving? They would have the keys...

  She had been in the basement doing some laundry when the police showed up. Whoever was driving would have the keys... Helen scrambled into the house and burst into Joey's room. Without ceremony she dug into the woman's pockets. A money clip, a handkerchief, a jackknife...KEYS! Helen held them up by the fob and frowned. It didn't look like they were for the cop car but it was worth a shot.

  Helen ran back out to the car and tried the first key that looked like a car key. It didn't fit! She dropped the keys and had to frantically dig around on the floorboard until she found them again. The good news was that she was able to get through the rest of the keys without dropping them. The bad news was that none of the keys worked. The keys had to be in the other cop's pockets...

  She rushed to the shed, dug out her own set of keys and opened the door. The inside of Vic's shed looked like a great big water balloon filled with red paint had been dropped on the floor. Vic looked up with...with bits of the big policeman's insides in his hands. Helen felt the color drain out of her face and she spun on her heel slamming the door behind her. Helen put a hand on the shed and swallowed fighting the urge to throw up. “If you don't get those keys they'll catch you for sure.” Helen told herself, her hands curling into fists “If you go to jail nobody will be around to take care of Joey.”

  That thought helped her fight down the nausea and revulsion. She stood, took a deep breath and opened the door again. The smell...the shed was always hot in the summer and now... Vic smelled bad and he was starting to look like he had gangrene or something and now... Now there was the stench of the cop. Vic had torn him open like he had the cat and had was eating the poor man's insides. There was blood everywhere!

  However Vic did seem a lot calmer. Instead of getting all excited and biting at the air he was kneeling over the man's corpse mechanically shoving gobbets of flesh into his maw. In fact he barely seemed to notice that his wife was in the room. She slowly and carefully crouched down and reached every so slowly towards the dead cop's leg. A low keening wail made Helen jump to her feet. Vic's eyes followed her then he leaped and Helen barely evaded her husband's groping fingers.

  Helen was out of the shed and into the house inside Joey's room in a flash. “You...you bitch!” she spat at the young woman still chained to her son's bed. It dawned on her what the woman had been doing with her radio. She had been sending out an alarm! Helen kicked her hard in the ribs then picked up the jackknife she had taken from the cop's pocket. “I-I'll fix you!”

  The knife was sharp so it made short work of the ropes holding the boy's wrists and the ankle farthest from the prostrate woman. Her boy was hungry and it looked like her goose was pretty well cooked. No reason why Joey shouldn't have something to eat. It was one last thing she could do for him before they took her away from her little boy after all.

  Joey scrambled like some kind of small necrotic crab until he hit the end of his tether his little tummy smacking hard on the bedpost. Julie screamed as the fucking crazy bitch who had clocked her backed towards the door putting her out of reach of the kid. Joey's head snapped down fixing the prostrate policewoman with a look of mechanical hunger. Unthinking she kicked and screamed her throat raw and writhed.

  The boy's clammy hand caught her forearm and he pulled himself down his jaws opening wide. Julie screeched as Joey's teeth sank into the meat of her arm tearing away a chunk of flesh. She brought a knee up and smashed it into the back of the little boy's head as she thrashed trying to get him off of her. Julie rolled, got a knee under her then some how managed to stand flipping the bed over sending the mattress tumbling against the far wall.

  Unthinking she started towards the door and made it about half a step before the bed frame got caught on the dresser. Eyes wild with fear she looked down as the boy's surprisingly strong hands wrapped around her ankle. The thing that up until quite recently had been Joey Giustino dragged itself forward and sank its teeth into the hamstring of Julie's right leg. She collapsed as soon as she put weight on the leg pulling the bed frame down on top of her and the boy.

  Joey swallowed the piece of her trouser pants and flesh then took another bite. She howled in pain and tried to get through the door or at least away from the child that was currently mauling her leg. Somebody shouted and strong hands grabbed under her armpits trying to pull her away. “Oh for fuck's sake!” a voice shouted in her ear. There was a loud bang and her ears were ringing but the boy had stopped using her leg for a chew toy. White hot pain flared across the back of her calf. She flopped into the ground and somebody dragged her out into the hall. “Hey don't worry, buddy. We gotcha. You're gonna be fine.” the owner of the voice said reassuringly...

  Safe

  2 May 2011 19:32 hours MIT Student Dormitory Boston, Massachusetts

  Amy woke with a small snort and squirmed, pressing her back against the chest of the man holding her. The room was warm and smelled like sweat and sex. A gentle breeze stirred the humid muggy air in Jacob’s dorm room. She shivered and squirmed closer and pulled his arms tight around her. It was almost summertime but she still felt cold all the time.

  Like a lot of things, the change in weather took a lot of getting used to. And…well…it had been a bad week. There was the fight with Janice and her boyfriend and all the crap that that stirred up. The memory of lying on her back staring up at the clear blue sky the oily taste of smoldering plastic and acrid smok
e from rubber burning her brain whirling in her head as she tried to make sense of what the heck just happened…

  Jacob woke momentarily. He hugged her, kissed the back of her neck and seemed to fall back to sleep still holding her tight one arm around her stomach the other under her neck and across her chest one big calloused hand resting lightly on her breast. They were both naked under the sheets. She squeezed his arms and stared at the wall across the room. They had only been officially dating for about three weeks but she loved him fiercely. He was so sexy and strong and kind…

  The man’s breath tickled the back of her neck as he grumbled and mumbled occasionally in his sleep. They had been friendly before her Air Force Reserve section had been sent to Camp Freedom, Iraq. He helped her move her move her stuff in when she started school and out again before she left. Jacob had served in the Army and helped her pack her gear, telling her the stuff she would need and what could be left behind.

  They had exchanged emails and talked on Skype a few times while she was overseas. Frays smiled and settled into a more comfortable position. He had sent her a care package: books, candy, a bunch of mix CDs and a thumb drive with a video file on it. Amy had watched it with her roommate over there, Airman Watkins, the both of them wiping away tears as they stared at the laptop’s screen. Jacob had gotten their friends together and gone to The Brown Jug, her favorite pizza joint off campus, and made a video of them celebrating her birthday along with personal messages from everyone. At the bottom of the box there was a birthday card and a single dried up old rose. “If you don’t marry that man as soon as we get back I will.” Watkins had said.

  They ended up doing ‘virtual dates’ while she was on deployment. Watkins would hold the camera while her roommate talked to him and one of his friends back at school would do the same. It worked better than trying to Skype even if actual conversation was impossible. The Internet connection over there had been spotty at best.

  When Amy returned to school Jacob had spotted her from across the parking lot, come at her at a full sprint and hugged her so hard that he lifted her off the ground. The lunatic had run around the parking lot with her over his shoulder for a good ten minutes before helping her get her stuff upstairs.

  She decided right then and there that she loved this man. Nobody else at school seemed to even give a crap that she had been gone much less that she was back. Janice, her roommate, had even ‘borrowed’ some of the stuff that she had left behind and got her nose all out of joint when she pointed it out. She sat there so mad she was shaking in the hallway outside her advisor’s office when he told her that the committee had not approved her extension to present her Master’s thesis. It did not matter that she had to take almost seven months off from school to serve her country or that an errant rocket propelled grenade had set her work back two months. More than anything she was just so freaking angry. After everything she had done for these people they could not even give her another lousy stinking month.

  Nobody even stopped to ask if she was okay or not…

  She took a couple deep breaths and intentionally turned her mind to happier things. Amy found that she could be completely open with Jacob. He was the only person she had ever told everything that had happened to her overseas. He did not judge but at the same time tried his best to drag her kicking and screaming out of the comfortable little rut she had dug for herself. Things were weird. People were nervous and there were fights. Classes were canceled a lot. Something was very, very wrong…

  She had thrown herself back into her schoolwork and avoided watching the news at all costs. Sometimes they showed combat footage from overseas and…sleeping was sometimes kinda tough after that. Or they would show something about this meningitis strain and that was kind of freaky too.

  Jacob took her out to eat a couple times a week or organized movie nights and other ‘mandatory fun’ type activities with the other students on their floor. There were other little things: he held her hand while they waited in line for meals at the student union, the way he had talked her down after the incident with her roommate, how he just walked with her around the block when she could not sleep. He let her talk when she felt like it and did not pry when she did not but instead just held her until she calmed down. He never tried to pressure her into anything else either…unlike the few other boys she had dated.

  She settled into the mattress and tried to get comfortable. It was that quiet time in the middle of the night when everybody was generally asleep or passed out. It was also that time when, if she were awake for it, she had the most trouble getting to sleep at all. When there was nothing to distract her from her thoughts: that up armored Humvee flipping on its top after driving over an IED. Kicking in a door and pointing her M4 at a frightened kid about the same age as her little brother. The stinking trolls staring at her butt in the DFAC.

  Frays strained her ears and was pleased to hear crickets chirping in the dark. It was a comforting sound, reminding her of days spent at her parents’ cabin in the woods north of her hometown. A troubling thought occurred to her as sleep started to sneak back up on her. What would her parents say if they found out that she had slept with a man before she was married? Would they be upset?

  The thought churned Amy’s stomach for a few moments. It wouldn’t matter unless something happened. Until then it could stay between Father Mike, God and herself. Besides right now she felt pretty good. They loved each other and they were together and she was, most importantly, absolutely completely safe. They would build a life together. She grinned drowsily when Jacob squeezed her in his sleep. Amy took a deep breath, snuggled up against him and dropped off herself a few moments later.

  Home

  20 August 2010 13:21 hours Times Square Manhattan, New York City

  Private First Class Francesca Rodriguez hobbled along the sidewalk leaning heavily on the cane they had given her when she checked out of Walter Reed yesterday afternoon. The older woman next to her smiled at her daughter as she watched her try to take in everything going on around her at once. The flashing billboards, the traffic, the sounds, the smells of the iconic street brought a strange half smile to the younger Rodriguez’s face. Of course…the damage the shrapnel had done to the side of Frannie’s face made it next to impossible for her to really smile anymore. Mariana stopped smiling all of a sudden.

  “Mum…” Frannie made a frustrated grimace and rolled her eyes. There were appointments at the VA in Boston next month, chief of which was a speech therapist. The tendons in her cheek had been severed and the surgeons had done the best they could but it would take a lot of work to get rid of the lisp. Frannie pointed towards the red Planet Hollywood sign across the street. She took a deep breath and said slowly and clearly “Can we go there, please?”

  Mariana smiled at her daughter even though she was secretly dreading finding out how much it was going to cost. This was her day after all. They had planned the trip in between surgeries and physical therapies, Mari willing to promise her baby anything to try and take her mind off the agony she was in. “Sure, honey.” The elder Rodriguez took Frannie by the hand and walked with her towards the crowd amassed outside the restaurant.

  A sharply dressed man with an olive complexion, frosted black hair in a business suit held the door open for them. The man noticed the black and gold Army tee shirt she was wearing and the cane in her hand before he spotted the scars on Frannie’s face. “You in the Army?” he asked the man’s voice heavy with a Brooklyn accent. The man smiled politely as he let the women into the restaurant.

  “Yeth, thur.” Frannie said, raising her voice slightly to be heard of the din of the other people waiting to get a table. She groaned in frustration took a breath and repeated herself. “Yes, sir.” There was a look of understanding in the man’s eyes.

  “Welcome home, Soldier.” Business Suit said as he shook Frannie’s hand and gave her a sort of half hug. Behind them the man at the podium thing called out a name that Frannie could not quite make out. “Hey, that’s me. T
hanks for your service.”

  Frannie limped around the waiting area absolutely tripping balls over the various movie props set up in glass cases. There was this robot hand thing from Terminator 2, a jacket worn by (of all people) Michelle Rodriguez in one of those car racing movies… “Hey mom!” she called and pointed towards the leather jacket in the display “Look!”

  Mari grinned at the picture and put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Heh.” There was a framed picture of a pretty smiling Latina with some other people she vaguely recognized from the television. “We’re famous!”

  Frannie chuffed a tiny laugh, glancing at her thin reflection in the glass. Before that day in Afghanistan she had looked close enough to the woman in the picture to be related to her. Now she looked like a fucking freak. And for what? Francesca glanced at her watch. “I mithed my pills, Mom.” she mumbled and started off in search of the bathroom.

  Frannie grumbled breathing heavily as she shoved her way into the ladies room on the other side of the waiting area. She shook a couple of the Percocet out of the pill bottle and washed them down with a couple handfuls of water from the sink. Frannie pointedly avoided the mirror on the wall and splashed a little water on her face, squeezing her eyes shut as her fingers found their way down the cheese grater of scar tissue on her right cheek.

  Frannie found her mother right where she left her staring at the picture in the case. “Hey, Mum…Mom.” she said as she leaned in close to her mother’s ear. “I gotta sit down. My leg’s bothering me.”