by North, Geoff
“Maybe you shouldn’t have washed it down with a dozen warm beers.”
Louie pictured the beer in his mind. He could hear the tabs cracking open, and he could see the foam spilling up over the lids. The thought made his stomach rumble again. “Quit talking about it... please.”
“Then tell me about your workplace. Tell me about the freaky shit.”
“I worked at the DSC—that stands for Disease Study Center.”
“I’m not a fucking rube, I know what it stands for.”
Louie continued. “There was containment breach the day the bomb hit. A box holding some ticks broke open, released a swarm of the microscopic things... we evacuated the lower levels, but the damn things found a way out. I—that is we, spent the following days moving up level by level, attempting to secure the outbreak... a lot of good people were lost. I tried saving the last few, but the swarm moved too quickly. I was lucky to get out with my life.”
Roy was standing behind him, urinating. “Microscopic ticks... big deal. What’s so dangerous about that?” He turned, spraying yellow into the smouldering remains of the fire, dribbling across one of Louie’s feet along the way. “I had a dog once that used to get covered with wood ticks.”
Louie sat up. “These weren’t your ordinary variety of wood ticks. They were genetically enhanced. They operate through a hive-collective, they move as one... they feed as one.”
“And these ticks will spread out?”
“They’ll consume everything in their path.” Louie couldn’t prove the LDV3 ticks had moved beyond the destroyed confines of the DSC. He could only go with what he had seen. He had lied to Roy about how they had been set loose, but he’d seen what they had done to Richard Sheffield. That part of it was true. “We’re not safe in the city. We have to keep moving.”
Roy pushed the last bit of piss free from his bladder. It steamed over the coals, sending a cloud of stink into Louie’s face. “They would need living things to feed on. There isn’t much of anything to feed on back in the city.”
“I watched them take over a dead body. My boss rose back up.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.” Roy zipped his pants and lifted Louie up from the ground. “Come on, buddy. We’ll keep heading west, see what we can find.” What was who, and who was a grey-haired, shop-lifting dyke travelling with a couple of kids.
Louie started to feel better after a quarter mile of walking. His stomach, though emptied and once again in need of food, was no longer turning over. “So you know I worked at the DSC... You haven’t told me much about working in the shopping mall.”
“What the fuck else do you need to know? I was a security guard. I caught kids stealing and phoned their parents. I wasn’t some big-shot disease research asshole.”
They walked past a trucker’s weigh station a few miles ahead. Louie had wanted to explore the small building, but Roy had talked him out of it. Roy wanted to see what was in the gas stations and C-stores up ahead. They found very little.
“Maybe we should get off the main highway,” Louie offered. He pointed south, towards a distant forest. “There’s a care home that way, not far that far down 43. I had an uncle once that was sent there after his brains were kicked in by a horse.”
“A place for retards?”
“Convalescence,” Louie sighed. “A home for the elderly and disabled.”
“Did your uncle recover?”
“He died there about three years ago.”
“Doesn’t sound like a place I’d want to send a loved one.” Roy started south anyway, down highway 43. They weren’t going to find anything else in the looted town of Eustache.
Green Forest Haven was right where Louie said it would be, three miles south of the Trans-Canada Highway, nestled in a forest that wasn’t all that green anymore. It hadn’t always been a care home, Roy figured. It looked more like a hulking three-story prison built sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. It was a red brick monstrosity with high narrow windows. Roy could see bars set behind the glass. “Some place to send your uncle. I would’ve died here, too... probably hung myself.”
“Don’t let the appearance fool you. They took good care of their clients.”
“It looks like a goddamned house of horrors.”
“It used to be a residential school for First Nations children, so it may well have been many years ago.”
“Fucking Indians?”
“You’re a class act, Roy.”
Roy shrugged and walked up the wide concrete steps to the front doors. “They should’ve dropped one of those bombs here and cleaned up this eyesore.” He tried the handle. Locked. “Fucking figures. World goes to hell and everyone becomes a paranoid asshole.” The doors were old, but well kept. Each consisted more of glass set into six individual panes with a single dead bolt lock joining them together. Roy stepped back and then kicked at the frames in the middle. They gave way on his first attempt, banging inwards. Some of the glass insets shattered, depositing shards across the dull green linoleum inside.
“You could’ve rung the buzzer,” a woman said. “Or at least knocked.”
She was standing behind a desk at the reception counter. Louie groaned inwardly when he saw the rifle in her hands. She was tiny, smaller than the crazy woman that had ordered them to strip down in the underground parkade of the Sandman hotel. Marie Hodgkin would’ve shot them down like dogs if Roy hadn’t wrestled a gun from one of her security goons first and ended her life before she could give the order. “Sorry about that,” he said in a soothing tone. He offered up his empty hands. “Everything’s locked up these days, and we haven’t come across a single soul willing to help out. My friend and I are starving... we haven’t eaten in days.”
She lowered the rifle, but kept it aimed in Roy’s general direction.
The big ex-mall-security-guard studied the weapon while his companion continued speaking to the woman. It was a single-shot .22 calibre rifle. Thing looks older than the building we’re in. Roy had seen hundreds of them growing up, usually sitting in barns, or stored in the front porch closets of farm houses for easy access. They were good for killing gophers and scaring off skunks, but not much else. If the thing’s even loaded, she’ll only have time to take one of us down.
Louie was still talking. “Yeah, the city’s a mess. We’ve been slowly moving out for over a week, helping out those we can along the way.” He introduced himself and Roy.
She set the rifle down on the desk and shook her head. “Forgive me. My name’s Tracy Klausburg... I’ve been under so much stress since it happened. All the administrators and other nurses just up and left. Most of the residents—at least those capable enough—wandered off later. There’s only a few left.”
They stepped forward. Louie went to shake the small hand, and Roy punched her in the face. She fell back into the chair behind the desk, her nose shattered and spilling blood. Louie hooked onto his thick wrist and tried pulling him back. “Why did you do that? She put the gun down!”
Roy pushed him away. “You’re an idiot sometimes, Finkbiner... too damn trusting.” He went behind the counter and inspected the rifle. “Fucking empty. It figures. This bitch wouldn’t have had the nerve to shoot us even if it was loaded.”
Tracy Klausburg groaned in her chair. Blood was leaking out between the small fingers covering her face. A tooth was sitting on her lap.
“Did you have to hit her so hard?”
“No.” Roy placed the rifle back down on the desk. “I’m going to check this place out... see what we can take. You stay with her.” There were two winding stairways behind the reception counter. Roy started up one of them.
Louie called after him. “I thought you said stealing was wrong. You told me the only thing that would keep civilization going was if we obeyed the laws.”
“I said shop-lifting was wrong. And that shit about civilization and laws doesn’t apply anymore. I lost my fucking job.” He vanished up onto the second floor, leaving Louie alone with the l
ast staff member on duty at Green Forest Haven.
The first few rooms he entered were empty. Roy continued down the narrow hallway. The third door to the left was open. He found the first of the six remaining residents lying in a bed, staring up at the ceiling with a comatose expression on his sunken face. Roy went and stood over the frail-looking man. He could see white patches at the corners of his mouth where saliva had dried. More of it had soaked into the pillow beneath his head.
Roy nudged the man’s boney shoulder. “What’s your fucking problem? You just going to lay there and let that bitch downstairs take care of you?”
The man didn’t answer. Roy slapped the side of his face. “The world’s ended, pal. There was a big war and everybody lost. Get up and start taking care of yourself. No one’s going to wipe your ass anymore.”
He remained unresponsive. Roy slapped him again, harder. He didn’t even blink. Roy felt a tingling sensation in the bottom of his gut; it was the same sensation he’d felt after being forced to strip down in front of Marie Hodgkin. He wrapped his fingers around the man’s throat and shook him. Roy squeezed harder and the tingle at the bottom of his stomach travelled down into his genitals. His scrotum tightened, his cock hardened. I’m not gay, he told himself. This had nothing to do with touching another man—that was sick. This was something entirely different. He had felt it the very first time when he was eleven years old, and had a cat pinned to the ground with his knee. He had wrapped his hand around its neck and squeezed and twisted until it was dead. Young Roy had then bludgeoned three of its new-born kittens with the side of his fist into the floor, and thrown the other three against a wall with all of his might. His cock and balls responded when he did it again a year later to a stray mother dog and its single pup. He had a raging hard-on when he’d murdered over a hundred people at the shopping mall, and he had another erection now.
It wasn’t a gay thing. Roy wasn’t even convinced it was a sexual thing. It was what it was, and it felt wonderful. Both hands were around the man’s neck now, throttling, shaking. Feeble fucker. Helpless, defenceless, stupid retard. The man remained completely silent as his life was choked away. Roy made lots of sounds. He moaned as he breathed in and whistled as he exhaled.
Finally, when there was nothing of the man left to kill, Roy released him. His fingers were stiff and sore, as if rigor had set in. He staggered back and saw the wet spot on the crotch of his pants. Goddamn, that’s never happened before. It’s not supposed to do that. How am I going to explain this to Louie? Fuck. I’m not gay.
He continued stepping back until he bumped into the window ledge. Moments later, the room grew dark. Roy turned and looked at the narrow pane of glass set behind the bars. Light had been shining through there seconds earlier, he was sure. Roy had seen the forest beyond the front parking lot, and the clouds in the sky. Now the glass was covered over in grey. It looked as if someone had thrown a can of paint over it, coloring the window a dismal shade of light black. It grew darker.
“What the fuck?”
He looked back at the man he’d murdered. The erection in his pants had started to subside. Roy remembered the woman downstairs saying there were a few of them left. Two, three, five, twenty—it didn’t matter how many. Just imagining them laying in their beds, useless and defenceless, brought his boner back.
I’ll choke them all. I’ll do more than that. I’ll make them suffer.
He left the room, hunched over slightly and limping to accommodate the throbbing bulge in his underwear. The grey mist, turning darker with every passing second, was forgotten. It pressed against the glass, and worked its way under the frame’s bottom edge.
“He’s not such a bad guy,” Louie explained as he dabbed the nurse’s face with a wet face cloth. “If it wasn’t for Roy, I’m not sure I’d still be alive. He’s helped me out of a few scrapes since I resurfaced.”
“Hees a reah angull.” Tracy Klausburg was still sitting in the chair behind the reception counter. Her head was resting back against the black leather upholstery to stop the bleeding.
“What’s that?”
She sat forward, winced, and repeated herself more clearly through her shattered mouth. “He’s... a real... angel.”
“I know what he is, but he’s kept me safe. Most of my life guys like him have been teasing and hurting me. It feels good to have one of them on your side for a change.”
Tracy stared back at him with wet, terror-filled eyes.
Louie chuckled uncomfortably. “Sorry about your nose and teeth. He gets carried away sometimes.”
“Wha... wha iv he doee now?”
Louie stared at her swollen lips uncomprehendingly for a moment until he caught on. “What is he doing now? I imagine he’s going through the building, finding supplies for us to take. We have to get as far away from the city as possible.” He leaned forward and whispered. “I think something really bad is spreading out from there. If you were smart, you’d leave whoever’s left here and join us.”
Roy covered the next man’s face with a pillow and pressed down. He watched the simpleton’s legs thrash, and listened to the pathetic muffled moans until he thrashed no more. He found a woman in the next room. She was old, and she asked him if he was there to feed her. Roy hammered her in the chest with both fists and crushed her ribcage.
He started up for the third floor, unzipping his fly and letting his penis out to breathe. It wasn’t like this back in the mall. It feels so good standing over them... doing it with my bare hands. He massaged his aching balls with one hand and dragged himself along the banister with the other. I’m going to jerk off on the next one. Let all this stress go.
Roy entered the first room on his right and found a fat woman propped up in a chair facing the window. He walked up to her. “I’m going to hurt you, and you’re going to make me feel good.” He kicked at her thick calf. “I’m fucking talking to you. Look at me!”
The room was dark. The window was covered with the same dark slime as he’d seen below. Roy bent over and studied the woman’s bloated face. He was too late—the bitch was already dead. Lines of black were running from both of her nostrils and from the corners of her mouth. They disappeared into the folds of her neck. Roy reached forward to touch one of the thin strips with his finger, thinking it was blood. His hand shot back when another line appeared from her ear and crept across her cheek. It burrowed into the woman’s right eye.
Roy stood away from the corpse. She had been obese in life, and the transformation her body was undergoing now was making her even larger. It was like watching a human balloon being filled before his eyes. He tried rationalizing it; bodies swell up after death—and he’d seen plenty of dead bodies in the last few days to know—fluids and gases collect. Not like that, they don’t. Not that fast.
Roy reached down and tucked his now flaccid penis into his pants. The urge to murder had passed. One of the woman’s cheeks started to bubble. The white skin turned a bruised purple and popped open. Black liquid sprayed out and splattered across the far wall ten feet away. The gooey deposit started spreading out in every direction, like a crack in a sheet of glass, blossoming and growing.
The dead woman’s body made a farting sound in the chair and a flood of black gushed out from between her legs, dropping to the floor in clumps and streams. It collected in a puddle and started moving towards him.
Roy had seen enough. Green Forest Haven had lost all of its appeal.
Louie looked up at the staircase. He could hear Roy’s thunderous feet thumping down the steps. “Sounds like he’s done up there. Are you sure you’re going to stay here?”
Tracy nodded. She wasn’t going anywhere with the two mad men.
Roy started screaming at Louie from the second floor. “We gotta get the fuck out of here! There’s black shit coming out of people! It’s coming after me!”
His rambling would’ve made no sense to Tracy Klausburg, or almost any other person left on the planet, but Louie Finkbiner knew full well what he was scream
ing about. A hot fist punched into his chest, causing his heart to hammer. The fear spread down into his gut and up into his throat. He pushed the chair Tracy was in against a filing cabinet with enough force to snap her head back, and fled around the desk. Roy was only a few steps behind him when he reached the front doors.
This was impossible, Louie thought as they ran down the steps and into the parking lot. They’re microscopic, they can’t move that fast. We’ve kept ahead of them. How did the swarm get this far out of the city?
He found the answers to his questions lying in a ditch less than a hundred yards up the road.
“Jesus Christ,” Roy panted. “Is that a deer?”
“It was,” Louie whispered back.
There was nothing left of the animal’s back end. It clawed away at the grass in front of it, trying to stand, unaware its back legs were gone. It slipped and collapsed in a puddle of its own blood and entrails. The blood was black, and it was moving.
“The fucking things can take over anything,” Louie said. “I thought it was just people... but they can take animals, too.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“LDV3! Ticks! Goddamned microscopic wood ticks! It’s what they were working on back in the disease center.”
A woman started screaming from the building behind them. Roy looked towards the entrance. “The nurse I punched.”
“She’s dead, or she will be soon.”
The fat dead corpse from the third floor lurched out onto the steps. Moments later the old lady Roy had murdered with his hammering fists followed. The upper part of her body was hanging forward, flopping from side to side, with only skin and a bit of spine left to support it.
“I killed her,” Roy whimpered. “I fucking smashed her chest in. She can’t be alive... she just can’t be.”
“She isn’t.” The comatose man stumbled out after them. His face was black from the throttling Roy had given him, but he was back on his feet nevertheless. “None of them are alive anymore. Only the things inside are keeping them going now.”