by Brett Abell
“You’re welcome,” said the fortysomething rather snottily as she took her coffee in hand and slam-dunked the two quarters change into Tara’s tip jar.
Without meeting the woman’s gaze or catching the sarcasm dripping from her words, Tara muttered, “Thanks,” and felt her limbs stiffen.
Shaking her head, the woman adjusted her pack on her shoulder, turned and took her first tentative steps toward the elevators—the one on the left now buzzing angrily and opening and closing continuously on the prostrate body.
While the lady with the backpack hustled across the lobby toward the fallen man, the rest of the people present seemed to gravitate to the coffee kiosk, their nervous chatter rising as blood pooled around the fallen man’s head and upper body.
With the noise of the gathering crowd matching the level of the elevator’s warning peal, the fortysomething reached the body and dropped her pack to the floor. Then, gripping her short skirt with one hand, she set her coffee by her pack and, completing a sort of slow-motion curtsy, knelt primly next to the body. While she went to all fours, in what looked like a very uncomfortable position for one wearing high heels, Tara felt a sudden pang of guilt with a side order of shame for not following the woman’s lead. So not wanting to be lumped in with the gawking bystanders, she willed herself back to work and, in an effort to detach from what was transpiring, began dragging a white towel in big lazy circles across the kiosk’s stainless steel counter.
The busy work distracted Tara for a second, and when she cast her gaze up, the elevator had just gone silent with the doors locked open. An older man, presumably a professor she didn’t know, stepped out, a pained look already parked on his bearded face.
As the man backed away from the rapidly growing lake of blood, the woman shuffled on hands and knees until she was parallel with the body. Then, slowly, like she was about to seize a charmed cobra, she reached out with her left arm and gently pressed three fingers to the man’s neck.
“An ambulance is en route,” called a man, a cell pressed to one ear.
Voice wavering, a woman on the periphery asked: “Is he alive?”
The middle-aged woman drew her hand back. She grimaced and, regarding the young student who had asked the question, shook her head.
“Most of his neck on the right side … where the carotid runs … is torn wide open.”
Grateful that it was the woman she’d just served coffee to and not her who had touched the dead body, Tara tossed the towel in a bleach bucket and walked out from behind her kiosk. Without saying a word, she elbowed her way through the throng of people, some of them snapping photos or taking videos with their phones. Just as she found a better vantage point and was absentmindedly rolling up her sleeves, the woman rocketed out of her crouch as if she had just received an electric shock. Then, with the clicking of her high heels the only sound in the atrium, the woman took two steps back as the body suddenly convulsed and started twitching strangely, like a fish out of water. And, as if checking to see that she was not the only witness to the dead student seemingly come back to life, the woman turned mechanically toward the crowd and, in doing so, accidentally kicked her Venti cup, sending a torrent of steaming brown liquid across the floor tiles.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the building, aided by the unfortunate placement of a panic bar meant to allow breathing humans a quick escape from the north stairwell in the event of fire or other calamity, an oblivious undead Charlie Noble stumbled off the last step. He hit the waist-high metal bar with a full head of steam and staggered into daylight.
With the door closing at its back, the ashen-faced abomination took a single lurching step forward and made a wild, slow-motion grab for the fresh meat that happened to be strolling along the sidewalk just an arm’s length away.
But reacting much faster than one would think a person face down in a handheld device capable, the co-ed passerby’s quick stutter-step caused undead Charlie to miss horribly, perform a clumsy pirouette off the curb, and collapse in a vertical heap directly in front of an approaching city bus.
There was a squeal of brakes as fifteen tons of Detroit metal bled speed, and riding the blast of air, a drift of red and orange and yellow oak leaves was sent skittering along the ground ahead of it. A fraction of a second later, Newton’s Law kicked in as the shocks and brakes working in unison reeled in the kinetic energy and the bus ground to a noisy halt, its right front tire three inches from the fallen monster’s skull, and the act that may have altered the course of history sadly averted.
Chapter 9
Inside the university’s main entrance, illuminated by bars of sunlight infiltrating the glass atrium, the student who had fled after receiving the mortal wound from undead Janitor Hal was now reanimating in front of Tara, the coffee lady, and nearly two dozen witnesses—a just-arrived and under-caffeinated Professor Sylvester Fuentes counted among them.
People gasped and a murmur rippled around the lobby as the man, whom the woman had just pronounced dead, flopped around in the pool of his own blood.
With everyone seemingly frozen in place, the pallid corpse suddenly lay flat, turned its head to the left, and fixed a lifeless gaze on Coffee Lady.
Feeling a cold chill rip up her spine, Tara put her hand on a stranger’s shoulder and stood on her toes. Through a sliver of daylight between the people in front, she watched the lady stand and inexplicably take a couple of steps toward the thing on the floor.
No, Tara thought as the lady again knelt next to the prostrate man.
In the next beat, two things happened near simultaneously. First, speaking softly, the woman urged the man to remain still. Then she turned to the crowd and at the top of her voice said, “Somebody give me a hand here.” But before anyone could react, and with the bellowed plea still echoing off the high ceiling, the man sat up straight and grabbed two fistfuls of blonde hair. Already off balance, and with her high heels doing her no favors, the woman sprawled backward right for the thing’s gaping maw.
At first sight of the supposedly dead man sitting up, every instinct in Tara’s body urged her to run. Yet like a passerby at a fatal car wreck, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sight her mind was having difficulty processing. And it wasn’t until the woman screamed and crimson blood was sluicing from a puckered wound behind her right ear that Tara decided she had seen plenty.
As more screams rang out and were echoing about the atrium, the man Tara had been using for support doubled over and emptied the contents of his stomach all over his shoes. Then, like a school of fish parted by a predator, half of the people who had been rooted in place were dashing toward the entry; the rest pounced and were in the process of pulling the bloody attacker off of the woman’s unmoving body.
Through the dissipating crowd, Tara caught a glimpse of the crazy guy’s eyes and threw a visible shudder. There was almost no white to them. Where she expected to see rage, she only saw two dime-sized pools of black conveying no emotion whatsoever.
In that instant, closing the store, counting the till, and calling her boss, Richard Less, to tell him what had happened and that she was leaving ranked in importance just below whatever her last asshole boyfriend was doing at this very moment.
So Tara turned and grabbed her pack and phone. Then, without a second glance at the kiosk and forgoing all responsibility for it, she made a beeline for the front entrance, pressing her thumb to her phone on the run. Once outside, she squeezed past a clutch of people talking excitedly into phones of their own. Body checking slow movers out of her way, she ran down the wide walkway, past a phalanx of cement planters, and turned right at the sidewalk, head down and sprinting for the distant student parking lot beneath the glass sky bridge. Backpack banging against her lower back, she turned the next corner, crossed the street, and zippered between a pair of cars on their way into the lot.
Slowing to a trot three rows in, she brought the phone to her mouth and instructed her phone’s AI helper to call, “Bro.”
“No
match found,” replied the semi-robotic female voice.
Breathing hard, Tara said, “Fuck it,” and tapped the green phone icon, selected Contacts, and scrolled down until she found the correct one.
Nearly running headlong into her little red car, she selected the number with the 678 Atlanta area code, hit Speaker, and took a knee next to the car door. As the first ring rattled from the tiny speaker, she set the phone on the ground by her knee, ripped open her pack, and started rooting around inside for her keys.
Before she was wrist-deep into her pack, the first ring had dissipated and a connection was made, going straight to voicemail. Instantly, there was a beep and then a digital recording of her brother, sounding uncomfortable and out-of-sorts, emanated from the speaker: “This is Leland Riker and you have penetrated his cellular phone’s defenses. So um … please … um, leave a message”—there was a pregnant pause and then his voice went on—”and if I can remember my pass code”—another second or two of dead air—”I will call you back A-sap.”
Not likely, thought Tara. And it didn’t surprise her he hadn’t picked up. Par for the course for typically tech-challenged Lee to accidentally leave the ringer off and then play dumb when called out for it later. So she cursed again and jammed her arm into the pack elbow-deep. A tick later, a smile graced her face as she grasped the fob attached to her keys and introduced them to daylight. Wasting no time, she tucked her phone into the bag and stood up straight. However, the smile faded as she watched a pair of small black SUVs nose in hard against the curb adjacent to the front entry, where people were now surging out in twos and threes, half of them screaming, the rest wearing incredulous looks, their mouths frozen into silent O’s. Then, with the two black Jeeps still rocking on their suspensions from the sudden stop, the doors emblazoned with silver shield-shaped decals sporting the words Middletown Campus Security flew open. Four security guards—two women and two men—leaped out with a sense of urgency, suggesting that they knew the coffee kiosk was unmanned and the lemon pound cake unguarded. Leaving the doors wide open, the four uniformed figures put their heads down and ran toward the action, probably, thought Tara, blissfully unaware of the carnage they were about to find inside.
Chapter 10
In one fluid movement, Tara punched the button on the fob, popping the door locks, yanked her door open, and tossed her pack onto the small shelf behind her seat. Casting an expectant glance toward the lot’s secure exit, she slid in behind the wheel, closed and locked the door, and breathing hard with hands visibly shaking, guided the key into the ignition.
Pausing momentarily to get her breath, Tara was caught off guard when a woman roughly her age staggered up, stopped outside her door, and bent at the waist. Eyes glazed and mouth agape, the stranger looked Tara in the eye, spread her arms like a pair of wings, and mouthed the words, What the fuck?
WTF indeed, thought Tara as the woman continued on her way and the little three-banger under the hood turned over with nary a sound. She slipped the transmission into Reverse then flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror where she saw the woman at her own car, working a key in the door.
Coast clear, Tara tromped the gas and J-turned out of the spot. She negotiated the lot at twice the posted speed, dodging a couple of cars reversing from their spaces, and arrived at the exit chute third in line. Thankfully for her, whoever was driving the cars ahead of hers had likely seen the same thing she had and wasted no time getting through the gate. The first sped off to the left, nearly colliding head on with a Middletown PD Crown Victoria. The second, however—some kind of modern muscle car painted lime green with twin stripes on the hood—sped off to the right, past the arriving officers, leaving a pair of long, black burnout marks on the pavement and the street clouded with a low-hanging blue haze.
With the green car already out of sight, Tara swiped her key card in front of the reader. It took a second to register and, while she waited for the arm to rise, her attention was drawn to the atrium, where she saw that her kiosk had been pushed up against the glass and the guards were struggling mightily to advance toward the entrance against the river of bodies streaming out.
About the time Tara was swiping her card at the gate, two blocks away Patient Zero was back on his feet. As Tara waited for the gate to open, Patient Zero made its way up onto the curb and wavered before the closed bus door. And when the gate was opening to let Tara drive her car out, Patient Zero hungrily eyed the oblivious bus driver, who was bouncing rhythmically in his air ride seat and talking rapid-fire into a hand-held microphone.
Seeing the man whom he had already written off as street pizza pressing up against the bi-fold doors, the ashen-faced driver, suddenly realizing a coroner wasn’t necessary, called off the meat wagon, and stowed the sweat-slickened handset. Suffering from a welling state of shock, the portly driver opened the door and started to babble at Patient Zero. “Thank God you’re alive,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. Choking back a sob, he covered his face with one hand, bowed his head, and exhaled sharply.
A smattering of applause started among the passengers up front and continued to the rear of the bus, rising to a crescendo like a stadium wave until everyone was clapping.
Head down and scrutinizing the stairwell, the beast stepped over the threshold and, acting on a flash of buried memory, gripped the brushed metal railing and took a tentative step up.
With the clapping slowly giving way to the low hum of conversation, the driver drew a deep breath, shook his head, and said, “Oh nelly. I was sure you were my first … I’ve seen what one of these tires will do to a person’s head. And it’s not pretty … not by a longshot. No, siree.” Calming down a touch, the driver shifted in his seat to wipe his eyes on his uniform sleeve, causing his chair to hiss as it bounced up and down wildly.
While the driver was busy, the corpse conquered another step.
“Come on in,” the driver said, looking up and forcing a smile. “You gonna need one zone or two today?”
Patient Zero made it to the landing and, sounding like a person who had been dealt a lifetime’s worth of bad luck and trouble and was having the mother of all bad days, emitted a thick guttural groan that resonated throughout the bus.
Seeing the fella’s wobbly legs and awful pallor, and thinking maybe he’d tied on an early one, the driver, who had suffered similar battles of his own with the bottle, made a quick and fatal decision. Intent on letting the day’s luckiest man in the world ride for free, the driver extricated himself from behind the wheel, covered the fare box with one meaty hand, and gently grasped the drunk’s elbow with the other—a move that left him defenseless as he unwittingly became Patient Zero’s next victim.
Missing most of his left ear and emitting a high-pitched warble, the driver released his grip on his attacker’s elbow and fell backward, becoming hopelessly wedged in the small space between the seatback and horizontally oriented steering wheel.
As Patient Zero ground the bloody hunk of skin-covered gristle between its teeth, the kids immediately to its left started screaming, and instantly the kicking and flailing bus driver lost all appeal.
Chapter 11
Thirty silence-filled minutes after Riker escaped his seat next to Tourette’s Lady, the bus was nearing the Oxford exit and he could see what looked like a half dozen Day-Glo yellow emergency vehicles, red lights strobing hypnotically and sirens blaring, barreling down a side road parallel to the interstate the Greyhound had finally gotten back to. As the driver braked and pulled the bus hard to the shoulder to heed the right-of-way, Riker saw the emergency vehicles curl around the adjacent on-ramp, nose to bumper, and enter the six-lane heading the same direction as the bus and in quite a bit of a hurry.
Thinking nothing more of the first responders who appeared to be doing what they were supposed to—responding first—Riker fished his four-year-old flip-phone from a pocket and opened it with a flick of his thumb. The numeric keypad flared green and he punched 1 followed by the # key and then pressed the speaker
to his ear.
He listened to his phone automatically dial the ten-digit tone for him, and then endured six drawn-out warbling rings. Not a message guy, preferring to actually converse—whether over the air, on a landline, or in an honest to goodness face-to-face tête-à-tête—Riker was about to fold his phone and try again later when he heard a beep and, distant and tinny-sounding, his sister’s greeting started playing. He put the phone back to his ear and after all of the pertinent information was relayed, another tone sounded. The urge to close the phone hit him again, but since he’d already gone this far, he committed fully and left a message telling her he’d be at her apartment within the hour. He ended the call a little pissed off at himself for giving in to technology and was folding the Motorola away when suddenly he remembered he was about to be let off in Oxford, Ohio. Way different from Atlanta, where one could be in a cab and pulling from the curb nearly as fast as the legendary Scotty of Trek fame could beam up a four-person away party. And without a smartphone, he conceded, the time he was going to burn trying to find a taxi in the backwater “college town” was likely to make a liar out of him. Mulling over the idea of calling Tara back and amending his message, he subconsciously started thumbing the phone’s thin earpiece open and closed repeatedly in one hand and, while staring out the window at the squat, appropriately hued battleship-gray Greyhound depot, he decided to let fate run its course.
As the bus bumped over the curb cut and slipped into a brightly lit bay, Riker saw that a second bus was offloading and a couple of dozen passengers were already gathered around its rectangular luggage compartment door. So without waiting for his bus to stop completely, he was out of his seat, single gym bag in hand, and edging for the front door.