The Fall: Victim Zero

by Joshua Guess

  The pathogen in this instance existed in a two-step state; one was harmless and indeed somewhat helpful, the other dangerous beyond belief. For the first, Kell would have been correct—David was patient zero for the Chimera strain he carried.

  For the second, however, a victim was required.

  Margaret French, Maggie to her friends, walked down the street. She huddled insider her heavy coat and fought the growing nausea that hit her in the car. It was a brisk morning and one she'd have rather not spent much time ambling in, but the parking lot outside the office where she worked was packed day and night. The perils of having a lot in that part of the city.

  Each day she parked several blocks away and walked to the office. Today was her early shift, and she was responsible for coming in two hours before the rest of her coworkers to check balance sheets and answer emails accrued the night before. It was thankless and dull, but it paid the rent.

  Maggie had no idea that while she slept, agents had carefully collected all the freshly dead in the city. She didn't know—couldn't know—that their greatest worry was a person dying suddenly and away from help. A corpse alone, waiting for the plague to reanimate it, a time bomb poised to set off a chain reaction.

  Of all the important things Maggie didn't know, the most important was also the most personal. She was a time bomb herself.

  The aneurysm could have gone at any time, but fate, being a tricky bitch on the best of days, chose that morning to hit the detonator on Maggie French.

  It was over blessedly fast for her. The aneurysm was larger than most and unusually deadly. Maggie was hit with sudden back pain and a sharp spike in her nausea. She leaned against a building in an effort to stay standing, but the pain overwhelmed her. The world tilted, time slowed down, and her brain began to fuzz out.

  She lost consciousness within seconds, and fell against the brick wall she was leaning on.

  Her brain died a quick death as the blood so vital to its function seeped into the ether surrounding her internal organs. Maggie felt only that flash of pain before the darkness took her, then little as her abdomen filled with fresh, hot blood through her ruptured aorta.

  The thing that rose on that empty street twenty minutes later felt no pain at all.

  They were delayed, and Kell wanted to scream. Instead he leaned over Jennifer and made stupid faces at her.

  “What's the problem?” Karen asked the driver.

  “Plane is late,” the man replied. “Don't know why. We're waiting here until we have clearance to leave.”

  Karen snorted. “We need clearance to even head over there? Is there some reason we can't just go and wait at the airport?”

  The agent turned in his seat. “Something about Agent Jones thinking you're a flight risk, actually.”

  She laughed in his face. “Wow. That's paranoid. There are four of you. You have guns, for Christ's sake. What are we going to do, go on the lam hauling our newborn daughter with us, dodging bullets?”

  The agent bristled. “I have my orders, ma'am. We have confirmation the plane will be landing and beginning refuel in approximately half an hour. We'll be on our way when she touches down.”

  It was closer to forty-five minutes before they left, and even then they had to redirect; an accident closed off the route they were going to take to the airport. The driver, unfamiliar with the city, relied on his GPS to direct them through their alternate route. After the thing told them to turn a few seconds late for the fourth time, he finally listened to Kell and Karen, who knew their way around the city quite well.

  “Look, just take a left and we'll head down Auburn. I can get us to 71 from there,” Karen directed as Kell sat quietly, looking impassive but feeling amused at how his wife managed to overwhelm even government agents. None of them seemed willing to argue with her in the face of their own cluelessness.

  “We'll have to cross into Kentucky, of course. That's where the airport is, and 71 will take us there,” she repeated to their blank expressions. With an irritated grunt, the driver followed her instructions, and they were off.

  It had been exactly sixty-four minutes since Maggie French fell.

  In that time, the shambling corpse that had been Maggie had attacked three people. Those three worked their way toward larger gatherings, which were few and far between this early in the morning, but enough folk were out and about over the intervening time to create a fair amount of havoc.

  Kell would have been interested to see the correlation between time of death and time of reanimation, if only in a horrified but morbidly fascinated sort of way. By the time the vehicle carrying him and his family came within three blocks of the outbreak, more than forty people were dead and better than half already risen. The police were on scene, but the callers, unable to deal with what they were witnessing, called it a riot.

  Had the driver of the SUV carrying Kell and his family been aware of the activity in front of them, he could have easily avoided it. But the scanner he was supposed to be using was unplugged; in its place was the useless GPS. No one thought to call the riot in to the agents in the SUV, since back at the Sinclair building, no fatalities had been reported.

  The driver saw the disturbance ahead, but was too distant to make out the details. He slowed to a crawl in an effort to avoid running into unknown danger, but that choice was double-edged. The driver kept a sharp eye down the road for the source of the commotion, which was mostly people running and a few fights, but that gave him tunnel vision.

  An older model car slammed into the SUV from a side street, pushing it across all the way across the road and into parked vehicles.

  Kell screamed as the door crumpled into him, smashing his arm and shoulder, pieces of window lacerating his face as the safety glass exploded across him. His right side was slammed into the baby seat, which in turn was pushed into Karen, who struck the passenger window with her head hard enough to break the glass.

  Disoriented and dazed, it took Kell what felt like hours to get a grip on the situation. The first thing he did was check on Jennifer. His left arm was numb and flopping, but he ignored that and used his right to carefully undo his seat belt.

  The baby was squalling, which was probably a good sign, and she didn't have any obvious injuries.

  “She looks okay, Karen,” Kell said. There was no response.

  He looked up at her and saw the splatter of blood across the crazed glass, her head still leaning against it, making the window bow outward under its weight. She was breathing but unconscious, and bleeding heavily from her scalp.

  “Ugh, fuck,” the driver said. “You guys okay back there? What happened?”

  “T-boned,” Kell said. “Car's still up against my door. Karen's side is pushed up against a car, too. She's out cold.”

  The other agents were groggy but coming around, and everyone tried their doors. The ones on the passenger side were jammed against the parked cars they'd been pushed into, and the only one undamaged in the crash was the rearmost driver's side door.

  “All right,” the driver said. “Let's get everyone unbuckled and out through that door. Jameson, call Agent Jones, tell him what's going on. Paul, you call 911. Mrs. McDonald is hurt, and we need to have the doctor and his daughter checked out as well.”

  Kell looked over his shoulder and tried to think of a way he could climb through the narrow space; the math didn't work out. “Look, agent...” he paused, looking at the driver.

  “Wilson,” the man replied.

  “Agent Wilson, I'm not making it over that seat with one arm working, not as big as I am. I'm gonna try to get through my window.” He glanced at the man in the seat behind him. “Agent Paul? Will you please hand my daughter to me when I'm through?”

  Paul nodded.

  Kell wiggled until he was sideways in his seat, back to the empty window frame. Karen was directly in front of him, and he saw her begin to move a little. That was a good sign, Kell was sure.

  With a deep breath he hunched down, crumpling his body into
as tight a ball as possible before leaning his head back to fit it through the window. His good arm went through next, latching onto the luggage rack as he released the tension in his core and pushed upward. From there it was all legs as he wormed through the window and straightened, standing on the hood of the car that hit them.

  He looked down to see how much progress Agent Paul had made in extricating the baby carrier only to find the man standing halfway out of the vehicle, starting down the street.

  “Agent Paul?” Kell said. “My daughter?”

  Paul responded by yanking his weapon out of his holster and screaming, “Out of the way!”

  Panicked, Kell jumped forward and hauled himself onto the roof. As he landed he looked in the same direction, and what he saw took his breath away.

  The street was swarming with the reanimated bodies of the infected. At least a dozen of them were rushing toward the car.

  The surreal moment struck him hard; it looked like every zombie movie he'd ever seen suddenly made real.

  “Aim for--” Kell tried to shout, but was drowned out by gunfire.

  The agents had all been warned what to do, but years of training sometimes fail in the heat of the moment. Paul was a good shot; his first four found the chests of three different zombies. But it was only on the fifth shot he remembered to aim for the head, and by that time it was too late. The whole crowd of dead people reached the SUV at almost the same time, and Agent Paul only managed to take down two before he was overwhelmed. One of them leaned against the other car and reached up toward Kell's foot. He responded by dropping to one knee and kicking the thing in the face as hard as he could.

  The attackers rushed in on the driver's side of the car, three reaching for Agent Wilson through his window, the rest tearing apart and through Agent Paul. Gunfire erupted from beneath him as the remaining agents responded to the attack, but Kell saw a spray of blood fly from the driver's seat, heard the other agent in the back seat shriek as one of the undead managed to get inside.

  “Karen! Oh, Christ! Jennifer!” Kell screamed as he threw himself off the passenger side and onto the top of the cars parked next to them. Through the heavily tinted glass he saw the undead tearing Wilson apart. Next to him, the last remaining agent was pulling himself out of the vehicle through his window. Kell screamed at the man as he tore at the window Karen leaned against.

  “Help me, damn it! We have to get them out!”

  He managed to break the window, a section just large enough to fit his fist through. Kell felt the edges of the broken window dig into his flesh like razors as he pulled out more and more of the fractured glass, the open space allowing him to hear Jennifer's heart-wrenching wails.

  A garbled snarl sounded inside the car, and his daughter's shrieks cut off with a wet squeak.

  “Oh, god, no!” Kell sobbed, tears running down his face. “No, goddammit!”

  He was still yanking at the window, hand lacerated dozens of times and pouring blood, when one of the undead in the vehicle lunged forward. It was Agent Jameson who saved him by pulling hard on his belt; Kell was gone by then. The man he was, every quirk of personality that created the unique tapestry of him was simply lost in a tide of grief and rage. As he fell backward onto his seat, the monster that had lunged at him, that had taken his daughter, stared at him through the gaping hole in the window before tearing into his unconscious wife.

  Kell could not look away. Why should he? This was the end of his world. There was nothing else. Right then there was no reason to move, no sense of self-preservation.

  Jameson knelt next to him and raised his weapon, fired a single shot through the window. The creature that had taken everything from him dropped instantly, Karen's blood still vividly scarlet on its lips.

  “Come on, man,” Jameson said. “We have to get out of here. We have to tell people.”

  Kell didn't move at first, but Jameson kept yelling in his ear. “Doctor McDonald, there are several of them left. They're going to come after us as soon as they finish...what they're doing. We need to run, and we have to tell Agent Jones that Chimera is now loose.”

  A sudden, dark sense of purpose filled him. A promise remembered.

  Jones.

  Jameson tried to pull Kell to his feet again, but the big man stood on his own. The agent shouted things at him, but nothing important. Things about survival, about securing a vehicle. Kell ignored him and hopped down to the ground, walked around the car and slapped the back of his (mostly) good (but still heavily bleeding) hand against the rear fender of the SUV.

  The zombie at the back was only leaned into the vehicle, and stood straight to take in its next victim. Even as it turned to face Kell he hefted a foot and kicked the thing in the knee, breaking the joint backward. He stepped back as it toppled spinning to the pavement, and danced a little as the thing grabbed at his feet. Kell did the most expedient thing and kicked it again, this time in the side of the head.

  The zombie appeared dazed for a second, and Kell took that time to stomp as hard as he could on its neck, leg pistoning several times before it stopped moving. Even when the bones and nerves in its cervical spine were so much mush and splinters, the jaw still worked. So he stomped on that, too.

  There were only a few others left; one completely in the back of the SUV where it noisily consumed what was left of the unknown agent, and two others crammed against the front window, where the remains of Agent Wilson served as a nice distraction.

  Kell walked around the car that had run into them, only then noticing the driver—a little old lady—was being torn apart by another of the undead. Kell pointed toward the back seat of the SUV as he heard Jameson sidle in behind him. “Kill the one in the back,” he said coldly.

  Kell picked up Agent Paul's dropped weapon as Jameson moved in to comply, and pulled the man's corpse closer. He found what he was looking for—spare ammunition.

  Kell squatted at the passenger door of the old woman's car and tapped on the window. The zombie gnashing its teeth in her throat—an obese man with a thick beard drenched in blood—looked up.

  Having never fired a handgun, he missed with the first shot. That bullet shattered the window, which fell in sheets and was clearly not safety glass, and struck the old woman in the temple.

  “Fuck,” Kell said as the undead cocked its head at him in curiosity. Carefully, he steadied the gun in his wounded hand and fired again, this time sending a round through the bridge of the obese man's nose.

  The noise drew the attention of the remaining two zombies, but Jameson stepped up and fired in a practiced way as they turned from their meal to locate the source of the sound. The agent scanned the area for more attackers and saw several ungainly forms moving up the street toward them.

  “Come on,” the agent said. “If we hustle we can get ahead of them.”

  Kell nodded in agreement and followed behind as the other man took off at a fast jog. Blood fell in heavy drops from the injured hand still wrapped around the pistol.

  Chapter Seven

  Kell leaned against the window of their stolen car. Jameson, like something out of a movie, had demanded the use of a vehicle from a motorist at a stoplight a few hundred yards from the crash. The driver, panicked at the sight of two bloodied men holding firearms, peeled out and ran the light.

  They had then made their way to a gas station where Jameson leveled his pistol at a man filling his Mazda. That gentleman had been happy to hand over the keys, and as they pulled away Kell looked over his shoulder to see the carjacked citizen talking animatedly on his cell phone.

  “Hope you can get us back to the lab before the cops find us,” Kell said.

  Jameson was trying to call Jones for the hundredth time, and swore as he tossed the phone on the dash. “Goddamn cell networks are overloaded. Probably all the emergency calls going out,” he said. “And I wouldn't worry about the cops. They're having a busy day. We'll be low on the priority list.”

  Leaning his head against the window, Kell felt empty. Hi
s mind veered away from the last half hour like water around a stone. The space of time just wasn't there for him, but his anger bent around it anyway. Jameson filled the silence with constant chatter and cursing as he tried to call Jones again and again.

  The sensation in his left arm began to come back. Slowly, at first, and with the uncomfortable but painless pins-and-needles of a limb gone to sleep. The process picked up steam and a healthy dose of revenge after a minute or so, and turned into knives-and-pitchforks. Kell gritted his teeth against the pain but couldn't help letting out a strangled yelp.

  Jameson glanced at him as he cradled that burning arm with his bloody right hand, pistol still held in a white-knuckle grip. The agent winced in sympathy. “I've been there, man. Probably got hit in the nerve cluster in your shoulder,” he said. “You might want to set that gun somewhere, though. I don't want you to accidentally shoot me while I'm driving.”

  “I know what I'm doing,” Kell spat though a pained grimace.

  “Yeah, I saw that when you missed your target from three feet away and managed to shoot an old woman in the head.”

  “She was already dead,” Kell said without much conviction.

  “Yeah. Lot of that going around today.”

  The drive to the lab was uneventful. No police chase, no more run-ins with the undead (though Kell imagined that would be unavoidable very soon) and not even a heavy load of traffic, though it was rush hour. The parking lot at Sinclair buzzed with activity. There were ambulances, a collection of different funeral vehicles, more giant, shiny black government SUVs running idle, and even two large military Humvees. Clearly word had spread about the morning's events.

  “Doc, you need to have that hand looked at,” Jameson said. Now that they had arrived, he didn't matter any longer. Kell ignored him and walked into the building. People stared at him, but he ignored them as well. One man, obviously one of Jones's agents, even tried to stop him. Kell stared the man down before pushing past him and into the elevator.