Dead Things

by Darst, Matt

  Unlike Burt’s hero, Superman, Ian has no power of x-ray vision. Had he, he would see through the shroud of the being’s stained sweatshirt. He would see the creature’s belly button, although slightly distended, is oddly devoid of maggots.

  If Ian had Superman’s superior hearing, he would perceive no “crackle” or “pop”—the sounds of wet rice krispies—of larvae gnawing and gobbling their way through the subcutaneous fat in the genitalia and throat. The fat had collapsed and leached from the corpses. Since there is no meal to be had, there are no guests over for dinner.

  The ghouls’ faces and bellies, although swollen, lack the severe bloat characteristic of putrefaction. Odd, as the dead generally cannot expel gas, for they have no working stomach muscles or sphincters. The small intestine collapses, sealing itself off and creating a “gut balloon.” Perhaps, though, kinesis and vertical alignment are enough to allow the gas to vent. Perhaps it is the expulsion of the gas over the vocal chords of these things that gives them their monstrous voice.

  Perhaps the bacterial colonies on the skin and in the intestines and lungs have nothing on which to dine. Perhaps the pathogen responsible for the transformation multiplied so quickly that its sheer numbers kept the competitors in check.

  Perhaps.

  Perhaps.

  Perhaps…

  Decay operates quickly. Three weeks after death, the body’s organs turn to soup. The colon and lungs go first. Then bacteria chew through the palate to the brain. The liquid discharges from the ears, and a thick chocolate-like syrup purges from the mouth.

  Without putrefaction, however, decay is slowed. In these creatures, the digestive organs and lungs remain, but now with as much purpose as an appendix. More importantly, the brain stays intact, well protected inside its bony fortress. And while the creatures cough bits of purge from time to time, the pace of overall decomposition is glacial.

  “Who are they?” Van asks, although he already knows the answer.

  They are the passengers that remained on Flight 183.

  And they are famished.

  **

  Wright shakes her head as she looks out the window of the master bedroom.

  Now there are forty of them, probably more. The new ones make a racket. More will come this evening. The windows on the first floor will not hold.

  They need to act. And fast.

  Wright knows they should leave, depart under the cover of night. But there will be casualties. And they need to set a course. And there’s Jessica.…

  Jessica’s death warrant has been signed. They should leave her, Wright knows. Wright just can’t bring herself to do so. Not just yet, anyway.

  They need to buy time.

  They move everything and everyone upstairs.

  Then Ian, Van, and Burt go about the business of destroying the staircase. They pull up the stairs one by one, dropping them into the cellar below. They stop at the first landing, about eight feet up, the basement serving neatly as a moat.

  Jessica is getting worse. She’s coughing and moaning. Anne no longer sits with her. Wright has sent her to the master bedroom. Instead, Wright reads to Jessica from an antique rocking chair, shotgun propped ominously against the wall.

  It is hard for Ian to walk into her room. When he does, Jessica is sleeping fitfully. Wright sees him, puts her finger to her lip. Ian motions silently for Wright to join him.

  In the hallway, they whisper and conspire, out of earshot of Jessica and the others.

  “What’s the plan?” Ian asks.

  “The plan?” Wright takes offense. His tone seems to suggest she doesn’t have one, or worse, he doesn’t trust it.

  Ian senses the defiance in her tone and ignores it. “I figure we need to leave here tonight, before dawn at the latest.”

  Wright sighs. And just how does he expect to do this? Jessica is in no state to travel.

  “What?” Ian says. “Kari, she’ll never be able to travel. Not with us, anyway. You know this. Why are you denying the inevitable?”

  Because she is my responsibility, Wright wants to say. Because I failed her.

  She doesn’t need to say a thing. Ian knows what she’s thinking. “This isn’t your fault, you know.”

  Wright tries to be a good soldier, but a lone tear falls. She’s shocked when it deflects off her cheek. Her shoulders start to bounce, her face cracking.

  Ian draws her to him, buries her head in his chest. Her sobs are muffled in the fabric of his shirt, but not totally.

  Burt leans out the master bedroom. He makes eye contact with Ian, sees Ian mouth, “It’s okay,” even though it is anything but. Burt nods, pulls the bedroom door behind him, affording them just a moment of privacy.

  There in the darkness of the hall, Ian tells Wright what they will do, what they must do.

  She nods, her hand on his shoulder.

  Next he explains to her, over her objections, why he must leave them and strike out on his own.

  Chapter Seventeen: Bait and Switch

  Wright wakes Jessica. They need to talk. Jessica can guess why. Jessica knows she’s changing. She can feel it.

  Inside Jessica, a war is raging. The enemy has invaded, and her body mounts a response.

  Jessica’s complement molecules are first to attack the invader—something more complex than a virus, something less than a protozoa. The complement molecule’s job is simple; latch onto the invader, punch holes in its membrane and break it down. Then call for help.

  This is in accord with the invader’s plan. The intruder lets the complement molecule do its work and prays for it to call for reinforcements.

  Jessica’s macrophages respond to the beacon. They probe with fine hairs, filopodia that wave about like fishing lines, increasing the area the warrior cells cover as they sweep for intruders. Filopodia snare trespassers and retract quickly, allowing the macrophages to swallow their enemies whole.

  Just another step in the invader’s plan. It allows itself to be consumed without a hint of fight.

  As the macrophages lumber forth, they signal the immune system to act, loosening and widening blood vessel walls so more macrophages can attack. They dispatch molecules to drag other immune cells, like roaming T cells, to the battleground.

  This is the third step of the invader’s plan. It wants the roaming Ts on the frontline.

  Later, they will become Jessica’s own worst enemy.

  In a perfect world, the macrophages make their way to the lymph nodes. There, B and T cells, with faces as distinctive as jigsaw pieces, look for bits of the invader, bits called antigens presented by the macrophage like trophies of war. When presented with the antigens, T cells bearing the right receptor multiply, forming three regiments.

  1. Killer Ts, T cells that search for infected cells. They are the Special Forces. They identify the contaminated cells and force them onto their own swords.

  2. The infantry, or inflammatory Ts. They rush to the site of the breach, spraying deadly poison. The inflammation they cause allows other immune cells to enter the fray.

  3. Helper Ts infiltrate and provide military intelligence. They work with B cells, binding to antigens. Once locked on, the T cells spy on the visitor, providing signals to the Bs to create antibodies. The antibodies attach to the invaders, rendering them harmless.

  But Jessica’s immune response fails to escalate. The regiments do not form. For the macrophages are nothing more than Trojan horses, the invaders hidden inside. Ensconced within the cells, the invaders go to work severing the macrophages molecular knives. It’s a neat piece of mischief, for the macrophages can no longer present bits of the enemy to the audience of Bs and Ts in the lymph nodes. Since there are no antigens, the existing Ts lack reinforcements.

  And there are precious few Ts ready to handle the crisis. Those that do respond get twitchy, adopting a slash and burn policy, assassinating friend and foe indiscriminately. The collateral damage mounts, and the war further spirals out of control.

  Yet another phase of the in
vader’s plan. Dead host cells and antigens pile up and start to rot. The macrophages cannot remove the dead and dying soldiers from the battlefield quickly enough. The body becomes over-stimulated, septic, and attacks itself.

  The few trespassers who fail to find homes in macrophages have another trick up their sleeves. They change their coats, by manipulating the position of the DNA on their surface. They change their skin so often, the antibodies fortunate enough to survive the fire fight cannot match the pace.

  With little in the way to stop it, the attacker makes its way forward. It knows where to go. The body is a closed system, full of bouncing chemical markers. The invader circulates through the body, sensitive to all the molecular “smells.” As it nears the brain, it detects hormones released by the hypothalamus, a gland controlling critical bodily functions, like circadian rhythm, homeostasis, and…

  Hunger.

  The scent is a trigger, telling the invader to stop its caterpillar-like progression, and start burrowing.

  The brain’s blood vessel walls are tight knit and form a daunting barrier, the blood-brain barrier. The wall keeps large molecules from seeping in from the bloodstream into brain tissue.

  Or, at least, that’s the concept. Jessica’s barrier is compromised. The invader presents a protein, not unlike the one resting on the surface of the rabies virus, that opens a passageway in the blood vessel walls and into the individual nerve cells. As if uttering the magic phrase, “Open Sesame,” the invader enters the cavern of the upper spinal cord, following the nerve to the brain.

  The invader moves fast, finding the hindbrain in less than thirty minutes time from entry. Technically, the body barely has time to mount an immune response. Yet the invader makes sure some of its troops linger throughout the Jessica’s body, especially near her lymph nodes.

  It wants to be discovered. It expects to be discovered. That’s all part of the plan too. It wants to cause as much damage to the immune system as possible.

  Why? Because it doesn’t want to be like its cousin, the parasite responsible for the resurrection of cadavers.

  Its cousin (one day the microbe will have a nice sanitary name like NAP Type 2) is the milder form. It shuns attention. It has been living in Jessica’s brain since she was a child—just as it inhabits most people, hiding in their grey matter, cocooned in a cyst, like toxoplasma gondii, which infected billions of cat owners prior to the New Order. When Type 2 does break out, a rare occurrence in the living, it is immediately checked by the immune system. The infected might exhibit symptoms of the flu, or they may not show any signs at all. Only natural death unlocks its secrets, just as Heston hypothesized.

  The version tearing Jessica apart, Type 1, has mutated to exploit the immune system. This evolutionary improvement increases both its virulence and the opportunity for contagion. It does not want to stay hidden in the brain like Type 2, kept in check by a jealous co-star. This invader is a media whore, and unlike its camera-shy relative, it is ready for its close-up. It will have its time on the stage, the director be damned.

  And the stage? The brain.

  This is where the invader takes up permanent residency, building its base in the brain stem, spreading throughout the cerebellum and along the top edges of the brain to the motor cortex, the area responsible for bilateral movement and locomotion.

  The brain. This is where the invader will reign, driving the decedent’s actions through chemical manipulation. It hijacks the hypothalamus, stimulating the ventromedial nucleus, mimicking the triggers for hunger. It spurs the need for food intake—although most of the devoured flesh spills from the monsters’ torn cheeks or rots in their esophagus or stomach.

  The brain. This is where the invader will reproduce, using the facial and glossopharyngeal nerves to carry it from the brainstem to the decedent’s mouth, just a bite from finding a home in its next victim.

  The brain. This is the organ that must be destroyed to halt the trespasser and its host in their tracks.

  Jessica can feel her body being rampaged. She can feel it losing the war and her mind losing control. Her appetite is growing. “I don’t want to become one of them,” she says to Wright.

  Wright hands her the shotgun. She reminds her that there’s only one round. She’s got just one shot, so to speak.

  Jessica isn’t worried. “It’s a shotgun,” she jokes. “There’s some room for error.” She agrees she will wait until they are clear. She smiles, tells Wright to tell Anne goodbye.

  She’s looking forward to heaven. She can’t wait to find out how Harry Potter ends.

  **

  Wright awakens the others during the darkness of the morning hours. There are a number of questions. “Where’s Jessica?” “Where’s Ian?” Wright provides them the opening details of the plan.

  Once the crying subsides, Wright carries on with the briefing.

  When they jump from the bathroom window, they’ll need to move quietly, and they’ll need to move quickly. They should run flat out for half an hour. Wright will keep pace with the slowest. After that they can slow to a jog. Once at the highway, they will track north. She tells them to count mile markers. They will rendezvous ten miles north, near the closest overpass.

  It is a hasty plan, and it has lots of holes. Van decides to point one of them out. “What if we get lost?” Van asks.

  “Make sure you don’t,” Wright says.

  Then they hear Ian’s cries. It’s time to go.

  Van is out first. He drops silently, no sign of the monsters. He hears shouts in the distance. The howls have drawn them away. Poor Ian, he thinks.

  Anne’s bag almost hits him in the head. He grabs it, steadies Anne as she jumps. She grunts when she hits, but Van has her up and moving in a beat. Van thinks he hears Burt, then Wright, drop from the window. He doesn’t wait to find out. They can handle themselves. Van will watch the sky as they run, keeping the coming light on the right side of his body.

  They run, following the line of a deer path. Van’s heart is beating hard in the cage of his chest. He opens his mouth wide, an effort to silence his panting. He keeps a hand out, ensuring Anne is at his side. Branches and brush whip their legs.

  There’s a gunshot. A shotgun blast.

  Anne crumples, starts to sob. Van quickly puts a hand over her mouth, an arm around her waist. “Not here,” he whispers. They have to keep moving. There will be time enough later to mourn Jessica’s death.

  **

  It is funny that Ian would choose to play decoy, to lead the creatures away from his friends. Funny because of a similar choice eighteen years earlier. A choice that would save Ian’s young life.

  Once Peter is past the Loop, he progresses more swiftly. It takes him just under an hour to reach the front steps of his brownstone. He trips up the steps, spilling onto the porch below the bay window. He curses, holds his knee, goes for the keys.

  The door opens before he can get to it. “Oh my God, are you hurt?” a young woman asks. She embraces a child and runs to greet him. Her hand goes to his face, cradling it to make sure it is indeed him.

  They kiss hard, Peter trying not to crush Ian between them. He looks hastily about. “Let’s go inside. Fast.”

  For the next several hours they watch the expanding coverage on CNN. The world, it would seem, is on fire.

  Reports are coming in from several major cities: New York. Miami. Detroit. Minneapolis. And now, Chicago.

  The Mayor declares martial law. The newscasters warn to stay inside, doors locked, curtains drawn, and lights down when possible. But there is a terror plain on their faces that belies this advice.

  An internal voice tells Peter they are wrong. The voice tells Peter to get out of this city. Go south, it says. Fast.

  She packs while Peter readies the car. She grabs a photo album, some of Peter’s clothes. She grabs what he’s thrown on the bed, what he wore today, a navy striped tie and dress shirt, and then jeans, socks, underwear, whatever. She can hardly think straight, she doesn’t know how to
prepare.

  Peter decides to take Mr. Carr, their elderly and solitary neighbor, with them.

  He helps his wife carry the suitcases down the stairs. Ian is crying. He wants his stuffed Curious George. The front room is darkened, and Peter can’t find Ian’s stuffed animal. His wife tries to help and makes the mistake of turning on the light.

  “Turn it off,” he says, with a hushed intensity.

  She does so without delay, but has the damage been done?

  Peter creeps to the bay window, peers through the curtains. On the street three men stand under the lit street lamp. One turns, meets his glance directly. He lurches towards their home. The others follow.

  Shit. Peter turns, hurries his wife and son to the rear of the living room. She tries to grab the suitcases. He tells her to leave them.

  There’s pounding on the steps, next at the door.

  She urges Ian to be quiet as the shadows cross the window. Three, four, now five of them. One slaps the window with an open hand, then slaps harder. It breaks. They come through.

  These people care not for pain. They tear themselves apart coming over the broken glass. Peter cannot fight them. They are not people. They are wild animals. He rushes his wife and son into the closet.

  “Don’t wait for me. Get to your mother’s!” he shouts. “I love you!” He slams the door and begins furiously screaming at these things, these intruders.

  He has their attention. Shit. He runs.