Mass Hysteria

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered.

  After the sickness passed, her head feeling fuzzy, she set the arrow down on a metal shelf attached to the bottom lip of the mirror and began to strip.

  Her uniform blouse was a catastrophe and far beyond salvaging. The fabric peeled away, tugging at the fine hairs across her arms and abdomen, and she let it fall to the floor, kicking it away. The Kevlar vest she wore beneath the shirt was also stained, but seemed to have stopped the gore from ruining the tank top below. Her pants were a total loss, so she worked her way out of her boots and tossed the pants into a corner alongside the discarded shirt. She was soaked right down to her socks and panties, her feet squelching inside the boots. She could live with the discomfort of the bloodstained underwear, but rid herself of the socks. She had always hated going to the beach because of how wet sand felt between her toes, and bloody socks were even worse.

  Standing in front of the mirror, she did the best she could to clean herself. The well water was cool against her skin and she had to scrub hard with her hands to free herself of the gore coating her body. She stuffed her head into the sink as best she could, funneling the water across her thick, black hair. Satisfied, she then moved onto washing her face, arms, legs, and feet, then dried herself with handfuls of paper towel.

  “Jesus, you’re one hot mess,” she said, then chuckled.

  She toyed with the idea of going back to the council room and seeing if any of the dead officials had clothes worth salvaging, but the grisly scene made that proposition highly unlikely and she dismissed the thought almost as quickly as it had occurred.

  If it was really the end of the world, she told herself, who cares how you look?

  She pictured herself walking out of City Hall and back onto the street wearing only a thin cotton shirt and underwear that looked like it had been through the period from hell, and tactical combat boots, and couldn’t help but laugh. That would surely be one hell of a sight. When she thought of her Bible-thumping, End-of-the-World Daddy and what his reaction to her appearance would have been, she laughed even harder.

  Okay then, this is totally worth it just for that thought alone, she thought.

  She grabbed the arrow from the shelf and looked in the mirror one last time, mentally prepared herself to head outside.

  The walk to the library was a short distance, but she took it slow due to her various aches and pains. It gave her time to think, even as she kept a wary eye open for an attack from the dogs or birds or anything else with teeth and claws.

  Passing by the cluster of wolves Harbin had dispatched with his rifle, she explored the question that had been hounding her for the past several hours.

  The dogs, and even the other animals she had witnessed over the last twenty-four hours, had stayed in packs, hunting together. Harbin, though, had been the only human thus far to attempt to hunt and kill her.

  Were humans affected by this…this…whatever it was?

  She knew that in animal packs there was also some kind of alpha. Male lions would fight one another for control of their pride, and then the victor would slaughter his adversary’s offspring in order to assume total domination and ensure his own bloodline continued.

  Was that why Harbin had gone after her? Because she was a rival for his supremacy?

  It made sense, she supposed. He was a big game hunter, and a mayor. Clearly, he possessed an alpha streak. She was a police officer—not exactly a career for the passive, beta types. And Tremblay had been the sheriff, a police officer and politician in equal measure, in a position of power not for the faint of heart.

  The more she thought on it, the more she thought she was onto something. This infection—or plague, maybe?—brought out something primal and upended the natural order, turned everyone hysterical. Everything and everyone was hyper-aggressive, intent on domineering and eliminating their competition, prone to crazed fits of violence.

  For a moment, she was able to look outside herself and examine the issue with a sense of detachment, as if this problem were affecting only others and not her directly. That moment passed almost as soon as it had arrived, her concentration broken by a sharp, loud whistle.

  Her eyes fell upon the men at the library entrance, their gazes lingering and intent plain on each of their faces. Both men’s eyes moved from her booted feet up her bare calves and muscled thighs, across the thin fabric covering her pubis and up the length of her belly, to her breasts, and finally, her eyes. The leer was unmistakable, and as she approached, a lascivious grin spread across their lips. A plain alpha intent shined in their eyes, and the way their bodies shifted to put a bit more distance between themselves carried a hint of potential violence that she recognized well enough from her years on the force. Men always underestimated her.

  She let her eyes drop, forced her body to assume an unchallenging pose as her shoulders slumped and her head tipped down. She made herself look smaller and unassuming, unthreatening. She kept the arrow hidden in her hand, the thin broken shaft tight against the back of her forearm.

  While they had been studying her, she had done a quick assessment of them. They were clearly sentries, guarding the library and whoever was inside. One held a pistol, the barrel pointed toward the ground, and the other a tire iron. As she approached, the man with the tire iron thwacked the steel against his palm.

  “Hey there, baby,” he said, his eyes locked onto her tits. His tongue peaked out from between glistening lips.

  There would be no better opening than this, she knew. She had to strike hard and fast while their raging hormones distracted them.

  She lightly pressed her empty palm to Tire Iron’s face, his stubble coarse against her soft skin, and forced a coquettish smile as she batted her eyes. Blood still stained the creases of her knuckles. He leaned his face into her hand, his head craning toward hers, already pursing his lips.

  She slammed the arrow into his jugular, then tore the tire iron from his grip.

  Before the man with the pistol could realize what had happened, she pivoted and brought the tire iron around fast, whipping it into his head. He stumbled back, shocked and wounded, and she pressed the advantage, bringing the tire iron down again over the top of his head, denting his skull, slamming it down once more, skin splitting and his skull breached, blood pouring down his face in a thick, syrupy cascade.

  She turned back toward the other man, and swung the tire iron at him as well. He had a hand around his neck, fingers pressed against either side of the arrow jutting from his jugular, and he dimly raised his other hand to ward off the blow. He was too slow, and she caught him across the eyes with the iron. He fell hard on his ass, and she reached down to him, yanking the arrow free. A propulsive stream of crimson fountained out from between his fingers, and she left him to bleed out.

  The pistol had wound up in the grass, and she quickly picked it up and tucked into the back of her underwear’s waistband. Then, she grabbed a hold of the door handle and stepped into the library.

  Rather than be greeted with the peculiar, musty scent of well-worn books and collections of newspapers and magazines, Shay was assaulted by the cloying stench of bodily fluids and waste, and of the unwashed. As she moved from the lobby and into the main collections, following the noises of grunting and panting into the fiction section, the stink only grew stronger. She could very nearly identify the scent of various organ meats as they rotted in the still, hot air. Her nostrils flared as her stomach growled, her mouth watering with anticipation.

  Entrails littered the floor, the ropes of intestine and discarded innards practically a roadmap to the main center of debauchery. A corpse, nothing more than an empty, gutted husk of disused flesh and barely concealed bone, was planted beside the shelves of New Fiction, her head cocked at an abstract angle and twisted almost completely around on a broken neck.

  Books were strewn everywhere, cast to the floor and flung across the tables. Torn pages turned brown with the dried stains of bodily fluids were scattered around the room, th
eir empty broken-spined shells tossed aside. The room looked as if a tornado had ripped through, and following the excited resonations of moaning around the stacks, she saw why.

  A disbelieving laugh nearly escaped her, but she stifled it with her palm. Her skin was still perfumed with a coppery tang that made her gut roil, even as her eyes went wide and a new thrill sent tenterhooks into a deeper, more primal urge buried in her core.

  Naked bodies heaved upon one another, their skin stained a delirious crimson and flecked with black chunks, their hair matted and pasted in clumps to their scalps and the sides of their faces.

  Her presence did nothing to disturb the animalistic rutting around her, and she waded deeper into the crimson orgy. The room stank of the heavy, musky stink of sex and sweat, of waste and gore. The couplings were erratic and fluid and she briefly watched as men savaged one another, women pleasuring other women, partners swapped in an unending train of thrusting bodies, lost in the throes of their manic fucking.

  A creeping wetness moistened her panties and she unconsciously groped at her own breast, her nipple hard in her palm. Her breathing came in hitched gasps as her desire grew, her heart beating faster as an urgent insistence to be filled tensed within her.

  She felt insanely tempted to strip out of the thin garments covering her skin and slide into the fray, wanting to taste the bodies of those around her, needing to be tasted in turn. Instead, she waded deeper, past the threesomes and foursomes and moresomes, into the center of the room.

  A man stood in the middle of it all, his back pressed against the shelving. His studied the erratic pressing of bodies before him, noting her approach with an upturned smile. Two women knelt before him, passing his cock between their mouths.

  Shay’s heart quickened at the sight of his rigid, upturned erection. The knob was swollen and empurpled, thick veins lining the shaft and pulsing his hardness. His member was not large, but settled in the smallness of the women’s hands, it possessed an undeniable appeal. When he crooked his finger at her, summoning her forward, she felt compelled to proceed. She licked her lips. Her underwear was thoroughly soaked, and a brief glimmer of fantasy ran through her mind in which she pulled aside the crotch of her panties and pressed her backside against him, pulling him inside her. Her fingers squeezed at the arrow cupped in her palm, and she strode forward with a heady confidence.

  He was Alpha.

  She was the Omega.

  Her lips curled at this realization. That curl grew into a wider smile as she realized who the man was. Barret Ward—the fucking mailman, of all people. It had taken her a moment to recognize him. Usually when she saw him he was decked out in his blue postal carrier uniform and a safari hat, half his face hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. Naked, he looked different, older. Although his arms and legs were corded with thick muscle, his old-man tits dropped so that his hairy nipples pointed downward toward his soggy-looking potbelly. His solid cock jutted up from a thick gray thatch of pubic hair, the shaft bent at an upward slope.

  Ward was a gruff, no-nonsense sort of man. He did his daily duties with mercurial satisfaction, a disposition that leaned toward abrasive. He was not the type of mailman to nod and say hello. If anything, on those rare occasions that his eyes were bared, his stare carried a cruelness that was razorblade sharp, accompanied by a quick barb that lived perpetually on the tip of his tongue. The Army Ranger tattoo on his forearm had been dulled by the years, but the puckered scars across his abdomen still carried a certain pink shine.

  On more than one occasion, Shay had been called out by a parent claiming Ward had struck their child. During a polar snap a few years back, a handful of kids who had been stuck at home due to a school closure were hamming it up with a snowball fight. When Ward passed in their direction, slipping the mail free from his shoulder sling for delivery, they had pelted him with a snowball that was mostly ice. Furious, Ward went after them, surprisingly fast for an old man. He had caught the slowest boy by the hood of his parka and yanked him off his feet, slamming him onto the snow-covered lawn.

  Before Ward was able to strike the boy—which by all accounts, was certainly his plan—the storm door sprung open and a mother to one of the kids raced out, grabbing ahold of Ward and pushing him away from the child. Ward flung the mail he had been delivering, letting the letters scatter in the wind, and marched off on his way.

  The parents of the boy had decided not to press charges, but it was not the first, nor the last time that Barret Ward had some kind of a run-in with the local youths.

  Now here he was, with the matronly seventy-six-year-old retiree who volunteered at the library practically gagging on his spit-shined dick.

  His eyes landed on Shay’s tits, his gaze pulling her forward. She moved slowly, letting her hips sway in a gentle, exaggerated rhythm, and then knelt and pressed in between the women. The other woman was a ripe and buxom forty-something with a soccer-mom look about her. The geriatric pulled away from Ward’s cock, his hard-on clearing her lips with a slick popping noise, and angled the throbbing member toward Shay.

  Shay rose up slightly, tilting her head to accommodate the crooked member and took him into her mouth. His pubic hair stank with a heady, fungal aroma, and even through the gore dried against his skin she could pick out the strong scent of menthol he had slathered on his legs for muscle relief.

  She cupped his dangling balls in her hand, rolling the testicles in her palm, seeking his eyes with her own and held them while she worked her tongue against the tip of his penis. His fingers sank into her thick hair, holding her head still as he thrust into her face, moaning loudly. With her index finger, she traced the fold of skin behind his balls, the pad of her finger pressing against his anus, circling the clenched opening, teasing him slightly before withdrawing back to his testes.

  His mouth fell open, his head slightly nodding.

  He liked that, she thought, smiling around his erection. Let’s see how he likes this.

  Still holding his balls in one hand, she reached up slowly between his legs with the other, sliding the arrow point forward. She kept him entranced with her wide eyes, taking his shaft as deep into her mouth as she could, always maintaining eye contact, keeping him engaged and distracted.

  To either side of her, she felt the bodies of the other two women. A soft, wrinkly hand groped at her breast, while the younger woman reached between Shay’s thighs, her fingers slipping beneath the sodden panties and circling her opening.

  The pleasure was impossible to deny, and she found the excitement building toward a natural crescendo.

  She pointed the arrowhead up and thrust quickly, slamming the three-bladed broadhead into the soft knot of his anus. He howled, a barbaric gut-deep bellow, his hands grabbing fistfuls of her hair and pulling, but she refused to relent.

  She drove the arrow up further, using the small broken bit of shaft to twist it as she jammed further up, and then quickly yanked it down with all her might. Blood and shit splattered free as his sphincter snared around the broadhead, prolapsed, and tore free of his rectum.

  Shay bit down hard on his cock, her teeth snapping through the thin layer of flesh and cutting through the veiny gristle. She twisted her head from side to side, tearing his dick free from its base, squeezing his balls tight between her fingers until they ruptured.

  Ward was howling viciously at this point, hyperventilating and breathless from the fresh agony. His grip on her hair loosened and as Shay stood, she stabbed him in the belly with the broadhead. His face twisted into a now-soundless rictus of pain, drool and blood pouring from his mouth, and she freed the arrow, stabbing him repeatedly, holding him up by the shoulder. Finally satisfied, she released him and let him fall, still alive but in enormous pain.

  She knew all eyes were on her, and she had to guarantee there was no questioning her claim to this pack. Ward’s days as Alpha were over, and they all had to know that. She raised her booted foot up, and then slammed the heel down onto Ward’s throat, crushing his neck. She stomped on
his face, over and over, until his skull fractured and collapsed into a black and red paste that was swirled with funnels of pulped gray brain matter. Breathless, she smeared the residue onto the tiled floor, the toes of her boot making a waxy scream.

  Turning toward her pack, she saw only startled gazes. Then the men rose, a hardness entering their eyes. Shay pulled the gun from her waistband and leveled it, shooting one man after another until four more dead dicks littered the library and the rest willingly lowered their gazes and sank back to their knees. There were no alpha streaks in those boys, she was sure of that much. Not anymore.

  I am your queen now, she thought, looking out at them.

  Slowly, the tension in the air bled out and her people resumed their day’s entertainment, feasting on the corpses or rutting loudly amongst the books.

  She turned her eyes on the soccer mom who had been kneeling beside her earlier, and cupped her chin, drawing her closer. She bent to kiss the woman on the forehead, beneath her bangs, and then shoved her face to the sodden panties.

  “Lick,” Shay said.

  17

  THE DOWNTOWN CORRIDOR WAS a miasma of scorched bodies and burnt insulation emanating from the ruined husks of what had once been restaurants and souvenir shops, and the fecund stink of animal fear pheromones.

  Lauren’s leg muscles burned from pedaling, her whole body a catalog of bone-deep aches and pains. Sheer exhaustion nearly swallowed her whole, but she pressed on.

  Although the flames had abated, the heat lingered. The line of abandoned vehicles radiated a ghost of warmth, the paint blistered or burnt away to reveal blackened metal frames. Pedaling past the deserted cars was enough to leave her sweating, a red glow rising across her bare arms.

  Small gutters of fire sputtered in the hollows of the collapsed business district, dancing in the windows of the downed aircraft that had buried itself in the street and smashed through storefronts.