The first time the female voice, bright and cheerful, issued from the recorder, Armani jumped instinctively and looked around, feeling guilty. Because he couldn’t see her, Armani decided the female speaker was holding the camera.
“Paulie!” she exclaimed with obvious affection as a man came into view.
Armani saw they were in the store where the camera had been abandoned. It was lighted and in operation, so Armani concluded the recording took place sometime before the Onset.
“Jess,” Paul responded, and his voice was more measured and reserved than the young woman’s that he spoke to. The look on his face, though, was amused and friendly.
“You’re doing a fabulous job training me,” Jess told Paul, exaggerating her words and making him smile. She moved around the counter to focus on the other cashier, who stood at the register. He watched her in an almost-exasperated but mostly affable way. “But I’m bored!” She dragged out the word, overstressing it with a heavy, dramatic sigh. Paul smiled ever wider.
“Well, we’re third shifters,” he reminded her. “We get the bar rush and then at the ass end of the shift, we get the people going in on firsts. Gotta do something to pass the time.”
“Nap?” Jess suggested in a hopeful yet joking tone.
“Not on your life,” Paul replied with a chuckle. “Go stock the cooler, you spaz.”
“Right on,” Jess responded easily. The the camera moved with her through the store.
Armani saw shelves he had decided not to raid earlier, happily filled with bright wrappers, hanging bags of snacks, and bottled beverages.
Jess entered the cooler.
Armani saw other shelves, these ones metal and not meant to be decorative and appealing. They were packed full of boxes that contained the juices, pop, and water meant to replace those taken from the cooler’s front display. Jess moved through them easily, and her breath plumed on the air. The camera occasionally went foggy with it as she moved. Armani assumed the back of the cooler was kept relatively cold, so the beverages were chilled when the customers took them.
“And this is the only part of this job besides working with Paulie I actually enjoy,” Jess said to the camera as she set it on one of the shelves.
Armani saw the girl was a looker with bright blue eyes and a spill of fine, silky brown hair. She had high cheekbones and shadows of dimples in both her cheeks. Her brightness of spirit was radiantly evident. She obviously smiled a lot.
Jess turned and grabbed something the camera couldn’t see. When she brought it back in front of the lens, Armani saw a box of juices. She pulled a few singles out to place them in their proper rows. After repeating the process a few times, she turned at the sound of the cooler door opening. Though Armani couldn’t see him, he guessed Paul popped his head in to speak.
“Hey, your future husband is back,” Paul said teasingly. Jess groaned.
“I can’t believe he came back again! He’s been here four times! Paulie, make him go away, please.”
Armani heard Paul chuckle and the door closed with a solid thunk. The door was metal, thick, and weighty. It made plenty of noise when it opened or closed.
Jess was once again all alone with her stocking, but she grabbed the camera and zoomed in so she could see between the rows of orange juice and chocolate milk as the front door of the store opened.
When shouts and sounds of a struggle sounded from outside the cooler, Armani glanced at the time display in the corner of the screen. It read 10:47p.m. The Onset had occurred or was in the process as Jess recorded; he knew it instinctively.
Armani heard Jess breathing rapidly. She gave a distressed whine as the camera whipped back and forth, seeking her co-worker.
“Paul,” she whispered, and Armani heard the fear and concern in the word. “Paulie…” She might not have been aware of speaking her co-worker’s name in that anxiety-laden tone, but her distress was nearly palpable.
She couldn’t find Paul or his potential assailant. The jerky movements of the camera conveyed that to Armani easily.
To her left, a crash of thunderous conflict sounded as Paul and his attacker fell, grappling, through the cooler door.
Jess screamed.
Quickly, Jess shifted the camera to Paul, who tried to pull what Armani immediately recognized as a full corrupted out of the cooler and away from Jess.
The man was frenzied; mouth foaming blood and saliva. His teeth were pointed; incisors dug into his lower lip and drew his own blood, which only seemed to incite him further. The first word that came to Armani’s mind was ‘vampire’ and he’d seen enough fully corrupted by that point to make an educated assumption on how the blight morphed the host’s physiology. The psychology had a lot to do with it. The form was inherently dictated by the corrupted, not the corruption.
“Jess, run!” Paul screamed, dragging Armani away from his thought and back to the drama on the little screen.
The blood on the corrupted man’s mouth was mostly Paul’s, Armani could see. His arm, which he had locked around his assailant’s throat, had been torn open. Blood dripped steadily onto the floor, or was flung against the cooler’s shelves when the corrupted struggled against him.
Paul shouted to Jess again, trying desperately to break her paralysis of terror.
“Jess, damn it, go!” He roared the words, and it was finally enough to get through to the girl paralyzed by fear.
Jess turned and fled. Armani was curious as to where she could possibly go. The valiant Paul and the corrupted man blocked the only door Armani had seen.
The camera rocked and jolted as Jess sprinted. She stumbled, but met her goal quickly. The cooler was only about forty paces wide. There was another door, Armani saw. It opened to a deep freeze, where bags of ice were stocked and stored. Extra boxes of ice cream and microwaveable goods were neatly and unobtrusively nestled behind the display stacks of bagged ice.
As soon as Jess got the door open, Armani heard two hellish sounds from behind her. One was something he tentatively identified as the cracking of bone and tearing of flesh. He assumed Paul was in very bad shape judging by the second awful sound: the nearly inhuman howl of pain he gave in response to the first noise. The agony inside his voice sounded like insanity, and it made his cries blend with eerie similarity with the bellowing hunting call the corrupted gave as it charged for the girl.
Jess never focused the recorder back on her fallen co-worker. The corrupted hit the door to the ice cooler, which Jess had had to pull open. The door slammed shut when the weight of the corrupted form struck it. With its thought process quickly devolving, it couldn’t find a way to get at its prey and therefore scrabbled and scratched in fury at the door, but never touched its handle to pull it back open.
Jess had not given into her fear paralysis a second time. She stumbled through the front door of the ice cooler, which put her in the main body of the store. Panning the camera toward the big front windows, she let her audience–currently Armani–see that there were other potential threats outside.
She moved low, quick, and made for the light switches.
Armani mentally applauded the girl. He unconsciously rooted for her.
He realized now why the lights had been off but the store was still running for all intents and purposes. Jess had been trying not to draw attention to the store by turning all of the lights off.
“Smart girl,” Armani whispered, though she obviously couldn’t hear him.
Jess moved toward the back room, behind the cash register. She wanted to be away from those big, exposing windows, Armani assumed.
Before she made it through the door, some dark shape hit her. The camera fell and as it did, it captured her short (Armani felt, very final) scream.
The camera hit the floor and the video stopped.
There was nothing more.
Armani sighed and turned the device off. Poor girl, he thought. Not smart enough.
In the church bus, as Armani turned off the video device, Kirby stared in outright amaz
ement at the two car procession driving toward the highway. He was floored to see other people, other living, normal people. He thought they’d have to be normal, wouldn’t they? They were driving. That alone indicated something beyond what those fully given into the blight were capable of.
He wasn’t overly perturbed by the fact that they drove on without stopping to see if they were normal, too. Maybe in their position he wouldn’t have, either. He knew he would’ve liked to see other new people; others who were only partially corrupted or, even better, uncorrupted by the taint. But his main focus right now was Eric.
The massively muscular man had collapsed upon getting safely into the church bus. He’d lost blood from the horrific neck wound the corrupted man had inflicted on him, and no matter how much pressure Kirby applied, he hadn’t yet been able to get the bleeding to stop.
Eric was a great guy. They’d clicked immediately. Maybe if they’d met in the gym or somewhere else, a friendship between them would have been laughable, but in the present situation, they’d practically become like brothers overnight. Kirby had lost everyone else already. He was caught up with a fine trembling to think he might lose Eric, as well.
“Armani’s waving us out,” Molly told Kirby in a gentle voice. “There aren’t any corrupted around that we can see. Some may have been drawn to the noise of the cars, though, so we have to try to get into the med center quick or risk having them on us again. Dave will help you carry him, all right?”
Kirby nodded too quickly. There was blood on his hands. He didn’t want to think about it, but they felt terribly unclean.
“Good,” he said, and his voice had a breathy, panicky quality he disliked even more than the blood on his hands. He forced himself to calm.
“I can do it if you need me to,” Molly offered. She didn’t like the way he looked, the way he sounded. She trusted that he wanted to help, but he was verging on a breakdown that would render him useless. Carrying his mauled, unconscious friend might be the tipping point that would push him over.
“I’ve got him, Molly,” Kirby said, and his voice sounded stronger and surer. “Get Dave in here and let’s do this.” At that, David used a hand on her shoulder to get Molly to sit down out of his way so he could get through to where Eric and Kirby were.
Eric groaned as David and Kirby lifted him between them, and his head lolled forward. Blood continued to ooze from the wound and Kirby wondered if it actually was slowing and he was just panicking at the fact that there was still blood at all.
“We’ve got you, buddy,” Kirby assured Eric, hoping he could hear him.
“No problems,” Dave agreed. Kirby didn’t know who he was talking to, but he hoped David was right.
The bus aisle was narrow, and getting three grown men through it was a difficult chore. They moved slowly and with painstaking care, not wanting to jostle Eric any more than they had to. It was a process, but they eventually got the wounded man out of the vehicle without injuring him further.
“Quickly, please. Quickly.”
The man who urged them inside from the barely-cracked doorway was short and willowy with the darkest hair a man can have and eyes nearly the same shade. He was of Asian descent and wore thin-framed glasses and a white lab coat. His black slacks were neat and pressed, his shoes were polished. The only sign of disarray existed in his too-large eyes, mussed hair, and the long diagonal gash that swept across his left cheek. The wound oozed blood steadily and Kirby decided there was a good chance the injury was fairly fresh.
“Thank you,” Armani told them man in a soft, deeply grateful voice as they clasped hands companionable.
Kirby had noticed Armani initiated physical contact with all humans upon first meeting and he wondered why. Then, he realized the thing inside of him had less of a hold when he was touching other people. Armani was uncorrupted, maybe he hoped that the lack of corruption in him would push back the blight in others. Or maybe he was just a very touchy-feely kind of guy. Either way, Kirby was thankful to follow him inside the clinic.
Once the entire group had entered the clinic’s first door, the doctor re-locked it and quickly re-attached the sheet he’d hastily hung using hammer and nails. Stepping down from the chair he needed in order to reach the wall above the glass doors, the doctor picked up the tool box he had. When Kirby looked at it questioningly, the man flushed and said, “I always have it in my car.” Though he didn’t look the type to carry a well-stocked tool kit, Kirby figured the man was probably glad he did.
“Smart man,” Armani declared appreciatively. The doctor gave him a wan, tired smile as he pushed several chairs taken from the waiting room–two of which were large, cushioned and obviously heavy–against the first set of doors. They went through the second and the doctor locked those, as well.
“Room two, in the back to the left,” the doctor directed Kirby and Dave.
Gwen, Molly, the twins, Kim, and her baby sat in the chairs still in the waiting room.
They’d brought in two bags of their food goods and left the rest in their vehicles. As Dave and Kirby hauled the still-unconscious Eric toward the room they were directed toward, Gwen and Molly brought out foodstuffs and Kim began mixing a bottle of formula for Alec. The babe had been quiet and sleepy ever since the incident at the gas station, as though he finally realized the safety of the group at times depended upon his silence.
Kim’s hands shook. She spilled some of the formula onto the table and brushed it off onto the floor before anyone noticed. Something shrill and panicky bubbled up in her throat, some sound that would do no good to anyone, least of all her son, so she bit it back by biting into her tongue. She bit hard and pain warred with panic; the sick feeling was accompanied by the metallic precursor to blood, a taste in the back of her throat that finally pushed the noise trying to worm its way out back down where it would be confined.
“Honey, do you want some help?”
A female voice. It was Gwen; Gwen of the soft eyes and ever-patient demeanor. Kim knew Gwen was childless, but she had the presence of a caregiver. She always wanted to help, and even though Kim couldn’t accept her help without admitting everything that was wrong, she wanted to. Desperately, she wanted to.
“I’ve got it,” Kim said, and her voice cracked and wavered.
Gwen heard it; the break was impossible to ignore. Sympathy for Kim washed through her. She didn’t know how far she could go toward forcing her help, so she made the first attempt by putting her hand on the hand of Kim’s that held Alec’s bottle.
“One feeding, I can do it for you,” she offered gently. Kim’s eyes filled with tears, and Gwen wanted to hug her. But Kim pulled away, not impolitely, but firmly, and said, “I prefer to feed him myself. Feeding is bonding, so they say.”
Gwen nodded. “All right, hon,” she said kindly. “Just let me know if you need anything, okay? Don’t hesitate.”
“I appreciate it,” Kim said as Gwen moved away.
While Kim fed Alec and the twins ate with Molly, Gwen moved toward the hallway where David and Kirby had followed the doctor and Armani to tend to Eric. She wanted to see how it was going.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Armani’s Journal
I almost lost one of my best men today. We have to figure out a way to be safer. We need a list of rules and contingencies. I cannot lose more people. How am I supposed to protect them against what we’re facing? I couldn’t protect my own…what can I do for these people? We’ll stay on the road until we’re presented with a better option. We need to stay moving. Stay safe.
Eric had been laid out on the long, uncomfortable bed that was a staple of all emergency clinics. The paper he’d been settled on did not rustle and make noise as it would with most other patients because Eric did not move. He was far too still in the opinion of all of those gathered around him.
“Room for one more?” Gwen asked as she knocked softly on the door. Armani waved her in.
“This is Dr. Ken Larson,” Armani offered the introduction to G
wen. “He’s going to try to help Eric.”
“Under the circumstances, I think simply Ken is appropriate,” the doctor stated, even though his tone suggested it pained him to do so.
“What do you think can be done here?” Kirby asked, and his tone was full of anxiety. He wrung his hands without realizing it.
“Treat the wound, start him on antibiotics,” Ken said as he swabbed Eric’s neck with iodine. “A human bite would result in problems if a patient didn’t seek medical attention immediately and allowed infection to set in. I assume this bite was recent?”
“Right before we came here,” Armani acknowledged.
“Why is he unconscious, then?” Kirby interjected.
“Hard to say,” the doctor murmured as he pulled liquid from a vial with a syringe. “Stress, maybe? After all that’s happened, the exhaustion and then this attack…I’m optimistic about his recovery but I won’t disregard the uniqueness of this situation. Who’s to say the blight isn’t responsible for his state? Certainly not I.”
“But he’ll be okay,” Armani said as he put a soothing hand on Kirby’s shoulder. He knew Kirby needed his reassurance as much as he needed the doctor’s.
“His prognosis is fair,” Ken assured Kirby as he smoothly and professionally injected Eric in the neck with the syringe. “Tetanus,” Ken explained to Armani and Kirby as both of the other men winced. “The chances that he hasn’t had a tetanus shot recently or ever are high. I want to make sure I do for him what needs to be done to ensure his full recovery.”
“Thank you very much,” Armani said as he clasped the doctor on his forearm.
Ken turned from his patient after he covered him from chin to toes with two thin, white blankets. Gwen, who’d been a silent observer until that point, stepped forward and put a hand on the side of the narrow bed.
“I’ll stay and watch over him,” she said softly. “Kim needs reassurance. She feels terrible about what happened to her brother. Can one of you go talk to her?”
Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller Page 21