by Unknown
“Is it rude to ask,” Elizabeth began, “what you are?”
“Only slightly.” The creature’s eyes were visible in the shadows. They were white orbs with no iris. “But I like you, human. I am a rusalka. I guard this river. Below Bureau 7 is mine. Above is all theirs.”
“I have to warn you, there’s been an accident,” Elizabeth said.
“I know. We’ve eaten many of your accidents.” A wet sound that could’ve the smack of lips echoed.
Adam didn’t like how close she was to Elizabeth. In all the stories of rusalka he’d heard, they were like sirens, luring men to their deaths.
“What do you want with us?” Adam asked.
She laughed again, the sound horrible. “It is you who have come to me, dead man. Not the other way around.”
“Will you allow us to pass?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes,” the rusalka agreed. “But with your promise to send me more of your tasty accidents.”
“They’re infected with a virus. You don’t know how it will affect you.”
“Aren’t you sweet? Just sweet enough to eat, if I didn’t like you.” A fork in the river appeared and the rusalka guided them to the right, toward the frothy waters that contained ever more of her young.
“Wait!” Elizabeth cried. “Look! It’s Polidori’s lab coat!”
Adam looked to the left and saw John’s blood splattered, shredded lab coat.
“You know him?”
“Yes. I worked with him,” Elizabeth answered.
“I hope you didn’t like him. I sent him the wrong way and there are worse things in these waters than me.”
“Have you been topside?” Elizabeth asked.
“You’re just full of questions, aren’t you?”
Adam stayed silent.
“I’m a scientist. I’m curious about everything.”
“No, I am much like your Poly-dor, in that aspect.”
The canal narrowed and the scaly hand disappeared from the side of the raft.
“This is as far as I go. See the light up ahead? Make sure to grab ropes or you’ll go over the edge of the falls.”
She sank beneath the swirling black waters and her children followed.
Adam decided he was definitely anti-rusalka.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, was excited. “That was amazing.”
She was probably going to be the death of him. Literally. His hearts would stop in his chest, but he decided that was mostly okay.
The fire in her eyes was worth it.
The ropes came at them quickly and they were pulled up into the light. Into a room where everything was sterile and clean and bright. It was completely different from the subterranean world they’d just left.
It appeared that none of the infected had been in this room, either.
There was a keycard and thumbprint apparatus on the only door out and the ax and other weapons had stayed in the raft. There’d been no way to grab them and hold on to the ropes.
Now, the only thing standing between Elizabeth and infection was him.
For the first time, it mattered if he was enough.
For the first time, he doubted himself.
Whatever it was that gave him that extra sensory perception about the Wollstonecraft bloodline also told him that it was Elizabeth who was going to pay the price.
7
T he rusalka had been terrifying, but one of the more interesting creatures she’d gotten to interact with since taking the Bureau 7 job. She’d thought for sure the thing was going to eat them, but was pleased they’d made it to the ropes.
She looked to Adam and instinctively knew he was wondering how she was going to fight with no ax. Elizabeth still had the gun, but she had limited rounds and she wasn’t that experienced.
She supposed the zombie apocalypse would be the mother of invention. Experience. Whatever.
Part of her so desperately wanted to take Adam up on his offer to let him carry her away to his boat and sail to warm waters where none of this mattered. But if she didn’t stop it, who would? She couldn’t abdicate her responsibility for what happened here. Sure, they could blame X, but they couldn’t blame them if she abandoned the mess they’d made without trying to clean it up.
“Are you ready?” she asked him.
“Would it do any good if I asked you to stay behind me?” He sounded tired, like it was an exhaustion that went deeper than the body. Soul-tired, if one believed in such things.
“Yeah. I can do that.”
He pulled her close and kissed her hard. “I knew fear once, when I was first made. The first time the villagers came for me, the first time they burned me, I was afraid. But never since. Not until now. I’m afraid for you.” He said this as if he didn’t understand the feelings.
She cupped his cheek. “I’m afraid for you, too.”
“And still we press on.” He nodded. There was no recrimination in his words, no accusation. Only fact.
“We do, because it’s the right thing to do.” She allowed herself to lean against him for a long moment before she approached the door. “You ready?”
“Hit it.”
She pressed her finger against the scanner and the door whooshed open. It was like pulling back a curtain in a slaughterhouse. Blood and meat was splashed on the walls like modern art and there was a pack of them feeding on another. They’d already started on their own.
One lifted his head from the meal, backed away from the throng of feeding and turned his attention on her.
No, it wasn’t a him. It was a her. Margie, from the cafeteria. Margie, who brought her lunch when she forgot to feed herself. Margie, with her pretty hair, a handsome poet husband, and a young son on the mainland. Tony. His birthday party was Saturday… Margie, who was working for Bureau 7 so that she could go to medical school.
She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see how the infection had changed her. How it had done things there was no going back from. The skin hanging like dried leaves from her face, that once pretty hair all white, thin, with patched missing. Her hands curled into red-stained claws.
“Margie,” she whispered.
All seven of them turned their attention from their still struggling meal to her.
“Goddamn it, back inside. Right now!” Adam commanded.
But there was no going back inside. There was only forward. There was no keycard or fingerprint module to open the door from that side.
Terror knifed her. There were too many of them.
Adam was strong, and he was fast, but he only had two hands. She drew her gun. Elizabeth tried to stay behind Adam, but snapping teeth and claws were everywhere.
And most importantly were the deadly jaws right in front of her on the face of her friend. She knew what was coming at her wasn’t Margie anymore, but she couldn’t shoot her.
Except, didn’t she owe her that?
No, what she fucking owed her was to have thought about these kinds of outcomes when she agreed to move forward with testing on live subjects.
Her heart clenched and tears welled. Fuck, she wasn’t going to cry. There was no time for tears. Only survival. She could cry later.
Margie launched herself and, even though she swore she wasn’t going to cry, tears streamed down her face, hot and acidic. But that didn’t stop her for doing what she had to do.
She took the shot and dropped the creature that had once been her friend in a pool of her own blood.
The other revenants didn’t try to claim the meal. They took off down the halls, running as if the hounds of hell were at their heels.
And maybe they were.
Adam looked like a demon, his face and hands covered in blood, and the rage in his eyes was something only the damned could know.
But it died when he saw her.
It was a physical change in him as all that ferocity left his body. His eyes were hooded pools of shadows, no longer the fires of hell. He seemed smaller somehow. Yet, he’d fought so bravely. He was so strong. She
didn’t understand what looked like the weight of defeat on his shoulders.
Until she looked down at her wrist and saw it.
The bite.
She was infected.
Part of her raged at how unfair it was. She wasn’t supposed to be punished for doing the right thing. She still had work to do. She had to fix this.
But she never would fix it, would she? It was all going to be over in a matter of minutes. There was so much she still wanted to experience. She’d only just now found Adam, and she had to leave him.
For a moment, she felt a wash of cold guilt for thinking of herself. Margie hadn’t wanted to leave her life, either. Especially not her son, who was turning four…
A cry was wrenched from her, and even she didn’t know if it was grief, rage or some toxic sludge of both.
Because she knew what she had to do.
“I don’t know how long I have,” she began.
“No.”
She’d already learned to recognize that hard set to his jaw. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes, I do. You’re going to tell me to go to my boat. You’re going to tell me to leave you, and I won’t do it. I’ll never leave you.”
Her heart swelled and cracked, broken for what they could’ve shared. “What are you going to do, Adam? Take me back to your castle and chain me in the dungeon and feed me tourists?”
“A monster just might.”
She gave him a watery laugh. “What if I got free? Then what?”
“Woman, don’t you understand yet that the only reason I came was for you? I don’t give a flying damn about the rest of the world. They can all rot.”
“No, Adam. They can’t.” She shook her head. “My friend Margie… her son is going to be four on Saturday. Would leave him to this?” She motioned at the carnage before them.
“Don’t ask me to leave you.”
“I’m going to ask you, because it’s what I need you to do. Help me get the rest of the way to the lab to initiate the failsafe. Then you have to leave. If Bureau 7 finds you here, you won’t go home, and you won’t be able to stop them from putting me down.”
“I’ll kill them all,” he snarled.
“I don’t want you to. I’m part of the contagion now.” She shivered as her body temperature began to drop. “It’s happening. We have to move.”
“Wait!”
“Adam—”
“No, that one.”
He pointed to where Margie’s body lay. She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see the aftermath of what she’d done.
“You have to look.”
Slowly, she turned her eyes toward Margie’s body. It was so much worse than she thought. Margie’s eyes had returned to normal, except for the empty stare of death. Her hair was still white, and patchy. But her face… oh god, her face. It was all too human and the bullet hole in the center of her forehead much too surreal and bright.
“She’s the one that bit you, isn’t she?” Adam asked.
“I think so.”
“You might not turn. We need to get to the lab. Which way?”
Elizabeth gave him directions as a certain numbness spread through her. It was highly unlikely that she wouldn’t turn with her symptoms. But she didn’t tell him that. She had to get to the lab, no matter the cost.
Even if it meant letting Adam have false hope.
The revenants didn’t bother them now, they could smell death on her and could sense that Adam would be no easy meal, even if they were turning on themselves. That didn’t stop him though, didn’t crush his hope like it should’ve. No, he kept moving so fast—she couldn’t keep up.
When she was sure she was going to fall, Adam caught her and carried her the rest of the way.
“I’m turning, Adam. You have to go,” she murmured.
“Shh. Rest. Just rest. We’re almost there.”
“If they find you here—” Elizabeth didn’t get to finish her sentence. Darkness filled all the noisy places in her brain, that need for survival screaming in her head was silenced as it drowned in shadow.
All she could do was surrender.
8
A dam refused to believe this was the end for them.
When Elizabeth’s eyes closed and her heart stopped, a roar was torn from him the likes of which no creature had ever heard before. It rattled the very foundations of the walls around them. Walls that he would tear down with his bare fucking hands if his Elizabeth had been taken from him.
The electricity crackled around his fingertips, and he didn’t try to hold it back. He let it flow from his body, into hers. He’d give her everything he had.
He’d give her the gift she hadn’t asked for when her mother died.
Her body spasmed in his arms and the current was like alchemy, binding them in a way that curse never could.
Two long, white streaks appeared at her temples and the wound stitched itself back together, but left a scar, much like his own where his body had been cobbled together from spare parts of dead men.
When the lightning storm passed, she lay limp in his arms and he sank to the floor, holding her close.
Without her, nothing mattered. Not humanity. Not the infection. Not the new pack of revenants that seemed to sense his surrender that were coming for them. He’d let them tear him apart—anything so he didn’t have to face the long, endless eternity without her.
Only, when they crept close to them, they didn’t attack. They slavered their venomous drool, and snapped their teeth, but they didn’t bite. It was as if they were waiting for something. One reached out a skeletal hand, and he slapped it away.
The thing howled.
Adam bared his teeth. “Mine.”
“Ours,” one hissed. Then another and still another until it was a chorus. “Ours.”
A loud thump startled them all. Then another. And still another.
It was her heart! It had found the rhythm! Her eyelashes fluttered, and she opened her eyes slowly—so slowly.
He waited to see if this world had earned its apocalypse or its redemption.
If she’d become one of those things that now reached for her, that tried to claim her as their own, the world had signed its own death warrant.
Her eyes were brown, not the pale white of the undead.
Yet in them, he still saw the yawning stretch of eternity. In them, he saw the same Wollstonecraft eyes that had witnessed his beginning, and in what about them that made them uniquely hers, he saw those that would witness his end.
She reached up and touched his face. “I’m okay.”
The revenants seemed intrigued, also reaching forward to touch him. Again, he slapped them off. “Stop.”
“Mother,” they whispered and reached for her.
“They’re evolving,” she whispered.
Her interest was suddenly consumed by the unnatural creatures before them, and it was if she’d never been in any danger.
Adam felt a sudden sharpness at his leg and saw one of them trying to bite him, so he crushed it like a bug.
The rest of them shied away from him now. She was right, they were learning. They were evolving past their hunger. Or perhaps, they’d only become more efficient hunters? Why had they called her mother? He supposed she’d had a hand in their birth, but how would they know that?
Perhaps the same way he knew without even looking at her that she was of the Wollstonecraft bloodline.
“Do you think they’d go with me to the lab?”
“Elizabeth—”
“I need to get all the information I can. There’s a SWAT team on the way to help put them down, but if X has the prion, they could unleash this anywhere.”
Adam sighed. “You’re right.”
He stood and followed behind the group as they moved through the bloody halls toward the lab.
Not all of the revenants were evolving, only the few that walked with them. They picked up two others as they made their way through the labyrinthine halls. So
me watched them warily while they continued their grisly meals, but it was as if the ones who knew they were different, knew to join their motley group.
If one tried that wasn’t like them, they quickly ripped him to pieces. They protected their small tribe, and Elizabeth, even though they gave him the side-eye.
Once they got to the lab, Elizabeth took samples from everyone, except him. She loaded them into the centrifuge and led them into a holding area. They did everything she asked. As the minutes ticked by, it seemed they became more familiar. They lost the white film over their eyes, they began speaking in coherent sentences. With every change, they seemed more and more human.
“Adam, look!” She pointed. “They all have a bite mark, just like mine.”
They were all scarred in the same place.
Except for one. One he’d seen start on Elizabeth’s friend, the one who’d bitten her.
“It’s in your blood, Elizabeth. The cure for this disease, is in your blood.”
She ran to the data terminal and began typing furiously. “I need to upload all of this information. Hey, I have a jump drive in the second drawer. I’m making copies.”
He handed her the jump drive and in truth, had never felt more worthless. He didn’t know how else to help her. Killing, he could do. Fighting, he could do. Science… He could hand her a jump drive.
She laughed. “Oh my god. I look like the Bride of Frankenstein. Have you seen my hair?” Elizabeth ran her fingers through the white streaks that had appeared at her temples.
“Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster,” he corrected with a smirk.
Her mouth curved into a smile that reached her eyes. Even soaked in blood, that smile was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“I never date other scientists.” She moved her fingers over the keyboard, and it looked for all the world like she was weaving some magic spell.
Adam still thought technology was a kind of magic, anyway.
She stopped, hit a few more buttons before she looked at him. “But I find that I might have a penchant for monsters.”
“This monster?” he teased. “Or those?” He indicated to the holding area where the zombies seemed to be recovering their senses.