by North, Geoff
“Looks like someone wanted to keep the place empty.” Angela said.
“Or maybe there’s someone still here, trying to stay hidden.” Caitlan commented. “All the doors have been locked from the inside.”
They crept along a hallway, and found a wide set of stairs leading up. The classrooms on the main floor had been vandalized. Desks had been overturned, their contents spilled about and kicked across the floors. Text books had been torn to shreds, and profanities were scrawled on the chalkboards.
“Stupid bunch of kids... Why do they have to wreck stuff?” Amanda asked.
“I get the feeling it may have been more than kids,” Angela answered. She had taken one of the chalk brushes and was erasing off some of the more descriptive words. “A lot of adults can act like animals when civilization breaks down.”
You’re a real expert on that aren’t you, Angie? Remember that poor kid you murdered? You stabbed him through the heart with a knitting needle. It doesn’t get more animal than that, does it? This world needs more animals and a whole lot less civilization, Angie. Get rid of these losers. Kill them off. Leave their bodies here and drive off in that nice truck… Just the two of us.
Fred was going through the drawers of the teacher’s desk. “Not much of use in here… stapler, staples, some dried out pens and dulled pencils, a stack of half-corrected math projects.”
“This was a bad idea,” Hayden said. “We need to travel to the bigger centers, see if any of the cities have survived.”
Fred slammed the last drawer shut. “We’re not going anywhere until we’ve checked out this town’s hospital.” He was staring directly at Michael. The doctor looked away quickly when Michael saw him watching. “I worked a few shifts there years ago for a doctor friend of mine. It isn’t all that big, but we might be able to scrounge up something useful. When we’re done there, we’ll leave Tarantan. I want to go back to my home town next. I want to see what’s left of Rokerton.”
Hayden shook his head. “We know what’s left of Rokerton, Fred. We saw what happened there with our own eyes. We’re going to keep heading south, like Caitlan suggested. Maybe there’s something to that message she saw online.”
“Cuba? Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” Fred started for the door. “Maybe it is a safe zone, maybe it isn’t. We can head down that way eventually. Rokerton’s where we have to go next. The Armed Forces were set up there for a while. I treated a lot of folks there with radiation sickness… maybe some of that medicine is still there.”
“And maybe it isn’t,” Caitlan said.
Fred ignored her. “The Army was doing more there than just treating the sick. They would’ve been gathering information about the war… Perhaps they even knew something about the disease that wiped them out in the end. That’s information we could use to help us decide where to go.”
They headed down the stairs again, back into the freezing gymnasium and open window they had come through. Hayden started up into the opening first. Fred was lifting Nicholas to him when Amanda spun back towards the open equipment room door. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Her brother asked.
“A baby crying… I heard a baby crying.”
Caitlan pushed the girl towards the window. “This place is making you think of those nightmares again, girl. Don’t let it get inside your head. The babies aren’t real.”
“I know what I heard.” She took a few steps towards the small room. “There! Can’t you hear it?”
The girl ran into the shadows and disappeared through the back door before anyone could stop her.
Angela ran after her. “The rest of you get outside and wait in the vehicles. I’ll bring her back.”
Of course you will. You know all about voices inside people’s heads, don’t you?
Michael shot after Angela and Caitlan followed.
“What’s going on in there?” Hayden asked, kneeling down in the snow outside the window.
Fred waved him back in. “Amanda thought she heard something. The others have gone after her.”
Hayden squeezed back through the opening and plopped down on the floor. He scooped Nicholas up into his arm. “Well we’re waiting right here. And once they’re back, were putting this town behind us.”
“Next stop, Rokerton.” Fred rose his eye brows questioningly and smiled.
“Sure. Why not?”
The school was small, there weren’t that many rooms for one girl to get lost in. Caitlan and Michael caught up to Angela, and the three caught up to Amanda on the main floor. There was a muffled sound down the long hallway away from the first set of classrooms they had explored. Caitlan’s mouth dropped and she stared at Angela. “A baby crying… She wasn’t imagining it.”
“I told you.” The girl said. They followed her and stopped at a set of double doors marked library.
“Why would there be a baby in a room with a bunch of books?” Michael said.
Caitlan nodded at the handle. “Only one way to find out.”
Angela pulled the woman’s arm away before she could push the door open. “I don’t like this. Maybe one of us should go back for a gun.”
“What for? You into shooting little babies?” Caitlan asked.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
“I… I just think we should be careful.”
“We gotta help it,” Amanda said, looking up into their eyes. “I can’t stand hearing them cry. Please.”
Michael pushed down on the bar and went into the dark space. “Come on then, what are you waiting for?”
They followed him in. The baby cried out again and was silenced just as quickly. Caitlan dug into the front pocket of her jeans and pulled out her cell phone. She turned the flashlight on and poured the light down the first aisle of old books. “That way,” she whispered, pointing left beyond the shelves to the back of the room.
They moved slowly into the shadows, padding quietly—waiting for the infant to cry again. Something cold pressed against the side of Caitlan’s skull. “Give me the phone… Give it to me or I’ll put a hole in your head, I swear I will.”
Caitan held the phone up and someone snatched it out of her hand. “None of you move. I’ll shoot the first one that tries anything.” The phone’s light went out.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Angela said. “We heard a baby. We just wanted to make sure it was okay… see if anyone needed our help.”
The light returned, but it wasn’t the light of Caitan’s phone. Someone had lit a candle. Two more candles were lit, surrounding the four in pale yellow. The gun barrel against Caitlan’s temple pulled away. She turned and saw an emaciated man of perhaps twenty holding a rifle in his shaking hands. “We don’t need anybody’s help,” he spoke. “Tanner’s doing just fine with us.”
“Tanner?” Caitlan asked.
“Our baby boy,” a girl answered. She was huddled up against one of the book shelves, sitting in the light of one of the candles, holding the baby to her breast. “He gets really loud right before feeding.” Tanner looked content enough at the moment.
The other two candles moved in. They were held by an older man and woman in their forties, perhaps early fifties. They both had handguns trained on the strangers. The woman spoke first. “If you’re with CFS, you can turn around and get the hell out right now. The baby’s staying with its parents.”
“What’s CFS?” Amanda asked.
Caitlan explained. “Child and Family Services. They look after children that need help.”
The older man shook his gun at Caitlan. “Our grandson doesn’t need the goddamned government’s help. My son and his wife are providing for their child a whole lot more than you. Where was our government when everything went to shit?”
Caitlan held her hands up peaceably. “We’re not with CFS… Jesus, man, the world outside is pretty much gone. Why would you even think they still exist?”
The woman lowered her gun and sat down next to her daughter-in-law. “Put
that gun away before you hurt yourself, Kevin. They aren’t with the Government, and they don’t look like any of the infected.”
“The infected,” Angela repeated. “People with bugs inside them?”
Kevin placed his gun onto a shelf beside a stack of children’s books. “Corpses is more like it. The bugs get inside dead bodies and bring them back. We thought we’d seen the last of it after they bust in through the gymnasium windows. The cold should’ve wiped them all out by now.”
“You locked yourselves in here intentionally,” Caitlan said. “Why didn’t you stay in your homes?”
“We tried staying there as long as we could.” Kevin nodded at his son to lower his rifle. “We helped neighbors in the beginning, right after the attack, when the power went out and stayed out that is. Then strangers started to arrive, and we helped them too, as much as we could with as much as we could spare.”
“But there’s only so much a small town can give,” Kevin’s wife continued. “People can get pretty nasty when they’re sick and starving, traveling from one dead city to the next. They started coming with weapons and taking what they needed. We had to leave our home.”
The young breast-feeding mother looked up. “It was my idea to come live in the school. A few people have bust in over the last few months, but they don’t look around for too long. There’s nothing here for them anymore. Nothing to learn, nothing to steal. Not once has anyone come inside the library… until today.”
“That’s pretty smart,” Michael said. “A room full of books is about the last place people trying to survive the Apocalypse would want to visit.”
“We’ve been here for months,” the young father said, placing his rifle to the floor. “Waiting for the cold to kill them things off for good.” He held his hand out to Caitlan. “Sorry for putting the gun to your head. My name’s Jon.”
Caitlan wouldn’t shake his hand. “Stick it up your ass.”
“Caitlan!” Amanda scolded.
“Sorry, kid, but these jerk-offs pulled guns on us thinking we were the goddamned CFS. I would’ve thought corpses stuffed with blood-sucking bugs might’ve been more to worry about.”
“We aren’t stupid,” Kevin snapped. “We’ve stayed alive watching and keeping quiet. Me and Jon have been sneaking out once a week to see what food we can scrounge up. About a month ago we saw a black van pull into town. Two men dressed in funny white suits with gasmasks went to a house and removed three children by force.” He paused, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “We knew the parents, they were friends of ours. They tried to stop them, tried taking their kids back… the men shot them dead. Right on the street... in front of the children.”
“Doesn’t sound like the Child and Family Services I remember,” Caitlan finally replied.
The young mother shrugged. “I did some drugs during my pregnancy… drinking too. It wasn’t much, I swear, but someone reported it and the CFS threatened to take the baby away when it was born unless I straightened myself out. I just thought… well we all thought it might be them.”
“The CFS doesn’t drive around in vans shooting people.” Caitlan looked at Angela. “The Army was stationed in Rokerton before all hell broke loose. Most of them were corrupt volunteers, but I didn’t see any wearing white suits and gas masks. What do you think?”
I think you should murder these strangers and take their guns. It wouldn’t hurt to put a bullet between the black bitch’s eyes either. Survival of the fittest, dearie. Do it.
“I… I think we should get out of this town.”
***
“This is taking too long,” Fred said. “They should’ve been back by now.”
Hayden crossed his arms over his chest and kicked at the light dusting of snow covering parts of the wooden gymnasium floor. “Someone would’ve yelled out if they got into any trouble.”
“Maybe you should run back out to the car and grab one of the guns.”
He watched his little boy play quietly a few feet away. Hayden didn’t want to raise him in a world where every single confrontation and worry was handled with weapons. He shook his head. “We’ll give them a little more time.”
Nicholas was running slow circles around the two men, following the bits of painted lines he could see. He had no idea the colorful strips of paint had been used to mark game boundaries. Games such as basketball, badminton, and floor hockey—sports the young boy would never know of or get to play. He jogged along the faded patterns anyway. It was more fun than listening to the grown-ups go on and on. One curving line led him to a far wall where a big box of colorful rubber balls was sitting. There were hundreds of them, he guessed, maybe millions.
He gave the adults one last look and reached for the biggest, most colorful ball closest to him. He pressed the rubberized material in and heard air rush out. He moved the deflating thing around in his fingers and felt the cold air blow against his face. It smelled stale and old. Disappointed, but hardly disheartened, Nicholas tossed the flat ball aside and went for another one. It went all squishy too.
He got down on his knees and dug down deeper, pushing balls back, looking for one he could actually bounce and roll on the floor. Something cold wrapped around his small forearm and pulled.
Nicholas screamed as he began to disappear under the balls.
His cheek hit the bottom of the box and slid along a surface cold and slimy. It smelled a lot worse than the escaping ball air. He could hear Hayden and Fred yelling from far away. The thing continued pulling him in, closer. Nicholas could see its face now, all white and grey and peeling. A person, he realized. A grownup with brown teeth and blue lips.
It had both hands around his arm now, twisting and tugging him closer. The boy could see something round and bulging in its throat. One of the balls had got stuck in there. What else could it be? One of the hands released his arm and scratched at his face with yellow nails. The fingers twisted into his hair. Nicholas screamed louder as he was dragged towards the swollen throat and snapping teeth.
Hayden took hold of his son’s ankles and pulled. One of his shoes came off, and Fred grabbed at his bare foot. The men brought him back out from the ball pit, dragging the creature along. Its teeth were inches from Nicholas’s throat. They wouldn’t have time to free him before it bit in.
A loud shot exploded through the gymnasium. The thing’s nose vanished, and the contents inside its skull splattered out over the balls behind it. The fingers in Nicholas’s hair fell away, Hayden and Fred pulled him free.
Hayden fell backwards to the floor with his son in his arms. He looked towards the equipment room door and saw eight people gathered there instead of the four he expected. One of them, a young man barely out of his teens, was still pointing the rifle their way. An older woman pushed the shooter aside and yelled. “Get the hell away from it—the thing isn’t dead!”
Hayden scrambled back to his feet with Fred’s help. The corpse in the ball bin was rising back up. The massive swelling in its throat had begun to quiver and move, working its way up into the gaping, rotted mouth. A thin black leg resembling a shard of obsidian shot out of the corpse’s cheek, slicing through grey skin to make more room. The arachnid’s head came next. There was nothing recognizable as a face to the stunned onlookers—only a confusion of little slithering pieces and probing mandibles. A second leg tore into the other cheek, and the swollen tick began to pull itself free, snapping rotted teeth out of the way, and breaking the lower jaw open of its dead host. Six more legs cut through the bursting flesh of the neck, and black fluid jutted out in syrupy streams. It splattered over the balls, sprayed against the wall, and dripped down the sides of the bin. There was a sickening wet smack as the tick emerged fully and plopped onto the floor.
“Keep away from it, keep your distance,” the young shooter warned. “They can’t move all that fast when they grow that big.” He stepped forward, and much to Hayden’s surprise, didn’t shoot the thing. He started kicking snow over it instead. The tick crawled along a few mo
re feet, slowed some more as the white stuff piled up on top, and eventually came to a stop.
The young man’s father stepped forward. “They grow on the stolen heat of the bodies they inhabit. The cold stops them altogether. That’s the only way to truly kill the disease, stop its spread.”
Nicholas began to cry into Hayden’s chest. Hayden looked from one stranger to the next, and then to Caitan, Angela, and the twins. “Who are these people… where did you find them?”
Caitan explained it all to the men—how the family had survived for months holed up in the school library, and their story of the men in white murdering parents and abducting children.
“A lot’s happened since we left,” Fred Gill finally said. “We have to keep moving, keep ahead of this… this sickness.”
The family living in the library didn’t ask to come along, and no one offered to take them. Survivors were being whittled down into small groups. We’ve become like animals, traveling in packs, Hayden thought as they headed back to their vehicles. The seven left Tarantan and headed east for Rokerton.
Chapter 9
“Quit pushing. You trying to knock me off the ladder?”
“Why would I do that?” Grace snapped. “You’d knock me off as well. Keep moving, quit slowing down.”
Roy had been tempted a dozen times to stomp down on the woman’s fingers, or lower himself even further and kick her square in the face. He would’ve loved to hear her scream, dropping more than three thousand feet into darkness to her grisly end. But she was right, he knew. He couldn’t slow down, couldn’t rest. Roy had come too far to give in to rest now. The woman on the rungs beneath him seemed to have limitless energy, she never tired. It didn’t seem fair. Roy was three times stronger than her. But Roy also outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds. There was a lot less of Amazing Grace to haul up.