by Poe, S. B.
“Gideon.” The voice said.
“What’s gonna happen to me, Gideon?”
“Oh, don’t worry. You’ll see soon enough. Bertie let me ask you something.” Gideon started. “Why are you still here?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t huh me, Bertie, I asked you a simple question. Why are you still here?”
“I don’t know. Luck, I guess.”
“Luck? You think you’re lucky, Bertie?”
“I don’t know.” Bertie said.
“The place you came from, did it have a lot of eaters, a lot of the dead?” Gideon asked.
“At times.” Bertie said.
“Did you have walls?”
“Sort of.” Bertie said. “Fencing strung between the houses and across the roads with a bunch of shit piled high behind it.”
“Get up.” Gideon said.
Bertie felt hands grasp his shoulders and lift him. He had been sitting for unknown hours and when his feet hit the ground everything hurt. He let out an audible groan.
“Easy there Bertie.” Gideon wrapped an arm around him, helping steady him. “You need to stretch or something?”
“Just sitting for so long.”
“Sucks getting old, huh? Not something most people have to worry about now.” Gideon said flippantly. “Tucker tells me you said you were looking for somewhere safer.”
“Tucker?”
“The man who brought you here. But you just told me you had walls and shit. Which is it Bertie? What are you looking for?” Gideon asked.
“I guess we were just looking for something different.” Bertie hung his head as they moved him along.
“Well, Bertie, this will certainly be different.” Gideon said, laughing.
Bertie felt himself being guided towards the heat of the flames and then around it. The sound of chain link rattling grew louder and he could hear the sounds of the dead. They spun him around with the sounds of the goners behind him. The light still flickered beyond the mask.
A hand snatched the hood off his head. He blinked in the light. A few moments passed as his pupils slowly constricted. Flickers of flames and dark shapes appeared. As his focused returned, he looked around like an animal sprung from its cage. He took it all in as quickly as he could, but none of it made any sense. A dozen people stood in a semi-circle backlit by a ring of torches that flickered in the darkness. In the darkness between the torches Bertie could see at least a dozen goners just above the ground, arms outstretched, rot oozing from the gaping wound below their necks. Wooden shafts protruded from the wounds and Bertie could see all the dead flailing wildly as they hung in the air, impaled.
He swung his head away and he looked through the fence behind him. Goners, at least a dozen, moved in the shadows cast from the flickering firelight beyond fencing. A voice came from the darkness. He strained to glimpse the speaker and saw a black hood moving among the goners. It drifted towards him with the dead following behind. The figure came up to the fence and lowered her hood.
Bertie looked in the woman’s face. Her hair was wild and a shade of black usually reserved for artists and gods. Her eyes danced green in the glow of the firelight. Her gaze fell on Bertie as the dead crowded around her. He fell to his knees.
Bertie kept his head down and his eyes closed. He felt himself shivering and his stomach twisting into painful knots. He remembered hiding in the shed behind the house when he was a child, his father drunk and stalking around looking for him. He remembered the fear every time the footsteps came closer and the relief when they moved away. He felt no relief now. Just blind fear. He heard his own heart pounding in his ears and wished it would explode to take him away from this.
Bertie felt a hand fall on his shoulder and lifted his head. Gideon spoke.
“Everyone, this is Bertie.” Gideon spoke to the crowd.
Bertie couldn’t take his eyes off the things on the other side of the fence. His eyes darted between the girl and dead. They gathered around her like moths to a flame but none coming close enough to get burned. They just hovered. Occasionally one would come near the fence but the pull from the girl was even stronger than the pull of fresh blood. But none harmed her. None touched her.
The young woman turned and lowered the top of the robe. Her back shimmered sweaty in the moonlight. She reached up and swept her black mane aside. Bertie could see the bite mark on her shoulder. Several of the dead came closer to the fence. The woman spun around, pulling her robe up as she did, and looked into Bertie’s eyes. As she approached the fence the dead gathered behind her. He gazed at the green emerald eyes as she spoke.
“Hello Bertie.” She said as she drifted back into a sea of the dead, disappearing from his view. He felt his bladder let go as the fear engulfed him. He had never passed out before. The world went dark.
Genesis
“Wakey wakey Bertie.” Gideon’s voice came through the fog in his head. “Rise and shine”
He felt a slap against his leg and blinked his eyes. The drop ceiling and the textured panels made him think of the break room for the folks who worked in the office at the sawmill. He blinked again and saw Gideon setting a tray on the small table in the corner of the room.
“I’m alive.” Bertie blurted out.
“Of course.” Gideon said.
“My wife?” Bertie asked.
“She’s resting. You can see her later.” Gideon said.
“That woman. Last night.” Bertie rubbed his forehead.
“Rachel. She’s my baby sister. Well, twenty-three obviously ain’t a baby but you know what I mean. And yeah, she’s a bit dramatic. Good for morale though. Folks like to see what they’re fighting for.”
“How long was I out?” Bertie rubbed his head.
“You’ve been asleep just about six hours now.”
Bertie looked on his arm and saw the band-aid. He pulled it off and there was a tiny little dot of blood on the bandage.
“Yeah, Dr. Sherrill gave you a vitamin shot and something to help you sleep. She figured you were exhausted and that’s why you passed out.”
“I saw goners, eaters, hanging on poles.” He said.
“You sure did. We keep a few hanging up. Kind of masks our scent from the others. We got dead hanging in the trees all around the place.”
“But your sister. The dead. She… they didn’t…why didn’t they…I don’t understand.”
“I know Bertie. I know.” Gideon stood and walked over to the table.
He grabbed the pitcher of water and poured a glass. He handed it to Bertie as he sat up on the bed. It squeaked and groaned and Bertie realized it was one of those old campground cots full of rusty springs and awkward noises. He looked around the room. The paneled walls were painted the greenish gray of hospitals and state park bathrooms. Two windows on each wall, screened. One door, closed. He glanced over his shoulder through the nearest window but could see nothing but a few treetops swaying in the wind.
“Where are we?” Bertie asked.
“Stand up, look.” Gideon said as he walked over to the window.
Bertie stood, the blanket falling away. He was still dressed in his clothes from the night before; maybe it had been longer, he didn’t know. He sat the glass on the table and walked over to the window. He realized someone had removed his boots. He glanced around and saw them tossed haphazardly under the cot he had been lying on.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Gideon said as he gazed through the window.
Bertie walked over beside him and looked. The lake shimmered in the morning sun, small ripples sparkling as though the water were on fire. A fog hung a few feet off the surface but the smell in Bertie’s nostrils made him think of smoke. He craned his neck to see if he could see the stakes full of the dead or if it had all been a bad dream. Gideon’s hand landed on his shoulder. He turned.
“Bertie I want you to know something.” Gideon said.
“What’s that?”
“We’re going to save the world, Bertie. She’s going
to save the world. And you can help.” Gideon said. “Look, I get it. You’re confused as hell. Here sit down.” Gideon pulled the chair away from the table. Bertie looked at the MRE lying on the tray. He sat down and tore the bag open.
“Who are you people?” Bertie asked as he tore open a pack of crackers.
“That’s a good question Bertie. A really good question.” Gideon smiled. “Let me tell you a story.”
*
The airport terminal was surrounded with floodlights that glowed against the night sky. The runway was dark. It had been almost two weeks since the last helicopter had left. He approached the building and could hear the generators humming. Flat, dull fluorescent lights lit the foyer of the terminal. A few soldiers were sprawled out sleeping on top of whatever flat surface they could find. In another direction, he saw two people in civilian clothes and one officer talking. He headed towards them.
“Captain Murphy.” Gideon started.
“Go away, Gideon. I don’t have time right now.” He said dismissively.
“That’s exactly what I want to do.”
“Then leave.” He said.
“Fine, let me get my sister, and we’ll be out of your hair.” Gideon said.
“Oh no, you can’t do that. She’s too important.” One of the civilians spoke. Dr. Sherrill.
“Why? Why is she so important?” He pleaded.
Sherrill’s face softened and she looked at Murphy. She wore surgeon scrubs with a borrowed Army overcoat. The temperature had fallen close to freezing and Gideon watched her breath roll out of her mouth as she spoke. Murphy raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t guess it matters much now anyway.” He said as he turned and walked away. “Gideon, walk with me.” She said as she turned. “You know your sister is special, right?”
“She was bitten by the infected and survived.” He said.
“Yes, but that’s not what makes her special.” Sherrill said.
“That seems pretty special to me” He said.
“Let me show you something.” She turned.
She led him under the fluorescent lights and through a door and down a flight of stairs. The hallway was narrow and she walked a few steps ahead of him. They passed several doors along the hall before she stopped. She turned and smiled as she pulled the key from her pocket and unlocked the door. They walked inside.
On the wall was a whiteboard with several sequential numbers hastily erased and written over. The number thirty-six was the most recent addition. She saw him looking at it.
“It’s wrong. It’s probably twice that, maybe more. I’ve lost count.” She said as she walked around the table at the center of the room.
A stack of papers sat in the middle of the table. Gideon glanced at them. Sherrill grabbed the stack and began laying them across the table. Each one contained a different image.
“Look at this.” She said as she slid one picture over to the corner where Gideon stood. He looked down at the image. It was an arm, flayed open exposing the muscle below the skin. He looked closer and could see small yellow webbing intertwined within the muscle.
“Do you know what that is?” She asked, smiling slightly.
“Not really.” He said as he looked up at her.
“That is Marionette.” She said. He looked back at the picture, focusing on the image.
“That little web is the, well we don’t know what it is. It looks more like a fungus than anything but it doesn’t seem to be able to do anything without a host so it acts like a parasite or a virus.” She said.
“Fungus? Virus? Parasite?” He asked. “You don’t know what it is?”
“Not really. We’ve been able to understand what it does but we have no idea how it does it.” She said.
“What do you know?” He said.
“Everyone is infected.” She bluntly said.
“Everyone? Me? You?” His voice registered his shock. “So we’re all going to turn into one of those things?”
“Eventually.”
“What does that mean?” He asked.
“From everything we have figured out, no matter how death comes, this is what comes after.” She said as she pointed back to the picture.
“So it doesn’t matter if you get bit or not by one of those things.” He asked as he looked back at the image.
“Getting bit speeds up the process but no it doesn’t matter. If a person dies, they will turn.” Sherrill admitted. “We know that a bite by an infected spurs the growth of the virus until it inundates the muscle with this webbing. And it does it at an alarmingly fast rate. Once it reaches the heart muscle, it’s over. That process can take as little as a few minutes up to a day. Its whole effort after a bite seems to be to stop the heart. Because when the heart stops it changes. It rapidly replaces the central nervous system functions and controls the muscles somehow. We’re still not sure how. But we know it protects itself by growing within the cranial cavity and then distributing through the myelin sheath.”
“I don't really understand?” Gideon asked.
“Well, without giving you a biology lecture, the sheath protects the nerves but once the infection takes hold, it protects the virus. There is an odd pressure, almost like a gaseous waste from bacteria that builds throughout the nervous system. That’s why the head is how to kill them. Rupturing the meninges around the brain releases that pressure and makes the whole system collapse within the body. It really is fascinating.”
“Yeah, fascinating. That’s one way to put it. The fucking end of the world is another way to put it.” Gideon said.
“Maybe. Probably. We don’t know.” Sherrill said.
“Who is we?” Gideon asked.
“I was part of a team of field researchers. I was studying dengue fever in the Congo but had returned to the United States just a few weeks before the outbreak. There were several places like this around the country within days of it reaching here. We would collect samples and conduct interviews then send all the information to headquarters.”
“Where is headquarters?”
“For a while, the CDC. But it’s all gone now. It all fell apart so fast. These images came through a month ago. I don’t even know if there is anything left out there at all. We have been completely out of communications for four days now.” She said.
“Okay, so the world is fucked. Kind of old news. What the hell does any of the shit have to do with my sister?” Gideon said as he stood, turning to face her.
She reached past him and grabbed another one of the pictures. It was an image taken through the lens of a microscope.
“Look.” She pointed to the image. “Those little yellow dots in the blood cell, that is what everyone has inside them now. We compared samples from healthy people all over the network and everyone has it. I don’t know how that is even possible but it is. Now look here.” She grabbed another image. It looked almost identical the previous one except the little yellow dots we cigar shaped and protruding beyond the cell wall.
“That’s from one of the infected. Well, I guess we’re all infected but that is from someone who has turned. Now look at this one.” She slid another image over. It had the same cigar shaped specks but they looked trapped within the cell wall.
“Before it all went dark, there had been a couple dozen cases globally of people bitten who didn’t turn. Under the microscope, their blood looked almost exactly the same as everyone else’s. The only difference is the number of spores within the cell. But one and only one had this.” She pointed to the odd-shaped blobs trapped within the cell.
“Rachel?”
“Rachel.”
“Where is she?”
Dr. Sherrill climbed the stairs ahead of him. The lights in the stairwell flickered.
“We need to hurry.” She said.
“Why? What did Murphy mean when he said it didn’t matter now?” Gideon asked.
“Before we lost contact with NORAD, back when we were first tasked here, we had established our faci
lity inside the big stadium on the other end of town. But it got inside. I lost half my team before Murphy secured the gates and trapped the infected inside. Something must have happened there because they got out. Thousands of them.”
“When?”
“Sometime yesterday. The horde has spread out within the town and it’s only a matter of time before it comes here. There are less than a dozen soldiers left. Most were trapped inside the stadium and the others deserted after Murphy, well he didn’t just trap the dead inside. It’s all coming apart.” Sherrill said as she walked through a set of double swinging doors.