“You more valuable alive than dead,” Smith lectured at Harley, in the same choppy accent that characterized her speech when her temper flared. “At least until tomorrow morning. Fresh organ needed for research.”
“White, I’m relieving you of your responsibilities here,” the officer said.
Dr. White scowled at him. “Just who do you think you are?” He shook his head. “No, no, no. I run this facility. This is my work!” he shouted.
Smith gave a derisive laugh. “You lie to yourself. Dr. Compton built this place. You are nothing.”
“White, I’m relieving you. Smith is taking over,” the officer shouted.
Dr. White plunged his arm inside his lab coat.
“Freeze!” the officer shouted. In a lightning-fast draw, he leveled the barrel of his pistol at Dr. White. “This didn’t have to be difficult,” he grumbled, “but I see now that it will be. Smith, release the subject.”
“Commander…?” she began. “You sure?”
“Do as I say!” the officer ordered.
Smith quickly slipped her hand into her coat pocket and withdrew a key. She moved to Harley’s side and unlocked the wrist cuff with a swift turn. The tension released from the teenager’s arm. She moved to the girl’s other wrist, freed it from its restraints, and then repeated the action with the cuffs around each ankle.
Harley was confused. “Are you letting me go?” she asked.
The commander laughed. “Of course not,” he answered. “Do you think we’re crazy?” He kept the gun trained on White. “Smith, let’s observe, shall we?”
She nodded, a smirk crossing her lips.
“What are you doing?” Dr. White shrieked. His voice cracked, and Harley detected the odor of pheromones in the sweat trickling down his temples. He was afraid.
“A little demonstration, that’s all,” the officer answered. “Come with me, Smith,” he ordered.
The officer and the female scientist backed out of the room, pulled the doors closed, and the sound of metallic clicks confirmed they were securing the locks. Smith and the officer disappeared from view. A light clicked on in the observation room, and Harley could see the two of them barring themselves inside.
“You can’t leave me in here with her!” Dr. White screamed.
Through the window, Harley saw the officer and Smith conversing. Smith pointed to a control panel, and the officer pushed a button and positioned himself in front of a microphone. A click, followed by static, preceded his voice. “I believe you’ll find we can,” he corrected White. “Release the accelerant,” he commanded. Smith moved to a control panel mounted on the wall and began flipping switches. Several overhead valves opened in the operating room, and thick jets of steam-like fog sprayed from them. An unfamiliar chemical smell drifted into the room.
“No! You can’t do that!” Dr. White’s face was an angry flush of purple. He reached back into his lab coat, pulled out a gun and pointed it at Harley. “I’ll destroy your sample set, and you won’t be ready for tomorrow’s procurements. I’ll kill her!” he yelled.
“Maybe,” Dr. Smith’s voice came over the intercom system. “But we not sure. Time to find out,” she explained with deadly serious calm.
As the fog surrounded Harley, she choked and gasped on the gasses. She cringed, expecting to die but, instead, she felt her body being filled with renewed energy. It was invigorating. Every cell pulsated with power, and she watched in horrified amazement as her arms and legs changed before her eyes. Her flesh began to disintegrate, and then…how could she possibly explain this…revived itself. Large hunks of healthy-looking skin formed, only to erupt into sores and pustules. It’s just like what happened to Baba’s samples at the high school!
The pain was unbearable, but the hunger. The hunger was worse. A maddening need to feed filled her awareness, shutting out concerns over anything else. From somewhere, she again smelled the most tantalizing aroma of chicken, and her mouth watered with want. She turned toward its source. Dr. White.
He kept the gun trained on her and backed away. “Don’t come any closer, or I’ll kill you!”
Harley realized, with deep satisfaction, that his voice was practically warbling with fear. It felt good to watch him quiver under her stare.
“Get her out of here!” he yelled toward the glass. “I’ll do anything!”
Smith and the officer exchanged words off the mic, and then she leaned over the audio device. A hint of static sounded. “The Commander says, no. We’re watching now,” she said.
White squeezed the trigger, and his gun discharged multiple shots in rapid fire, spraying Harley’s abdomen with bullets. She fell backward off the bed and landed on the floor with a splat.
Thank goodness! I can die again, she thought. She rested on the floor for a few seconds, watching the foul black blood gurgle out of the cavernous hole White had blown through her torso. She waited as the blood pulsed out of her body, savoring the hot pain from her wounds, and their promise of death. In a sick kind of way, it felt good to know this would be the end. Any minute now, I should die.
Right?
How long did this take?
Harley wasn’t sure how much time passed before she felt the sting of tissue and bone reconstructing itself inside her chest and abdomen.
No!
She raised up on her elbows and watched with wonder and growing disappointment as her body rebuilt itself before her eyes. As the process continued, she became more and more aware of the hunger that had grown, now to an unimaginable level. A primal rage filled her brain, blocking out all conscious thought. She scrambled to her feet, faster than should have been possible, and pushed the bed aside. It shot sideways in a blur and rammed into the doors, knocking both off their hinges.
“Secure the control room, Smith,” the officer’s voice sounded over the din of crashing metal. There was a click, and the microphone went dead. The hum of a motor sounded, and Harley turned to see bars coming down in front of the observation window. Smith and the officer continued watching, and the commander was positioning a mounted video camera behind the glass. He flipped a switch, and a red light appeared on the front of the unit.
White fired again, and his bullets went through Harley’s body and out her back, ripping flesh from her ribs and sending it flying across the room. The pain burned, and her anger exploded in an inhuman rage as she leaped forward and landed on the doctor, knocking him to the floor.
White held his gun inches from her face and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon didn’t fire. The microphone crackled. Smith’s voice echoed into the room. “Commander says, tap, rack, bang, Dr. White.”
“You bastards!” White cursed. He frantically rapped the butt of the magazine on the floor. He pulled the slide and aimed.
Harley felt herself smiling and wondered vaguely if enough of her face remained for him to see how much pleasure she was taking in the way the tables had turned. She didn’t even flinch when he squeezed the trigger. Again, the gun jammed.
Smith’s voice came over the speaker, “The commander says you didn’t do it right.”
Harley lunged at White, and he bashed the gun against her head, dislodging her ear. It fell back onto his face, streaming a black streak of fetid blood across his face and neck. He cringed and gagged beneath her.
It had been a long time since Harley had roasted chicken. Again, her mouth watered at the thought, and she giggled as gooey droplets of saliva bubbled forth from the gash in her cheek. It dribbled onto the badge clipped to the doctor’s Oxford shirt. She caught a familiar whiff of fabric softener, but the chicken was what she craved.
White pushed against the teen’s body with one arm and threw wild punches at her, using the pistol as a club. With a mighty swipe, she smacked the gun, sending it, and the hand that had gripped it, flying across the room.
White screamed in agony as blood spewed from the shredded bone and flesh of his forearm. As she looked into his face, Harley felt no compassion or remorse. In her consciousness, ther
e was only her prey and her need to feed.
“Please, don’t!” he cried.
Harley noticed how wide his eyes were and marveled at the amount of blood flowing from his severed wrist, but there was no mercy in her awareness. Mercy. She remembered the meaning of a word like that, but she was no longer capable of feeling it. That was something humans understood, and she wasn’t human anymore.
“Please, you’re hurting me,” he cried. “I need something to stop the bleeding and for the pain.”
Harley felt laughter gurgling in her chest as she grasped his hair. She tried to speak and found her words had become little more than guttural grunts. “Not yet,” she growled. “I’ll get you something for that when we’re finished.”
The intoxicating high of revenge, and the promise of food, was so intense that she didn’t care whether or not White could understand what she’d said. Maybe she wasn’t even using language anymore, not as she used to understand it. She squeezed the doctor’s skull between her hands, and it crushed under her grip with a satisfying crack. Ahh, that aroma! So fresh. Still warm.
Harley was remotely aware of Dr. White’s screams as she sampled the first bits of the spongy tissue she ripped from his brain. With each bite, the ungodly pain of starvation was assuaged. As she tore out more and more chunks, the doctor’s screaming abated, and his body jerked with erratic spasms until it stopped moving altogether. She plunged her mouth into the open skull cavity and gorged herself on the remains of his cerebral tissues. As she finished the last bits, she looked up into the stone-cold faces of Smith and the commander, who were calmly watching from behind the barred glass. Harley stood and turned, looking at the open door. Then she ran.
She sprinted out of the building with mind-bending speed. Outside, Harley saw hundreds of cages all around her. Inside were more people like her. Zombies suffering, hungering, and in pain. They wailed and screamed. Though they didn’t use words, their collective moans conveyed agony and yearning for release. The mournful, raging groans and howls triggered something deep in Harley’s brain, igniting recognition of kinship with them all. They were a tribe now, a pack. Without hesitation, she darted to the metal cages that held them captive. The bars snapped in her hands as she ripped each door from its hinges. The creatures sprang from their confines, and connections formed in Harley’s primal understanding. She sensed in each of them their needs and wants. The mechanic who missed his wife. A child who, like Harley had been, was starving and wanted only food.
Ahead, a female zombie shrieked at her from its enclosure. What remained of its nostrils flared as it breathed in the air in Harley’s direction. Its face pressed against the bars as its cries wavered on the air in a pleading tone. Her voice differed from the others, somehow. It conveyed a sense of loss that resonated in Harley’s chest. It was the pain of the loss of love, a great crevasse of the heart the teenager once knew all too well.
Harley approached the cage and saw that the woman’s diseased skin showed signs of advanced stages of decay on one side more than the other. Despite the woman’s festering skin, her pale green eyes were intense and intelligent. Harley could tell from the half of her face that still resembled a human that the woman had once been beautiful. Her rotting clothing retained little of its original color and style, but it had clearly been medical scrubs of some kind. A hank of strawberry blonde hair hung from the sole patch of skin clinging to the woman’s scalp. Harley looked into her eyes.
The beast’s arms reached through the bars, palms upturned, in a gesture of begging. Her cracked lips parted, and a voice as lifeless and dry as rustling leaves whispered forth. “Myyyyy…baby boy….” Harley wasn’t sure whether the sounds the female made were actual words, or if she had somehow gleaned the woman’s meaning in a telepathic way. The woman wanted to find her child.
Familiarity drifted into Harley’s awareness, but she wasn’t sure why. There was a spore she recognized, but from where she couldn’t guess.
Harley clutched the bars of the cage and pulled. They snapped like matchsticks under her grip as she dragged the door from its hinges. The woman freed, Harley turned to leave.
An agonizing wail emitted from the woman’s throat. Harley turned and saw that the woman appeared desperate to come with her, but her feet only scuffed across the ground in short, shuffling steps. Her arms remained outstretched, and her eyes were fixed on Harley, pleading evident in their depths.
A gust of wind brought another familiar scent to Harley’s awareness. She lifted her nose into the air and sniffed, mouth agape. Casey! The teen zombie breathed in, savoring the air. Jordan, Kyle, and Nurse Hoffstedder had been here, too. Harley’s olfactory senses homed in on the spore trail, and she realized she could detect the direction they’d gone from the thickness of the vaporous ribbon of scent hanging in the air. Something like what Harley used to identify as satisfaction filled her chest. She turned toward the back of the compound and inhaled, savoring the map her friends left in their wake.
The scene before her was one of chaos. The zombies she’d freed descended on the soldiers positioned across the field. The field rippled in waves of panicked men and women fighting for their lives. Their shouts and screams rang into the night, punctuated by gunfire. Some of the zombies dropped onto the ground, only to be replaced by even more behind them. The soldiers were no match for Harley’s tribe of the undead.
Harley returned her attention to the spore and stepped away, but the lone woman zombie howled after her again. It continued to move toward her.
The teen knew there was no way the woman could keep up. She shook her head, and the woman’s eyes conveyed heartbreaking loss. She wanted to come with her. The name Tamra drifted into Harley’s awareness, and she understood this had been the woman’s human name.
Harley could smell her friends’ scents dissipating on the wind and knew she couldn’t wait for Tamra to move on her own. Without wasting more time debating what to do, she stepped in front of the zombie and hoisted its rotting form onto her own back. The teen marveled that Tamra’s weight seemed like nothing to her. There had to have been something in the accelerant Dr. Smith sprayed on her in the operating room that gave her this incredible strength and speed. It had to have been intentional, but how and why?
With Tamra’s arms and legs wrapped around her, Harley sped into the night in the direction of the spore trail.
Chapter 4
Casey
It was the first time we’d been out in the open with no safe place for shelter, or protection from the undead, since the outbreak. We were in the most vulnerable position we’d known since the explosion that released the virus on Ft. Wayne a month ago.
A bitter north wind whipped my hair and stung my cheeks as we shuffled across the sparsely populated countryside of northeastern Indiana. In the last couple of miles that we’d walked, we’d seen only a few isolated farmhouses. None of them showed apparent signs of life. Windows were broken, and field crops had gone to seed. Doors of some houses were torn askew from their hinges, making me wonder if it had been zombies or the authorities who’d broken into the dwellings. Were the families that had lived there dead, or undead, or had they been rescued by some miracle? I doubted they’d had much of a chance and hoped for their sake they were either safe or dead. Either way, it looked as if no one had been in the area for quite some time. We continued onward, staying quiet, and trying to avoid detection by anyone, living or undead.
Kyle swept the horizon with his gaze. Alert and vigilant, he moved like a seasoned sentinel, somehow both rigid and fluid, almost hawk-like in his assessment of our environment.
We understood that, in addition to zombies, there was a possibility the military and police might be in the area. Even though we’d taken precautions to conceal our escape, we had to assume we were being watched for, and possibly pursued. We avoided the main thoroughfare in anticipation of roadblocks and checkpoints, where we might be identified and detained.
With no safe passage into Canada by road, Kyle, Verna, Jo
rdan, and I left the security of our escape vehicle earlier this morning. We planned to venture toward the northeast on foot, walking across uninhabited areas as much as possible. We each carried rifles and bags containing the few essentials we’d scavenged at the Ellington truck stop for our journey. So far, the terrain had been mostly flat farmland with some low hills, and if it hadn’t been for the stands of windbreak trees lining the fields, we would have been proverbial sitting ducks. I appreciated the occasional stretches of woodlands that dotted the landscape and gave us a slim measure of safety.
We were making decent time, but we weren’t moving as fast as we could have, because of Verna’s knee pain. She was still limping from her fall back at the high school several weeks ago, and it slowed our progress. Jordan and I were also recovering from recent injuries, but his sprains seemed to have healed well. He was much younger than Verna and had been in excellent physical condition, both of which hastened his recovery. My shoulder injury had improved. Now it was just an occasional aching nuisance. I’d aggravated it again during our escape from the safe zone compound.
“About how far do you think it is to the Canadian border?” I asked Kyle, who walked at my side. His hand in mine offered a welcome warmth in the chilly fall air. We’d crossed a boundary of sorts, and I allowed myself to take comfort in his closeness. For now. As long as I kept this in the right perspective, it would be okay, I reasoned. We’d become as close-knit as family, and in many ways, Verna, Jordan, and Kyle seemed closer to me than my real family ever was.
Kyle shrugged and shook his head. “Can’t say for sure,” he answered, glancing down at me with a half-smile as we continued moving, carefully staying under cover of trees.
He had this stoic, ever-present calm and self-assurance, no matter what came. At times I caught myself daring to think I could get used to having someone like him around, someone dependable, who pulled his own weight. He’d learned better than to try and boss me around, and I appreciated that. Not that he’d been overbearing, but he was a soldier after all. He was merely accustomed to giving and taking orders, and he’d accepted that I made my own decisions.
The Viral Series (Book 2): Viral Storm Page 5