Verna’s eyes went vacant, and she appeared to be thinking through what limited options they had.
“You might be the only ones who can stop this,” I said, looking at each of them in turn. “Just stick with what we discussed, and take those records we stole to someone in government who can help.”
“The Canadian Representative to the United Nations may be our only hope,” Verna said.
I rummaged through my pack and found one of the touristy t-shirts we’d taken from the truck stop. Gouging the hemline with a pocket knife, I tore the thin poly-cotton blend material into a couple of long strips. I placed one of the pieces over my wound, and it stuck fast to the blood that oozed from the gash. My skin felt hot and feverish, and swelling had begun from my shoulder to my elbow, making normal movement stiff and painful. Securing the makeshift bandage was awkward, and I fidgeted with the loose ends, attempting to interlace them. Eventually, I managed to slip one end between my teeth, where I held it secure, to wrap the other end around it and tighten it into a square knot. The dressing was clearly inadequate but would make do for now. Once the bandage was tight, I continued, “You’ve got to ensure the world knows the truth, Verna.”
The nurse protectively placed her hand over the pocket that bulged with the documents she’d taken from the research laboratory. “I know it’s important, but we are going to help you first.”
Jordan agreed with her. “She’s right. We’re not going anywhere without you.”
“You need us,” Verna reasoned. “We don’t know how long you have before the virus makes you sick. It could be hours or days. Kyle, Jordan, and I could even help carry you if necessary. We can get you to the army depot, get the serum, and still make sure these records get to the authorities.”
“No, you can’t go with me,” I cried. “Those people will kill you. They’ll destroy us all if they find those documents on us or figure out who we are.” I tossed my hands up in exasperation. This wasn’t rocket science. “So, we’re actually safer splitting up because they might expect us to be together.”
“Good point,” Kyle agreed. “I think you should find a safe place to hide those documents once you cross the border. Keep them hidden until you’re ready for them.”
My friends weren’t entirely convinced. I could tell by their expressions. Sure, they didn’t want this. Neither did I, but we had no other options. If I didn’t get them away from me, they were all at risk. “You saw what they did to Harley and the others,” I snapped. My voice trembled at the turmoil welling in my chest. “They’ll use us in their twisted experiments, like lab rats. They will kill you. For that matter, I could kill you. You know this!”
A sharp pain ran up my arm, making me wince and reminding me how little time we had. I picked up my rifle and aimed it into the air. “You all need to get away from me!” I commanded. The hurt in their eyes caused me physical pain, but I couldn’t give in. “You need to leave now, or I’ll fire this gun, and anyone who hears it will know we’re here. The army will come after you. I swear I’ll do it!”
“C’mon, girl, you know you won’t,” Jordan said. “They’d take you, too, and cut on you like they did to me…and Harley.”
I stared hard at them and flipped the safety mechanisms into firing position. “I don’t have anything to lose,” I countered, “but you do.”
“Stop it, Casey! Don’t do anything stupid,” Verna cautioned. She splayed her hands outward as she spoke. “We’ll go. Just take it easy. I’m going to leave some of this money with you, just in case you need it.”
“Not necessary,” I protested. “I’m not going to make it.”
“Yes, you will, Casey Williams!” She spoke with conviction. Her typically gentle voice grew stern, and her face flushed red. “You're going to stop feeling sorry for yourself, get up off your ass, and go to that depot where you can get the serum.” She divided the stack of bills and handed half to Kyle.
“I’m staying with you, Casey,” Kyle said. His eyes locked onto mine.
“No, you’re not. You can’t.” I struggled to keep my tone steady, despite my fear. “You can’t help me now, but Verna and Jordan still need you. I couldn’t live with knowing I’m putting any of you at risk.” Especially not you, Kyle.
He took a step toward me.
Protective rage rippled through me as I realized he wasn’t listening to anything I was saying. “I won’t let you—”
Kyle lunged at me, batting the rifle from my hands. Before I could process what happened, he pulled me toward him. His arms locked around me, and his lips were on mine in a kiss so hard and desperate, I couldn’t breathe. I winced and instinctively squeezed my eyes closed tight, as if doing so might shield him from the infection.
What was he doing? Was he crazy?
I wedged my hands against his chest and pushed, but his embrace was unyielding. His muscles trembled beneath my fingers, and a warm droplet of moisture fell onto my cheek and rolled across my skin. My urge to fight him abated as I realized he was crying. I opened my eyes and looked into his. Seeing him in pain was more than I could stand, and soon I also began to weep.
I wasn’t even sure why I was crying. My anger boiled inside me that Kyle didn’t do what I asked, that he was taking such a risk with his life, and yet it was the most loving thing anyone had ever done for me. His tears dropped onto my cheeks and melded with mine. I lost all awareness of time and space as my resistance fell away, stilled by the strength of his arms. I shuddered, and he pulled me closer.
How long he held me, I wasn’t sure. As my consciousness faded, I realized that, at this darkest point in my life, for the first time, I no longer felt alone. I lost myself in the strange discovery of human affection that I’d never known, and the savage fear that ripped my soul in two.
As the moments passed, I felt Kyle’s kiss soften, and he looked into my eyes in a way that seemed to touch my deepest thoughts. “It’s settled then,” he whispered. “Now I’m infected, too. I have to go with you.”
“You idiot!” I sobbed. I couldn’t believe what he’d done. “How could you be so careless with your life?”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t let you go through this alone. I want to be with you and take care of you.”
I was sure my expression was as bewildered as my thoughts. “But we’re not even…together, Kyle. We’ve talked about this.”
His mouth cracked into a fractured smile. “Yeah, I know, you made that clear, but it doesn’t matter. I want to be with you anyway, whether we’re just friends or whatever this is.”
It was a strange thing to care about someone so much, but to fight against that feeling with every fiber of your being. Part of me was adamant it didn’t want him with me. Not now. Not this way. An intrusive thought struck me, and I felt my head shaking emphatically on its own.
“Wait, what if you’re not infected yet? I was only bitten minutes ago and may not be a carrier,” I reasoned with him. “What if it takes time? You have to give yourself a chance to survive and go with Verna and Jordan.”
Kyle’s expression grew intense, and he reached up and clasped my chin in his fingers. “No, I know it’s already too late. I can feel it.”
“You can feel it already?” I asked.
“What I can feel, Casey, is that I’m already doomed.” His hand slid to the back of my neck, and he cradled me, pulling me closer. “Even if I’m not infected, I will be soon, because I’m not going to stop kissing you.” Again, his lips met mine, and this time, I couldn’t push him away.
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I was furious at him and powerless to resist, all at once. It felt so natural and right for him to be here with me, but I knew our chances of beating this were so very small. Somewhere beneath my fear, I became aware of a new feeling I didn’t quite recognize. I wouldn’t call it happiness, but it seemed closer to what I thought normal might be than anything I’d felt before.
***
Kyle’s embrace relaxed, though he kept his arms around me. Lea
ning back, he faced Jordan and Verna. “You two go on. I’ll take care of Casey.”
If possible, Verna’s face had grown even redder than before, and she was wiping tears from her eyes. “No matter what happens, I’ll never forget you two,” she promised.
The muscles along Jordan’s jaw pulsed, and his lips thinned to a tight, thin line. He cast his gaze to the sky, and his shoulders heaved. “We will find you again, when all of this is over,” he declared. Covering his eyes with his hand, he turned away and swore at the ground.
“When we’ve shared the information with Canadian authorities, we’ll contact the nearest Red Cross,” Verna said. “They maintain survivor contact registries after disasters. Casey, we will give them our current location and keep it updated if we move.”
“Wait,” Kyle interjected. “The military will have access to that communication. We can’t take the chance on that. If we put our names on a list with our whereabouts, it will be like turning ourselves in. We’d be as good as dead.”
Jordan paced back and forth, scuffling rocks and dirt in frustration. “This is hell,” he exclaimed, his voice tinged with anger.
Verna’s cheeks, once chubby, had grown sunken and gaunt since the outbreak, and now she looked much older and tired. “I hadn’t thought about that,” she sighed.
“We may as well face it,” Jordan surmised. “We’re as good as dead already.” He quickened his step and was now kicking the larger stones as he turned, lofting them into the brush with each punt. “We are dead already,” he grumbled. “We’re just putting off the inevitable.” He kept repeating it as he walked.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Jesus, Jordan! Stop it!” I cried. “You can’t think that way. You’ve got to survive. You can’t just give up and die.”
He stopped abruptly and stared at me. “No, I have to die. We all do.” His dark face broke into a smile that sent chills down my arms. Is he having a nervous breakdown? I didn’t know what I would do if Jordan had lost it.
“Are you okay?” Verna asked. She approached him with a hand outstretched toward his forehead, as if to give a rudimentary temperature check.
“No,” Jordan answered. “I’m not okay. None of us are, but don’t you see? That’s the answer. We have to be dead to survive this.” His expression said he had it all figured out, but he was making no sense.
“We’ll use dead people’s names to register with the Red Cross. Man, why didn’t we think of this before? We don’t have any ID, so we can just tell them anything we want. They’d have to accept it at first because they’re set up to deal with people from all kinds of disasters who don’t have anything but the clothes on their backs…if that. Right?”
I let his words sink in and felt my breath release in relief as I realized that Jordan wasn’t going crazy, at least not yet.
“So, you’re saying we should use random dead people’s names?” Kyle asked.
“No, not just any. We’ll use names that we’ll remember, but won’t raise suspicion,” I interrupted. “It will be perfect. That way, it just might buy us some time. There’s no chance the dead will come back, after all. They won’t just randomly show up and blow our cover.”
“That might work,” Verna agreed. Her forehead creased with doubt, but her eyes held a glimmer of hope. “But whose names should we use?” she asked.
We stood in silence, looking from one to another in thought. I considered Jordan’s suggestion. I couldn’t think of any reasons why we might not be able to pull it off if we were careful. It was risky, but at this point, anything we did was dangerous, I concluded. “I think Matt would have been honored for you to use his name,” I said, looking at Jordan.
Moisture brimmed on his thick lashes at the mention of Matt, and Jordan simply nodded, and we all stood in reverent silence for a long moment.
Jordan cleared his throat. “And I think Harley would want you to do the same.”
I flinched. The pain of losing Harley the way we did, and the fear that I was hallucinating about her, burned raw in my mind. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I whispered.
“It makes sense,” Kyle said. “You cared a lot about her. She was one of your closest friends.”
I let the idea swirl in my mind. Using Harley’s name felt comforting, almost as if it brought her closer to me. It was sad, but didn’t feel like I was doing something wrong or being disrespectful. “Okay, I’ll do it,” I answered.
We discussed other options and settled on Verna keeping her own first name and using our old school security officer’s last name. Kyle would use Trey Bronson. We agreed that if any of us checked into a compound or facility of any type, we would use those names instead of our own. Once inside Canada, Jordan and Verna would provide those names to the Red Cross’ missing and displaced persons registry, along with locations where they could be reached.
Standing in the chilly midday air, Verna’s shoulders slumped with fatigue. Jordan’s face seemed to have aged ten years. The odds were against us ever reconnecting, I realized. Life was like that. There would always be a last time for everything, and it was a cruel reality that you never knew when that last time might be. “We’d better get going now,” I told them. “We can’t waste time.”
Kyle helped me to my feet. My socks and shoes, which I hadn’t had time to remove before the attack, were uncomfortably wet and squishy. Everyone else retrieved their footwear from their bags and put them on.
Verna eyed my wet clothes. “Maybe we should just take a few minutes to light a fire so you can dry out,” she said. “Jordan and I aren’t as wet as you and Kyle.”
“Harley showed symptoms within an hour or so after being bitten,” I reminded her. “There’s no time to waste.”
“You could still get sick,” she cautioned.
“You said you can’t get sick from just cold temperatures.”
“I did, but in your weakened condition, you could be more likely to catch something.”
“Verna, I’m already going to be sick. It won’t matter. I’m the worst kind of sick,” I laughed at the insanity of her attempt to mother me.
“Ladies,” Kyle interrupted. “I promise Casey and I will stop early for the night at the first acceptable place to shelter and build a fire. I got this.”
Verna’s lips screwed up into an expression of annoyed concession. “Okay,” she said. “A hug before we leave?”
“You know I can’t let you do that,” I told her.
She and Jordan shouldered their packs and guns, turned, and began their journey. I watched as my dearest friends hiked, side by side, up the hill toward the northeast, Jordan’s lanky figure supporting Verna’s cumbersome movements. Their silhouettes became smaller as the span between us grew.
Chapter 6
Harley
Rage coursed through Harley’s veins as she ran through the dense understory. Bushes slapped against her face, arms, and legs as she sped up and down over the hills. Thorns caught her flesh and ripped bits of rotting skin from her body as she passed. Thoughts came in fragmented shards, with their meaning and connection barely taking hold in her mind. Processing information no longer involved conscious thought in this new state of being. Impulse, feeling, and primal need fueled her actions.
With the zombie still clinging to her back, she rushed through the woods and noticed a change in the spore signatures hanging in the air surrounding them. She stopped. The exertion hadn’t left her fatigued, but her hunger had increased. Harley dropped her arms, releasing the undead beast. It crumpled to the ground.
It scurried to the base of a nearby tree, where it huddled against the trunk, its half-dead carcass creaking with slimy shudders as it cowered away from her.
Harley sniffed the air. Fear. Pleasure. She glared at the beast she knew as Tamra. It had harmed one of her own. The impulse to feed on it coursed through the ragged remnants of her brain, and her cells pulsed with adrenaline in response. She lumbered toward it.
Tamra cowered under Harley’s shadow, and
she pushed herself back against the tree as if it might somehow protect her.
A hoarse, guttural laugh escaped Harley’s mangled lips. She stepped closer, watching the thing pushing the soil with its feet. Stupid. I warned you. You didn’t listen.
Tamra shrieked a pitiful cry and raised her arms in a futile shield.
Harley swooped down on Tamra, grabbed a skeletal hand, and twisted. She broke off the creature’s wrist with a brittle, hollow snap. Tamra screamed and writhed in the grass and rolled herself into a fetal position, whimpering and shaking.
Harley laughed again. Like a roly-poly. She laughed, lifted the dismembered hand to her lips, and bit into the fleshy palm. Ripping away a chunk of putrid tissue, she began to chew. Her face contorted, and she spat a dollop of skin and muscle onto the dirt. Her shoulders jerked as she bent over. Rancid vomit spewed onto Tamra’s head and back.
Harley’s rage surged, and she threw the hand at Tamra, hitting her on the side of the head. Stay!
Tamra’s body drew into a tighter ball, and Harley ran back in the direction from which they had come, leaving the miserable creature waiting beneath the tree. When she reached the riverside, Harley sniffed. She ran up and down the bank, taking in great gulps of air and letting it settle into the back of her throat. The taste was different than before. The human’s scent had dissipated at the spot where Tamra had attacked her. She turned in a circle, frantically sampling the spore all around her.
Gone.
Fear.
It couldn’t be. Where had the scent gone? Sadness. Confusion.
The decaying synapses in Harley’s brain fired erratically, triggering images and sounds that seemed both familiar and foreign. Voices and noises with no real meaning. Raw, inexplicable emotion. They were gone, and she had no way to follow. Her frustration rose, and she cried out in anguish.
Nearby, a loud snort sounded deep in the thicket. A stand of bushes shook, and Harley saw a flash of a white as a doe scurried up the hillside, whipping her tail in warming. It didn’t put off the same irresistible aroma humans did, but it smelled of food, and Harley was hungry. Very Hungry. She felt herself smile as she sprang into the chase. Wind whipped the lone strand of pink hair that still clung to her scalp as she ran after the animal. In mere seconds, Harley was upon it, despite its head start. She pounced on its back and rolled with it onto the ground. Its long, spindly legs kicking wildly in the air as they fell.
The Viral Series (Book 2): Viral Storm Page 9