Rapture: Survivor Chronicles 1, Page 2

In peace and prosperity states and individuals are actuated by higher principles because they do not find themselves face to face with imperious necessities. - Thucydides

  He sat with his back to the campfire, looking out into the trees that surrounded the small camp. The flicker of the fire’s light sent shadows dancing on the trunks of the trees, in a nearly hypnotic pattern that he had watched for what felt like days.

  Leaning back on a log with his shotgun in his lap, he mindlessly flicked on and off the safety switch repeatedly as the last few days ran through his head. At least as much as much of them that he could still recall. They all ran together into a giant blur of color and motion, including some of the parts that he would rather have forgotten. It took much concentration for him to keep everything strait. He was alive and in most cases that might be more than he could have hoped for.

  The last few days had been rough to say the least, he had watched friends die terrible deaths. He had to kill more to save them a fate that was most defiantly worse than death. Three days since it all had really started and three days on the run. This had been the first peaceful night that they had had in those long days. Peaceful was relative, though the excitement had died down, the memories were still fresh. The panic and mindless terror were beginning to fade away, leaving a kind of numbness in their place.

  He could still hear the moans and screams of the dying whenever the soft clicking of the safety switch died down, even over the crackling of the fire behind him. And from the sounds that his companions were making, they were in the same place that he was. He jumped up a little as one of the logs in the fire split and collapsed with a dull thud that sent sparks racing skyward. He knew nothing would ever be the same, as he wondered whether or not he would ever regain his nerves. Best not to think about it, but he had little choice. It all just kept coming back.

  He got up to stretch his legs for a moment and walk around the perimeter of the camp. This was at least the twentieth time that he had done it over the course of the night, and each time with the same results, nothing was out there. Still he was left with the gut wrenching feeling that if he let his guard down for a moment something would appear and pounce on them all.

  The sky began to lighten as from time to time one of his companions gave a soft murmur in their sleep, once in a while even going so far as to speak or cry out. Troubled by their dreams, or more likely their nightmares. He knew what they were going through in the depths of their subconscious. Sleep was not something that he wanted to endure at the moment, he was still haunted by the nightmares that assailed him the last time he tired. The faces of the dead wouldn’t leave him alone. He could face the horrors while awake, but doing so in his sleep deeply unnerved him. To be afraid of a dream. It was pure cowardice.

  Lynn stirred and finally awoke, she had actually managed to sleep through most of the night, but she was a tough woman. A damn near fearless woman. He was glad that she was in charge. She kept her head through the entire ordeal. “What time is it?” She asked sleepily.

  “It’s nearing morning, not quite sure, maybe five or so.” He had lost the watch that he had picked up in an encounter the day before, but it didn’t matter, time didn’t mean very much anymore. No meetings to get to and no schedules to keep. All that was left was staying alive for as long as possible. He stopped flicking the safety switch and turned to look at her, she looked a little disheveled and bleary-eyed from a long night out in the open, but aside from that she looked as good as ever. Lynn palmed the sleep from her eyes and then shakily stood up.

  “Have you been sitting up all night?”

  “Yep” he grunted as he turned back to watching the woods. Watching for movement.

  Lynn put her glasses on and came over and sat next to him, ”mind if I sit here?”

  “Mi casa es su casa.” He slid over a little on his log to make some room for her.

  Lynn shook her head at him, “you should have gotten one of us up to take the watch for you, so you could get some sleep!”

  “I didn’t feel like sleeping.” He went back to flicking the safety switch on and off.

  Lynn noticed his flicking of the safety grabbed his shoulder and gave him a gentle squeeze “You still need rest.”

  “Any good dreams?”

  “You know I don’t dream.”

  “Seems like anything is possible, I also know that the dead don’t get up and walk around to feed on the living, look where that got me.” He stopped flicking the safety switch once again and turned his head to look at her. Pretty as ever. Honestly though he was the only one he knew who thought that she was pretty, besides perhaps Douglas. He had thought so since they met back in junior high school. It was her smile that did it for him, her smile was like the sun. Bright and always there. But she hadn’t smiled for three days now, three days was a long time to go without seeing the sun.

  “Jason, please try and get some sleep.”

  “I’ll try.” For the first time in those three days she smiled and just for that he knew it was worth the nightmares that would come the moment he dropped off. Lynn took the shotgun from him and pushed him on his way to the empty sleeping bag that she had been using. Within seconds of his head hitting the pillow and the blankets accepting him within its warm embrace, he was asleep.

  The four of them sat in the darkened living room with their eyes on the television that was sitting in the corner of the room. The warm glow of the television flickered and washed over them as the images on its screen changed. Their worn VHS copy of the movie Dawn of the Dead was playing for perhaps the 20th time and it was starting to show it’s age. They had all seen the movie many times, some of them had done so willingly, and the rest because that is what was going on at the time and they didn’t wish to rock the boat.

  Billy sat alone in the easy chair in the corner opposite from the television. He sat there with a grin on his face. He always got a kick out of Hare Krishna zombie girl, nobody was quite sure why and nobody really wanted to know badly enough to bother to ask. It was just one of his many quirks, you accepted them when you accepted Billy as a friend. They made life more interesting.

  Jason sat on the couch with both Lynn and her intended Douglas. Lynn was enraptured by the movie as ever, while Douglas was doing his best not to look bored, if only out of politeness for his fiancée. He was failing that struggle, but he always did. The man couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper sack.

  Jason personally divided his attention between the movie, and his friends. Unlike Douglas he thought that the movie was still fun, but their reaction to it was usually even better. Lynn with her usual thoughtful look and Billy with his girlish delight over the entire premise and more so over the rampant chaos. He was just waiting for either of them to ask the question. It was only a matter of time before it happened, it always came. Even more interesting would be the reaction that Douglas would have to the question being asked.

  Tonight he looked tired and Jason thought that he would use that as an excuse to finally take his leave and head off to bed for the night. Some nights he just sighed and sat in the silent agony of a martyr who was being burned at the stake for his beliefs. On others he exploded and informed them about how stupid and childish they were acting.

  The question finally came during the scene where the characters in the movie were cleaning up the mall after killing off all the zombie hordes. It was Billy this time who finally put the question to voice, “What would you guys do during a zombie uprising?” He did it in a lazy manner that suggested that it was only done out of proprieties and tradition.

  True to form, Douglas got up and said “Good night all, I’m off to bed.” That being said he headed upstairs to his and Lynn’s room. The man was rather intelligent, but he had little of either imagination or patience for those who had it in excess. Billy and Jason shared a grin behind his back as he left. Douglas didn’t care much for Billy, and Billy returned the disdain in spades. Likely he ha
d spoken up just as a chance to get Douglas to leave. Another one of Billy’s quirks.

  As Douglas reached the top of the stairs Billy prodded on “well?” It was a silly question, not in itself for being about an absurd subject. The distant possibility of zombie uprisings were very important among the three of them, however unlikely. It was absurd more for the fact that they had discussed it as many times as they had watched the various zombie movies that had come across their hands and played in their living room. They all knew the answers that the others would give by heart and all the arguments both for and against the plans that they made. Some people discussed religion or politics, the three of them invented survival plans for the apocalypse.

  First thing that they would all do, because they were in it together, was to raid the gun store out on the highway. Amend that, the first thing that Billy would do was to take off his pants, nobody ever asked, after that they’d all cut their hair short. After they cut their hair, and Billy de-panted himself, THEN they would make a run on the gun shop. Not many people there, so there weren’t many corpses to have to wade through. The best part about that gun shop though was that they also carried some old fashioned swords and axes. Sort of as a novelty, but still a high quality products and very useful ones at that. You needed something to rely on when you ran out of bullets.

  Once they were stocked up on a variety of boomsticks, shells and what not, then they would move on to the mega-store down the street a couple miles. That is where they would pick up everything that they felt that they might need in a zombie holocaust. Toilet paper, decks of cards, food, flashlights, more toilet paper(leaves suck, don’t ask). Batteries were a big one, as was a portable radio. They would come up with lists and discard them to make more. Knives, candles, bed sheets, matches, chemistry text books and Nerf weapons (they needed something to play with when they were safely away from the undead) had all graced at least one list at one time or another. Some things were more useful than others. It all depended on their moods at the time, somber and serious or giddy and silly.

  After they were stocked up they usually devised two different schemes. The first is that they would hold up in the store, Dawn of the Dead style and wait for it all to pass in relative comfort. The second, which he was personally fond of, was to escape out into the wilderness and start a new community hundreds of miles away from the crushing zombie hordes. He liked the scenario so much so that he had built a storage box into the back of his aged El Camino that held all of the camping gear that they would ever need. Aside from the distant threat of the inevitable zombie uprising, it came in handy whenever he wanted to just take off from work for the weekend and spend some time alone in the woods.

  The biggest factor was who would go with them. It was always the four of them (three if Billy got his way), plus usually whichever of their friends might be over at the time. They often debated about whether or not they would help any victims that they ran across along the way. In his own words Billy often said that he would lend a hand “only if the chicks were hot!” Lynn being the compassionate idealist always said yes to trying to save as many people as she possibly could, going out of their way if they had to. While Jason himself kept mum on the subject, he felt that it was best to help who they could, as long as they weren’t a burden. The safety of his friends came first. Lynn’s before the rest.

  Their plans relied always on several important points. They would all have to be together for one. Or close to one another anyways. They were all sure that they would be on the ball and that none of them would panic when it all went down. That was never really a worry, they all acted gung ho about fighting zombies. Billy even talked about all the zombies that he was going to kill, and he would not only list, but also describe what he would do to them when he had a chance. Neither of them were sure exactly how serious he was on the subject, but some times they wondered and hoped that he was only joking with them.

  With another round of bullshitting past them, they turned back to the movie.

  The small office was lined with bookshelves, many of which were full to capacity and overflowing onto the floor beneath. Books and papers lay stacked along the floorboards, devouring the floor until a narrow strip of carpet, running between the door and the beautifully carved antique desk that sat underneath the windows, was all that remained visible. The room was lit by a lone lamp sat atop the desk, bathing the walls in colored patterns formed by the stained glass shade.

  There sat Father Bagrowski, reading his bible. The original Latin translation. Reading the bible, or at least trying. In practice he was just staring at what might as well have been blank pages.

  The day had been a trying one. Bittersweet. The last thirteen years of his life had been happy ones. Thirteen years since he had spoken his vows before God and become one of the anointed of the Church. Five of those very blessed years he had spent in this very Parish. In all of his years of observing his flock he had noticed a definite and disturbing trait possessed by the whole of humanity. Love of country and God were often set-aside during times of happiness and prosperity, only to be sought and dusted off when the tides changed and life became more difficult. These feelings were like a suit worn to funerals, moth-eaten and tattered and always in need of a good cleaning.

  And here again came those sorrowful times. In the times of the prophets of the Old Testament, God Almighty would send down conquers or plagues upon His children to punish them for turning away from Him. To subdue them when they strayed too far from His chosen path, His covenant with them. He announced His great displeasure with violence. Eventually His people would finally listen, wake up and return gladly to His warm embrace, weeping for their past mistakes. Supposedly, according to His Son Jesus, Father Bagrowski’s, and all of the rest of humanity’s Lord and Savior, that cycle had ended leaving only the loving forgiving God.

  The radio had said that a new plague had arisen all across the state. More than the state. The national news said that this was an international crisis, inflicting all the nations of the world with death. The whole world was plagued and suffering before God’s righteous wrath.

  But Jesus had now revealed himself to his true followers yet. The world was very clearly ending before their eyes and the Lord was late. Rome had been quiet on the subject of God’s retribution. They claimed not to wish to add to the fear and panic of the times. Despite their silence, Father Bagrowski knew what was happening. Judgment day was upon them, and they had been found wanting. His parishioners knew this too, they could see the signs as clearly as could he, even those souls who only gave lip service to their faith, coming to mass only on the most holy days of Christmas and Easter. His pews were packed with the renewed faith.

  A bitter victory.

  Too little too late.

  The church numbers had been dwindling for years, only a small number of the devout youth carried through with their parents’ expression of faith. Sure people claimed the faith, but then they only showed up to services on Easter and Christmas, taking the rest of the year to sleep in.

  But once again, the church was full of singing voices and prayers for forgiveness begging for deliverance. Father Bagrowski shook his head and wondered why it must always come down to this? Why did his people never learn? The Scriptures were clear, laying out the eternal cycle of arrogance, failure and then redemption. But why couldn’t they just learn finally and walk the path that they had been ordered? Only the fool said in his own heart that there was no God.

  Here they were once more, dying and crying out for God’s forgiveness and aid.

  Father Bagrowski even wondered if their Father was even listening to his children anymore. He ran his fingers through his short, grey flecked, light brown hair. Back to the Psalms of King David. The Lord is my Shepard, I shall not want, he maketh me lie…

  He stood up and paced to the door and back along his worn strip of carpet. Even the book of Psalms, the calming and ever inspiring book of wis
dom and faith written by the greatest anointed warrior king of Israel, even they were unable to calm his mind.

  The pacing did nothing to sooth his nerves.

  He returned to his chair, turned it to face out the windows, and gazed out into his little courtyard garden. The garden had always been his sanctuary from the troubled times of the material world. The sun was setting, and a pleasant breeze was passing through. The shadows deepened as the sunlight faded away until the spotlights blinked on, casting shadows that followed the forms of the garden as it danced in the wind. Even the beauty of the evening sunlight playing on the flowers could not take his mind off his woes.

  The most harrowing part of the ordeal was the test of his faith. His parishioners, his flock, had the sick and dying amongst them, driving them back into the pews where they belonged. The plague though had not been isolated and spread among only the strays, but within even the very faithful of the flock.

  Mrs. Saboski, one of his most kindhearted and dedicated parishioners, a woman who attended every single mass and confessed daily (as if she had anything to confess, but she did anyhow, and to be honest, her confessions were very dull to take), a true modern saint of a woman, long-suffering and meek, the greatest of their Lord’s followers. She had born the brunt of God’s wrath, falling ill and sending her eldest son to take her place in the pews.

  He was a boy, or now a man, who hadn’t stepped through the sacred arches to attend communion for the greater part of the last decade. If rumor held true he had been working as a pimp in some back alley whorehouse for many of those years. How his mother had been struck down, only to leave him hale and whole, defied reason. Maybe it was God’s way to bring him back into the fold. But why take one such as Mrs. Saboski? The woman did everything in her power to lead the boy to God. Why punish her for failing her lost cause?

  But within the church, that was the worst news of it all. Three of his nuns had been afflicted. Two of the sick had taken their vows more than two decades before hand. What sort of sins had they committed, these brides of Christ?

  Humanity must have greatly angered the Lord for Him to target His clergy with his wrath. It was the only logical answer for the turn of events that he had beheld. Where had they in turn failed him in their ministrations? Where had they been blind or lazy in their work in His name?

  But they had worked so hard. Stretched their budget and labored long hours and into the depth of the night. The nuns most of all, they had lived for the spreading of the word in their deeds amongst the lost and orphaned, as they tried to lead those granted with free will and blinded with the sins to the flesh to His glorious word and away from their lowly beginnings. Was this how He repaid their selfless toil and sacrifice? By striking them down?

  What if he had been wrong in the first place? What if there had been no God at all, and the love that he had felt was an illusion? What if the Church, and his life within, had been built on a long-lived lie? What if there was a God, but the Church wasn’t the true faith as he had so long believed and preached.

  The moment of temptation. Even their Lord had faced it. The devil was ever there, waiting in the shadows to whisper doubts. Waiting to spring and attack in the moments of weakness such as these. Father Bagrowski had had his faith shaken before, but never so powerfully. Never to its very foundations. Would those foundations crack and have his whole being collapse?

  Nuns sick, perhaps dying. The wheat burned along with the chaff.

  He stood again and walked to the door and placed his hand on the carved surface. It was made with solid oak and carved in the relief of a story taken from the book of Mathew, the Christ preaching to the masses, arms outspread and raised in blessing. He eased the heavy door open on its well oiled hinges and let himself out into the corridor beyond. His study had become too small and stuffy all of a sudden, too close. Father Bagrowski was overcome by the need to stretch his legs.

  The halls were empty, save himself, the sisters had been set to ministering to the sick and the frightened as they poured into the awaiting arms of the church. As he walked, only the reverberation of his footsteps on the stone floors arose to meet his ears. Some time in the past two hours since he had retreated to his office, the massive pipe organ that had been the pride (pride, one of the sins of humanity) and joy of the community, had fallen silent.

  Big Mary massaged her lower back. She was a large woman, not just fat, but all around big. Almost as tall as the majority of American men, and she out weighed most of them. Some of her bulk was even muscle, though it was like a solid core of apple wrapped in a jellowey outer shell. Thinking of Jello molds made her hungry. She was a big woman. If she had to guess, it was due to some unexpected reaction caused by the mixing of her parent’s African and Samoan genes. Big, tall and strong. That was her. All wrapped up with the homely brown-ribbon bow that was her face. A face lined by long years of smiling. And even more tears.

  Her uniform was stained from the night’s hard use, spots of sweat had formed here and there, where the fabric rose like ocean swells on a rough sea, pressed against her ample flesh. All of the walking had made the sweat pour from her body, drenching the cloth with salty water and making her uniform resemble the ocean that much more closely. Even with the building’s air-conditioning working hard to make the building’s atmosphere comfortable for the people housed within.

  Her feet ached, even in the supportive tennis shoes with the expensive inserts. She didn’t want to think of how her feet would have pained her back in the days where formal shoes and high heels had been required as part of the uniforms for the nurses and caretakers. Eight hours on her feet in heels would probably break her as sure as a week of torture.

  She stopped for a moment and checked her clipboard. She just completed her final round of the floor, having checked all of the patients under her care. She had a few other tasks to complete and then she was going to take a much needed and deserved break.

  It had been a long shift, and it was only going to get worse. Three of her orderly’s had called in sick so far that morning. Half of her ward had taken ill too. Some sort of flu it looked like. A nasty thing it was too, they had a fever, the chills and were feeling an overall bodily weakness. Not that most of them were very strong to begin with. It was heartbreaking to see these poor dears drained of what little strength that they did have. At least though, there was no nausea reported. Cleaning up vomit from forty different patients would have been more than she would have cared to do.

  “The poor dears.” She said aloud to nobody in particular. Most of her patients were in their seventies or eighties. Many of them suffered from such afflictions as senility. And quite a number of them were bedridden. Making her rounds and seeing their eternal suffering broke her heart some days. Most days. Hardly a month went past when she didn’t lose a couple of them. The poor, poor dears. They were put in this place to die, and most of them knew it. Whether they were aware of anything else or not, they seemed to know that their race was nearly run.

  Mary looked around to make sure that nobody was standing near by and watching, before she scratched herself in a certain private area that nobody else need know. The air conditioner was on the fritz again and the night had been full of hard labor in warm rooms that caused sweat to drip from her brow. She let out a content moan, she had been aching to find relief in that spot for what felt like hours now.

  All she really wanted to do was to go home and get a good day’s sleep. But that wasn’t going to happen was it? No, she was going to have to pull another double shift. The pay was outstanding, but the long hours were at times quite wearisome. The job was stressful too. But she loved the people. All of them. Not counting some of the administrators, but they could hardly be considered people now could they?

  The random potted plants swayed with the wind that she created with her passage through the corridor. Mary watched the reflection of the overhead florescent lights on the waxed tile floors stre
tch and morph as she walked. It was something that she had done as a child, watching the patterns that the light made. That she fallen once again into the childhood habit was measure of how tired she was. She forced herself to stop, and instead looked at the furniture as she walked down the corridor. Uncomfortable chairs mostly, one or two in the nook between the doorways that lead to each of the little rooms. They were meant to briefly seat the visitors of the patients as they waited their turn. At this early hour the chairs were all empty. But then, the chairs were nearly always empty.

  At times like this loneliness hung over the ward like an invisible fog, it was nearly tangible against her skin. She could feel it all the way down to her bones as if a giant hand was squeezing her. It would be worse for the patients. They never got to leave the hospital. The poor dears. They were such nice, interesting and wonderful people. And now they were forgotten and abandoned. The hospital was like the Humane Society for unwanted people. This place worse even than an orphanage found in the works of Dickens. If nothing else, Dickens’ children could eventually escape.

  When she had first started on the job more than thirty years ago, the thought had made her weep. Every day when she had gone home, she cried herself to sleep on her pillow. With time she became more determined to show these people as much kindness as she could. Mary was a sweet, kind woman, and she had a lot of love to share. The job had been more than a job. It gave her life meaning. She never married, she never had kids of her own. And her own family was hundreds of miles away. She needed the people here as much, if not more than they needed her.

  So, she was willing to work the double shifts when she had to. She accepted the discomfort and pain. Some things were just more important. And her job was one of those things.

  A voice came over the intercom, echoing through the hallway ahead and behind her “Mary, please report to the front desk.” Mary’s heart sank as she heard the summons, it was never a good sign. Either she was in trouble, unlikely, or an even worse event had transpired, like a death, or one of her staff was fired and she was being called as a witness. Considering the facts that none of the administrators would be around at this hour, that left only one option. Mary wondered who it was.

  She went to the front desk as summoned using the most direct way possible, though she walked at her normal slow waddling speed. Walking faster just made her look silly, besides, who wanted to get bad news any more quickly.

  The usual clamor greeted her as she entered the lobby. There was the hum of the computers that was barely audible over the racket coming from the television. They kept it tuned into the news, CNN some days, Fox News on others. MSNBC rarely. The television was there as much for the distracting noise as it was to keep the office workers informed about the goings on of the outside world.

  Having the news on had managed at times to help them keep a sense of relativity in their lives. Mrs. Smith dying all suddenly like that might be upsetting, but what was it to a car bomb killing fifteen small children in the middle east? It was morbid and somewhat demeaning, but it helped them from slumping into a depression brought on by the near constant misery of the world in which they lived. A sad fact of living on Earth, no matter how bad it was in your neck of the woods, somebody else always seemed to have it worse.

  The front desk was their reception desk for the facility. Someone, one of the more intelligent administrators. Intelligent administrator. Hah. Less stupid, she’d leave it at that. One of the less stupid administrators had at one time decided to lighten the atmosphere and make it less imposing using potted plants. The remodeling had worked to an extent and the desk looked marginally more cheerful that it had.

  Diane the nurse-receptionist did a lot to dispel that smidgeon of cheer. She was an angry woman. Stuck for ten years now doing the same job with just minor pay raises and a worsening economy to keep her from quitting. Small and round, most of her ample form was hidden behind the desk and computer monitor, all you could usually see on passing was the top portion of her deeply lined forehead.

  Her hair was rolled up in the standard bun that the nurses in the facility favored, with the usual end of day loose strands poking out here and there. For the time being she looked more tired than angry and just a little sad. Even the hardest heart on the floor had their favorites, Diane included, Mary guessed that the news must involve one of those.

  “What’s the rotten news?” She asked Diane when she finally arrived, standing before the front desk. She leaned her elbows on the counter and looked down at the clerk, waiting for a response.

  Diane had her head tilted in to her left in the bizarre manner that usually meant trouble. She sighed and said, “Mr. Anderson is dead.”

  Mr. Anderson, Rocky he liked to be called, though he was too skinny for it to have even been considered more than a joke name. He was a sweet old man who was well loved by the staff. He always told her that she was looking beautiful that day whenever she stopped in to check on him. It was a pleasant fiction for the both of them, since he was half blind from diabetes and they suspected that he was nearly senile as well. He had been one of the staff’s favorites, for his funny stories and happy-go-lucky manner.

  All fictions aside, she had loved to hear it from the old rascal. So he called her pretty, and she called him Rocky, and they had a swell time together. He was well on his way out when they had brought him to the hospital, and never managed to improve much despite the intense level of care that he had been given. So with his coming down sick with this new illness, it was no real surprise that he had finally checked out. Hearing of his loss was still sad news.

  Diane and Mary held hands for a moment. A customary gesture to perform when a patient died. In theory they tried not to get too close to the people under their care. But then they were human beings one and all, patients and staff alike. Wonderful marvelous people.

  She asked if everything had been arranged and Diane told her that Claude and Jeffery had been put in charge of the late Mr. Anderson and they had covered his thin body and taken it down to the morgue. Where he would await the autopsy as state law required. Too many scandals had erupted in recent years involving mysterious deaths in these places. The public demanded that the state keep an eye on those souls contained within these walls. Mary thought that was because they didn’t want to be bothered with the duty themselves.

  The front desk phone rang again. Another death, this time it was Mrs. Sales, up on the third floor.

  Mary’s shoulders slumped. It looked as if it was going to be a bad day as well as a long one. Two patients in the space of an hour was always a bad omen for things to come. She hadn’t been close to Mrs. Sales, the woman was difficult on the best days, and impossible on the rest. Her death had been unexpected as well, the woman was as strong as an ox, and most of the staff had expected her to outlive even the youngest orderly, on sheer stubbornness alone. There had been talk among some of the staff about cutting off her food, just to see if she could do it.

  Mrs. Sales had taken ill with the same symptoms as Mr. Anderson, but the flu wasn’t enough to bring a woman like her down. Mary wondered briefly if someone finally lived up to their grumbled threats and smothered her in her sleep. She discounted the thought.

  As sad as the loss of Mr. Anderson and even Mrs. Sales was, Mary had duties to attend to. She was responsible for making calls to the next of kin. It was the part of her job that she hated the most. Telling people that their loved ones were dead was a difficult task, and was made worse when the indifference was poorly masked, as was the case with Mr.Anderson. But then, she hadn’t expected much enthusiasm in the call, as he no longer had any close living relatives.

  The news about Mrs. Sales on the other hand received a burst of joy from her son, which had not been completely unexpected. Mary knew part of the story, an ugly story it was, and she wasn’t sure that she would have had a different reaction had the tables been turned. Still, it was painful. To have someone
pass, and have that passing celebrated.

  Another page from Diane. Three more deaths. Two of the dead had been fairly strong and healthy. Something clicked. They were all people who had taken ill. They had contracted some form of deadly flu. She almost cried. She had thirty-five more potential deaths in her hands, and it had happened in a span of less than an hour for the first five. She was absolutely certain that it was just a matter of time before more were discovered.

  The intercom spoke again, Dianne once more “Mary, please return to the front desk immediately!” Mary could hear the fear in her voice and that startled her. Diane was not one for letting her feelings get out of control. The bare emotion would difficult to miss, even for their half deaf residents.

  She got up and actually rushed to the front desk, forgetting her rule about taking her time to hear about bad news. She suspected that ‘bad news’ didn’t quite describe what was taking place. ‘Bad news’ was a major under statement for the epidemic they had on their hands.

  At the front desk, Claude and Jeffery were talking to Dianne. The two orderlies were clad in their usual white work uniforms with their heavy leather utility belts wrapped around their waists with the standard rings of keys and long flashlights. Claude was hunched over his left arm, as Mary got closer she saw that it had been wrapped in a towel and blood was seeping through. “What happened here?” Her normally husky voice cracked as she spoke.

  “Rocky got up and bit Claude ma’am,” said Jeffery. She looked at him as if he were insane. Mary couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The two of them were known for their hijinks and practical jokes.

  “This is hardly the time for jokes Jeffery. Mr. Anderson is dead.”

  “It ain’t a joke ma’am.” He was nearly hysterical. Claude and Jeffery were men who had to deal with death on a regular basis. It was his job to assist the coroner when the time arose. Mary had never known Jeffery to loose his cool like this.

  Claude stripped back the towel and showed her his wounded arm. It wasn’t just a bite wound, they got those from time to time with the wilder patients, if they let their guard down and got too close to the teeth. What Claude had looked if a wild animal had torn a piece of his arm off. This was defiantly no joke. But a little guy like Rocky did not get up and bite a big strong man like Claude, especially after he was most decidedly deceased.

  Since dead men did not get up and bite other men, there must have been another explanation. Even if the bite didn’t look as if it were made by an animal. But it certainly wasn’t a corpse who did this.

  Mary lead Claude back to behind the front desk next to Diane and had him sit down in an uncomfortable old wooden chair that they kept for the few visitors who stopped by the front desk for more than a moment or two at a time. She sent Jeffery off after a first aid kit and examined the wound in the mean time.

  Mary could clearly make out the marks made by human teeth. Mary hummed along to the song that was playing over the loud speaker as she worked, an old habit that she had picked up from one of the other nurses. She liked the song, and it helped to calm her nerves a little bit. She took the first aid kit from Jeffery and began to clean out the wound with anti-septic. Very important, the mouths of their fellow human beings were teaming with bacteria, and some of the residents didn’t hold to good oral hygiene. ‘What do I need teeth for?’ they would say ‘I don’t get to eat solid foods anymore. Just this lousy mush you bring us.’

  “Tell me what happened to you Claude.” Mary said.

  “We picked up Mr. Anderson in his room when he was reported croaked.” She ignored the use of the word ‘croaked’. She knew that he meant no disrespect by it. “Then we wheeled him to the elevator. The man didn’t move or breathe the entire time. He had even started to go cold.” He grimaced as a spasm of pain shot through his arm with the hydrogen peroxide, but otherwise kept still.

  “We had him down in the morgue, on the gurney covered up under a sheet. Jeffery wanted to stay a minute and offer his last respects you know, he really liked the old guy. But I didn’t know him that well and the beeper goes off again, another one bit it and needed to be taken care of. So I said to him ‘first we need to get the rest of the bodies, then yous can say your words’. While we’re getting Mrs. Sales, when we gets the word that another one shuffled off, ya know. I turns to him and says ‘it’s gonna be a busy night pal,’ and he suggests that we split up and each take one of the bodies down. So we does that. We get both the new bodies wheeled down, and Jeffery takes them few moments to stand over Mr. Anderson and say his words. Jeffery said that I would have liked him. But since I didn’t know him, I walks back and waits by the door and wait for Jeffery to say his goodbyes, and a prayer or something, when Jeffery yells out all of a sudden. So I come back to take a look at what’s got him so riled. He’s pointing at the runner with Mr. Anderson lying on it, and I says ‘what’s wrong with you, ya dope?’ and he goes off on how the body ‘neath the sheet had just moved. I said ‘yeah right’ cause you know how me and him like to joke each other, and I goes over to the gurney and pulls off the sheet from Mr. Anderson’s face, ya know, to call Jeffery’s bluff. Only his eyes are open and he’s lookin at me.” Jeffery was nodding furiously along with Claude as he spilled his story, crossing himself repeatedly, even though Mary was certain that he was not a religious man, and most defiantly not a Catholic. But even so, he made the gesture rather fervently

  Mary started bandaging the arm. It wasn’t as bad as it first looked. He was missing a piece of skin around the size of a quarter, and maybe a little muscle, but no major arteries had been severed. It was a nasty bite and he would need to go to the hospital to get it patched up better, but it wouldn’t be life threatening after receiving first aid. They would defiantly need to treat it for infection, human bites were much more prone to get infected than those given by animals.

  “So then, then he sits up. And turns his head and looks at me. Jeffery is telling him over and over how sorry we are, we thought he was dead, and how glad we are to have been wrong. I went to grab his hand to help him to his feet as best as I can. So he grabs my hand and pulls it in to bite me. and took a chunk out. I mean, he actually pulled me over. He was skinny as a rail and he shouldn’t ta been able to do that.”

  “That’s what happened ma’am, every last word the truth.” Jeffrey said in the background.

  “Then what did you two do?”

  “Well, Claude hit him in the face with his fist, and then pushed him away and we both ran for the elevator. I looked back as the door was closing behind us and see him getting off the runner to follow us. The punch didn’t faze him none. And I really let him have it. I’ve knocked out some big guys in my time too.”

  “Uh Ma’am, I’m not feeling all that well, do you mind if I lie down?” Mary put her hands to Claude’s face, he was roasting as if he had a severe infection. She led him to one of the empty offices that they used for storage and had him lie down on a cot that the nurses used during long shifts. She didn’t know how she felt about their story. The dead, outside the bible didn’t get up. And those in the bible didn’t bite people. If she remembered correctly from her days in Sunday school as a little girl. Mary hadn’t much attended since childhood, but was still convinced that she wasn’t remembering it wrong.

  There was no singing either, or wailing or praying. Only the scraping sounds of his shoes meeting stone, and the echoes of his footsteps as they raced on before him along the hallway. A silence met him as he approached the basilica, an eerie silence that, in his memory, had never been part of his life in the clergy.

  His feet led him down the hall, and into the ambulatory.

  So quiet.

  Quiet.

  Father Bagrowski was at a complete loss to explain the silence in any way, even to himself to calm his growing nervousness. The silence was wrong, unnatural. Dangerous. He knew it, but wasn’t sure why.

  He reached out his hand and plac
ed it onto the large wooden double door that led to the dais underneath the apse. The doors were carved with a wonderful relief of their Lord’s Last Supper, a work of art that Father Bagrowski had never before failed to stop and appreciate on his way through the entryway and into the hall beyond. Today he breezed past without a second look. His mind locked on the wrongness of the whole situation.

  There were other people moving. He could hear the whisper of cloth and the clatter of shoes as they reverberated across the arches and columns of the nave. They were standing in silence, but they were out there.

  Perhaps Father Michaels had called for a moment of quiet contemplation and prayer. For the flock to search their souls and beg forgiveness. To plead for salvation. Their Lord had once said that it was better to ask humbly in silence than to repeat rituals and boasts. So far their rituals had failed them. Perhaps their pride and repetition had been what angered God. Father Michaels was a smart man, perhaps he had seen this too.

  Father Bagrowski inched his way around the stone buttress that lent its shoulders to help support the vault above, and towards the altar. There were people standing in between the rows of the pews. He began to step forward, stopping himself with his leg half raised in the air, remaining hidden behind the buttress. Mostly.

  The people were standing, some of them. But it was in a funny, awkward manner in which they were holding themselves that halted Father Bagrowski in his tracks. The large redheaded woman wearing the purple sweat suit, her neck, arms and back were stiff as she rocked back and forth like a tree swaying in the wind. Her shoulders seemed to be stuck in the midst of a shrug.

  Where was father Michaels? Father Bagrowski scanned the crowd. The man should have been positioned behind the altar, leading his flock in prayer.

  Then there was the fat man with the goatee. He was waddling around in a circle as if one of his legs was drastically shorter than the other.

  No. Not just those two. There was something wrong with everyone present. He finally spotted Father Michaels. The man was sprawled over the front pew, with several of his parishioners gathered around him. Tugging at him. He was lying in a pool of blood.

  “Sweet Holy Jesus and His Mother the Blessed Mary.” Father Bagrowski breathed, the people around Father Michaels were tearing pieces of his flesh, and putting those bits into their mouths. They were eating a man of the cloth. His friend of seven years. Father Bagrowski felt himself grow ill, his stomach revolting from his supper of bread and water. Then he was sick.

  He cleaned his mouth off on the sleeve of his sweater. The spectacle of the gathered crowd in the pews had demonstrated for him exactly how far they had allowed the human race to sink. No wonder God was angry with the Church, if this is what became of his children! They had become worse than the cursed inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even those two obscene towns had not been so wicked.

  Cannibalism! They had murdered and devoured the flesh of a priest! Madness! They would spend eternity burning in the fiery lakes of fire in the pit of Hell for such blaspheme against God and the Church!

  He felt the heat of a righteous rage well up within his soul. He threw himself out from behind the stone wall where he had been lurking, hidden in the shadows. “Sinners!” He bellowed in his finest ‘brimstone voice’, his voice booming across the acoustically perfect chamber. He had their attention. His flock turned their gazes onto him, moving as one, their eyes drawn to him like a compass needle being compelled to point north. The ones who had been sitting, or lying down, stood to join the others.

  “Your dark and sinful crimes against the Church and our Lord have called down God’s righteous wrath!” His facial expressions and hand gestures were in top form as the entered the Zone. As a priest and public speaker he had to be a skilled actor, a master of inflection and feeling. His trade called on him to pluck at the basest emotions of love and fear to keep his congregation in line. He was well practiced in his trade.

  The words on his tongue froze and evaporated as he looked down upon the sea of faces before him. They were blank. There was no fear, love, anger or hate, they held nothing. Where they should have been quaking at the reminder of their imminent damnation to the lake of fire for an eternity of torture at the hands of devils wielding pitchforks, there was nothing. A wall of empty masks portraying people that he had once known.

  Moving masks.

  As one they had surged forward with his first words. Their legs stiff under them as if they were corpses facing the onset of rigor mortis. Walking corpses. A thought tickled the back of his mind, and the scene before him smothered it before he could fully grasp what was there.

  They came. Mouths hanging open. Hands reaching out before them, reaching towards Father Bagrowski as he stood behind the pulpit. There was a hundred of the walking dead, perhaps two hundred, and maybe more than that. He couldn’t count, his mind wouldn’t even try to hold the numbers in any linear fashion, to string them together, to make sense of the order. The chaos surrounding him was too powerful.

  They all wanted him. He knew, oh Lord Jesus, he knew. He could feel their hunger as they stammered forward. Iron filings to a magnet, was the old cliché that writers so loved to use in the cheap novels that he had devoured as a student in the seminary. The cliché fit. They came straight at him, ignoring the candelabras and the railings that stood in between.

  They saw nothing but him.

  Father Bagrowski felt the terror that he had moments before tried to raise in his flock. He had never before experienced the emotion, and had never guessed its true weight and depth. Not even during the train accident when he was sixteen, the very trauma that stole from him forever his love of riding the rails. There had always been within him the warmth of God’s love keeping all fear at bay. The still small voice that was ever calming and reassuring.

  Now all he heard was the voice screaming at him to flee. It reverberated through his skull, bouncing back and forth until it shattered coherent thought. The voice was too much, he couldn’t ignore it, Father Bagrowski turned and fled.

  Back through the heavy doors, paying them no more mind the second time than he had the first. His feet slapped down on the stone floor as he raced down the hall like a kindergartener at the end of a school day. Sometime before he reached his office he heard a scream, only to realize that it had been his own. He burst through the door, and slammed it behind him.

  Father Bagrowski slumped down, his back against the door, and his arms around his knees. Above his head, and frozen in wood, was the artist’s imagined rendering of the savior. There he posed, blessing the terrified priest as he wept in despair.

  The army of Satan was loose in God’s very house!

  He wept. As the stars began to appear in the sky, he wept.

  The first thump on the door brought him around and out of his stupor. Jolting him forward onto his hands and knees. They had found him. The army of the damned had found him.

  All was lost!

  No!

  He was not ready to surrender his soul yet to the deceiver. What did that poem say? Do not go gently into the night? Or something very similar. He tried to recall a verse of scripture that concurred, but failed as the poem galloped about his mind. It was a trumpet call to him, raising his spirits and pressing him forward.

  Do not go gently into the night! Do not go gently into the night!

  The weight slammed against the door for a second time. One of the damned managed to slide its hands through the crack between the door and the frame. Father Bagrowski pushed against the door, as he forced himself up off the ground and back onto his feet.

  He slammed his shoulder into the door, his full strength behind the blow slicing, no, bludgeoning through the fingers. They dropped to the ground like rancid grey sausages, leaving a smear of blood on the door as they fell.

  Father Bagrowski locked the deadbolt into place. It was a sad state of affairs when a church needed to install locks on its doo
rs to ward against intruders. A church was supposed to welcome all, to be a place of respite and salvation. Locks were meant to keep those very people who most needed to be reached out to forever at arms distance. But there had been thefts and vandalism. Against a church! Fear of worse to come had led the dioceses to install locks on all of the offices, barring further wanton criminal acts.

  He put his ear carefully to the door and listened. There were no sounds. No screaming or crying. He couldn’t even hear breathing. Maybe those things didn’t merely look like corpses, and act like them, maybe they truly were corpses. Maybe the great Worm had unleashed a plague to slay the living and raise them from the embrace of eternal peace as his host army. In his minds eye he pictured the horror as relatives of the living rose up to slay their own family at Lucifer’s bequest.

  For the second time in nearly as many minutes he doubted his very faith. That Satan possessed the power to slay the faithful in God’s own house, under his very nose, and then turn those poor souls against their neighbors. Fear numbed his mind.

  More of the damned joined the first on the far side of the door. Pounding on the wooden carvings. No rhythm, no cooperation, just a group of individuals blindly using brute force.

  Father Bagrowski resumed his restless pacing once more. In the long philosophical discussions that he had enjoyed with Father Michaels over their many years of friendship, they had discussed the possibility of losing their faith. Doubt only strengthened the faith, that had been Father Michaels stance in all of those talks. Father Bagrowski had been of the opinion that doubt was a weakness to be shed. He wondered if Father Michaels had doubted, strong as his faith was, when the damned began to tear his flesh and feed on his very body.

  Father Bagrowski began to doubt deeply in his loving God.

  War. Murder. Terrorism. Poverty. Famine. Children dying. So called natural disasters wherever one turned. What sort of loving God inflicted these miseries upon His children?

  He did not know.

  He lifted up a hand and removed his collar. Maybe his doubts in God were true, and maybe they were the work of dark powers attempting to trick him away from the Lord’s loving embrace. Father Bagrowski didn’t know. But for now, he was no longer worthy of wearing that collar, the symbol of faith. Maybe he never would be again.

  Father Bagrowski picked up his desk chair and threw it through the window. The glass exploded outwards with a shriek. He cleared the errant shards of glass and then climbed down out through the window and into his garden. The cathedral garage lay across the courtyard. He would take one of the Church’s cars and leave. Fleeing into the night. Fleeing from his terror and his doubt. Fleeing before the devil himself. The fists pounding on the door followed the ex-priest as he ran.

  He would find other survivors in this holy war between Heaven and Hell and he would offer them his services. He may no longer have the God-bestowed strength gifted by his faith, but he was still a man who possessed talents and skills that would be needed and could be put to use.

  She left Claude alone in the dark office, with a cold towel across his face. He would be needing some rest. She shut the door behind her as she left, making sure to listen for the click as it latched into place. The door had a tendency not to close completely. Mary returned to the front desk. Diane was looking more terrified than she had when Mary and Claude left. Jeffery was leaning over the desk towards her and Mary guessed what had been going on even before she heard him speak. He had been trying to scare her. Don’t that just beat all, the little rat.

  Had she not treated the bite wound herself, Mary would have slapped him upside the head for the prank. She still might. But she wanted to be sure first. She kept on coming back to the bite wound. It was still a disturbing notion that Mr. Anderson had bitten Claude.

  She grabbed Jeffery by the earlobe. Stopping herself before she did any real harm took almost all of her frayed and battered will power. But she managed.

  “Come on you little rat,” she said to Jeffery as she pulled him over towards the elevator that traveled to the basement where the morgue was located. He protested loudly, switching between yelping about the pain and that he hadn’t done anything to deserve the title of rat, or the physical abuse. Mary disagreed with his vocal and whiney protestations so she twisted his ear a bit to get him moving more quickly.

  There were only two ways into the basement and to the morgue. The freight elevator and a stairway right next to it. Mary chose the elevator that morning. It had been a long night and she didn’t feel like walking down any more stairs than was purely necessary.

  It was a doublewide freight elevator, and was the only elevator in the building that lead to the basement of the complex. The administration building had it’s own elevator, though technically it didn’t lead to this basement, the two just had a tunnel running between.

  She closed the gate pressed the button with the capital ‘B’ on it and down they went.

  “You sure ya wanna do this ma’am?” Jeffery asked? He was fiddling with the large tubular flashlight that all of the maintenance workers and orderlies carried around. Those flashlights had been the cause of yet another widely publicized scandal around one their sister facilities out east a couple years before. Video had been taken of one of the orderlies brutally beating one of the patients with the flashlight. A furor had arisen and the lawmakers had demanded that all the flashlights be replaced with smaller models. Idiots. Rather than fixing the real problem, the abusive scum who had committed the crime, they had instead wasted everyone’s time and money with a stupid and pointless measure. The most infuriating part was that though the measure passed, they didn’t supply any money to purchase new flashlights. Since the homes were run by the state rather than private institutions, the state was required to fund any demanded changes. A bunch of useless blow-hards.

  “Want to do this? What sort of question is that? It’s our job to take care of these people. If Mr. Anderson is down here and biting people, then he’s ill and in need out our assistance. Now show me where he’s at!” The lights were flickering a bit. The ones that worked at least. They usually did in the damp of the basements. It didn’t help that they were neglected due to the fact that neither outsiders nor the administrators visited the any of the sub-levels in the nursing home complex. Like with the inhabitants above, the unseen parts of the building suffered a painful neglect. There was so little money in their budget, that such things were allowed to slide.

  Better than half of the florescent lights were usually out at any given time. Today it was worse than usual, leaving much of the box-laden hallway concealed in shadows. She rummaged in her purse for a moment, standing in the elevator with Jeffery, until she found what she was looking for, her small flashlight. She flicked the switch and the light came on. She flashed the light up into her own face to check the power, or lack there of. The flashlight was a dimmer reflection of the corridor that it had been meant to brighten. She was dismayed, recalling that it had been a couple years or more since she had last used the light, and its demise shouldn’t be much of a shock.

  There was a rhythmic dripping sound, as droplets of water fell from where they had condensed on the pipes overhead and onto puddles of water on the floors below. The water made the floors a bit slippery. Which was only a major worry for anyone who was goofing around and running when they should be walking. The only other noise, aside from the whimpers the Jeffery was admitting. Was the constant low muffled rumble from the furnace. Honestly, he was a grown man, he should know when he was talking a joke a bit too far.

  The basement ran nearly the full length of the building, though half of the total area was sectioned off for use as an underground garage and storage facility. The rest of the available space was divided up between the morgue and several unused offices that had been converted into more storage facilities for old documents. The furnace and air conditioning equipment took the final quarter.

  Th
e elevator opened up into the main corridor, giving Mary the choice of left or right. The morgue was on their right. She grabbed Jeffery as he was sidling off to the left and towards the stairs back up to the ground floor and led him down to the double doors that marked the morgue entrance. He turned on his own flashlight in an attempt to chase away some of the gloom.

  “Well?” Mary asked, standing outside of the morgue and looking in through the small windows imbedded in the doors. She didn’t see much. Only the emergency lights were on, a power saving feature installed by the administrators. One of their few good ideas Mary thought. Anything that saved money and didn’t detract from the wellbeing of the residents or the staff was usually a good idea in her opinion. For the most part anyway.

  The rest of the switches were on the wall on the other side of the door. The emergency lights made the interior of the morgue seem even dimmer than the hallway. Mary had Jeffery shine his light into the room. The beam illuminating a scant bit more than they could see without it.

  She was just about to open the doors and step through, when Jeffery actually grabbed her shoulder, and shook his head, telling her “N-n-no, you don’t want to go in there. Just wait, please just wait.” He wasn’t telling her. He was ordering her. She found herself confused and rather annoyed. His story was made so very convincing with the addition of the stutter. But he was trying to order her around. She knew that he had taken acting courses during his so very brief stint at college, but she hadn’t known that he was such a natural. It made her wonder for the first time why he was working at a state run old folks home and not off in Hollywood somewhere making the world fall in love with the characters he portrayed.

  What would she do when she found out that this was all just a hoax. First she would kill a couple of idiots with her bare hands, and then she would skin them, and then kill them all over again. Before spilling her wrath on the individuals who had helped with the hoax. Mary was just too damn worn out to waste time with all this nonsense.

  There was nothing in there. No bodies, nothing. To be seen. Mary made herself unclench her fist before she decked Jeffery for his part in the joke. She turned to the man, and was momentarily taken aback by the confused expression that he was wearing just before he pushed his face to the glass. She was about to tell him that he was taking it all too far when he yelped and pointed his finger, slamming it into the glass in his excitement.

  Mary peered into the gloom, tracing through the space and following the direction that he indicated with his finger. There was nothing… something was moving inside the morgue. The shape was shuffling around at the very edge of the light. Whispers of movement could be seen. A few fingers, or a flutter of sheet crossing out of the curtain of darkness and then disappearing back into the shadows. Mary gasped, there was more than one something and they seemed to be approaching the door.

  “That’s not possible! They were dead!” Jeffery roared as one of the shapes stepped completely into the light. He screamed a high-pitched, girlish scream and then lost his grip on the flashlight, letting it tumble from his hand as he turned from the morgue and bolted back down the hallway from where they had come.

  The tube of the flashlight hit the floor with a loud clatter and went out. Mary gaped at Jeffery as he fled in what had been blind terror. She tried to call him back as he ran screaming down the hall. She followed the sound of his feet flapping through the puddles of water that covered the floor as he passed through the sickly cones of light, into the darkness and back again. Weaving almost gracefully through the box-heavy pallets that lined the walls of the hallway.

  The last she saw of him was when he took a hard left into the stairwell, grunted as he slammed into the far wall and then bounded up the stairs, leaving the hallway resonating with his footfalls.

  Mary picked up the flashlight and tested it. It still worked, though it seemed to have come down with a lesser case the same terrible affliction suffered by the basement lights. Mary put the light into the window. The shapes were still moving inside, and they seemed to get closer. Her breath caught as she looked. Maybe it had all just been a huge misunderstanding. Perhaps their equipment was faulty. That was far more believable than the dead rising and biting people. There was only one course of action she could take, though her feet seemed to have become cemented to the floor. Mary extended her hand to open the door, willing her feet to move. It was a full minute before they finally responded, and then only slowly with baby steps at first.

  She pushed open the door, her flashlight in hand and sputtering like a giant lightning bug.

  She could hear the sounds of bare feet padding and scraping along the concrete floor of the morgue, a floor that was painted smooth, but still cold and rough and hard on the flesh. The poor dears, left down in the dank chill. They would truly catch their death if she didn’t do something quickly. Especially since they were still down with that nasty bout of the flu.

  Mary fumbled for the light switches with her free hand, patting along the wall. She could never remember exactly where they were and had to search them out every time she came. The steps getting closer. She called out into the dark as she searched the wall for the switches, wondering why she hadn’t found them yet. Jeffery and Claude’s joke must have gotten to her further than she expected to rattle her so. “Mr. Anderson? Mrs. Sales? Are you two OK?”

  There was no answer, beyond the sound of feet sliding across the floor, nearer this time. Three different sets of feet it sounded like. Mary began to worry. It wasn’t like Mr. Anderson to remain silent for so long. Or Mrs. Sales either, defiantly not Mrs. Sales, she should be cussing a blue streak by now about being left alone in the dark in the damp and cold basement. The woman was not one to take such treatment, ‘abuse’ as she called it. Maybe in this one case she was right.

  She realized that it wasn’t like either of them to walk around in a dark basement, let alone anywhere else. Neither of them could walk around without the aid of a walker for more than a few feet at a time. They had been moving about since she had stepped through the door at the very least.

  Her brain screamed down to her that the sounds must have not been coming from her patients. Jeffery and Claude had had her on. They had made up some stupid story and gotten some others along with it. Dianne too probably. She felt fury rise up in her, making her stomach and heart burn like the giant furnace in the far corner of the building. Oh she was going to club the lot of them. And then they would be looking for different jobs, assuming that they survived her righteous wrath. They had all gone too far this time, way too far. She had even notified the next of kin. Mary squeezed the flashlight, wringing it with her hand as if it were Jeffery’s scrawny neck. Mary looked back out the window, expecting to see Claude and Jeffery and perhaps even Diane pointing and laughing. The hall was still dark and empty.

  Her wandering hand finally found the switches and flicked them on, the overhead lamps stuttering awake after such a long sleep, throwing the room into a bright, neutral and unflattering light. Mary gasped again as her eyes finally adjusted to the newfound brightness. Mr. Anderson was standing, actually standing, ten feet out in front of her and off to her right. Mrs. Sales was a few feet behind him and on his right a bit. And Mr. Gunderson, a man who suffered a debilitating case of emphysema.

  They were walking, all three of them. It was a miracle, by God, a miracle. They were looking at her. The logical half her mind called out that this was impossible, but it was shushed by the rest of her, who was happy to see these people up and on their feet, even under these conditions. They stumbled forward towards her, and Mary stepped forward to help them.

  Her mind locked her feet again. Something was wrong. With how they moved. How they looked. Mary peered forward, examining her friends and patients more thoroughly. Their skin had taken a sickly pallid tone. Something else nagged at her.

  They weren’t breathing.

  She recoiled at the unnaturalness of the
entire situation. Three walking human beings, who shouldn’t be walking and who should be breathing. They should be talking to her. Saying something, anything at all, that guy on TV is so nice, hi cutie, my dinner was burnt again you stupid mongrel bitch. The silence just made it that much more unnatural. They remained silent. They got closer.

  Mary could see Claude’s dried blood on Mr. Anderson’s face, covering his lips. She could clearly see where it had run down his chin and dribbled onto his shirt.

  He anger about the hoax disappeared by the sudden revelation that Jeffery and Claude had actually been telling her the truth. If he had bit Claude…

  Mary held the flashlight out in front of her. Mr. Anderson was less than five feet away distant now, and reaching out for her, his mouth hanging open. If he had been alive, she would have expected him to be drooling too.

  Jeffery was a big man. And if he hit Mr. Anderson with a full punch to the face, without phasing him at all, what was she going to do? She would fight these unnatural creatures. But what would that get her?

  She swung the flashlight as hard as she could at one of his hands, trying to ward him off with a little pain. It connected and there was a crunching sound as some of the fragile bones in his frail body shattered under the blow. He seemed not to notice, where he should have been screaming in agony.

  Maybe, she should leave, she decided. Too late. He was on her, reaching for her, trying to bite, pushing her back towards the door, trying to pin her with all the weight he could muster his feather frame. The next few seconds were all an indistinct blur. She pushed him back, keeping her hand and arm away from his mouth, swatting away his probing hands. Mary struck the dear sweet old man again. And again. This time on the head and face. Repeatedly. Finally he fell to the floor, and stopped moving.

  Panting, Mary had noticed that she had lost control of her bladder as a warm spot began to spread down her pant legs. She looked down at Mr. Anderson’s lifeless body and wondered what she had actually done. More movement. Mrs. Sales and Mr. Gunderson were getting closer. They didn’t even glance at Mr. Anderson.

  Something was really wrong.

  Mary put her empty hand back towards the doorknob, found it, and gave it a turn. In one graceful movement, that would of surprised people who didn’t know her, she opened the door, turned and ran out following the path that Jeffery had blazed only a few minutes before.

  She had killed Mr. Anderson. Or had it been Mr. Anderson at all? Confusion, panic, and self-loathing all mixed together, crowding her mind and fogging it. Weaving through the boxes at full speed, she slipped and crashed down onto one of the pallets. The flashlight flew from her hand, bouncing off of the wall before crashing to the floor and going out for good as it rolled off into the shadows.

  Mary lay there for a moment or two. Her heart was pounding, she felt as if it was almost about to give way and burst. The confusion and panic drained away leaving some of the self-loathing that was quickly replaced by fear. Anxiety. She remembered that there were a lot of people who had been struck with the same horrendous plague as the three who were now stuck in the morgue. There might be more of those things walking around her facility, attacking her poor defenseless people.

  Behind her came a thumping noise, fists falling on a metal door, some times on the pane of glass. It was rhythmic almost. And puzzling. Why pound on the door? Why didn’t they just open it and follow her?

  Mary pushed herself up off the boxes and onto her feet. The boxes had seen better days, most of the ones that had come before her falling on them. But then, so had she. She hobbled her way back to the elevator, there was no way she was going to mount those stairs in her current condition. Before closing the elevator door behind her, she stopped for a moment to note the bit of blood on the wall where Jeffery had struck his head during his blind flight down the slippery hallway. Wherever he went, he was probably in pretty bad shape, as he must have hit hard to leave any amount of blood behind.

  She closed the gate behind her again and selected the button for the main floor.

  The elevator came to a stop, and she lifted the gate and opened the door. Stepping out of the elevator, she thanked God that most of the sick had been separated from the healthy early on in a seemingly futile attempt to keep the illness from spreading. If what had happened to Mr. Anderson and the other two was related.

  She didn’t want to think any further along those lines. What would come, if she were to assess those dark and frightening notions, was quite possibly maddening. Instead she would work, and fight that which she wasn’t able to bring herself to fully understand.

  Back to the front desk. The very heart and never center of their entire operation. She would need to marshal her forces. Big Mary would be damned if she was going to lose this war, whatever it was, without a fight. She was going to save as many of these wonderful, sorrowful people as she could, and maybe, God willing, a few more.

  A trio of battered heavy-duty hand me down trucks blocked each side of median running through the center of northern freeway that ran through the very core of Jefferson, the state’s largest city. The reserve unit had taken a position underneath one of the many overpasses that crossed the highway. The highway was just one in the vast the network of paved arteries allowed the human lifeblood of a civilization to flow through the body and keep the town alive. If that comparison was accurate, then he was currently resting on the aorta for this entire city. In light of the day’s work, it was a bloody and queasy image to have in mind.

  The olive drab trucks were old, at least two decades, but serviceable still, much thanks to the fine mechanics who spent hours each week keeping the damned things from breaking down and bursting into flames. The trucks had been given to his unit by the Army, after the Army had gotten newer and fancier vehicles, and grown tired of keeping around the dull green diesel monsters with their canvas tops in fair condition. The trucks were nearly antiques, or museum pieces, a stubborn part of a bygone era.

  The same could be said for the machineguns in the back of each of the six trucks. M60s, hailing from the 1970s. They were good solid weapons, much like the trucks. Each of the six guns had seen action in Vietnam. There, while attached to the air cavalry, they had been blooded and transformed from complex machines into killing tools. The weapons had also developed their own personalities and quirks, which his company was still trying to figure out.

  The crews manning the guns in the back of the six trucks were waiting for anyone to defy the declaration of martial law and approach the roadblocks. Their orders were to prevent the spread of this new plague by all means necessary. Ash didn’t know quite what that meant, but he guessed that it involved mowing down civilians with the heavy weapons.

  People were getting sick, and they were here to keep them in one place. But the army didn’t give them any those paper facemasks to keep the soldiers from catching whatever was going around.

  Here they sat though, blocking the road, and making sure that nobody either entered or left Jefferson. His entire reserve unit had been called up only the night before and had been deployed to help deal with a crisis that none of them entirely understood. In the few hours that they had been on duty, his unit had already encountered a few people both attempting to flee from and to gain entrance to Jefferson. The lieutenant said that they had orders to use deadly force if necessary. Thankfully those incidents had passed without bloodshed when the civilians turned around and went back to where they had come from.

  They were part of a company of reserve engineers. Which was a fancy way to say ditch-digging weekend-warriors. His platoon wasn’t trained for combat, even something as simple as guarding a roadblock against largely unarmed civilians. So far most of their training sessions had ended up as drag races using the bulldozers and having the lieutenant yell at them for being a bunch of fuckups.

  Killing Americans was NOT what he had signed on for. Ash, like several of his friends from home, had joined up b
ecause they promised money for school. He got like $10,000 in cash to sign on with the reserves. He used some of that to go to the community college near his folks’ home. That didn’t last long. College was even more boring than high school had been, and he had to fucking pay for it too! Not him Jack. He took the rest of that fat stack of cash and dropped it on a wicked sound system for the GTO that he and his dad were restoring. Fucking thing sounded awesome.

  Ash took what little money he had left and went to a tech school instead, and learned about automobile mechanics. He loved cars and working on them. He had done so since he was a kid in his father’s garage. All he needed was certification, and he was golden. Right now, he was waiting to find a job somewhere and get out of the lousy Quicklube shop and get a real job.

  Playing soldier a few weekends a year was a lot of fun, going out into the woods, dressing up in the smart fatigues and shooting off guns was a blast. It beat the hell working forty hours a week at Burger King, like he had during high school. Mostly. Shooting civilians though? He like playing soldier some times, just not that kind of soldier.

  Shooting people was just not his thing. Video games and paint ball matches of capture the flag aside. But with real blood and gaping wounds? He had seen Saving Private Ryan in the theatres with his unit back when it came out. Ash had only lasted about fifteen minutes into the beach-landing scene before he had to get the hell out of the theatre or risk puking in his own lap. The movie left him feeling ill for hours afterwards. Only a couple of the guys gave him any trouble for it. Most of the rest told him that he had the right idea.

  He adjusted his helmet. The damn thing was heavy. With all the cool space aged materials and shit that the Army was always boasting about, that they could come up with a helmet that didn’t feel like it weighed a ton whenever he strapped it on. He so wanted to take the damned thing off, it was killing his neck, but Sarge had told them, though the Sarge was looking straight at Ash when he said it, that the helmets were mandatory and that every soldier was required to wear it while on the line. He punctuated it with a “And that goes for you too Private James, so don’t even open your smart assed mouth.” Ash didn’t. He wasn’t that stupid.

  He tried to ignore the helmet taking his mind of the weight and inspecting his rifle. Another hand me down from big brother army. Could have been the very same rifle that his dad had used in Nam in the early 70s when he was stationed there in the Air-Calv, Judy he had named it. After his girlfriend back in the states. The girl dumped him half-way through his first tour. He then stayed on for a second. His dad had wild stories to tell of the time that he and Judy had taken on the V.C., often single-handed and at night. Ever the winner, always out numbered, and usually low on ammo.

  As a kid, Ash had loved to listen to his father’s stories, though he noted that they had grown in scope and bluster over the years. The time that he had come across the lone sniper waiting for his squad was magically transformed to company of regulars with tanks and bazookas and everything. The story got a lot cooler to hear, but man Ash wondered if his dad was just completely full of shit.

  Didn’t help much that the stories were usually told when his dad was drunk. Which honestly happened a lot, until he had gotten to high school and his mom had threatened to take the kids leave him. Ash didn’t get to hear the stories any more, which bummed him out for a long time, but life at home had gotten a lot better when his dad had cleaned up and got a job. Odd though that he was only noticing this now. Well Sarge always said that he needed to think more, and that was what he was doin now.

  Despite her age, the rifle was still a solid weapon that had been retooled a couple times to fix the all the crap that had come up with the gun as everyone realized how busted the M-16s were. Dumb ass officers and generals needed to pull their heads out of their asses some time. Still, the rifle was still buggy. Weird problems, like the thing would jam if he didn’t take the first round out of the magazine, the whole damned thing would jam after like the third shot. Every time. Didn’t matter what kind of magazines he used. Twenty rounds or thirty. Fucking annoying. And it was only his rifle that had that problem. Sarge got one that was brand new and out of the box. So did the lieutenant. While the grunts all had to make due with antique shit. The lieutenant almost never fired his rifle anyway, why did he need a new one?

  One weekend a month and two weeks a year his left nut!

  A burst from one of the M60s drew his eyes away from Judy. The rifle in his hands now might not have been the weapon that his dad had carried, but he gave it the same name anyways. It felt lucky for some reason. His dad had survived two tours in Nam carrying Judy. He hoped to be as lucky as his old man. Ash stood up, rifle in hand. Fighting the helmet as the damn thing tried to drag him backwards and to the ground again. He swore that the thing was made of lead. Sarge often said that for a big man, he sure had a weak neck.

  The lieutenant’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “This city has been quarantined. Turn around and go back the way you came. Ash stood up. There was a line of like twenty cars approaching their position. They weren’t coming to a halt. The lieutenant yelled his same orders again over the loudspeaker, waiting like a minute for them to stop before calling on the machinegun crews to open fire.

  The tree M60s hesitated for a moment and then opened up. Shattering glass and bone. The report of the bursts were echoing through the concrete canyon that the roadblock had been set up in, bouncing off the bridge overhead. Ash threw his hands over his ears to keep himself from going deaf as bullets pinged off the concrete all around the caravan. Half a minute, and it was all over. The caravan had come to a halt, with the folks in the car screaming in pain, the ones that lived. A car horn was blaring, Ash didn’t know whether the horn had been hit by a bullet, or if the driver was leaning on the button, but either way, he wanted it to stop right now.

  They had done it, they had actually opened fire on and killed American civilians! What the fuck? Ash found himself trembling where he stood. Feeling green again and ready to puke. He breathed deeply and looked away, remembering what Sarge had told him about nausea.

  Ash stood trembling on the street, the weight of the helmet forgotten completely in the aftermath of the massacre. A strong hand enclosed on his shoulder. “What the hell is your malfunction private James?” It was the Sarge. The Sarge was a large man. He was probably about twice the size of Ash. He was also old, like in his late fifties or early sixties. He had a graying moustache, neatly cut to regulation shape and size. That was the Sarge. Regulation all the way. Even in the reserves. He was a giant pain in the ass, especially if he caught you goofing off or something and gave you a kick to the backside to set you straight.

  “I dunno sir. This is the first time I’ve seen killing. And we killed Americans.”

  “I know what you mean kid. But it’s our duty to protect America.”

  “By killing civilians sir?”

  “We have to keep this thing under wraps, so that it doesn’t spread any more than it already has.” Sarge’s statement made sense, in that painful way that you had to sometimes cut off a infected leg to save the patient.

  “If the entire city of Jefferson was sick like he said, then why didn’t they just bomb it?”

  “You want to actually think it all over for a minute private? What if they come up with a cure? If we go and bomb one of our major cities, and then find a cure, then we’re going to look pretty damn stupid won’t we?”

  “But how are we gonna actually keep everyone in the city? There are hundreds of roads into and out of the town. We can’t watch them all!” Ash had come from one of the suburbs. His folks still lived in the house where he had grown up. His sister and her kids live just down the street. Ash knew the place like the back of his own hand. There was no way that the National Guard and Reserves were going to keep this place locked down, drained as they were, without the support of the army. And with most of the army
over seas, fucking around with Congress’ circle jerk. They were fucked. Fuck.

  “We’ll let the brass worry about that. All we need to worry about is this here road, our little piece of the game. So focus private, keep your head on.”

  “Will do sir.” He said, adding a little dig.

  “Don’t sir me you little rat bastard,” the Sergeant growled as he walked away. In every war movie Ash had ever seen, Sergeants seemed to always hate being called sir. It was what you called an officer, not an NCO. For the most part, in basic and elsewhere, that had always been false. Most sergeants didn’t mind being called sir, as long as you listened and did what they said. Some even liked it. Their platoon sergeant was spot on for all those movie sergeants. Maybe Sarge had seen all those movies too.

  Sarge was a career soldier, who retired and then joined up with the reserves because he needed something to do. Too much time at home with the missus, he would say with a nudge and a wink. Like Ash was supposed to get the joke. Ash had never been married, but he had seen his parents, who were still together, amazingly, so maybe he kind of did get the joke. He wondered if his dad had ever thought of rejoining to get away from time to time.

  The lieutenant recorded his message and set it to play through the loudspeakers over and over. After a time, Ash covered his ears with his hands to try and block the noise out before it drove him crazy. The thought tugged at him. What kinda disease was so God awful that the government would want to kill its own people rather than to let it spread? And why the hell was he still here?

  A single shot rang out. Not one of the M60s, but a sidearm. Ash got up off the ground, pushing himself away from the tire that he had been leaning on to see what was happening.

  The lieutenant had shot a man. Grover of second squad it looked like. Grover got his name cause he was a total muppet. Not one of those cute furry puppet guys that his niece and nephew loved from Sesame Street, but a stupid human being that kinda walked and talked real unnatural like. Blank, empty eyes and everything. Grover was dumb. He even made Ash feel smart some times. The man had washed out of the real army and ended up working in a car wash and joining the reserves so he could play make believe with a gun. Except, they wouldn’t usually issue the man a gun.

  Now he was dead, and the lieutenant had killed him. Not only were they killing the people that they swore to protect, they were killing each other.

  Maybe the fucking disease made you crazy. And you got all paranoid and shit before you started to turn on each other. Ash looked around out of the corners of his eyes, wondering if they were all asking themselves the same question. He was glad that he had brought along Judy. Some of the others left their rifles leaning against the trucks.

  “What happened to that dummy?” Ash asked.

  Sarge turned to him, and the whole platoon as they stood watching in silence, “The idiot went mental, and tried to run, disobeying a direct order from the lieutenant.”

  “What freaked him out?” It was Cervantes, the only chick in the group. Though she didn’t seem to know that she was a chick. She was badder-assed than anyone but Sarge. She was a corporal in the second squad in the reserves and a bricklayer out in the real world. A real lesbo. Ash didn’t mind though, they traded pictures of hot women and talked about tits.

  “That doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we follow our orders and keep this roadblock up and the quarantine in place until relieved.”

  Grover had always been dumb. Only it looked like Grover wasn’t as dumb as he had seemed. He had figured out the whole situation with the plague and tried to get the fuck out well before Ash had. Made Ash feel a bit stupider after all. And more frightened. He had known that this was serious. But they were only the reserves. To have the lieutenant actually shoot someone who was trying to run away was just unbelievable. Ash couldn’t make himself understand it all.

  “Clean this mess up. Make sure you strip his gear. We might need it.” The lieutenant ordered. Sarge had a couple of privates, Hicks and Hudson from first squad, who were standing around and gawking at the body, drag it off and toss it into the high grass off the side of the highway.