Till The World Ends: Dawn of Eden / Thistle & Thorne / Sun Storm
Julie Kagawa
Ann Aguirre
Karen Duvall
Imagine what it takes to survive in a world where everything you know— and love—is about to disappear…forever.DAWN OF EDEN BY JULIE KAGAWA Before The Immortal Rules, there was Red Lung, a relentless virus determined to take out all in its path. For Kylie, the miracle of her survival is also her burden—as a doctor at one of the clinics for the infected, she is forced to witness endless suffering. What’s worse, strange things are happening to the remains of the dead, and by the time she befriends Ben Archer, she’s beginning to wonder if a global pandemic is the least of her problems….THISTLE & THORNE BY ANN AGUIRRE After a catastrophic spill turns the country into a vast chemical wasteland, those who could afford it retreated to fortresses, self-contained communities run by powerful corporations. But for Mari Thistle, life on the outside—in the Red Zone—is a constant struggle. To protect her family, Mari teams up with the mysterious Thorne Goodman. Together, they’ll face an evil plot in both the underworld of the Red Zone and the society inside the fortresses that could destroy those on the outside…for good.SUN STORM BY KAREN DUVALL Sarah Daggot has been chasing storms since she was a child. But after the biggest solar flares in history nearly destroy the planet, she becomes a Kinetic, endowed by her exposure to extreme radiation with the power to sense coming storms—in the cosmos and beyond. And she’s not the only one. Sarah believes the Kinetics are destined to join forces and halt the final onslaught of the sun. She’ll vow to keep trying to convince the one missing link in their chain of defence, the enigmatic Ian Matthews, up until the world ends.FEATURING A PREQUEL TO THE IMMORTAL RULES BY JULIE KAGAWA‘Katniss Everdeen better watch out.’– Huffington Post onT he Immortal Rules'Julie Kagawa is one killer storyteller.’—MTV
Dawn of Eden by Julie Kagawa
Before The Immortal Rules, there was the Red Lung, a relentless virus determined to take out all in its path. For Kylie, the miracle of her survival is also her burden—as a doctor at one of the clinics for the infected, she is forced to witness endless suffering. What’s worse, strange things are happening to the remains of the dead, and by the time she befriends Ben Archer, she’s beginning to wonder if a global pandemic is the least of her problems….
Thistle & Thorne by Ann Aguirre
After a catastrophic spill turns the country into a vast chemical wasteland, those who could afford it retreated to fortresses, self-contained communities run by powerful corporations. But for Mari Thistle, life on the outside—in the Red Zone—is a constant struggle. To protect her family, Mari teams up with the mysterious Thorne Goodman. Together, they’ll face an evil plot in both the underworld of the Red Zone and the society inside the fortresses that could destroy those on the outside…for good.
Sun Storm by Karen Duvall
Sarah Daggot has been chasing storms since she was a child. But after the biggest solar flares in history nearly destroy the planet, she becomes a Kinetic, endowed by her exposure to extreme radiation with the power to sense coming storms—in the cosmos and beyond. And she’s not the only one. Sarah believes the Kinetics are destined to join forces and halt the final onslaught of the sun. She’ll vow to keep trying to convince the one missing link in their chain of defense, the enigmatic Ian Matthews, up until the world ends.
Praise for the authors of
’Til the World Ends
Julie Kagawa
“Kagawa wraps excellent writing and skillful plotting around a
well-developed concept and engaging characters, resulting in a
fresh and imaginative thrill-ride that deserves a wide audience.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Immortal Rules, starred review
“Kagawa has done the seemingly impossible and written
a vampire book…that feels fresh in an otherwise crowded genre.
Mix[ing] paranormal and dystopian tropes to good effect,
creating a world that will appeal across audiences.”
—Kirkus Reviews on The Immortal Rules
“Julie Kagawa is one killer storyteller.”
—MTV’s Hollywood Crush blog
Ann Aguirre
“A gripping survival story set in an apocalyptic future…. This is a
tense, action-packed dystopia with intriguingly gray characters.”
—Booklist on Enclave
“A dark, haunting read.... Ann Aguirre has me hooked!”
—New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter on Enclave
“The world Ann Aguirre has created is a roller-coaster ride to remember.”
— #1 New York Times bestselling author Christine Feehan
on the Sirantha Jax series
Karen Duvall
“Rich with action, romance, and sensory overload, the story goes places I never expected and delighted me every step of the way. Duvall is a writer to watch for!”
—C.E. Murphy on Knight’s Curse
“Magic, mystery, and mayhem—Knight’s Curse by Karen Duvall dares to tread where others have not.”
—Deb Stover, Colorado Book Award and Dorothy Parker Award winner for Another Dawn
“Duvall’s heroine is an endearing mixed bag of coiled emotions, and the other characters are a collection of good and evil that readers will want to know more about.”
—RT Book Reviews on Knight’s Curse
’Till the World Ends
Julie Kagawa, Ann Aguirre, Karen Duvall
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Contents
Dawn of Eden (#u2048fbf1-b0f3-5cb7-9554-fb000b095b1e)
Thistle & Thorne (#litres_trial_promo)
Sun Storm (#litres_trial_promo)
Dawn of Eden
Julie Kagawa
Contents
Chapter One (#u8f6c68bd-04b4-5bd8-ae62-c0163776defe)
Chapter Two (#u73147b1e-51c6-5a76-8220-261c84d9d3ea)
Chapter Three (#u5cfee4a8-e721-5908-8673-f1f15f9176fd)
Chapter Four (#u8a097849-95db-5b8a-8de4-1c4afdc92f44)
Chapter Five (#u74f500c6-de6e-5e5e-abcc-a7a43db085bb)
Chapter Six (#u912b2614-12fe-5797-b8f6-be3c544b16c9)
Chapter Seven (#u8911e07e-8da0-5dd0-b8bd-fcdf899bd899)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
In the summer of my twenty-third year, the Red Lung virus began its spread across the eastern United States. Flulike symptoms evolved to raging fever, necrosis of the lungs and finally asphyxiation, as victims choked and drowned in their own blood. By the time government officials knew anything was wrong, the virus had already made its way overseas and was rapidly decimating Europe and parts of Asia, with no signs of slowing down. A worldwide emergency was called; towns had been emptied, cities lay in ruins and the virus continued its deadly march toward human extinction.
We thought Red Lung was as bad as it could get.
We were wrong.
* * *
“Kylie! It’s Mr. Johnson!”
I spun from Ms. Sawyer’s cot, nearly beaning Maggie in the nose as I whirled around. The intern looked frantic, her eyes wide over her mask, her face pale as she pointed to a cot along the far wall. Two masked interns were struggling with the body of a middle-aged man who was spasming and coughing violently, trying to throw them off. Blood flecked his lips, spattered in vivid patterns across his sheets and hospital robes. His mouth gaped, trying to suck in air, and his breathing tube lay on the ground in a pool of blood and saliva.
I rushed over, snatching a syringe from my lab coat and dodging the intern, who stumbled back as the man flailed. Grabbing the patient’s arm, I threw my weight against him, which didn’t do much as Mr. Johnson was a big guy and frantic, and I weighed about one hundred ten sopping wet.
“Hold him down!” I called to Eric, the intern who’d been flung back, and he pounced on the man again. Blood streamed from the man’s nose and flew in arcing ribbons across the bed as he coughed and flailed. I uncapped the syringe and plunged it into his arm, injecting eight mms of morphine into his veins.
Gradually, his struggles ceased. His eyes rolled back, and his head lolled to the side as he passed into unconsciousness.
At this stage of the infection, he would probably never wake up.
I sighed and brushed away a strand of ash-blond hair that had come loose from my clip during my struggles with Mr. Johnson. My hand came away sticky with blood, but I was so used to that now, I barely noticed. “Keep an eye on him,” I told Eric and the other intern, Jenna, who looked on with weary, hooded eyes. “Let me know if there’s any change, or if he wakes up.”
Jen nodded, but Eric made a disgusted sound and shook his head, his dark curls bouncing.
“He’s not going to wake up,” he said, voicing the fact that everyone knew but was too numb to think about. “We’ve seen this a thousand times, now.” He turned accusing eyes on me, gesturing at the unconscious patient. Though he slept now, we could hear the gurgling in his throat and lungs, the rasp of air through a rapidly flooding windpipe. “Why did you even waste a shot of morphine on him? We’re almost out, and it could’ve been used on someone who has a chance. Why not put the poor bastard out of his misery?”
“Keep your voice down,” I said in a cool, even tone, giving him a hard glare. Around us, our patients coughed or slept fitfully, too drug-addled to really understand what we said, but they weren’t deaf. And the other interns were watching. They were just as discouraged and frightened and exhausted, but I could not show weakness, especially now.
“It’s not our place to say who lives or dies,” I said quietly, looking at Eric but speaking to all of them. “We have a responsibility to these people, to fight for them. To not give up. That’s why we set up this clinic, even though all the hospitals in the city have probably shut down by now. We can still help, and we will not abandon them.”
“You’re crazy.” Eric finally looked up at me, his face bleak. “This is crazy, Kylie. Everyone is gone, even Doc Adams, and he set this whole place up. You might not want to accept it, but it’s time to face facts.” He nodded at Maggie and Jen on the other side of the bed. “This is futile. We’re the only ones left, and we can’t save anyone. We lost. It’s time to throw in the towel.”
“No.” My voice came out flat, cold. “This isn’t a stupid boxing match. These are people’s lives. I’m not going to abandon them. Even if I can only give them a peaceful last few days, that’s better than doing nothing.” Eric snorted, and I stared him down. “But I’m not keeping you here.” I pointed past him at the entrance to the makeshift clinic, the opening covered with plastic strips. “You can walk out anytime. If you want to leave, there’s the door.”
He glared at me before he reached up and tugged down his mask. I could see the grim line of his mouth and jaw, and my heart sank, but I kept my expression calm.
“You expect miracles,” he said, taking a step back. Glancing around the small, cloth-walled room, the patients huddled beneath the bloodstained sheets, he shook his head. “You can stay here until the city crumbles around you, and the stink of dead bodies makes your insides rot. You might not have a family, but I haven’t seen mine in weeks, and I don’t even know if they’re still alive.” His face crumpled with worry and fear, and I felt a stab of guilt before he curled a lip and sneered at me. “So you stay here with your cadavers and the virus until one of them kills you. I’m done.”
He spun on his heel and walked across the room, pushed through the door in a swoosh of plastic, and was gone.
I wanted, badly, to sink into a chair, to rub my tired eyes and even get a little sleep, but that wasn’t an option. Glancing at the two remaining interns, I gave them what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
“Maggie, go check on Ms. Sawyer,” I said, and she nodded, looking relieved to do something that didn’t involve large, violent patients. “Jen, why don’t you check the supplies, see what we have and what we’re running out of. I’ll keep an eye on Mr. Johnson.”
They hurried off, and I hoped I’d managed to hide the worry and constant strain of keeping this clinic alive, the despair that another had gone, given up, and the secret fear that he was right. I noted the hopeless slump of their shoulders, the exhausted way they carried themselves, and knew they wouldn’t last much longer, either.
* * *
Walking to our tiny operating room, I turned on the sink and ran my arms beneath the cold water, letting the dried blood swirl into the basin. I glanced up, and a thin, pale girl stared back at me from the mirror, blood speckling her face and streaked through her fine blond hair, which hadn’t been washed for days. Dark circles crouched beneath green eyes, the telltale marks of exhaustion, her cheeks gaunt and wasted.
“You look hideous,” I told my reflection, which nodded in agreement. “You’re going to have to sleep sometime or you’ll be fainting on the patients.”
But there was no time for rest, no time to take a break, especially now that Eric was gone. This small clinic, hastily set up on the edge of urban D.C., was the last hope for those infected with Red Lung, the virus that had decimated the city and turned the downtown area into a war zone. Makeshift clinics had been constructed around the city to help with the overwhelming number of sick, but it was never enough. As more people died and civilization broke down, chaos and riots had spread rapidly with nothing to stop them, the worst of mankind coming to the surface. All the other hospitals had closed down, the dead left to rot in their rooms, or laid out in rows in the parking lot. As the city had emptied, even the other clinics had begun to vanish, the doctors and staff either dying or giving up in despair. As far as I knew, this was one of the last, but there were still infected people out there, and they deserved some kind of hope. Even if it was very slim.
Splashing water on my face, I rubbed my tired eyes. Now, if I could just cling to a bit of that hope myself.
“Hello?” A deep voice cut through the beeping machinery and coughing of patients. “Anyone here?”
I jerked up. Hastily I dried my hands, scrubbed the towel over my face and hurried out to the main room.
Two strangers stood just inside the entrance flaps, both young men, one leaning on the other with an arm around his shoulders. I blinked in shock; the second man had on a stained white lab coat much like mine. He had light brown hair and glasses, and even across the room, I could see he was badly hurt; his shirt was torn, especially his sleeve, and his arm looked as if he’d stuck it in a meat grinder. The other was tall and broad-shouldered, holding his friend’s weight easily. His shirt and jeans were stained with blood, though I suspected it wasn’t his own. His gaze met mine, dark eyes appraising beneath a mess of short, mahogany-colored hair.
“Can you help us?” he asked, his voice rough with worry. “We saw this place from the road. Is there a doctor around?”
“I’m in charge,” I said, stepping forward. “But this is a quarantined zone. You can’t be here—you’ll both be exposed to the virus.”
“Please.” His brown eyes grew pleading, and he glanced down at his friend, who seemed barely conscious, hanging from his shoulders. “There’s nowhere else to go—the other hospitals are empty. He’ll die.”
I sighed and gave a brisk nod. “In here,” I ordered, and he followed me into the operating room, hefting his friend onto the table as gently as he could. The other moaned, delirious, and his arm flopped to the counter. His skin was flushed, feverish, his face tight with pain.
I cut away his shirt and coat, revealing an upper torso that was pale and slightly overweight, but he didn’t seem to be wounded anywhere else. I would examine him thoroughly later, but the arm was the most pressing concern. Gently, I lifted the mangled limb from the table to study it. Several torn, bloody holes ran up the limb from wrist to elbow. The flesh around the wounds was hot and puffy, deep punctures well on their way to infection.
“These are teeth marks,” I said, frowning at the strangely symmetrical patterns through the mess of blood and shredded skin. “What attacked him?”
“I don’t know.” The voice behind me was husky, evasive, but I wasn’t really listening. I studied the arm further, trying to match the bite patterns with what I’d seen before: dogs, cats, even a horse, once. Nothing fit.
Except...
“These...almost look like human bite marks.” But that wasn’t right, either, not with this type of deep puncture wound. The thing that had left these marks had long canines like a predator. Human teeth were not capable of this.
The stranger’s voice was stiff, uncomfortable. “Can you save him?”
“I’ll try.” Turning, I fixed the stranger with a firm stare. He gazed back, eyes hooded. “What is your relation to this man, Mr....?”
“Archer. Ben Archer. And we’re not related.” He nodded to the body on the table. “Nathan and I... I worked for him. He’s a friend.”
“All right, Mr. Archer. Not to be rude, but you can either help me or get out. I can’t be tripping over you every time I turn around. If you think you can take direction and do exactly as I tell you, you’re welcome to stay.”
He nodded. I pointed to the counter behind us. “Get some gloves on, then. This is going to be messy.”
He turned, and I blinked. Blood covered one side of his shirt, and the fabric was torn, sticking to the skin. Several deep gashes were raked across his shoulder blade, still raw and bloody, though he didn’t seem to notice them.
“What happened to your back, Mr. Archer?”
He jerked up, wincing. “Ah,” he muttered, not meeting my gaze. “Nathan was attacked and...I got it when I went to help. It’s nothing, not that deep. Please, help him first.”
“I intend to, but as soon as we’re done here, you need to let me take care of that. And you are going to tell me what happened when we’re done, Mr. Archer.”
He nodded, and we worked in tense, determined silence, broken only by me barking orders, directing my helper to hold this or fetch that. I didn’t mince words or attempt civility; my focus was on saving this man’s life. But my impromptu assistant took all direction without comment until the task was complete.
“There.” I pulled the final stitch shut, tying it off with a short jerk. The man lay on the table, disinfected, bandaged and sewn up the best I could manage with such limited supplies. “That’s it. We’ll just have to keep an eye on him, now.”
Ben Archer stood behind me. I could feel his hooded gaze on the table in front of us. “Will he make it?”
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” I said, turning around. “He needs a transfusion, but there’s no way we can do that now. The wounds haven’t gone septic, but I’m mostly worried about his fever.” The man’s face fell, and I offered a kind lie out of habit. “We’ll have to wait and see if he survives the night, but I think he has a chance of pulling through.”
“Thank you,” he murmured. He seemed relieved but shifted restlessly at the edge of the counter, as if he expected something to come lunging through the operating room doors any second. “I didn’t get your name, Doctor...?”
“Just call me Kylie.” I really looked at him for the first time, seeing the stubble on his chin, the haunted look in his dark brown eyes. His shoulders were broad, his arms muscular under his shirt, as if he was used to hard labor.
“Miss Kylie.” He shot a glance at the tiny window, at the late-afternoon sun slanting in through the glass. “I’m grateful for your help. But we have to go. Now.”
“Excuse me?”
“We have to leave,” he repeated to my astonishment. “We can’t stay here. I’m sorry, but we have to go.”
I scowled at him. “You’re not going anywhere, Mr. Archer. Your friend is still badly hurt, and you don’t look so good yourself. What you’re going to do is sit down, let me take care of those lacerations on your back, and tell me what the hell happened to your friend.”
He flinched, one hand going to his shoulder, but shook his head. “No,” he whispered, and the guilt on his face was overwhelming. “We can’t stay here,” he protested in a stronger voice. “We have to leave the city.” His gaze flicked to mine, intense. “You should come with us. Everyone should—everyone who can still walk needs to go. It...isn’t safe out there anymore.”
“When was it ever safe?” I murmured. He took a breath to argue again, but my voice grew sharp. “Move him now, and your friend will die,” I stated bluntly. “With that fever and those wounds, he’ll be dead by morning. You leave, you kill him. It’s as simple as that.”
He slumped, the fight going out of him. I gestured to the stool, and he sank down, his posture defeated. “If you would take your shirt off, Mr. Archer,” I urged, trying to remain businesslike as I fished a needle and thread from my coat pockets. He blinked, pulling back a little, and I sighed. “I don’t have the time or patience for modesty, Mr. Archer. And we ran out of hospital gowns the first week we were here. So, please.” I gestured with the needle. “Take off your shirt.”
Wearily, he complied, pulling the garment over his head without so much as a wince. I kept my expression professional, but my gaze roamed over the tanned, powerful shoulders and sculpted chest as he dropped his shirt to the floor. Things were bleak, but I wasn’t blind. Ben Archer was gorgeous; you didn’t need a Ph.D. to see that.
He didn’t move as I walked up behind him, examining the five deep lacerations that ran from his shoulder nearly to the center of his back. They looked like...claw marks. I shivered. Something was very wrong here.
“What happened to you and your friend?” I began, dabbing the wounds gently with an alcohol wipe. He didn’t flinch, though the lacerations were quite deep, and I knew the alcohol stung. “Did you hear me, Mr. Archer?”
“Ben. Just Ben.”
“All right, Ben.” I wiped the last of the blood away and reached for the needle and thread. “You still haven’t answered my question. Those bite wounds on your friend, they aren’t normal. What happened?”
I felt him hesitate. My voice grew a little harder. “Don’t lie to me, Mr. Archer. If I’m going to help him, I need to know exactly what happened. Any information you withhold could end up killing him, or my other patients. Now—last time—tell me what happened.”
“We...” Ben paused, as if fighting himself, struggling to get the words out. “Nathan and I...we were attacked,” he finally admitted.
“Yes, that I gathered,” I said, gently touching his shoulder. His skin was warm, and he finally flinched at my touch. “I’m going to start stitching now, so brace yourself.”
He nodded.
“So, something attacked you,” I continued, sinking the needle into the smooth, tanned skin, talking quickly to keep him distracted. “What was it?”
“I...I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I frowned as I pulled a stitch closed, seeing him grit his teeth. “Something obviously savaged your friend and tore the hell out of your shoulder. What was it?”
“I didn’t see it very clearly,” Ben muttered. “It was dark, and the thing moved so fast.” He shrugged, then grunted in pain as the motion pulled at the stitches. “I thought it was human, but...” He trailed off again, and I frowned over his shoulder.
“Ben, your friend was bitten by something with canines at least an inch long. Humans don’t have teeth like that.”
He raised his head just as I looked up at him, and for a second, our faces were inches apart. Guilt, horror and fear lay open on his face; he had the look of a soldier who had seen far too much and would be eternally haunted by it.
“You should leave,” he whispered once more, his voice like a ragged, open wound. And my stomach flip-flopped at the look in his eyes. “Don’t ask questions, Kylie, just trust me. Get out of here as soon as you can. Go home, leave this place, and don’t look back.”
I took a deep, steadying breath.
“I can’t leave,” I told him firmly. “I won’t leave my patients, so that’s out of the question. Besides, I don’t have a home to go back to.” He looked away, and I wished I could turn his head back, force him to meet my gaze. “You’re not telling me everything,” I said, and his face shut down into a blank mask. My eyes narrowed. “What are you hiding?”
“Miss Kylie?”
Maggie appeared in the door. Seeing Ben, she blushed and looked down at her feet. “Ms. Sawyer was complaining that it hurt to breathe. I gave her a shot of morphine for the pain and a sedative to help her sleep.”
“Good girl,” I said, feeling a lump rise to my throat. The final stages of Red Lung, before the victim began coughing uncontrollably and drowning in their own blood, was difficult, painful breathing.
I felt Ben’s eyes on me, sympathetic and knowing. Suddenly self-conscious, I drew away. I didn’t need his pity or his advice to leave—as if I could just walk out. And it was clear I wouldn’t be getting anything further out of him, at least not now. “I have to get back to my patients,” I told him, beckoning Maggie into the room. “I’m sorry. Maggie, would you mind taking care of Mr. Archer, please?”
“Sure.” Maggie smiled at Ben, and he gave her a tired nod. I left them together and wandered back to the main room, checking the rows of patients along the makeshift walls. For now, everyone seemed okay; comfortable and in no pain, at least. Except for Ms. Sawyer’s raspy breathing and the occasional bloody cough that I couldn’t do anything about, the clinic was quiet. An event that occurred less and less, as Red Lung continued its war on the human body and continued to win.
I pondered what Ben had told me. He and his friend had been attacked, there was no mistaking that. It wasn’t uncommon, sadly. With the breakdown of normal society, human beings reverted to their base instincts and started preying on each other. In the early days of the plague, not a day had gone by that I hadn’t heard gunshots, screams or other sounds of distant chaos. I didn’t doubt they’d been attacked, but the wounds on Nathan’s arm and Ben’s shoulder didn’t look like anything I’d seen before.
What was Ben Archer hiding? What wasn’t he telling me?
“Kylie.” Jenna appeared as I made another circle through the rows of cots. The intern had been training to be a nurse and was older than me by several years, but always took my instructions without fail or complaint. Her gaze was sympathetic as she pulled me aside. “You’re exhausted,” she stated, blue eyes appraising, and I didn’t argue with her. “How long since you slept last?”
I shrugged, and she patted my arm. “Go lie down. Maggie and I can take care of things for a few hours.”
“I don’t know. Ms. Sawyer—”
“You’ve done everything you could for her,” Jenna said in a low voice. “Seriously, Kylie, get some sleep. While you still can. You’re going to fall over if you don’t rest soon, and no one can afford that. I promise, we’ll come get you if anything happens.”
I nodded. It was getting close to eighteen hours with no sleep, and I was tired. But before I left the room, I made a note to check on my newest patients, make sure Nathan was comfortable at least. And maybe, I could get the last of that story out of Ben Archer.
I didn’t quite get that far. Instead, I went to Doc Adams’s old office and collapsed on the cot against the far wall, pulling the sheet over my face. I thought I wouldn’t sleep with all the dark thoughts swirling through my head, but I was out almost before I touched the pillow.
Chapter Two
It seemed only a few minutes had passed before someone touched my shoulder, jostling me awake. Blearily, I opened my eyes and glanced up at Maggie, who stood over me with a half-worried, half-reluctant expression.
“Yeah?” I mumbled, struggling to sit up.
“Sorry, Miss Kylie.” Maggie bit her lip. “But, I wanted to let you know, Mr. Johnson just passed away.”
I sighed, scrubbing a hand over my eyes, grief and anger and disappointment flaring up momentarily. “All right, I’ll be right out. Thank you, Maggie.”
She nodded and scurried away. Standing, I put my fingers to my temples, massaging the headache pounding behind my eyes.
Dammit. Another one lost. Another life taken by the plague, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Eric had been right; this was futile. Those people out there, coughing and gagging and fighting to breathe, they wouldn’t survive. Not at this stage of the virus. But I couldn’t abandon them. I’d promised my patients I would fight to the end, and that was what I was going to do.
Grabbing my coat, which I’d tossed on the desk before falling into unconsciousness, I walked out of the office.
And ran smack into a large, solid chest as I emerged, yawning and rubbing my face. With a yelp, I stumbled back, looking up into Ben Archer’s worried brown eyes.
“Sorry.” His deep voice held traces of alarm, and I gave him a wary look. “I need to talk to you. Something is wrong with Nate, and I don’t know what to do for him.”
My head pounded. The stress, disappointment, and looming sense of pointlessness were starting to get to me, but I put my feelings aside to focus on what I had to do.
“Walk with me.” I started down the hall, and he followed at my side. The clinic was dark now, as evening stole in through the door and cloaked everything in shadow. I could hear the generators out back, humming away, but we were running out of gas, and not much power was left for lights.
We reached the spot where Nathan was being kept, one of the smaller rooms that was separated from the main wing, away from the sick. A chair stood in the corner, probably where Ben had been sitting. Jenna hovered next to the patient, looking grim.
The man on the bed groaned, sounding delirious. He was definitely paler, and blood had soaked through the bandages on his arm. But what was most worrying was the red fluid seeping from beneath his eyelids. It oozed slowly over his cheeks, cutting two crimson paths down his skin, and it could be only one thing.
I swabbed it with a cotton ball, just to be sure. Yes, it was definitely blood. Ben came up behind me, peering over my shoulder.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I...don’t know.” Though I hated admitting it. Peeling back his lids, I shone a light over his pupils, checking for wounds or scratches. Nothing. “The only thing I can think of is a subconjunctival hemorrhage, or Ebola, as unlikely as that is. Sadly, the only way to know for sure would be to conduct blood tests, but we don’t have any way to do that here. We’ll just have to keep him under surveillance and see what happens.”
I caught a whiff of something foul, rotten, like the stench of a decaying animal, and my heart sank. Frowning, I shooed Ben out of the way and bent over the wounded man, gently unwrapping the gauze to see the wounds on his arm.
The wounds were clean. The skin around them was still puffy and red, but the bites themselves looked fine. Or at least not infected. And yet, I could still smell the faint stench of rot and decay that suggested gangrene or wounds that had gone septic.
Then I realized it wasn’t coming off his arm, but the body as a whole.
Puzzled, I cleaned and rebandaged the arm, feeling Ben’s worried eyes on me the whole time. Nathan groaned and tossed restlessly, and I finally gave him a shot of morphine to calm him down. As his tortured thrashing stilled and he drifted into a drugged sleep, I heard Ben take a ragged breath.
“He’s getting worse.”
I turned to face him, wiping my hands. “There’s no infection, as far as I can see. His fever is getting worse, yes, but we’ve done all we can for him now. We just have to wait and see if he pulls out of it.” Ben sagged, looking lost and hopeless, unsure what to do. Sinking into the chair, he ran both hands over his face and sighed.
I hesitated. Then, not really knowing why, I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not giving up,” I told him softly. “And you shouldn’t, either. Why don’t you get some sleep? There’s an extra cot in the office if you need it. I’ll let you know if there are any changes.”
He looked up with a faint, grateful smile. “Thank you,” he murmured. “But, if it’s all the same, I’d like to stay. I should be here if...anything happens to him.”
“Miss Kylie.” Maggie walked into the room. The petite intern smiled shyly at Ben before turning to me. “Sorry to interrupt, but Jenna wanted to know if you’d like us to move Mr. Johnson’s body to the back lot now or down to storage.”
I stifled a groan. “I don’t think Mr. Johnson will fit in any of the storage units we have down there,” I said, aware of how morbid this must sound to Ben. It had become so commonplace to us now, we didn’t even think about it anymore. “If you and Jenna will get him on a gurney, I’ll take him out back.”
She nodded and padded away, and Ben gave me a worried look. “Out back?”
“There’s an empty lot we’ve been using for body storage,” I said tiredly. “When the freezers downstairs get full, we move them outside. This place was set up pretty fast, so it didn’t come with a proper morgue. We’ve had to improvise.”
“You’re going outside? Now?”
“I can’t leave a cadaver lying on a bed all night.”
He rose swiftly, his gaze narrowing. “I’ll come with you.”
I frowned at his sudden change of mood. “There’s no need. I’m capable of handling a dead body by myself. Besides—” I glanced back toward the bed “—I thought you wanted to stay with your friend.”
“Please.” He took a step forward, not intimidating, but intense. “Let me help. It’s the least I can do.”
There was more to it than that, I thought. I wasn’t stupid. He was still hiding something, and I was going to find out what. Just not tonight. I was tired, my head hurt and I didn’t want to fight him. “All right,” I sighed. “If you think you can stomach working with a dead body, then I’ll put those muscles of yours to work. Follow me.”
We walked back to the main room, where Maggie and Jenna were struggling to load the body onto a gurney. In times past, I’d had a couple of the male interns perform this task. But they were gone now; it was just the three of us left.
Plus Ben. Who didn’t flinch as he hefted Mr. Johnson onto the cart, handling the body like he might a sick calf. His face remained businesslike as he laid the corpse down gently, and Jenna and Maggie gaped at him.
As I covered the body with a sheet, I caught a faint hint of rot coming off the corpse. What the hell? It hadn’t even been an hour since Mr. Johnson had passed; there was no way the body would start to decompose so quickly.
“What is it?” Ben asked quietly. I shook my head.
“Nothing.” I flipped the sheet over the body’s head, and the smell vanished. Maybe I’d imagined it, or maybe I was smelling something else: a dead animal outside. I maneuvered the gurney around him and the interns, ducked through the curtains surrounding the bed and headed out the back door. Ben followed.
Outside, the temperature was cool, chilly even. Which was a good thing, given the number of dead things lying everywhere around us, hidden away in houses and beds; the ones who had died alone and forgotten. As it was, the stench coming from the back lot was always there, drifting in the clinic when the breeze blew just right. If it had been high summer, the smell would’ve been unbearable.
As we made our way down the sidewalk, I was struck again by how quiet everything was. Not long ago, the sounds of sirens and cars, screaming, gunshots and breaking glass, had been constant. Just across the river, in monument D.C., the city had been a war zone. Now, an eerie silence hung over everything, and the buildings around us were dark. Of course, our small clinic was located just outside the city limits, so I didn’t know what was happening closer to downtown. Occasionally, I heard screams or the roar of a distant car engine, signs that there was still human life somewhere out there. But the city seemed abandoned now, left to the desperate and the dying.
I sneaked a glance at Ben, walking beside me, one hand on the corner of the gurney. His gaze scanned the buildings and the shadows around us, every fiber of his body on high alert. The same look he’d had in the clinic when night was starting to fall, only amplified a hundred-fold.
He didn’t come out here to help me, I realized with a cold feeling in my stomach. He’s afraid there’s something out here now. I pulled the gurney to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. “Ben...”
Something big slipped from the shadows into our path, making us both jump. I flinched, but Ben lunged forward and grabbed my arm as if prepared to yank me behind him. A stray dog, big and black, drew back when it saw us. It dropped what it was carrying and darted out of sight between two cars, its tail between its legs.
Ben relaxed. Quickly, he dropped my wrist, looking embarrassed. “Sorry,” he murmured, staring at the ground. “I’m not usually this jumpy, I swear. Are you all right?”
I rubbed my arm, wincing from the strength in those hands. “I’m fine,” I told him, and was about to ask him why he was so twitchy. But then I noticed what the dog had been carrying and stifled a groan.
“Is that...an arm?” Ben asked, peering past the gurney.
“Yeah.” I sighed, knowing where the dog had probably gotten it. As we got closer to our destination, the smell began to permeate the darkness around us. That familiar knot of dread, guilt, sorrow and anger coiled in my stomach. “Just a warning,” I told Ben, “this isn’t going to be pretty. Steel yourself.”
“For what?”
I smiled humorlessly and turned the corner of the alley.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Ben straighten, though he didn’t say anything. The drone of insects was a constant hum over the hundreds of bodies lined up in neat rows up and down the empty lot. Most were covered with sheets and tarps, but several covers were torn off or had blown away, leaving the corpses to stare empty-eyed at the sky. And, from the looks of the older, “riper” corpses, the scavengers were already gathering en masse.
Ben made a sound in the back of his throat, as if he was struggling not to gag. For a moment, I was sorry for bringing him out here, letting him see the stark reality we faced every day. But he set his jaw and walked with me to the edge of the last row, where I’d laid three people—a mother and her two sons—side by side last week. I tried not to look at them as we lifted Mr. Johnson’s body up in the sheet and set it on the pavement. But it was hard not to remember. I’d stayed up countless nights with that family, trying desperately to save them, but the virus had taken the mother first and the boys hours later, and that failure still haunted me.
Ben was quiet as we left the lot and pushed the empty gurney back to the clinic. He didn’t say anything, but instead of scanning the streets and shadows, he appeared deep in thought, brooding over what he had just seen. It was pretty sobering, when you realized how much we had lost, how insidious this thing was: an enemy that couldn’t be stopped, put down, reasoned with. It made you realize...we might not make it through this.
“How do you do it?”
I blinked. I’d gotten so used to his silence; the question caught me off guard. Strange, thinking I knew a man after only a few hours with him. His brown eyes were on me now, solemn and assessing.
“Because you have to,” I said, ducking through the back door with him behind me. “Because you have to give people hope. Because sometimes that’s the only thing that will get them through, the only thing that keeps them alive.”
His next words were a whisper. I barely caught them as we moved through the main room into the dark hall beyond. “What if there is no hope?”
I shoved the gurney against the wall and turned, pinning him with my fiercest glare. “There is always hope, Ben. And I will thank you to keep any doom-and-gloom observations to yourself while you’re here. I don’t need my patients hearing it. Or my interns, for that matter.”
He ducked his head, looking contrite. “I’m sorry. It’s just...it’s hard to keep an open mind when you’ve seen...what I have.” I raised an eyebrow at him, and he had the grace to wince. “And...you’ve seen a lot worse, I know. My apologies. I’ll...stop whining, now.”
I sighed. “Have you had anything to eat lately?” I asked, and he shook his head. “Come on, then. We don’t have much, but I can at least make you some coffee. Instant, anyway. You look like you could use some.”
“That would be nice,” Ben admitted, smiling, “but you don’t have to go to the trouble.”
“Not at all. Besides, I could use some, so keep me company for a while, okay?” He nodded, and we headed upstairs to the small break room and dining area that hadn’t seen much use since the clinic opened. The fridge and the microwave hadn’t been used since the power had gone out and we’d switched to the generators, but the gas stove worked well enough to heat water. I boiled two cups of bottled water, spooned in liberal amounts of instant coffee and handed a mug to Ben, sitting at the table.
“It’s not great, but at least it’s hot,” I said, sliding into the seat across from his. He smiled his thanks and held the mug in both hands, watching me through the steam. Taking a cautious sip, I scrunched my forehead and forced the bitter swallow down. “Ugh. You’d think I’d get used to this stuff by now. I think Starbucks ruined me for life.”
That actually got a chuckle out of him, and he sipped his drink without complaint or grotesque faces. I studied him over my mug, pretending to frown into my coffee but sneaking glances at him every few seconds. The haunted look had left his face, and he seemed a bit calmer. Though the worry still remained in his eyes. I found myself wishing I could reach over the table, stroke his stubbly cheek and tell him everything would be fine.
Then I wondered what had brought that on.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said, setting the mug down on the table, suddenly giving me his full attention. “No offense, but you’re awfully young and pretty to be running a clinic alone. And you don’t wear masks like the others. Aren’t you afraid you’ll get sick, too?”
Absurdly, I blushed at the compliment. “I caught Red Lung early,” I told him, and his eyebrows arched into his hair. “From one of the patients at the hospital where I worked. Kept me in bed for three days straight, and everyone thought I would die, but I pulled out of it before my lungs started disintegrating.”
“You’re a survivor?” Ben sounded shocked. I nodded.
“One of the lucky sixteen percent.” I looked down at my hands, remembering. Lying in a sterile hospital room, coughing bloody flecks onto the sheets. The worried, bleak faces of my colleagues. “Everyone was surprised when I pulled through,” I said, taking another sip of the stuff that claimed it was coffee. “And afterward, I felt so grateful and lucky, I volunteered to help Doc Adams when he set this place up. Especially after...” I trailed off.
“After?” Ben prodded.
I swallowed. “After I found out that my family all passed away from the virus,” I muttered. “They got sick when I was in the hospital, only they never recovered. I found out when I was released and planned to go home, only I didn’t have a home to go back to.”
I thought of the little home in the suburbs, the place I’d spent my childhood, with its tiny front yard and single-car garage. My mom’s small but perfect flower garden, my dad’s ancient leather armchair. My old room. It had just been the three of us; I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but I’d never been lonely. I’d had friends, and my parents had filled whatever void was left, encouraging me to chase my dreams. Dad had always said he knew I would become something big, either a doctor or an astronaut or a scientist, and pretty much let me do whatever I’d wanted. I’d left for college as soon as I’d graduated, eager to see what was out there, but had always come home for breaks and holidays. Both Mom and Dad had been so proud, so eager to hear of my life at school. It had never crossed my mind that one day they would just be...gone.
When I’d returned to the house after my parents had died, I’d stood in the living room, with its empty armchair and ticking clock, and realized how much I had lost. Curling up in my Dad’s old chair, I’d cried for about an hour, but when it was over, I’d left the house with a new resolve. I couldn’t save my parents, but maybe I could save other people. Red Lung, the silent killer, was my enemy now. And I would do whatever I could to destroy it.
Across from me, Ben was quiet. I kept my gaze on the table between us, so I was surprised when his rough, calloused hand covered my own. “I’m sorry,” he murmured as I looked up at him. I smiled shakily.
“It’s okay. They went quickly, or at least that’s what the doctors said.” My throat closed, and I sniffled, taking a breath to open it. Ben squeezed my palm; his thick fingers were gentle, his skin warm. A shiver raced up my arm. “What about you?” I asked, as Ben pulled his hand back, cupping it around his mug again. “Where’s your family? If it’s not too personal?”
“It’s not.” He sighed, his face going dark as he looked away. “My family owns a big farm out west,” he said in a flat voice. “Nathan and I were on our way there, to see if anyone survived. They’re pretty isolated, so we were hoping the outbreak hadn’t reached them yet. I don’t know, I haven’t seen them for a while.”
A farm. That fit him, I thought, looking at his broad shoulders and calloused, work-toughened hands. I could imagine him slinging bales of hay and wrestling cows. But there was something else about him, too, something not quite so rough. “What were you doing in the city?” I asked, and his face darkened even more. “You said you haven’t seen them in a while. How long has it been?”
“Four years.” He set his mug down and put his chin on his hands, brooding over them. “I moved to the city four years ago, and since then I haven’t even talked to my folks. They wanted me to take over the farm, like everyone before me, but I wanted to finish school at Illinois Tech.” He gave a bitter snort. “My dad and I got into a huge fight one day—I even threw a punch at him—and I walked out. Haven’t seen them since.”
“I’m sorry, Ben.” I thought of my family, my dad who had been so proud I was going into medicine. My mom who always told me to dream big. “That has to suck.”
He hung his head. “I haven’t spoken to them in years. Mom always sent me Christmas cards, telling me how the farm is doing, that they miss me, but I never answered. Not once. And now...” His voice broke a little, and he hunched his shoulders. “With the plague and the virus and everything going to hell, I don’t know how they’re doing. I don’t...I don’t even know if they’re alive.”
He covered his eyes with a hand. I stood, quietly walked around the table to sit beside him, and put my arm around his shoulders. They trembled, though Ben didn’t move or make a sound otherwise. How many times had I done this; comforted a family member who had lost someone dear? More times then I cared to remember, especially with the rapid spread of the plague. But it felt different this time. Before, I had been there to offer support when someone needed it, not caring if it was from a virtual stranger. With Ben Archer, I truly wanted to be there for him, let him know there was someone he could lean on.
I still didn’t know where this was coming from. The man was a virtual stranger himself; I’d known him only a few hours. But I stayed there, holding him and saying nothing, as he succumbed to his grief in the small, dirty break room of the clinic. I had the feeling he’d been holding this in a long time, and it had finally broken through.
Finally, he took a ragged breath and pulled away, not looking at me. I rose and went to refill our coffee mugs, giving him time to compose himself.
“Thank you,” he murmured as I handed him the filled mug again, and I knew it wasn’t just for the coffee. I smiled and sat down, but before I had even settled myself, footsteps pounded outside the door, and Maggie rushed into the room.
“Miss Kylie?”
I stifled a groan even as I rose quickly to my feet, Ben following my example. “Yes, Maggie, what is it?”
“It’s Mr. Archer’s friend,” Maggie said, and Ben straightened quickly. The intern shot him a half-fearful, half-sorrowful look and turned back to me. “I’m so sorry. He slipped into a coma a few minutes ago, and we can’t wake him up.”
Chapter Three
“We’ve done everything we can for him.”
I wiped my hands on a towel, gazing wearily at the man beneath the covers, so pale he could have been made of paper. His limp hair and clothes were the only things of color left, and the skin on his face had shrunk tightly to his bones, making him look skeletal. His bandages had been changed again, IV tubes had been put in and I’d given him several shots of antibiotics to try to help with the fever. The smell—that ominous, disturbing smell of rot and death—still clung to him, though I’d checked and double-checked for any sign of gangrene. There was none that I could see, but that wasn’t what worried me most.
Nathan lay on his back beneath the sheets, his shallow and raspy breathing the only indicator that he was still alive. Blood flecked his lips, making my stomach knot in dread. Jenna’s sad, knowing eyes met mine over the patient. I didn’t need to listen to the gurgle in his chest to know. He was infected with Red Lung. The virus had gotten him, too.
Ben stood in the corner, looking on with hooded eyes. I didn’t know how to tell him. “Ben...”
“He has it.” Ben’s voice was flat, his eyes blank.
“I’m so sorry.” He gave no indication that he’d heard. “We’ll keep him under surveillance and make him as comfortable as we can, but...” I paused, hating that I had to say the next words. “But I think you should prepare yourself for the worst.”
Ben gave a single, short nod. I shooed the interns out of the room and walked up to him. “Does he have any family that you are aware of?”
“No.” Ben sank down in the chair, running his hands over his scalp. “Nate’s family all lived here and...they were gone before we started out.” I put a hand on his shoulder, and he stirred a little. “Sorry, but could I have a few minutes?”
“Sure,” I whispered, and walked out, leaving him alone with his friend. As I ducked through the frame, I heard the thump of his fist against the armrest, a muffled, broken curse, and swallowed my own frustrated tears as the door clicked behind us.
* * *
Maggie and Jenna looked so disheartened when I returned to the main room that I told them both to get some sleep.
“I can handle the patients alone for a few hours,” I said as Jenna protested, though Maggie looked ready to fall over. “They’re not going anywhere, and I’ll call you if I need assistance. Get some rest.”
“Are you sure, Kylie?” Jenna asked, even as Maggie stumbled away, heading for the few extra cots upstairs. “Maggie and I can take turns, if you want one of us down here with you.”
I opened my mouth to answer and caught the subtle hint of rot, drifting from the beds along the wall. My stomach turned over, and the scent vanished as quickly as it had come.
“I’ll be fine,” I told Jenna firmly. “Go get some shut-eye. Lie down, at least. That’s an order.”
She looked reluctant but left the room after Maggie. When they were gone, I hurried over to Ms. Sawyer, slipping through the curtains to the side of her bed.
Her skin was chalky white, and the faint smell of decay clung to her, as it had to Nathan. Looking at her face, my blood ran cold. Though her chest rose and fell with shallow, labored breaths, her eyes were half open, and red fluid seeped from beneath the lids.
Just like Nathan.
As I went to wipe the blood from her other cheek, Ms. Sawyer jerked in her sleep, lunging toward my hand without opening her eyes. A short hiss came from her open mouth, and I yanked my hand back, heart pounding, as she sank down, still unconscious.
She didn’t move again, and about an hour after midnight I woke Jenna, helped her move the body onto a gurney, and took it down to storage. Then, because the freezers in the basement were full, we woke Maggie and began the painstaking task of moving all the bodies to the back lot, freeing up space for future victims. We didn’t know then how soon we would need it.
The epidemic began several hours later.
It started with Ms. Sawyer’s bed neighbor, a middle-aged man who had been clinging stubbornly to life and who I’d hoped had a good chance of pulling through. An hour or so before dawn, he started bleeding from the eyes and rapidly went downhill. He was dead two hours later. Then, one by one, all the patients began weeping the bloody red tears and coughing violently, causing Jenna, Maggie and me to scurry from bed to bed, trying desperately to slow the flood. By the time the late-afternoon sun began setting over the tops of the empty buildings, half our patients were gone, with the other half barely holding on to life. We didn’t even have time to move the corpses from their beds and resorted to covering them with sheets when they died. As evening wore on, the number of bodies under sheets outnumbered the living. With every death, my anger grew, until I was swearing under my breath and snapping at my poor interns.
At last, the flood slowed. The patients still bled from the eyes, and the smell of decay had permeated the room, but there was a lull in the storm of coughing and gasping and death. As the sun set and the light began fading rapidly, I called Jenna and Maggie into the hall. Jenna looked on edge, and Maggie had succumbed to exhausted tears as I drew them aside, fighting my own frustration and the urge to lash out at everything around me.
“Where is Mr. Archer?” I asked in a low voice. I’d never seen a roomful of patients decline so rapidly, and I had a sneaking, terrible suspicion. I hoped I was wrong, but I needed answers, and there was only one person who could give them to me.
“I think he’s still in the room with his friend,” Maggie sniffled. “We haven’t seen him all day.”
I spun on a heel and marched down the hall. Blood from the eyes, the strange bite marks, the rotten smell without the infection. Nathan’s symptoms had spread to my patients, and Ben knew what it was. He knew, and I was fed up with this hiding, keeping secrets. Less than a day after Ben Archer had stepped into my sick ward with his friend, I had a roomful of corpses. He was going to tell me what he knew if I had to beat it out of him.
I swept into his room, bristling for a fight, and stopped.
Ben sat slumped in the corner chair, eyes closed, snoring softly. Exhaustion had finally caught up to him, too. Despite my anger, I hesitated, reluctant to wake him. Sleep was a precious commodity here; you snatched it where and when you could. Still, I would have woken him right then if I hadn’t seen what had happened to the body in the room with us.
Nathan lay on the bed, unmoving. Unnaturally still. The faint smell of rot still lingered around him, and in the shadows, his skin was the color of chalk. I moved to his bedside, and a chill ran up my spine. His eyes were open, gazing sightlessly at the ceiling, but his pupils had turned a blank, solid white.
The chair scraped in the corner as Ben rose. I held my breath as his footsteps clicked softly over the linoleum to stand beside me. I heard his ragged intake of breath and glanced up at him.
He had gone pale, so white I thought he might pass out. The look on his face was awful; grief and rage and guilt and horror, all at once. He gripped the edge of the railing in both hands, swaying on his feet, and I put a hand out to steady him, my anger forgotten.
“Ben.”
He glanced at me, a terrifyingly feverish look in his eyes, and his voice was a hoarse rasp as he grabbed my arm. “We have to destroy the body.”
“What?”
“Right now.” He looked at the corpse of his friend and shuddered. “Please, don’t ask questions. We need to burn it, quickly. Does this place have an incinerator?”
“Ben, what are you talking about?” I wrenched my arm from his grasp and glared up at him. “All right, this has gone far enough. What are you hiding? Where did you and Nathan come from? He was sick, wasn’t he?” Ben flinched, and my fury rose up again. “He was sick, and now I have a roomful of dead patients because you’re hiding something! I want answers, and you’re going to tell me everything, right now!”
“Oh, God.” If possible, Ben paled even more. He glanced down the hall, running his fingers through his hair. “Oh, shit. This has all gone crazy. I’m sorry, Kylie. I’ll tell you everything. After we destroy the body, I’ll tell you everything I know, I swear. Just...we have to take care of this now. Please.” He grabbed my arm. “Help me, and then I’ll tell you anything you want.”
I clenched my fists, actually tempted to hit him, to strike him across that ruggedly handsome face. Taking a deep breath to calm my rage, I spoke in a low, controlled tone. “Fine. I don’t know what this is about, or why you want to deface your friend, but I will help you this one last time. And then, Ben Archer, you are going to tell me what the hell is going on before you leave my clinic forever.”
He might have nodded, but I was already marching back into the hall, fighting a sudden, unexplainable terror. The unknown loomed around me, hovering over Nathan’s corpse, the sick ward full of the newly dead. The body on the table looked...unnatural, with its pale shrunken skin and blank, dead eyes. It didn’t even look human anymore.
The sick ward was eerily silent as I walked in, searching for the gurney I’d left at the edge of the room. In the shadows, bodies lay under sheets in their beds, mingled with the few still living. Jenna glanced up over a patient’s cot, her cheeks wasted, her eyes sunken. Lightning flickered through the plastic over the front door, illuminating the room for a split second, and thunder growled a distant answer.
Something touched my arm, and I jumped nearly three feet. Bristling, I spun around to come face-to-face with Ben.
“Sorry.” His gaze flickered to the darkened sick ward, then slid to me again. “I just... How are we going to do this? Do you need help with anything?”
I yanked a gurney from the wall. “What I needed is for you to have told me why you were here the first time I asked, not when all my patients started bleeding from the eyes and dying around me.” He didn’t respond, too preoccupied with the current tragedy to take note of my anger, and I sighed. “We’ll transport the body to the empty lot,” I explained, pushing the cot back down the hall, Ben trailing after. “Once we’re there, you can do whatever you want.”
“Outside?”
“Yes, outside! Preferably before the storm hits. I’m not starting a fire indoors so my clinic can burn down around me.”
He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and followed me silently down the hall, our footsteps and the squeaking of the gurney wheels the only sounds in the darkness.
I sneaked a glance at him. His face was blank, his eyes expressionless, though I’d seen that look before. It was a mask, a stoic front, the disguise of someone whose world had been shattered and who was holding himself together by a thread. My anger melted a little more. In my line of work, death was so common, but I had to remind myself that I wasn’t just treating patients; I was treating family members, friends, people who were loved.
“I’m sorry about Nathan,” I offered, trying to be sympathetic. “It wasn’t your fault that he was hurt, that he was sick. Were you two very close?”
Ben nodded miserably. “He was my roommate,” he muttered, briefly closing his eyes. “We went to Georgetown together. I was working on my Masters in Computer Engineering, and he got me an IT job at the lab where he worked. I was never about that biology stuff. When the virus hit, the lab threw everything else out the window to work on a cure. They kept me on for computer stuff, but Nathan was with them for the really crazy shit. He couldn’t tell me much—everything was very hush-hush—but some of the things I heard...” Ben shivered. “Let’s just say there were some very dark things happening in that lab. Even before the—”
He stopped in the doorway of the last room, his face draining of any remaining color. Blinking, I looked into the corner where Nathan’s bed sat, where the corpse had been lying minutes ago.
The mattress was empty.
Chapter Four
I stared at the empty bed, the logical part of my brain trying to come up with a way for a dead body to vanish from a room in a few short minutes. One of the interns must’ve come in and moved it. Perhaps Maggie had whisked it down to storage, by herself, without a gurney. Improbable. Impossible, really. But that was the only thing that made any sort of sense. It wasn’t as if the corpse got up and walked out by itself.
Ben staggered back, shaking his head. I could see he was trembling. “No,” he muttered in a low, anguished voice. “No, it isn’t possible.”
“I’m...I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” I began, trying to ignore the chill creeping up my back. “Maggie probably took it away. Come on.” I turned, suddenly eager to leave to room. The silent, empty bed, sitting motionless in the shadows, was starting to freak me out. The once-familiar walls of the clinic seemed darker now, closing in on me. “We’ll check storage,” I told Ben, leading him back down the corridor. It seemed longer, somehow. I could hear the groans of my patients, drifting to me from the main room. “This is nothing to worry about. She’s probably down in the basement right now.”
Ben didn’t answer, and my words felt hollow as we reached the stairs to the sub-basement level. The door at the bottom of the steps was partially open, creaking faintly on its hinges, and the space beyond was pitch-black.
I fished the mini-flashlight from my coat and clicked it on, shining it down the stairwell. That faint smell of rot lingered in the corridor, but it could be coming from the bodies in storage.
I pushed the door to the basement open and was hit by a wave of cold, dry air that made me shiver. As usual, the scent of death was thick down here, like stepping into a tomb, and tonight it seemed even more ominous. There was no light, no need for electricity except to keep the freezers running, and everything was cloaked in suffocating darkness.
“Maggie?” My voice was a whisper as I eased inside, Ben following at my heels. The door groaned as it swung behind us, closing with a soft click. I swept the flashlight around, scanning the rows of cluttered shelves, the thick white columns that held up the building. I’d never thought about what a maze this place was until tonight. Against the far wall, barely discernible in the weak light, the huge freezers with their grisly contents gave off a faint, low hum.
“Maggie?”
Something clinked to the floor nearby, and an empty can rolled out from between the aisles, stopping at my feet. It caused a chill to skitter up my back.
“Maggie!” I hissed again, sweeping the light around. “Are you down here? Maggie!”
“Yes?”
Ben and I both jumped, swinging around as Maggie stepped between the aisles, holding several sets of folded sheets, a mini-flashlight stuck between them. She frowned at our reaction, looking confused. “Sorry, Miss Kylie. We ran of sheets to cover the bodies, so I came down to get some more. Are you all right?”
“Geez, Maggie!” I released Ben and slumped against the wall, my hand going to my heart. “You scared me half to—”
Something lunged between shelves and slammed into the girl, dragging her down with a screech. Her flashlight spun wildly, clinking to the floor before flickering out. Stumbling back, I caught a split-second glance of a spindly, emaciated creature that faintly resembled a man before it bent its head and sank its teeth into Maggie’s throat.
I screamed. Maggie’s body jerked and flopped to the cement, twitching, and the coppery smell of blood filled the room. My mouth gaped again, but nothing came out. In the flashlight beam, the thing raised its head and stared at me with Nathan’s face, no recognition in its dead white eyes, nothing but the flat, glazed stare of a predator. It hissed, and I couldn’t tear my gaze from its gleaming, jagged fangs, smeared with the blood of my intern.
My mind had gone blank. This wasn’t happening. That thing couldn’t exist, it was dead! The stress had finally gotten to me, and my mind had cracked.
Frozen, I stared at it, subconsciously knowing I was about to die. But the thing turned and started savaging Maggie’s corpse, tearing her open with long fingers, ripping into her with its fangs. Blood splattered everywhere, painting the walls with wet ribbons, and I threw myself backward, hitting the edge of a shelf.
Something grabbed my wrist, yanking me away. I cried out and fought to break loose, hitting the arm with the flashlight, barely conscious of what I was doing, until I realized it was Ben. He dragged me across the floor and up the staircase, his eyes hard, his mouth pressed into a thin white line.
We ducked into the stairwell, the smell of blood clogging our nostrils and the sound of ripping flesh following us out. Ben slammed the door behind us and leaned against it, gasping. I stood there, shaking, trying to gather my thoughts. Rain pounded the ceiling overhead, and lightning flickered erratically over the wall, reflecting the pulse at my throat.
Maggie. Maggie was gone. And that thing, that horrible, pale thing, had been Nathan. It couldn’t be real! I had seen him die. I knew he was dead, but now...
This had to be a nightmare.
“Kylie.” Ben’s voice was low, hoarse. I blinked, attempting to focus. “We have to get out of here, now. Do you have anything you have to take, anything you absolutely can’t leave behind?”
“Leave?” I stared at him, still reeling. “I can’t leave. What about Jenna?”
“We’ll take her, too.”
“But my patients! What about the survivors? I can’t leave them—”
“Kylie!” Ben pushed himself off the door and took my upper arms, forcing me to look at him. “They’re dead,” he whispered, his eyes dark with sorrow and guilt. “Everyone here is dead, or they will be. There’s nothing you can do for them anymore. But we have to get out of here now, if we want to survive ourselves.”
A crash from the main room startled me upright. Lightning danced over the walls, the flash revealing eerie dark spatters that hadn’t been there before. Fear, cold and acute, stabbed through me. Ben followed my gaze, his muscles coiled tight beneath his shirt.
“Come on,” he whispered, leading me down the hall. “My truck is out front. Let’s find Jenna and get out of...”
He stopped. I looked down the hall, and everything inside me went cold.
Ms. Sawyer’s gaunt, wasted body stood silhouetted in the doorway to the sick ward, still in the hospital gown she had died in. Blood stained her face and hands, smeared around her mouth and the fangs that protruded from her upper jaw. She carried something in her hands, something round and dripping, the size of a basketball.
Lightning flashed again, and I saw that it was Jenna’s head.
I might have gasped, or gagged, for the thing that had been Ms. Sawyer looked up, and her dead, blank eyes flashed to mine. Her mouth opened, fangs gleaming, like jagged bits of glass. She screamed, a wail unlike anything remotely human, and charged toward us.
Ben yanked me across the hall, ducked into Doc Adams’s office and slammed the door. A booming thud rattled the frame just as he threw the latch and looked frantically around for something to brace it with.
Another bang on the door, followed by the screech of the thing on the other side. I fell back in terror. Ben pulled me aside, dragged the old wooden desk from the corner and shoved it across the tile, pushing it up against the door.
“Kylie, come on!” His voice snapped me out of my daze. Crossing the room, he yanked back the curtain on the window, revealing the full fury of the storm outside. “Hurry, before it claws its way in.”
The door jumped inward a few inches, scraping the desk back, and nails clawed at the opening. More voices joined the one beyond the frame, terrifying shrieks and howls, as if a whole pack of the things were clustered outside. The door shook and began to open as pale arms and shoulders shoved their way inside.
Ben threw up the window with a blast of rain-scented wind. “Come on!” he yelled at me, and I threw myself forward. His hands grabbed my waist as I scrambled for the opening, pushing me through. I fell on wet pavement, gasping as my elbow struck the hard ground, and then Ben collapsed beside me, rolling to his feet.
He dragged me upright, and through the window, I saw the door burst inward and a host of pale, shrieking bodies spill into the room. Former patients, people who had died that very afternoon, reanimated and somehow transformed into bloodthirsty monsters. Their empty white eyes scanned the room, catching sight of us outside the window, and they lunged forward with vicious wails.
We ran.
My shoes splashed over the wet concrete, cold rainwater soaking my hair and clothes. The storm raged around us, forks of lightning slashing the sky over the buildings. Behind me, I heard the monsters’ savage cries as they leaped through the window and skittered after us.
I followed Ben around a corner, dodging a rubble pile, and nearly ran into a small white pickup parked between two buildings. I waited, heart hammering, as Ben fiddled with the keys, hands shaking as he tried to unlock the door. A monster leaped to the top of the rubble pile, hissed when it saw us and sprang forward.
Ben yanked open the door, reached in and pulled a shotgun out of the front seat. The monster leaped onto the hood, snarling, as Ben aimed the muzzle at it and pulled the trigger point-blank.
A flash and a deafening boom rocked the alley, nearly making my heart stop. The creature was hurled away, crumpling into the wall and slumping down, a bloody mess. But then it staggered to its feet, hissing, though there was a massive gaping hole that went right through its chest, showing jagged ribs. It shrieked again, sounding more pissed than hurt, and lurched forward as several others came around the corner.
Ben pushed me into the truck and lunged in after me, slamming the door just as Ms. Sawyer crashed into the glass. She shrieked at us, clawing the door with bony talons, as Ben jammed the keys into the ignition and the truck roared to life. The monster with the bloodied chest scrambled onto the hood again and lunged at me. Its head bounced off the windshield, and a spiderweb of cracks spread out from the impact. More creatures crowded the truck as Ben threw it into Drive. The vehicle lurched forward, striking several monsters as it roared out of the alley. The creature on the hood slipped and rolled off the side as Ben slammed his foot onto the gas and sped into the road.
I turned to look through the back window, watching the clinic and the pale, spindly creatures swarming from it like ants, until Ben turned a corner and the building was lost from view.
Chapter Five
We drove for nearly an hour in frozen silence. Ben kept his gaze on the road, swerving around rubble and debris, easing through oceans of dead cars that had clogged the street. The city loomed above us, dark and menacing in the rain. Except for a few flickering streetlamps and several dying traffic lights, the streets were black, the buildings empty and dark. I remembered, when I first came here, how bright and busy the city had felt, even at night. Now, it was like driving through a war zone. Most everyone had fled or succumbed to the virus. There were a few stubborn hangers-on, those who had nowhere to go, or worse, those who stayed behind to prey on what was left. But for the most part, the city was empty of life, and just a few short months after the catastrophe hit, it was already beginning to crumble.
But things moved in the shadows, pale and terrifying, skirting the edges of the light. They skittered through alleys and between aisles of dead cars, sometimes alone, sometimes in small packs. Every time I saw one, my stomach convulsed in dread, and I couldn’t move. How long had they been here, roaming the city, with me oblivious to the monsters right outside my door? Or was this something new, some awful, mutated side effect of the virus?
We drove on, through the city limits, though progress was slow. The road out of the city was clogged with cars, crashed into railings and each other, some upside-down or on their sides. Hundreds lay in ditches, and a few sat burned and blackened in the middle of the road. After weaving around this endless obstacle course of steel and glass, Ben finally pulled his truck off the pavement and drove through the dirt and trees.
It seemed to take forever, but the sea of cars finally thinned, then stopped altogether. After a few miles of nothing, Ben took the next off-ramp and parked the truck at an abandoned gas station.
“Stay here.” His voice was hoarse. Turning off the engine, he grabbed the door handle, not looking at me. “We’re almost out of gas. I’ll be right back.”
“Ben, wait!” My words came out harsh and sharp, startling us both. Ben flinched, then slowly took his hand from the door, turning to face me. His eyes, his face, his entire body, were slumped and resigned, as if he’d been waiting for this moment, dreading it.
“You promised me answers,” I whispered. The numbness inside was fading, the horror and fear slipping away into something that felt close to rage. I could barely force the words out, but I did. “You promised you would tell me what’s going on. I’m not going another step with you until you start talking.”
“All right.” Ben took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “All right, Kylie, I’ll tell you everything I know. I don’t have all the details, because I wasn’t close to it, not like Nathan. But what I did find out...well, you’ll see why I couldn’t tell anyone.”
“You know what those monsters are,” I guessed, and it was an accusation. Ben hesitated, then nodded slowly.
“I’ve seen them before,” he began, gazing out the window. “It was one of those things that attacked Nathan, in the lab.” He looked at me, suddenly pleading. “I swear, I didn’t know it was transferable. Not like that. Nathan was bitten, but I didn’t know the disease could spread to others, Kylie. If I’d known that, I would have never brought him in.”
“Disease?” My mind was spinning. “Ben, what are those things? I just watched my dead patients come back to life and attack me! Are they...some sort of zombies?” The words sounded ridiculous out loud, but what else could I think? I’d only seen this happen in horror movies.
“No.” Ben rubbed the stubble on his chin, clearly uncomfortable. “Not...zombies. From what I understand, they’re more of a hybrid. Of human, and...” He trailed off, bring his lip.
“And?” I prompted.
“Vampire.”
Ben grimaced, even as he said the word. I blinked. The implication hung between us, impossible. Ridiculous. Vampires didn’t exist. They were movie monsters, Halloween costumes. Never mind that a second ago I’d seriously considered the zombie apocalypse. My logical doctor’s brain scoffed at the idea of fanged, undead creatures that came out at night and drank the blood of the living to survive.
And yet...I’d been attacked by people who had died. I’d seen the corpses, lying in their beds that very afternoon, before they’d sprung to life. Corpses that moved at lethal, frightening speeds. That had ripped apart two humans as easily as paper, that had smelled of death and rot and decay. Corpses that had fangs.
“Vampires,” I said slowly, still trying to decide what I thought about this, whether to accept, question or scoff at the claim. “You mean...like Dracula? The drinking-blood, turn-into-bats kind?”
Ben sighed. “I know how it sounds,” he muttered. “And that’s why I couldn’t tell you before. You would’ve thought I was insane. But...yes, vampires are real. They don’t turn into bats or wolves or mist, as far as I know, but everything else—the drinking blood, the coming out at night—it’s all true.” My face must’ve betrayed my disbelief, because he shook his head. “I know. When Nathan told me, I thought the chemicals in the lab were affecting his brain. I told him he needed help. But then he showed me, once, what they were keeping behind closed doors.” He visibly shivered. “And that was enough to convince me.”
“Why...” I couldn’t believe I was asking this. “Why were they keeping vampires down there, anyway? I thought you said Nathan was part of a team searching for a cure.”
“He was. And they were.” Ben looked disturbed now, his brows drawn together in a frown. “I didn’t get this out of Nathan until later, but...they were experimenting on the vampires. They were using vampire blood to try to develop the cure.”
“Why?”
“Because vampires were immune to the Red Lung virus,” Ben replied solemnly. “Nathan told me they didn’t know if it was because the vampires were, technically, dead, but none of the specimens they acquired could be infected with the virus. They were hoping to duplicate the vampire’s natural immunity to disease into something that could combat Red Lung.” His gaze darkened, and he gripped the steering wheel tightly. “But something went wrong,” he said in a near whisper. “The virus mutated. The ‘cure’ they gave infected patients—human patients—killed them. And turned them into those...things.” He shuddered, running a hand through his hair. “I was there the night they escaped. No one knows how it happened, but Nathan was attacked, bitten. Everything was chaos. We got out, came here. But I had no idea the mutated virus was airborne, that it would spread just like Red Lung.”
“Then...” My stomach felt cold as the implication of what he was really saying hit me like a load of bricks. The virus was airborne, seeping across the country like a spill of blood. “Then, you’re saying that everyone who is already infected with the Red Lung virus...”
Ben didn’t meet my gaze. His hands gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. His face was ashen, and for a moment, I thought he might actually pass out.
“Oh, God,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “What have I done? What have we done, Nate?”
My hands were shaking. I clenched them in my lap and took a deep, calming breath. I’d seen what Red Lung could do to a person, I knew how fast it spread, I’d heard how entire communities and towns had vanished off the map in the space of a week. I imagined those towns now, only instead of bodies lying in their homes, I could see pale, screaming abominations filling the roads, destroying anything they came across.
And it had started right here. With the person in the seat next to mine.
No, that wasn’t entirely fair. Ben Archer hadn’t performed those experiments on—I stumbled over the word—vampires. Ben hadn’t created the retrovirus that was spreading across the country, turning the sick into bloodthirsty undead. He wasn’t responsible for the creation of those monsters, he wasn’t even a scientist. I knew that. My doctor’s brain accepted that.
But the part of me that felt responsible for Maggie and Jenna, that had worked like a dog to save those patients, that viewed Red Lung as an enemy that had to be destroyed—that part of me hated him. He’d brought a hidden virus into my clinic, and because of him, my patients were all dead. Worse than dead, they were monsters, rabid beasts. If Ben Archer had never darkened my doorstep, they would still be alive.
My heart pounded. Anger and rage coursed through my veins, turning them hot. Ben’s shotgun lay on the seat between us; without thinking, I grabbed it and flung open the door of the truck, leaping to the pavement.
“Kylie!”
Ben scrambled after me. I heard his footsteps round the hood of the truck, and though my hands were shaking, I planted my feet, spun around and raised the muzzle of the gun, leveling it at his chest.
He stopped, raising his hands, as I took a step backward, glaring at him down the barrel.
Lightning flickered, distant now, the storm having moved on. The lingering rain felt like cold spider webs falling across my skin.
Ben took a slow, careful step forward, still keeping his hands raised. I bared my teeth and shoved the muzzle at him, and he stopped.
“Stay back!” I hissed, knowing how I must look: wild and desperate, the whites of my eyes gleaming in the darkness. I felt crazy, out of control. “You stay right there, Ben Archer. Don’t move, or I swear I’ll kill you!”
“Kylie.” His voice was low, calming, though he didn’t move from where he stood. “Don’t do this. Please. You can’t survive out there alone.”
“You,” I snarled, curling my lip back, “have no right to tell me anything! You brought this down on our heads. My patients are dead because of you! Maggie and Jenna are dead because of you! The whole city, the whole world, maybe, is going to hell. Because of you!” With every accusation, he flinched, as if my words were stones smashing into him. My throat closed up, and I took a breath to open it. “All my life,” I whispered, “I wanted to help people, save people. That’s why I became a doctor, so I could make a difference. I wanted to beat this thing, so badly. And all it took was you waltzing into my clinic with your demon friend to destroy everything I worked for!”
“Then shoot me.” He dropped his arms as he said it, regarding me with dead, hooded eyes. I blinked at him in shock, but he didn’t move. “You’re right,” he said in a quiet voice. “What we did, what happened at that lab, there’s no excuse. We unleashed something that could destroy everything. And if I...” He paused, closing his eyes. “If I deserve to die for that, if killing me will make things right for you, then...do it.” Opening his eyes, he met my gaze, sorrowful but unafraid. “If this will bring you peace,” he rasped, “for Maggie and Jenna and everyone, then do what you have to. No one will fault you for pulling that trigger.”
My arms shook, and the gun was cold in my hands, the curved edge of the metal trigger pressing into my skin. It would be so easy, I realized—a quick pull, barely a motion in itself. I gazed down the barrel at the body in the rain, my throat and chest tight, my mind spinning. No one would hear the gunshot this far from the city. And even if they did, no one would care.
Ben stood there, unmoving, the rain falling lightly around his shoulders, waiting to see if I would kill him.
God, Kylie, what are you doing? You’re really going to murder this man in cold blood? Horror, swift and abrupt, lanced through me. I was a doctor, sworn to save lives, regardless of circumstances or personal feelings. Ben had saved my life. If he hadn’t been there when those things attacked, I would be a pile of blood and bones on the clinic floor. Just like Maggie and Jenna.
And then, all the fear, frustration, sorrow and guilt of the past three days rose up like a black wave and came crashing down. Tears blinded me, my throat closed up and the world went blurry. The gun dropped from my limp grasp, falling into the mud, as, to my horror, I started to cry.
Strong arms wrapped around me a moment later, pulling me to a broad chest. For a heartbeat, anger flashed, but it was immediately drowned by everything else. I had failed. I had lost everything, not only the patients whom I had sworn to save, but my family, my friends and, very nearly, my humanity. And now, the world was filled with monsters and things I didn’t understand, I had nearly been eaten by my dead patients and I had nowhere to go, nowhere left that was familiar. I leaned into Ben and sobbed, ugly, gasping breaths that blotched my face and left the front of his shirt stained with tears.
Ben didn’t say anything, just held me as I cried myself out, the rain falling around us. My back and shoulders were cold and damp, but my arms, folded to his body, and the side of my face where his cheek pressed against mine, were very warm. Eventually, the tears stopped and my breathing became normal again, but he didn’t let me go. One arm was wound across the small of my back, the other rested near my shoulders, holding me to him. His head was bowed, and I could feel rough stubble against my cheek.
My arms, trapped against his chest and stomach, began to wind around his waist, to pull him to me as well, but I stopped myself. No, I thought, as my senses finally returned. Just because he saved you, do not excuse this man for what he has done. Jenna and Maggie are dead. If he’d never come to your clinic, they would still be alive.
I stiffened, and Ben apparently sensed the change, for he let me go. I stepped back to compose myself, wiping my face, pulling my hair back, deliberately not looking at the man beside me. Because if I glanced up and met those haunted, soulful brown eyes, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from reaching for him again.
The shotgun still lay in the mud between us, and Ben casually reached down for it, as if it had simply fallen and hadn’t been aimed at his chest a few minutes earlier. I looked at the weapon and shuddered, appalled at myself, what I had almost done.
“What now?” I whispered, rubbing my arms as the rain started to come down hard again. Ben hefted the shotgun to one shoulder, staring out into the darkness.
“I’m going home,” he said without looking back. “Back to the farm. It’s been...too long since I’ve seen everyone. If they’re still there.” He paused, then added, very softly, “You’re welcome to come with me. If you want.”
I nodded, feeling dazed. “Thanks. I...I think I will. Come with you, I mean.” He finally glanced back, eyebrows raised in surprise. I shrugged, though I was a little surprised at myself, as well. “Might as well. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
He didn’t say anything to that, and we walked back to the truck in silence. Ben pulled open the passenger door, and I slid inside, blinking as he handed me the shotgun as if nothing had happened. Shivering, I placed it on the dashboard and watched Ben use a rubber tube to siphon fuel from one of the abandoned cars into a gas can. It was a slow, tedious process, but it couldn’t be helped. Many of the everyday conveniences—like ATMs, smart phones and gas pumps—were no longer working since the plague and the collapse of society. There was no one left to keep the grids going, no one to man the towers and the internet servers. It was a wake-up call for everyone, to realize how much we relied on things like electricity, running water and easy communication, and how crippling it was to go without.
When he was done, Ben slid into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and sat there a moment, staring out the glass.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he asked in a near whisper, glancing at the weapon on the dashboard. “I won’t force you to come with me. I can drop you off anywhere between here and home.”
“No.” I gave my head a shake. “Like I said, I have nowhere to go. And I don’t want to be by myself right now, not with what’s happening out there. Not if those things could be spreading across the country like the plague.” Ben looked away, hunching his shoulders, and I wasn’t sorry. “I’ll figure out what to do next when we get there. If your family doesn’t mind me hanging around...”
“They won’t. Mom, especially. She’ll be thrilled I finally brought home a girl.”
That tiny bit of humor, forced as it was, finally coaxed a smile from me. I settled back against the leather seat and pulled down the seat belt, clicking it into place. “Then let’s not keep them waiting.”
Ben nodded. Turning the key in the ignition, he eased the truck down the ramp and onto the empty road, and we roared off toward our destination.
Chapter Six
We drove through the night, down a road that was desolate and empty, snaking through the darkness. No cars passed us, no headlights pierced the blackness but our own. Ben and I didn’t speak much, just watched the quiet, primitive world scroll by through the glass. Out here, far from cities and towns and dimly lit suburbs, it truly felt as if we were the only humans left alive. The last two people on earth.
I dozed against the window, and when I opened my eyes again, Ben was pulling into the parking lot of a small motel and shutting off the ignition. The streetlamps surrounding the lot were dead and dark but, oddly enough, a Vacancy sign flickered erratically in the window of the office.
“We’re stopping?”
“Just for a bit.” Ben opened the door, and a gust of rain-scented air dispersed my drowsiness a little. “It’s almost dawn. I need a couple hours of sleep, at least, or I’m going to drive us off the road. This looks safe enough.”
It might’ve looked safe enough, but he snatched the gun off the dashboard and handed me a flashlight before walking up to the office door. I followed closely, peering over my shoulder, shining the beam into windows and dark corners. We stepped up to the porch, and my heart pounded, imagining gaunt, pale faces peering through the windows. But they remained dark and empty.
After several moments of pounding on the office door and calling “Hello?” into the darkened interior, Ben raised the shotgun and drove the butt into the glass above the door, shattering it. Ducking inside, he emerged seconds later with a key on a wooden peg, jingling it with weary triumph. I trailed him down the walkway to a battered green door with a brass 14B on the front and watched as he unlocked the door and pushed it back. It creaked open slowly, revealing a small room with an old TV, a hideous pink-and-green armchair and a single bed.
“Damn,” I heard him mutter, and he glanced over his shoulder at me. “Sorry, I was hoping to get one with double beds. I’ll see if they have the keys to another room—”
“There’s no need.” Bringing up the flashlight, I brushed past him through the doorway. The room was stale and dusty, and the carpet probably hadn’t been cleaned in years, but at least there was no stench of death and blood and decay. “We’re both adults,” I said, attempting to be pragmatic and reasonable. “We can share a bed if we have to. And I...I’d feel better not sleeping alone tonight, anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ben, I’m a doctor. You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before, trust me.”
My voice sounded too normal, too flippant, for what was happening outside. I felt like a deflated balloon, empty and hollow. Numb. I’d seen patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, having lost a loved one or even their whole family, and wondered if maybe I was heading down that same road. If perhaps this eerie calm and sense of detachment were the beginning.
The door clicked shut behind me, plunging the room into darkness. I whirled with the flashlight, shining the beam into Ben’s face. He flinched, turning his head, and I quickly dropped the light.
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right.” He looked up, and I saw that his stoic mask had slipped back into place. I shivered a little. If anyone was suffering from PTSD, it was probably Ben.
I turned from that haunting gaze, shining the light toward the bathroom in the corner. “I’m...going to see if the water still works.”
He didn’t say anything to that, and I retreated to the bathroom, leaving him in the dark.
Miraculously, the water still ran, though the temperature barely got above lukewarm. I told Ben I was going to take a bath, then filled the tub halfway, sinking down into it with a sigh in the darkness. The flashlight sat upright on the sink, shining a circle of light at the ceiling, turning the room ghostly and surreal. A tiny bar of complimentary soap sat on the edge of the tub, and I scrubbed myself down furiously, as if I could wash away the horror, grief and fear along with the blood. I heard Ben stumble outside the door and felt guilty for hoarding our only light source, but after a minute or two I heard the door open and close, the lock clicking as it shut behind him.
Uncomfortable that he was going somewhere alone, I counted the seconds, the silence pressing against my eardrums. After a few minutes, though, the door creaked open again. I heard his footsteps shuffle around the room before the bed squeaked as he settled atop it, and finally stopped moving.
I finished my bath, slipped back into my dirty, disgusting clothes, and left the room, keeping the flashlight low in case Ben had gone to sleep.
He hadn’t. He was perched on the edge of the mattress with his back to me, head bowed, slumping forward. His tattered shirt lay in a heap at the foot of the bed, and the flashlight beam slid over his broad shoulders and back. As I paused on the other side of the mattress, I saw his shoulders tremble, and heard the quiet, hopeless sound of someone trying to muffle a sob.
“Ben.”
Anger forgotten, I set the flashlight down and slipped around to his side, touching a bare shoulder as I came up. A nest of bloody gauze sat on an end table, next to a bottle of peroxide. His stitches had torn open, and the claw marks were dark, thin stripes down his back.
Sympathy bloomed through me, dissolving the last of the anger as my logical doctor’s brain finally caught up with my emotions. Ben was hurting, not from his wounds, but from the guilt that was tearing him apart inside. I wasn’t quite ready to forgive what had happened to Maggie, Jenna and my patients, but I knew, really knew, that the horrible night in the clinic was not his fault. And if he hadn’t been there, I probably would have died.
“Would you...help me?” Ben didn’t even bother trying to hide the wet tracks down his cheeks, though he didn’t glance up. He gestured to the peroxide and an open first aid kit on the nightstand. “I found those in the office, but I can’t reach it on my own.”
Silently, I picked up the first aid kit and scooted behind him on the bed. His skin was cold, but the area around the slashes was puffy and hot, though it didn’t look infected. I gently wiped away the dirt and blood, watching the peroxide sizzle into the open wounds, bubbling white. Ben didn’t even flinch.
“I don’t blame you, you know.” My voice surprised me, even more that I found it true. Ben didn’t answer, and I pressed a gauze pad to the wounds, keeping my voice low and calm. “What happened back in the clinic, in the lab with Nathan, that wasn’t your fault. I just...I freaked out. I reacted badly and I’m sorry for that, Ben.”
“You have no reason to apologize,” Ben murmured. “I should have been straight with you from the beginning, but...I didn’t know what you would think. How do you explain zombies and vampires to someone without sounding like a raving lunatic?” He scrubbed a hand over his face, and now I felt a tiny prick of guilt. If he had told me that in the clinic, I probably would have scoffed at the idea, or assumed he was on drugs. Whose fault was this, really? “But I should have told you,” Ben went on. “Nate...he was the smart one, the one who could explain anything and have it all make sense. In fact, I was hoping he would wake up so he could tell you what was going on. If that’s not a selfish reason...” A soft, bitter laugh, ending in a muffled sob. “It should’ve been me,” he said in a near whisper. “I should’ve been the one who died.”
“No.” I slid off the bed and walked around to face him. Crouching down, I peered at his face, putting a hand on his knee for balance. “Ben, look at me. This isn’t your fault,” I whispered again, as those tortured eyes met mine. “It isn’t Nathan’s fault. Ben, the virus is killing us. The human race is facing extinction, though no one is willing to admit it. Something had to be done.”
“Something was,” he muttered. “And now things are even worse. I don’t know if we can survive this. And just thinking that I was there when it happened, that maybe if I’d done something a little different, I could’ve stopped them from getting out—”
“You couldn’t have known what would happen.” I kept my voice calm, reasonable, my doctor’s voice. “And those scientists, they were only doing what anyone would do to save our race. We had to try something. It isn’t our nature to roll over and die without a fight.” I smiled faintly. “Humans are stubborn like that.”
He held my gaze, the light reflected in his eyes. Very slowly, as if afraid it would scare me away, he reached out and took a strand of my hair between his fingers. I held my breath, my heartbeat kicking into high gear, pulsing very loudly in my ears.
“I don’t know how you can stand to be around me,” Ben murmured, staring at his hand, at the pale strings between his fingers. “But...don’t go. Don’t leave. You’re the only thing keeping me sane right now.”
Maggie and Jenna’s faces crowded my mind, angry and accusing. My patients rose up from the darkness to stare at me, their gazes vengeful, but I shoved those thoughts away. They were gone. They were dead, and I couldn’t honor their memory with anger and blame and hate. The world was screwed, monsters roamed the streets and I had to cling to my lifelines where I could. I was sure everything would hit me, hard, when I had the chance to breathe. But right now, I had to make sure I—we—kept breathing.
Gently, I placed a palm on his cheek, feeling rough stubble under my fingers. “We’ll get through this,” I promised him, feeling, absurdly, that I was his lifeline right now, and if I left he might take that shotgun and put the muzzle under his chin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
For just a moment, Ben’s gaze grew smoldering, a dark, molten look that swallowed even the anguish on his face, before he straightened and pulled back, looking embarrassed.
Turning away, he gingerly bent to scoop up his shirt. “I’ll take the chair,” he offered in a husky voice, rising to his feet. I stood as well, frowning.
“Ben, you don’t have to—”
“Trust me.” He slipped into his shirt, grimacing. “I think I do.”
I didn’t think I would sleep, but I did drift off, listening to Ben’s quiet snores from the chair in the corner. I awoke the next morning to sunlight streaming in through the dingy curtains and Ben emptying a bag of junk food onto the table.
“Morning,” he greeted, and though his voice was solemn, it lacked the despair of the night before. “I thought you might be hungry, so I raided the snack machines by the office. I, uh, hope you don’t mind Doritos and Twinkies for breakfast.”
I smiled and struggled to my feet, brushing my hair back. “Any Ho Hos in the bunch?” I asked, walking up to the table.
“Mmm...no, sorry.” Ben held up a package. “But I do have Zingers.”
We smiled and ate our hideously unhealthy breakfast without complaint, knowing food was an unknown equation. The days of easy access were over. Places like McDonald’s or Wendy’s, where you could just walk in and order a hot breakfast, were a thing of the past. And many of the big superstores had been raided, gutted and picked clean when the chaos began. I wondered how long it would be before things went back to normal. I wondered if things would ever go back to normal.
“How far is it to your parents’ farm?” I asked, once the chip bags were empty and plastic wrappers covered the table. Ben handed me a Diet Coke, and I washed down the cloying sweetness in my throat.
Ben shrugged. “About a fourteen-hour drive, if the roads are clear. We should get there by this evening if we don’t run into anything.”
Like rabid zombie vampires. I shivered and shook that thought away. “You’ll be home soon, then. That’s good.”
“Yeah.” Ben didn’t sound entirely convinced. I glanced up and saw him watching me intently, his chin on the back of his laced hands. A flutter went through my stomach. Abruptly, he stood and started cleaning up the piles of wrappers scattered about the table, before he stopped, shaking his head. “Sorry. Old habits. Mom would always have us clear the dinner table for her. Come on.” He grabbed the shotgun and opened the door for me. “Let’s get out of here. The sooner we’re on the road, the sooner we’ll arrive.”
We piled into the truck, after stashing the shotgun safely in the backseat, and Ben stuck the key in the ignition. “Home,” he muttered in a voice barely above a whisper, and turned the key.
Nothing happened.
Chapter Seven
My heart stood still. Ben swore quietly and turned the key again. Same result. Nothing. The engine lay still and cold and dead, and no amount of jiggling the key or pumping the gas pedal seemed to revive it.
“Dammit.” Ben jumped out of the driver’s seat and stalked to the front, opening the hood with a rusty squeak. I watched him through the window, obeying when he told me to slide into the driver’s seat and try the ignition again. We worked for nearly twenty minutes, but the old truck remained stubbornly silent.
Ben dropped the hood with a bang, his face sweaty and grim. I peeked out the driver’s side window, trying to stay calm. “No luck?”
He shook his head. “Fuses are blown, I think. That, or the battery is dead. Either way, I’m not going to be able to get it started without jumper cables and another running engine. Dammit.” He rubbed his jaw. “Looks like we’re hoofing it.”
“To Illinois?” The thought was staggering. “A fourteen-hour drive will probably take us a week or more of walking, and that’s if we don’t run into anything.”
“I don’t see any other way, do you?” Ben looked around helplessly, hands on his hips. “We’ll look for another vehicle down the road, but we can’t stay here. I know, it scares me, too. But we have to get moving.”
Daunting was the word that came to mind—hiking across a lawless, empty, plague-ridden country, where society had broken down and humans were just as likely to turn on you as help—it was a frightening thought. Especially now, with those...things out there. But Ben was right; we couldn’t stay here. We had to continue.
Ben dug an old green backpack out from under the seats, and we raided the broken vending machines again, stocking up on sweets, chips and soda, as much as the pack could carry. Hefting it to his back, slinging the gun over one shoulder, he beckoned to me, and we started down the empty road, feeling like the only two people left on Earth.
* * *
The highway continued, weaving through hills and forest, past side roads and off-ramps that led to unknown places. Occasionally, we passed cars on the road, pulled over on the shoulder, abandoned in ditches, or sometimes just stopped in the middle of the lane. Once, I thought I saw a person in one of the cars in a ditch, a woman slumped against the dashboard, and hurried over to help. But she was long dead, and so was her little boy in the backseat. Sickened, I turned away, hoping their deaths had been swift, and the images continued to haunt me the rest of the afternoon.
Ben inspected every car we came across, searching around the dashboard and glove compartments, hoping for a lucky break. But except for the dead woman’s car, none of them had keys, and hers was too damaged to use. Another, a van, seemed to be in good condition, but the tires were flat. I asked him once if we could hot-wire a vehicle into running, but neither of us had a clue how to do that. So we kept walking as the sun slid across the sky and the shadows around us lengthened.
“Here,” Ben said, handing me an open can of Sprite when we stopped for a break. I took a long swig and handed it back as he sat beside me on the guardrail. We’d been hiking uphill for what had seemed like miles, and I could feel the heat of his body against mine, our shoulders and arms lightly touching. My stomach did a weird little twirl, especially when his large hand came to rest over mine on the railing.
“I think we’re coming up on a town,” he said, after finishing off the can and tossing it into the ditch. “If we are, it might be a good idea to stop and look around for a car. And food. Real food, anyway.” He glanced at the backpack, lying open at our feet. Twinkies, Snowballs, chips and candy wrappers stood out brightly against the dull gray of the pavement. “I might slip into a sugar-induced coma if I eat one more Twinkie.”
I smiled, liking this lighter, easygoing version of Ben. Out in the sunlight, away from all the blood, death, horror and despair, things didn’t look as bleak.
I grinned at him, bumping his shoulder, just as he looked back at me. And, very suddenly, we were staring at each other on a lonely, empty road, miles from anywhere.
The late-afternoon sun slanted through the branches of the pine trees, turning his hair golden-brown, his eyes hazel. I could see rings of amber and green around the coffee-colored irises. They were beautiful, and they held my gaze, soft and tender, and a little bit afraid. As if Ben was unsure where we stood, if this was all one-sided.
My heart pounded. Ben waited, not moving, though his eyes never left mine. The ball was in my court. I licked my lips and suddenly found myself leaning toward him.
The growl of a car engine echoed, unnaturally loud in the silence, making us both jerk up. Gazing down the road, I saw a flash of metal in the sun, speeding toward us, and my heart leaped. Ben stood, grabbing the shotgun from where it lay against the railing, as a rusty brown pickup roared around the bend and skidded to a halt in a spray of gravel.
My senses prickled a warning, and I moved closer to Ben as the doors opened and three big, rough-looking guys stepped out into the road. They looked related, brothers maybe, blond and tanned, with the same watery blue eyes. I caught the stench of alcohol wafting from the cab as they sauntered to the edge of the pavement and grinned at us.
They all had guns, one rifle and a couple pistols, though no one had raised a weapon yet. My stomach clenched with dread.
“Hey there.” The closest guy, a little bigger than the other two, leered at me. His voice was lazy and drawling, and a little slurred. I saw his gaze rake over me before he turned a mean look on Ben. “You two lost? Kind of a bad spot to be stranded—never know what kind of crazies you’ll run into out here.”
The other two snickered, as if that was actually funny. Ben nodded politely, though his arms and shoulders were tense, his finger resting on the trigger of the shotgun. “We’re not lost,” he said in a cool, firm voice. “We’re just going home. Thank you for your concern.”
They hooted with laughter. “Ooh, listen to him, all dandy and proper,” one of the others mocked. “A real gentleman, he is.”
“Now, now, be nice, Bobby,” the leader said, turning to grin at the one who’d spoken. “They said they’re trying to get home, so let’s help ’em out.” He turned and smiled at me, blue eyes gleaming, as inviting as a snarling wolf. “We’ll take you home, darlin’. So why don’t you just hop in the truck, right now?”
Ben’s weapon came up instantly, as did the other three. I gasped as a trio of deadly gun barrels were suddenly trained on Ben, who had his own pointed at the leader’s chest.
Time seemed to stop, the air around us crystallizing into a silence that hovered on the edge of chaos and death. I froze, unable to move, shocked at how quickly the situation had descended into another horror film. Only the guns pointed right at us were real.
“Ben,” I whispered, placing a hand on his arm. My legs shook, and a cold, terrified sweat dripped down my spine. “Stop this. You’ll be killed.”
“Listen to your girlfriend, boy,” the leader said, smiling as he leveled the pistol at Ben’s face. “There’s three of us and only one of you. Odds ain’t in your favor.” His eyes flicked to me, and he jerked his head toward the open truck door. “Just come along quietly, missy, and make it easy on you both. Unless you want your dandy boyfriend pumped full o’ holes in about two seconds.”
“I’ll go,” I told both of them, though my eyes still pleaded with Ben. I felt sick, knowing what they wanted, what would happen to me the second I went into that truck. But I couldn’t let them shoot Ben. “Ben, don’t. Please. They’ll kill you.”
“Stay where you are.” His voice, low and steely, froze me in my tracks. He hadn’t moved through the whole encounter, and his stare never wavered from the man in front of him. “There’s three of you,” he agreed, still locking eyes with the leader. “But I can still kill one of you before the others get their shots off. And the odds aren’t in your favor, are they?” The leader stiffened, and the barrel moved with him, just enough to keep him in its sight. “Do you know what happens to a body shot point-blank with a shotgun?” Ben asked, his voice cold as ice. “You’ll have to be buried with your truck, because they’ll never get all the pieces out of it.”
“Fuck you.” The leader pulled the hammer on his pistol back, aiming it at Ben’s face. Ben stared him down over the shotgun, not moving, never wavering, while my heart hammered so hard against my ribs I thought I might pass out.
Finally, the leader slowly raised his other hand, placating. “All right,” he said in a soothing voice, and lowered his weapon. “Everyone just take it easy, now. Relax.” He shot the other two a hard look, and they reluctantly lowered their guns. “This is what we’re gonna do. Give us that pack full of stuff, and we’ll be on our way. That sound like an okay trade, boy?”
“Fine,” Ben said instantly, not lowering his weapon. “Take it and go.”
The leader, still keeping one hand in the air, jerked his head at one of the other two, who edged around the truck and snatched the bag from the ground. Ben kept his gaze and his weapon trained unwaveringly on the leader, who smirked at us and slipped back into the truck, slamming the door as the others did the same.
“Well, thank ya kindly, dandy boy.” He grinned as his friends hooted and pawed through the bag, snatching at Twinkies and cupcakes. “You two have fun, now. Run on home to mommy. It’ll be dark soon.”
The truck peeled away in a squeal of gravel, the echoes of their laughter ringing out behind them.
Ben let out a shaky breath and finally lowered the weapon. I could see his hands shaking as he leaned back against the rail, breathing hard. “Why did you do that?” I whispered, my heart slamming against my ribs. “You could’ve been killed.”
“I wasn’t going to let them take you.”
My legs were trembling. I took a shaky step toward him, and he reached out with one arm, pulling me close. I felt his heart, beating frantically through his shirt, and wrapped my arms around his waist, clinging to him as fear and adrenaline slowly ebbed away, and my heartbeat slowed to normal. Ben leaned the shotgun against the railing and held me in a fierce, almost desperate embrace, as if daring something to try to rip me away. I relaxed into him, felt his arms around me and, if only for a moment, let myself feel safe.
“Come on,” he whispered, finally drawing back. “Let’s try to make town before nightfall.”
* * *
It wasn’t quite dusk when we stumbled off the main highway, following an exit ramp into the ruins of a small town. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows over the empty streets and rows of dark, decaying houses, their yards overgrown with weeds. We passed homes and streets that must have been a nice little suburban community. Yards had been well-tended once, and the driveways were full of station wagons and minivans. I kept looking for signs of life, hints that people still lived, but except for a small orange cat, darting away into the bushes, there was nothing.
“What are we looking for?” I asked Ben, my voice sounding unnaturally loud in the stillness. The sun hovered low on the horizon, a sullen blood-red, like a swollen eye. Ben gave it a nervous look, then gestured to a building as we reached a crossroad. “Something like that.”
A gas station sat desolately on a corner, windows smashed, gas hoses lying on the ground. We approached cautiously, peering through the shattered glass, but it was empty of life and most everything else. Inside, the shelves were stripped clean, glass littered the floor, and most of the displays were tipped over. Others had been here before us. Fleeing town, perhaps, when the plague hit. Though I didn’t know where they thought they could run. Red Lung was everywhere, now.
“Been pretty picked over,” Ben muttered, stepping around downed shelves and broken glass. He nudged an empty display that had once held energy drinks and shook his head. “Let’s not waste too much time looking; I want to get out of here soon. This place is making me jumpy.”
Me, too. Though I couldn’t put my finger on why. The town seemed lifeless. We rummaged around and found a few meat tins, jerky rolls and a bag of Doritos that had been missed. We tossed our findings into a plastic bag, the rustle of paper and plastic the only sounds in the quiet. Outside, the sun dipped below the horizon, stealing the last of the evening light, and a chill crept through the air.
“All right,” Ben said, rising to his feet, “I think we have enough, for a little while, at least. Now, I wonder how hard it will be to find a car...?”
A woman shuffled past the broken window.
I jerked, grabbing Ben’s arm, as the figure moved by without stopping. My stomach lurched. “Hey!” I called, hopping over shelves and broken glass to the door, peering out. The woman was walking down the sidewalk, stumbling every few steps, and didn’t seem to have heard me.
Abruptly, she put a hand against the wall and bent over as violent coughing shook her thin frame. Blood spattered the ground beneath her in crimson drops, and I stumbled to a halt.
Ben came up behind me and took my arm, moving me back. The woman finally stopped coughing and slowly turned to face us. I saw the thin streams of blood, running from her eyes like crimson tears, and my insides turned to ice.
“Oh, my God.” I looked at Ben, saw the same horror reflected on his face, the realization of what was happening. Not Red Lung. The other thing. It was already here. “How could it spread this fast?”
He grabbed my wrist as the woman gagged on her own blood and collapsed to the gutter, twitching. “The whole town could be infected. We have to get out of here, now!”
We turned and fled, our footsteps pounding the sidewalk, echoing dully in the stillness. Only...the town wasn’t as empty and still as I’d first thought. As the light vanished from the skies and streetlamps flickered to life, things began moving in the darkness and shadows. Moans and wails crept from dark houses, doors slammed open and pale, shambling figures stumbled out of the black. Terror gripped me. We were out in the open, exposed. The second that one spotted us, we would be run down and torn apart. The only saving grace was that the creatures seemed groggy and confused right now, not completely alert. If we could get to the edge of town without being seen—
Ben jerked to a halt in front of a line of cars as one of the creatures, long and thin and terrible, leaped onto the roof with the ease of a cat. It peered at us with blank white eyes and hissed, baring a mouthful of jagged fangs. My heart and stomach turned to ice. Gasping, we turned to run the other way.
Three more of the monsters leaped over a fence, hissing and snarling as they crept forward, blocking our path. One of them had been a woman, once; she wore a tattered dress that dragged through the mud, and her hair was long and matted.
Oh, God. This is it, we’re going to die.
One of the creatures screamed, sounding eerily human, and rushed Ben. It moved shockingly fast, like a monstrous spider skittering forward. Ben barely had time to raise the shotgun, but he did bring the muzzle up just in time, and a deafening boom rocked the air around us. The creature was flung backward, landing in the bushes with a shriek, and wild screeching erupted from the shadows around us. Pale things scuttled forward, closing in from all directions, teeth, claws and dead eyes shining in the darkness.
“This way!”
The deep voice rang out like a shot, startling us both. Whirling around, I saw a tall, dark figure emerge from the shadows between two houses, beckoning us forward.
“Hurry!” he snapped, and we darted toward him, following his dark shadow as it turned and vanished between houses, seeming to melt into the night. The shrieks of the monsters rang all around us, but we trailed the figure through a maze of overgrown yards and fences until he fled up a crumbling set of stairs into the ruins of a brick house.
The door slammed behind us as we ducked over the threshold. Gasping, we watched the figure throw the lock, then stalk to the front windows and yank the curtains shut before turning around.
Muffled silence descended, broken only by the shrieks and wails outside. I blinked, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. The man before us was enormous; not overly tall or heavy, just physically imposing. He wasn’t that much taller than Ben, but he possessed a definite quiet strength, the bearing of someone who knew how to handle himself. His skin was the pale color of a man who spent all his time indoors, someone who didn’t see a lot of sun, though his broad chest and corded muscle hinted at the power underneath. His hair was dark, and his eyes, when they turned on us, were blacker than the shadows that surrounded him.
“Stay back from the windows,” he said in that deep, powerful voice. “We should be safe here, but the rabids will tear down the walls if they see us. Move back.”
“Rabids?” I whispered. The man shrugged.
“What some have taken to calling them.” His piercing gaze lingered on me, assessing. “Have either of you been bitten?”
“No,” Ben said, holding his shotgun in both hands, I noted. Not pointing it at the stranger but not relaxing it, either. I held my breath, but the stranger didn’t press the question. He simply nodded and moved away from the door, heading toward the dilapidated kitchen.
“If either of you wish to be helpful, you might want to start covering any windows that you find.” His voice drifted back from the hall. “Just don’t let the rabids see you, or we’ll have to find a new place to hole up. I’m afraid you’re rather stuck here until morning.”
Ben and I shared a glance, then did what we were told. For several minutes, we concentrated on fortifying the house, making sure there were no windows, gaps or open spaces through which the monsters—the rabids—could climb in or see us. When we had made the house as secure as we could, closing curtains, shoving furniture in front of doors, we returned to the kitchen, which was small and had no windows to speak of. The dark stranger was there, leaning against a counter, watching us with fathomless black eyes.
“You might want to turn the flashlight off for now,” he said, nodding at the light in my hands, the feeble ray barely piercing the shadows. “There are candles in the drawers if you need light, but be cautious where you set them out. Make sure they are in a spot where the rabids cannot see them.”
I watched him carefully, shining the light for Ben as he rummaged through the drawer across from the stranger, pulling out three short candles and a book of matches. He stood there, motionless as a statue, his stark gaze not even on us anymore. He seemed distracted, as if we were only shadows, moving around him, not part of his world at all.
There was the sharp hiss and sizzle of a match flaring to life, and I clicked off the flashlight as Ben set the lit candles on the counter. The stranger’s attention finally shifted back to us, and he looked almost surprised that we were still there. Ben stared back, his expression cautious, all the muscles in his body rigid.
“You can relax,” the stranger told us with the faintest hint of a smile. “It was pure coincidence that I stumbled upon you this evening. I did not lure you here to kill you in your sleep.” His smile faded, and he turned away. “I mean you no harm tonight, I give you my word.”
Tonight? I thought, not knowing why that sounded odd to me. What about tomorrow night, then? “We don’t mean to be ungrateful,” I said, as Ben slowly relaxed his grip on the shotgun. “It’s just been a rough couple of days.”
“Yes, it has.” The man scrubbed a hand across his face, then pushed himself off the counter. “There’s food in the cupboards,” he announced, sounding tired. “And I believe the stove is gas. It might still work. I’d advise you not to open the refrigerator—the electricity has been out for a couple weeks, by the looks of it.”
“Thank you,” Ben murmured, setting the gun on the counter as the stranger moved toward the door. “I’m Ben, by the way, and that’s Kylie.”
The stranger nodded. “I’ll check the closets for blankets,” he continued, as if Ben hadn’t spoken at all. “Make yourselves as comfortable as you can.”
With a nod to me, he turned and left the room, making absolutely no noise on his way out.
He didn’t, I noticed, offer his name.
* * *
I found several boxes of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard, along with a few cans of vegetables, and cooked them in the darkness with Ben hovering beside the stove. I found myself wondering who had lived here before, what had happened to them. Had they fled town, leaving their house and all their possessions behind? Or were they now a part of the horror...outside?
“Your carrots are boiling over,” Ben commented, and I jerked up with a whispered curse. Water was bubbling over the rim of the pot and flowing down to the stovetop. “Sorry,” I muttered, moving it to a different burner. “Cooking is not my strong suit. Most of my dinners come in microwave boxes.” The macaroni suddenly followed the carrot’s example, hissing as it overflowed its container. “Dammit!”
“Here.” Ben gently moved me out of the way, turning down the heat and maneuvering the pots around with the ease of familiarity. I watched him stir in the cheese, spoon the noodles and carrots onto tin plates, and wondered at the surreal normalcy of it all. Here we were, cooking macaroni and having dinner, while outside the world was falling to the vampire-zombie apocalypse.
No sleep for me tonight, that’s for certain. Think about something else, Kylie.
“Wow,” I said, as Ben put the bowls on the table, “a man who can shoot a gun and cook? Why are you still single, Ben Archer?”
I couldn’t be positive in the flickering candlelight, but he might’ve blushed. “Mac-n-cheese is not cooking,” he said with a small grin. “And, I don’t know. I’ve never found the right girl, I suppose. What about you?”
“Me?” I sat down at the table, picking up the spoon left on the cloth, hoping it was clean. “I never had the time for...anything like that,” I admitted, as Ben sat down across from me. “It was either work and study or have a life, you know? I never thought about settling down or having a family. I wanted to concentrate on finishing school, getting a good job. Everything else sort of took a backseat.”
“What about now?” Ben asked softly.
I fidgeted. He was giving me that intense, smoldering look again, the one that made my insides do strange twirly backflips. “What do you mean?”
He gave me a you-know-what-I-mean look. “What do you want to do, now that the world is screwed over?” He jerked his head at a window. “Everything is different, and it won’t be normal for a long time, I think. Do you...” He paused, playing with his fork. “Do you ever think you’d want to...settle down? Find a safe place to wait this out and start a family?”
“You mean pull an Adam and Eve and populate the world again?” He didn’t smile at the joke, and I sighed. “I don’t know, Ben. Maybe. But I also want to see if I can help. I know everything is screwed up right now, but I’d like to help out where I can.” I shrugged and prodded my food. “I haven’t really given it much thought, though. Right now, all I want to do is stay alive.”
“An admirable plan,” came a voice from the doorway.
We both jumped. The dark stranger stood in the frame, the light flickering over his strong yet elegant features. I hadn’t even heard him approach; the space had been empty a moment before, and now he was just there.
“Next time, though, perhaps you should avoid going into any towns or settlements at night,” he said. “The rabids are everywhere now, and spreading. Just like the virus. Soon, nowhere will be safe, for anyone.”
His voice was dull, hopeless, and though his face remained calm, I could see the agony flickering in his dark eyes. As if his mask was slipping, cracking, showing glints of guilt, horror and sorrow underneath. I recognized it, because Ben had worn the same mask when he’d stepped into my clinic that day, a stoic front over a mind about to fall apart. This stranger looked the same.
Ben gestured to the chair at the end of the table. “There’s plenty of food, if you want it,” he offered.
“I’ve already eaten.”
“Well, join us, at least,” I added, and that black, depthless gaze flicked to me. “You sort of saved our lives. The least we can do is thank you for it.”
He paused, as though weighing the consequences of such a simple action, before he very slowly pulled out a chair and sat down, lacing his fingers together. Every motion, everything he did, was powerful and controlled; nothing was wasted. His eyes, however, remained dark and far away.
A moment of awkward silence passed, the only sounds being the clink of utensils against the bowls and the occasional shriek of the rabids outside. The man didn’t move; he remained sitting with his chin on his hands, staring at the table. He was so still, so quiet, if you weren’t looking directly at him, you wouldn’t know he was there at all.
“Where are you headed?” the stranger murmured without looking up, an obvious attempt at civility. Ben swallowed a mouthful of water and put the cup down.
“West,” he replied. “Toward Illinois. I have family there, I hope.” His face tightened, but he shook it off. “What about you? If we’re headed the same direction, you’re welcome to come along. Where are you going?”
For a few seconds, there was no answer. I wasn’t sure the stranger was even paying attention, when he gave a short, bitter laugh. My gut clenched with horror and fear. In that moment, his mask slipped away, and I saw the raw agony beneath the smooth facade, the glassy sheen in his eyes that hovered close to madness.
“It doesn’t matter,” he rasped. “Nothing matters anymore. No matter where I go, I’ll be hunted. I could flee to the other side of the world, and they would find me. I thought...” He covered his eyes with a hand. “I thought I could change things. But I’ve only made it far, far worse.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The stranger drew in a deep breath, appearing to compose himself. “I’ve...done something,” he admitted, lowering his hand. He stared down at the table, the candlelight reflected in his dark eyes. “Something I will never be forgiven for. Something that will likely cause my death. A very painful, drawn-out death, if I know my kin.” Another of his short, bitter laughs. “And it will be completely justified.”
Outside, something shrieked and slammed into the side of the wall. We froze, holding our breath, listening, as the body scrabbled around the base of the house, watching its jerky movements through a slit in the curtain. Finally, it shuffled off, vanishing into the night, and we started breathing again.
I glanced at the stranger. “Whatever it was,” I began, knowing he probably wouldn’t tell me the details, “it can’t be that bad, right?”
No answer. Just a tight, bitter smile.
I took a breath. “Look,” I began, wondering why I wanted to help him, to ease the darkness in his eyes, on his face. Maybe I was trying to return the favor, or maybe I felt that I was seeing only a hint of the agony beneath that cool, flinty shell. The reasons didn’t matter; I reached out and put a hand on his wrist. “Whatever you’ve done, or think you’ve done, it’s over now. You can’t go back and change it. What you do about it, right now, from here on out, that’s the important thing.”
I felt Ben’s eyes on me and realized I could be talking to both of them. And myself. I couldn’t go back and change anything. Maggie and Jenna were gone. The world was full of monsters, or it would be soon. I could not dwell on the past, what I had lost, who I had failed. From here on, I could only move forward.
The stranger blinked, staring at my fingers on his wrist as though surprised to find them there. His skin was pale, smooth and oddly cool.
“Perhaps...you are right.” He straightened, giving me an unfathomable look. “I cannot escape what I have done, but perhaps I can make up for it. I still have time. It shames me that a...stranger...must tell me what should be obvious, but these are unusual times.” He stared at me, and that faint, bemused smile flickered across his face. “Incredible, that after all these years I can still be surprised.”
He rose, startling me with the smooth, quick motion. “There are stairs to a finished basement down the hall,” he said, back to being matter-of-fact, his mask sliding into place once more. “It will be the safest place for you to spend the night, I believe. If you want to get some sleep, I would do so there.”
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