Bestial (29 page)

As she biked south, she thought about her son, how she had held him on the day he was born, the sweet milky scent of him. He had her eyes, and he had her love of old films and the theater. She recalled the last time they had attended a musical at the Aronoff Center (how long ago had it been? what was the show?), and tears welled up in her eyes. She shook her head, dispelling them when she felt a crick in her neck.

He had been her baby, her little boy, her awkward teenage son, her little, quiet man. He’d been so much to her, and what had she been to him? A traitor.

Never again,
she vowed. Never again would she turn a blind eye.

She wondered where this surge of feeling had originated. Had it been there all along, lying dormant within her? In any case,
she could see what was important now. Funny how that happened. Your world was turned upside down, shaken violently, and what was meaningful somehow floated to the top.

And she was going to grasp at those drifting emotions like the life preservers they were.

The dark clouds she’d noticed earlier were now clustering closer together, giving the daytime a twilight feeling. A storm was definitely on the way, and she would probably get soaked, cold, and miserable. But it wouldn’t stop her. Not from finding Chris. Not after she’d lived through so much.

As she passed a small quarry, she saw several nude people bobbing in the water, arms and legs outstretched in the classic dead man’s float. She remembered seeing several corpses in swimming pools back in Indian Hill, where every house had a pool. There’d been a few in the local lake as well. She hadn’t taken much notice of it before, but the sight of those bodies in the quarry brought the memory back.

As she continued down the highway, never going as fast as she would have liked, she wondered whether the beasts could swim, or if their bodies were too heavy and broad for their smallish arms. Maybe they sank like stones.

Had they leaped to their deaths, knowing they wouldn’t be able to swim in their monstrous states, or had they simply fallen in? Had they clawed at the sides of the quarry in a vain effort to escape?

She wondered if this would be the answer, if God would bring back the floodwaters and drown the evil world and all the cruel people in it. She wasn’t a religious person, but the thought held a certain charm for her, a simplicity in a world that was no longer simple.

As she entered the shadow of a train overpass, her bike hit something—a dead woman’s hand. The corpse was splayed on the pavement, just outside of a car door. Its back had been torn open between the shoulder blades, and most of the woman’s insides had been pulled out, displayed neatly on the road.

The sight was so horrendous that Cathy turned the wheel too hard and found herself losing her balance. The bike spun from beneath her, and she landed next to the body. The skin peeled from her
left hand when she tried to stop her tumble, and her right kneecap smacked against the pavement. Crying out, she tucked herself into a ball and rolled, watching as her bike skidded away from her.

When she stopped moving, she checked herself. Other than a sore knee and a skinned hand, she didn’t detect any damage. She limped a bit as she walked back to her bicycle. It hadn’t sustained any real damage either.

Leaning against a Mustang convertible, she caught her breath, legs throbbing from the unfamiliar exercise. Her hand didn’t bleed much, but it stung like hell. She shook it, wiped it against the leg of her jeans.

Exhaling, she marveled at how good it felt to stop for a rest. The shade of the overpass felt more secure to her, as if she was hiding in plain sight. She stretched, pulling her limbs taut. Moaning softly, she sat on the hood of the Mustang.

Something moved on the overpass above her. A series of shadows scuttling back to their sanctuaries.

Cathy shivered, chastised herself for stopping.

She could see the Norwood Lateral ahead of her, which marked the halfway point to her destination. If she’d been asked a year ago whether she could bike that far, she would have denied it, laughing at the very concept. Now, despite her Jell-O legs, her sore, blistering hands, and her mental exhaustion, she knew she would make it downtown.

But would she be in time?

Taking a few stretches in preparation, she jogged in place for a couple of minutes. She massaged her thighs. Her leg muscles quivered, but there were no actual spasms yet. A good sign.

She climbed back onto her bike.

“Hey, lady.” A girl emerged from an ancient pickup truck that had run off the road several yards away. She looked like she was coming out of a cave, blinking and holding a hand to the side of her face. Her hair was a dirty brown, loose around her shoulders, trembling in the breeze. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, and her floral-print cotton dress was torn and filthy.

Walking forward, the girl tilted her head, cocking it to the side,
listening for something that Cathy couldn’t hear. Her fingers scurried like spiders against her thighs, as though she were playing the strains of a long-forgotten piano piece. Nervous tension emanated from her in almost visible waves.

“Hey,” she said, her voice low. “You seen anybody on the road?” She had a Southern twang.

Cathy shook her head, took a few tentative steps back as the girl stepped up to her. The stranger placed a thin arm on the handlebars of the bike. Cathy tightened her grip.

“No. I haven’t seen anybody along the highway. I saw some people in Indian Hill.”

“That where you’re from? That rich place?”

“Yes. And I need to get moving.”

“I got left here,” the girl said. “Goddamn family ain’t worth spit. They left me in the truck, said they was gonna look for someone else.”

Cathy’s eyes darted to the vehicle. Flies buzzed around the open bed of the truck, and on its dirty white paint job, a single crimson smear traversed from the passenger door to the bumper, a hideous racing stripe along the rusted-out side.

“How long have you been in there?”

“Couple days. We was going to the store for the groceries. I still got some left. You want some water? Or a pop?”

Cathy swallowed hard; her mouth and throat were parched. “A water might be nice.”

The girl took her hand and grinned at her, but there was no humor behind her smile. There was something else.

Something old and primeval.

Suddenly, Cathy didn’t want to go with the girl. She resisted, holding her bike tightly between her legs.

“Oh, come on,” the girl said. “I ain’t gonna hurt you none. What can I do? I’m just a kid.”

It was true. When Christian was her age, he had been perfectly harmless.

Slowly, Cathy stepped off the bike and allowed herself to be pulled
along. “Just one quick water,” she said, her mouth feeling more and more like a desert. Even her voice sounded cracked and dry.

In the shadows of the overpass, something stirred. Then something else.

“My name’s Beth Blue. My folks call me Bethie, but I like Beth better. Do you know what’s happening? People were acting crazy, like they was animals. Did you see it?”

Cathy nodded. Each step brought them closer to the truck, and in the cloudy daylight, the stain along its side glowed almost a stop-sign red.

“Hell of a thing, wasn’t it? My daddy says it’s God punishing us. Ain’t no reason to lie. We’re his kin, and all. He says people are getting what they deserve. Here we are.”

They stopped at the edge of the truck. Someone was slumped forward over the steering wheel, and Cathy leaned forward to help him.

“Oh God, someone’s hurt,” she said.

Then the smell hit her, and she knew why the truck was swarmed with flies. She could see a man, his face battered and crushed, his guts trailing out the crack at the bottom of the driver’s-side door.

In the truck bed, there was another body, that of an older woman. Her head had been torn from her neck, and her corpse lay between paper bags and spilled groceries. Long strips of meat were missing from her nude, wrinkled body. A bright red apple had been placed in her mouth.

Wrapping her arms around Cathy’s throat, the girl pulled backward. Cathy couldn’t breathe, and she spun, dragging the thin girl.

“We couldn’t never afford no meat,” Beth Blue cried gleefully as Cathy twisted beneath her. “Now I got lots of meat. Hold still, why don’t ya? It won’t hurt.”

Spots like solar flares passed across Cathy’s vision. She needed to throw off her attacker, or she was going to pass out and end up another meal for this crazy child. But the girl was deceptively strong, and her arms were latched together as she pulled back hard.

Turning, Cathy faced away from the old truck. She rushed backward, slamming the girl into the side of the cab. Beth Blue’s
head flung back, and it shattered the window, forming a jagged halo around her face. The truck must have been so old it predated safety glass.

“Hey! Bitch, there ain’t no cause for that! I was just hungry. You’re only making it harder on yourself.”

Her grip on Cathy strengthened. Cathy shoved backward, harder this time. She was beginning to see tiny green flares of light. Most everything else was going black.

She didn’t have much time left.

Several figures emerged from the shadows. Men and women with torn, stained clothing and the eagerness of hunters glowing gold in their eyes. They were still fifty feet away, but they seemed to move as a pack, with a young, muscular, shirtless man in the lead; the others followed him, skirting outward to frame the highway.

Cathy rushed toward the truck, putting Beth Blue’s head through the window. When Cathy moved back and forth a few times, the glass lodged in the skin and sinew of the girl’s neck. Her hold on Cathy loosened, and her hands fluttered to the gash. Cathy could hear a gurgling sound behind her, loud even over her own coughing.

The shambling figures were thirty feet away, and the young man in the lead, obviously some kind of alpha dog, sniffed the air and motioned for the others to spread out farther.

“Goddamn you,” Beth Blue cried out. “I was just … hungry. Goddamn you.”

Cathy pulled loose, and the girl slumped to her knees, pressing her palms to the wounds, unable to contain the gushes of bright red blood. When the girl’s hands dropped to her sides, the arterial spray shot out of her like a mist, spattering the side of the white truck, creating odd pop art patterns. The girl fell gracefully onto her side, one hand beneath her cheek as though she were sleeping.

The pack of crazies was at least twenty strong, and they had bloodstains on their chins and cheeks. They’d been at someone recently.

Cathy hurried to her bike.

A teenage boy emerged from the shadows and ran to Beth Blue, sinking his teeth into her ruined throat and slurping at the blood.
The others grew jittery, excited by the sight of so much gore spattered across the road. They shot nervous glances at their leader.

He was staring at Cathy. The skin on the back of her neck crawled beneath his empty gaze. His lips curled into a snarl. She threw a leg over her bike and took a seat, shifting one foot to the pedal.

Three more members of the ragged crew joined the teenager, surrounding Beth Blue’s body like hyenas, snapping bones, sucking at the marrow.

Cathy pedaled south again, slowly, trying to stay on the edge of the highway. The pack leader tossed his curly-maned head at her and issued a growl to the others. He didn’t speak, just grunted at them after he howled. They responded as if he’d given them orders.

The group of bloody crazies blocked the shadowed area under the overpass, and more emerged from the darkness. There was a hill on either side, and Cathy biked farther off the road.

The pack leader ran toward her, twelve of his followers behind him. They ran close to the ground, their backs hunched over, their noses guiding them.

Cathy ran into a fence just past the ditch and close to the hill. She leaped off her bike, tossed it over the chain-link fence, and started climbing. She didn’t dare turn to see how close the pack was.

When she dropped to the other side, Cathy barely noticed the pain in her legs as she landed. She grabbed her bike by the handlebars and scurried to the top of the hill, into the middle of the railroad tracks. Behind her, the fence rattled as the crazy people scaled it. They dropped on the other side, crouching on all fours. The leader was already heading up the hill.

Ahead of Cathy, a few members of the shabby army stepped into the light from beneath the overpass. Behind her, one of the crazy people laughed and huffed like an animal.

She knew it was now or never. Cathy jumped on her bike and pedaled furiously down the other slope of the hill. Luckily there was no fence on this side. When she hit pavement, she lowered her head and steered between the wrecked cars.

The crazies leaped at her, but she’d gained enough speed that they soon fell far behind. Cathy didn’t slow down.

She had been stupid and careless, and she couldn’t afford to repeat that mistake. She wondered if the members of the pack had gone crazy because of something they had done in their primitive state, or if they had embraced their new, dark side.

Shuddering, Cathy nearly lost her balance, but she recovered, her determination overcoming her terror. She vowed to pedal until she reached the Bio-Gen building. Stopping again, even for only a brief respite, was too great of a risk.

Who knew what other dangerous things hovered just out of sight, hiding in the shadows, waiting for prey? How many other packs had formed, forging tenuous alliances in order to attain fresh meat?

She headed south again, steering between the cars until she was at the side of the highway. It was more difficult to bike through the grass, but there were fewer obstructions. And it kept her away from the things lurking amongst the vehicles.

SEPTEMBER 18, 12:30 P.M.

C
hesya showed Christian to the break room, where she had discovered the television set. Even though she had checked it once, she turned it on again, but with the power failure no picture showed on the screen. Sighing, she dropped into one of the three overstuffed chairs in the room.