Bitten (3 page)

RACHAEL’S ALARM WENT OFF AT six am sharp as usual. Reaching over she smacked the snooze button and promptly fell back to sleep. Moments later she jolted herself awake and squinted at the clock again. Her head throbbed.

“Dammit,” she mumbled
to herself, her voice dry and rough. She rubbed the temples of her forehead, adding, “A little too much wine for you, sweetheart.”

Just then she sat up in bed with a
frightful worry. Her heart raced. What if Hector had called for her in the night and she had been passed out like a veritable Rip Van Winkle?

Wrapping herself up in a silky nightgown, she cinched up the sash around her waist and rushed down the hall. Rachael barged into Hector’s room and gasped at the sight of an empty bed.
Her chest filling with panic, Rachael darted into the living room where Hector liked to watch his morning cartoons before school, but he wasn’t there either.

“Hector?” Rachael called out. “W
here are you, babe?”

From behind the kitchen counter Rachael heard a strange noise.
It sounded like a grinding of some sort. Slowly she eased up to the kitchen nook and peered around the counter. Covering her mouth she fought hard not to scream at the terrible, stomach churning, sight she beheld.

Hector was crouched over the
ir cat, Trixie, eating her disemboweled remains. He slurped up the entrails and licked his bloody fingers. Rachael crouched down and put her hand on Hector’s shoulder. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might explode in her chest. “Honey, what are you doing?”

Hector didn’t
respond to her touch. Looking over his shoulder he let out what sounded like a grumble, as if he didn’t appreciate the interruption, and went back to chewing on what remained of poor Trixie.

“Stop it!” Rachael demanded, and she forcefully grabbed Hector by his arm and tore him away from the dead cat. His ar
m felt awfully cold and clammy. Hector gazed at her with milky-white eyes. He wore a vacant expression on his face and his mouth was dappled with specs of red gooey cat entrails. His skin was a jaundiced hue which gave him a sickly look. Rachael recoiled, letting go of Hector’s arm, and was about to scream but quickly smothered her mouth with a cupped hand.

“Baby,
” she said in a whisper, “I think you’re sick. We should get you to the hos—”

Without warning Hector lunged and grabbed a
hold of his mother’s arm and sunk his teeth in. Rachael grimaced with pain and let out an animal-like whimper. Instinctively, she defensively shoved Hector back. As Hector lurched back he managed to tear of a bit of flesh from her arm, which caused Rachael to squeal with horror filled agony. Hector slammed into the stainless steel fridge behind him, which shook and rattled from the harsh impact.

Before Rachael could begin to feel
sorry for slamming her son into the refrigerator, however, Hector bared his blood drenched teeth and lunged at her again. His jowls snapped at her with the ravenousness of a wild animal. Again his teeth dug into her, piercing her right shoulder. Rachael screamed out in pain, but she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know why he kept attacking her. “Hector, it’s me, your mom!”

Somehow Rachael
had to get him to stop. Wrapping her arms around him she pulled him tight to her chest and held him there. He fought and squirmed desperately to get out of her grasp, but she managed to hold on tight.

Rachael wrangled him into the living room, but he wouldn’t stop writhing and kicking wildly, attempting to break free
of her. It took all of her strength to maintain her hold on him.

In his fit of rage,
Hector somehow managed to kick the island counter with such a force it knocked them both back into the kitchen table. The two of them rolled over the table top and tumbled off the other end. Getting to her feet, Rachael felt Hector’s hands reach around her and his fingernails suddenly dug into her chest. His nails cut jagged red lines across her breasts as he tore at her flesh.

Wincing form the pain, Rachael tried to pry Hector’s cold fingers
off of her, but his strength was inhuman. Reaching over with her free hand, she found the empty wine bottle she had left out the night before. They must have knocked to the floor in their tumultuous tumble.

Gripping t
he bottle neck with a tight grip, her knuckles as white as bone, she closed her eyes as she smashed the bottle down onto Hector’s head with all hear strength. The blow was so severe that it sent what felt like the sting of a thousand hot needles up Rachael’s arm. The impact sent Hector staggering back and he fell over the back of a toppled over chair.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Rachael
murmured, half beside herself. She couldn’t believe what she had just done. Rachael looked down at her aching shoulder. Rivers of red blood trickled down her neck and arms, and gathered to form droplets that ran off her tightly clenched knuckles. That’s when it dawned on her that she was fighting for her life.

Hector shambled back
to his feet and bull rushed her. Rachael swung what remained of the jagged bottle as a warning for him not to come any closer but it didn’t seem to have any effect. He slammed into her abdomen and sent her staggering backward. Her foot nicked the corner of the sofa and she tripped over it. Her backward momentum caused her to crash through the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. Glass crinkled, popped, and shattered under the weight of her fall.

Rachael sat up slowly and pulled a shard of glass
from her elbow, and quickly discarded it. Hector inched forwards with blood soaked hands and blood encrusted fingernails, reaching out for her. Crawling backward on her elbows, to evade his swipes, Rachael’s hand searched around for the bottle, but she couldn’t find it. It had rolled all the way to the other side of the living room.

Hector kept creeping closer and closer.
His tiny bare feet dragged across broken glass with a horrible scraping noise as he closed in on her. He seemed to be oblivious to the pain and the trails of blood smears he left behind.

“Hector, it’s me, your mother! It’s
mommy! Don’t you recognize me?” Tears swelled in Rachael’s eyes but her son did not respond to the sound of her voice.

Reaching down, Rachael retrieved the standing lamp and used it to block Hector’s advances. But he kept on pushing
forward, until Rachael felt her back pinned to the wall. But this didn’t deter Hector’s advance. He continued pressing forward until the light bulb crunched into his chest.

Rachael’s motherly instinct kicked in and she dropped the lamp, opened her arms wide, and
embraced her rabid son. It was the only thing she could think to do. She felt Hector breathing on her neck with a disturbingly cold breath. Just as she was about to speak to him she felt a horrible searing pain in her neck. Rachael reeled back but Hector had dug his nails into her back. She couldn’t shake him off. Not this time. He was latched on to her like a koala bear from hell.

Rachael’s instincts screamed for her to get away.
Grunting, she pushed herself up and staggered toward the window. With a crash they both fell through the glass.

Catching
ahold of the curtain, Rachael dangled out of her sixteenth story window. Slowly, she pulled herself back up, her arms aching tremendously with each tug. Reaching up her bloodied fingers clenched onto the windowsill and she climbed back through the window.

Tumbling to the floor, Rachael laid staring up at the ceiling,
panting. Her whole body ached from the assault. Grunting, she forced herself to sit up and looked out the gaping hole where the window once was and scanned the ground below. On the pavement, laid the distorted and broken frame of what remained of her child.

“No!” she gasped. “O
h god, no. Please, no. This can’t be happening. Oh, God!”

Rachael ran as fast as she could to the elevator b
ut for some reason the power had gone out. Come to think of it, nothing worked. Only her alarm clock was functional, but that’s because it ran on batteries. Mashing the elevator button was getting her nowhere, so she decided to take the stairs instead.

Leaping down two and
three sets of stairs at a time, she flew into the lobby and darted toward the main entrance. Once outside, she came to the middle of the street and put her hand up to block the brilliance of the morning sun. Frantically scouring the street, she looked for the body of her dead son. Rachael walked over to the exact spot he had landed, but there was nothing there except for a large splotch of blood. Looking up and down the street with worried eyes, Rachael began bawling out her son’s name. “Hector!” she screamed. “Hector!”

Out of breath, Rachael slowly collapsed to her knees. She was too numb to cry, so she just sat
there staring down the street. It’s just a nightmare, she told herself, hoping it was true. Hoping she’d wake up and everything would be back to normal. Back to the way it was before this god awful day.

Rachael looked up at the sky. She watched white clouds waft across a vast blue dome. It was serene, peaceful, but somehow it didn’t
feel quite right. There weren’t any jet trails threading the sky above, nor was there any sound of traffic in the streets below. No morning dog walkers. No joggers. No kids on their way to school. The world had fallen deathly silent.

THE OFFICE DOORS
RATTLED
violently
causing Jennifer Hurley to jump in fright. Entering into the waiting room of Callahan & Salinger law firm was, what appeared to Hurley, to be a good looking copyboy. He was a fantastically well built, well groomed, dark haired man of Italian descent. “Yummy,” she thought to herself.

Pushing a cart over to the
secretary’s desk, he pulled out some mail and set it down. Hurley couldn’t help but eye his tight buttocks as he turned to walk away. As he did she made sure to cross her long legs, accentuated by her black miniskirt, and flashed him a flirtatious glance.

The young man smiled and then headed down the hall and took a left. Jennifer went back to staring
out the tall windows which lined one side of the waiting room. One of the reasons she picked Ramirez as her attorney was that she had a corner office. Anyone with a corner office was a closer. Hurley knew this woman could get whatever Hurley asked, even if she asked more than what was within her means.

As she gazed out was the white-washed sky,
her mind wondered. She was beginning to wonder where Rachael was. She was already thirty minutes late and Hurley was getting impatient. Tapping her nails on the glass counter she looked up at the secretary. “Do you know when she’ll be in?”

“Ma’am, like I said before, sometimes Ms. Ramirez has to drop her son off at school. She might not be in until ten.”

“But you didn’t get a call from her, did you?”

“No, ma’am. No call. But you know how it is being a mother.”

Hurley glared at the secretary, who was a twenty-something stuck up snob. “How old do I look to you?” Hurley asked defensively.

The secretary’s eyes widened as she realized she had cause a small offense. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Hurley crossed her legs again and began tapping her purple painted nails on the glass again.

Feeling
awkward, the secretary got up and asked, “Do you want anything from the break room? A coffee or tea perhaps?”

Hurley smiled politely and said, “No thanks.”

The secretary scurried off and disappeared around the same corner the cute paperboy had turned down.

Jennifer
didn’t feel like waiting around another fifteen minutes, so she stood up and walked to the elevator at the end of the hall. As she waited for it to come up she heard the young secretary giggling. Feeling annoyed that the elevator was taking forever, and the fact that listening to the giggling was slowly driving her crazy, she turned left down the hall and headed toward the break room.

Upon entering she found the cute copy boy necking the secretary with his hands all over her. They both stepped back in surprise, as if they were two teens
making out on the couch suddenly caught by their parents’ late return. Hurley put on a fake smile. “I changed my mind,” she said, addressing the secretary. “I think I will have a cup of tea.”

Brushing her skirt down, the secretary rushed over and opened a cupboard above the sink. “What would you like? We have Darjeeling and Earl Grey.”

“Darjeeling will be fine,” Hurley said.

“Sorry, we haven’t been properly introduced,” the young man said, extending his hand. “My name is Jesse Zanato.”

Hurley shook his hand and smiled at him. “Nice to meet you,” Hurley replied, brushing her blonde bangs from her crystal clear blue eyes.

Zanato smiled at her and she smiled back.

“Here’s your tea, miss.” The secretary handed Hurley the cup of tea and Hurley took a sip. Just then the phone began to ring in the lobby.

“Oh, that might be Ms. Ramirez now,” the young girl said. She looked at Hurley and back at Zanato, then turned to go answer the phone. As she did, Zanato bent forward and slapped her on the ass. She giggled and ran out of the room.

“You ought to be more careful,” Hurley said, giving this Jesse kid a stern look. “You touch the wrong girl the wrong way even just once and you could have your own lawsuit to deal with.”

Zanato laughed. His teeth were perfectly white. “No, it’s not like that,” he said.

“Oh, she’s your girlfriend then?”

He laughed again. “Not exactly. We sometimes fool around. That’s all.”

Hurley raised an eyebrow. “So you mean you’re just sex buddies, then?”

“Something like that,” Zanato said, his smile stretching across his face.

Putting her tea down on the counter, Hurley stepped closer to Zanato, and brushed her hair back again. “So, no serious commitment then?”

“No commitment,”
Zanato proudly said.

Hurley took another step closer to him. “Let me ask you something. How do two people become just sex buddies?”

“Well,” Zanato began, “First you have to feel a certain attraction to them.”

“Yeah?” Hurley said. This time she was standing
barely a foot from him and had her eyes locked onto his amazingly bright smile. “Then what?”

“Then you need to be willing to…”

“Willing…?”

“You know?” Feeling put on the spot Zanato tugged on his collar to loosen his necktie
and gulped.

Hurley looked up at him and waited for him to say something, but her doe-eyes obviously had their effect, for the very next minute his tongue was in her mouth and she was pressed up against the copy machine undoing his belt buckle as fast as her fingers would allow.

Soon enough his pants were down around his ankles, her skirt was pulled up, and he was inside her pounding away. She wrapped her arms around his neck and let out a pleasure filled moan.

Before they even had time to get into the moment
however, the door flew open and the building’s security guard burst in. Scrambling to get their clothes on, it seemed the guard was more concerned with securing the door than anything they might have been doing.

Sweat patches grew
around his chest and armpits from his blue uniform. His bald, brown, head glistened with moisture under the florescent lights of the break room. He had a closely trimmed black goatee. In a panic, he yelled at them to “Get back.” Suddenly he tugged the copy machine away from the wall and wedged it up against the door he had just come through.

“Totally not cool, dude,” Jesse said as
he hastily fastened his belt. “Did it ever occur to you to, you know, maybe knock first?”

“Why would I need to knock?” the guard asked, perplexed.
Looking over he notice a beautiful blonde tucking her bosom back into her blouse and buttoning it up, her exposed cleavage still glistening with sweat.

“All I’m saying is, you win the cock-block award of the year
, bro.”

“It’s th
e copy room,” replied the guard. “Not a Super Eight motel.”

Before Zanato could come back with a smart-ass answer, something slammed into the door with such a horrific force that Jennifer thought the door would tear off from its hinges. The copier rattled as it absorbed the impact.

“What the hell was that?” Jennifer asked.

Out of breath, the guard
huffed, “I’m being chased.” Before he could explain any further, there was another loud thud. The door buckled, but it held—just barely.

“We gotta
get the hell out of here,” the security guard implored, beads of nervous sweat popping out all across his bald head.

Jennifer looked at him with a probing look.
“What do you mean
we
? Leave us out of it.”

Thud!
Somebody wanted into the room badly. Whoever it was, they were certainly intent on breaking the damn door down.

With the fourth impact the door latch gave out, and the door tore open. The copier rattled back as it absorbed the brunt of the impact. Throwing the whole of his body weight against the unhinged door, the security guard slammed it back shut.

“You two have to get out of here!”

“What are you talking about?” Zanato replied, not giving two figs about the oddity of the situation they found themselves in. “We were here first. Why don’t you just take your crazy-ass shit somewhere else?”

Jennifer grabbed Jesse’s arm, and with an agitated look, stated, “Leave him be. I don’t want to get caught up in his mess. Let’s just get out of here.”

“Fine by me,” Zanato affirmed. But before
they could turn to leave, the door came crashing in and the security guard crashed to the floor.

The guard drew his gun out and aimed it at the open entrance. His arms shook with equal parts adrenaline and fear, which made holding the gun
steady a rather difficult task.

Suddenly t
hree colorless bodies pushed their way into the room. Their eyes were all a fogged over with a murky white glaze. Even the pupils had faded to gray. Patches of their skin had turned jaundice yellow and were peeling off in layers. They looked more like corpses than living.

Jennifer gasped, “Their faces! They’re all torn to shreds, as if—”

“Grahhhrrr!” growled a man in a cheap navy-blue suit and wearing a generic red necktie, obviously a salary man. Chunks of bloody meat dangled from his excoriated chin. It looked like some kind of wild animal mauled him.

“Holy shit balls!” cried Jesse Zanato, as he backpedaled toward the rear door.

Without any further hesitation, the guard took careful aim and fired off several shots into the salary man’s chest. But even having taken two bullets at point blank range, the white-eyed office worker kept scratching and clawing at the guard.

Zanato and Jennifer watched
in horror as the others joined him in the feeding frenzy. The salary man’s snapping teeth latched onto the guard’s ear and tore it off. The guard howled with pain. Covering his bloodied ear with his free hand, he put his gun to the head of the mad salary man.

With a loud bang, bloody chunks of gray matter blew out to top of
the salary man’s skull and splattered against the wall. The office worker instantly crumpled under the weight of the other rabid employees. Jennifer and Jesse watched in terror filled awe as the others bent down and ripped into the security guard’s torso.

Tearing off his shirt, t
heir cracked fingernails dug into his flesh. The guard yowled as his ribs cracked like dry branches, being bent and snapped. Then their hand pushed into his guts and began ripping organs out. The guard let out a blood curdling scream as they pried him open like a walnut and disemboweled him. Reaching into his abdomen, they tore out what looked like a chain of raw blood sausages, and gnawed on the guard’s intestines.

“Jesus Christ!”
Hurley exclaimed, barely able to breathe.

Taking her arm,
Zanato peeled her away from the scene. “Come on! We have to get out of here. Now!”

Hand in hand they
dashed down the hall to the elevator. Jamming the elevator button repeatedly, Jennifer chanted, “Come on! Come on! Come on!” But the elevator was indifferent to her button mashing. Just then the chime dinged and the door opened. Looking in, Zanato and Hurley saw the secretary trampled by two salary men and a woman. In an instant she fell to their collective weight and suddenly they were biting into her neck, arms and legs. But the truly frightful aspect was that she was still conscious, still awake, as the wild pack of “biters” devoured her. Her head turned toward Hurley and Zanato and with blood dripping out of the corner of her mouth, she reached out her hand and mouthed the words, “Help me.”

“The stairs!” Zanato cried out
, tugging on Hurley’s arm. “Follow me!” Jesse Zanato took Hurley’s hand and they ran into the stairwell.

“We can’t just leave her there!” Hurley protested.

“You want to go back and try to help her,” Zanato said, his voice filled with fear. “Be my guest.”

Hurley looked back but changed her mind. It wasn’t worth the risk.

Ducking into the stairwell, they skidded around the corner and hopped down several flights of stairs. As they made their way to the landing they heard screams echoing up from below. More people were being torn apart. Downstairs was a death trap.

“What the hell is going on?” Zanato
growled in frustration.

Turning back the way they came, the door flew open and the zombie employee with the red tie stood rigidly at the top of the stairs growling at them. Chunks of human meat dangled from his
chin.

Hurley screamed again and Zanato jumped back down
to the bottom of the stairwell. Zanato threw open the door and motioned for Jennifer to go on through. Once they entered the offices Zanato slammed the door shut behind him and ordered Jennifer to hold it tight.

Pointing his chin at the crash-bar of the door, Zanato said,
“Hold this! And whatever you do, don’t let go.”

“What? Are you
kidding me?”

“Just do it,” he insisted. Then he disappeared around the corner.

“Don’t you fucking leave me!” Jennifer cried out. But there wasn’t any reply. Without realizing it, her eyes had started streaming silent tears.