Bitten (8 page)

Barnes rolled over in the bed and checked his watch with weary eyes. It read twenty-two hundred hours.

“Shit,” he said in
a hushed tone as he squinted at the green digital numbers. Valentine stirred awake and rolled over and smiled at him. As he smiled back at her, Barnes noticed that her bare breasts became illuminated by a soft orange glow. That’s when they realized they weren’t alone.

General Greer reclined on a stool at the foot of the bed watching the two lovebirds scramble to cover themselves. Smoke wafted lightly in the air as Greer puffed regimentally on the cigar.

“Staff Sergeant Barnes, I do believe I had issued a direct order to report back to me at your earliest convenience, did I not?”

“Yes, sir,” said Barnes, apologetically. “Sorry, sir.”

“It’s my fault,” Valentine interjected. “I didn’t specify that it was a direct order. I—”

“Never mind that,” the general stated,
cutting her off. He eyed Valentine’s long legs poking out from the sheets, “We’re past pleasantries, I should think.” Greer took another puff on his cigar.

“May I inquire as to why you’re here
, sir?” Valentine asked.

“Last I checked,” grumbled the general, “this was my base. Are you telling me I can’t go wherever I goddamn please?”

“Apologies, sir. All I meant was … what I mean is … what brings you to my domicile in the secrecy of night?”

Grinning coyly, the corner of Greer’s eyes wri
nkled with crow’s-feet. “Sometimes the best place to have a powwow is out of the detection of prying eyes and ears.”

Barnes
interjected, “Does the general mean to say that he wishes to disclose classified information which he could not disclose under normal circumstances due to regulation?”

The general pretended he ha
dn’t heard Barnes’ last remark. “Like I said, since we’re all so familiar with one another, what’s a bit of gossip among friends?”

“Yes, sir. I read you loud and clear,” Valentine said, immediately realizing how officially corny she sounded.

Barnes leaned over and whispered, “Loud and clear?”

“Oh, hush up!” she said in jest
, pinching him below the covers. Barnes squirmed but forced himself to ignore it seeing as they were sitting in front of the General.

Greer blew a smoke ring which could be seen in the dim glow cast by the orange
glowing bud of his cigar. Dark shadows blotted out his face and gave him the appearance of a specter.

“Intel
has informed me that the contagion is retroviral in nature. However, the retrovirus has hybridized. Common rabies has crossbred with H5N1, and their wicked union has created a nasty little Chimera capable of causing some pretty damn ugly babies.”

“
A retrovirus? So you mean to say that whatever else it may be doing, it’s effectively re-writing the DNA of every living thing it comes into contact with?” Valentine asked.

“Exactly
,” replied the general. He took another drag on his cigar and puffed out a cloud of smoke. “If we don’t sort it out soon, it will be too goddamn late.”

“Too late?” Barnes hesitantly echoed. “Too late for what?”

“Too late to find a cure,” the general informed.

“What do you mean too late for a cure?” Valentine inquired.

The general raised his eyebrow and informed, “I don’t think you fully grasp the grim nature of the situation. It took goddamn near a half century before we cracked the code for HIV. At the rate at which this new retrovirus acts, a cure won’t even matter because by the time one is found, the world will already have been completely and utterly consumed by the damn thing.”

“
Dear God,” Valentine gasped.

“The virus replicates faster than
any of our scientists anticipated. The CDC was following reports as early as two weeks back, but now look at things. Half the city is missing, probably eaten alive, or else turned into one of those blasted things.”

“What are the projections for propagation of the contagion?” Valentine asked.

Greer let out another puff of smoke from the “O” shaped hole formed on his lips, and then continued. “As you probably know, it spreads through coming into contact with infected blood. Anywhere from an hour to two hours after that the virus will effectively take over its host. At this rate, by next week the entire city will be overrun. In two weeks the plague will spread throughout the entire eastern seaboard. In three weeks the infection will be global. By the end of the month the projected number of survivors will be—none.”

“Heaven help us,”
Valentine said in utter dismay.

“By the time scientists crack the genetic code of this Chimera
from hell, it will have spread beyond our capacity to contain it. Hell, there won’t even be enough scientists left to mass produce the damn cure.”

“It’
s a huge fucking nightmare,” Barnes said.

Valentine looked over at Barnes then back at the general, and asked, “But we’re working toward a cure, right? I mean, it is a virus we’re dealing wi
th, isn’t it? So it’s, in theory, curable. We’re working on an anti-viral, right?”

The general shook his head grimly. His silence spoke volumes.

“What’s it called? Does the virus have a name?” Barnes inquired.

“Unofficially, we’re calling it the Resurrection Virus. As you witnessed firsthand, the blasted thing
reanimates its victims, but not before it boils their brain away with a vicious godforsaken fever. This causes the infected to go mad. Then they die of enzyme failure. As far as we can tell, they stay dead until the retrovirus completely takes over the host. Then they wake up.” The general lingered on those last words a moment before continuing on. “When they do awaken from death, their minds are completely gone but their madness lingers.”

“Sir, with all due respect, the creatures seem to have minimal cognitive function. They stalk prey and will bite anything that moves.”

“True enough,” the General affirmed, puffing away on the short nub of his slowly dwindling cigar. “Their basic instinct to feed remains intact.”

“What can we
do?” asked Valentine, looking at the general with dark glossy eyes that seemed somehow vulnerable yet invincible all at the same time.

“You can brace yourselves for the worst, because I guarantee you, the worst is yet to come.”

“So why are you telling us all this? I’m sure it’s beyond our clearance level,” asked Barnes.

Greer took a long drag on his cigar and then slowly stood up. “Like I said, I need you to brace yourselves for the worst. I can’t have my
soldiers panicking when the shit hits the fan.” Getting up, the General went over and opened the door, but before exiting the room he paused briefly and added one last thing, “This conversation never happened.”

Valentine smiled
coyly, “What conversation?”

With that the general left the room and let the door slam shut behin
d him. Barnes looked at Valentine and they stared at each other with forlorn faces. Barnes was the first to break the silence. “Since it’s the end of the world and all, I think we should, you know…?”

Reaching up she grabbed Barnes by the scruff of his neck and pulled him onto her.
“Oh, shut up and fuck me already!” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, and kissed her
soft lips.

With a well-worn noise, the main entrance door
creaked open as Rachael pushed her way inside the darkened hallway of Newcastle Middle School. Standing in the entrance, she looked behind her back at the slowly setting sun. The horizon was a bright orange band which melted into a blue evening sky dappled with the white glow of astral spackle.

Rachael’s
eyes trailed down the dusky skyline as she looked back at her car. Inside was the sleeping girl she had rescued from a horde of zombies earlier that evening. She hesitated leaving her alone in the car, but it would be hours before any of those creatures caught up to them. She was pretty certain they were safe, for now.

Pushing onward, Rachael
heard the heavy metal doors to the entrance of her son’s middle school slam shut behind her. Once her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, she saw loose papers, discarded notebooks, and a disarray of school stationary peppered with broken glass. So much stuff littered the corridor floors that it seemed more like a warzone than a school.

Rachael flicked the light switch, but nothing happened. The only available light was coming from outside, and it wouldn’t be long before the sun would set and everything would turn to pitch black. She looked out the window to see that the orange band had already narrowed into a pink sliver hovering just above the horizon. Time was running out. The darkness would take over soon.
If she was going to find any survivors, she’d have to hurry.

Stepping lightly, she started down the hazardous hallway and glanced into empty classrooms as she went. School desks and chairs were all piled up against the doors to each classr
oom as a rough and ready barricade. It was unnerving, but perhaps not as unnerving as the fact that the clutter was deliberately set on the
outside
of the rooms, as if they were meant to keep something from getting out instead of getting in.

More unnerving than that were
all the smudges of bloody handprints that were plastered all over the walls and floors, like a child’s hand painting session gone horrifically mad. It sent a chill down her spine and she tried not to dwell on it.

Strange
r still, Rachael thought, that there should be so much blood but not a body in sight. Dead men tell no tales, everybody knew that, but they don’t just get up and walk away either. Somebody had to be left.

Turning another corner, Rachael r
an smack dab into a dark figure and screamed. Recoiling in fright, she shuffled back and slammed into some lockers. She gripped her chest in fear, but then relaxed again when she realized it was just the janitor’s jacket hanging on a mop handle which was propped up in a bucket. It was all just part of the mess meant to hold the classroom doors closed and keep whatever it was inside at bay.

Everything was smashed up and all the windows were broken.
The broken glass brought flashbacks of her and Hector’s tumbling through the window of their apartment. Rachael cringed as she contemplated what might have transpired here. If it was anything like her morning of terror, waking up to find her son hungrily devouring their pet cat, his white-frosted eyes locking onto her with a cold, inhuman hunger, and then the struggle that ensued as Rachael fought for her very life—if it was anything half as terrible as that…

N
o, Rachael told herself, and quickly put the thought out of her mind. It was too horrible to imagine. Rachael rubbed a tear from the corner of her eye with her thumb, gathered her nerves together, and then went to her son’s homeroom.

Although the door was blockaded by more chairs, desks, computers and anything which could be crammed against it, the
shattered windows allowed for easy access. Rachael climbed up and over the window sill and stepped cautiously down into the classroom.

Broken glass and yellow number two pencils crunched under her feet as she made her way over to her son’s cubby at the back of the roo
m. Bending over, she looked inside Hector’s blue backpack. The one they had bought together for his new school year. As Rachael took up the bag, she was completely unaware of the dark figure that stood in the hallway and watched her with ravenous eyes.

Opening her son’s bag, she took out his math homework, which she had helped him with the night before, well, before the whole nightmare began. She shuffled around inside the bag until she found what she was looking for. Pulling out her son’s iPhone,
the one he explicitly told her he hadn’t forgotten, she hit the on-button and slid her finger across the lock-screen.

The phone lit up brightly and cast a ghostly contrast of light and shadow across her face. Rachael stood up and turned toward the front of the class. She tapped the photo application and looked at a snapshot Hector took of them together at the dinner table
the night before. It was her last memory of her son became, well, before he…

She
wiped another tear from her eye. Suddenly, she had the disturbing feeling that she was being watched. Rachael spun toward the hall to confront whoever it was, but there wasn’t anyone there. She looked hard and listened even harder, but she didn’t see anyone. It was only her imagination, she told herself.

Looking back down at the glowing screen of the phone, Rachael flicked open her son’s voicemail and played the message she had left yesterday, before all of the ensuing madness.

“Hey, kiddo, this is mom. The meeting with my client went longer than expected, so I’ll be running a bit late. Please just wait in the office or out on the front steps of the school until I come pick you up. Again, I feel horrible for breaking my promise. How about I make it up to you by taking you out for pizza tonight? Oh, and I love you. Hugs and kisses.”

Rachael rubbed another tear from her cheek and sniffled. They never had the opportunity for that night out together. Hector had come down with a fever and on the way home he fell fast asleep in the passenger seat next to her. She had decided to skip pizza and take him
straight home so she could get him into bed. Why hadn’t she just shaken him awake and taken him out for pizza?

She felt her body shudder with a torrent of sobs which threatened to flood over her fortified emotional barrier.
Before she knew it she was sobbing uncontrollably. Dropping down to her knees she grabbed Hector’s blue bag tight and sobbed into it.

Just then she heard a rattling noise
—the sound of a locker door being shimmied. Rachael tucked the cell phone into her back pocket, threw the backpack across her shoulder, and made her way back out into the hall. She followed the rattling noise and tip-toed up to a locker at the end of the hall. Pausing, she listened for the noise to happen again. She was almost certain this was where the sound seemed to be emanating from.

She picked a locker and quickly opened it. But nothing. She skipped a couple
of doors and opened another. But again found nothing inside. Biting her lower lip nervously, Rachael slowly reached for the handle of the last locker in the row. Her fingers hovered fretfully over the metal latch when all of a sudden it began to jitter.

Swiftly, Rachael pulled up on the latch and then jumped back in anticipation. As the door swung open, the body of Mrs. Jensen, the school secretary, tumbled out. Her body crumbl
ed to the ground and Rachael caught her in time to help ease her fall. With fearful eyes, Mrs. Jensen looked up at Rachael and mumbled, “Don’t eat me. Please, God, don’t let them eat me.”

“Nobody is going to eat you,” Rachael assured. But Mrs. Jensen was unresponsive.
Her pupils were fully dilated, probably from being in the dark for so long. Rachael waved her hand in front of Mrs. Jensen’s face and asked, “Are you alright?”

Mrs. Jensen repeated her ominous pleas to God, begging for him to spare her life. She was obviously in shock. Rachael tried to physically move her, but Mrs. Jensen scurried up against the lockers, grabbed herself tight, and rocked back and forth as she repeated those unnerving words, “Don’t eat me. Please, God, don’t let them eat me.”

Rachael crouched down in front of Mrs. Jensen’s face and said, “You’re obviously in shock. Come along, I’ll get you out of here. I have my car waiting outside. Just take my hand and we can—”

A loud moan tore
down the corridor and Rachael snapped her head in the direction of the alarming noise. Squinting hard, she peered down the dim passage, but it was already too dark to make out anything clearly. All she could make out were a row of lockers which ran along either side of the hallway and quickly got gobbled up by the dark mouth of the black void. A void which inched closer and closer toward her. What lurked in those sinister shadows was anyone’s guess, but whatever it was, it didn’t sound awfully friendly.

Suddenly a hand wrenched Rachael’s wrist so tight that she thought she’d scream. Looking down, Mrs. Jensen held onto Rachael’s arm with a fierce grip. “He knows you’re here. You have to leave! Get out of here, while there’s still time.”

“I’m not going to leave you,” Rachael said firmly. Getting underneath Mrs. Jensen’s arm she tried propping her up.

“No, you don’t understand,” Mrs. Jensen said. “I can’t run away with you,
because they took my feet.
”

“What?!” Rachael laughed, feeling it was some kind of bad joke. As she looked down at Mrs. Jensen's legs she wrapped both hands over her mouth in horror. Mrs. Jensen wasn’t lying. Her feet were gone.
Nothing but bloody stumps of raw meat and bone remained. “Oh, my God!” Rachael gasped, barely able to believe her eyes.

“I was cornered, no place to run,” informed Mrs. Jensen. “The
ir lifeless fingers dug into me, and before I knew it, they had me cornered. I was left with no choice but to shut myself inside this locker and close the door tight, and pray to God for a miracle. But before I could secure the door completely, their tiny meat-hooks gripped into me. Then I felt them pulling me, dragging me out, and then … god … those razor sharp teeth. I fought them as best I could, until ... until I finally managed to get the damn door closed. I didn’t even realize what had actually happened, until...” her voiced broke into a sob as she spoke. “Until I went to scratch an itch that wasn’t even there.”

The voracious moaning grew louder, closer. Rachael checked over her shoulder, but
all she could see was darkness. Again, Rachael made an effort to pick Mrs. Jensen up, but Mrs. Jensen resisted.

“Godammit, listen to me, Ramirez. He’s coming. You have to get out of here before it’s too late!”

“I can’t just leave you here,” Rachael insisted. She pulled on Mrs. Jensen's arm again, but was met with stubborn resistance.

“You don’t understand,” Mrs. Jensen said sharply, raising her voice. She took Rachael’s hand and brought it up to he
r forehead. She was burning up with the hotness of a terrible fever.

“Jesus,” Rachael gasped, and reflexively drew back her hand. It was the same terrible fever that had afflicted her son, Hector. The same fever he had suffered soon after a schoolmate had bitten him during a scuffle at recess. The same fever before he
had turned.

“I’m infected,” Mrs. Jensen informed. “Whatever it is, I can feel it eating away at me from the inside out. It’s only a matter of time before I become one of those things.”

“How can you be so sure?” Rachael inquired.

“Because I watched it happen! The whole school became infected. The children tore each other to ribbons, and then…” Mrs. Jensen’s eyes streamed with tears as she struggled to process the dreadful memories. “My God, the children!”

“Try not to think about it,” Rachael urged. “Right now we need to—”

Before Rachael could complete her sentence she was silenced by
yet another hideous moan. This time it sounded as if it were right on top of her. As if it could be breathing down her neck.

“Y
ou’re still not getting it!” Mrs. Jensen stated, her tone growing frightfully urgent. “It’s not me he’s after. It’s you!”

Rachael looked one last time into Mrs. Jensen’s eyes, hoping she’d change her mind, but she just stared at Rachael with a
look that spoke volumes.

Rachael stood up and
then turned and ran down the hall. She didn’t dare look back. She just ran as fast as her legs would carry her. Her pulse raced so hard that she could barely make out the moaning over the sound of her own beating heart.