“God, dammit!” she said, halfway between a yell and a whimper. She pulled back on it again. She gritted her teeth and growled as she used all her strength.
Liam walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder as the other one reached for the crossbow. She let him take it from her. He leaned it against the wall and sat down in the chair, looking at the other one for her to sit next to him.
She stood up straight. Her face was scrunched in anger, concealing the tears that gathered in her eyes. “Why couldn’t I do it?” she blurted out. “Why couldn’t I shoot it?”
She looked to Liam, but didn’t wait for him to answer.
He didn’t know how to answer her, anyhow.
“When I left this morning I was all ready to play the part, be one of you guys, kill one of those things if I had to. I really thought I could do it, but I don’t know…” Her voice was rapid and loud as she turned to look over the railing.
Liam let her talk as long as she wanted. She needed to figure out what happened earlier, what caused her to freeze up after all the hours of training she put in. Only then could she work on fixing the problem.
“Maybe I’m not cut out for this world,” she said with a shaky voice as she looked down at the darkened parking lot. “Maybe I don’t deserve to be here.” Tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her rosy cheeks. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment. Why couldn’t she stop crying over everything? Why was she so weak?
Liam stood up and wrapped his arms around her. “It’s all right, love. You did your best. Nobody was hurt. Everything is all right.”
“It was a person once,” she said with her head resting against his chest, wiping at the tears on her face. “It was a person like you or me and somehow it turned into this…this ugly, disgusting monster!”
He stroked her hair and rested his chin gently on the top of her head. “I know,” he said. “I know. But you can’t think like that when one of them in trying to kill you. You can’t.”
“What if it was me?” she asked as she looked up into his hazel eyes. There were dark circles under them that hadn’t been there before. “What if I was one of them? Could you kill me?”
He looked back at her. Her soft, pink lips were slightly parted as she awaited his answer. There was a deep bow in her upper lip that he caught himself staring at on many occasions. He took a shallow breath. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“Do you think they can feel anything anymore?”
His eyes widened as he stared out at the trees swaying in the cool breeze. Leaves scattered through the air before they fell to the ground. He’d hadn’t thought about it before. He hadn’t allowed himself to. Now the question beat against his brain for a definitive answer.
“Do you think they still have thoughts?”
Liam released his hold on her. He scratched his head, not knowing what else to do. He couldn’t answer any of her questions. He considered promising to think about it, but closed his mouth again before he let the words escape. If he wanted to survive he couldn’t think about it at all. He couldn’t see them for who they used to be. He could only see them for what they were in that moment—already dead.
“Why don’t we go inside?” he said, placing his hand on the small of her back.
The rest of the day was spent in silence and solitude. Liam curled up on the floor with his back against the couch as he read through his old boss’s journal. Deep down he had hopes that something in Dr. Hyde’s writing would inspire him to creating a cure. It was a fool’s dream, he knew that. But he couldn’t help hoping for it.
The man had been a genius at creating vaccines. The flu that was supposed to wipe out more than half of mankind was stopped because of him. Of course, it was replaced with an even worse condition that the doctor was not around to cure, but Liam still was.
Some nights he lie awake thinking about Dr. Hyde and wondered if he had been the one to get sick, if the doctor would have been able to stop it from spreading and cure the ones infected. Every time he came to the same conclusion—you can’t cure death.
Not that it mattered in the end. Liam was alive and the one man he believed could cure anything was dead and all he had was a journal. There had to be
something
in that journal. There just had to be.
XVIII.
Dr. Victor Faustus Hyde
Friday June 12, 2020
I think I’ve done it! I think we’ve done it! Earlier this week we developed a vaccine with some of the mutated plants from Dr. Scott’s lab. (I knew that Brit would be invaluable!) He hasn’t been here long at all and he’s already provided us with the answer to preventing this wretched flu from taking over the world.
I tested the vaccine on various lab rats, all with the flu virus given to them. Some were in the advanced stages while others were not showing any symptoms yet. I’ll be damned if every single lab rat didn’t pull through and rid itself of this God forsaken flu!
I have to get this out to the people. I have to release it before anyone else figures out what we’ve done here and tries to duplicate it, pass it off as their own. This is my vaccine. Our vaccine. No one will be the face of ending the end of humanity, but me and my team.
Clinical trials are required, but we don’t have the time. I’d have to seek out people, gather volunteers, (not that it would be hard to do. Everyone is scared to death of this flu. They’ll take anything we say might stop it.), give them the vaccine, watch them, study them, record their every symptom, lack of symptom, and move. I’d have to organize all this information into a lovely cockamamie presentation that proves the vaccine works. This. Vaccine. Works.
So here is the start of my recordings of the clinical trial.
Patient One
June 12, 2020
11:49pm
Age 58
Native of New England, currently residing in the Midwest.
Has not contracted the flu virus yet, but will be injected with it in mere minutes.
Marital Status, Single. Never married. No children. No surviving parents. No family to speak of at all.
11:53pm The flu virus was injected. There was no sensation to speak of aside from the sting of the needle.
June 13, 2020
03:36am I’ve given sufficient amount of time for the virus to inhabit my body. We’re told it acts at an alarmingly fast rate once it enters. Already I am feeling a touch of nausea and warmth in my head. Fascinating when compared to the common influenza which takes 24 to 96 hours to show symptoms. This flu is extremely advanced. Mother Nature must be pissed off.
03:41am The vaccine has been injected. Upon injection there was the sting of the needle and then a dull burn as the liquid entered the body. This faded as the vaccine dispersed.
04:57am Already my rising temperature has begun its decent back to normality. The nausea is also subsiding. I am done for the day as it is Saturday now.
I can’t wait for the coming week to see what happens.
XIX.
After practicing her kill techniques all day, Christine Moore gave up, just as Liam had. He didn’t instruct her any longer on how she should stand or hold her weapon of choice for the day. Instead, he shut himself inside and read from the frayed leather journal when he wasn’t out with the guys. So, Christine sat herself down on the window seat and read the book she could never finish,
Anna Karenina
. She’d started the massive classic five years ago and was still only halfway through it. What else did she have to do now that the world had fallen apart and she wasn’t fit to go out in it?
As night fell, she got distracted by her reflection growing more vivid in the window pane. She caught herself glancing over to look into her own face, lost in thought. Even with nothing else to do but read, she wasn’t getting through the eight hundred plus pages of miniscule type. She forced her eyes back onto the book, but only a minute passed before she realized she was looking at herself again.
She closed the book and let it fall against her leg as she sat perfectly still. The fireplace gave off a warm, orange glow that spread throughout the darkened living room.
“You know what I don’t miss,” she finally said as she sat up to cross her legs Indian-style. She leaned forward with a cheeky smile. “Telemarketers calling during dinner. How did they even get our cellphone numbers?”
Liam chuckled despite what he’d just read. He set down the journal and bent his right leg up and rested his elbow on it, bringing his thumb to his lips as he thought. “I don’t miss….eBooks,” he said, looking straight at Christine. “I’m glad that paperbacks are the reigning king of the book world.”
She threw her head back and laughed as she clutched
Anna Karenina
to her chest. “Low blow!” she said through giggles. “This apartment isn’t big enough to house every book we own, so I was saving us money by using an eReader. We didn’t have to rent out a storage unit to house hundreds of books that we would only read once.”
They both laughed fully, their eyes squinted and creased in the corners.
“Speaking of saving money,” she said as she tried to control herself. “I don’t miss saving all our loose change for a big, expensive vacation that we’re never going to take.”
“We could’ve taken one,” Liam said through his laughter. It tapered off in his throat.
“Yeah, right! Between your sixty hours a week at the lab and my seventy-five at the firm, when could we have found the time to take a vacation?”
“Well, now we don’t have to save our pennies anymore,” he said with a smile. “We can go wherever we want whenever we want.” He made a sweeping gesture, as if the world was theirs for the taking.
The faint screams of Lilly crying across the hall brought the conversation to a halt. They listened, staring down at their hands. “I guess Ralph’s not back with the formula yet.” Liam’s mouth pulled back into a sad grimace. “Shall we go to bed?” He picked up the journal again and held it to his chest.
Even with the bedroom door closed, tucked under the warm blankets they’d recently dug out of the storage, they could still hear the shrill wails of a starving Lilly. It penetrated their ears and burrowed deep inside their heads.
Christine turned over on her side with her back to Liam. She took long, slow breaths in hopes that he would think she was asleep. The last thing she wanted to do was talk. Ralph and Zack were out there and she wouldn’t know until morning if they were alive or dead. Meanwhile, a sweet nine month old baby was wailing her heart out from stomach pains her mother couldn’t subside. She thought about going over there to see if she could help in any way, but the fear of running into Ralph kept her tucked in bed.
She closed her eyes and repeated the world “sleep” slowly and quietly, almost making no sound at all, until she drifted off to another place in time.
XX.
A five-year-old Christine stood on the Calumet bike path that ran alongside the train tracks near the Dunes. The hot, summer sun beat against her back. She looked down at the vibrant green grass and searched the wildflowers for the perfect one to pick. She smiled a toothy grin as her tiny hand lunged forward, plucking a purple flower from the overgrown weeds. It was the perfect addition to her boring collection of white daisies and yellow dandelions.
“Grandma, look what I found!” she said, running over to an older woman further up the path.
Her grandmother stood with her back turned to little Christine and her older sister was even further away, squatted in the tall grass as she picked blade after blade and tossed them aside out of boredom.
“Grandma!” Christine said again, but stopped short.
She dropped the flowers in her hand when she heard a slow rattle from deep within her grandmother’s chest. The white haired woman turned around slowly. Her feet dragged on the gravel pathway. When Christine saw the mangled face, and entire side completely gone, blood oozing from her missing jaw as she gurgled from deep within her throat, she screamed with everything she had.
——
“Christine,” she heard someone say from a distance. “Christine.” She sat upright and she gasped for air. Liam was sitting next to her. “You were having a bad dream.”
She panted as sweat dripped down from her forehead and neck.
“All right, love?” Liam asked with his eyes still half closed, also awoken from a deep sleep.
“Yeah, go back to bed. I’m fine.” She lowered herself down onto the cool gel pillow and turned her head to look at him, but he was already fast asleep. She took a deep breath. Would she ever dream of anything else again?
As soon as she turned over and tried to fall asleep again, Lilly’s cried returned to her canals. She picked up her phone from the bedside table. It was one in the morning. Ralph still wasn’t back yet. Or if he was, then he hadn’t found any food for the baby. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, and willed herself to sleep. “Fall asleep, fall asleep, fall asleep,” she repeated in her head over and over again. When she opened her eyes, the sun was up and the room was silent. Lilly had finally stopped crying.