Betrayal (6 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Jensen Holloway was a small man, maybe in his late thirties, with a widow’s peak, a repulsively flat nose, and was missing more teeth than Kimberly wanted to count. He had, for the last month or so, been coming onto her so strongly that on more than one occasion Kimberly had feared for her safety. Thankfully, a little over a week ago, Ra
ff had put him in his place with a few fists and a stern warning. She saw the devil in Jensen’s eyes that day, and he’d yet to speak a lick to her since.

Now, however, it w
as his turn to have some fun with the teenager.

Kimberly strode up to him
and he tilted his head. She noticed his lips were flustering. She stepped up to face him and batted her eyes. “Hi,” she said.

“The hell do you want?” Jensen spat behind him.

“To talk.”

“‘Bout what?”

Kimberly put her arms behind her back, lowered her head, and kicked softly at the ground. “About what happened the other day,” she finally answered as she looked up to him.

Jensen took a step back and sur
veyed the yard. Was it possible he was waiting for Rafael to pounce on him from some spot out of sight? He sure looked around like the head of security was lurking about. Did he not know that Rafael had come down with the sickness?

“Heard you
r boyfriend’s sick,” he said, laying his eyes upon hers.

Kimberly nodded
and lowered her head. “He is… and I heard what he did to you.”

Rubbing his jaw, as if the mere mention of the assault
brought a spike of pain, Jensen waited for her to continue.

“I-I told him to just leave you alone.” Kimberly lowered her head once more, know
ing that the next words spoken were going to be a lie, possibly even a blemish on what she and Raff had, but Alicia needed her, needed something better than
this
. “He’s been real bossy as of late, and I just wanted him to calm down. I-I told him that I didn’t want to be with him anymore.”

“That so?”

Kimberly bit her lip. “Then he…” She nodded to him and blinked several times.

Jensen spat again, and Kimberly hoped he couldn’t see the grimace on her face or feel the revulsion flowing within her.

“So, why are you here?”

Forcing away her hate for this despicable pervert, she took a step forward and put on her best fake smile.

“I-I want to make things right.”

The grin that formed on that bastard’s face was one she’d
not soon forget.

***

Mark found the doctor sitting in a leather office chair, staring out one of the windows in the maternity ward on the third floor, and he had that strange glow enveloping him as well. After leaving his patient room on the seventh floor, Corporal Payton had led Mark down through the stairwell to here. Some of the rooms they had passed contained the dead, housing them as if they were patients themselves. What concerned him the most, though, was the fact that the they regarded him as one of their own. No longer did they taunt him with their growls and snarls. They only eyed him as if they were lesser beings and he was some sort of divinity they now worshipped. When he’d mentioned something about this to Payton, the corporal only laughed it off and said that there was much more than meets the eye.

The doctor shifted in his
chair. “Have a seat, Mister Goodman.” To Payton, he said, “Has Bell briefed you of your upcoming mission?”

“He has,” the corporal replied. “And I’m
really looking forward to meeting up with an old friend.” Payton’s cracking knuckles accentuated his statement.

Mark chewed it over for a moment. “Are you guys going after Trevor and the rest?”

“That, my newfound friend, does not concern you,” the doctor said.

Mark turned back to the
doctor. “And why is that, exactly? Not to mention, what the
fuck
have you done to me, to the Sarge, and Payton?”

The doctor dismissed Payton with a wave and glanced out the window.

“To answer your first question, Mister Goodman, there are forces at work beyond your control—at least for now.” Before Mark could respond, he held up a hand. “As for what I have done to you and your friends. Well, to put it bluntly: I’ve infected you.”

Gritting his teeth, Mark said, “I think that’s a little obvious, Doc. Don’t ya think?”

The doc briefly chuckled. “You can call me Frank, Mister Goodman. Frank McQuade.”

“All right, Frank, why don’t you tell me
exactly
what it is that you did to me?”

Frank leaned back in his seat, set his hands on his lap, and laced his fingers.

Mark’s lips twitched as he waited for the answers he so desperately sought.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jonathan followed Trevor and Jared through the night vision scope attached to the .243 rifle. The two men were taking their time wading through the piles of corpses strewn about the street, gingerly approaching a grocery store that, strangely enough, seemed unscathed from the exterior.  Smears of blood could be seen through enhanced vision. The sight was maddening, and the mechanic was grateful that he’d drawn the shortest straw and was stuck up here doing recon.

Though the last shot had been fired nearly an hour ago,
his ears were still ringing something horrible. He looked to the walkie-talkie beside him and wondered if he could even hear Trevor if he called for him.

At least we’ve got enough ammo to last us a while,
he thought, looking back to the stockpile they’d found inside the pawn shop.

Jonathan felt a pinch in his gut
. Dinner wasn’t agreeing with him. He rubbed his tummy and grimaced.

“Should have never mixed beans with mixed fruit.”

He peered once more through the scope; Jared was entering the store, looking from side to side. The streets were awash with death, and none of it appeared in motion. Swinging the rifle and scanning the perimeter, Jonathan confirmed that, at least for the moment, it would be safe for him to relieve himself. Luckily, the pawn shop had a bathroom connected to the manager’s office. He’d always wondered if places like these had such accommodations, and now that he was bounding down the steps, fearful that he might lose his load, he was grateful this place did.

As he slammed open the entry, his eyes adju
sting slightly to the darkness, Jonathan yanked down his pants and plopped down on the wintry ceramic.

When his bu
siness was finished, he scanned the facilities until he found an unused roll of toilet paper under the sink to his left. Pulling up his pants, buttoning them and then the belt, Jonathan released a sigh of relief.

“Glad to see you’re still doing what you do best
, Redman,” said a hauntingly familiar voice from the doorway.

Jonathan snapped his neck up to see the silhouette of a man and two brilliant orange orbs where his eyes should be. A third orange circle briefly lit up. The man let out an audible e
xhale, and through the darkness Jonathan could see the swirls of smoke as they fizzled away.  

***

Chandler approached Rafael with an air of caution, his hand on the trigger of his loaded pistol.

“Raff,” he called out.

The head of security was making his way to his feet, but details were washed away in the blackness of the room.

“You all right, man?”

Rafael grunted and, before the ex-con could react, lunged at him, swiping away his pistol and sinking his teeth into Chandler’s neck. Chandler’s scream was cut short as the head of security ripped free his Adam’s apple. Forcing himself away with a right hook that threw Rafael off balance, Chandler fell back, trying unsuccessfully to breathe. Covering the wound with his hand, knowing that it was a fruitless gesture, he closed his eyes as blood geysered forth with each frantic heartbeat.

Chandler’s
memory took him back to a time when he was happy, when the world was a far more stable environment than it was now. He saw his ex-wife before they were married, when she still had a heart-stopping smile with those thin, yet soft lips. Her soulful blue eyes, steely like a midwinter day, warmed Chandler as Rafael pounced on him and bit at his cheeks.

The pain dissolved as
Chandler was taken to another life, the will to fight as useless now as ever.

***

Mark roamed the halls of the hospital, taking in not only the sight of the “tamed” dead, but trying to wrap his head around what the doctor had just told him. He looked at his arms, noting the once blue veins were now thin and black. No longer did blood flow through him as it had before. He truly was
dead
; no heart rate, no pulse, no need to breathe or feed. Mark was now in what McQuade had called a “state of simple existence.”

He was still Mark Goodman
, only now he was
improved
. The dead would no longer see him as another piece of meat on a buffet. Though Mark had been infected, the hunger possessed by the snarling monsters held captive within the hospital didn’t exist within him. All from the formula the doctor injected not only in Mark, but the remaining marines and a few other “survivors” who called this madhouse home.

“I have beaten the infection,” he remembered McQuade saying.

By creating a new race of monsters,
Mark thought as he eyed a dead woman staring at him through a thick pane of glass. She didn’t growl, didn’t swipe at him. Instead it appeared as if she were studying him. Instinctively knowing something was off. Though her pale eyes lacked true definition, he could see the confusion in them. He took a step forward, she took two back.

Instead of feeling relieved that he no longer had anything to fear from the infected,
Mark felt sadness wash over him. As he leaned in to study one of Frank’s observation rooms, he saw four more infected, two of them children which couldn’t have been older than five or six, cower at the sight of him. He imagined that, to some, this would be a feeling of power. Finally, after two years, mankind had no reason to fear the dead, and he still felt scared and powerless. Now, instead of wondering when his time to die would come, Mark Goodman realized he was a slave. Not to the dead. Not to the doctor.

“To existence,” he muttered.

Mark shook his head.
Mankind doesn’t apply to you anymore, does it?

Maybe that was what bothered him the most. His humanity had been taken from him just as everything
else had these last few years. He hadn’t asked for any of it—especial being part of some sick fucking experiment by a deranged old man who wanted to start anew, to create a race of beings that “Would not be bound by needs or wants.”

Gritting his teeth, Mark slammed a hand against the glass.

“
Dammit
.”

O
ut in the middle of the city, Mark knew the fate of his fellow survivors—a term he now used loosely. They would be caught and captured, brought back here, and turned into something alive yet not.

He looked up to see his reflection. His skin was that of a corpse
: pasty.

And he knew it would only be a matter of time before this new faction of beings was going to topple the Colony.
He wondered how many would fight, and how many would die in an attempt to stave off the coming assault. Carol, Rafael, Jonathan’s daughter… So many were likely to perish.

Mayb
e they’re the lucky ones
, he thought while still staring at his reflection.

Though Doctor McQuade had promised that
this new life wouldn’t be as vacant as it had once been, Mark still found it difficult to believe that there was anything to look forward to.

He recalled something he’
d been taught in school; something about organisms that, when in the face of extinction, evolved and reproduced in order to survive in a world of predators. Was this what was to become of the human race? To become a shadow of its former self?

“Evolution,” Mark
mumbled and shook his head.

He still couldn’t shake the image of the infant girl Frank McQuade’s assistant
had set in his arms. The smile on the doctor’s face was… was reminiscent of what Mark recalled as true happiness. She was the first of her kind; that which was alive yet not. That little girl would be the link between the dead and the living.

Mark’s lips twitched into a smile as the sight of that girl wrapping her tiny fingers around McQuade’s thumb
came to mind and her sweet, innocent laughter filled his ears.

“Maybe this isn’t going to be so bad.”