This is the eighth installment of the short story "Ink" by Steve Metcalf as it first appeared in the second Event collection "Iron Bay."
INK
Steve Metcalf
Chapter Seven
Virus
It was a cacophony of muffled horror drifting up the smoke-filled night to the apartment three stories above. Screams. Gunshots. Crackling flames. A distant explosion. It sounded like the end of the world was fast approaching and nothing was standing in its way.
“Did you hear that?” Sara asked. She was a short, black woman who had lived in this neighborhood in quieter times . . . four days ago. Her disposition then could generally be summed up as angry. Now, she was terrified.
Four days ago everything was fine. Four days ago was a world away.
“Yeah,” Jones said, wiping the sweat from his head – eyebrows back to the nape of his neck – in one smooth motion with the palm of his dirty left hand. He would have used his right, but it was heavily bandaged for some reason. The gauze was filthy with dirt and soot. “I heard. I don’t care. I need to meet the Gray Pigeon in an hour. Nothing will stop that.”
Jones pulled a small, thin piece of plastic out of his pocket. It was a Minion figurine from the popular kid’s movie series. He pulled the little guy apart at the middle and Sara saw that it was a thumb drive. A removable storage device for a computer.
“He needs to update my file with the new data,” Jones said as he snapped the two dirty, yellow halves of the toy back together. He slid the small piece of electronics into his pocket. “We can end this thing tonight.”
“Are you sure it’s powerful enough?” Sara, who had now turned into Jenny, asked with a worried look on her face. She was now a tall blonde with no ties to Jones at all. This all, of course, seemed absolutely normal to him.
He nodded.
“It has to be powerful enough,” he pulled on a pair of leather workman’s gloves. “Or we’re all dead.”
* *
“A week ago, patient zero tried to make a sandwich,” Dr. Clayton was holding court in his small lab. It was on the top floor of a large metro high school. The windows and doors were barricaded with initially slap-dash contraptions that had been systematically added to and upgraded. What used to be the AP English room, right next door, was now a morgue of sorts. There were several bodies in various states of surgical mutilation. There was one path into and out of the high school. Highly guarded. Easily defensed. The doctor was explaining the situation to a handful of new workers escorted in by a rare combination of Marines, Rangers and National Guardsmen. The rest of the scientists went about their delicate yet crucial work.
“We think it was a Monte Cristo sandwich,” the doctor continued. “Perhaps he used the wrong raspberry currant. Perhaps he experimented with a none-too-fresh chocolate pudding. In any event, the catastrophic lunch led to a virus which led to,” and the doctor waved his hand at the barred windows in dramatic fashion. “In four days the virus has caused the decay of civilization as we know it. In four more, we’ll all be food.”
Jones was there and not there. Somehow he was watching this presentation while he was making his way across the neighborhood backyards to get to the lab.
“Are we close to a cure?” one researcher asked. She had shoulder-length black hair, pulled back behind her ears. Her face was dirty and there was a dark smudge on her neck. It looked like dried blood. It looked like a hand-print.
Doc Clayton nodded. He smiled, but it was an empty gesture.
“We make leaps and bounds every day,” he said, pointing to his computer. “We’re building a file. We’re one of four outposts doing the research. We will provide this latest batch of data to the CDC as soon as their courier gets here.” He checked his watch, and absently wound the mechanism. “Any minute now. God willing.”
* *
It was Kira, now. They tracked through the backyard of a house on Larch Avenue and managed to avoid tripping over the hard, plastic temporary kiddie pool and running into the swing set on the north end of the fenced area. Jones and Kira looped around these objects quietly. The sounds of anguish filled the night air, but were never less than 30 yards away.
They stopped at the end of the yard. It was a four-foot high wooden fence – more decorative than functional. The two couriers knelt and surveyed the land beyond. They were one more house and then the grounds of the school away from Dr. Clayton’s lab.
Jones looked up and over the fence while Kira checked her phone.
“I got him,” she said. “He’s close.”
“I know,” Jones said. “The school’s right there. The doctor will be – “
“No, that’s not,” and then she stopped. There was a low growling sound about 10 feet behind her.
She slowly turned to look and saw a man – and infected man – standing just inside the back door of the house.
The media had been careful not to refer to them as zombies. The general edict came down from the CDC and the WHO as they were worried that it might incite even more of a panic than had already been created. These weren’t zombies, by definition. They were humans. Infected with a particularly virulent strain of Ebola that make them aggressive and hungry.
The military was cautioned to kill only as a last resort which meant, of course, that they were allowed to kill on sight.
Jones pulled a bicycle chain out of his jacket pocket and slowly began winding it around his leather-clad right hand – never taking his eyes off the infected homeowner.
“If he stays there, he’ll live,” Jones said through clenched teeth. “Otherwise.”
Kira’s phone beeped. She looked from the screen to the infected back to her screen.
“DiNapoli,” she breathed.
With a shout, the infected crashed through the storm door in the back of his house. He ran at Jones and Kira with shards of glass stuck in his arms and a long piece of gray screen trailing behind him.
Jones stood and flexed his right arm. A short length of chain hung out of his clenched fist.
“Okay,” he said, pivoting at the waist as if coiling all the muscles along his core. Kira was pushing backward, as if trying to squeeze through the fence. When the infected man was only two steps away, Jones uncorked and twisted his body back the other way in perfect timing. His armor-clad right fist made solid contact with the running man. His forward momentum was rerouted by the fist and the man flew to his right – to Jones’s left – directly into the fence. His head took the brunt of the impact and he went down in a heap.
The infected man groaned.
Jones stood over him, fist still clenched. As if for the first time, the infected man saw Kira and lunged for her. He had kicked out his right leg and caught Jones across the side of his left knee.
“Br,” he groaned and then was silenced. Jones hit him with a right cross that shattered his jaw and loosened nearly every tooth. The infected man gurgled, swallowing blood, and looked up at Jones. A combination of clarity and confusion erupted across his eyes.
“Hi,” he said.
“Don’t you fucking hi, me,” Jones hissed. Kira had gotten back to her feet and took a step away from the two men. The infected had scared her. Jones stood, panting, rubbing his knee.
“Chad,” the man said, drooling blood and small chunks of teeth out of his mouth. They tracked a grotesque river of gore from his bottom lip, across this chin and down his throat. Soon, the front of his shirt was sticky with blood and mucus. “Hi.”
The infected looked from Jones to Kira. He spit a wad of blood on the ground. In the waning light, the blood seemed darker, more ominous than it should. Kira stared at it. The man took a wheezing breath and she realized that he must have a punctured lung … from the initial blow. A rib, completely broken in half, must have been driven backward with the force of Jones’s metal-enhanced punch.
“Hi,” the man said again. “It’s me.”
The infected man slumped back against the fence and fell unconscious. He began to breathe shallowly, eyes closed.
“You’ve killed him,” Kira said. She stood back a few feet and cinched the cords of her hoodie, pulling the hood closed around her head. Jones looked at her, her alabaster skin glowing in the moonlight, her sleeve tattoo standing out against the skin of her right arm.
“He killed himself when he decided to come after us,” Jones said. He unspooled the bicycle chain from around his fist and stood next to Kira. “We still need to get to the doctor.”
Kira nodded.
“I think we’re okay,” she said and touched his arm.
The last thing he remembered was smiling.
* *
“We’re dead,” Dr. Clayton said to himself. “All of us.”
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