Post by GoldShadow on Sept 13, 2011 11:32:34 GMT -5
This is a short story I wrote for a little writing contest on another forum. It's by no means perfect, but it's definitely the best short story I've written to date. Let me know what you think.
A man’s body lay sprawled in a macabre pose on the expressway’s shoulder. Rigor mortis had frozen his face in a permanent grimace—as if, even in death, he experienced some abject horror, and would continue to do so until rot ate him away and left nothing but an expressionless skeleton.
“Daddy.” A little girl, all of seven years old, tugged at Frank’s khakis. She pointed at the dead man—specifically, at the man’s severed leg. It wasn’t a clean cut, and looked rather like it had been torn off in an industrial accident. Mangled and stringy, clumps of flesh hanging off at the knee’s circumference, messy all around. Black patches of dry blood mottled the surrounding asphalt.
“I know, pumpkin,” Frank said. She hugged his thigh. Frank turned to Nelsen. “The hell do you think happened to him?”
Nelsen was busy snooping around the Chevy SUV parked a few yards away from the dead man. He looked like a TV detective, surveying the scene of a crime and scouring it for clues. The car was in poor shape—tires and sides muddied, dinged up doors, and a rear bumper crumpled like a beer can.
A bit of a junker, Frank thought, but hell, it was free and they didn’t have to worry about insurance. Not a bad deal. Not bad at all.
“Aha.” Nelsen bent down and grabbed something from beneath the car. “Hacksaw.”
The handheld saw’s jagged, serrated blade was covered in blood, as if its natural color was hemoglobin burgundy and not stainless steel silver.
“Must have done himself,” Nelsen said. “Probably thought amputating the limb would save him. A shame there was so much damn misinformation floating around. Can you believe there were people like him who thought it was just like rabies?”
Frank shrugged. Almost instinctively, he felt for his own knife, which was tucked away in a sheath attached to a belt loop on his pants—perhaps wondering if he would be able to amputate his own leg with it should the need ever arise. Doubtful, he thought, even with its six-inch semi-serrated blade.
“You can prevent rabies if you remove the affected limb fast enough, you know.”
“But not EF.”
“Nope,” Nelsen said. “Not EF. Although, this man was lucky.”
“Doesn’t look too lucky to me.”
“The hack job was awful. Blood loss must have killed him long before the EF had a chance to set in. I’d call that pretty lucky.”
“I guess.” Not exactly Vegas-worthy betting odds, Frank thought. He appraised the scene for a moment, then took a step back. “Hey, Rick? Is it safe to… touch the saw like that? With all his blood on it, I mean.”
“Hm?” Nelsen glanced at the crimsoned saw in his hand. “Oh. Of course. After this much time has passed, it’s fine. Trust me.”
“If you say so.” Frank gestured at the Chevy. “We should get a move on.”
There was no sign of the keys—in the car or on the man—so Frank popped the SUV’s hood and worked a little magic to hot wire the vehicle. The engine turned over with a boastful roar. The fuel gauge read a tick under one-quarter, and a few dashboard lights were on—check engine, oil low, the TCS malfunction indicator—but for travelers entirely too accustomed to walking, any wheels were better than no wheels.
Frank and Nelsen tossed their backpacks in the trunk. Frank held on to his Remington 870 shotgun—an arm’s length was about as much space as he was willing to give it. He hoisted the little girl into the back seat and buckled her in, kissed her forehead, then took his place in the passenger seat.
Frank twisted around. “You okay back there, Emmy?”
“I’m tired.”
“I know, pumpkin.” He petted her on the head, frazzling her brunette hair. “You can sleep during the ride.”
Nelsen shifted into drive and the car jerked forward. He navigated around the corpse, then accelerated to a comfortable speed. The ride was rickety until he pulled off the shoulder and into the right lane. Frank wasn’t sure why Nelsen signaled. Force of habit, probably.
They traveled for a solid twenty minutes sans conversation. It was Nelsen who first injected a few words into the air.
“Hell, you were right,” he said. “Whole damn expressway’s practically empty.”
And it was. There was a car every half mile or so. Most were parked on the side of the road, though a few sat right on the dashed white line in the middle of it. Their former owners were long gone—abandoned their vehicles after running out of gas, no doubt. Lucky for Frank and Nelsen and Emmy, Saw-Leg back there had decided to pull over with a quarter tank of gas in a futile attempt to treat himself.
Frank grinned. “One of the perks of having pals that worked domestic MILINT when the shit hit the fan. And the fact that we’re smack dab in the middle of Bumfuck, USA doesn’t hurt either.”
For the hell of it, Frank turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial. 97.1, nothing. 97.3, nothing. 97.5, nothing, and so on. After exhausting the FM spectrum, he switched over to AM, but the radio spit out aural fuzz on every frequency. Meaningless static, grating white noise—the audio equivalent of snow on a television screen.
“You looking for oldies?” Nelsen said. “I’m pretty sure that’s one-oh-six-nine. But I have to warn you, the only song they play now is ‘Make My Ears Bleed.’ Them and every other god damn station. But look on the bright side.”
“And what bright side is that?”
“No commercials.”
Clever, Frank thought with a chuckle. “Not looking for music. Sure would be nice, though. Could go for some Allman Brothers right about now.” He popped open a plastic bottle and gulped down some water. Then he craned his neck around. “What about you, squirt? You like the Allmans?”
Emmy looked at Frank with her big, unassuming baby browns, and shrugged. Frank loved it when she did that. It was the cutest thing—the way she’d stare at him as if he had just asked her the most serious question in the world, and then shrug. He offered her some water—“Little sips, pumpkin. The road’s bumpy”—and turned back around.
It was rough going. The expressway was not a terribly well maintained road. Located in a suburban—more sub than urban, almost rural—part of the great New England expanse, it had been a road less traveled even before things went sour. Now it wallowed in its loneliness, surrounded by deciduous greenery on both sides, winding left and right through several hundred square miles of untouched forest.
As he drove, Nelsen turned clammy. He licked his lips and blinked frequently and, almost glaring straight ahead at the road, gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands. Frank eyed him curiously and hoped he wasn’t about to vomit all over the steering wheel.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Nelsen said, finally.
“Shoot.”
“The reason we’re on this road, the reason I wanted to travel this direction. I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…” Nelsen shifted nervously in his seat and took a deep breath. He briefly eyed the shotgun leaning against the passenger door, next to Frank. “I didn’t live in Glensberg. I worked there.”
“You worked there?”
Emmy twirled her ponytail and swung her legs back and forth as she stared out the window. She wasn’t tired anymore. Something about the greenery passing by, a continuously moving blur of the world, captivated her like nothing else. Back when Mommy and Daddy bought that minivan with the DVD player in it, she still preferred to stare aimlessly out the window—even when they put in The Little Mermaid, which said a lot, because The Little Mermaid was her favorite.
In the front of the car, Mr. Nelsen—no, Dr. Nelsen, Daddy always corrected her—was talking to Daddy. Emmy didn’t care to eavesdrop. They were probably discussing something boring. They always talked about boring things. It was a bad habit adults had. Sometimes, Dr. Nelsen explained things to her in simple terms, like what viruses were. But today, he was busy talking to Daddy. Emmy liked it when Dr. Nelsen taught her things, but she didn’t care for the tone of voice he used. He treated her like a baby. She wasn’t dumb or a baby. She was just young.
The car went over a big bump in the road. Emmy stuck her neck up high, like a giraffe, to see above the dashboard. It wasn’t easy; she was buckled into the back seat, and a seat right next to the door at that. She liked to sit in the middle, but Daddy never let her. He said the seat belts on the sides were safer than the seat belt in the middle, and something about airbags.
Cracks and bumps peppered the road, like an old, dry, clay model. Her art teacher, Ms. Kimmy, once had the class make little clay sculptures. Emmy made a .22 caliber Long Rifle bullet, like the one Daddy showed her at the shooting range. She didn’t like the shooting range. It was loud, even with those funny earmuffs he made her wear. But she wanted to make a sculpture of a bullet, so she did. At first, she thought it turned out great. But then it dried, and she hadn’t used enough clay or enough water, and it got cracks in it. When she brought it home, Daddy laughed and said he liked it nonetheless—and that if Mommy asked, it was supposed to be a funny hat for one of Emmy’s dolls.
She missed Mommy.
“You’re kidding,” Daddy said loudly. He was talking to Dr. Nelsen. “Here? In the middle of fuck all nowhere?”
Emmy didn’t like it when Daddy used that word. Her teachers said it was a bad word. Mommy said it was a bad word too, even though she used it just as much as Daddy. One time, Mommy scolded Daddy for it, and he grinned and called her a hippo crit, and Mommy frowned and then she kissed him and shoved him away and they both laughed, but Emmy didn’t think it was all that funny.
Anyway, where was she? Oh, right. Mommy. Emmy missed her. Daddy did too. Sometimes, he got a picture of her from his wallet and looked at it and showed it to Emmy. In the picture, Mommy lay in a hospital bed holding an infant, and Daddy flashed the camera a thumbs up. Daddy always pointed at the newborn and said, “That’s you.” Emmy couldn’t believe she’d been that little once. Sometimes, his eyes got misty and Emmy asked him if he was crying, but Daddy laughed and cleared his throat with a loud harrumph and wiped his eyes and said, “Just got something in my eye. Besides, there’s enough shit to worry about as it is. No time to waste shedding useless tears, squirt.” But Emmy knew he was lying, because people in the movies always had “something in their eye” when they were crying. She didn’t like it when he lied.
“I know it sounds weird,” Dr. Nelsen said. “But I have to know. Call it morbid curiosity. I have to know.”
Emmy tapped Daddy on the shoulder and asked for a piece of gum. She liked looking out the window, but sometimes it got boring and she liked to chew gum. Only sugar free gum, though. Daddy didn’t let her chew sugar full gum. He said it would rot her teeth and give her ginger vitis and make her mouth look like Gramma’s. Gramma had to wear dentures. But Daddy had his arms crossed and he didn’t even look at her. He put his palm up, a signal for her to shut up and be quiet. She obeyed and stared out the window.
Nelsen kept his gaze awkwardly glued to the road, hands on the steering wheel in the ten and two positions. Hope I didn’t bring it up too late, he thought; the conversation he’d just sparked had erected a barrier between the driver and passenger seats, like the protective plastic divider in an NYC taxi cab—except this barrier was not so protective.
Frank sat there contemplatively, his meaty forearms folded across his chest.
“I understand if you don’t want to join me,” Nelsen said. “This is a purely personal matter. It’d be wrong of me to involve you. I’m not going to endanger you, or”—He jutted his thumb toward the back seat—“your little girl. If you’d like, we can part ways once we reach Glensberg. Heck, you can even keep the car.”
Frank soaked up the scenery. The sun was coming down from its apogee now, on the descent from its high place in the sky.
“And if that’s what you choose to do,” Nelsen said, “I understand. It’s been good knowing you, and I wish you and Emily the best.” He licked his lips and swallowed.
A stream of sunlight peeked through the branches and hit Frank in the face. He did not lower the sun visor. Instead, he squinted. His voice was as stony as his face when, eventually, he said, “No.”
“No, yes?” Nelsen said. “Or no, no?”
“I’ll go with you. When we reach Glensberg—if it’s not too dangerous—I’ll go with you.”
“Okay.” Nelsen sighed with relief, and then a foreign sensation crept up his back. His breaths turned quick and shallow.
“If I decide it is too dangerous, we’ll go our separate ways.”
“Sounds good.” And it did sound good. Nelsen had a SIG Sauer P226 handgun. He had lifted it off the body of a dead police officer almost two months ago. He’d never actually pulled a trigger before that, but the officer had no use for it, and Nelsen did—even if he didn’t quite know how to use it. He stumbled across Frank a few weeks later. Frank, a veritable encyclopedia on bullets and the things they could be shot out of, knew everything about the SIG. Frank taught him how to shoot. Of course, that didn’t mean Nelsen was any good at it. His aim was shit, and he knew it.
A green, rectangular sign whizzed by along the side of the expressway.
“Exit twenty-five,” Frank said. “That the one?”
“Yeah.”
Nelsen veered over to the off-ramp and merged onto Route 40C. Route 40C was a local road that winded through several small towns, each one more wooded than the last. It was a hell of a scenic route—little Emily probably enjoyed it, Nelsen thought—but passing through all these ghost towns struck him as more than a little eerie, like seeing the skinless, meatless skeleton of an old friend. These small towns had never been fountainheads of civilization or bustling hubs of activity, but there was not a single person on the streets. And the lights, naturally, were all off. It sent a tremorous shudder down his spine. The crescent moon, shrouded by wisps of dark cirrostratus, only amplified the sensation.
Night fell before they reached Glensberg, so they decided to settle into a single story house in a secluded neighborhood. Frank spent fifteen minutes circling the house’s perimeter, peering into all the windows with a flashlight, and examining every crevice, big or small. Then he did it all again—twice—double- and triple-checking all the same spots. At one point, he knocked sonorously loud on every door and window, which scared the wits out of Nelsen. Nelsen, practically on the verge of pissing his pants, sternly informed him that he was liable to attract a whole lot of undesirable attention. Frank chuckled; he knew exactly how much noise he was making—certainly not enough to attract attention—but no amount of reassurance would quell Nelsen’s fears.
When Frank was satisfied, he picked a tiny window near the front door that neither he nor Nelsen had a chance in hell of fitting through. Frank wrapped his elbow with a cotton shirt and slammed it through the window. The glass shattered into a hundred crystalline pieces, all glinting star-like in the moon’s pale light. Then he spent another forty-five minutes circling the perimeter and looking into the house to ensure that the broken window hadn’t alerted anybody—or anything—that might have been sleeping inside. Finally, he declared it safe.
Nelsen asked Frank why he couldn’t have just busted open a bigger window. Frank explained that it would pose a security risk.
“If a couple of grown men can fit through it, so can they,” Frank said. “But nothing’ll get through a small opening. Except maybe a cat, or a raccoon if we’re real unlucky. Nasty fuckers, those raccoons.” He turned to Emmy. “You ready, squirt?”
She frowned, eyebrows downturned and cheeks drooping. “I’m scared.”
“I know, pumpkin.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “Remember what I taught you.”
He lifted her up and snaked her through the opening, careful not to let her scrape against the shards of glass stuck in edges of the window frame. He cut himself by accident, but it was only a surface wound. Ignoring the steady stream of blood from his own hand, he lowered her into the house and passed her a flashlight. She tiptoed around to the front door and unlocked it from the inside, allowing the two men to enter.
That night, dinner comprised an appetizer of canned black beans, a canned black beans entrée, and canned black beans for dessert. They consumed it around candlelight, as usual.
After dinner, Nelsen went to bed in the master bedroom while Frank stayed awake on watch. Nelsen had stayed awake last time, so it was Frank’s turn at bat. Frank tucked Emmy under the covers in the other bedroom and told her to go to sleep, but an hour later she crawled out and complained about a nightmare.
“You know you’re being ridiculous, right, pumpkin?”
“I know,” she said, somber and enervated.
“Dreams are just dreams. They’re not real.”
“It was the one about Mommy. The same as last time.”
Frank’s features softened. “Shh. It’s all right. Bring the pillow and blanket out. You can sleep here.”
She spread some sheets out on the floor and snuggled up next to him as he sat with his back against the wall. He downed a six-pack of Coca-Cola for a healthy dose of caffeine. He spent the rest of the night staring at the melting candle wax, one hand caressing Emmy’s hair and the other coiled around a shotgun.
The next morning, they set off early at the crack of dawn, after a hearty breakfast of canned black beans. Frank got a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror before breakfast. His face had set into a permanent scowl, and gray stubble covered his chin and the sides of his cheeks like an uncared for lawn of facial hair. Maybe he would shave later, he thought. It had been a while since his last shave.
It wasn’t until after he exited the bathroom that it hit him: all gray.
“Shit,” he said to Emmy. “Well, I guess premature gray is better than premature bald, right, squirt?”
She shrugged.
“Lucky for me, Grampa had a full head of hair till the day he died. That’s genetic, right? I’d ask Rick, but, well… Never mind, squirt. Let’s get a move on.”
And so they did, while a haze of orange and violet carpeted the sky, and the moon was a gray-white silhouette against a twilight backdrop. The town was as empty now as it was last night. But as the group continued along Route 40C, it began to see them. Not many. They were sporadic. But they were there, some lying flat on their faces in front yards, others curled up against lamp posts and inside locked cars. Frank pulled his shotgun extra close, and instructed Emmy to keep her head down and close her eyes.
Ten minutes later, Frank caught sight of a road sign anchored to a tree. It read, Glensberg Town Line. According to a second sign below it, Glensberg High had won some state football championship three decades ago. Glensberg’s claim to fame, or something like that.
“We getting close?”
“Yeah,” Nelsen said. “We follow Main Street for a few minutes, and then hook a left onto Research Ave.”
“I take it you’re familiar with the town.”
Nelsen furrowed his brow. “Hm?”
“In case we need to make a quick getaway.”
“Oh. Familiar enough. I didn’t explore much, if that’s what you mean, but I know my way around. Came through here every day for three years.”
Sure enough, the group turned right at an intersection onto Main Street. There were more and more of them. Frank didn’t like it, but he told himself it was okay. Virtually all of them were confined indoors, like fish in an aquarium. He imagined them banging on the glass walls of the barbershop, hair unkempt and asymmetrically cut, or banging on the door of the Citgo gas station back by the intersection. Much to his relief, though, virtually all of them—whether they were indoors or out—were sluggish. Languid. Of course they were. They had been milling about for weeks or months. Nelsen had mentioned that. Something about prolonged inactivity and temporary dormancy. They hardly noticed the SUV gliding through the streets, let alone attempt to chase it. Now, if the car had stalled on the road for a while, the persistent noise could have been enough to rouse them, but Frank thought it best to cross that bridge if he came to it.
Nelsen swung left onto Research Avenue. A few minutes later, he eased on the brakes and brought the vehicle to a halt in the parking lot of a large concrete building—large relative to everything else in town, anyway. The building’s front lawn was overgrown with waist-high grass and myriad weeds. The building itself was impressive and impersonal, like a finely crafted cement statue. A steel façade jutted out over the front entrance, and a stone tile courtyard extended some fifty feet out from the building’s side. There were benches and wooden tables, probably for employees to spend lunch breaks in the spring and summer and fall, but the courtyard must have turned into an ice trap in winter. Unless you were a glass half full type, in which case it could have made for a decent skate rink.
A lackluster metal sign greeted them at the parking lot entrance. It read, Welcome to Saltzman and Meyer Biotech, Inc., Glensberg Branch.
“You’re kidding,” Frank said. “Saltzman and Meyer Biotech?”
Nelsen gulped. His hands had acquired the jitters. With a tinge of fear in his voice, he asked, “What about it?”
“This place is called S and M Biotech? Hell, take away a couple vowels in ‘Biotech’ and you end up with S and M Bitch.”
Nelsen, forehead drenched in sweat, squeaked out a nervous laugh. “Three years I worked here, and not once did I see that. Where’s your head at?”
“Daddy, what’s S and M?”
“Tell you what, pumpkin. Ask me again in…” Frank chortled and then counted up on his fingers. “Never.”
Once they got out of the car, Frank steeled himself. The parking attendant was nowhere to be found and the parking lot was empty, but Frank wasn’t foolish enough to let his guard down.
“We’ll head in through the side entrance,” Nelsen said. “Not as flashy as the front, but more practical for our purposes.”
Frank gave the side entrance a once over. Drab, white wall with slightly darker patches of caulk pasted here and there, like splotchy bruises on the building’s paint-layered cement skin. Definitely not as flashy as the front. He nudged the door’s push-bar. It was stuck. He shot an inquisitive glance Nelsen’s way—maybe the man was in possession of a key or something—but Nelsen, body trembling, shook his head and gestured with his palms for Frank to push it. Frank nodded, inhaled deeply, and shoved his body weight into the door like a human battering ram. The door swung in on its hinges.
“Not the best security,” Frank said matter-of-factly.
“Back when the power was still on, your stunt would have alerted the PD. Patrol car would have arrived in two minutes.”
Emmy cowered at the pit of darkness, as if the building were a monster and she was about to step into its cavernous maw. She hid behind Frank’s leg.
Frank had duct taped a flashlight to the barrel of his shotgun earlier this morning. Nelsen had taken note and followed suit. As he switched the light on and tested it a few times, Frank said, “You know the drill, right, squirt?”
She nodded. “Hold on to your pants and keep my mouth shut and tug if I see anything.”
“Good girl.” He patted her on the head. To Nelsen, he said, “You take point. I don’t know where we’re going.”
Breathing heavily, Nelsen assented.
They stepped into the darkness. It engulfed them, coated them in murk. The mustiness in the air was almost tangible, the blindness all-encompassing. Frank held his shotgun at the ready, eyes focused down the ring sight atop the barrel and neck on a swivel. The gun was an extension of himself; where his face turned, it turned.
Finger on the trigger and senses attuned to the blackness, he absorbed every stimulus: Emmy’s fingers wrapped around the crease of his pants, the musty scent of dust in the air, the cold steel in his palms, the outline of a man with a handgun in front of him, the delicate tip tap of their boots on glossy, linoleum flooring. The electrical impulses traversed his sensory nerves and converged in his brain, a no nonsense processing center able to discern each piece of data from the next and, at the same time, assemble the trees to analyze the forest.
Sight proved to be the limiting variable in the equation. The LED flashlight was a godsend, but that finite circle of illumination was not exactly designed to service whole rooms or hallways. Thus, Frank had to memorize what he saw and put all the pieces together like a puzzle. Door. Okay, check. Swivel left. Wall. Okay, check. Swivel down. Floor, and a bloody shirt. Okay, check—walk around the shirt.
Up ahead, an office door hung open. As they crept past it, a deep, lifeless groan penetrated the silence. Emmy’s grip on his leg tightened. Nelsen froze.
Frank turned right and shined his light into the office. A humanoid stood behind the desk. Part of its face looked like it had been burned off, but the skin was not charred; it was bubbly and splotchy and raw, perhaps a chemical burn as opposed to a heat burn. Dry blood caked its lips, or what was left of them, and a yellow-red gash ran misshapen down the length of its chest, like a puffed out scar, except the scar was one long sac of blood and pus.
Nelsen raised his weapon, but Frank pushed his wrist down. Shoot now, and alert every other creature in the building—assuming there were more. And Frank always assumed there were more. He carefully leaned forward and, before the curious zombie got any more curious, pulled the office door shut. Then he motioned for Nelsen to continue moving.
They turned right at a hallway intersection. A bulletin board on the wall was littered with postings and thumb tacks. One flier asked employees, Did you remember to wash your hands?
As they sliced through the dark, the place took a turn from friendly neighborhood biotech company to something out of a B-movie slaughterhouse—swatches of blood on the walls, a severed hand, and was that an eyeball? And then, as if Frank had hallucinated it, the next stretch of hallway was pristine. Immaculate. He was about to ask Nelsen what might have happened in that previous part of the hall, what had been going on in the lab adjacent, but he thought better of it.
“Here.” Nelsen led them into a small office. The plaque on the wall said Records. The office was a bit larger than a college dorm room but smaller than a luxury hotel suite—and nowhere near as luxurious. A tired, coffee stained carpet covered the floor, and there were two desks, each topped by a computer, against the walls perpendicular to the entrance. A massive shelf full of cabinets blocked the wall opposite the entrance. It spanned from floor to ceiling and wall to wall.
Nelsen shined a light on each cabinet drawer and read the labels. He moved from one to the next, then to the next, and again to the next.
“Emmy, stand outside by the door,” Frank said. He could read the lines of fear on her face as clearly as if she were a magazine, but he gritted his teeth and continued. “I want you to keep an eye out in case anything tries to sneak up on us.”
She did as she was told and positioned herself just outside the open doorway, flashlight in hand.
Nelsen glanced at one particular cabinet and did a double-take. It must have been the one he was looking for. He pulled it out and thumbed through a series of folders. He removed one particular folder and placed it on the desk.
Frank’s eyes shifted warily left and right, as though the walls themselves might attack him at any moment. “Would’ve figured you guys kept electronic records.”
“We did,” Nelsen said. The sheer trembling in his voice made him difficult to understand. “Backed up securely. But at the end of each week, a hard copy was printed out and stored here.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
Nelsen had begun hyperventilating. Sweat dripped from his matted hair onto the desk. “When the disease first popped up in South America, a Guatemalan lab isolated it and sent it to us.”
“Why would they do that?”
“We had a… a working relationship with them. They’d contracted things out to us in the past because we had resources they didn’t. We got a hold of isolates from three strains of the virus. EF-alpha, EF-beta, and EF-gamma.”
“Okay.”
“Alpha and gamma could be carried in humans, but didn’t cause symptoms of the disease—at least not in the short time frame we were able to study it. Beta. Beta was the bad bug. Beta’s the one responsible for… for everything.”
Frank’s face was stern, rigid. “Okay.”
“The CDC wanted a sample of Beta. They wanted two sets of samples. One unaltered, and one heat inactivated. And… Jesus, please. I have to know.”
Frank put a hand on Nelsen’s shoulder. It was not a friendly hand. “Heat inactivated?”
“Y-yeah. Using the autoclave. It’s a big, pressurized oven.”
“And?”
“I was working here at the time. I handled some of the samples. Jesus, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what we were dealing with. Nobody did at the time. I had no idea. I swear. I would have been more careful if I knew.”
“Get a hold of yourself.”
“I think… See, the autoclave is normally set for high temp, high pressure. But that day, I… Jolene, from down the hall. She changed the settings for some procedure of hers. She was working on something else. She lowered the temp and pressure settings. Normally, we didn’t change the settings, but she had to. For some procedure.” His whole body was vibrating now, particularly his head, like a few screws were loose in his neck. The man may as well have been standing in a meat freezer. “Jesus. I can’t remember if I changed the settings back before I autoclaved the Beta samples. I can’t remember. My wife was leaving me for some douchebag lawyer and my kid was in the hospital… Jesus, I can’t remember.”
“What would’ve happened if you didn’t change the settings?” Frank said. He grabbed Nelsen by the lapel. “What does that mean?”
“It means… If the settings were too low, the virus wouldn’t have been completely inactivated. Some of it… would have been live.”
Frank thrust a glance at the file. Nelsen scanned it. Frank did too.
“Talk to me,” Frank said. The file went on but Nelsen had stopped reading.
Nelsen shook his head vigorously. “Jesus. It wasn’t my fault. The CDC. They screwed up. If they hadn’t screwed up, it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. It’s their fault. It’s their god damn fault.”
Frank went to close the door. Emmy’s eyes protested, but Frank clenched his jaw and shut it tight. “What do you mean the CDC screwed up?”
“The… the news. You watched the news, right? The CDC screwed up. The hole in the suit. You remember that, right?”
“The guy at the CDC who screwed up was handling your sample, wasn’t he.”
“It was his fault. He should have been more careful. He screwed up. If he hadn’t screwed up, none of this… none of it would have mattered.”
“Your ‘inactivated’ sample wasn’t, was it.”
“Look. I was under a lot of pressure. And it wasn’t my fault. If the CDC hadn’t screwed up…”
“Bad luck.” Frank rubbed his temple. “Two unfortunate screw ups.”
“Jesus. They’re the god damn CDC. We’re just some small lab in the middle of… where’d you call it? Bumfuck, USA? That’s on them. That’s on them and only them.”
“They didn’t trace it back to you?”
“They would have. If they had more time. But it spread so quickly… And look, it was already in South America. It was already out there. It’s not like I… We… It’s not like we started it.”
“How many, if you had to guess?” Frank laughed. There was no humor in it. “One billion? Two billion? Three, four, five?”
“I swear. I didn’t mean to. I had kids. A life. You think I wanted this?”
“Two unlucky accidents.” Frank snorted. “And then you and I happen to meet. What are the odds, right?”
“Yeah,” Nelsen said. A spat of deranged laughter burst from his mouth, but he quickly checked it. “What are the odds? Jesus.”
Emmy sat down cross-legged on the floor outside the office. She had a flashlight, but it didn’t help much. Like one little chocolate chip of light in a big cookie of darkness. She didn’t like the dark. She loathed it. She wanted to go back outside. Why were they here in the dark when it was sunny outside?
The floors were dusty. She tried to forget about the dark by pointing her flashlight at the floor and drawing snowflakes in the dust, but she couldn’t remember if snowflakes had five sides, like a star, or six. Dr. Nelsen once said snowflakes were smetrical, whatever that meant. She hadn’t seen snow in a long time. Well, Daddy said it’d only been a couple months, but she loved snow, and it seemed like a long time. But thinking of snow also brought back memories of Mommy. Daddy didn’t have a gun with him when Mommy changed. Emmy still remembered the bloody knife tossed carelessly in the garage. She remembered how, afterward, Daddy went out in the blizzard with a shovel and dug a big hole in the ground. Emmy wanted to help, but he wouldn’t let her. He didn’t cry that day, so she had to cry twice as much—for herself and for him.
There was a loud thud in the office, like a chair being slammed against a wall. Emmy jumped. Loud noises didn’t startle her much anymore, but between the dark and the noise, it was too much for her nerves to handle. Then there was a wet gurgling sound. A minute later, Daddy stepped out of the office, wiping a bloody knife with a piece of cloth. He put the knife back in its sheath, tossed the cloth into the office and shut the door behind him. Then he scooped up Emmy in his arms and held her close. She felt the thump-thump of his heartbeat in his chest. She wondered if he felt hers.
“Squirt,” he said, hugging her tight, “do you think your Daddy’s a bad person?”
She shook her head.
“Guess that makes one of us.” He smiled weakly. “I could rationalize it. Tell myself I did him a favor. I mean, how could anybody stay sane after learning something like that, right?”
Emmy shrugged.
“But the truth is, it felt good. Even if it doesn’t change a thing. Maybe Mommy can sleep now.”
He kissed her forehead and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “When you grow up, don’t be like Daddy, pumpkin. You be a good person.”
Emmy nodded and rested her head on his shoulder as he walked toward the exit. His shoulder was comfy. In one arm, he carried her; in the other, a shotgun. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she smiled. She was happy because she knew that, whatever it was, he wasn’t lying.
Pumpkin
A man’s body lay sprawled in a macabre pose on the expressway’s shoulder. Rigor mortis had frozen his face in a permanent grimace—as if, even in death, he experienced some abject horror, and would continue to do so until rot ate him away and left nothing but an expressionless skeleton.
“Daddy.” A little girl, all of seven years old, tugged at Frank’s khakis. She pointed at the dead man—specifically, at the man’s severed leg. It wasn’t a clean cut, and looked rather like it had been torn off in an industrial accident. Mangled and stringy, clumps of flesh hanging off at the knee’s circumference, messy all around. Black patches of dry blood mottled the surrounding asphalt.
“I know, pumpkin,” Frank said. She hugged his thigh. Frank turned to Nelsen. “The hell do you think happened to him?”
Nelsen was busy snooping around the Chevy SUV parked a few yards away from the dead man. He looked like a TV detective, surveying the scene of a crime and scouring it for clues. The car was in poor shape—tires and sides muddied, dinged up doors, and a rear bumper crumpled like a beer can.
A bit of a junker, Frank thought, but hell, it was free and they didn’t have to worry about insurance. Not a bad deal. Not bad at all.
“Aha.” Nelsen bent down and grabbed something from beneath the car. “Hacksaw.”
The handheld saw’s jagged, serrated blade was covered in blood, as if its natural color was hemoglobin burgundy and not stainless steel silver.
“Must have done himself,” Nelsen said. “Probably thought amputating the limb would save him. A shame there was so much damn misinformation floating around. Can you believe there were people like him who thought it was just like rabies?”
Frank shrugged. Almost instinctively, he felt for his own knife, which was tucked away in a sheath attached to a belt loop on his pants—perhaps wondering if he would be able to amputate his own leg with it should the need ever arise. Doubtful, he thought, even with its six-inch semi-serrated blade.
“You can prevent rabies if you remove the affected limb fast enough, you know.”
“But not EF.”
“Nope,” Nelsen said. “Not EF. Although, this man was lucky.”
“Doesn’t look too lucky to me.”
“The hack job was awful. Blood loss must have killed him long before the EF had a chance to set in. I’d call that pretty lucky.”
“I guess.” Not exactly Vegas-worthy betting odds, Frank thought. He appraised the scene for a moment, then took a step back. “Hey, Rick? Is it safe to… touch the saw like that? With all his blood on it, I mean.”
“Hm?” Nelsen glanced at the crimsoned saw in his hand. “Oh. Of course. After this much time has passed, it’s fine. Trust me.”
“If you say so.” Frank gestured at the Chevy. “We should get a move on.”
There was no sign of the keys—in the car or on the man—so Frank popped the SUV’s hood and worked a little magic to hot wire the vehicle. The engine turned over with a boastful roar. The fuel gauge read a tick under one-quarter, and a few dashboard lights were on—check engine, oil low, the TCS malfunction indicator—but for travelers entirely too accustomed to walking, any wheels were better than no wheels.
Frank and Nelsen tossed their backpacks in the trunk. Frank held on to his Remington 870 shotgun—an arm’s length was about as much space as he was willing to give it. He hoisted the little girl into the back seat and buckled her in, kissed her forehead, then took his place in the passenger seat.
Frank twisted around. “You okay back there, Emmy?”
“I’m tired.”
“I know, pumpkin.” He petted her on the head, frazzling her brunette hair. “You can sleep during the ride.”
Nelsen shifted into drive and the car jerked forward. He navigated around the corpse, then accelerated to a comfortable speed. The ride was rickety until he pulled off the shoulder and into the right lane. Frank wasn’t sure why Nelsen signaled. Force of habit, probably.
They traveled for a solid twenty minutes sans conversation. It was Nelsen who first injected a few words into the air.
“Hell, you were right,” he said. “Whole damn expressway’s practically empty.”
And it was. There was a car every half mile or so. Most were parked on the side of the road, though a few sat right on the dashed white line in the middle of it. Their former owners were long gone—abandoned their vehicles after running out of gas, no doubt. Lucky for Frank and Nelsen and Emmy, Saw-Leg back there had decided to pull over with a quarter tank of gas in a futile attempt to treat himself.
Frank grinned. “One of the perks of having pals that worked domestic MILINT when the shit hit the fan. And the fact that we’re smack dab in the middle of Bumfuck, USA doesn’t hurt either.”
For the hell of it, Frank turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial. 97.1, nothing. 97.3, nothing. 97.5, nothing, and so on. After exhausting the FM spectrum, he switched over to AM, but the radio spit out aural fuzz on every frequency. Meaningless static, grating white noise—the audio equivalent of snow on a television screen.
“You looking for oldies?” Nelsen said. “I’m pretty sure that’s one-oh-six-nine. But I have to warn you, the only song they play now is ‘Make My Ears Bleed.’ Them and every other god damn station. But look on the bright side.”
“And what bright side is that?”
“No commercials.”
Clever, Frank thought with a chuckle. “Not looking for music. Sure would be nice, though. Could go for some Allman Brothers right about now.” He popped open a plastic bottle and gulped down some water. Then he craned his neck around. “What about you, squirt? You like the Allmans?”
Emmy looked at Frank with her big, unassuming baby browns, and shrugged. Frank loved it when she did that. It was the cutest thing—the way she’d stare at him as if he had just asked her the most serious question in the world, and then shrug. He offered her some water—“Little sips, pumpkin. The road’s bumpy”—and turned back around.
It was rough going. The expressway was not a terribly well maintained road. Located in a suburban—more sub than urban, almost rural—part of the great New England expanse, it had been a road less traveled even before things went sour. Now it wallowed in its loneliness, surrounded by deciduous greenery on both sides, winding left and right through several hundred square miles of untouched forest.
As he drove, Nelsen turned clammy. He licked his lips and blinked frequently and, almost glaring straight ahead at the road, gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands. Frank eyed him curiously and hoped he wasn’t about to vomit all over the steering wheel.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Nelsen said, finally.
“Shoot.”
“The reason we’re on this road, the reason I wanted to travel this direction. I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…” Nelsen shifted nervously in his seat and took a deep breath. He briefly eyed the shotgun leaning against the passenger door, next to Frank. “I didn’t live in Glensberg. I worked there.”
“You worked there?”
***
Emmy twirled her ponytail and swung her legs back and forth as she stared out the window. She wasn’t tired anymore. Something about the greenery passing by, a continuously moving blur of the world, captivated her like nothing else. Back when Mommy and Daddy bought that minivan with the DVD player in it, she still preferred to stare aimlessly out the window—even when they put in The Little Mermaid, which said a lot, because The Little Mermaid was her favorite.
In the front of the car, Mr. Nelsen—no, Dr. Nelsen, Daddy always corrected her—was talking to Daddy. Emmy didn’t care to eavesdrop. They were probably discussing something boring. They always talked about boring things. It was a bad habit adults had. Sometimes, Dr. Nelsen explained things to her in simple terms, like what viruses were. But today, he was busy talking to Daddy. Emmy liked it when Dr. Nelsen taught her things, but she didn’t care for the tone of voice he used. He treated her like a baby. She wasn’t dumb or a baby. She was just young.
The car went over a big bump in the road. Emmy stuck her neck up high, like a giraffe, to see above the dashboard. It wasn’t easy; she was buckled into the back seat, and a seat right next to the door at that. She liked to sit in the middle, but Daddy never let her. He said the seat belts on the sides were safer than the seat belt in the middle, and something about airbags.
Cracks and bumps peppered the road, like an old, dry, clay model. Her art teacher, Ms. Kimmy, once had the class make little clay sculptures. Emmy made a .22 caliber Long Rifle bullet, like the one Daddy showed her at the shooting range. She didn’t like the shooting range. It was loud, even with those funny earmuffs he made her wear. But she wanted to make a sculpture of a bullet, so she did. At first, she thought it turned out great. But then it dried, and she hadn’t used enough clay or enough water, and it got cracks in it. When she brought it home, Daddy laughed and said he liked it nonetheless—and that if Mommy asked, it was supposed to be a funny hat for one of Emmy’s dolls.
She missed Mommy.
“You’re kidding,” Daddy said loudly. He was talking to Dr. Nelsen. “Here? In the middle of fuck all nowhere?”
Emmy didn’t like it when Daddy used that word. Her teachers said it was a bad word. Mommy said it was a bad word too, even though she used it just as much as Daddy. One time, Mommy scolded Daddy for it, and he grinned and called her a hippo crit, and Mommy frowned and then she kissed him and shoved him away and they both laughed, but Emmy didn’t think it was all that funny.
Anyway, where was she? Oh, right. Mommy. Emmy missed her. Daddy did too. Sometimes, he got a picture of her from his wallet and looked at it and showed it to Emmy. In the picture, Mommy lay in a hospital bed holding an infant, and Daddy flashed the camera a thumbs up. Daddy always pointed at the newborn and said, “That’s you.” Emmy couldn’t believe she’d been that little once. Sometimes, his eyes got misty and Emmy asked him if he was crying, but Daddy laughed and cleared his throat with a loud harrumph and wiped his eyes and said, “Just got something in my eye. Besides, there’s enough shit to worry about as it is. No time to waste shedding useless tears, squirt.” But Emmy knew he was lying, because people in the movies always had “something in their eye” when they were crying. She didn’t like it when he lied.
“I know it sounds weird,” Dr. Nelsen said. “But I have to know. Call it morbid curiosity. I have to know.”
Emmy tapped Daddy on the shoulder and asked for a piece of gum. She liked looking out the window, but sometimes it got boring and she liked to chew gum. Only sugar free gum, though. Daddy didn’t let her chew sugar full gum. He said it would rot her teeth and give her ginger vitis and make her mouth look like Gramma’s. Gramma had to wear dentures. But Daddy had his arms crossed and he didn’t even look at her. He put his palm up, a signal for her to shut up and be quiet. She obeyed and stared out the window.
***
Nelsen kept his gaze awkwardly glued to the road, hands on the steering wheel in the ten and two positions. Hope I didn’t bring it up too late, he thought; the conversation he’d just sparked had erected a barrier between the driver and passenger seats, like the protective plastic divider in an NYC taxi cab—except this barrier was not so protective.
Frank sat there contemplatively, his meaty forearms folded across his chest.
“I understand if you don’t want to join me,” Nelsen said. “This is a purely personal matter. It’d be wrong of me to involve you. I’m not going to endanger you, or”—He jutted his thumb toward the back seat—“your little girl. If you’d like, we can part ways once we reach Glensberg. Heck, you can even keep the car.”
Frank soaked up the scenery. The sun was coming down from its apogee now, on the descent from its high place in the sky.
“And if that’s what you choose to do,” Nelsen said, “I understand. It’s been good knowing you, and I wish you and Emily the best.” He licked his lips and swallowed.
A stream of sunlight peeked through the branches and hit Frank in the face. He did not lower the sun visor. Instead, he squinted. His voice was as stony as his face when, eventually, he said, “No.”
“No, yes?” Nelsen said. “Or no, no?”
“I’ll go with you. When we reach Glensberg—if it’s not too dangerous—I’ll go with you.”
“Okay.” Nelsen sighed with relief, and then a foreign sensation crept up his back. His breaths turned quick and shallow.
“If I decide it is too dangerous, we’ll go our separate ways.”
“Sounds good.” And it did sound good. Nelsen had a SIG Sauer P226 handgun. He had lifted it off the body of a dead police officer almost two months ago. He’d never actually pulled a trigger before that, but the officer had no use for it, and Nelsen did—even if he didn’t quite know how to use it. He stumbled across Frank a few weeks later. Frank, a veritable encyclopedia on bullets and the things they could be shot out of, knew everything about the SIG. Frank taught him how to shoot. Of course, that didn’t mean Nelsen was any good at it. His aim was shit, and he knew it.
A green, rectangular sign whizzed by along the side of the expressway.
“Exit twenty-five,” Frank said. “That the one?”
“Yeah.”
Nelsen veered over to the off-ramp and merged onto Route 40C. Route 40C was a local road that winded through several small towns, each one more wooded than the last. It was a hell of a scenic route—little Emily probably enjoyed it, Nelsen thought—but passing through all these ghost towns struck him as more than a little eerie, like seeing the skinless, meatless skeleton of an old friend. These small towns had never been fountainheads of civilization or bustling hubs of activity, but there was not a single person on the streets. And the lights, naturally, were all off. It sent a tremorous shudder down his spine. The crescent moon, shrouded by wisps of dark cirrostratus, only amplified the sensation.
***
Night fell before they reached Glensberg, so they decided to settle into a single story house in a secluded neighborhood. Frank spent fifteen minutes circling the house’s perimeter, peering into all the windows with a flashlight, and examining every crevice, big or small. Then he did it all again—twice—double- and triple-checking all the same spots. At one point, he knocked sonorously loud on every door and window, which scared the wits out of Nelsen. Nelsen, practically on the verge of pissing his pants, sternly informed him that he was liable to attract a whole lot of undesirable attention. Frank chuckled; he knew exactly how much noise he was making—certainly not enough to attract attention—but no amount of reassurance would quell Nelsen’s fears.
When Frank was satisfied, he picked a tiny window near the front door that neither he nor Nelsen had a chance in hell of fitting through. Frank wrapped his elbow with a cotton shirt and slammed it through the window. The glass shattered into a hundred crystalline pieces, all glinting star-like in the moon’s pale light. Then he spent another forty-five minutes circling the perimeter and looking into the house to ensure that the broken window hadn’t alerted anybody—or anything—that might have been sleeping inside. Finally, he declared it safe.
Nelsen asked Frank why he couldn’t have just busted open a bigger window. Frank explained that it would pose a security risk.
“If a couple of grown men can fit through it, so can they,” Frank said. “But nothing’ll get through a small opening. Except maybe a cat, or a raccoon if we’re real unlucky. Nasty fuckers, those raccoons.” He turned to Emmy. “You ready, squirt?”
She frowned, eyebrows downturned and cheeks drooping. “I’m scared.”
“I know, pumpkin.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “Remember what I taught you.”
He lifted her up and snaked her through the opening, careful not to let her scrape against the shards of glass stuck in edges of the window frame. He cut himself by accident, but it was only a surface wound. Ignoring the steady stream of blood from his own hand, he lowered her into the house and passed her a flashlight. She tiptoed around to the front door and unlocked it from the inside, allowing the two men to enter.
That night, dinner comprised an appetizer of canned black beans, a canned black beans entrée, and canned black beans for dessert. They consumed it around candlelight, as usual.
After dinner, Nelsen went to bed in the master bedroom while Frank stayed awake on watch. Nelsen had stayed awake last time, so it was Frank’s turn at bat. Frank tucked Emmy under the covers in the other bedroom and told her to go to sleep, but an hour later she crawled out and complained about a nightmare.
“You know you’re being ridiculous, right, pumpkin?”
“I know,” she said, somber and enervated.
“Dreams are just dreams. They’re not real.”
“It was the one about Mommy. The same as last time.”
Frank’s features softened. “Shh. It’s all right. Bring the pillow and blanket out. You can sleep here.”
She spread some sheets out on the floor and snuggled up next to him as he sat with his back against the wall. He downed a six-pack of Coca-Cola for a healthy dose of caffeine. He spent the rest of the night staring at the melting candle wax, one hand caressing Emmy’s hair and the other coiled around a shotgun.
***
The next morning, they set off early at the crack of dawn, after a hearty breakfast of canned black beans. Frank got a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror before breakfast. His face had set into a permanent scowl, and gray stubble covered his chin and the sides of his cheeks like an uncared for lawn of facial hair. Maybe he would shave later, he thought. It had been a while since his last shave.
It wasn’t until after he exited the bathroom that it hit him: all gray.
“Shit,” he said to Emmy. “Well, I guess premature gray is better than premature bald, right, squirt?”
She shrugged.
“Lucky for me, Grampa had a full head of hair till the day he died. That’s genetic, right? I’d ask Rick, but, well… Never mind, squirt. Let’s get a move on.”
And so they did, while a haze of orange and violet carpeted the sky, and the moon was a gray-white silhouette against a twilight backdrop. The town was as empty now as it was last night. But as the group continued along Route 40C, it began to see them. Not many. They were sporadic. But they were there, some lying flat on their faces in front yards, others curled up against lamp posts and inside locked cars. Frank pulled his shotgun extra close, and instructed Emmy to keep her head down and close her eyes.
Ten minutes later, Frank caught sight of a road sign anchored to a tree. It read, Glensberg Town Line. According to a second sign below it, Glensberg High had won some state football championship three decades ago. Glensberg’s claim to fame, or something like that.
“We getting close?”
“Yeah,” Nelsen said. “We follow Main Street for a few minutes, and then hook a left onto Research Ave.”
“I take it you’re familiar with the town.”
Nelsen furrowed his brow. “Hm?”
“In case we need to make a quick getaway.”
“Oh. Familiar enough. I didn’t explore much, if that’s what you mean, but I know my way around. Came through here every day for three years.”
Sure enough, the group turned right at an intersection onto Main Street. There were more and more of them. Frank didn’t like it, but he told himself it was okay. Virtually all of them were confined indoors, like fish in an aquarium. He imagined them banging on the glass walls of the barbershop, hair unkempt and asymmetrically cut, or banging on the door of the Citgo gas station back by the intersection. Much to his relief, though, virtually all of them—whether they were indoors or out—were sluggish. Languid. Of course they were. They had been milling about for weeks or months. Nelsen had mentioned that. Something about prolonged inactivity and temporary dormancy. They hardly noticed the SUV gliding through the streets, let alone attempt to chase it. Now, if the car had stalled on the road for a while, the persistent noise could have been enough to rouse them, but Frank thought it best to cross that bridge if he came to it.
Nelsen swung left onto Research Avenue. A few minutes later, he eased on the brakes and brought the vehicle to a halt in the parking lot of a large concrete building—large relative to everything else in town, anyway. The building’s front lawn was overgrown with waist-high grass and myriad weeds. The building itself was impressive and impersonal, like a finely crafted cement statue. A steel façade jutted out over the front entrance, and a stone tile courtyard extended some fifty feet out from the building’s side. There were benches and wooden tables, probably for employees to spend lunch breaks in the spring and summer and fall, but the courtyard must have turned into an ice trap in winter. Unless you were a glass half full type, in which case it could have made for a decent skate rink.
A lackluster metal sign greeted them at the parking lot entrance. It read, Welcome to Saltzman and Meyer Biotech, Inc., Glensberg Branch.
“You’re kidding,” Frank said. “Saltzman and Meyer Biotech?”
Nelsen gulped. His hands had acquired the jitters. With a tinge of fear in his voice, he asked, “What about it?”
“This place is called S and M Biotech? Hell, take away a couple vowels in ‘Biotech’ and you end up with S and M Bitch.”
Nelsen, forehead drenched in sweat, squeaked out a nervous laugh. “Three years I worked here, and not once did I see that. Where’s your head at?”
“Daddy, what’s S and M?”
“Tell you what, pumpkin. Ask me again in…” Frank chortled and then counted up on his fingers. “Never.”
Once they got out of the car, Frank steeled himself. The parking attendant was nowhere to be found and the parking lot was empty, but Frank wasn’t foolish enough to let his guard down.
“We’ll head in through the side entrance,” Nelsen said. “Not as flashy as the front, but more practical for our purposes.”
Frank gave the side entrance a once over. Drab, white wall with slightly darker patches of caulk pasted here and there, like splotchy bruises on the building’s paint-layered cement skin. Definitely not as flashy as the front. He nudged the door’s push-bar. It was stuck. He shot an inquisitive glance Nelsen’s way—maybe the man was in possession of a key or something—but Nelsen, body trembling, shook his head and gestured with his palms for Frank to push it. Frank nodded, inhaled deeply, and shoved his body weight into the door like a human battering ram. The door swung in on its hinges.
“Not the best security,” Frank said matter-of-factly.
“Back when the power was still on, your stunt would have alerted the PD. Patrol car would have arrived in two minutes.”
Emmy cowered at the pit of darkness, as if the building were a monster and she was about to step into its cavernous maw. She hid behind Frank’s leg.
Frank had duct taped a flashlight to the barrel of his shotgun earlier this morning. Nelsen had taken note and followed suit. As he switched the light on and tested it a few times, Frank said, “You know the drill, right, squirt?”
She nodded. “Hold on to your pants and keep my mouth shut and tug if I see anything.”
“Good girl.” He patted her on the head. To Nelsen, he said, “You take point. I don’t know where we’re going.”
Breathing heavily, Nelsen assented.
They stepped into the darkness. It engulfed them, coated them in murk. The mustiness in the air was almost tangible, the blindness all-encompassing. Frank held his shotgun at the ready, eyes focused down the ring sight atop the barrel and neck on a swivel. The gun was an extension of himself; where his face turned, it turned.
Finger on the trigger and senses attuned to the blackness, he absorbed every stimulus: Emmy’s fingers wrapped around the crease of his pants, the musty scent of dust in the air, the cold steel in his palms, the outline of a man with a handgun in front of him, the delicate tip tap of their boots on glossy, linoleum flooring. The electrical impulses traversed his sensory nerves and converged in his brain, a no nonsense processing center able to discern each piece of data from the next and, at the same time, assemble the trees to analyze the forest.
Sight proved to be the limiting variable in the equation. The LED flashlight was a godsend, but that finite circle of illumination was not exactly designed to service whole rooms or hallways. Thus, Frank had to memorize what he saw and put all the pieces together like a puzzle. Door. Okay, check. Swivel left. Wall. Okay, check. Swivel down. Floor, and a bloody shirt. Okay, check—walk around the shirt.
Up ahead, an office door hung open. As they crept past it, a deep, lifeless groan penetrated the silence. Emmy’s grip on his leg tightened. Nelsen froze.
Frank turned right and shined his light into the office. A humanoid stood behind the desk. Part of its face looked like it had been burned off, but the skin was not charred; it was bubbly and splotchy and raw, perhaps a chemical burn as opposed to a heat burn. Dry blood caked its lips, or what was left of them, and a yellow-red gash ran misshapen down the length of its chest, like a puffed out scar, except the scar was one long sac of blood and pus.
Nelsen raised his weapon, but Frank pushed his wrist down. Shoot now, and alert every other creature in the building—assuming there were more. And Frank always assumed there were more. He carefully leaned forward and, before the curious zombie got any more curious, pulled the office door shut. Then he motioned for Nelsen to continue moving.
They turned right at a hallway intersection. A bulletin board on the wall was littered with postings and thumb tacks. One flier asked employees, Did you remember to wash your hands?
As they sliced through the dark, the place took a turn from friendly neighborhood biotech company to something out of a B-movie slaughterhouse—swatches of blood on the walls, a severed hand, and was that an eyeball? And then, as if Frank had hallucinated it, the next stretch of hallway was pristine. Immaculate. He was about to ask Nelsen what might have happened in that previous part of the hall, what had been going on in the lab adjacent, but he thought better of it.
“Here.” Nelsen led them into a small office. The plaque on the wall said Records. The office was a bit larger than a college dorm room but smaller than a luxury hotel suite—and nowhere near as luxurious. A tired, coffee stained carpet covered the floor, and there were two desks, each topped by a computer, against the walls perpendicular to the entrance. A massive shelf full of cabinets blocked the wall opposite the entrance. It spanned from floor to ceiling and wall to wall.
Nelsen shined a light on each cabinet drawer and read the labels. He moved from one to the next, then to the next, and again to the next.
“Emmy, stand outside by the door,” Frank said. He could read the lines of fear on her face as clearly as if she were a magazine, but he gritted his teeth and continued. “I want you to keep an eye out in case anything tries to sneak up on us.”
She did as she was told and positioned herself just outside the open doorway, flashlight in hand.
Nelsen glanced at one particular cabinet and did a double-take. It must have been the one he was looking for. He pulled it out and thumbed through a series of folders. He removed one particular folder and placed it on the desk.
Frank’s eyes shifted warily left and right, as though the walls themselves might attack him at any moment. “Would’ve figured you guys kept electronic records.”
“We did,” Nelsen said. The sheer trembling in his voice made him difficult to understand. “Backed up securely. But at the end of each week, a hard copy was printed out and stored here.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
Nelsen had begun hyperventilating. Sweat dripped from his matted hair onto the desk. “When the disease first popped up in South America, a Guatemalan lab isolated it and sent it to us.”
“Why would they do that?”
“We had a… a working relationship with them. They’d contracted things out to us in the past because we had resources they didn’t. We got a hold of isolates from three strains of the virus. EF-alpha, EF-beta, and EF-gamma.”
“Okay.”
“Alpha and gamma could be carried in humans, but didn’t cause symptoms of the disease—at least not in the short time frame we were able to study it. Beta. Beta was the bad bug. Beta’s the one responsible for… for everything.”
Frank’s face was stern, rigid. “Okay.”
“The CDC wanted a sample of Beta. They wanted two sets of samples. One unaltered, and one heat inactivated. And… Jesus, please. I have to know.”
Frank put a hand on Nelsen’s shoulder. It was not a friendly hand. “Heat inactivated?”
“Y-yeah. Using the autoclave. It’s a big, pressurized oven.”
“And?”
“I was working here at the time. I handled some of the samples. Jesus, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what we were dealing with. Nobody did at the time. I had no idea. I swear. I would have been more careful if I knew.”
“Get a hold of yourself.”
“I think… See, the autoclave is normally set for high temp, high pressure. But that day, I… Jolene, from down the hall. She changed the settings for some procedure of hers. She was working on something else. She lowered the temp and pressure settings. Normally, we didn’t change the settings, but she had to. For some procedure.” His whole body was vibrating now, particularly his head, like a few screws were loose in his neck. The man may as well have been standing in a meat freezer. “Jesus. I can’t remember if I changed the settings back before I autoclaved the Beta samples. I can’t remember. My wife was leaving me for some douchebag lawyer and my kid was in the hospital… Jesus, I can’t remember.”
“What would’ve happened if you didn’t change the settings?” Frank said. He grabbed Nelsen by the lapel. “What does that mean?”
“It means… If the settings were too low, the virus wouldn’t have been completely inactivated. Some of it… would have been live.”
Frank thrust a glance at the file. Nelsen scanned it. Frank did too.
January 24
…
Samples retrieved from -80°C storage:
E. Coli DH5α (special order) BY: KUDROW, JOLENE PHD
Guatemalan Encephalitic Fever subtype β BY: NELSEN, RICHARD PHD
Murine (cohort 7) blood samples BY NUNN, THOMAS MS
Samples placed in -80°C storage:
NONE
…
Autoclave usage log:
8:58 AM BY: PATEL, MOHAN PHD, PRESET 1
10:04 AM BY LEWIS, ANDREW MS, PRESET 1
12:15 PM BY REITER, JOHANN MD, PRESET 1
1:44 PM BY KUDROW, JOLENE PHD, (CUSTOM SETTING)
3:12 PM BY NELSEN, RICHARD PHD, (CUSTOM SETTING)
4:01 PM BY FEHLMAN, STEVEN PHD, PRESET 1
“Talk to me,” Frank said. The file went on but Nelsen had stopped reading.
Nelsen shook his head vigorously. “Jesus. It wasn’t my fault. The CDC. They screwed up. If they hadn’t screwed up, it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. It’s their fault. It’s their god damn fault.”
Frank went to close the door. Emmy’s eyes protested, but Frank clenched his jaw and shut it tight. “What do you mean the CDC screwed up?”
“The… the news. You watched the news, right? The CDC screwed up. The hole in the suit. You remember that, right?”
“The guy at the CDC who screwed up was handling your sample, wasn’t he.”
“It was his fault. He should have been more careful. He screwed up. If he hadn’t screwed up, none of this… none of it would have mattered.”
“Your ‘inactivated’ sample wasn’t, was it.”
“Look. I was under a lot of pressure. And it wasn’t my fault. If the CDC hadn’t screwed up…”
“Bad luck.” Frank rubbed his temple. “Two unfortunate screw ups.”
“Jesus. They’re the god damn CDC. We’re just some small lab in the middle of… where’d you call it? Bumfuck, USA? That’s on them. That’s on them and only them.”
“They didn’t trace it back to you?”
“They would have. If they had more time. But it spread so quickly… And look, it was already in South America. It was already out there. It’s not like I… We… It’s not like we started it.”
“How many, if you had to guess?” Frank laughed. There was no humor in it. “One billion? Two billion? Three, four, five?”
“I swear. I didn’t mean to. I had kids. A life. You think I wanted this?”
“Two unlucky accidents.” Frank snorted. “And then you and I happen to meet. What are the odds, right?”
“Yeah,” Nelsen said. A spat of deranged laughter burst from his mouth, but he quickly checked it. “What are the odds? Jesus.”
***
Emmy sat down cross-legged on the floor outside the office. She had a flashlight, but it didn’t help much. Like one little chocolate chip of light in a big cookie of darkness. She didn’t like the dark. She loathed it. She wanted to go back outside. Why were they here in the dark when it was sunny outside?
The floors were dusty. She tried to forget about the dark by pointing her flashlight at the floor and drawing snowflakes in the dust, but she couldn’t remember if snowflakes had five sides, like a star, or six. Dr. Nelsen once said snowflakes were smetrical, whatever that meant. She hadn’t seen snow in a long time. Well, Daddy said it’d only been a couple months, but she loved snow, and it seemed like a long time. But thinking of snow also brought back memories of Mommy. Daddy didn’t have a gun with him when Mommy changed. Emmy still remembered the bloody knife tossed carelessly in the garage. She remembered how, afterward, Daddy went out in the blizzard with a shovel and dug a big hole in the ground. Emmy wanted to help, but he wouldn’t let her. He didn’t cry that day, so she had to cry twice as much—for herself and for him.
There was a loud thud in the office, like a chair being slammed against a wall. Emmy jumped. Loud noises didn’t startle her much anymore, but between the dark and the noise, it was too much for her nerves to handle. Then there was a wet gurgling sound. A minute later, Daddy stepped out of the office, wiping a bloody knife with a piece of cloth. He put the knife back in its sheath, tossed the cloth into the office and shut the door behind him. Then he scooped up Emmy in his arms and held her close. She felt the thump-thump of his heartbeat in his chest. She wondered if he felt hers.
“Squirt,” he said, hugging her tight, “do you think your Daddy’s a bad person?”
She shook her head.
“Guess that makes one of us.” He smiled weakly. “I could rationalize it. Tell myself I did him a favor. I mean, how could anybody stay sane after learning something like that, right?”
Emmy shrugged.
“But the truth is, it felt good. Even if it doesn’t change a thing. Maybe Mommy can sleep now.”
He kissed her forehead and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “When you grow up, don’t be like Daddy, pumpkin. You be a good person.”
Emmy nodded and rested her head on his shoulder as he walked toward the exit. His shoulder was comfy. In one arm, he carried her; in the other, a shotgun. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she smiled. She was happy because she knew that, whatever it was, he wasn’t lying.