CHAPTER 2
That’d been two days ago.
Two days of an Uber-Dantean Hell where everyone was a demon and everyone was damned. Buckley had run and killed- his flight or fight instinct working simultaneously within his spinning mind. Everyone he’d known, everyone he’d yet to meet, was a threat.
He tried not to kill. He really tried. Deep down, smothered in swathes of terror, Buckley’s humanity struggled with the necessities of his murders. Like the twenty-three year old private he’d once been in Lebanon, however, he understood as no suburban protestor ever could, that absolutely, positively, without a fucking doubt, everyone was a threat.
Everyone.
Like the shopkeeper who sold him his daily pack of menthols he’d found price-tagging the bodies of dead customers and placing them beside warm beer and hot dog relish.
Or the cat lady who lived next door, who he’d found feeding on a particularly large calico from her once prodigious collection of fifty-seven felines.
Or the crossing guard who was embattled with a herd of school children in an abattoir of pigtails, gnashing teeth, and freckled screams between two thin yellow lines that had once meant safety.
Buckley had known and loved them all. He was a Christian and had tried to live his life by the complicated precepts of a sometimes-confused God. He did not covet his neighbor’s wife, he did not lie, neither did he cheat or steal. Even when it hurt, Buckley had been known to turn the other cheek.
Now, however, as when he’d been in Lebanon just before the Barrack's Bombing that killed 299 Marines, Buckley understood that turning the other cheek was akin to allowing a bright-eyed, young Arab boy with an AK and no sense in the world to take pot shots at his convoy when they went out on their thrice weekly trip to the coast. And like the neighborhood paperboy who’d chased him for six blocks on a bicycle, the cards in the spokes a continuous clackity-clack warning of what could be, Buckley had tried to avoid the killing.
But just like in Lebanon, killing became necessary and Buckley had tired before the child. With resignation he’d spun, aimed and fired. When the empty bike tumbled past, he felt defeat in his victory. Buckley would have cried if he could, but he was too dried up inside.
The religious called it The Day of Doom. The environmentalists called it the inevitable effect of sunspots on the hole in the ozone layer created by greedy industrialists who’d never listened to their warnings. The conspiracy theorists called it a military experiment gone awry. The liberals called it a purposeful assault on humanity by the conservatives as if a roomful of right-wing extremists had cooked up the entire event after a round of eighteen holes at a whites-only golf club, followed by drive-by lynchings of the losing player’s caddies. The conservatives called it an attempt by California tree-huggers to hijack the news with tales to scare children at bedtime. Even the Trekkies were heard spouting “I come in peace” crap about terraforming or terracotta or whatever. When the Governor of North Carolina, presidential hopeful and the anointed savior of the Democratic Party, was eaten alive on national TV, people stopped caring who was responsible.
It was a fucking disaster, pure and simple.
And in the top floor of the Franklin Hotel where Buckley had managed to find brick and mortar safe harbor, he wallowed in the dregs of charcoal filtered salvation watching it all. As a citizen of Wilmington, he was a veteran of seven hurricanes, an earthquake and two tornadoes. He couldn’t help but wonder how FEMA would classify this. It wasn't as if no one believed, just that the event was too much. Maggies were one thing, but a sentient herd was another.
CHAPTER 3
"Close the fucking door!" Buckley shouted, rushing across the room.
Lashawna ignored him and pulled the door wide enough so that everyone got a view of Sally Struthers, her hair matted with blood, her face pock-marked by maggot holes and her skin undulating as the tiny beasts tasted the air.
"Open up and let me in or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow the house in." Sally coughed, then gagged as a hundred maggies erupted from her throat and showered Lashawna in the face.
Both women screamed.
Buckley hit the door with his shoulder, slamming it shut. Lashawna screamed again as she raised her hands to bat the maggies from her face. But she hadn't the time. Buckley shoved the barrel of the shotgun into the girl's chest and pulled the trigger. Her eyes flew wide as her chest plastered the door behind her. She fell to the floor, a look of surprise still on her face. Buckley began to stomp on the maggies that had fallen to the ground. He had to get every one of them. To miss even one meant their deaths.
"What the fuck! What the fuck did you kill her for," Samuel screamed. "She was my girl, you son of a bitch. I'm gonna-"
“Do nothing,” Buckley said slapping the barrel of the shotgun across the boy's nose, knocking him to the floor. "Sissy, give me a hand. We need salt. A full bucket."
Sissy stared at the body of Lashawna, who’d been until just now, a vibrant dark-skinned girl whose only fault seemed to be a constant need to defy authority. The two of them had been friends, if only for a short while. Sissy had enjoyed the presence of someone her age. Lashawna's intelligence, masked by her inner-city facade, had shone and the girls spent most of their time talking.
"Sissy! Get the Goddamned salt. She's infected." Samuel pulled himself along the floor to Lashawna, but was sent reeling back by a shove of Buckley’s boot. "Are you deaf? Do you have a fucking death wish? She's infected."
Buckley had his back to the door to not only hold it shut, but to keep the others from making the same mistake Lashawna had made. If he went to get the salt, one of the others would open it for sure and then all their planning and defenses would be for not.
"Open up and let me in," cackled Sally in a man's voice from the hallway, "or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow the house in."
"Not by the hair on our chinny chin chins," Grandma Riggs cried from her wheelchair in the center of the living room.
Sally Struthers started to scream, as if a small part of her mind remembered that she was human and realized the irrevocable damage that had been done to her body.
"Will somebody get me a fucking bucket of salt!"
"Here you go, Mr. Adamski," came a small, knee-high voice.
It was Little Rashad. Through the boy’s tears, Buckley saw fierce determination. As brave as the boy was trying to be, each of Sally's screams from the hall outside produced a flinch in the kid’s small thin frame.
Buckley grabbed the bucket and poured half of the contents on Lashawna’s face and the other half along her body. No more than five seconds passed before a tiny plume of smoke escaped from her nose.
“See? I fucking told you. Now, no more messing around. One more mistake like that could mean all of our deaths." It’d been too close.
"Fuck this. This shit is gonna stop," murmured Samuel, reacting to the helpless stares of his companions. The screaming from the other side of the stout wooden door had gone on for far too long and was making everyone a little weak in the knees. "Those things killed my girl, so I'm gonna kill them."
"I got yer back," a slim Italian kid added, gesturing aggressively with a set of matching pistols he jerked from the waist band of his nylon pants.
“You know what? I don’t care,” Buckley said. “You two wanna die, go ahead."
Bennie, until recently an upwardly-mobile crack salesman, gave in to the instincts that had kept him out of jail and invisible during a dozen drive-bys. He sagged against the wall, his courage smothered by Buckley’s logic. He was dead, but not yet. There seemed to be no consoling Samuel, however. Unless he was given something to keep him busy, he’d end up joining his dead girlfriend.