The Senator’s eyes were closed, her body limp. She felt like a corpse. Voorhees checked her pulse: none.
“Oh my God.”
Then she woke up.
She lunged at Voorhees’ arm, snapping her teeth, and he stumbled back and fell on his ass and scrambled for either his radio or his baton, he wasn’t sure, while the Senator got to her feet and stared out at the crowd with dead eyes.
Murmurs turned to screams.
Manning ran at Blake, who dropped his radio and swung out with his baton, cracking her over the head. She stumbled, but continued headlong into him, and they both collapsed in a tangle of thrashing limbs.
“VOORHEES!” Blake screamed. The other cop looked up, just as he drew his baton… and he saw Manning tear a thick strip of meat from Blake’s left forearm.
The amphitheater was in chaos. People threw one another down toward the stage as they fled. Killian and Halstead ran out from backstage and saw Blake running from Manning, blood spurting from his arm.
Tackling Manning, Voorhees drove her face first into the stage. He slammed the baton into the nape of her neck. Why in the fuck didn’t he have his widowmaker? She struggled beneath him with shocking strength, trying to claw his legs and bite his wrists. He brought the baton down on her over and over. He heard her skull give and felt his weapon sink into gray matter. Still she fought, and hissed, and then she threw him off of her back and off of the stage.
Manning rose with wild, feral eyes — Killian smashed her mouth with her baton. Manning caught it in her claws and wrenched it away from the cop. Halstead shoved Killian aside and met the Senator’s broken, gnashing jaws with her own baton. Black blood gushed forth.
Killian recovered her baton from the stage as Voorhees climbed back up. Most of the audience was gone, save for those frozen with terror.
Manning had been a lovely woman, poised and painted and always ready to be presented to her constituents. Now she was a gruesome parody of her former self, racing across the stage like an animal and flying back as she was hit again, and again, and again.
Blake was howling. Manning saw him lying prone at the end of the stage and charged. Voorhees clipped her knee with his baton and she went sprawling. Halstead and Killian fell upon her, smashing her head into a lumpy pulp, sending bits of bone flying and blood spewing from what remained of her face.
Her arms and fingers kept twitching. She was still undead. But she’d been immobilized.
Other P.Os swarmed onto the stage, and Casey came rolling down the center aisle, barking into his radio.
All was madness. Voorhees peeled off his overcoat and shook the gore from it. Blake screamed in agony, seeing Manning’s quivering corpse and knowing what he was to become. Emergency services arrived, and the techs recoiled from Blake when they saw his gaping wound.
“Oh God,” he wept, grabbing at Voorhees’ leg, “I’m dead… Voorhees, I’m dead.”
The techs finally got up the nerve to approach the man and set down their equipment, wrapping gauze around his arm while they took his vitals. Blake just rocked back and forth, shaking his head. “Dead. Dead. Deadeadead.”
The he saw the scalpel, wrapped in plastic, in the tech’s treatment kit.
You can never know until it happens to you. How you would react, what thoughts would race through your mind… and what dark, primal instincts might take hold. Blake saw the scalpel. There was no further thought. He snatched it and pushed the blade through the plastic into his carotid and he dragged the blade through his windpipe with a gurgling scream.
Voorhees watched numbly, his baton slipping from his hand.
Killian shrieked and tried to grab the scalpel, but she was far too late.
Halstead turned away with a shivering grimace, a look that said she had seen it a dozen times before and knew she would see it again.
Casey simply set down his radio and sighed.
Blake hit the stage, and one of the techs stifled the arterial spray with a rag and everyone sat in silence as a man became a memory.
Seventeen / Autopsy
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Killian said, pale-faced, as she stood with the others in a hospital corridor.
A door marked MORGUE opened, and Casey stuck his head out. “Voorhees?”
“Why me?” Voorhees asked as he followed Casey through the door.
“Because you saw her better than anybody else.” Except Blake went unsaid.
Manning’s headless body was strapped to a table in a brightly-lit room. A thin man with a crooked smile stood over her, pulling on latex gloves. “I’m Doctor Zane,” the man said. “Please direct any questions you may have to me, and I’ll ask the deceased.”
Voorhees let that one go without comment and stood silent while the doctor cut away the twitching subject’s garments. Laying them open, Zane began prodding Manning’s flesh with his fingertips, looking for the bite.
“Can you tell us how long she’d been infected?” Casey asked. Zane shook his head. “Infection period always varies. Still don’t know why. You know what they say, though, about spiritual constitution. ‘The flesh is willing if the spirit is weak.’”
“Do you really believe that?” Voorhees asked.
“It’d make perfect sense,” Zane replied, “if I believed in the spirit to begin with. But since I don’t, no. That’s a load of crap.”
One at a time, he loosened the restraints of Manning’s limbs and lifted them for examination. “The real question is, if she’d been infected for long, why hadn’t she told anyone?”
“Simple. She didn’t want to be sealed away in quarantine to die.”
“Dead is dead,” Zane muttered. “I don’t understand people.”
“She wanted to settle her affairs,” Casey suggested. “Or maybe she was just hoping she wouldn’t turn. The infected aren’t known for their rationality.”
“Well I’ll be.” Zane lifted Manning’s hips slightly and called the P.Os over to his side of the table.
“Fresh puncture to the left lower back,” he M.E. said. “And look at this…”
He produced a pair of tweezers and carefully removed something from the small wound. “Looks like a bone fragment.”
“There were bone fragments all over the place out there,” Casey said.
“But that wound was small, and covered,” said Voorhees. “How did bone get in there?”
“It was lodged in the meat,” Zane said. “My guess is, it’s part of whatever made that wound.”
The room started to spin. Voorhees slammed his hands down on the autopsy table. “Wait.”
He stepped back, taking in the sight of Manning’s nude, twitching body. Then he said, “This was a murder.”
Casey gaped at him. “How?”
Voorhees pointed to the tweezers in Zane’s grip. “That bone is infected. It’s from a rotter.”
“She was stabbed with infected bone?” Casey cried.
“Not bad,” Zane whistled.
“You can’t be serious,” protested Casey. “How would the killer have known that Manning would turn on stage?”
“Maybe that wasn’t the plan,” said Voorhees, “or at least it wasn’t necessary that she turn right there at the amphitheater. She could have turned anytime… at a Senate meeting, for example.”
“Manning was assassinated,” Casey breathed.
“And we were forced to destroy her,” Voorhees said grimly.
“Hey, don’t do that to yourself.” Zane patted Manning’s clutching hand. “Remember — they’re not us. Homo inferis, gentlemen. No longer human.”
He dropped the bone fragment into a bottle. “I’ll test this for infection to confirm your theory. Good luck finding the sicko who did this.”