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Tracy stared back at him with wet, terror-filled eyes.

Louie chuckled uncomfortably. “Sorry about your nose and teeth. He gets carried away sometimes.”

“Wha… wha iv he doee now?”

Louie stared at her swollen lips uncomprehendingly for a moment until he caught on. “What is he doing now? I imagine he’s going through the building, finding supplies for us to take. We have to get as far away from the city as possible.” He leaned forward and whispered. “I think something really bad is spreading out from there. If you were smart, you’d leave whoever’s left here and join us.”

Roy covered the next man’s face with a pillow and pressed down. He watched the simpleton’s legs thrash, and listened to the pathetic muffled moans until he thrashed no more. He found a woman in the next room. She was old, and she asked him if he was there to feed her. Roy hammered her in the chest with both fists and crushed her ribcage.

He started up for the third floor, unzipping his fly and letting his penis out to breathe. It wasn’t like this back in the mall. It feels so good standing over them… doing it with my bare hands. He massaged his aching balls with one hand and dragged himself along the banister with the other. I’m going to jerk off on the next one. Let all this stress go.

Roy entered the first room on his right and found a fat woman propped up in a chair facing the window. He walked up to her. “I’m going to hurt you, and you’re going to make me feel good.” He kicked at her thick calf. “I’m fucking talking to you. Look at me!”

The room was dark. The window was covered with the same dark slime as he’d seen below. Roy bent over and studied the woman’s bloated face. He was too late—the bitch was already dead. Lines of black were running from both of her nostrils and from the corners of her mouth. They disappeared into the folds of her neck. Roy reached forward to touch one of the thin strips with his finger, thinking it was blood. His hand shot back when another line appeared from her ear and crept across her cheek. It burrowed into the woman’s right eye.

Roy stood away from the corpse. She had been obese in life, and the transformation her body was undergoing now was making her even larger. It was like watching a human balloon being filled before his eyes. He tried rationalizing it; bodies swell up after death—and he’d seen plenty of dead bodies in the last few days to know—fluids and gases collect. Not like that, they don’t. Not that fast.

Roy reached down and tucked his now flaccid penis into his pants. The urge to murder had passed. One of the woman’s cheeks started to bubble. The white skin turned a bruised purple and popped open. Black liquid sprayed out and splattered across the far wall ten feet away. The gooey deposit started spreading out in every direction, like a crack in a sheet of glass, blossoming and growing.

The dead woman’s body made a farting sound in the chair and a flood of black gushed out from between her legs, dropping to the floor in clumps and streams. It collected in a puddle and started moving towards him.

Roy had seen enough. Green Forest Haven had lost all of its appeal.

Louie looked up at the staircase. He could hear Roy’s thunderous feet thumping down the steps. “Sounds like he’s done up there. Are you sure you’re going to stay here?”

Tracy nodded. She wasn’t going anywhere with the two mad men.

Roy started screaming at Louie from the second floor. “We gotta get the fuck out of here! There’s black shit coming out of people! It’s coming after me!”

His rambling would’ve made no sense to Tracy Klausburg, or almost any other person left on the planet, but Louie Finkbiner knew full well what he was screaming about. A hot fist punched into his chest, causing his heart to hammer. The fear spread down into his gut and up into his throat. He pushed the chair Tracy was in against a filing cabinet with enough force to snap her head back, and fled around the desk. Roy was only a few steps behind him when he reached the front doors.

This was impossible, Louie thought as they ran down the steps and into the parking lot. They’re microscopic, they can’t move that fast. We’ve kept ahead of them. How did the swarm get this far out of the city?

He found the answers to his questions lying in a ditch less than a hundred yards up the road.

“Jesus Christ,” Roy panted. “Is that a deer?”

“It was,” Louie whispered back.

There was nothing left of the animal’s back end. It clawed away at the grass in front of it, trying to stand, unaware its back legs were gone. It slipped and collapsed in a puddle of its own blood and entrails. The blood was black, and it was moving.

“The fucking things can take over anything,” Louie said. “I thought it was just people… but they can take animals, too.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“LDV3! Ticks! Goddamned microscopic wood ticks! It’s what they were working on back in the disease center.”

A woman started screaming from the building behind them. Roy looked towards the entrance. “The nurse I punched.”

“She’s dead, or she will be soon.”

The fat dead corpse from the third floor lurched out onto the steps. Moments later the old lady Roy had murdered with his hammering fists followed. The upper part of her body was hanging forward, flopping from side to side, with only skin and a bit of spine left to support it.

“I killed her,” Roy whimpered. “I fucking smashed her chest in. She can’t be alive… she just can’t be.”

“She isn’t.” The comatose man stumbled out after them. His face was black from the throttling Roy had given him, but he was back on his feet nevertheless. “None of them are alive anymore. Only the things inside are keeping them going now.”

“Don’t you have some kind of spray to use? Didn’t your scientist buddies develop a repellent for the little fuckers?”

The question was so ridiculous it actually made sense. The DSC would have undoubtedly been working on a way to kill the spread of something so vile. If they were weaponizing the swarm, surely they would have developed a counteragent—or as Roy had put it, a spray—to neutralize them with. HR was right. I would’ve made a shitty disease research scientist.

The puddle of black fluid from the deer was headed for them. The dead residents of Green Forest Haven were headed for them. Louie ran out into an open field, and Roy followed. “We have to keep out of the forests,” he gasped. “These things can travel faster than us now. Open ground… we have to stay in the open so we can see them coming.”

Roy had caught up to him. “Monsters. You and all the assholes you worked with. No better than the fuckers that dropped the bombs.”

Louie wanted to point out that Roy had a monstrous streak of his own, but there wasn’t time to argue. They had to keep ahead of the swarm, and that was going to be a difficult thing to do.

Tracy hid in the small space under the desk and waited. She had dove under there when the remains of Mrs. Brown rolled down the stairs from the second floor. The woman had always been large, but the thing she had become was a tank—a bloated, purple mass of dripping flesh. Mr. Combes, the comatose resident in room 207, had also put on an extraordinary amount of weight. He hadn’t moved from his bed in three years. Tracy watched from around the desk leg as Maureen Whitaker descended the steps behind Mr. Combes. The ancient spinster was Green Forest’s oldest resident. She had been a kind old woman, and she had been in her room on the second floor for at least a decade.

None of them were alive anymore, but there they were, lurching and jerking and stumbling for the front doors. They left a trail of blood and black goo. Tracy turned in the tight space and saw their bloated ankles and feet. They left the building.

Tracy started to cry. She was alone. All alone now.

Through the tears she saw a line of black creeping over the back of her hand. It travelled to her thumb and entered under the nail. Tracy jumped back and hit her aching head on the underside of the desk. It felt as if someone was jabbing spikes under all of her finger nails. The agony spread into her hand and intensified up her arm.

Twelve seconds later the swarm found her heart and put Tracy out of her misery.