Just a little.
I’m just looking for a little room. A little room to move. Someplace I can use to make more time. Looking for a little crack to edge through and slip away. One more time. If I can get away one more time I might have a chance. Even if it’s a chance I don’t deserve, I want it anyway.
The door moves, a tiny bit of give, and I take it. Jerk the fucker back and forth, pushing myself up out of the cover of the dead, bodies tumbling off me as I rise for leverage, grabbing the edge of the door as it clears the jamb. Pull, push, pull.
– Fooker, ya are!
I know who it is, so I don’t waste time looking.
I just pull harder, pull and jam myself into the gap I’ve opened, skinning my face trying to push through.
– Ya backstabber, ya are!
He hasn’t shot me. Either for lack of bullets or because he wants his hands on me.
Someone on the other side shoves the door, pushing it an inch farther open against the bodies, I heave myself, the slightly jutting ends of those two broken ribs snagged by the edge of the door, cracking, and I don’t care because I’m through and the monsters are back there and I’ve got a step on Hurley and I just need to get my feet under me and start up the stairs and all I need to do is run.
And I’m on my feet.
And I remember someone just got me through the door.
And I look up and see one of the starving infecteds of Cure. One of the howlers trapped behind the doors along the stairwell. One of the Vyrus-mad Vampyres Amanda released and set on the enforcers when they breached the building.
An explanation of how they were driven down here.
I’m trying to bring the amputation blade up, get it in the starved fucker’s eye, hoping it will cut something in the brain that will instantly sever communications with the body before it can start ripping me limb from limb, but it’s all happening too fast. Man or woman, I can’t tell what it is, how it was born. Mommy’s little boy, daddy’s little girl. Perfect angel or shitty little brat. The years between. Bum or banker. Loved or hated. Ruthless feeder and killer, or helpless infected who lived off Coalition dole. Whatever humanity is worth, this thing is far beyond it. It is hunger and the pain of being hungry, and anything that can’t give relief is either a hated foe or invisible, depending on whether it gets in its way. Maddened not by any hunger for my infected blood, but purely by the sight of something that moves and sounds like prey, it’s on top of me, feet in my stomach, hunched, hands on my neck, howling at the scent of my undrinkable blood.
And I go limp. Arms at my sides, blade cradled in my good hand.
It crushes my throat, I feel cartilage crack. Its toes dig into my belly, like the claws of the Vyrus. Shriveled, sexless face in mine, sniffing, sniffing. The stink out of its mouth making me gag, but there’s nothing to come up, and nowhere for it to go while I’m being choked to death. Speckles at the edge of my vision, spreading. Blackening. My hand opens and closes on the taped hilt of the blade, wanting to stab of its own will.
That darkness irising down the scope of my vision, swallowing the stairwell from the outside in, is there something in it? Something moving in the dark.
Is there something cold coming for me?
God I hope not.
It lets go of my neck and climbs off me. My windpipe uncrinkles a bit, but there’s a definite rasp in my breath. Darkness recedes.
The starving infected paws at the bodies of dead enforcers. Jumps up and down on one. Looks at me. I don’t move.
I can smell something. I can smell it. Its smell clinging to me. But no, that’s wrong. It’s me I smell. My own dying. Not as potent, but it’s only a matter of time. The smell that comes out of its gullet is in my own now. Rotting inside.
To emphasize the point, the Vyrus pours hot lead down the middle of my bones and sets me shaking. The starving jumps up and down higher, points at me, opens its mouth, and I’d swear it fucking laughs. Delighted to see someone else in pain.
Then the screams and gunfire beyond the door raise in volume as it is pushed open again and I’m no longer the center of attention.
– Joe, ya fooker!
I’m off the floor.
– Hurley, watch out.
Half through the door, struggling to pull it wide enough to fit his massive frame, the starving is on him. And Hurley, not close to starving himself, his smell is all wrong, and he puts up a fight. A sudden obstacle, the starving tries to kill him. I’m crawling up the stairs, watching, unable not to watch. Hurley’s arm reaching through the blur of the starving’s whirling limbs as it tries to rend him. Like a man reaching slow into a barrel of thrashing eels. Until Hurley has its neck, and squeezes, and slams the head against the door that still has him pinned between monsters. The head is dented, crushed, spilling down the door. Its arms and legs still windmill. Hurley jerks it back and forth, harder, harder, and the head comes off and he tosses the body aside and it flops and gets to its feet, runs into a wall, falls down, legs churning the air.
Through the blood congealed on his face and in his eyes, Hurley looks up at me, where I’m almost at the door at the top of the stairs.
– A word wit ya, Joe, when ya got a sec.
He looks back into the shit storm in the basement.
– Terry! Here an now, Terry boy!
The heat has run out of my bones and I’m out the door at the top and making for the main stairwell. More dead enforcers about. A second to spare, I pick up a gun. It feels useless in my hand, but I keep it anyway.
Bottom of the stairs, I look up.
Starvings on the stairs.
Misery trying to die.
Turning their heads to look at me as I come into view.
Down the hall is the front door. A short walk out of madness. More enforcers out there? Probably. Ordered to snatch anyone who comes out of the building? Probably. And so what. Them I might kill with a couple well-placed bullets. Here in the asylum, Hurley is the only safe bet to get out alive. And he’s trying to kill me.
– C’mon, Joe, tis just a little chat I’m looking fer! An Terry would like a word as well I tink!
I push the door closed. Look for something to block it with, but there are no trucks handy that I can park in front of it.
The starving closest to me on the stairs pulls itself onto the banister and scuttles down it a half flight closer.
I take a step toward the front of the building.
Hurley will be up here in a second. I should leave. No one can tell me I shouldn’t be gone from here and taking my shots on the street. Everything is dead here anyway.
Except Amanda. And Chubby’s daughter. And her baby.
Maybe.
I close my eye for one heartbeat. Picture Evie. Telling her I was too late. The kids were dead, them and their baby. I tried but I was too late. I really tried.
I open my eye.
My girl, I’ve lied to her too many times. She knows what it looks like when I pull that shit.
So I start slow up the stairs.
The time I died, I starved to death. Went one step further than these sad pieces of work. Went to the place the Enclave go. Differences. Enclave go there willfully, exercise some kind of discipline, do it in a warehouse of like-minded crazies. All of them holding one another’s hands as they go through it. When I went, I just went. Starved and beat, I tilted, heart stopped, air froze in my lungs, brain blacked. And the Vyrus brought me back. Like a built-in heart shock and a stab of adrenaline between the eyes. These, they’ve been dragged to this stage. Amanda feeding them what she could, until she realized she didn’t have enough to really keep them alive. Until they crossed over in her brain and became more valuable like this than like people. Until the idea of someone being better off dead didn’t make sense to her work.