“Always remember that Nature can be cruel, little girl,” said Grandpa. “Sometimes it’s what looks most harmless that hurts you the most. You want to go back?”
“No,” I said, and I meant it. We spent the next three hours in our little boat, watching the gators as they slowly returned, and being eaten alive by mosquitoes. I have never been that content with the world before or since.
I’m so glad my grandparents died when they did.
The slice of campus I can see through the window is perfectly still, deserted and at peace. The few bodies in view have been still for the entire time that I’ve been watching. I don’t trust their stillness; alligators, all. Corpses aside, I’ve never seen the quad so clean. The wind has had time to whisk away the debris, and even the birds are gone. They don’t seem to get sick the way that mammals do, but without the student body dropping easy-to-scavenge meals, there’s nothing for them here. I miss the birds. I miss the rest of the student body more-although we could find them if we tried. It wouldn’t be that hard. All we need to do is go outside, and wait for them to follow the scent of blood.
A loudspeaker crackles to life on the far side of the quad. “This is Professor Mason,” it announces. “We have lost contact with the library. Repeat, we have lost contact with the library. Do not attempt to gather supplies from that area until we have reestablished communications. We have established contact with Durant Hall-” The list continues seemingly without end, giving status updates for all the groups we’re in contact with, either on or off the campus. I try to make myself listen and, when that doesn’t work, begin trying to make myself feel anything beyond a vague irritation over possibly losing the library. They have the best vending machines.
The broadcast ends, and the speaker crackles again, marking time, before a nervous voice says, “This is Susan Wright from the Drama Department. I’ll be working the campus radio for the next hour. Please call in if you have anything to report. And, um, go Bears.” This feeble attempt at normalcy concluded, her voice clicks out, replaced by a Death Cab for Cutie song. The sound confuses the dead. It isn’t enough to save you if they’ve already caught your scent, but if the radio went offline we wouldn’t be able to move around at all. I doubt we’d last long after that. A prey species that can’t run is destined to become extinct.
Footsteps behind me. I turn. Andrei-big, brave Andrei, who broke the chain on the Life Science Hall door when we needed a place to run-stands in the doorway, face pale, the shaking in his hands almost imperceptible. “I think Eva’s worse,” he says, and I follow him away from the window, out of the well-lit classroom, and back into the darkness of the halls.
A school the size of ours never really shuts down, although there are times when it edges toward dormant. The summer semester is always sparsely attended when compared to fall or spring, cutting the population down to less than half. I’d been enjoying the quiet. The professor I was working for was nice enough and he didn’t ask me to do much, leaving my time free for hikes in the local hills and live observation of the native rattlesnakes. They have a hot, dry reptile smell, nothing like the swampy green smell that rises from an alligator’s skin. Such polite snakes, warning you before they strike. Rattlesnakes are a lot like people, although that’s probably not a comparison that most people would appreciate.
Monday, some aspiring comedian did a mock news report on the school radio station. “This just in: Romero was right! The dead walk! Signs of life even spotted in the Math Department!”
Tuesday, half my mailing lists were going off-topic to talk about strange events, disappearances, attacks. Some people suggested that it was zombies. Everybody laughed.
Wednesday, the laughter stopped.
Thursday, the zombies came.
Some people fought, some people ran, and some people hid. On Saturday, there were twenty-six of us here in the Life Science building, half of us grad students who’d been checking on our projects when chaos broke out on the campus. By Monday, that number had been more than cut in half. We were down to nine, and if Eva was worse, we might be looking at eight before much longer. That’s bad. That’s very bad. Because out of all of us, Eva is the one who has a clue.
Andrei leads me down the hall, through the atrium where the reconstructed Tyrannosaurus Rex stands skeletal judgment over us all, and into the lecture hall that we’ve converted, temporarily, into a sickroom. Eva is inside, reclining on the couch we brought down from the indefensible teacher’s lounge. She has her laptop open on her knees, typing with a ferocious intensity that frightens me. How long does it take to transcribe a lifetime? Is it longer than she has?
In the lecture hall, the smell of the Everglades hangs over everything, hot and ancient and green. The smell of sickness, burning its way through human flesh, eating as it goes. Eva hears our footsteps and lifts her head, eyes chips of burning ice against the sickroom pallor of her complexion. Acne stands out at her temples and on her chin, reminders that she’s barely out of her teens, the youngest of us left here in the hall. Her hair is the color of dried corn husks, and that’s what she looks like-a girl somehow woven out of corn husks that have been drenched with that hot swampy smell. She barely looks like Eva at all.
“It’s viral.” That’s the first thing she says in her reedy little voice, the words delivered with matter-of-fact calm. “Danny’s team over at the med school managed to isolate a sample and get some pictures. It looks sort of like Ebola, and sort of like the end of the fucking world. They’re online now.” She smiles, the heartbreaking smile of a corn husk angel. “They’ve been trying all the common antivirals. Nothing’s making any difference in the progression of the infection.”
“Hello to you, too, Eva,” I say. A duct tape circle on the floor around the couch marks the edge of the “safe” area; any closer puts us at risk of infection. I walk to the circle’s edge and stop, uncertain what else to say. I settle for, “Professor Mason just gave an update. We’ve lost contact with the library.”
“That isn’t a surprise,” says Eva. “They had Jorge over there.”
“So?” asks Andrei.
“He updated his Facebook status about three hours ago to say that he’d been bitten, but they washed the wound out with bleach. Bleach won’t save you from Ebola, so it’s definitely not going to save you from Ebola’s bitchy big sister.” She coughs into her hand before saying, almost cheerfully, “Good news for you: the structure of the virus means it’s not droplet-based. So you don’t need to worry about sharing my air. Bad news for me: if Jorge took three hours to turn after being bitten, I’d say I have another hour-maybe two-before I go.”
“Don’t say that.” There’s no strength in Andrei’s command. He lost that when Eva got the blood in her eyes, when it became clear that she was going to get sick. She was the one who told him we needed to run. Losing her is proof that all of this is really happening.
Eva continues like she doesn’t hear him: “I’ve been collecting everyone’s data and reposting it. The campus network is still holding. That’s the advantage to everything happening as fast as it has. Professor Mason has a pretty decent file sharing hub in place. If you can keep trading data, keep track of where the biters are, you can probably maintain control of the campus until help arrives.” Matter-of-factly, she adds, “You’ll have to shoot me soon.”
Andrei is still arguing with her when I turn and leave the room. The smell of the swamp travels with me, hot decay and predators in hiding.