Archive for the 'NaNoWriMo' Category
Another NaNo?
November 16
Yep, the time is here. November. And if you’ve known me the past two years, you know I usually write a novel this month. Well, between the baby and trying to find a job, it’s not gonna happen this time around.
I am writing. But it won’t be a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month. In fact, I just started writing it last night. Anyway, it’s up in the Novels area of the site. So, go read if you want and tell me what you think.
Thirty-five
February 1
Elijah watched Jones and the soldier walk off into the mist. His soldier, the one that was standing near him, watched them walk off, too. He seemed really nervous now that his fellow Marine, or whatever they were, wasn’t at his side. What the hell would a fully armed soldier have to fear?
Someone coughed and moaned on one of the cots behind Elijah. The moan sent a shiver down his spine; it was too eerily familiar. Oh yeah. THAT’s what he’s afraid of. Elijah shivered again. Jones and the soldier had disappeared in the hazy air. He sat and stared into the mist for a few seconds before his guard — was he really under guard? Just for a little bite? — turned and walked away toward the computer stations. Elijah watched him walk, too. Seemed he’d been doing a lot of that today.
The soldier didn’t do anything interesting. He put his foot up on a box and started chatting with another soldier who was sitting at the computer. They were talking quietly but Elijah was pretty sure they were talking about him since they kept glancing in his direction. The sitting soldier nodded several times and then got up and started rifling through a box behind him. Elijah’s soldier turned and started back towards him.
A scream and shots came from the hazy greyness in front of the tents. Another scream followed soon after. All of the soldiers were frozen for a moment, armed the next. Those near the — patients? prisoners? — cots stayed were they were, looking around both fearfully and confidently at the same time. Their eyes never left the people on the cots.
Some of the soldiers at the computers hurried over to the radio setup, the others seemed to be pecking out hurried emails. Elijah’s grunt took a few steps out into the growing fog and peered into the mist. Elijah stared after him, frozen to his cot. Nothing moved. He could just barely see the still-rotating, still-shining lights on the ambulance, but nothing else where Jones should have been. He wondered if they were going to let him drive through or make him go around.
Or had those gunshots been for him?
A cough, moan, and gurgle came from the cots behind Elijah. One of the soldiers sucked in his breath and held it. He could hear another cursing under his breath, searching for a pulse, apparently. Ten seconds passed, Elijah counting out Mississippis in his head. Twenty. Thirty. How long could you go without a pulse anyway? Fourty-five. A minute. The soldier cursed again, and Elijah heard a gun cock.
His soldier, he couldn’t help but think of him that way, reached a hand out and said, “Come on, man, don’t do that. He’s gone. Leave him alone.” Elijah’s eyes grew wider and he started shaking. He had been bitten. That was why they were keeping him here, wasn’t it? So that meant the other people had to have been bitten. So…what did it mean? The paramedic, the woman, had been bitten, too. She’d had her fucking throat ripped out, too, though. So was it the bite that had brought he back?
Elijah leapt to his feet. His soldier shouted “Hey!” at him, but he didn’t notice.
“I have to get out of here. He — ” He turned to look at the dead guy and saw what an awful color he had turned. His skin was GREEN with sickly yellow splotches, and two bright slashes of red blood on either side of his mouth. Elijah screamed, both from the pain of standing on his bitten leg and from fright. People were NOT supposed to be green!
“Sit down,” the soldier ordered, one hand on Elijah’s chest. Elijah stared at him, mouth open. The gun-happy soldier walked over and stood next to Elijah’s guard. “Now,” ordered his soldier. The other grunt raised his gun and pointed it at Elijah.
“You need to sit down,” he said, quietly and through his teeth. He raised his thumb to cock the gun, hopefully just for the threat. Another moan made his eyes dart to the side and Elijah looked, helplessly, too.
The recently deceased man had rolled his head to the side, staring at them. His tongue came out of his blood-speckled lips and licked them, smearing the red into obscene lip stick. He groaned again and rolled his shoulders over, moving to get up from the cot.
The gun in the soldiers hand started spitting fire inches away from Elijah’s head.
They could hear shouts coming from the thickening fog. Ruth hurried over to where Seth was kneeling on the ground next to the paramedic. Seth was sitting very silently on his heels, his head down. He had left the shotgun back at the ambulance. She wasn’t frightened, though, even though the gun, and especially an armed Seth, had come to mean protection and security in the last few hours. Seth looked on the verge of tears. She laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I think he’s dead,” Seth said quietly. “I — I don’t know why, but him dying really makes me sad. Like, more than anyone else so far.” He shrugged and his voice was harsh and filled with tears when he spoke again. “So far! Ha!” He hung his head down again and looked at Jones for a few seconds, then he started to get to his feet again. Ruth jumped up quicker and offered her hand for support. “He said they’ve blocked off the rest of the road. Some military blockade or something.”
Ruth hadn’t said anything yet, not sure if her voice would stand up to the stress of seeing her… protector… under such stress. “So how are we gonna get by?” Her voice surprised her. It wasn’t weak at all. “Do you think we could just go around?”
He looked at her for a second, the two of them still walking back toward the ambulance. “No. I don’t think we can.” She nodded, willing to accept almost anything that he decided today. It had worked well so far.
They reached the ambulance and Ruth went to check the soldier again after Seth asked her if he was alive or dead. His pulse was almost gone and his breathing seemed to have stopped. She nodded, then added in a whisper, “Just about.” Seth nodded back and picked up his shotgun from where it had been laying in the ambulance. He looked at the soldier one more time, shrugged, and turned toward where the shouting was coming from.
“Let’s go see what all the noise is.”
Ruth jumped up from the wet pavement and followed, her weapon forgotten.
Thirty-three
November 30
The cop car could have made good time down the still-wet streets. Ruth kept it around twenty miles per hour, though, not wanting to miss anything that they’d regret later on. She had pulled off her soccer jacket once they were going, claiming the car was hot. Seth had turned off the heater, but the car really was heating up inside. He had stripped off his jacket not long after she had shed hers. They were both in t-shirts, now. The relaxed feeling, the comfort of being warm, was working on both of them. They were all smiles now.
“Hey, I think I see something,” Ruth said, leaning forward and squinting through the windshield. She put on the brakes and stopped as quickly as she could. She wiped the windshield with her jacket that had been bunched up in her lap and squinted out again. “Yeah, I do. But what the hell is it?”
Seth looked, but he couldn’t make anything of it either. With how this day had gone, though, he doubted it was anything he wanted to see. He rolled down the window and stuck his head out, trying to get a better look with no glass in front of him. It had stopped raining and the wind had stopped blowing, but it was foggy now, anything over a quarter-mile away was a ghostly mix of white and grey. He squinted a bit more and could finally make out what it was.
“I see the end of an ambulance, I think. Yeah, I see lights flashing now.” He looked over at Ruth who looked back at him, her eyes wide. “Why would an ambulance just be sitting in the middle of the road?”
Ruth shook her head. “I don’t like it. I don’t know why it’s there, but I don’t like it. I think we should try and find another way to the hospital.” She looked back out the windshield and squinted some more. “What do you think?”
Seth nodded, still staring out the window. “Yeah, I agree. Defintely not a good sign.” Flashes in the fog, bright yellow against the white of everything else, were quickly followed with banging sounds. The couple looked at each other again and then looked back out the window. “We DEFINITELY need to find another way around,” Seth said.
Ruth giggled, but her face didn’t look carefree and happy. She pulled the gearshifter into reverse and the car back up a half-block to the nearest side street. She turned left onto it and crept down the road. She didn’t go far, less than halfway down the block, before she stopped the car again. “Do you think it was the ambulance that came to the library?”
Seth hadn’t thought about that. What if it was? Should they go help? Elijah was in there, and even though he had been a complete ass earlier, Seth didn’t want to think of him dead or… not. “Maybe we should.” What about the flashes and bangs, though? Those had to have been gunshots. And where there were gunshots…. Seth didn’t know what had to be there, but he didn’t want to be there himself. Still, they had guns themselves, they could fight back. He hoped.
Ruth nodded and said, “Yeah, maybe.” She put the car in reverse again and backed out of the sidestreet. The police cruiser was sticking across the oncoming lane of traffic, but there wasn’t any traffic so it wasn’t much of a worry. They both looked out Seth’s still-open window. They didn’t see any more flashes or hear any bangs, but they couldn’t see the ambulance either.
“Well, if we’re gonna go, let’s go,” Seth said. He tried to steel himself as much as he could, but butterflies were still flittering around in his stomach. The idea of running into anything that someone else would have needed to SHOOT just… just turned his stomach into a quivering mass. He patted the shotgun that was propped in the dash-mounted holster. He knew he was a shitty shot, but it was comforting to have it around. Ruth had tucked the pistol under her leg. Neither was anxious to have to use them, though.
“Alright, let’s go,” Ruth said, sighing first. A flick of the stick from R to D and the car started to creep down Grand again. A minute or two later, the back end of the ambulance came into view again. Seth could read the hospital name from the back, now. Eden Medical Center. That was the hospital that had sent the ambulance before. Or the one it had belonged to, at least. The lights were still on inside, and the lights on top were flashing silently, white and red. Seth didn’t see anyone around it or in the back.
Ruth pulled the cop car slowly up behind the ambulance, but stayed back a quarter-block or so. They both looked out of the car at both sides of the street and tried to see around the ambulance. Ruth spotted something first.
“Seth,” she grabbed his hand, “there’s something over there. Something big and black. I can’t see what it is, though. Maybe a tent? Why would there be a tent in the middle of Grand?” She was still wide-eyed. Seth had no idea, and said so. She pulled the gun out from under her thigh and double-checked that the safety was on.
“Well,” Seth said, “I guess we’d better see. You want to drive up or should we get out?” He hoped and prayed she’d answer the former.
“I know it sounds stupid,” she started, and he felt his hopes fall, “but I feel safer out of the car. I mean, this is just such a big target….” She trailed off into silence. He wasn’t sure what she meant or what made her feel that way, but he didn’t want to argue with her on it. They’d just stay close, the best of both worlds.
“If we get out, I want to stay close to the car, alright? So we can jump back in if we need to?” She nodded. He popped the latch that held the gun to the rack and gingerly picked it up and sat it in his lap. “OK,” he said, and opened his door.
Ruth climbed out of the other side, the gun in her hand held down to her side. She looked grim now that they were both out in the fog, armed. They slowly approached the back end of the ambulance, still not seeing or hearing anything. Seth reached a hand up and tried to open the back door. The handle turned slowly and surely and he pulled the door toward him. No one was in there and he didn’t see anything that looked out of place. Not that he would have known, anyway. He was about to turn around and tell Ruth, when something small and brown caught his eye. It was a wallet, laying on the floor by the side-long bench. He scrambled partway into the ambulance and picked it up off of the floor, laying his gun on the seat first.
A quick flip through the wallet showed that it belonged to Elijah Powell. It held his driver’s license and his taxi driver’s union membership card. There were a few green bills in the largest pocket but Seth wasn’t a thief. He put the wallet in the other back pocket in his pants. He picked up the shotgun and climbed out of the ambulance. Ruth was standing on the ground, trying to look every way at once.
“Well, this is the same ambulance,” he said. She looked at him questioningly. “I found Elijah’s wallet. Unless you think there are two Elijah Powells that drive taxi cabs in this city.” She half-smiled at him. He felt the same way. It was hard to find anything happy or satisfying the world right now.
She pointed around the left side of the ambulance. “I think I saw something over there, but I’m not sure.” He shrugged his shoulders in that direction and pointed with the tip of his shotgun. She took the hint and started around that corner.
The ambulance seemed miles long as they slowly crept up the side of it. He was starting to wish he had put his jacket back on. After just a few steps along the length of the vehicle, he saw a large lump laying on the ground. A few more steps revealed that it was a man-sized green lump. A few more and they could see that it was a soldier. What was a soldier doing here?
Ruth reached him first and she knealt down next to him. He had his pistol in the hand that wasn’t curled up beneath his body. He had almost collapsed in on himself, as if all of his muscles had given away. He laid on the ground, breathing shallowly. “I can feel a heartbeat,” she said, smiling at finding someone alive. “It’s really fast, though,” she added.
Seth didn’t answer. He was looking around, trying to see further through the fog. It seemed to be increasing, getting thicker, more numbing. He could make out a few orange lines beyond the end of the ambulance, and the black shape that Ruth had seen earlier was definitely a tent. He couldn’t see much else, though. Well, one other thing, he added to his mental list. Another lump was on the ground several yards away toward the other sidewalk. Ruth looked where his eyes were pointed and let out a small gasp.
They could see this lump a little more clearly than they had the soldier. It was a white lump, stark contrast to the black pavement of the road. White except for a couple of slowly spreading spots of red on his back. Seth jogged over to the body to find that it was indeed Jones. He was laying face-down on the pavement, still holding onto life, though. He had some sort of hypodermic needle in his hand, the knuckles white with how tightly he was holding on. His hair was wet, making it curl more than it had the first time Seth had seen him. He looked up at the sound of steps approaching.
Seth knealt down next to him and Jones looked up, smiling when he recognized the face. The smile didn’t last, though. It was quickly replaced by a red cough. After he was through, he looked up at Seth again and Seth leaned in. He felt sure the man wanted to tell him something.
“Sa — safe out here,” he let go of the plastic tube and pointed at the ground. “Safe. The — They’re sca — sca –” he coughed and tried again. “Scared.”
Seth had no idea who “they” were, but he could guess what they were scared of. He patted Jones on the shoulder and Jones coughed up some more blood. “Soldiers. Army. Kee — keeping a secret. Disease.”
Seth couldn’t believe his ears. “Soldiers? What secret are they keeping? The secret of the disease? What disease?”
Jones nodded, once, weakly. He closed his eyes and rested for a second, then whispered, “Their disease. The one that brings out the –” The end was drowned in blood-red coughing, but Seth knew what he meant. He didn’t think Jones would make it much longer.
“What about Eden?” Seth asked. “Can I get to the hospital?” Jones shook his head a couple of times. He was coughing more often now, not able to breath or speak easily.
“Ma — martial law. They have it all blocked off.” He coughed again and moaned loudly when he finally finished. “I — ” another fit of coughing interrupted. When it had passed, he started again. “I remembered the secret, though.” He smiled a small smile at Seth, then his head fell and smacked into the pavement. Seth knew it was useless, but he reached with his hand and felt the neck of paramedic. Nothing that he could feel. So many people had died today, but if Jones was right, there might be hundreds more. Thousands. God, how many would die from this disease, whatever it was?
Jones was dumbfounded. They knew. How could they know? They weren’t supposed to know, they were supposed to…. He didn’t know what they were supposed to do or be, but they weren’t supposed to be in charge of the situation or to know what was going on. It had just started! How could they KNOW ALREADY?
He swallowed and tried to breathe regularly. This was too much for him, though, he couldn’t process all of this. If they knew, they had to have been in on it, right? They can’t know otherwise. It had just happened an hour ago, maybe two. Jones swallowed again, still having trouble getting air down his sticky throat. He looked up at Elijah who looked as shocked as he was. The soldiers were somehow more proper and more relaxed at the same time. The one in the ambulance was standing as much as he could, the low ceiling made for hunched over postures, and was holding a hand out toward Elijah. “Come on, sir, I need you to exit the vehicle and come with us.” There was no question in that voice, no politeness that wasn’t strained with the weight of an order. Elijah was shocked out of their shared stare and looked over at the soldier.
“Y — yes, sir.” He tried to stand and winced when he put any weight on his leg. He scooted himself around on straight arms and his good leg until he was sitting on the floor at the back end of the ambulance. The soldier had gotten down onto the ground and was waiting next to his superior. “I’m not going to be able to walk,” Elijah said, blank honesty on his face. It looked like the same thoughts of military association were running through his head as through Jones’ Something was definitely wrong and they were caught in the middle of it. Jones moved toward the ambulance and the closest soldier put an arm across his chest.
“I’m just gonna get the crutches for him,” Jones said, more aggressively and whiney than he had wanted. He wasn’t sure how he could be aggressive and weak-sounding at the same time, but he had managed it. The soldier stared at him for a few moments longer, then moved his arm. Jones grunted quietly and moved toward the ambulance. The crutches were stored in a rectangular steel box under the seat that Elijah had been standing on. For the brief moment that he was standing there, pulling out the metal braces, Elijah was between him and the soldier. He decided to use it.
“I don’t trust this. No, don’t say anyting, don’t move.” Elijah had been on the verge of opening his mouth and turning to look at Jones. “Just listen. I don’t trust it. They’re in on it or something. I’m going to try to get us away. Somehow.” He popped the door open and started pulling out the thin metal tubing. Elijah gave the smallest nod with his head.
The crutches worked well enough to help Elijah get around on the wet pavement. The four of them walked around the ambulance toward the large tent. When they were passing the cab, Jones stopped suddenly. “Hey, I need to turn the ambulance off, give me a second.” The soldiers stopped and looked at him, then one motioned for him to go ahead. He popped open the driver’s side door and climbed in quickly. He thought about throwing it in reverse and gunning the engine, but he couldn’t leave Elijah to them. No telling what they’d do now that they knew he was bitten. He sighed and killed the ignition. He saw his medic’s bag on the passenger’s side floorboard and remembered what all he had it in. There was a sterile scalpel, a few hypodermic needles. Nothing deadly, but stuff that could be used in a pinch. He grabbed the black leather case and slid back out of the cab.
When he turned around to join the group, the lead soldier pointed and asked, “What’s that?” Neither of them looked happy.
“My bag,” Jones answered, trying to sound calm. He pointed at Elijah’s leg. “He may need help, depending on how long we’re here. I’d rather have it with me than have to run back and get it.” He hoped they didn’t have any medics with them. He was sure they’d rather use their own than trust to some paramedic from a local hospital, especially since they probably figured he had a gun hidden in the bag. “You can look through here if you think I have a gun or something,” he said, holding the bag out to them.
“Come on,” the soldier answered, turning to lead the way. Jones sighed in relief and fell in behind Elijah. The soldiers led the way and seemed to trust that the two of them would follow. Their trust wasn’t misplaced, apparently, as the two civilians followed close behind. Jones was trying to work through the bag in his mind. He knew he had a few EpiPens in there. One wasn’t always enough for a grown man, but you had to be careful when giving the second one. Too close together and you’d send him into cardiac arrest. Well, close enough. You’d probably wear his heart out first.
He remembered the defribilator that was still in the ambulance. That might have been effective, but it was out of his hands by now. No way they’d let him run back to get something like that. No way to justify needing it. Elijah was getting around just fine. And if they knew what was going on, they probably weren’t worried about keeping him alive very long. Unless they didn’t know about the bites, that is….
They had reached the tent. It was a large black canvas tent with a slicker plastic coating on the outside to keep the rain where it belonged. It didn’t quite reach the ground, so it was more like the tent’s stores used for outside sales. The bottom edge of the canvas stopped some five feet off of the ground. All four men had to duck to enter the canvas shelter.
Jones had been right. Several desks were arranged in a polygon over to the side nearest the antennae. A large computer and a laptop sat on each desk with a soldier at each one. Jones couldn’t see most of the screens, and the ones he could were mostly text read outs. One, however, had a rotating 3D diagram of something that looked like a molecule of something. He thought he had seen it before, but he couldn’t be sure.
Beyond the computer desks, toward the far end of the tent, was another large table with radio equipment on it. The radio set wasn’t very large, only a few feet square and a foot or so tall, but the rest of the desk held walkie talkies and other communications devices. A few cell phones were mixed in, it looked like.
Further into the tent was a collection of cots and chairs. A few of the cots had people laying on them, none of them in military garb. A couple of chairs had soldiers sitting in them. The people on the cots didn’t look very healthy or happy. The soldiers didn’t look happy, either. They were sitting very stiffly, each looking directly at one of the more sickly-looking residents on a cot. Someone from there coughed a few times, very wet coughs.
The soldiers were leading Elijah and Jones toward the cots. The one who seemed to be in charge nodded to the other and tapped him on the shoulder, then turned and walked over toward the computers. The soldier that was left motioned for Elijah to take a seat on the closest empty cot and pulled one of the folding metal chairs over. Jones stood where he was between the cot and the chair.
“How’re you feeling?” Jones asked Elijah. The cabbie looked up at him and smiled weakly.
“I’d be feeling a lot better if I was at the hospital,” he answered, somewhat weakly with a sidelong glance at the soldier. The soldier didn’t move or react at all to either the statement or the look. He just sat back in his chair, legs crossed, rifle sitting across his lap, looking through Elijah. Jones sat his bag down on the cot and flipped open the swinging hook latch. Elijah leaned forward a bit to peer in, but stopped looking when he saw the soldier trying to check the contents, too.
“Yeah, but how do you really feel?” Jones asked again. “Light-headed or woozy? Thick-headed, like you can’t think well? Open your mouth.” Elijah complied, somewhat slowly, after licking his lips and smacking a few times. Must have some cottonmouth, Jones thought. “Can you breathe alright?” he asked as he leaned forward with a small flashlight and a tongue depressor.
Before Elijah could answer, the other soldier came walking back. He asked, “Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” Jones looked down at his hands and noticed he had forgotten to pull on a pair of latex gloves. He was about to try and make an excuse when the soldier spoke up again. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Come, it’s time for you to go back to your ambulance and go on your way. We’ll take care of your patient from here on.” He reached a hand out to take Jones’ arm to lead him away.
Jones yelled, “What? No!” and yanked his arm away. The soldier didn’t try to take his arm again immediately. He stood where he was. Jones asked again, “Why? Why can’t I take him with me to the hospital where he can get the care he needs?”
The seated soldier leaned forward to put a restraining hand on Elijah’s shoulder. Elijah had been about to stand up and he looked at the hand and sank back down on the olive-colored blanket-covered cot. He grimaced as he sat but Jones didn’t know if it was from the hand on his shoulder or the pain in his leg. He was betting on equal parts of both.
Hand on his shoulder or not, Elijah apparently decided he didn’t like this treatment enough to say something. “Yeah, I want to go to the hospital. I’m an American citizen. You can’t just keep me here!”
The soldier sitting next to him stood up to have better leverage against the sitting wounded man. Elijah looked up at him with a look that was turning into hatred on his face. “You can’t,” he said again, but weaker this time.
The soldier standing in front of Jones turned around to face Elijah. “We most certainly can. And we most certainly will. THIS is the only hospital you’ll be visiting, sir.” He turned back around to Jones. “As I said before, I think it’s time for you to leave.” He put his hand on Jones’s arm again.
“Wait, what do you mean ‘only hospital’? This man needs some serious attention!” Jones was getting to the edge of violence, now. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d wager any amount that these other people on the cots were all sick and needing medical help, too. They all had that sickly sheen that Elijah had picked up lately. An almost sweaty look, without there being any sweat. Waxy.
The soldier didn’t take hand off of Jones this time. “Come on, sir.”
“No, I want to know what’s going on. What do you know?” Jones’ eyes were wide and he stared directly into the soldier’s face. They were about the same height so it worked. The soldier stared back, then nodded.
“Fine, I’ll tell you. Once you go past this roadblock you won’t be able to leave anyway. We’ve cordoned off the next five square miles of the city, including Eden Medical, where you’re headed. I’ve called ahead and you’re expected. If you don’t show up soon, you’ll be looked for. The finding won’t be a pretty sight, I don’t imagine.
“This man,” he pointed at Elijah, “was bitten by a girl that had come back to life, correct? He’s infected, then. We’re not sure where the infection started, but we know it’s out there and spreading like wildfire. We’ve had some fifteen cases come through this tent already. In some people it catches and moves through their system like nothing we’ve ever seen. In others, like your friend here, it seems to move slower, has a harder time with the body’s natural defenses. In both cases, though, it’s fatal.”
Jones’s jaw was slack. He hadn’t been expecting this. Not at all. How could something just pop up like this? Viruses didn’t spring out of nowhere and start killing with a one hundred percent fatality rate. What were they doing to treat the infected? He decided to ask. “What — what do you do with them? To — to treat them, I mean?”
The soldier’s face was hard. “We keep them comfortable. We keep them warm. When the time comes, we keep them dead.” Elijah’s face went pale and his eyes went wide.
“I don’t wanna be no demon!” he yelled. A few of the other patients looked up at his yell and they were all wide-eyed and distressed-looking. He moaned his protest again, much quieter this time, with no force. The soldier standing over him didn’t show any signs of compassion, but he wasn’t holding him down any longer, either.
Jones stood slack. No wonder it was fatal. No one was trying to prevent it or fix it. They were just letting it run its course. Just letting this disease kill any it wanted to. He couldn’t believe it. “How — how can you justify that? How can you be OK with just killing innocent people?”
The soldier looked at him dead in the face. “When we do what we have to do, they’re not people any longer.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Come on, I’ve let you stay too long already. Your expected at the hospital in ten minutes. Check in with the staff sergeant at the front desk.”
They reached the ambulance faster going out, not slowed by Elijah’s limping progress. “Remember what I said. You’ll be looked for if you go missing. This isn’t America any more. This is martial rule and you’re expected to comply. Just get in your wagon and drive it on through to the hospital. You’ll be well taken care of. We need all the medical staff we can get. Just go on to the hospital and find out what you need to do next.” He reached out and opened the driver’s side door. “We’ll move the barricades for you to drive through.”
Jones sighed. Apparently it was worse than he had ever thought. Some disease running rampant that killed all who were infected with it. Well, it killed them and brought them back. The soldiers were the ones ultimately responsible for the final death. He still had some sneaking suspicion that somehow they were responsible, or at least tied into it. So what was a God-fearing man such as himself supposed to do? Could he justify just going along with them, letting them take care of it how they were taking care of it now? Could he just let them keep killing people who hadn’t done anything worse than get a virus? One they probably didn’t try to get, that they got by being attacked by someone else on the street? Someone that would have seemed completely insane. How did you guard against the insane?
You didn’t.
Jones nodded at the soldier and flicked the clasp on his bag as surreptitiously as he could. He turned toward the door and sat the bag on the seat, then moved his hand and tipped the bag over. “Damn it!” he cursed, the anger in his voice only partially attributable to the soldiers and their unbelievable actions. The soldier looked around the door and saw all the medical paraphenalia on the floor of the cab. “Shit, let me pick this stuff up real quick,” Jones said. The soldier nodded and continued to stand where he was. Seeing no gun on the floor or in the open bag must have made him decide there wasn’t anything Jones could really do to him.
Jones picked up a few things off the floor and seat. A couple of scalpels in their sterile paper packaging. A packet of cotton bandages for wounds. A two pack of splints for setting bones. He glanced of his shoulder and saw that the soldier wasn’t paying him any attention, he was staring into the distance, squinting at something coming this way. Jones closed his hand around a pre-packaged syringe filled with adrenaline, an EpiPen. He closed his eyes for a second and said a quick prayer that this would turn out better than he thought it would.
The packaging was almost non-existant, just the plastic tube of the “gun” with a plunger sticking out of the end. The only thing keeping it safe was a plastic plug stuck to the other end that he popped out with his fingernail. It came primed and ready, since there wasn’t much time to prepare for someone to go into anaphylactic shock. He turned toward the soldier, the syringe in his right hand. Centrifugal force carried his arm and hand up and forward, bringing the tip of the pen to the soldier’s back, just above the waistband of his pants. Jones’ thumb jammed down on the end.
The soldier jumped like had been shot, but it was too late. The liquid adrenaline was already making its way through his veins toward his heart.
Thirty-one
November 29
Elijah didn’t like the look of this at all. One soldier was sitting across from him petting the stock of his rifle. The other was standing on the ground, staring at the paramedic. His hand was on his pistol. How had this gone from strange roadblock to the soldiers being on the verge of drawing guns and shooting innocent people over being slow to tell a story about people coming back from the dead? I mean, it wasn’t a story that you could just tell to anyone. Who the fuck would believe you?
Elijah spoke before Jones could continue. “Yeah, she WAS dead. That didn’t stop her from doing, though. She sat up and attacked the other paramedic. She killed her, even. That’s why she’s not here. The damn girl came back to life and ripped her goddamn throat out.”
Both soldiers turned to look at him, their eyes the only part of their faces showing any shock. He wasn’t sure if it was from the language, the suddeness of his interruption, or what he had told them. He had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t the latter. The one on the ground slowly crossed his arms again and said, “Go on.”
Elijah shook his head. “What’s to tell? We killed her. Again. We had to kill the paramedic again, too. She came back just a few minutes later. What else were we supposed to do? Huh? What else? What would you do with two women coming back to life trying to eat you?” He was almost to screaming tears now. He held himself together, though, knowing that that kind of breakdown wouldn’t help anything and would probably only prolong their delay here. He wanted to get through this shit and get to the goddamn hospital to get his leg looked at. The more he thought about it, the more he could feel the girl’s teeth in his leg still. The more he could feel his leg going numb. Or, more accurately, the less he could feel that he leg belonged to him.
He looked down at his leg, his vision starting to blur with wetness in his eyes. His leg was more numb than it had been when they were driving along. Then it had just been the calf and below, going down to about the middle of the foot. Now it seemed to be moving up toward his knee and thigh. He wasn’t sure his knee would even obey him any longer. He didn’t have any way to test it, though. Not with the soldiers in the way. Testing would have to wait for the hospital. He hoped.
The soldier in the ambulance tapped on Elijah’s foot with a finger. “So which one did this?” Elijah shook his head and looked up, tears actually coming to his eyes. He felt they were going to take him away somewhere. He didn’t want to go anywhere with them. He wanted to go to the hospital and get some help for his leg. This was complete bullshit. BULLSHIT! The soldiers scared him.
“The girl. She bit me before we… put her down.”
The soldiers looked at each other and the one on the ground, who happened to have more bars on his helmet than the one in the box, nodded. The one in the ambulance placed a firm hand on Elijah’s ankle. A hand and grip he could only feel halfway. Something was definitely wrong. “You going to have to come with us, sir.” Elijah had known that was going to come out of his mouth as soon as the hand had touched his ankle.
“What? Why?” Jones was up in arms, again. “He’s not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking. He really did get attacked by the girl and she was definitely dead. Mary said she was and I would have trusted her with my life. The girl came back to life and — ” The soldier standing in front of him raised a hand.
“We know, sir.”