I’m not sure which was more frightening… “Reaper’s Sabbath,” as some of us have come to call it, on which I nearly lost Gabby and, for a time, was sure I was going to lose my own life and leave her orphaned… or the day after. The Day of Unholy Resurrection. The day on which the dead rose, and both my daughter and I found ourselves running for our lives.
The first day was scary, but sickness and death are natural. They are a part of life. I was shocked by how quickly the pandemic spread and how effectively it killed, but there are other diseases with the same potential for disaster.
The second day was truly horrific. Rising from death, in the physical sense, is completely unnatural… illogical… unexplainable. The walking dead… what satanic power is responsible for such an abomination? I shudder to think.
The world is a different place now. Our lives have completely changed. Our knowledge has changed. It seems nothing is out of the realm of possibility now, and that is frightening. The unknown is frightening. What does the future hold? What will become of us?
If there’s one comfort I have here, it is that I’m surrounded by decent people. People who look out for each other, who strive to keep us safe. If they’ve taught me anything, it’s this: There are three things in this world that are still the same. The first is the inherent goodness of man. The second is man’s will to survive. And the third is a mother’s instinct… her instinct to protect her child.
That’s natural. And that will never change.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
7:00 a.m.
The sun was just rising over Tampa when Jo awoke to the sounds of shouting and stampeding feet.
At first, she was alarmed and jumped out of bed, fearing burglars. Then she looked around the stark room and remembered she wasn’t home, but at the air force base. She relaxed for just a moment, but the shouting continued, and as the pounding footsteps raced past her door, she remembered all that had happened the day before and became alarmed again. Trouble on a military base had to be worse than trouble at home, especially considering recent events.
Jo hesitated in the middle of the room she’d been given in the “TLF,” as the military men called it. Temporary lodging facility, it stood for, and it was essentially a dormitory. She debated over whether or not to open her door and stick her head out into the hall to find out what was going on. On one hand, she was curious, anxious to know. On the other, if the shouting men weren’t the same ones who had put her up here last night, she wasn’t sure she wanted to attract attention to herself and Gabby, who was still asleep in the bed on the other side of the room.
Colonel Richardson had offered them separate rooms, but Gabby had insisted on sleeping with Jo. That had surprised her, considering her daughter was usually so disconnected, but she supposed it shouldn’t have. She’d felt the same way, anxious to keep Gabby in her sight after their separation the day before. It was this instinct to protect her daughter that made her decision for her. She’d stay put, safe in her room and out of sight, until the sounds of panic stopped. If there was real trouble, she felt sure Colonel Richardson wouldn’t forget them in here. In his relief at seeing two people who were alive and well even without gas masks, he’d bent over backwards to be hospitable to them yesterday.
Suddenly, she recognized his voice joining the others and remembered he’d said he was staying in a room just down the hall. “I’ll be right there if you need anything in the night,” he’d told them kindly, a true gentleman. His presence reassured her, and she moved towards the door. She was just about to reach for the knob when someone on the other side of the door knocked. It was an urgent knock, and it startled her, causing her to jump back.
“Jo? It’s Colonel Richardson; are you awake? Jo?”
He knocked again, but Jo was already rushing for the doorknob. She opened the door to a gruesome scene in the hallway: Colonel Richardson was standing in front of her door, and behind him were two other men she’d met last night, an officer by the name of Edwards and a young private called Flakeland. They were both spattered with blood and together were cradling the limp body of a third soldier, dressed in torn and bloody military fatigues.
“Richardson said you’re a nurse?” The captain, Edwards, pelted the question at her and didn’t wait for an answer. “This woman was attacked; she needs medical attention. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do for her, but… dear God, you’re all we’ve got.”
Jo stepped back at once. “Bring her in,” she said, and the two soldiers rushed by her with the third. Richardson followed, giving her a brief nod of greeting. She couldn’t see much of his face through his gas mask, but his eyes looked grim.
Edwards and Flakeland lay the wounded soldier on Jo’s bed. As they set her down and backed out of the way, the woman’s head lolled to the side, and Jo gasped. The woman had suffered a massive head wound; the left side of her skull had been cracked wide open, her bloody scalp hanging in sheets. She still wore her gas mask, the kind the strapped on at the back of her head, but flesh had been torn from any part of her face not covered, and it was badly mutilated, a gaping hole where her left ear had been.
Carefully, with shaking hands, Jo unstrapped the gas mask and removed it. She regretted it instantly. It made it somehow worse, seeing the pretty young girl underneath, who looked like she’d been shoved into a meat grinder and yanked back out again.
“Was she shot?” Richardson demanded to know, and although his voice was sharp, commanding, Jo could detect the quiver of fear and revulsion in it. It was the same voice she’d heard attending physicians use in the ER when a particularly grisly trauma came in.
Jo started to shake her head even before one of the other soldiers answered. She’d worked on a number of GSWs to the head, but this looked like no gunshot she’d ever seen.
“No, sir,” gulped Flakeland. He didn’t even try to control the trembling in his own voice. “She was bitten.”
“Bitten??” Richardson repeated. “What do you mean, bitten? Bitten by what?”
Wondering the same thing, Jo looked up to see Flakeland and Edwards exchange glances through their gas masks.
“Bitten by what??” Richardson repeated, his voice rising. “What in God’s name-”
Edwards cleared his throat. “It was a… a person, sir.”
“No!” interjected Flakeland quickly, almost before the colonel or Jo could react. “Not a person… not anymore. It was a zombie that attacked her!”
There was a split second of silence, in which this information was digested. Then Richardson roared, “Alright! Enough of this bullcrap. Flakeland, why don’t you take Jo’s daughter out of here – she shouldn’t see this. Jo, is there-”
“No, wait!” Jo cried, as the private moved towards the bed where Gabby lay sleeping. “Leave her be. My daughter… she’s a deep sleeper. If we all just lower our voices and calm down, we may not even wake her.” She took a deep breath. They all did. The room seemed to calm a fraction.
Jo felt relieved, until she turned her eyes back onto her patient. “What’s her name?” she asked quietly.
“Butler,” Flakeland said, his voice still shaking. He sounded near tears. “Private Amy Butler.”
Jo nodded. Her own throat was threatening to close up, but she swallowed hard to clear it. “I’m afraid Private Butler is dead,” she said. “This head wound is a fatal one. There’s… there’s gray matter all over her skull and in her hair. Brain tissue,” she added, when she caught the flicker of confusion in Flakeland’s eyes. She held his gaze long enough to see comprehension dawn, and then his eyes welled up, and he bowed his head.
There was a grave silence in the room, as Jo dutifully pressed two fingers to the carotid artery in the young woman’s neck – the side that had not been ravaged to a pulp. As she’d suspected, there was no pulse. Anything resembling a pulse would have been fleeting. No one could survive a head injury like that.
When she looked up, all three soldiers were watching her, waiting for the official confirmation. She shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry. She’s gone.”
“Damn it,” cursed Edwards in a low voice, turning away.
Richardson turned to Flakeland and grabbed him by both shoulders. “What did you mean by what you said earlier?”
“I… I meant what I said,” Flakeland gasped. “It… it was a horde of zombies, sir. Dead people – well, formerly dead, I guess – walking around, attacking. Soldiers and civilians… all victims of the plague, I guess.”
“You’re telling me that the people who died on this base – military men and their families – have come back to life as zombies. Am I understanding you, Flakeland?” asked Richardson, and Jo could hear the frustrated sarcasm in his voice.
Quivering, Flakeland nodded, and to Jo’s surprise, so did Edwards. “He’s telling the truth, Colonel Richardson,” the latter admitted, in a grim voice. “I recognized some of them. Men and women whose bodies we hauled out to the fire pits last night, to burn in the morning. I know it sounds crazy, sir, callin’ ‘em zombies, but… I witnessed it myself. I was guarding the front gate when I heard screaming and gunfire. I hopped in my Humvee and came upon the two privates, tryin’ to fight ‘em off. Looked like a goddamn mob scene. I… I hit one of ‘em, accidentally, when I saw ‘em jump Butler. It was a woman, and she went right down, but when I stopped the Hummer and jumped out, she got right up again and started comin’ towards me, draggin’ a busted leg behind her. I knew somethin’ wasn’t right.”
“I shot some,” Flakeland inserted, his eyes wide. “So did Butler! They just kept getting right back up! She couldn’t fight them off; there were too many of them! You have to shoot them in the head, or they just keep coming back. One of them bit me right here on the shoulder when I was trying to get them off Amy.”
For the first time, Jo noticed that the shoulder of his uniform was torn and that the shiny blood coating it – unlike the blood that covered the rest of them both from carrying Butler – was his own.
“Let me look at that,” she said. She moved Butler’s legs, heavy with dead weight in their combat boots, over to the wall and pressed Flakeland down onto the spot she’d cleared on the mattress. “Take off your jacket.”
The private stripped down to the plain white t-shirt he wore underneath his uniform and pushed up the blood-soaked sleeve. The wound was deep; a whole chunk of flesh had been torn from his shoulder, and she could clearly see teeth marks. Jo had treated a variety of animal bites before, usually from dogs, occasionally something wilder – once in a blue moon, even a shark – but these looked human, and she told Colonel Richardson so.
“I’m telling you, there’s zombies out there,” Flakeland insisted. “I wouldn’t make this up, sir, and neither would Edwards. Zombies killed Butler.”
Edwards nodded once in agreement, and Richardson shook his head. “I’m not doubting you, Flakeland,” he murmured. “I just… I can’t…”
Edwards put a hand on Richardson’s shoulder. “We understand, sir. You have to see it to believe it.”
“I need something to clean this bite out with,” Jo spoke up. “Disinfectant of some sort. And some gauze.”
Richardson put a hand to his mask in frustration. “This is just a lodging facility; there’s no first aid supplies here. There’s a Red Cross building down the street from here…”
“If any of us goes out there, we’re all going,” Edwards injected firmly. “It’s not safe.”
“Mom? What’s not safe?”
Four heads turned to the bed across the room. All the talking had finally awakened Sleeping Beauty herself, Gabby, who was half-sitting up in bed, tangled in her sheet and blanket, her disheveled hair in her eyes and the t-shirt Colonel Richardson had loaned her to sleep in hanging off her shoulder. She blinked blearily in confusion at them.
“What’s going on?”
“Go back to sleep,” was Jo’s first reaction, but that only served to put Gabby on alert. She sat up fully and looked past the officers. Her frown deepened, and then her eyes widened.
“What happened?? Is that girl-”
“Cover her,” Jo hissed, and Flakeland quickly pulled the sheet from her bed up over Private Butler’s face. To Gabby, Jo said, “We’re not sure what’s going on, sweetheart. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Something…” She refused to use the word “zombie.” “… attacked her.”
“What did? What attacked her??”
They all exchanged glances. No one wanted to repeat what they’d just convinced Jo and Richardson to believe.
“We’re not sure,” Edwards finally answered for the group. His voice was flat, and Jo could tell by the way Gabby’s eyes narrowed suspiciously that she didn’t buy it. She was too perceptive for her own good sometimes.
“I’ll settle for antibacterial soap and water for now,” said Jo, eager to stop Gabby’s line of questioning. “And anything you can bring me to cover this up.”
“I’ll go,” said Edwards, and he hurried from the room, returning a few minutes later with a small basin of warm water, a bottle of liquid soap, a washcloth, and a couple of towels. Jo set to work at once gently cleaning and dressing the wound with the towels.
“Just hold that to your shoulder, and that should stop the bleeding,” she assured Flakeland, who was looking pretty green around the gills beneath his gas mask. His skin felt hot and clammy. She worried shock was starting to set in. “Maybe we should have you lie down,” she suggested, looking around the room. “Gabrielle, would you mind giving up your bed for this young man? We’ll get you some fresh sheets later.”
“Or a fresh room,” added Colonel Richardson. Jo flashed him a grateful smile and a nod. Somehow, she knew Gabby wouldn’t be keen on spending another night in a room where a girl had died, on a bed where this bleeding man had lain.
Gabby reluctantly got out of bed, tugging self-consciously on her t-shirt, though it already hung to her knees. She stood back out of the way while Jo walked Private Flakeland to her bed and eased him down on it. “There you go… now lie down and rest; your body’s been through quite a shock,” she spoke softly to him in a nurturing voice. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty, more scared than hurt. She concentrated on caring for him while the two senior officers spoke in low, conspiratorial voices about what to do next. “What’s your first name, Private Flakeland?” she asked him.
“J… Justin,” he croaked, and no sooner had his name left his lips than his eyes suddenly rolled back into his head, and his whole body began to twitch violently.
“Justin?” Jo repeated his name loudly, attracting the attention of everyone else in the room.
“What’s happening??” Richardson demanded in alarm. “Is he having a seizure?”
“It looks like it,” confirmed Jo, a heavy feeling of trepidation settling into her chest. She recalled all the people she’d seen go into convulsions yesterday, leading into cardiac arrest.
“Is it the virus?” Richardson asked, his thoughts on the same wavelength as hers. “Could it have spread through the bite?”
“I’m wondering the same thing,” Jo admitted, watching helplessly as the young soldier twitched and flailed.
“Can’t you stop it?”
Jo shook her head. “The only way to stop a seizure is with an anti-seizure drug, which I’m sure you don’t have here either. Otherwise, they just have to run their course. It should be over soon.”
And so they waited, until at last, the spasms slowed, and Justin’s body fell heavy and limp upon the mattress. By then, Gabby was crying, her face turned into the corner so she wouldn’t have to watch. Everyone else was silent, nervously waiting to see if he would regain consciousness. Jo took his wrist to check for a pulse, and though she’d feared it was inevitable, she was shocked to find that his heart had already stopped.
“No pulse,” she murmured. She leaned over Flakeland, rubbing her knuckles against his breastbone to try and stimulate some kind of response. “Justin? Justin!” She took his mask off to check for breathing. She tried a few chest compressions, but nothing brought back his vital signs. “He’s gone,” she admitted at last, her shoulders slumping in defeat.
“Just like that??” Edwards said in disbelief, shaking his head. “All from the bite, you think?”
“That has to be it. He wasn’t showing any other signs of the virus, was he?” She looked Justin’s body over. His pallor was gray now, but not pocked with the same lesions she had noticed on the victims at the hospital. He hadn’t had the virus before today; she was sure of it.
Edwards and Richardson both agreed that he hadn’t, confirming her theory and, as far as Jo was concerned, Flakeland’s entire story. The two dead soldiers, one bitten, one utterly mutilated, were all the confirmation she needed to believe there was a threat worse than the virus itself lurking outside.
She looked to the two officers. “Do you have a plan for dealing with… what’s out there?” she asked cryptically. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gabby turn to look at her. She was staying out of the way, but she was listening.
Edwards looked as grim as ever. “I think we should stay put for now. There were more of them out there than there are of us. We took out a few to get them away from Private Butler, but we were still outnumbered. And if our theory proves right, there’ll be more…”
His eyes took on a faraway look, and Jo could understand why. She had watched him and the others dispose of the bodies in mass cremation piles on the outskirts of the base yesterday. They’d burned many of the remains, but there had been more lined up for their turn today. If Edwards was right, if Flakeland had been right, the dead would no longer be lying amongst the smoldering ashes.
“More what?” asked Gabby, and before anyone could find a way to deter her questions again, she stamped her bare foot against the industrial tiled floor and insisted, “I know you know, and I deserve to know too! I’m thirteen years old; I’m not a little kid anymore! Tell me what’s going on!”
Jo looked apologetically at Edwards and Richardson, embarrassed by her daughter’s disrespectful outburst in front of the two officers, before rounding on Gabby to scold her. But before she could say anything, Colonel Richardson shrugged at Edwards and said, “I think she has a point. Everyone here deserves to be briefed on the situation. It’s all of our lives at stake. Do you agree, Jo?” He turned a meaningful look upon Jo, who hesitated, flustered, and finally nodded her consent.
In the seconds before Richardson relayed what Edwards and Flakeland had told him, Jo watched her daughter with sadness. She was barely thirteen, and yet, she was right: in many ways, she was no longer a child. In the last day, she had seen death, witnessed the breakdown of society as they’d known it. How far into society that breakdown reached, no one yet knew. But it was clear the world had changed, and Gabby with it. What she was about to hear would change her further, just as it had changed all of them.
Colonel Richardson cleared his throat before turning his attention to Gabby. Despite the barrier of his gas mask, Jo admired the way he looked right at her when he talked to her, like she was his equal. “Captain Edwards and Private Flakeland were attacked by a group of people outside. They killed Private Butler, and we believe the bite they inflicted on Justin Flakeland is what killed him, too.” Richardson kept his voice controlled and even, and the way he spoke in his low, easy drawl was calming, despite the frightening things he was saying. “We think they had the virus that’s been killing almost everyone… and we think they’d already died from it.”
Gabby frowned, her brow knitting in disbelief. “But then… you mean-?”
Richardson perched on the foot of the bed which held Flakeland’s body, looked her full on in the face, and nodded. “I mean that they seem to be dead people, come back to life… or something resembling life. They’re not the same as they were, that’s for sure… not if they did this.” He made a vague, sweeping gesture that encompassed both Flakeland and Butler.
“Like… zombies?” The word came out as a whisper.
Richardson nodded. “I guess so.”
“For real?? This isn’t, like, ‘Scare Tactics’ or something, is it?” She looked around, craning her neck, as if searching for hidden cameras. Jo didn’t have a clue what “Scare Tactics” was, but marveled over her daughter’s cynicism.
Richardson shook his head and answered with the same quiet sensibility that made Jo innately respect and trust him. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”
Gabby’s reaction surprised her. Jo wasn’t sure what she was expecting – screaming terror? A flood of frightened tears? But all Gabby said was, “Wow… this is just liked ‘Resident Evil.’”
Jo only knew vaguely that this was a video game, but Richardson seemed to know more. He nodded, and though his mouth was concealed by his mask, she could tell by the way his eyes crinkled at the corners that he had actually cracked a smile.
“I guess so.”
“Well, what are we gonna do?” Gabby asked, looking around the room. No one had an answer for her. Edwards’s plan of waiting seemed as good as any for now, but they all knew they would need another one eventually.
And then something happened that would change the plan immediately.
Amy Butler sat up.
As the sheet fell off her body, Gabby was the first to shriek and jump back, even though she was clear across the room. Edwards, who was closest, uttered a half-repressed shout that sounded like “Gah!” and scrambled away, his eyes wide with disbelief. Jo watched in horror as the young woman dragged her legs stiffly off of the mattress, until her combat boots hit the floor with a heavy thump. Then she wrenched her upper body around to align with the lower half. Her eyes opened, and they were clouded over with a white film. The mottled, gray tissue of what was left of her brain oozed from the open fracture in her skull, and Jo knew she had not mispronounced this woman’s death.
What she was looking at now was the living dead.
She retracted, instinctively, back as far as she could go, which was Gabby’s bed on the opposite side of the room, the bed now occupied by Justin Flakeland’s dead body. That was when she felt the mattress behind her move and knew, before she heard Gabby’s second scream, before she turned to see for herself, that Justin Flakeland was not so dead anymore.
“Get out!” Richardson’s voice suddenly boomed. “Go! Run!” He grabbed Gabby first by the arm and practically yanked her into the hall, then turned back for the others.
Jo launched herself towards the door and looked over her shoulder at the same time, stumbling into Edwards. Flakeland had risen as well and was dragging himself off the bed. Butler was already lurching towards them, moving stiff-legged, her feet pointed inward, the reinforced toes of her boots scraping the tile.
Edwards caught Jo and hurried her into the hall. Richardson slammed the door shut behind them, then said, “I don’t have a key to lock it. We’ve gotta get out of here – go!”
It was Edwards who led the way now. Jo reached for Gabby’s hand and followed at his heels, aware of Richardson bringing up the rear. She could hear thumps and scratching noises from inside the door even as their footsteps reverberated through the hall. They rounded the corner, ducked into the stairwell, and spiraled downwards. Edwards’s heavy boots pounded loudly against the concrete steps, but Richardson, having been roused from his sleep, was in slippers, and Jo and Gabby were both barefoot, their feet slapping the cement.
When they reached the ground level, Edwards stopped them shy of the door that led outside and drew his gun. It was a big gun, but it didn’t give Jo much reassurance, not when she pictured the brains foaming out the side of Butler’s head. Private Butler, she was sure, had been armed as well.
“I’ll lead,” Edwards said, speaking in a hushed voice. “Stay behind me, but keep close. Lieutenant Colonel, sir, you cover us from behind.”
“You got it, Captain,” replied Richardson.
Edwards pushed open the heavy door emblazoned with an Emergency Exit sign. An alarm went off, but the four ignored it as they crept outside. The light of the early morning sun was a welcomed relief. Jo didn’t think she would have the courage to venture out in darkness.
“Let’s go to the chapel,” murmured Edwards, pointing his gun towards a building across a long parking lot. “We should be able to barricade ourselves in there.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Richardson agreed.
Jo squeezed Gabby’s hand and pulled her daughter closer to her side.
They had only made it a few paces across the parking lot when they heard a terrible, strangled sort of moan that ran chills through Jo and made her hair stand on end. She turned towards the sound and gasped, as a figure lurched from the shadows, moving with the same, stiff gait as Butler. Edwards cocked his gun and aimed, but before he could fire, more of them appeared behind the first.
Jo heard a click behind her and looked back to see Richardson also with his gun raised, though pointed the other way. She followed the line of his gun barrel and felt her heart sink at the sight of yet more zombies coming towards them from the opposite direction. They were completely outnumbered, and if they didn’t move fast, they were about to be surrounded as well.
Edwards seemed to recognize this. He fired, and as the first zombie fell, he turned and shouted, “Richardson, take them and run! I got this!” He aimed again and fired a second time.
The loud blasts of the gunfire made Jo jump and Gabby clap her hands over her ears, but when the colonel yelled, “C’mon!” and beckoned them to follow him, they followed, running as fast as they could.
The blacktop surface of the parking lot was scattered with tiny pebbles and soot that cut into the bottom of Jo’s bare feet, but she ignored this, running like she hadn’t run in many years. Gabby, with the natural endurance of a child, broke ahead of her, but kept looking back, screaming, “C’mon, Mom! Run!”
“Keep going!” Jo shouted, urging her forward. “I’m right behind you!”
She heard gun blasts from behind her, as Edwards took out more of their would-be attackers. In front of them, Richardson slowed down to aim at a couple of zombies who had appeared ahead. He fired once, and the first zombie fell straight backwards, a bullet wound to the forehead. He aimed again, fired, and the second zombie twisted to a heap on the ground with a shot to the neck. More emerged from the shadows, but they were almost to the church. Jo could see a back entrance just a few more yards ahead.
Richardson reached it first and opened it, then stood guard as he beckoned furiously to Gabby and Jo, ready to take out any creature that tried to block their path. Gabby reached him first, and he shoved her on into the building. Winded and panting, Jo stumbled through the door after her and immediately doubled over to catch her breath.
“Let’s go, Edwards!” she heard Richardson shout, but she didn’t look back. She didn’t want to see any more. She started to lead Gabby further into the safety of the building, but Richardson said, “Wait!” When she paused and looked back, he added, “Wait for me to clear the building… just in case there’s more in here.”
Jo hadn’t considered that, but now, she shuddered at the prospect and pulled Gabby back into a protective hug at her side. They waited until they heard the pounding of Edwards’s boots on the pavement, and at last, he burst through the door. Richardson shut it immediately behind him and bolted it.
“We need to compass the building,” he told Edwards.
“I’ll do it,” Edwards volunteered quickly. There was an odd look in his eyes, but with the gas mask hiding most of his face, Jo couldn’t identify it. “Take them into one of the Sunday school rooms; those should be small, easy to defend.”
Richardson nodded and motioned for Jo and Gabby to follow him again. They did, down a hallway and into a small classroom with a few tables spread with Bible coloring books and crayons. “Have at it,” said the colonel with a wink at Gabby, but she didn’t smile. She sank into a perch on one of the small, child-size chairs and hugged her knobby knees – still very much a child’s knees – to her chest. Jo sat down on the edge of the table, her own knees weak and quivery, as much from fear as from running.
And they waited.
They waited in tense silence, listening, until, at last, Edwards reappeared. “All clear,” he announced, but he didn’t look relieved. His eyes still held a grim shadow, and when he said, “Richardson? Could I have a private word?” Jo got a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Richardson started to move into the hall, but Gabby brazenly called out, “Hey! Whatever it is, you can say it in front of us. We have a right to know, just like before. Right, Mom?”
Jo couldn’t find it in her to agree out loud; she felt that, once again, Gabby was verging on disrespect. But in her heart, she did agree. She didn’t want to be sheltered to the point of being kept in darkness, in ignorance.
Edwards hesitated, sizing Gabby up. His eyes darkened even more, and then he said, “Alright, kid. You wanna know? Here, have a look.” And he turned around.
Gabby gasped aloud and nearly toppled backwards in her little chair. Jo didn’t react audibly, but felt her heart sink.
There was a chunk of flesh missing from the captain’s lower back.
He’d been bitten.
“I can feel it coming over me,” he said, and his voice was shaking now, as was his whole body. “The pain… the fever… I can feel myself starting to sweat and shake. Any minute now, I could collapse in convulsions just like that Flakeland kid and wake up wanting to rip your heads off with my teeth.”
He cocked his gun then, and it was Jo who screamed first and lunged in front of Gabby, her first instinct to protect her. But Edwards let out a derisive laugh and instead pointed the gun at his own head.
“Don’t!” shrieked Gabby in horror, and Jo pulled her to her side, shielding Gabby’s eyes against her body. Gabby struggled, her muffled voice screaming, “Don’t let him!” but Jo held her tight, refusing to let her see.
“Charlie, wait,” said Richardson, holding up a hand.
“You do it then! Put me out of my fucking misery before I end up like them! Please!” Edwards pleaded. His eyes were huge now, with savagery and fear. The hand holding his gun was shaking so badly, Jo wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to pull the trigger even if he’d wanted to right then.
“Not here,” spoke Richardson in that low, strangely calming voice. “Not in front of them.”
“Then let’s go.”
Edwards turned, and Richardson followed him into the hall. Gabby broke out of Jo’s hold and watched them go through wide, tear-filled eyes, shaking her head in denial. “No… oh my god… Mama, don’t let him… don’t let him.”
Jo said nothing, just put her arm around Gabby and held her. She wanted to cover her ears now, instead of her eyes, but it wouldn’t have done any good.
When it happened, the single shot shook the building. It rattled Jo’s insides and made her feel like vomiting.
With a guttural sob, Gabby collapsed against her shoulder.
