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The woman’s upper body flops unconscious against the table and against the newly animated body. The boy’s arm juts out at an odd angle, jerking spasmodically but clearly trying to bring the woman closer. The rest of his narrow upper body heaves against her, the crown of his head pushing senselessly against her neck. Rachel can’t make sense of what’s happening. She can’t see either face. But she can hear the sound the boy is making, an awful, guttural growl.

  Jenny tries to bolt toward them, suddenly fearless in the face of this horror, aiming to help this woman. Rachel catches her arm.

  “Jenny! It’s too late!” Rachel whispers hotly.

  Her friend eases back, a tiny whine escaping her throat.

  Rachel scans the line of corpses again, her gaze coming to rest on the gurney directly in front of her, across from the entrance to her father’s room. On this one, the body is moving with less muscle involvement, its shoulder twitching and its head clicking left and right on its stiffened neck. She looks down the rest of the corridor and confirms that none of the corpses have become so animated that they threaten to leave their beds. Is it possible that these things might, at some point, evolve to such an animated state?

  This shit can’t be real! It can’t!

  Rachel takes a step forward, toward this first corpse, watching it closely. Jenny’s hand shoots out instinctively to stop her but she snatches it back, letting Rachel move forward. Rachel takes another step, and now the corpse, once an athletic-looking man, goes instantly still. Hideously, it cocks its head, creaky on the neck, and one eye peers backward at her. It’s a dead eye, a fish eye with its flat, wide pupil, but it sees her, she’s sure of it. And barely, Rachel can perceive the red glow of that glowing orb coming from the open mouth.

  Her entire body goes cold, her hands clutched, white-knuckled at her sides.

  And then the thing is screeching at her, its dry mouth open at an unnatural angle. The sound is horrible, abrasive, inhuman. The body’s limbs shudder and twist across the gurney’s hard surface, disregarding the white sheet that has been placed over its body. The sheet bunches up and finally falls to the floor, giving Rachel a look at the whole corpse. There’s a weird, manic energy everywhere down the body, which is clad in a black tee-shirt and shorts, but as she suspected, the energy isn’t enough to actually lift the body from the gurney and propel it in any meaningful way. The muscles twitch almost painfully, not in control, but in the grip of some inner conflict.

  At the sound of the screech, the older woman who was awkwardly clutched by her son’s corpse finally falls to the floor in a heap, and the son is also now staring at Rachel with its dead eye, the head barely turned, the eye twisted too far back in its socket. Its mouth, too, begins to work hideously, and to screech. Soon the entire corridor is a dreadful chorus of guttural screams.

  Jenny claps her hands to her ears. For a long moment, the young women and Alan can only stare down the hall, at the similar scenes atop gurneys reaching into the flickering distance.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Jenny cries loudly.

  Rachel shrugs off Jenny’s cries and takes another step toward the closest animated corpse.

  “Rachel, what the fuck!?”

  “Hold on!” Rachel says, not taking her eyes off the thing.

  As she approaches, step by careful step, the corpse again goes still, watching her with its dead eyes, and then the screeching assaults her again, and the thing starts flailing its mostly unresponsive limbs with renewed vigor. The thing’s snarl immediately reminds Rachel of the raspy sound that brayed out of the janitor’s mouth at her dad’s building. There’s a presence in these corpses, and it’s alive. It’s a presence that is apparently struggling with the uncooperative shell that surrounds it. Rachel takes one more step, until she’s two feet away from the thing, and now it’s snarling, nearly barking at her. There’s an urgent fury on its face, as the body clenches and jerks. Rachel notices that the facial movements are all wrong, the muscles beneath the skin at odds with one another, as if they don’t understand how to work in concert.

  “Rachel! Come on! Jesus!”

  Rachel backs away and reaches to take Jenny’s hand.

  “What the hell were you doing?”

  “Learning,” Rachel replies.

  Her heart is slamming in her chest, and as they move toward the double doors leading to the admissions area, she works hard to calm her breathing. She glances back, listens as the screeching corpses lose their volume.

  “Damn, girl,” Jenny breathes, giving her a look. “Learning, huh? It’s a lot easier to learn at Front Range, huh? When there’s not scary shit going on all around you, right?”

  Jenny is referring to the classes they share together at the community college, and the reference stabs at Rachel. The morning history class there constitutes her last recollection of Tony, alive and well, winking suggestively at her from the other side of the room while Mr. Emmitt droned on. Tony’s longish brown hair—too long, she thought—his eyes deep like water at night. Jenny somewhere behind her in the classroom, Rachel not thinking of her then, more in retrospect now, but back there somewhere. Her last words with Tony were probably in the car yesterday morning. “Love you, crazy-ass,” he always said.

  Not anymore.

  Although the memory is less than two days old, it seems almost ancient already.

  Another life, certainly.

  The memory conjures her most recent image of Tony, in his bed, lifeless. Is his body, right now, going through this transformation, exhibiting signs of unnatural life when she knows very well that he’s gone?

  Chapter 11

  “What’s that?” Alan says, gesturing.

  The end of the hallway is flashing with the strobing light of some kind of emergency vehicle. Rachel, Jenny, and Alan leave behind the hallway of twitching corpses and make their way to the admissions area, which is deserted. In the quiet waiting room beyond the desk, a number of magazines are strewn across the floor, and an end table sits crookedly beneath a long window. Rachel’s eyes dart to a turned-over gurney off to the left, near the stairwell leading to the upper floors. There’s a body crumpled on the floor, shifting rhythmically. She can see its legs twitching. She points at it silently, and the other two see it.

  “Did everybody leave?” Jenny wonders.

  “Guess so,” Rachel whispers.

  They move toward the front doors, and Bonnie rushes in with a preteen boy in her arms. One look tells Rachel that the boy has suffered the same flesh-mutilating trauma as the others she saw come in earlier.

  “I’ll take him,” Alan insists, going to Bonnie.

  She gratefully, carefully, hands over the boy, and Alan whisks back through the propped-open double doors toward room 111. A chorus of hisses greets his entrance into the dim hallway.

  “Poor little soul,” Bonnie breathes. “A policeman brought him in.”

  The strobing lights are coming from a police cruiser, which is angled at the front entrance, its motor still ticking. Standing next to it is the policeman Rachel recognizes from Old Town, the serious-looking cop desperately seeking control in an out-of-control situation. He’s talking into his two-way radio. She feels an optimistic jolt, seeing that some kind of communication is occurring, that even one law-enforcement officer is still around in the world.

  “He just showed up,” Bonnie says. “I was seeing Irene off, and, well, there she goes.”

  Just beyond the police cruiser, a Toyota pickup is creeping out of the parking lot, and Rachel catches a quick glimpse of Irene’s profile in its driver’s seat. Despite their differences, Rachel wishes her well. A sigh escapes Bonnie’s mouth.

  Rachel marvels again at the deep blackness of the night. Without thinking, she reaches into her jeans pocket and pulls out her phone to check the time. Then she remembers that the phone is dead. She repockets it, looking behind her for a clock. There’s one above the admissions desk, and it reads 1:11 a.m. She’s pretty sure it’s accurate; it must be a battery-powered clock.

 
There’s a small group of men farther out in the dim parking lot; squinting, Rachel recognizes Scott and a couple of the frenzied volunteers from earlier.

  “Did he come with anyone else?” Jenny asks.

  “Just the boy. Said he found him wandering down Riverside. He could barely talk, said something about his mom in the car.”

  Rachel is still watching the cop, and after a few moments he twists around to look in her direction. He seems to be reporting the number of people he’s found here, into his radio. His gaze catches on her twice, doing a little double-take. He points at her curiously. He ends his conversation and places the radio back on his belt. Then he walks over.

  “I remember you.”

  “Rachel,” she says. “This is Jenny, and Bonnie.”

  He nods at them. “Joel.”

  Joel has a layer of soot all over him, most prominently swiped in sweat at his brow.

  “We saw the fire burning for a while,” Rachel says. “How’d that work out?”

  “Shit, burned down half the businesses right above Oak, the east side of the street there.” He pauses to dig a half-empty pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and shake one out, putting it to his lips. “Not a thing I could do about a lot of that. We finally managed to get a truck over there and got a hose hooked up to a hydrant, but it was too late to do much. Took the whole block. Everything pretty much burned out. Still burning, actually. We took care of a perimeter, though.” He lights up the cigarette with a blue Bic lighter.

  “Where are the rest …?”

  “A couple of guys are taking charge at the college, the student center. I helped corral most of the downtown survivors over there. They’ve got a generator over there, too. Going smooth. And I finally got one other cop on the radio, out of the southeast precinct, and he’s arranged something at an elementary school down there off Harmony. Between us, we have about fifty people, I think.”

  “Fifty!” Jenny says. “That’s all?”

  “I’ve seen others wandering around. Most people are just lost. But no, there’s not many of us that survived this thing.”

  Bonnie speaks up. “Officer, do you have any idea how far this thing reaches? That is to say, is it just Fort Collins, or has it reached Denver?”

  “I’ve been getting chatter on the radio all day, and CB reports from a trucker stuck on Mulberry. Not much of a network, but it’s there ...” He blows out some smoke and peers closely at them. “Word is, it’s the entire country. Possibly global. There’s nothing out there. Hell, there are still planes falling out of the sky everywhere.”

  “Dear lord.” Alan has appeared behind them. Rachel glances back at him, reaches back to touch his shoulder.

  “So who’s in charge here?” Joel asks, looking like he’s tired of talking about the end of the world. “One of you?”

  “Scott over there has been managing things since this morning,” Bonnie answers charitably, but her voice goes quieter. “To be honest, though, since things started getting out of control, he’s been less than reliable.”

  “Getting out of control? You’re talking about the bodies,” Joel says on a rush of smoke.

  “They’re waking up,” Jenny says.

  Rachel cuts in, “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly.”

  “That boy I brought in—I’ve seen a few others like him. In fact, I sent a couple others like him this way, with some other people. I guess I hoped someone here might be able to help them. But this poor kid. It happened right in front of me, in the front seats of a goddamned Hyundai. He was locked in there. Or he didn’t want to get out. He just wanted his folks to wake up. And it…burned him, or whatever. So yeah, I see what’s happening.” He takes a pull on his cigarette. “I don’t understand it, but I see what’s happening. That’s one reason I’m here. I was hoping someone here might be working on some answers.”

  “Well, I don’t think Scott’s your man,” Bonnie says with a glance at Rachel.

  “He doesn’t appear to be interested in talking to law enforcement, such as it is.”

  “Listen,” says Alan, clearing his throat, “it’s probably not my place to say this, but I need to mention it. It’s important. While I was tending to the wounded, Scott was taking from the morphine supply. He told me he needed it for survivors in the lobby, but I never saw those people. He was…he was not particularly friendly when I asked him about it. I suspect he, well—”

  “You are shitting me,” Jenny says, eyes flashing. “With all these people around him who really need it?!”

  “Now, I’m not completely sure that he’s taking it for himself,” Alan says, “just that I suspect it.”

  Bonnie is glancing down in guilt, nodding against her chest. “I saw the same. I never added it up, I guess, in the stress of everything.”

  “Well,” Joel says, weighing this bit of news. “That’s just great.”

  Rachel glances over her shoulder at Scott, who’s clustered with two of the young men he was working with earlier. Scott is whispering and gesticulating about something, pointing back at the hospital. One of the younger men is shrugging incessantly.

  “Anyway, I sure thought there’d be more people here,” Joel says. “I thought survivors were gathering here. In fact, I know they were. What happened?”

  “There were a lot of people here,” Bonnie responds, “and not that long ago. But after those bodies in there started twitching, and it was clear that they weren’t just, you know, waking up, well, people went from hopeful to—”

  “Scared shitless,” Jenny finishes.

  Joel takes a final drag off his cigarette and tosses the butt into the grassy area beyond the small parking lot. He blows out the rest of his smoke, rubs his neck.

  “Hell of a goddamn day.”

  Joel looks completely exhausted. This quiet little conversation has given his body the opportunity to catch up with him and let him know that it has been pushed to its limits. Rachel wonders when this man slept last. He might have been at the end of a night shift when this thing hit. And suddenly Rachel can feel the mirror image of his exhaustion, made worse by the knowledge that there will be no sleep in her immediate future.

  “Okay, I need to know what’s happening with these bodies,” Joel says. “What are we dealing with?” He’s looking from face to face.

  The group is mildly stunned for a moment. Rachel finds herself overcome with an irritating case of stage fright. She’s all too aware that she’s a teenager in the midst of adults and even professionals—a policeman, a medical specialist, not to mention the serene, somehow wise older man who was the first survivor she met at the start of this madness. Nevertheless, she feels the eyes of Bonnie and Jenny on her now, and she manages to open her mouth.

  “They’re becoming something else,” Rachel tells him.

  Joel focuses on her, shaking his head. “All day, these bodies have had no pulse, no respiration, no response at all.”

  “Oh, they’re quite dead,” Alan speaks up.

  The cop looks increasingly frustrated. “I’m not really in the mood for horror-movie shit.”

  “Can we show you something inside?” Rachel asks, glancing at Bonnie. “There’s a body in there that will make things much more clear. It did for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s easier just to see it.”

  “She’s right,” Bonnie offers.

  “Then lead the way,” he says. “Wait, let me settle down these lights.”

  Joel gets to the cruiser, reaches in and switches off the lightbar. He takes a moment to lock the doors, then heads back toward them. The group begins heading inside, and almost immediately Scott turns from his little group and approaches them. One of his cohorts takes the opportunity to detach from the group and run off in the opposite direction, into the night.

  “What can I do for you, Officer?” Scott says, inserting himself between Joel and the front doors.

  Face to face with him again, Rachel can see that Scott is shiny with perspiration, and his
eyes are shifty. Earlier, he seemed simply a confident asshole; a man in charge by virtue of his ill-contained sense of superiority. Now, however, there’s something oddly desperate about him. He knows things have gone out of control on his watch but he’ll be damned if his pride will allow him to lose his oversight of the deteriorating situation.

  “Scott, right?” Joel says, offering his hand to shake. “Joel Reynolds.”

  Scott takes a moment too long to return the gesture.

  Bonnie steps in. “We’re showing Joel the motorcyclist, so he can get a better idea what’s happening to these bodies.”

  Scott is shaking his head, moving another step to block their way. “I can’t authorize that. In the interest of safety—”

  “I’m going in there, Scott,” Joel says calmly.

  “Look,” Scott says, attempting to stand taller, “this situation has evolved. It’s dangerous in there. Those bodies were toxic to begin with, and now they’re undergoing some kind of involuntary—”

  “He’s aware of what’s happening,” Rachel interrupts him. “What we have to do now is find out why it’s happening.”

  “We?” Scott says. “What we have to do?”

  “We’re all in this together, man,” Joel says evenly. “Come on, this is your turf. Lead the way.”

  “I’m not going back in there, and I don’t think any of you should, either.”

  “You want to stay out here in the dark, that’s your business,” Joel says. “But if we’re going to find out what’s going on with these bodies, we’re not going to do it in a parking lot, or out in the street. It’s going to happen in there—in a hospital. And why am I even saying this? Shouldn’t you be the one arguing this?”

  He’s pointing a finger straight at Scott, who glances fleetingly at each one of them, grinding his teeth.

  “Are you not aware of what’s going on in there?” Scott asks, his voice betraying him by breaking. “Those bodies are hurting people—killing people!”

  Rachel steps forward. “That’s happening everywhere, not just in there.”

  Scott looks directly at her, albeit reluctantly. “The difference being that, in there, you have hundreds of those things in a small space, just waiting—to—”