A Dark Evolution (Book 2): Deranged (5 page)

He was just as surprised as she was and dropped her to the ground. She rolled to the side, and as he was gaping at his now bifurcated fist, she swung the axe into the back of his knee, bringing him wailing to the ground.
Shit, this racket is drawing them all to me
. Indeed it was, they were coming from all over the parking lot now. Except the one that had been wandering out here before, she couldn't locate him. I have to shut him up, she thought, then swung the axe like a softball player at the back of his neck, wincing as his decapitated head rolled forward and his body collapsed into a giant muscled heap.

She had no time to recover. Heaving her bloody axe back up to her shoulder, Kala ran again, toward the fence.
I can't believe that bastard just left me there! Left me to die! And stole all my supplies, that I gathered! Argh!
She was so pissed and blasted through the slit in the chain link without slowing. She would find her car, hopefully no one had stolen it, then she would get the hell out of here. But then where? Anywhere, it didn’t matter, she just needed to get the hell out of here, preferably in a big steel station wagon that could run down zombies.

She didn’t expect to ever see Dylan again, so when his body came flying out from behind a car just a few dozen feet in front of her, she startled. Then she saw why. Another dead one, the one they had seen wandering in the field, had caught up to him. As she ran, she watched the creature leap onto a car and dive for him. The dead landed on his back, flattening him into the ground. Dylan immediately shoulder rolled, slashing out with his knife. He stabbed the zombie dead center in the chest, going for its heart. But then it stuck there, and the zombie didn't stop.
He hit its sternum,
Kala thought, referring to the bone most people thought of as the breastbone. Dylan tried to remove the weapon but it was lodged in the bone. The dead one pinned him down and hammered Dylan’s face with a vicious set of punches. The boy cried out, then the creature cried out, opening his mouth wide in a primal scream. Dylan watched as the creature lunged for his face with those open, stinking jaws. Just before he bit into his face, Dylan heard a
thunk
, then the face shuddered forward and stopped, then lifted up.

“I should have let him kill you,” Kala said. She held onto her axe handle, the spiked end was lodged in the dead one’s skull. She pulled back on it, yanking the spike out of the bone at the same time the zombie fell backwards.

Dylan crab crawled backward, attempting to get to his feet, but Kala stopped him with the point of the fire axe hovering over his belly. She stood, legs apart and tall, with him beneath her.

“I scrape you with this axe and you’ll be infected, it’s got his blood all over it.”

Dylan stared at her with a mixture of fear and defiance, if such a thing was possible.

“Unsnap the backpack and take it off,” she told him. They heard some sounds from behind her. “They’re coming, you better hurry.”

Dylan complied.

“Good, toss it this way.” When the bag landed by her feet she spoke again. “I would have happily shared with you, and I told you that, you filthy thief.”

“Everyone’s just got to look out for themselves now.”

Kala shook her head. “It’s that kind of ignorance that's going to get you killed. Turn over, put your face into the dirt.”

Dylan hesitated and Kala let the axe drop a little.

“All right, all right!” he said holding up a hand. He did as she told him.

“Good, put your hands behind your head. And do it fast, we don’t have much time.” When Dylan was laid out like a criminal on the street, Kala stooped and picked up the backpack, then slung it over her shoulders. That done, she stepped over Dylan.

“Don’t let me see you again,” she growled at him. Then she walked off. She heard Dylan scuttle to his feet behind her, but without his weapon he was no threat to her at all.

She was feeling better, which meant she was feeling harder, and stronger.
No more bullshit, and nobody’s going to steal from me!
It took another five minutes to locate her car. Two tires were quite low, and an open window had provided the rainwater a nice place to collect and grow mildew.

She slid into the creaky driver’s side and felt for the keys. They were there! Oh thank god. She pumped the gas twice and turned the key,
whir whir whir
.
Oh no, not that!
She hit it again,
whir whir whir.
Oh Christ on sale, you have got to be kidding me! How can this be happening? They’re coming, for Christ's sake.
She turned the key again,
whir whir whir
, with less enthusiasm.
Shit, damn, hell!

“Stop it, you’ll kill the battery!” Dylan shouted at her. He was running at the car, fast, looking over his shoulder.

Kala raised the axe to defend herself but she was startled and Dylan was moving too fast. He reached out and yanked the axe out of her hand, causing her to fall out of the driver's seat and cry out in pain.

“Now,” he said, “I’m going to get this car started and then you’re taking me with you, deal?”

Kala glowered at him,
no fucking way.

“Deal?” he shouted.

“Ugh, yes, deal! Give me my axe!”

“In just a sec.” Dylan dropped to the ground by the front of the car and reached under it with the axe. Kala heard him strike something under the car three times, hard, then he shouted, “Start it!”

She hit the key and the engine roared to life.
Holy crap
, she thought. Dylan popped up and ran around the front of the car to get to the passenger side. Kala seriously contemplated just running his thieving ass over.
But he has your axe. Dammit, right again
. Kala shelved the thought for the moment. Dylan reached the door and vaulted in, tossing the axe behind him.

“Go, they’re right on top of us!”

Literally,
she thought. Two appeared right in front of them, running over the parked cars. With a quick look behind her, Kala jammed the car into reverse, skidding through the grass as she tore away from the approaching zombies, then spinning the wheel. It was a hairy few moments, waiting for the car to gain forward momentum after shifting, but the Subaru’s engine complied with her abusive demands and rocketed forward, gaining speed quickly as she charged for the airport road. As soon as they jumped over the curb and onto actual asphalt, Kala let out a breath she did not know she’d been holding.

“That was close,” she said quietly.

She silently glared at Dylan for a moment. She slowed, then turned out onto the road.

Dylan cleared his throat meekly. “So, uh, thank you for saving my life.”

“Thank you for starting the car.”

He nodded, then looked out the window, obviously ashamed of his own actions even after his, “gotta take care of ourselves,” statement.

“What was wrong with the car?”

“Starter solenoid is going bad,” he replied. “I had to bang on the starter to start it. We were lucky it worked.”

She nodded, lucky indeed. For both of them. “So will it keep doing that?”

“It’s likely. Just don’t shut off the car unless it’s absolutely necessary. Matter of time before it goes out completely.”

“So, who is us?”

Dylan looked at her questioningly.

“You said,
us
, before. So, who is us? Who is expecting you to return?”

Dylan shook his head. “Dammit.”

George Fredericks, people called him Fred, signed the last of his insurance forms with a sigh. He was woefully underinsured. He was eighty years old, and believed the modern insurance industry was a fraud. He still didn’t think he was wrong, but now he was being punished for his lack of foresight. He was sitting at the kitchen table inside his large double-wide modular home. There was a foundation and everything, it was not a trailer, but Fred wasn’t able to take the time off work to supervise the construction of a house, so having a modular placed onto the foundation was an easy solution for him and his wife. That was forty years ago now.

The house had seen a lot of wear since then, children and workers on the farm coming and going. His wife was long gone now, and when she left, she took with her the little desire Fred had for leisure time, for what others might call
fun.
Across from him, his insurance agent looked over the document, checking signatures and adding his own. Fred brushed rough fingers over his deeply spotted hands. His skin was always dark, tanned to a thick leathery texture by the sun. When the spots first started appearing, his wife had insisted he see a doctor. Age spots, the doc had called them. Later, ten years ago, as the dark patches started to grow, change, and stick together, another doctor told him it was cancer of the skin.

“Too many hours in the sun,” the doctor had said. It didn’t surprise Fred much. He was a farmer; he spent his life in the sun, toiling from dawn until dusk in the warm Michigan spring and summer. When the seasons changed and the earth became too cold to work, Fred and his family traveled to their orchards in northern Florida, where they farmed citrus all winter long. They homeschooled the children in a subject much more important, Fred thought, than reading and writing. That was hard work and good old-fashioned American labor. Fred never cared to tell his children about the cancer. Why bother? His wife was gone by then, succumbing to her own cancer, that of the breast. It had been a nasty ordeal, and he didn’t want any of that kind of nonsense when it came to his own passing.

“All right, Mr. Fredericks, that’s all I need,” the insurance agent told him, setting down his pen. Fred nodded his thanks. The young man slipped the signed paperwork into a folder and tucked it into his leather case.

“We’ll get back to you real soon.” The sandy-haired man held out a hand, which Fred shook. He couldn’t help but notice how small and soft the insurance agent’s hand felt. Not even his wife’s hands had been that soft, at least not in the time he could remember.

Agent Smock left without another word, closing the door gently behind him. For a minute or two, Fred just stayed where he sat, looking forlornly at the pictures of his children and grandchildren, even one great-grandchild. They were his hope, his legacy, and the reason he kept working hard every day.

“What a disappointment I have become,” he mumbled to the pictures on the wall, but they did not answer him, they were just as hollow as he felt.

He walked outside, climbing down the long deck steps into the backyard. He walked out past the enormous steel structure that housed his field and packaging equipment, then past the taller pole barn that held his sizeable tractor. He wandered into the orchard, the family orchard that had grown and thrived for one hundred years. But not now, not this year. The wide, craggy, apple trees that stretched for a hundred acres were barren. Their branches were not heavy with fruit, even though fall was rapidly approaching. Their flowers had withered and fallen to the ground after an extended bloom. But they were never fertilized, their pollen never spread from flower to flower. Not a single apple. Not a single dollar.

His meager insurance claim would pay for his heat through the winter, but nothing else. Fred held a withered hand out to the nearest tree, feeling the coarse black bark beneath his own coarse skin. It was a tragedy. He was absorbed in his own loss, but as he lowered himself to the ground and leaned back against the tree, he knew this was only the beginning of a much larger disaster. Everyone was so worried about the violent, zombie-like people in the south that sprang up and murdered those around them, spreading their sickness. But Fred had lived through many epidemics, and right or wrong, he saw those incidents as isolated. Whereas this new crisis would be in total, it would be all-consuming. When Fred realized the local bees were disappearing, not doing their diligent, lifelong work of pollinating the orchards, he immediately called commercial apiaries from New York to California. He would have to pay to have pollinators brought in. It would be expensive, but far less than an entire crop lost.

That was when the true breadth of the crisis hit him. All across the country, apiaries were reporting losses between 90 - 95%. Almost all of America's commercial pollinators were dying. He grabbed a tuft of grass and dirt from the ground next to him and sifted it around through his fingers. There were no ants, no beetles, not even a little pill bug. And he knew why.

Fred had always sprayed his farm for crop-eating pests, but sparingly, carefully, for he understood the delicate balance between life and death in the insect world. Too much and you could kill the bugs that enriched the earth and spread the pollen, too little and you ended up with apples and leaves that were chewed to pieces. He sighed and leaned his head back against his tree. Even though the zombie attacks were occurring in the south thus far, everyone knew the disease was spread by mosquitoes, like malaria. A kind of spray-happy panic was sweeping over the country, even here in Michigan where the mosquito population was only modest. Apparently, the tipping point had finally been met and exceeded in this battle against insects.

“We have finally done it, Lord; we have destroyed your creation.”

*****

Jason Carpenter boarded the small helicopter. On the short trip from the door of the CDC office complex to the helipad, he heard sirens rise up like a symphony of caterwauls from the area south of him. The sound gave him pause, but not more than the sight of three army Humvees screeching to a stop in front of the building. Four men rushed out of each Humvee. Radios were squawking and the men dispersed throughout the CDC’s large campus.

The helicopter shuddered as its rotors gained lift and then he was rising into the air over Atlanta. Jason watched the police lights illuminate the south side of Atlanta for miles. From the safety of the helicopter, in the cooler evening air, it was almost pretty. The pilot got a call and patched it into his headphones. It was Kaopyn.

“More bad news?” Jason asked.

“How did you know?”

“I can hear the sirens from up here!”

“Jesus, man. I don’t know if there was a tour bus full of infected or what, but police dispatch has reported thirty new sightings, all south of us, but it's chaos out there.”

“Well, if the parasite is here now, then you know there will be a lot more cases. This is only the first wave.”

“Yes, I know. We estimate only twenty percent of Atlanta residents have started receiving the antiparasitic treatments.”

“That's not even close to being able to rely on herd immunity.”

“You know, I don’t know why I even ask you to come around sometimes.”

“Well, I’m not exactly around anymore,” Jason chuckled as the chopper whisked him away from the city. “You going to be okay here?”

“Yes, my military transport has just arrived. It isn’t voluntary.”

“Some sort of doomsday protocol?”

“Something like that. I’m heading to our office in Iowa with half a dozen good doctors, real thinkers. We’re going to see if we can think a way around this outbreak, think of a way to get more medicine into everyone’s hands.”

“Too bad no one was thinking when this all started, when they firebombed Florida with freaking DDT! Too bad they weren't thinking when people started dumping pesticides into the lakes and rivers!”

“You know that wasn’t our call. There was no time, those people panicked, and we weren’t even consulted. And dammit, you know we publicly ostracized anyone dumping toxins into the water sources! We did not do this, Jason!”

“Sorry, sorry, I know it's a sore subject. I’m just frustrated.”

“Anyhow, I called to tell you that you will have to reroute to Dalton, we don't know if the airport here has been compromised.”

“Great.”

“Take care and be safe.”

“You too, Rosa.”

As soon as he clicked off, the pilot received another call and the helicopter changed paths.

“We’re going to have to take a detour, sir,” he said.

“I understand. Do we have enough fuel for something like that?”

The pilot hesitated, “We should be fine, sir.”

“Don’t ever become a salesman,” Jason chided him.

The pilot chuckled and dropped his black visor low over his face.

Jason leaned back and tried to relax, but the jarring chopper kept him from getting comfortable. That, and the weight his old friend Rosa Kaopyn had just placed on his shoulders. The task he had been given was to divine the solution to a global crisis the public didn’t even know existed yet.
Crap snacks.
The numbers that had been running through his head for a month now resurfaced and refigured in his mathematical mind, but again they came up with the same numbers.
Ten months.
Ten months until the end of civilization as they knew it.

It was every scientist's dream, every researcher's nightmare, and now, it was his mission to save the world. He was going to need a lot of coffee. The pilot broke his reverie by motioning below. A mass exodus was starting from Atlanta. They could see thousands of cars jamming the freeways, desperate to escape. Jason shook his head.

“There is no escape.”