One Blink From Oblivion (7 page)

***

Max and Brooke sit wordlessly in the Audi, still struggling to come to grips with what they’ve just heard. The prospect that they could encounter others like Vanessa is too unspeakable to even digest, much less give words to.

“We need to get home,” Max says with a new sense of urgency. “I have to get to my grandmother. She’s all alone.”

Knowing and respecting Max’s relationship with his grandmother, Brooke realizes that to argue this course of action would be futile, “You’re right. We better get Vinny and go. If the streets are clear like this all over, and we drive like bats out of hell, then we should be able to get there in about an hour.”

Max swings his driver’s side door open, scrambles around the Audi’s long hood and releases the door latch on Brooke’s side of the car. The two of them bound up the steps to the sheriff’s station and push through the double doors, having never noticed the two yellow eyes that have been watching them unblinkingly from the shadows across the street.

***

Inside the front doors, they stand briefly peering into the dimly lit lobby of the station and allowing their eyes to adjust.

Brooke states the obvious, “This place looks empty.”

Max, filled with a sense of foreboding, says nothing. He instead cocks his head to one side and listens.

“Do you hear that?” he asks in a low whisper, still straining to discern the sound.

Before Brooke can respond, a blood curdling shriek -akin to that of a barn owl on the hunt- cuts through the musty air of the station and envelopes her in pure dread.

“What the hell was that?” Max asks knowing the answer but not wanting to believe it.

Brooke stands motionless and focuses hard on the twilit room before them, “Oh God, someone’s infected.” She whispers.

Realizing that one way or the other, the shrill trumpeting of the infected probably means Vinny’s demise Brooke shrinks visibly. The weight of the thought is more than she can bear.

“We have to find Vinny,” Max says as he’s already begun to move.

“Wait!” cries Brooke, “Don’t you see that might have
been
Vinny!”

The words stop Max for a moment as he considers, “Go back to the car and connect the yellow and blue wires under the dash. If I’m not back in five minutes, I want you to leave. If Vinny comes out without me, then be careful.”

Brooke opens her mouth and prepares to debate but the look that Max gives her counters all of her points before she can make them. His expression tells her ‘Vinny’s my best friend and I’m not leaving without him’, and ‘I’m prepared for this in ways I can’t explain’. 

She leaves him with a hug and the appeal, “Be careful.”

The words are soft and full of more meaning than their mere definitions allow. Her hand lightly brushes Max’s cheek as she separates from him and momentarily gazes into his dark eyes. She turns and exits the front door.

Out on the front steps Brooke cautiously looks up and down the street. Solitude still rules the night air and she finds herself guiltily grateful that the consternation that Max now faces is to some extent behind her, at least for now.

Max quickly and quietly searches the multi office complex for signs: signs of Vinny and Lisa, signs of anyone else –alive or dead. What he finds is a bramble of file cabinets, papers, desks and drawers everywhere he looks. It is evident that either something had gone on a rampage or someone was looking for something. Max is hoping for the latter.

He reconnoiters each office as he makes his way down the increasingly dark passageway until the sign above one door in particular catches his eye, ‘ARMORY’. If Vinny went this way then he definitely would have stopped here. Max finds the door to the armory unlocked and proceeds inward. All of the lockers are open and the guns have apparently been picked over. Max considers that this could be a good or bad sign. It means that Vinny is probably armed. If he isn’t infected then he has the means to defend his self. If he is infected then –assuming he possesses the where-with-all to pull the trigger- he is that much more dangerous. The prospect of facing his best friend as a deranged adversary is more than unsettling. He isn’t sure what he would do if it came to that, but he does know what he is capable of. His father had taught him things about himself that no one should ever learn. Max shakes off that thought and reminds himself of the doctor’s words, “If the infection doesn’t kill us, the infected will.” In addition, there were two very dear ladies counting on him and he isn’t going to let them down. Not this time. Not again.

Max searches the armory for a weapon that’s simple to use while keeping in mind the doctor’s prescribed methods of defense. He settles on a riot shotgun and finds it to be partially loaded with a single shell of buckshot in the chamber. It is compact enough for close-quarters battle but still packs the 12-gauge punch he needs to put down an infected. He surveys the ground for more double-ought buckshot and finds a mix of shells scattered about -some buckshot and some labeled ‘shredders’. He recalls from a course in criminal justice that S.W.A.T. officers sometimes used shredders to defeat deadbolts and various other locks when serving high-risk warrants. He loads the three loose shredders first and finishes off with two more buckshot for a total of six shells in the gun including the one in the chamber. He searches a bit more on the cluttered floor and finds a shredder box still half full and slips it into the pocket of his cargo pants. Now, with a slightly higher level of confidence he steps into the hall and continues his search for Vinny. He is beginning to fear the worst since no other sounds have followed the horrible shriek that he heard earlier. He treads silently, opting for the element of surprise, rather than calling out and possibly alerting someone unfriendly to his presence.

***

Vinny is now down in the temporary holding cells that occupy the basement of the sheriffs station. The scream he heard moments ago vaguely reminds him of the previous night’s events but he can’t put his finger on the meaning. He wishes he hadn’t drunk so much then. He feels the memory is important but can’t quite pull it together. He is still hoping to find someone –preferably Lisa- that is possibly searching like him but too afraid to answer his calls, perhaps even running from his calls. Who knows what had happened here. Given what he saw at the cabin he could certainly relate to being scared silent.

The scream is his only clue to the location of his quarry since the footsteps had subsided or gotten too far away for him to hear. Armed with a flashlight in his left hand and the .357 magnum revolver in his right, Vinny scouts one cell after another. So far, all are empty and most are unlocked, that is, until he reaches the last one. Like most of the others, the door is unlocked and hanging ajar. He pans the light from one side of the small cell to the other. It appears empty, but an upturned mattress that rests against the combination wash basin/toilet obstructs his view of the back-right corner of the cell.

Vinny slowly nudges the heavy-duty steel barred cell door with his foot and though it offers some resistance and a complaint in the form of a loud squeal, it opens just enough for him to get his tall slender body through. He steps in, being careful to keep the beam of his light trained on the unexplored corner of the cell. He walks methodically, sidestepping debris that’s been spread across the floor of the cell. He wants to be certain to keep a solid footing should the need to run arise. As he nears the excessively stained mattress, his heartbeat quickens to a drum roll in his chest. Once in range he reaches out with the flashlight and uses it to lever the mattress back toward himself.

Vinny cocks the hammer of the revolver back and raises the gun with an outstretched arm until it’s level with his shoulder. He makes one last tug with the flashlight and the mattress falls toward him hitting the floor with a dull wallop and kicking up a cloud of dust from the seldom-occupied cell. The filth fills the air and envelopes his face. He instinctively shuts his eyes but he is too late. He drops the flashlight and reaches for his eyes that are already filled with dust and beginning to burn. Fortunately his grip on the weapon remains.

“Shit!” he realizes instantly what he’s done and fights the urge to keep his eyes closed.

The plastic flashlight bounces on the floor and momentarily catches the image of a face. Dark hair hanging long in front of it disguises its features and gives it a ghoulish appearance. Even through the dusty haze, it is enough to make Vinny shudder. Reflexively his right hand tenses around the gun and he inadvertently pulls the hair trigger of the magnum. The hammer falls and a bolt of lightening complete with thunderous crack erupts from the muzzle and shines a split second of bright light on his unintentional target. In that brief moment, Vinny catches a glimpse of a yellow windbreaker and his stomach knots with dread. He hears Lisa fall hard to the floor with a thud and he reaches for his fallen flashlight. His light has rolled behind him and back to the cell door. It now shines back down the corridor that had brought Vinny to this cell. He couldn’t escape the irony of his location if in fact Lisa lies dead behind him.

“No, No, No God No!” his eyes –previously wet from the airborne irritants now begin to flow with guilt and despair.

He bends to retrieve his light, which begins to flicker apparently damaged by the fall. Vinny returns the gun to his waistband to free his right hand and raps the flashlight a couple of times until the beam once again shines brightly.

Vinny turns to Lisa hoping it isn’t too late to administer some help but deep down knowing better. As he completes his spin, he discovers her standing on the fallen mattress nose to nose with him. The stench of death rises off of her like a slaughterhouse butcher after a full day of hard labor. He recognizes the look in her eyes as well as the yellow halos around her pupils as she stands so close to him now that the flashlight is no longer necessary. Lisa’s face bears a striking resemblance to Vanessa’s -post psychotic break. She had that same unhinged look that Vanessa did when she fed her freakish baby through her torn womb, the only difference being a missing three-inch triangle of scalp, skull and brain that had been blown off of Lisa’s head by the magnum revolver. Red, bloodstained teeth smile at Vinny, sardonically.

Vinny reaches for his waist with his right hand while his left brings the flashlight crashing to Lisa’s temple with such force the plastic shatters into pieces and the light is instantly extinguished with a hollow pop. Before Vinny can reach the gun in his waistband, he feels a beastly-strong hand grip his left shoulder and squeeze. Bright flashes of pain ripple through his left arm and up his neck like a red-hot soldering iron and he stumbles a step backward… Lisa follows. While Lisa –no longer standing on the mattress- adjusts her bone-crushing grip lower on his arm Vinny steadies himself enough to pull the .357 free from his waistband. He places it flush against Lisa’s gut and unloads the five remaining bullets with a series of muffled wet
thwumps
. Blood and bile erupt back at Vinny covering his hand and spraying into his face. By the third shot, Lisa has loosened her grip and Vinny manages to wedge his searing left arm between them, which he uses to push her backward toward the fallen mattress. As he’d hoped, the mattress catches the back heel of her right shoe and sends her tumbling to the floor. Her head –minus the missing triangular chunk- smashes against the side of the commode on the way down. Vinny waivers from the pain delivered by Lisa’s crushing grip. He turns and stumbles to the door. His eyes have adjusted to the darkness and through a fog, he now sees a crumpled sheet on the floor and wedged under the cell door. He heads for the sheet with the intention of turning it into a sling for his left arm. Given the haze of pain he’s under the few steps to the door are increasingly hard. He reaches for the sheet and pulls it. Again, the door squeals.

***

Max was slowly picking his way through the shamble of rooms and offices of the sheriff station when he heard a gunshot reverberate up from beyond and below the dark corridor. The shot gave him renewed hope of finding someone that was still on the humane side of human and he bolted blindly through the shadows in the direction of the sound. He dozed through anything in his path with total disregard for cacophony he left in his wake. Aiding whoever had fired the shot was now paramount to avoiding his own personal detection. His mind was squarely on the thought of Vinny –either on the giving or receiving end of the gun- and the possibility of his friend’s survival.

He wasted no time with the basement steps and instead leaped down them without breaking his stride or his grip on the shotgun that he held cocked and ready. He was now down in the retention cell level of the station and light was sparse. A small shard of light pierced the cellblock and bounced low off of the wall. He felt that was a good sign. A ‘biter’ probably wouldn’t use a flashlight. He slowed his pace in order to dampen the sound of his approach and zeroed in on the direction of the light just before it was extinguished with a pop. He heard the gun sound off again, this time a series of low hollow tones echoed through the cellblock and across the cold concrete floor. The reverberation caused his ears to ache.

When the gun had first been fired, Max thought he recognized the sound as a large caliber handgun. After the most recent flurry he was sure of it and by his count that meant that the weapon was almost certainly empty now, leaving he or she who wielded it defenseless against a threat that they probably couldn’t comprehend.

Figuring that anyone close to the sound of the gun had more than likely been temporarily deafened by it, Max quickened his pace until he got closer to where he’d seen the beam. Max put his back against the smooth concrete wall opposite the cell doors and raised the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder. He slid silently against the wall while covering the last few yards to the final cell.