Afterbirth (9 page)

The impending darkness set Frank on-edge.

John fidgeted with the white gauze rolled around his arm, scratching and wincing when the itching turned to obvious pain.

Frank glared at him from the van’s driver’s seat. “Will you leave that alone?” A new knocking in the old van’s engine preoccupied him.

“Where are we going?”

Frank was concerned John’s infection would spread to John’s bloodstream. He needed antibiotics and there were only two places he might be able to get them.

The van limped into the parking lot of the remains of the EMS station that had taken thirty-five years of Frank’s life. 

“What are we doing here?” John asked.

“Going back in time.” Frank pulled the hood release and got out. Smoke rolled out of the hood and he assessed the damage. “Lock the door behind you,” he said. “I’m going to have to get parts to fix this.”

The lock clicked and John stared at the gray sky, thinking, certainly, the same thing as Frank.

How are we going to get out of here?

Frank stepped through the smashed front door and looked around at what was left of his former home away from home. To the left, a reception desk stood on-end. Pre-hospital Care Reports littered the filthy tile floor and blood spattered the formerly white walls where Cheryl, the dispatcher, once sat. He opened the door to the double-bay to find both ambulances and the first responder Jeep gone. “Looks like someone beat us to the truck.”

John pulled the bloodstained knife from inside of his boot and looked around, nervously. “So what’re we going to do now? This place has way too many holes in it to be a decent place to stay for the night.”

Frank drew his pistol and climbed the stairs to the second floor sleeping quarters. “You need antibiotics, or where we stay is going to be the least of your problems. There might be something in the garage cabinet. Look for anything ending in ‘cillin’. I’m going to check the upstairs office.”

The narrow second floor hallway hadn’t changed in years. Plaques and awards, photos and mementos hung where they always had. Frank stopped at the collage from the last picnic before Marjorie, his wife, had died, and stared at the group picture. She stood in the front. Her light brown hair showed the first signs of graying and her gentle, green eyes were identical to Holly’s. He took the frame down, pried the backing loose, and tucked the picture in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt.

It felt good to have a new memento.

He turned the office doorknob and sighed. Someone had the same idea as him. The supply cabinet had been ransacked and there was nothing left.

“Any luck?” John called up the stairs.

Frank went to the overnight room across the hall and stared out the window. “No, but I might have found a way out of here.”

Penny searched the master bedroom closet for warmer clothes and decided on a thick, purple sweatshirt two sizes too large. Unlike her family’s cramped trailer, the house was cold. She never thought she’d miss the smell of the old kerosene heater, or the radiant, orange glow of the flames inside of it. Her nose ran and her hands were stiff from the cold. She rubbed them together and stared out the window. Grief intruded on the quiet moments. She spent the day cleaning to keep her mind busy and had opened the window to air the room out. The newness of the seals made the windows hard to lock and she’d given up after ten minutes of trying. She refused to ask Foster for help and struggled to reconcile her mixed feelings about him.

“You really should eat something.”

She turned around to see him standing in the doorway. His reddish-blond hair stood on end and his white t-shirt was smeared with gun cleaning solution. He pushed his dark-framed glasses up on his nose and forced a smile.

“I found some canned food in the pantry.”

Her stomach was so used to starving that she didn’t feel hungry anymore. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

He shrugged. “It’s not like it’s going to get cold.”

She could see he was put off that she wouldn’t go with him. His footsteps trailed down the hardwood stairs and she held back her tears. The approaching darkness of the first night without her parents made the fresh memories all the more painful. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing them, not how they were in life, but what had become of them in those final moments.

She dried her eyes and headed down to the kitchen.

A plate of canned peaches and potted meat smeared on crackers sat on the table. Foster opened a bottle of red wine, though a half-glass of dark whiskey sat next to his plate.

Penny sat down and picked up a fork. She turned it over in her hand and was unable to look him in the eyes.

“I meant it when I said I was sorry.” He pushed aside a half-empty cartridge and a pile of bullets yet to be loaded. “All ten times.” He set a cracker on her plate and sighed.

“I know,” she said, crying again when it was the last thing she wanted to do. The repeated apologies solidified his guilt, whether or not there was another option.

She lifted a cracker to her lips and forced herself to eat. 

The meal was a reminder, as everything before it that day had been, that something had changed. No more rationing.
No more family.

The cracker drew the moisture from her mouth and she sipped the wine she wasn’t used to drinking to get the food down. One sip turned to one glass, then one refill, and before she knew it, she felt dizzy and somehow sadder.

Foster, who hadn’t talked the whole time they sat there, stood up and pushed his chair in. “We have to seal up the first floor for the night. I could use your help.” He went into the living room where an expansive fireplace provided the only light and heat in the house, leaving behind a half-eaten plate of food and an empty glass.

Penny’s stomach, unused to food, churned. The wine sloshed inside of her as she went out to help him. “What do you need me to do?”

Foster lifted a piece of plywood into place over the front window. “Can you hold this end up a minute?”

Splintered wood poked her fingers as she held the end of the board in place. Foster tightened down the screws, tucked the screwdriver into the back pocket of his jeans, and went to the next window.

“What’s the matter?” he asked when she didn’t follow.

“I can’t live like this.” She slumped down on the couch. She couldn’t keep boarding herself up in this house or that, and she couldn’t stand the tension or her anger with him.

“What are you saying?”

The wine made the words come too easily and without thinking. “I’m saying maybe I’m better off on my own.”

“This isn’t an alone world, anymore, Penny. Do you know how many nights I watched your house? What I had to do to keep you safe or how hard it was to do by myself? How long do you think you’ll last out there?”

“What are you talking about? Watching my
house
? Why would you do that?” She grew angrier by the minute.

“Do you really need to ask? Isn’t it obvious how I feel about you?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I risked my life for you. I can’t stand the thought of you out there, defenseless, and me not knowing that you’re all right.”

“I know how to shoot, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“There’s more to surviving than handling a gun, Penny. I’m sorry about what happened. I don’t know how many times I can say that, but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t get your parents bit. I just kept them from living in that undead hell and infecting others. I was there that night for
you
. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since we left the Nixon Center, and I thought that if we had some time, once you were away from that goddamned nightmare, that we could have something, together. I knew how important home was to you, and I did everything in my power to keep your family safe.”

She huffed out an annoyed breath. “We see how well that turned out.”

Reid moved the infant to one of the basement labs and stood over him with his fingers in his ears. The boy had been crying for hours and refused to eat what was left of his previous meal now that the flesh had gone rancid. His hands shook, his fused fingers frantically fanning the air, and his eyes had become whiter and more opaque.

The infection appeared to be winning.

“Please, for the love of God, shut-up.” Reid shook the bassinette, hard, and the boy stopped crying, but only for a second. All Reid wanted to do was to kill.

In order to keep the child fed, he knew he might have to.

He closed the lab door, climbed out of the basement, and took a deep breath. Silence never sounded so good. He dragged the extension ladder out of the hole and carried it to his F250, which he left parked in front of the main entrance. He checked under the driver’s seat for the bottle of chloroform and the Nixon Center towel he carried “just in case.”

Months of being hunted had prepared him.

He climbed in, turned the key, and cracked open his window. Cool air poured in and mitigated the gas smell from the most recent run. Fumes from the siphoning hose curled up on the passenger’s side floor magnified his already pounding headache.

Miles passed between the secluded hospital and anything residential. This was a run he didn’t want to make twice. The easy solution to his problem was to find and dispatch a survivor. Easy was a relative term because he hadn’t seen another sign of life for months, other than the men Nixon sent after him. He suddenly wished he’d take at least one of them prisoner. It was a mistake he wouldn’t make twice.

He looked through the house’s windows and prayed for a single lantern to guide him. His shoulders tensed and his mind raced with the worry of losing the one thing that might get him off of Nixon’s radar: the infant.

Farmhouses and trailers lined the roads, many of them overgrown and with damage too severe to be a good hide-out. The windows of the school were black with darkness and St. Margaret’s Church was all but destroyed.

He turned a sharp corner into the outskirts of downtown and the ladder slid to the far side of the truck’s bed. The houses, in better repair and closer together, formed a suburban utopia. This is where people with money had lived. A familiar, red Jeep caught his eye and he slammed on his breaks. The ladder crashed into the bed liner loud enough that he prayed no one had heard. Unlike the surrounding houses, this one’s first floor windows were boarded up. There was no way of telling how many people were inside, only that one of them was Brian Foster.

Reid took a lap around the block and calculated his next move.

Paul’s slicked-back hair shined in the lantern light as he held the cabin door open for Joe, whose sharp features were cast in shadows.

Ben lifted his aching head, fighting the weight of the heavy chains wrapped around his neck, wrists, and feet to see what lied ahead.

Nixon appeared behind Paul, a blurry figure in the requisite white lab coat who clucked his tongue in disappointment.

Ben squinted to make out what was dangling from his right hand.

“Get him in here.” Nixon propped the door with his foot and pulled on a pair of thick, fire-resistant gloves.

Ben groaned at the sharp pain from Joe and Paul each lifting one of his arms. “Please, help me,” he whispered to Paul, the less maniacal of the two.

Joe yanked harder and snickered when Ben’s shoulder
snapped
. Ben screamed out in pain. The weight of the heavy chains dragging along the rustic, hardwood floor strained the injured joint and gave a fiery quality to the pain.

“Wayne, please do something.” Ben prayed the enormous cook, to whom he’d never been cruel, would intervene.

Wayne tended the stock pot and kept his gaze averted.

Nixon pushed Wayne aside and unlatched the woodstove handle. The metal hinge creaked as the door opened. Red, yellow, and blue flames danced in the cast iron belly. Nixon shifted the positioning of the half-burnt logs and reached beneath them with what Ben could now see were a pair of metal pincers.

“String him up.”

“No!” Ben’s heart beat faster and he fought harder to get free.

Joe tore a piece off of a roll of duct tape and covered his mouth, running his hand across it until it was sealed air-tight.

Ben struggled to breathe through his blood-crusted nose, broken from his struggle with Joe.

Paul lowered an old farm-style pulley hook, which was suspended from chains to the ceiling. He turned up the wick on the oil lamp for more light and gave way to Joe. Beneath the pulley, sat a plastic drainage basin stained from years of hunters’ butchering.

Ben’s eyes went wide, his begging muffled and useless.

Joe shoved Ben forward and threaded the old hook through a link chain around his neck. The chain tightened down on Ben’s neck, enough to make it hard for him to swallow, as he was hoisted to near-choking. Joe secured the chain to a cleat on the wall.

Ben scrambled to keep his feet under him, determined not to be hung.

Paul watched quietly.

Joe laughed.

Nixon appeared in Ben’s periphery, brandishing a burning hot coal. “The most important thing about science, Ben, is control. Take the constant out of the experiment and it skews all of the data.” He shook his head with disappointment. “I know you know this.” He nodded for Joe to lift him a bit higher.

Sweat rolled down Ben’s balding head and stung his eyes. The pulley squealed and clunked. Rust and an imperfectly round wheel caused the lift to be painfully slow.

“That’s far enough,” Nixon said.

Ben stood almost on tiptoes, stretched far enough that the virus-induced shivers made him squirm like a fish on a hook.

Nixon moved closer, close enough that Ben could see him clearly and smell the chicken shit on his boots. “I have to go back to square one, thanks to you, and I just don’t have that kind of time.” He adjusted his grip on the pliers, the ember still glowing red. “I trusted you and this is my repayment?”

Ben braced himself and squeezed his eyes shut in order to avoid seeing what was undoubtedly coming.

“You’ll look at me when I’m talking to you. Hold him!”

Joe steadied Ben like a trainer holding a heavy bag.

Ben squirmed, but it only made Joe hold on tighter. He told himself to open his eyes, but as the radiant heat moved closer to his face, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The smell of ash and fire filled his clogged nose.

“I said ‘open your eyes’.” Nixon pressed a fiery ember to Ben’s right eyelid. The thin covering of skin sizzled and bubbled. Ben lost his breath.

A bright red light preceded total blindness and forced his other eye open. He watched in distorted, monocular vision as Nixon twisted the dying ember. Hot, wet vitreous fluid ran down his cheek and he fainted.

* * * * *

The hot air smelled of boiling chicken, sweat, and burning flesh. Allison changed from her sweat-soaked gown to a pair of scrubs Ben had left for her. A tear rolled down her cheek as she listened to his muffled cries coming through her door. She had never heard more pure screams of pain, and she knew that if she didn’t escape, she was next.

The wood floor was rough on her bare feet. She sat down and pulled on a pair of slipper socks, which were the closest things she had to shoes. Her weak legs shook as she eased herself up.

A single beam of moonlight through the dusty window highlighted a ridge of fingerprints just above the sill. She tiptoed across the room, pressed her fingertips into the weathered wood, and lifted. Her arms shook under the weight of the glass and a cold breeze washed over her.

She wedged Nixon’s binder to hold the window open and breathed a sigh of temporary relief.

“Wake him up!” Nixon’s voice boomed through the door.

She heard the sound of ripping tape. Ben screamed. Joe kept laughing. Time was running out.

Allison went headfirst out the window, the pain in her stomach nearly unbearable as she doubled-over, half-in and half-out of the room. Her breath hung in the cold night air as she huffed and braced for the inevitable fall.

“1-2-3.”

She tumbled out into the darkness, leaving Ben’s screams behind her. Cold mud soaked through her cotton pants and the pebbles scraped her palms. She held still for a minute to get her bearings.

White pinpoints of light dotted the night’s sky.

A hen strutted over and pecked at the feed by her feet.

She rolled onto her hands and knees and pushed herself onto her feet. A bone-deep chill took hold and she shivered. The mud froze her feet, and by the time she reached the gate, she began losing feeling in them.

She unlatched the hasp and headed toward the sound of rushing water in the distance. Following the stream would lead her to safety, or if not, if Ben was right and the treatment was the only think keeping her alive, it would lead her to someplace else to die, alone and on her own terms.