And Doug did. He entered her and he remained there for a long time, fighting for control as long as he could. When he had gone to the point where his body exploded and his mind rode waves of pleasure, he withdrew and sat back for a moment, feeling a great sense of victory and knowing that he had, at least for now, controlled the demon within. But he was not finished yet. The game was good and he wanted it to go on.
Kacey giggled as she looked up at Doug and saw the relief on his face, the tiny drops of sweat on his brow, the ecstatic wideness of his eyes.
“Not bad,” she laughed. “We’re not done yet, are we?”
“No,” Doug told her. He had more exploring to do and he felt ready to do it. He was in a sudden realm of peace, of security, of confidence that he was not going to harm this woman. He saw her as a human being, not a machine, not a collection of components.
Kacey moaned as Doug went from place to place, his fingers moving across her body, his tongue touching here and there, caressing, probing, pressing invisible buttons that made noises of pleasure rise up from her lips and echo in the little room above the garage. Spasms of volcanic joy shook her body at intervals and she cried out more than once in purring sounds that were not words but pure exclamations of glee.
“Get the rest of my damn pants off,” she murmured after a while. Doug obeyed, backed up to the end of the bed, untied Kacey’s sneakers, pulled them off followed by her socks, then slid her jeans the rest of the way off, tossing them down to join the rest of her clothes in a tangled heap. He discarded the rest of his own attire too, looking, as he did so, at the naked body of the young woman he had just made love to. So absorbed in the act had he been that it had barely crossed his mind that he had just cast off the virginity he had held onto for so long out of fear that it might unleash the monster within his soul. If anything, he realized, it had done the opposite.
Pouring his energy and passion into the act of sharing pleasure with another human being had soothed him and sent his shadow-self off to some unknown place, leaving him alone. He gazed at Kacey’s naked body, his eyes taking in the whole picture from the hair that sat, tussled by his fingers, atop her head, down to her knees, ankles, and small pale feet he had just unveiled. She was there, she was alive, she drew happiness from his company and he had been with her in an intimate way without giving in to the urges he feared so much. He gazed at the woman on that bed and, without realizing it, began to cry.
Kacey laid in the slight coolness of the evening air that came in through the window to brush against her naked body. It felt wonderful. She had been with a few men before, hometown boys, natives of the same old town she’d seen every day of every week of every year of her life, but they had all been clumsy, groping apes without finesse, without consideration, all rushed tumbling and no skill. Compared to what she had known in the past, Doug had been wonderful, as if he’d followed his instincts and let go of inhibitions. Kacey felt incredible and she wondered how he had learned to do the things he had just done. It was almost, she thought in her dreamlike afterglow of the mind, like he understood exactly how a woman’s body was put together. As she looked up to see him staring down at her, she realized that a tear had made its way halfway down his face.
“Are you crying?” she asked. “What is it?”
“It’s you,” Doug said, just managing to get the words out. “You’re too beautiful.”
Chapter 9
Lieutenant Klein glanced at his watch: five-fifteen in the morning. The darkness outside the window showed the first signs of dissipation. Day was beginning, but what, Klein wondered, would the dawn reveal? How much of the Chicago that Klein had devoted his career to serving and protecting was still undamaged by recent events? Zombies! Klein had no better word in mind to describe the things that had turned his city into a battleground. It wasn’t something he ever thought he would see. Five-fifteen and he hadn’t slept, not a wink. His blood, he thought to himself, sarcasm defending his mind against the horror, must be more coffee than water by now.
Colonel Peterson returned at five-thirty. He had left by helicopter several hours earlier to meet with the mayor, the chief of police, representatives of the federal government and various others. Now he was back, marching into Klein’s makeshift command post with intensity in his eyes, shoulders held high. He looked rested and fully alert, but Klein suspected it was military discipline and adrenaline reserves that kept the army officer going, as he could not have had any more time to sleep than Klein had.
“Well?” Klein asked, not bothering with a more precise question.
“The city will be sealed within six hours,” Peterson said coldly, professionally. “More troops are on the way. We’ll need the assistance of your men and the rest of the police force as well of course.”
“That’s impossible!” Klein’s mind could not compute what Peterson had just said. “You can’t just seal a city, Colonel. Chicago’s no island. You can’t just close it off from the rest of the world!”
“We have to try, Lieutenant,” the colonel shot back. “I know … it’s like a Band-Aid over a bullet wound, but we have to do all we can to keep the contagion and violence from spreading. It’s insanity out there.”
Peterson walked over to the window, looking out with his back to Klein. “People are leaving in mass numbers, traffic flowing out at a pace that will choke the roads if it keeps increasing. We have to minimize the potential ways out to make it possible to set up checkpoints to look for the infected among those making their exodus. It’s not just the Empty Ones we have to worry about, either. There have been suicides, at least a dozen of them, by people who couldn’t stand the fear of what’s happening out there or those who got some religious bullshit about the end of the world in their heads. And I’m sure you’ve gotten the reports of accidental shootings too, people blowing away neighbors out of fear or because they were so on edge they thought they saw things that weren’t really there. It’s going too far too fast.”
Klein nodded. “Did you just refer to those things as Empty Ones? Where did that come from?”
“It was something one of my men said to me when the reports started coming across before we left the base,” Peterson explained. “This man, this captain, claims to have seen something like this before, when he was stationed in Africa. There, the people of some still-primitive tribe called the infected people by that name.”
“Interesting,” Klein said. “So just how high up did this ‘sealing off the city’ idea come from?”
“As high as it goes,” Peterson said. “It’s straight from a desk in the Oval Office.”
“Claire, wake up!” Danielle stood over her roommate’s bed, her voice growing louder with each word. “Claire, get the fuck up!”
Danielle had sat awake on the couch all night, alternating between thinking and turning on the TV to watch the latest news reports, most of them confused repetitions of what had already been either confirmed, or continued speculation. With dawn about to break through the darkness, she had risen, taken a few minutes to change and clean up. Now it was time to get her two companions out of Chicago before it was too late.
Claire sat up, straight and fast, eyes opening wide in alarm at the tone of Danielle’s shouting. “What?”
“Come on, Claire, get up. Get dressed, pack a bag. We’re getting out of here.”
Claire pulled the blanket loose from where it had been tucked under the mattress. She wrapped it around her body from thighs to shoulders, concealing her nakedness from Danielle as she stood up. “Where are we going?”
“Out of Chicago, fast as we can. I don’t know where, but things are getting worse out there. If we don’t get out soon, we never will.”
As Danielle spoke, everything Claire had seen on the news and heard from Danielle before going to sleep came crashing back into her mind in all its horror. She forgot modesty and let the blanket fall to the floor as she began pulling clothes from her dresser drawers, stepping into underwear, donning a T-shirt, pulling on socks.
“What about the kid?” Claire asked, remembering Brandon.
“We’ll take him with us,” Danielle said, adding, “obviously” with a strong slant of sarcasm. “What kind of a question is that?”
“Hi,” Brandon said from the doorway just as Claire had pulled up her jeans. “Is it almost morning? Why were you yelling?”
Danielle turned to Brandon, walked over to him and took his hand, leading him out of the room to let Claire finish dressing. They went into the living room, sat on the couch.
“How do you feel, Brandon?”
“Hungry,” was his answer, which sent relief washing over Danielle. At least for now, the shock and grief of what the boy had been through were not at the surface.
“Okay,” Danielle said. “You sit here and I’ll get you some breakfast. And after you eat, we’re getting out of here.”
“Where are we going?”
“Well, Chicago’s kind of a mess right now, so I think we should head out of here for a while and go to someplace less crowded. Now stay here and I’ll go get you some cereal.”
Danielle went into the kitchen, poured a bowl of Frosted Flakes. As she took the orange juice out of the refrigerator, she could hear the sound of the TV clicking on. For a second, she worried that Brandon would come unhinged when he came across the horrifying news reports. Her fears were dispelled as she heard him cry out in childlike wonder.
“Oh cool: zombies!”
Danielle could not help laughing as she heard Brandon’s innocent excitement. She carried the bowl of cereal into the living room and handed it to him.
“If that’s what they’re calling them,” she said as she sat down beside him, “I guess it’s as good a name as any. Doesn’t it scare you to think about those things walking around out there?”
“Nope,” the kid said through a mouth full of milk and crunchy flakes. “I’m not scared at all. Are you?”
“Maybe a little,” Danielle said, hoping her admission would make Brandon feel better about his own fear that he was so bravely trying to conceal. “But we’ll be fine. We just have to get past them all and get out of the city.”
“What if we have to fight them?”
“There are police and soldiers out there, Brandon. We’ll let them do the fighting. That’s no job for two college girls and a little boy.”
“But I bet I know more about those zombies than the army men do!”
“And why is that? A kid your age shouldn’t be watching scary movies.”
“It’s not from movies!”
“Then how do you know so much about the zombies, Brandon?”
The little boy fidgeted for a minute, swallowed his cereal, put the bowl down on the small table next to the couch, and looked at Danielle with a face that wore a mixture of innocence and guilt, wonder and dread.
“Because,” he said in a loud whisper, “I think I might have made them.”
“What do you mean, Brandon?”
“Well,” Brandon began his answer as his voice began to shake. “Zombies are dead people that came back from being dead and now they kill people, right? And they eat them!”
“Well, yes,” Danielle nodded, “at least according to horror movies that’s what they are, but there has to be another explanation in real life. I think what’s happening is some kind of sickness.”
“Yeah,” Brandon said, growing excited, “a zombie sickness! And I’m telling you … it started because of me! My brother was dead! And then I brought him back and he wasn’t dead anymore. But when he came alive again … there was something else with him! He was a zombie, wasn’t he? And he killed my Mom and my Dad, didn’t he? You can tell me. It’s okay, because I already know!”
“Yes, Brandon,” Danielle nodded sadly. “That’s what happened. Now what do you mean, you brought your brother back? As I understood it, your mother did that when she got him to breathe again after he fell in the water. Isn’t that what happened?”
“Yeah, that finished it, but I started it by putting him in rice and praying.”
“Why would you put him in rice?” Danielle asked, confused.
“Because it got the water out of Mom’s phone and I thought it might work with Joseph too. I didn’t know what else to do. I was scared. So I got rice and I put him on it and then I prayed … but I don’t think God heard me.”
“You don’t?”
“I think it was the wrong number and I called the Devil by mistake. That’s how I made the zombies come. It’s my fault.”
“Brandon, none of this is your fault.” Danielle felt sorry for him. “There’s no way anybody can blame a zombie infestation —I can’t believe I just said that seriously— on a seven-year old boy. Now finish your breakfast. I need to tell Claire to hurry up. We have to get going.”
She stood up, wishing she could make more sense out of what Brandon had just told her. Maybe, she thought, the chain of events that was tearing Chicago apart really had started with that poor family and their nearly drowned son, but there had to be a real, scientific explanation to how it had begun. Her interest in science and medicine made her want to sit down, close her eyes, go over every bit of information she’d stuffed into her head since starting med school, and solve the mystery that was tearing her home city apart. If only she had time to think. No, she told herself, shoving that thought aside; the first priority has to be to get to safety. She began to bang on the bathroom door to hurry Claire along. As she knocked, she glanced at the window. It was beginning to get light outside. She predicted a great tangle of traffic once the sun rose as people rushed to leave the city. She had hoped to beat what would probably be the worst morning rush hour in the history of Chicago.
Claire finally came out of the bathroom. Danielle sent Brandon in to wash up, gave him a spare toothbrush to use. She and Claire packed bags, one large bag each, with clothing, other small necessities, laptop computers and all the cash they had at the apartment. The money was not much; they would have to find an ATM on their way. Danielle felt a surge of adrenaline as she led the way, bag in one hand, crutch in the other. Claire walked behind her, holding Brandon’s hand. Claire was nervous and felt a few tears forming in her eyes. Brandon grinned with the look that only a child can have when he thinks he’s about to embark on a great adventure.
Doug woke up, blinked a few times. His brain registered that it was early morning. He sat up slowly, tired, gradually recalling where he was. He felt a bead of sweat trickle slowly down his face. As his mind adjusted to being awake, he remembered two things. He was in Kacey’s bed, and he had been dreaming.
The dream clung to his consciousness for a moment and he knew it had caused his perspiration. It had been a shadow-self dream. In the vision, Kacey sat across from him smiling. She had laughed as she announced that she had a surprise for him, a gift. He had smiled in anticipation and then watched in fascination as she had slowly, teasingly unbuttoned her shirt to reveal her naked body, but it was different. The left breast was gone, cut completely away, and a gaping hole, staring back at him like an empty eye socket, was in its place. Still giggling, Kacey reached one hand behind her back and produced her own heart, still beating, and offered it to Doug. “Look,” she said with glee, “it still works. Do you want to hold it?”
The dream was gone now, but Doug was disturbed by it. What if he had awakened enthralled by the dream’s content and been driven to make it reality? He could have killed her as she slept. Was being there with her a chance he could not afford to take, for her sake or his?
He got out of bed, suddenly uncomfortable with his own nakedness. He found his jeans, stepped into them, walked over to the window with his heart pounding. Part of him wanted to finish dressing and get out of there before Kacey woke, but part of him wanted desperately to be there with her, to be normal, to have no shadow-self, and to make love to her again. He sighed in frustration. He would stay, he decided, and see what happened next, but he vowed to flee at the first sign of trouble from his own corrupt soul.
After several minutes of gazing out the window into the driveway, Doug remembered everything else. He recalled the events in Chicago that kept him from returning home. He wondered what the status there was. He turned around, switched on Kacey’s small, old television and watched in morbid fascination as he came to understand just how serious the situation in his city had become.
The death toll was high but still only the roughest of estimates. People were being turned away from hospitals for fear of the contagion spreading. Most businesses were closed and the school system was completely shut down. Even the mail was suspended. The police, in tandem with the military, were in the process of locking down the city and setting up armed blockades on many roads. Some people were allowed to leave the city, but no one, unless affiliated with some branch of the government, was permitted to enter Chicago.