Evolution of the Dead (2 page)

Carmen ran into an open elevator.  She ran her finger up and down all of the shiny brass floor buttons not really caring where she went just as long as she was away from this nightmare.  When the doors opened again she was on the third floor.  No one was in the hall other than a hotel cleaning cart standing outside an open white door of a hotel suite.

Down the hall, a lady in a blood covered white frock was lying in a large pool of blood next to another man who was leaning against the wall choking.  Blood was running out of his ears.  A little further down, a man turned to look at her.  His clothing was covered in blood and vomit but he wasn’t struggling or begging for help.  He stood there reaching for her like the man inside the coffee shop had been.  His skin had a cracked pale yellow color.  Under his skin, his veins had turned orange.

Carmen stared at the man before she ran into the open suite.  She slammed the door shut, locking it behind her.

Now, sitting in an open window overlooking the city below, Carmen had her legs tucked under her chin.  Tears rolled down her cheeks. Carmen was afraid to go back into the hotel room because she thought the man out in the hall might break the door down and come in after her.  John and hundreds of others were standing down on the street.  All of their skin had gone yellow.  All of their veins had grown and now stood out through their broken cracked skin like orange spider webs.  Dried blood covered their clothing.  Long strings of mucus hung from their noses.  Their pants were soiled with urine and drying shit.

In the grass, on the street, on the brick walls of buildings, bodily fluids were splattered after erupting out of people’s bodies.

This is the window I was looking at when I had my vision
, she thought, tears dropping from her cheeks.

A hotel bus sat on the curb below her.

It’s not that far down to the bus.  I can make it.  It won’t hurt.  The fall won’t hurt
, she kept telling herself. 
I can make it to the car.

If she got down onto the roof of the bus, where would she go from there? The street around it was packed with people.  John was off to one side, his arm reaching up, trying to touch her.  The expression on his face was blank, his eyes were gone.

She didn’t think she’d be able to get through the group if she jumped down.  Her car sat on the side of the road not two blocks away.  If she could only get there…she could find a better place to hide.

She grabbed her knees a little tighter.

“I’ll wait here,” she mumbled, crying, her chin shivering.  “I’ll wait here a little longer.”

After exiting a hair salon downtown, Diane Patterson yelled at her five year old daughter, “Don’t touch that!”

Her daughter, Reesa, had just seen a five dollar bill lying on the sidewalk.  She was reaching to grab it.

“Money!” she said looking up at her mother.  “It’s money momma!”

“Well, be careful,” Diane said.  “You don’t know where it’s been.  It could be dirty and we just got prettied up.”

Reesa picked up the bill.  Handing it up to her mother, a long string of wet snot dripped from the edge.  It landed on the top of Reesa’s sandaled foot on a leather strap.

Diane jerked her hand back, stunned by the disgusting look of the bill.  “Honey, put that thing down!”

Reesa let it drop to the ground.

A man with deeply cracked dry yellow skin stepped on it.  He had no eyes.  His clothing was covered in blood.  Long strings of dangling snot hung from his mouth and nostrils swinging there as he went past.

He reached for Reesa.  Diane tried to grab her out of the way in time but she was too slow.  The dead man simply rested his hand on Reesa’s shoulder as he walked by.

Behind him, four others, all yellow, all with deeply dried cracked skin, large orange veins and bloody clothing came walking up the sidewalk from the direction of Lake Eola.

Frightened, Reesa screamed.  She grabbed her mother’s hip shying away from these men.  Something felt itchy on her shoulder.  She tried to scratch it away but it kept getting itchier.

Diane thought these weird looking men must be going to a parade or some kind of Fourth of July event.  Their costumes and make-up looked really good! Very professional.

Another one of the men coming up the road reached for her.  She ducked back playfully.  “Oh! You almost
got
me!”

He heavily vomited at her feet.  It splashed up onto her bare shins.

“Oh my
God
!”

Quickly, Diane grabbed Reesa’s hand, pulled the door open going back into the hair salon, and said, “Now we need to get cleaned up again.  Thanks
a lot
, asshole.”

Diane knelt down in front of Reesa as the door closed behind them.  “You ok, honey?”

Reesa’s skin was changing color, spreading quickly down her arm.  She bent over, hit by a strong stomach cramp.  She vomited all over the tiled floor.

The same receptionist who had just checked them out was texting her boyfriend when they came back in.  Without looking up she asked, “Can I help you?”

“Momma!” Reesa screamed holding her bottom.  “I gotta go poopy!”

“Ok honey!” Diane said, concerned.  She hugged her.  “We’ll find a toilet, ok?”

Reesa’s bowels blew wide open, flooding out, soiling the back of her pants all the way down to her ankles.

Reesa’s arms started to bleed.  She was crying, screaming for her mother.  Diane didn’t know what to do! She felt helpless as stomach cramps started to twist through her own bowels.

Reesa’s eyes blew out of her sockets. Her dead body fell backward onto the floor.  Her head hit the tile hard! Blood was coming out of every pore.

“Call 911!” Diane cried at the receptionist, bending over due to her own pain.

The receptionist was on her feet, her hands on her frightened face.  Throwing her long black hair back with the whip of her head she dialed 911.

With a shocked look on her face she asked, “The
line’s
busy? How can 911 be
busy
?”

Reesa’s dead body suddenly rolled onto its right side.  Her right arm bent at the elbow, pushed on the floor causing her dead torso to rise.  Her head slipped back.  There was no muscle control in her neck.

Her body started to fall forward but her left arm reached out and caught her weight.  Both of her hands pushed the rest of her body upward.  One knee bent forward putting her foot flat on the floor.

Her ruined dead body shakily stood on two legs.

Her brain had no function.  There was no sight.  There was no sense of smell.  All of Reesa’s body functions had ended.  The blood and liquids had been crushed out of her body by a massive infestation.

Under the layers of bloody torn skin, countless orange microscopic worms crawled through her veins, burrowing, moving here and there; causing her veins to pop up. Each worm had its own task in the ongoing evolution of the infestation.

The worms flooded through Reesa’s empty veins, filling them.  They were working toward a purpose to cause one of her arms to reach outward.

More worms surged into her legs, making her body step forward, teetering a bit, trying to walk, trying to become mobile so that she could touch and absorb into the body of this other taller undead host screaming into the phone, hiding behind the desk.

Diane’s own pain was excruciating, maddening, as it tore through her, flushing all liquids out of her body.

In death, Diane’s body dehydrated itself naturally as it fought to kill off this unknown infestation which had now settled deep into her drying bowels, reproducing itself over and over, billions of times in a matter of seconds until it became an entity of its own set on one goal.

Mobility
.

Diane’s dead body started to push itself to a standing position, too.

In the midst of a large panicked crowd running away from Lake Eola, five strangers broke away from the group.  They ran up a ramp of a parking garage.

In his frenzy of trying to escape, 30 year old Scott Olson, an architect, thought heading to higher ground might be a way to get away from the madness that had unfolded around him as he stepped out of an office building during a break for lunch.

He had been on the run for twenty minutes, dodging people as they choked, as they spewed vomit and discolored blood out of their changing bodies.

“Hurry, they’re getting closer,” Scott nervously yelled to the people running with him.  “
We gotta move! We gotta get higher
!”

With screams of people echoing up from below, they were suddenly blocked by a broken water line.  Water was spraying across the concrete floor at the top of the ramp.  The water was pooling, growing larger, much like the expanding infestation below.

A short Latino woman in the group, Jackie Mendoza, wearing sandals and a long flowing summer dress hollered, “Is it safe to cross?”

“I don’t know!” Scott yelled.

The water pooling was too wide to jump over.  It was now starting to rush down the ramp they just came up.

An older man with a short white goatee shouted over the rushing water, “You think we can get across by jumping across the top of the cars? They might be close enough to climb over.”  His eyes were wild with fear.

“I’m gonna take my chances,” Jackie hollered as she started tiptoeing through the rushing water.  When her foot touched the water, her skin started to yellow at the heel.

“No!” she screamed.  “No God please!”

Three other people in the group turned and quickly ran back down the way they came.

Scott hopped onto the hood of a car closer to the ramp. Two other people followed him; a woman wearing a green top with tan shorts and the older man with the white goatee.

Scott was able to step down onto the floor between the car he was on and get up onto the car in the next stall before water came gushing under.

Jackie was now lying face down in the water.  Blood and feces sprayed up out through her dress and splashed back down into the rushing water.

The contaminated water quickly spread across the flat concrete.  It was covering the whole down ramp now. Scott looked around for the next up ramp.  It was on the other end of the parking garage.  There weren’t enough cars to climb across to get to the other ramp.

If they didn’t do something quick, they would be trapped here with nowhere to go.

“We’re gonna get stuck here,” Kim Schlaegel, the woman with the green top shouted over the crashing water.  “What’re we gonna do?”

“I’m gonna go back before it’s too late,” the man with the white goatee said as he jumped down off the car. He sidestepped along the edge of the water.  He lost his balance and fell sideways onto his elbow, breaking it.  He grabbed his elbow in pain.  Water washed over him.  Scott and Kim watched helplessly as his skin started yellowing in seconds.  His muffled screams were quickly overcome by choking.

Jackie was up walking through the water.  She was a mobile infection that needed to be avoided at all costs.

Kim shouted, “We need to get out of here!”

With options of escape running low, Scott looked at the ceiling.  He expected to see mucus hanging from the supports or yellow hands reaching down through a hole.  Instead he saw black cable wiring running the length of the ceiling over to the other side of the garage.  If he and the lady in the green top could hang on them and swing across they might be able to get to the other side if the cables were strong enough to hold their weight.

He looked at her.  “You a good climber?”

She looked at him with her head cocked.  She had long sandy hair with straight cut bangs, a deep tan, light blue eyes, and white straight teeth.  She didn’t have any make-up on.

Kim asked, “Why?”

He pointed up at the cable lines.  “We’re gonna climb on those to get to the other side.”

She shouted, “Go! I’ll follow.”

Stepping up onto the roof of the car, Scott reached and grabbed one of the cables.  It was coated in a fine wet mist.  He jerked his hands back quickly.

Kim asked, “What’s wrong? Are they hot?”

“No there’s
moisture
on them.”

She rolled her eyes.  “Jesus man, grow some balls would ya?”

She hopped up onto the roof next to him elbowing him out of the way. Absent-mindedly, she thought he looked like the guy from the
Trivago
commercials; except maybe a little brawnier and definitely taller.

Jumping up, she grabbed a cable line in each hand and slowly shimmied along closely followed by Scott.

The cabling was strong.  It held their weight.

Jackie was moving around below them.  Her skin had dried.  It was cracking and peeling off.  Underneath, her veins had popped.  They were a deep orange color teeming with trillions of worms.  Her body stood in the raging water, one eye socket empty, the other eyeball bloodshot, following the hosts as they slung along the cable overhead.

As Kim got closer to Jackie, she kicked out with her foot and connected with her arm.  This caused Jackie to stumble in the water.  Her dead body was forced back a few feet.  It gave Kim enough space to shimmy along the cable faster and pass Jackie as she regained her footing.  Jackie reached out for Kim as she passed, but she was already out of range.  Turning around, Jackie stood in Scott’s way.  He dangled on the cable a few feet away from her, swaying, waiting for the infected woman to move out of the way.