Bits & Pieces (3 page)

Tom had studied jujutsu and karate since he was little. Kendo, too. He could fight with his hands and feet. He could grapple and wrestle.

He could use a sword.

Twice in his life he'd been in fights. Once in the seventh grade with a kid who was just being a punk. Once in twelfth grade when one of the kids on the hockey team mouthed
off to a girl Tom liked. Both fights had been brief. Some shoves, a couple of punches. The other guy went down both times. Not down and out, just down. Nothing big. No real damage.

Never once in his twenty years had Tom Imura fought for his life. Never once had he done serious harm to another person. The drills in the police academy, even the live-fire exercises, were no different from the dojo. It was all a dance. All practice and simulation. No real blood, no genuine intent.

All those years, all those black belts, they in no way prepared him for this moment.

To use a sword on a person. To cut flesh. To draw blood.

To kill.

There is no greater taboo. Only a psychopath disregards it without flinching. Tom was not a psychopath. He was a twenty-year-old Japanese-American police academy cadet. A son. A stepson. A half brother. He was barely a man. He couldn't even legally buy a beer.

He stood in the middle of his own street with a sword in his hands as everyone he knew in his neighborhood came at him. To kill him.

Video games don't prepare you for this.

Watching movies doesn't prepare you.

No training prepares you.

Nothing does.

Nothing.

He said, “Please . . .”

The people with the dead eyes and the slack faces moaned in reply. And they fell on him like a cloud of locusts.

The sword seemed to move of its own accord.

Distantly, Tom could feel his arms lift and swing. He could feel his hands tighten and loosen as the handle shifted within his grip for different cuts. The rising cut. The scarf cut. The lateral cut.

He saw the silver of the blade move like flowing mercury, tracing fire against the night.

He felt the shudder and shock as the weapon hit and sliced and cleaved through bone.

He felt his feet shift and step and pivot; he felt his waist turn, his thighs flex, his heels lift to tilt his mass into the cuts or to allow his knees to wheel him around.

He felt all of this.

He did not understand how any of it could happen when his mind was going blank. None of it came from his will. None of it was directed.

It just happened.

The moaning things came at him.

And his sword devoured them.

Three terrible minutes later, Tom unlocked the trunk and opened it.

Benny was cowering in the back of the trunk, huddled against Tom's gym bag. Tears and snot were pasted on his face. Benny opened his mouth to scream again, but he stopped. When he saw Tom, he stopped.

Tom stood there, the sword held loosely in one hand, the keys in the other. He was covered with blood. The sword was covered with blood.

The bodies around the car—more than a dozen of them—were covered with blood.

Benny screamed.

Not because he understood—he was far too young for that—but because the smell of blood reminded him of Dad. Of home. Benny wanted his mom.

He screamed and Tom stood there, trembling from head to toe. Tears broke from his eyes and fell in burning silver lines down his face.

“I'm sorry, Benny,” he said in a voice that was as broken as the world.

Tom tore off his blood-splattered shirt. The T-shirt he wore underneath was stained, but not as badly. Tom shivered as he lifted Benny and held him close. Benny beat at him with tiny fists.

“I'm sorry,” Tom said again.

All around him was a silent slaughterhouse.

And then it wasn't.

From the sides streets, from open doors,
more
of them came.

More.

More.

Mr. Gaynor from down the block. Old Lady Milhonne from across the street, wearing the same ratty bathrobe she always wore. The Kang kids. Delia and Marie Swanson. Others he didn't know. Even two cops in torn uniforms.

“No more,” Tom said as he buried his head in the cleft
between Benny's neck and shoulder. As if there was any comfort there.

No more.

But there was more, and on some level Tom knew there would always be more. This was how it was now. They'd hinted about it on the news. The street where he lived proved it to be true.

He kicked his way through them.

He kicked old Mr. Gaynor in the groin and watched the force of the kick bend him in half. It should have put him down. It should have left him in a purple-faced fetal ball.

It didn't.

Gaynor staggered and went down to one knee. His face did not change expression at all. Nothing. Not even a curl of the lip.

Then Gaynor got heavily, awkwardly to his feet and came forward again. Reaching for Benny.

Tom kicked him again. Same spot, even harder.

This time Gaynor didn't even go down to one knee. He tottered backward, caught his balance, and moved forward again.

Tom cursed at him. Shrieked every foul thing he could muster at him.

Benny squealed each time Tom kicked, and he hoped he wasn't crushing his brother as he exerted himself to lash out at the things around him.

He kicked once more, changing it from a front thrust to a
side thrust. Lower. To the knee instead of the groin. The femur broke with the sound of a batter hitting a hard one down the third-base line.

Sharp.

Gaynor went down that time. Not in pain, not yelling. But down. Bone speared through the cotton of his trousers, jagged and white. Tom stared at him, watching the man try to get back up again. Saw gravity pull him down, saw how the ruined scaffolding of shattered bone denied him the chance to stand.

Not pain.

Just broken bone.

Tom backed away, spun. Ran. Holding Benny, who kept screaming.

He dodged between parked cars, jumped over a fallen bike, blundered through a narrow gap in a row of privet hedges, staggered onto the pavement. Two teenagers, strangers, were there on their knees, faces buried in something that glistened and steamed.

A stomach.

Tom couldn't tell who it had been. But he saw the dead hands twitch. The teenagers recoiled from their meal, staring briefly with vacuous stupidity as the half-consumed body began shivering. The corpse tried to sit up, but there were no abdominal muscles left to power that effort. Instead it rolled onto its side, sloshing out intestines like dead snakes. The teenagers got to their feet, turned, looked, and sniffed the night.

Then they turned toward Tom.

And Benny.

Benny screamed and screamed and screamed.

It was then, only then, that the shape of this fit into Tom's mind. Not the cause, not the sense, not the solution.

The shape.

He backed away, turned, and ran again.

The lawns behind him were filled with slow bodies. Some sprawled on the grass like broken starfish, lacking enough of their muscles or tendons to move in any useful way. Others staggered along, relentless and slow.

Tom ran fast, clenching Benny to him, feeling the flutter of his brother's heart against his own chest.

The street ahead was filled with the people who had lived here in Sunset Hollow.

So many of them now.

All of them now.

Then another figure stepped out from behind a hedge.

Short, female, pretty. Wearing a torn dress. Wild eyes in a slack face.

She said, “Tom—?”

“Sherrie,” he said. Sherrie Tomlinson had gone all through school with him. Second grade through high school. He'd wanted to date her, but she was always a little standoffish. Not cold, just not interested.

Now she came toward him, ignoring his sword, ignoring the blood. She touched his face, his chest, his arms, his mouth.

“Tom? What is it?”

“Sherrie? Are you okay?”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don't 
know
.”

He didn't. There were news stories that made no sense. An outbreak in Pennsylvania. Then people getting sick in other places. Anywhere a plane from Philly landed. Anywhere near I-95 and I-76. Spreading out from bus terminals and train stations. The reporters put up numbers. Infected first, then casualties. In single digits. In triple. When Tom was racing back from the police academy, trying to get home, they were talking about blackout zones. Quarantine zones. There were helicopters in the air. Swarms of them. When he got home, the TV was on. Anderson Cooper was yelling—actually yelling—about fuel air bombs being deployed in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore. Other places.

London was about to go dark.

L.A. was on fire.

On 
fire
.

That's when he stopped watching TV. That's when they all stopped. It was when Dad came in from the backyard with those bites on his neck.

And it all fell apart.

All sense. All meaning.

All answers.

“What is it?” asked Sherrie.

All Tom could do was shake his head.

“What is it?”

He looked at her. Looked for wounds. For bites.

“What is it?” she repeated. And repeated it again.
“What is it?”

And Tom realized that the question was all Sherrie had left. She didn't want an answer. Couldn't really use one. She was like a machine left on after its usefulness was done. An organic recording device replaying a loop.

“What is it? What is it?” Varied only by the infrequent use of his name. “What is it, Tom?”

The only other changes were in the hysterical notes that ebbed and flowed.

The inflection, the stresses put on different words as something in her head misfired.

“What is 
it
?”

“What 
is
 it?”

“
What
is it?”

Like that. Repeated over and over again. A litany for an apocalyptic service without a church.

It reminded Tom of that old song.

“What's the Frequency, Kenneth?”

REM. From an album called 
Monster
.

Now there was irony.

“What's the Frequency, Kenneth?”

The title was a reference from an attack by two unknown assailants on a newsman. Dan Rather. Someone Tom's father used to watch. Someone his older brother, Sam, used to know. They kept whaling on Rather and demanding, “Kenneth, what's the frequency?”

Only Sherrie's message was simpler.

“What is it?”

Tom didn't have a word for it.

“Infection” was too shallow, and this ran a lot deeper.

“Pandemic” was a TV word. It seemed clinical despite its
implications. A word like that was too big and didn't seem to belong to this world. Not the world of the police academy; not here in sleepy little Sunset Hollow.

“What is it, Tom?”

The guy on Fox News called it the end of days. Like he was a biblical prophet. Called it that and then walked off to leave dead air.

End of days.

Tom couldn't tell Sherrie that this was the end of days. It was the end of today. And maybe it was the end of a lot of things.

But the end? The actual end?

Even now Tom didn't want to go all the way there.

He moved on, walking faster in hopes that she'd stop following him. She didn't. Sherrie walked with legs that chopped along like scissors. “What is it, Tom?”

She seemed to be settling into that now. Using his name. Latching onto him. Maybe because she thought that he knew where he was going.

He said, “I don't know.”

But it was clear Sherrie didn't hear him. Or maybe 
couldn't
.

Benny kept squirming, and Tom felt heat against his hip. Wet heat. Leaky diaper.

Damn.

Only pee, but still.

How do you change a diaper during the end of the world? What's the procedure there?

“What is it, Tom?”

He wheeled around, wanting to scream at her. To tell her to shut up. To hit her, to knock those stupid words out of her
mouth. To break that lipstick structure so it couldn't hold the words anymore.

She recoiled from him, eyes suddenly huge. In a small and plaintive voice she asked, “What is it, Tom?”

Then the bushes trembled and parted.

There were more of them.

Them.

“Sherrie,” Tom said quickly, “go to my car. It's right over there. It's unlocked.”

“What is it?”

“Get in the damn car.”

He pushed her away, fumbled with the door handle, pushed Benny inside. No time for car seats. Let them give him a ticket. A ticket would be nice.

“Sherrie, come on!”

She looked at him as if he was speaking a language composed of nonsense words. Vertical frown lines appeared between her brows.

“What is it?” she asked.

The people were coming now.

Many more of them.

Most of them strangers now. People from other parts of the town. Coming through yards and across lawns.

Coming.

Coming.

“Jesus, Sherrie, get in the damn car!”

She stepped back from him, shaking her head, almost smiling the way people do when they think you just don't get it.

“Sherrie—no!”

She backed one step too far.

Tom made a grab for her.

Ten hands grabbed her too. Her arms, her clothes, her hair.

“What is it, Tom?” she asked once more. Then she was gone.

Gone.

Sickened, horrified, Tom spun away and staggered toward the car. He thrust his sword into the passenger foot well and slid behind the wheel. Pulled the door shut as hands reached for him. Clawed at the door, at the glass.

It took forever to find the ignition slot, even though it was where it always was.

Behind him, Benny kept screaming.

The moans of the people outside were impossibly loud.