Breathers (39 page)

Shouts of surprise and screams of terror are already filtering down the stairwell, accompanied by the building sounds of general chaos and hysteria, which means Zack and Luke are doing their job.

I really need to give them a raise.

Halfway up the first flight, I encounter a kid wearing only a pair of boxers and a partial erection.

“Run!” he says, trying to get past me. “There's someone upstairs eating—”

That's when he notices my blistered face and the blood running down my chin and splattered across my shirt.

He turns to flee but Zack takes him down in a way that almost makes me jealous. He has so much passion. I leave him to finish the job and continue to the second floor.

The first two rooms I check are empty, but in the third room I find a naked guy with a hairy ass trying to escape one leg at a time out the window. Before he can get his second leg through, I bite into his thigh, puncturing the femoral artery, then grab him and yank him, screaming, back inside.

At first I don't recognize who it is, then I see the army fatigues on the floor. For some weird reason, he's still wearing his knit beanie.

“No!” he screams. “No! No!”

His arms flail as he tries to grab something to hit me with, then he starts beating on me with his fists. I grab his balls and squeeze to stop him, then bite into his arm and start chewing, tearing off chunks of flesh and spitting them out until I hit
bone. Mom always told me not to waste food, but I don't really have much of an appetite. I just want this one to suffer.

Between his leg and his arm, he's lost a lot of blood, but he's still breathing. And conscious. But he won't be for long.

I lean over him, his own blood dripping from my lips onto his, and I look into his eyes. I don't know if he recognizes me. I don't know if he recognizes anything. But I want my face to be the last thing he sees before he dies.

“This is for Jerry,” I say before sinking my teeth into his throat.

Once his pulse stops I get up to leave, but stop when I hear the sound of muffled crying. When I open the closet door, I find a naked girl curled up on the floor, shivering in a pile of dirty clothes. She stares up at me, her eyes filled with tears.

I stare back at her, at her pale face and her dark hair, and for a moment I imagine she's Rita. Then the moment passes.

“Hey,” she says.

Either she's in shock or she recognizes me from
The Daily Show.

I realize how I must look covered in her boyfriend's blood. Or maybe he was just a one-night stand. Doesn't matter. She's better off.

I pull a blanket from the bed and cover her up, then put a finger to my lips and close the closet door.

When I come out of the room, Luke is standing there with another fraternity member dead and bleeding at his feet. Down the hallway, Zack chases a screaming brunette into one of the bedrooms. By the time I finish checking the remaining two rooms on the second floor, her screaming stops.

From downstairs comes more screaming and shouting, only not all of it is in agony or terror. Some of the fraternity members are fighting back, calling out to each other, trying to rally some courage. Above it all, I can hear Naomi, whooping
and hollering, exhorting Tom to “Rip that bitch apart!” and challenging any and all comers, “Bring it on, dead meat! Bring that weak ass shit on!”

And I was worried she wouldn't have a good time.

I don't hear any voices that sound like Carl or Helen, but they're more subtle than Naomi, so I just have to hope they have the back door secured. I don't hear any sirens yet, which means we still have time.

On the third-floor landing, Luke is feeding on a petite blonde with bad fashion sense. I remind him that there'll be plenty of time for snacking later and that he needs to remain focused on the task at hand.

Luke leaves the blonde and takes off down the hallway, while I open the first door on my left and discover two young kids sitting on a couch. One is slouched on the couch grinning while the other is leaned over a bong. Neither one is Nick and both are completely stoned. They look up at me and start laughing, a lungful of smoke exploding from the second one's mouth.

I walk over to the second one, grab him by the hair, slam his face into the coffee table, then pull him to his feet and bite off his nose before launching him through the window and out into the night.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the other one stops laughing.

He gets up and tries to put up a fight, but it ends quickly when I pin him against the couch and chew open his carotid artery.

While the wholesale massacre of the Sigma Chi members is, in itself, gratifying and addictive, it won't feel complete unless I get who I came for.

If you've never raided a fraternity to exact mortal revenge for the immolation of the woman you love, your unborn
child, and your best friend, then you probably wouldn't understand.

In the bedroom across the hall, I find a girl passed out with her panties around her ankles and a used condom on the bed next to her.

Honestly, someone should have killed the members of this fraternity a long time ago.

Back out in the hallway, some kid who looks like Jerry Seinfeld is holding up a fire extinguisher, threatening to empty it at Luke. Zack, meanwhile, has his hands full with a feisty, six-foot-tall redhead who rakes her fingernails across his face.

In the distance, I hear a familiar wailing.

Prior to entering the fraternity, we all agreed that once the sirens started, everyone would scatter. But I'm not going anywhere until I find Nick, and from the look and sound of it, neither is anyone else.

Maybe we can't stop.

Maybe we know running would be pointless.

Or maybe it's just too much damn fun.

Luke is laughing as he closes the gap on Seinfeld's twin, who depresses the nozzle on the fire extinguisher. When nothing happens, he throws the fire extinguisher at Luke, then runs down the hallway past a short kid with blond hair who has stepped out of a room with a can of Lysol and a lighter. Luke sees him and rushes forward, but the kid aims the can of Lysol at him, depresses the nozzle, and sprays a jet of flame directly into Luke's face.

Luke screams and falls to the ground as the kid turns toward Zack, the can held up, the flame of the lighter flickering.

“Zack!” I yell.

He ducks out of the way before the flame shoots out, but the six-foot redhead isn't as agile. Her synthetic sweater catches
on fire and she starts screaming, trying to slither out of it until she finally goes running off down the hallway, smoke and flames trailing out behind her.

The sirens are getting closer. And there are more of them. More than I've ever heard.

Luke is on the floor, being checked by his brother. I can't tell how badly he's burned, but I can't concentrate on Luke. I've found my mark.

Nick is standing less than ten feet from me, the Lysol and Bic held up in front of him like a crucifix. His hands are trembling, but at least he's fighting back. You have to admire that in a Breather. Most of them are just pussies.

“Hey, Nick,” I say.

He seems stunned that I know his name. But then recognition dawns in his eyes as I start to walk toward him and whatever courage drove Nick out into the hallway abandons him.

“Stay back,” he says, his voice uneven, his hands starting to shake. “S-s-stay back.”

When I pass Luke and glance down, I see that his face is blistered worse than mine and his eyebrows are gone.

“Get him out of here,” I say to Zack.

Zack turns and lets out a growl that chases Nick back inside his room, then he helps Luke to his feet. As they start to descend the stairs, I hear the first sirens coming down the street.

Nick closes and locks his door, but that doesn't keep me out. I'm inside and cornering him against his bar in seconds. He tries to shoot me with his Lysol flame but his fingers are shaking and he can't get the lighter to work, so he gives up and throws them at me.

“Fuck you!” he says. “Fuck you, you freak!”

Those aren't his last words, but when a zombie is devouring you while you're still alive, you tend to speak in gibberish.

When I've eaten enough of him so that he's hovering on the edge of consciousness, I grab a bottle of Bacardi 151 from his bar and dump it across Nick's ravaged body, then I pick up the can of Lysol, hold the lighter up in front of it, and spin the wheel.

From downstairs comes the sound of wood splintering and windows breaking, followed by authoritative voices barking commands. Outside, sirens continue to wail and red lights flash through the bedroom windows.

I think about Rita. I think about my unborn child. I think about Jerry. I think about the plans I had, the hopes and dreams, the love and friendship. I think about all that I endured for the past five months and how none of it can compare to the amount I've suffered this evening. To what I've lost.

“This is for Rita,” I say, then I depress the nozzle on the can of Lysol, turning Nick's body into an instant inferno.

At least he's still conscious enough to scream.

arl and Tom are on one side of me, while Helen is across from us next to Naomi. It reminds me of high school dances—boys on one side, girls on the other. Only without the music or the nervous anticipation of awkward, adolescent sex.

The five of us are in the Animal Control van, our ankles and wrists restrained and secured to one another and to the sides of the van, our mouths strapped and muzzled with leather harnesses. We're like the Hannibal Lecter quintet.

Being bound and muzzled isn't as bad as you might think. The restraints are actually nylon and the muzzles are soft and have that new-car smell. The worst part was all the TV cameras and reporters waiting for us outside. How embarrassing. Talk about an awkward moment.

At least Zack and Luke got away. Or that's what we hope. No one saw them after the Santa Cruz County SWAT team arrived and no one heard any gunfire or sounds of pursuit. My guess is they'll disappear into the mountains until things die down. Maybe Ian will take them in, though he's probably going to try to distance himself from us as much as possible. I wouldn't blame him. After all he did to help us, after all the
work he did to bring our plight into the national spotlight, we probably killed the civil rights movement in less than an hour.

Sooner or later something like this was bound to happen, either in retaliation or for the simple pleasure of human flesh. We're zombies. We eat Breathers. It's in our nature to feed. And while you can suppress that nature for a period of time, eventually it's going to clamor for attention. And the more you feed it, the hungrier it's going to get.

No one has said much since the more than two dozen cops, sheriff's deputies, and Animal Control officers captured us, restrained us, and led us out of the fraternity and into the van. We didn't put up much resistance. Killing and partially devouring Breathers takes a lot out of you and when you're done, you just want to relax with a good book and a mug of peppermint tea. Helps with the digestion.

But for the most part, no one has said anything because there's nothing to say. We all knew the consequences of our actions. We all knew how this would turn out.

Even for celebrities, there are certain transgressions that society won't tolerate. Like shoplifting in Beverly Hills. Or having sex with a minor. Or slaughtering everyone at a fraternity New Year's party.

You don't do what we did and expect to spend the night in a posh cage at the SPCA next to Bandit or Tigger. And white-collar prisons don't exist for the undead. We're going to the county, to the laboratory, to the donation station—to Dr. Frankenstein or Cadaver College or whatever euphemism you want to give it.

A couple of us will likely end up getting farmed for organs or used for vehicle impact tests. Maybe one or two of us will get decapitated, our heads used to help the future plastic surgeons of the world. And at least one of us will probably spend
the rest of our existence in restraints on the side of a hill at a field research facility for human decay, left out to rot to help with the study of criminal forensics. In the end, it amounts to the same thing.