Hissers (30 page)

Jason Drake fell forward, landed on his extra arm, looked for a minute like he might do some kind of break dancing hand spin, and remained still.

Where he’d been standing, Amanita remained, the bloody flagstone down at her side. Her face was awash in bits of gray meat.
Brains.

“Get up,” she said. She was shaking. “Let’s go before more come.”

Seth stood up, felt the breeze kiss his bare chest. Even though he’d just survived a near-death experience, he was embarrassed to be shirtless in front to Amanita. His body was flabby, pasty white. She would laugh, like the boys on the soccer team did when they played shirts against skins.

“Come on!” she urged.

He rose, covering his chest with his arms, and followed her across the street toward the nearest house. He saw the path to the front door missing one of its flagstones, and finally said thank you to Amanita.
She shrugged it off.

They entered the backyard, ran around the in-ground pool. Something or someone in the house behind them was banging at the back door. Seth risked a look back and saw an old woman with curlers in her hair and dark yellow eyes tugging at the door from the inside. The mesh screen had been ripped off but the metal latticework, like jail cell bars, was still in tact. Stupid lady locked herself in, he thought. They can break through glass and wood but they still don’t know how to undo a deadbolt.

Finally they reached the fence separating them from Felton Street.

“Climb up and check,” Am said. “And stop covering yourself like that. It’s weird.”

“I’m fat. I have bigger tits than you. I have man boobs.”

“I don’t care about your
moobs
right now. See if the street is clear.”

He climbed up and peeked over the top of the fence. Jefferson Liquors was a stone’s throw away, and next to it…the hardware store.

In the middle of the street was an overturned motorcycle. The rider was still on the seat, his face bashed to a pulp. Must have destroyed the brain, thought Seth. Everything else was still and quiet.

If a tumbleweed had drifted across the road right then, it would have seemed all too appropriate.

Sunday, 10:30am

There was no time to even shout about running, they just had to do it. Nicole pushed as hard as she could, willing her legs to move faster than her body would allow. A nauseating sickness filled her belly, fire burned in her chest. Beside her, Connor was running just as fast on his wounded leg.

She looked back and saw that their speed was not enough. The things were fast, too fast to outrun. Her only hope was that the fence around the baseball field would slow them down. But when the creatures reached it, they leapt over it like a hurdle. The couple that got tripped up on it jumped to their feet and joined in the chase again.

She could see the plane ahead on the street , the fire trucks and police cars still where they were last night. Some of the lights had died out, but most still spun and flashed. Two Marine Jeeps had joined the impromptu vehicle graveyard.

Connor looked over his shoulder as he ran. “I count eleven!”

“Who fucking cares!”

They hit the street, their sneakers sloshing through the deep, oily puddles from the fire hoses. The water slowed them down just enough that they had to take high steps as they ran.

Connor stopped. Spun around.

Nicole, now ahead of him, turned back and called to him.

She saw him raise the gun, aim, and fire. In the near distance, the top of a hisser’s head erupted in a mist of red. The body fell in a tumbling heap, tripping up two creatures on its heels.

Like a natural,
she thought.

He spun back and raced past her.

She went after him, still processing the sight of one of the hissers behind them, the one with the hand growing out of its neck.

They were running so fast they each slammed into the plane, palms out, to stop themselves. A hole the size of a pickup truck had been ripped in its side, just above knee level.

“Get in!” Connor shouted, climbing up into the charred cavity of the fuselage. He reached out for her hand. She gave it. He hauled her up.

He leaned out and fired off another shot.

She didn’t see if it hit its target. She was too confused.

“Find it!” he yelled, sighting down the gun’s barrel.

Even if he hit every attacking monster, she thought, the gunshots would bring out the rest.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she said, spinning in a circle. The inside of the plane was both soaking wet and hot as hell. Burned, wet leather seats were piled up in a pyramid. An overturned drink cart had spilled out cans of Coke and Sprite, V8 and Minute Maid orange juice. Luggage was tossed everywhere. The rest of the interior was a collection of wet ash that smelled like death.

She saw a bone at her feet. An arm bone, once human, now a memento of some geneticist’s work gone wrong.

“Anything?” Connor asked.

“No!” She caught a glimpse of blue sky from out the front of the plane, where the nose had been ripped off, moved that way. Shoving aside piles of blackened debris and loose wall, she pushed toward first class. If she were a doctor, someone important on a trip to Washington D.C., she’d probably have sat up close to the cockpit; hopefully the geneticist who’d been on board had had the same ego. Nicole had only been on a plane twice but she knew that the desire to sit in first class was hard wired into most people.

“Here they come!”

The first of the hissers jumped toward the opening in the plane. Connor fired, caught the creature between the eyes. Brains blasted out the side of its head.

Another one reached in, grabbed Connor’s leg and tried to yank him out. He pressed the gun to the creature’s eye and pulled the trigger.
Bam!
The back of this one’s head flew off in a pink disc.

Nicole instinctively counted the bullets. One on the field, one as they’d climbed in, two just now.
Four.

She had to hurry.

She tore through more debris, trying desperately to ignore the angry grunts and spine chilling hisses coming from behind her.

Bam!
Five.

Nothing, just ash and clothes, a fire extinguisher and bent metal from the seats. She jumped ahead.

Bam!
Six.

More metal supports, a laptop computer burned beyond repair, indistinguishable bits of plane.

Bam!
Seven.

The door to the bathroom, caved in almost to an L shape. She slid over it.

Bam!
Eight.

The shot rang in her ear, closer to her now. The bathroom was open, something metallic inside, under the busted sink and toilet.

Bam!
Nine.

Connor was retreating inward toward her. She threw herself into the bathroom, buried her hands in the flotsam and grabbed the shining object.

Bam!
Ten.

Her ears rang. She pulled out the object, turned it over. A metallic briefcase, wrapped in a thin film of soot. Something vaguely readable etched into the dented cover: Prop rty f Dr. M ci Hal y. It was still warm. A single key lock was fastened tight under the handle.

She felt Connor’s legs bump into her. “Time to go,” he said.

“I think this is it but I can’t tell.”

“Drop it. Back away.”

She dropped it. He spun and shot the lock. The damn thing actually popped open.

Eleven. Two bullets left.

The papers inside were brown and yellow, nearly destroyed from the heat. But there was enough visible writing she knew she had found something important. Chemical equations and various notes, scribbled in black pen, covered every page. Other documents mentioned DNA and chromosomes. Two USB flash drives were labeled
SEQUENCE DATA 1
and
SEQUENCE DATA 2
. Whoever designed this briefcase deserved an engineering award.

There were some printouts, what looked like x-rays, and a Polaroid picture bubbled from heat exposure. What little she could make out in the ruined photo showed a young military man, just a boy, with an extra arm growing out below his ribs. He was screaming in pain.

Bam! Bam!
Twelve, thirteen.

She heard a thud. The last hisser was down.

Her ears were ringing.

Connor lifted her up and dragged her forward. She dropped the briefcase, yelled for him to wait, then saw there was still one creature left in the cabin, barreling up the fuselage toward them. She just had time to wrap her fingers around the two flash drives before Connor pulled her so hard she nearly lost her shoes.

She kicked out and caught the creature in the gut, tripping him backwards over debris.

“Get up! C’mon! No more bullets!”

She got up and chased Connor to the front of the plane, fighting her way through thick ash. Connor jumped out through the hole where the cockpit should be. She could see the fear in his eyes as he looked back at her. She could hear the hissing maniac behind her.

She slithered out like a snake, landed on her back in a puddle, rolled up onto her feet just as the creature, the one with the hand on its neck, fell out as well.

Connor grabbed a strip of metal near his feet, swung it at the undead man. The makeshift weapon was caught by the vestigial hand. Both Connor and the creature fought for control of it as the monster’s other two flailing arms lunged for Nicole’s head.

Her wet hair slipped between the hisser’s hands as she leapt sideways, landing on something long and hard and metal. A piece of rebar. She grasped it and lunged at her attacker, drove it upward under its chin.

The rebar stabbed up through the creature’s mouth, pinning it shut. Connor wrestled the metal bar back, beat the creature in the head until it fell backwards into the puddle, slimy bits of brain dancing in the shimmering rainbow oil slick. Finally it went still.

He fell to his knees and took deep breaths.

Nicole moved cautiously around the three-handed hisser and sat beside Connor, threw her arms over him. “That was close.”

“Too close. Did you find it?”

She held up the flash drives. They were now wet, but maybe still useful. “I found these.”

The open mouth of the fuselage sat before them. Within, a line of dead hissers lay motionless on the debris. The blackened interior cabin walls were wet with brain.

“You shot them all?”

“Yeah, tight spot. They couldn’t get around each other. Let ‘em get close then—blam. Headshots.” He dropped the empty gun in the puddle.

“Thought you said there were eleven.”

“I suck at math.”

“I need to go back and get the briefcase. There’re documents and other bits of information that might—”

“No time. We announced our arrival pretty good.”

He was looking down the street. She followed his gaze and felt her stomach drop. Unlike Connor she was a whiz at math, and by her estimates about a hundred hissers were racing toward the plane.

“Shit,” she said.

“Figure we got about a half hour left before the fire bombing begins.”

“Double shit.”

Sunday, 10:10am

The door to the hardware store was locked, so Seth picked up a trashcan and hurled it at the front window. It hit with a
BONG
, bounced off and rolled back onto the sidewalk.

“Bullet proof?” he asked.

It wasn’t the glass that was the problem, Am realized, it was that Seth was too worried about covering up his body to use both hands. Okay yes, he was overweight, but it wasn’t like that was such a big deal in the long run. She could stand for an overweight guy if his intentions were kind and he made her feel special.
When would guys learn that being able to listen and talk was just as appealing as a six pack stomach?

“Not bulletproof,” she said, “just backbone.”

“Huh?”

“Put some into it. Forget about your damn body for a second. Use two arms.”

She could see how uncomfortable it was for him to pick up the trashcan again and expose himself but this was not the time nor place for vanity. He heaved it with all his fourteen-year-old might. This time the window spider-webbed.

“Do it again. Hurry.”

“I’m going, I’m going.” Seth retrieved the trashcan and spun in a three-sixty, let it go when he was facing the window. The can burst through the glass and slid across the tile floor inside, knocking over a rack of batteries and crashing against the cash register counter. The din was sure to raise the dead, no pun intended.

Am held her breath and waited for the alarm to sound. Then she remembered the power was out. Aside from the crunch of their feet on shards of glass, the store was silent.