Last Man Standing (Book 1): Hunger (5 page)

Distant gunfire echoes through the otherwise silent street. It sounds like it's coming from all directions, shifting with the wind. Most of it sounds like it's way off, but every dozen steps I flinch as a shot rings out dangerously close.

I pause at the end of the street, peering timidly around the corner to the main road. Empty. Silent. About half a block away a Prius sits in the middle of the road facing in my direction, blocking the street between both banks of parked cars. The front driver's door hangs open, but there's nobody to be seen.

I lean back against the wall and take a mental inventory to calm myself. I look down at my feet, starting from the ground up. A pair of thick, scuffed Alden boots, a hangover from the days I liked to pretend I was Indiana Jones while I tooled around the Mongolian countryside. Heavyweight jeans, the thickest I own. I've no idea if they'll help if some infected fucker tries to take a bite out of me, but it won't make me an easy meal.

I move further up. Two plain gray t-shirts, layered one over the other in case I need spare cotton for... I don't know, bandages? Might come in handy. Onto my coat, a vintage Belstaff Trialmaster motorcycle jacket. I'm pleased with this one. The thick waxed cotton might offer my some bite protection, but the really useful thing is the detachable belt. Could come in handy as a tourniquet, if it comes to it.

I pat my pockets. Cigarettes, because fuck it. If the world is about to end at least I don't have to worry about cancer any more. Two disposable lighters, and a freshly filled Zippo that still stinks of lighter fluid. 

In my right jeans pockets I feel the outline of my house key, looped to a tiny little three inch Victorinox pen knife with a blade so blunt it'd struggle to open a letter, and in my left my iPhone, complete with documentary evidence that I'm just the shittiest of shitty boyfriends, sleeping off too many Friday night beers while my girlfriend pleaded for help.

I've been thinking about that final message since I saw it, and even now at the worst possible time I hear it repeating over and over in my head.
I love you so much
. Beneath the fear and dread twisting my hungover stomach I feel the unpleasant grip of... guilt, I guess? Shame? I don't know what it is, exactly, but a pretty big part of me wants to turn around and run in the opposite direction.

I don't love Kate. I don't know how else to put it. I just don't love her, and I never said I did. I like her a whole bunch. I love
spending time
with her - that old dodge - but I'm not
in
love with her. It was probably a bad idea to ask her to move in with me, but it just felt right at the time. It felt like the adult thing to do, and a good way to rescue myself from the pit I'd fallen down.

And now I'm walking through Brooklyn with a flimsy aluminum baseball bat trying to rescue her, because again that's the grown up thing to do. It's the thing Paul McQueen
didn't
do, and even with my world collapsing around me I don't want anyone to judge me the way I judged him. I don't want people to think I'm a coward who'd abandon his girlfriend. I'm putting myself in harm's way
because I don't want people to think less of me.

Jesus
, I'm fucked up.

I push the thought from my head, take a deep breath, heft the baseball bat so I can grip it in the middle, and turn into the street. I stick close to the walls on the south side of the road, the red brick still wet from the rain. The sound of my jacket scraping against the rough surface sounds deafening in the eerie silence. I take a step away, terrified that a thousand killers might hear me and come flooding around the corner.

Nothing comes.

Where is everybody?

The Prius is just a few dozen feet away now, and I stop behind the cover of a parked Lincoln to cautiously check it out. It's not crashed. It just looks abandoned, like the driver had to get out of there in a hurry, and I wonder if he might have left the key in the ignition. The roads look clear enough, and I figure the quiet electric motor might make it a perfect stealthy getaway vehicle once I find Kate.

I decide to risk stepping out into the open. The gunfire sounds like it's all far away now. Whoever was shooting nearby a minute ago seems to have stopped. I step out from behind the Lincoln and slowly, carefully make my way towards the Prius, creeping from car to car, my head low.

It's just a few feet from me now. I cross the street stealthily and slowly lower myself to the ground to check out the space beneath the car. All clear. I stand up and walk to the door, but the moment I reach out and touch the frame I hear a sound that makes my blood freeze in my veins.

Breathing. Slow, wet, rasping breath, like the sucking sound make by the gross little spit vacuum at the dentist.

And it's coming from inside the car.

She comes out of nowhere, launching herself from the back seat towards the dashboard. It all happens too fast to take anything in, but I fall back onto my ass and kick out reflexively, randomly, like a toddler who doesn't want his diaper changed. I don't even realize my foot has connected with the door until I see it slam shut in her face just as she throws herself towards me. Her head bounces against the window with a sickening
thunk
as the door slams shut.

My ears are ringing and spots flash in front of my eyes, and it takes a few seconds before I realize the crazed, gulping sobs I hear are coming from me. I swallow hard and force myself to take a slow, shuddering breath.
Control yourself, Tom. Stop fucking panicking.

I sit there for a moment, my foot pressed against the door just long enough to be sure that it's firmly closed, then push myself from the ground and look in the car.

She's just a kid. Can't be more than ten years old. A cute, chubby little blonde thing, her long hair plaited like the princess from Frozen. She doesn't look like there's anything wrong with her. I can't see any visible wounds from here, apart from the bright red trickle of blood rolling down her forehead from the wound that opened up when she hit the window. She doesn't even have that glazed, milky contact lens look these things always have in the movies. She just looks like a little girl. Snarling and crazed, but a little girl all the same. If I didn't know better I'd assume she was just a normal kid throwing a violent tantrum.

I can't help but feel sorry for her as I watch her watching me. Now the door is closed and I lock eyes with her she holds still, meeting my gaze like a dog asserting its dominance. She looks like she's gone into low power mode, like she's waiting for the next stimulus to trigger an attack.

Not for the first time I wish the Thais hadn't been so fucking stubborn and pigheaded in the wake of their attack. The junta burned most of the bodies, and nobody knows what happened to the few walkers still on their feet after the military firebombed the remains of Bangkok. The Thais refused to share much of what they'd learned about these things. They insisted it was an internal matter, and as General Kantawat descended deeper into paranoid madness the government stopped even talking with the wider world.

God, the things we could have learned if they'd just shared with us. We might have been able to stop this. We might have found a vaccine. We might even have found a way to cure it. This cute, chubby little girl might have been saved with a simple injection, but instead she's staring into my eyes through the glass, a glob of bloody pink spit drooling down her chin as she snarls. She's done. Gone. If her parents are still alive they'll never see their daughter again.

I'm not sure they'd even
want
to see her. Not like this. I don't know her, and even
I
can hardly bear to look into those eyes and see nothing I recognize as human looking back at me. She's just an animal now. This sweet little kid probably woke up early this morning to catch some cartoons while she munched on Cheerios, and now she's nothing but a vehicle for violence. I know she'd try to kill me if I gave her an inch. She'd sink her teeth into my flesh and tear away a chunk if I opened the door right now.

I feel hot tears stream down my cheeks. I know the smart thing to do would be to get the fuck out of here before this little monster breaks through the window or figures out the door handle. If she manages to get out of her prison I'd better be far away.

A small part of me, though, whispers that I should free her from this hell. I should crack open the door just enough to slide my bat through the gap and give her a few sharp jabs in the face with the handle until her brain switches off. After all, what kind of a life does this pathetic little thing have to look forward to? Her best case scenario is that she escapes the car and goes on to kill and eat a bunch of people. It's not like she can look forward to college. She'll never have an awkward first date. She'll never make out with some kid from the football team in the back row of a theater. She's lost. Whatever made her human has gone, and the kind thing to do would be to end her suffering.

Common sense kicks in before I let myself reach out for the door handle. I have no clue how strong these things are. My only experience of them is a second hand story from an old friend who, to be fair, wasn't of sound mind when I last spoke to him. I don't know what this girl is capable of. Maybe she could spit the infection at me. Hell, maybe it's airborne. Maybe just opening the door again would be enough for it to work its way into my system and turn me into one of these mindless monsters. It may be too late already, for all I know. It might already be in my blood. The countdown may have already begun.

In any case, I have no idea if I could even bring myself to kill her. They make it look easy in the movies. A quick swing of the bat and the thing goes down, threat neutralized, but a nasty little thought in the back of my mind tells me that the reality wouldn't be quite so PG13. I'm guessing the reality is much, much messier, and the kind of thing that would lead to years of therapy. I'd pound away with the heel of the bat until this sweet little kid's face caved in. She'd probably keep snarling as I turned her head into jelly, and she wouldn't stop until I finally drove enough shards of shattered skull into her brain to turn the fucking thing off. I don't know if I have the will to do that. Or the strength, for that matter. I haven't so much as thrown a punch in ten years, and who knows how much force it would take to kill her?

I turn away from the car before I can dwell on it any longer, and jump with shock as the little girl begins to pound her head hard against the glass. My movement set her off again, and now she's once again crazed. With each dull thump against the window the wound in her forehead spreads open wider, and the glass quickly smears with so much blood it looks like she's hiding behind a stained glass window.

I can't watch any longer. It doesn't look like she has the strength to break through, but I can't bear to see her destroy herself.

I hurry away from the car, moving on in the direction of the antique store where I hope - where I
need
- to find Kate. As I walk I can't help but wonder what it's like to be one of those things. Is that little girl still in there somewhere, trapped in the back of a mind now controlled by a monster? Is she watching what's happening to her through eyes she can't control, watching her own limbs move against her will, like a puppet?

Can she feel pain? Is she afraid? Does she miss her parents?

I shake my head to evict such thoughts, and remind myself that the more I dwell on questions like this the more likely it becomes that I'll get to learn the answers first hand. I need to be vigilant. I can't walk around in a daze, asking myself pointless questions while the world goes to shit. Survival is all that matters right now. Philosophy can take a number.

I reach another intersection, the last before the commercial block with Kate's coffee shop at its center After reading her texts I expect the antique store across the street from her place to be swarming with the infected, and I feel my heart thump madly in my chest as I creep towards the corner.

I crouch down low and hold my breath before I poke my head around the wall, as if the things could hear my breathing at fifty paces. I hardly dare look. I know what I see around the corner will tell me if she's dead, and... well, I really don't want to know. I don't want to replace the terrifying hope of
maybe
with the crushing, leaden finality of
no
.

I force myself to look. With the handle of the bat gripped tight in my fist I creep forward to the corner of the intersection and slowly poke my head out, peering down the road.