Project Pallid (31 page)

It’s like standing in front of one of
those mall grids—the type that says “You Are Here”, with a glaring, red
“X” to mark your spot. I’ve got to check the bottom for her hall’s letter and
number coding, then cross-reference it with the map on the top. From bottom to
top, and from top to bottom, my eyes shift back and forth to decode the puzzle.
All the while, I try to maintain constant awareness of everything around
me—listening for the slightest sound that breaks the deathly silence.

Finally, after what must be minutes,
maybe hours, I find it. It’s not far from where I’m standing. It looks like
it’s just around the corner and a couple side streets up the road. But when I
turn back to my car, I’m no longer alone. Silent but hurried, there are three
of them there: one’s moving in fast, and only yards from my car; two more
scramble quickly-in on flurried hands and feet from the far side of the parking
lot, just beyond my car.

I dive to get its door open, and I
lean-back on my spear just in time to catch the closest one, mid-air, as it
leaps over the roof of the Marquis and comes down hard on the point of my
upturned stake. With its blunt-end positioned firmly on the ground, the sharp
tip slices through its palate, then the top of his skull, like softened butter,
and I step aside as the union falls to the pavement—it’s a lifeless
sound, like a sack of flour dropped from five-feet up.

There’s no time to pry my weapon of
choice from its skull, so I resort to my backpack that rests on the seat.
Unzipped, its contents empty on the ground. There’s no time to waste. No time
for selective discernment. And I grab the next longest stake I’ve got, choosing
distance instead of a close-range, knife attack with either of the
two—now only a car-length away.

By the time the spear’s in hand, the
first lands on my side of the car. Seeing only Mr. Laverdier, I jam the
two-foot stake into its empty eye and reach to arm myself with another, as the
second one lands square on my back. I feel her nail-less fingers grab at my
skin; they latch onto me like eagle talons, and I worry she might spring away
with me still in her grip. My elbow kicks back to knock her aside, and she
rolls to the ground, but moves quick to her feet. They’ve been engineered to
fight.

I’m upright again, armed with two knives,
and she’s on the attack. Arms whirling, her few, remaining teeth snapping,
she’s coming in for the feed—like a starving animal without restraint.

I lash out with a lunge and try to catch
her in the face like I’d done the rest, but her spinning arms cast mine aside,
and the blade flies from my hand. It clangs across the tar as her mouth closes
around my shoulder, and I can feel the power of her bite. It tightens onto my
clavicle, and it threatens to snap the bone in two. The blood only fuels her
frenzy, and with more power than I’ve ever mustered before, my free arm swings
up, hooks round, and the point of my remaining blade juts out the other side of
her head.

The vice-like bite she has on me
instantly eases, and her teeth retract from my skin, as I push her
semi-lifeless body away. It falls to the ground: heavy, empty and lifeless now,
too.

That’s it.

I’m done.

It’s over.

Everything I’ve worked for.

Everything I’ve protected and hidden
myself from.

It’s all for nothing.

And now, like everyone else, I’ll be one
of them, too.

Four days.

Four days from infection to sickness.

Four days from sickness to death.

It’s fact.

And now, Damian Lawson, forgotten
freshman of Madison High, will finally be like everyone else.

May 11
^th:
12:04 P.M.

My
shoulder leaks with warm blood. It runs between my
fingers
and coats my hand in a thick layer of crimson goo that’s become one of the most
highly sought commodities around. I might as well shoot up flares to let them
know I’m here. My eyes can’t stop shifting between wound, parking lot, and the
campus’ surrounding fields. Is this really the end for me? Should I just throw
in the towel and end it, here and now? A wave of emotion rattles me. Each one
suggests its own course of action, contradictory to another, and I don’t know
what to do.

I
want to cry, but I can’t.

I
want to throw myself on my sharpest knife, but I can’t do that either.

And
I want to jump on the sunken, pallid face of the woman—the
thing—whose red-ringed mouth marks my demise, but it won’t achieve
anything, and I hold myself back.

And
then my shirt’s up and over my head.

I
use my knife to cut it up the middle, and with the two, long pieces at my
disposal, I wrap the first under my armpit and around my shoulder, again and
again, until I secure it in place and repeat the process with the second.

The
bite’s not so deep, and I’m not too worried about bleeding-out, but it’s not
the blood-loss I’m worried about. It’s what’s invading my body that’s most
damning. It’s the microscopic infection that’s undoubtedly made its way into my
bloodstream that’s leaving me defeated—like giving up might be the only
option I’ve got left.

I
try to think of everyone who could still be out there, and as difficult as it
all was before—when I was uninfected and strong—it feels almost
impossible now that I’m as much a detriment as I am of help to anyone. They’re
better off without me at this point. Maybe it’s time I finally accept my life
and world for what it is, instead of what I’ve been clinging to. Maybe it’s
time to let someone else take care of me again—or just let them find me
when it’s all said and done. To bury me alongside my dad. Or my sister. Or my
mom. Maybe even Catee.

And
the thought that if I go, there might be no one left to do that—to
reunite us, even after death—is what reinvigorates me. It brings my knee
to my chest and sends the heel of my shoe crashing into the face of the
nameless pallor that lies in front of me. My sole strikes the butt of my knife
and drives it downward until it clears her weakened skull and clangs into the
tar below. White mush fans around my foot, but I hardly mind, and I kick my
sneaker out to splatter the pale goo across the lot.

My
hard-set expression has returned. I can feel it in my clenching teeth and
shaking jaw—they’re glued so tight that my teeth could crumble like chalk
under the pressure of my angry determination.

I
will not go down like this.

I
will finish what I came for, and I will not relent until Catee’s dad has paid
for it all with his life.

My
makeshift bandages are nagging reminders of my pit-stop ambush as I climb back
into the Marquis and slam its door behind me.

Pedal
to the metal, I’m off to Androscoggin Hall.

I’ll
grab Nicole and then we’re out of here to finish what I’ve started.

But
swooping in on white horses—or in grey Grand Marquis—is the stuff
of dreams. The carefree ease with which it’s portrayed in books and movies
doesn’t translate so well to reality. And the imagery of dilapidated castles
and dried-up ivies is a thing of fantasy that’s incomparable to the disparaging
realities of my sister’s dorm.

The
Common, once lush and green, is speckled with white, dried-out bodies. Its
victims are gutted and strewn-out like fallen leaves—dried-up and
forgotten. I can’t even get my car into the lot of her building, but the mound
of stacked bodies at its entrance suggests there’s life here, somewhere. It’s
not a natural placement of corpses, and it’s not one I’ve seen anywhere before,
until now. They’re mixed: the sick and the Whitened, the mangled and gnawed on.
It’s like a pile of firewood that’s been haphazardly stacked for disposal.

Naturally,
I wonder who did it, and I look for Nicole’s face as I creep by. But I don’t
see her there.

The
main door of her building is propped open by its kickstand, and I get the sense
that I’m walking in on something: a cleansing of sorts. And as sickening as the
picture is, it gives me satisfaction to know that someone else is still alive.
That someone else survived the infection, and that they’re doing whatever they
can to purge its victims, infected or otherwise.

“Hello?????”
I ask of the empty stairwell, one foot inside and looking up into the vastness
of its six floors. I hope for a response, but I’m accustomed to none.

“Hello?????”
I loudly repeat. “Is there anyone up there?”

My
voice echoes, but it’s the only response.

I
can’t just leave though. Not when this is the last place Nicole was at. Not
when I’ve got concrete evidence, just outside, that someone else survived the
infection—at least long enough to start cleansing the dead.

“Can
you hear me??!!” I yell even louder, and I hope for anything that will bring
closure to the mysteriousness of the situation. Still, there’s nothing.

And
so I start my way up the short, concrete steps that lead to the first floor
landing: twelve in total—I count them. And then I turn left for the
second, and the answer to my question stares me in the face. There are three of
them there: two white, one not. The maimed is a boy—his clothes tell me
that much, or what’s left of them do. His shirt is mostly gone; his stomach is,
too. Turned almost completely inside out, I can see the grey of the stairs
through what remains of his torso. His dried-up innards spill in all
directions. Some still cling to their bodily connections, while others lay
nearby in dried and darkened pools, four-steps away, on both sides.

The
two infected have torn each other apart—mostly likely in competition for
him; haunting images of my pantry prison return, and I cringe.

One’s
head is barely connected, and it clings to its body by loose tissues at the
neck, while the other looks more mangled—sliced and spliced all over,
with chunks of flesh missing and dried splotches of white covering most its
body. Ironically, the pallid pair has collapsed in what looks like a loving
embrace that’s landed them a few steps below their collegiate meal, and I can’t
stifle yacking at the gore of it all. I splay a puddle of bile to my feet. It
tastes acrid in my mouth, and it burns my throat, but it doesn’t slow me down.

From
what I remember, my sister’s room is on the fifth floor. No. I
know
it’s
the fifth floor. I distinctly remember my mom complaining about walking the
flights on her bad knee when we first moved Nicole in, last fall. I step and
side step around the initial gore, but the rest of the stairwell’s the same.

Lit
only by shafts of light that shine through its arbitrarily dispersed and
irregularly shaped windows, the noontime light is plenty to illuminate the walk
to her floor. The smell of rot is intense, like forgotten meat in the trunk of
a car, and I can’t help but gag again as I make the turn to tackle the third
flight. It’s thankfully barren.

And
at my next turn, there are legs. But just legs.

They’re
still in jeans. Shoes, too.

But
they’re dismembered from the rest of their body.

Torn
completely away, they don’t even belong to the closest one that’s steps ahead:
a whited-out one. Hairless, sunken, toothless, and gaunt, it likely died in a
fight for the leg meat.

And
around the next bend, I see Nicole. She’s looking back at me, and her eyes are
desperate and pleading. Her arms reach out for me, like she knew I was coming,
and she’s asking for my help. But she can’t, because she’s only half the sister
she once was. She’s only half the sister I built cabins with and fought over
the most tedious crap with. She isn’t, and she won’t ever be again, the same
girl I used to torment by jumping from her closet in scary Halloween masks, or
the older sister who’d make me cry when she beat me down to put me in my place.
Good or bad, she’ll never be any of those things again, and I crumble. To scratched
knees and on concrete steps, I crumble.

Nicole’s
entirely gone, and there’s nothing that I or anyone else can do to bring her
back. Nothing can reunite with her separate half, and nothing can make her
whole again. I’ve dealt with the passing of my dad. I’ve come to terms with
it—as much as that’s possible. But this … this is something else
entirely. And it’s another thing I wasn’t prepared for. It’s something I don’t
know if I can handle. Everything we were, everything we’d experienced together,
it’s all been handed-off for me to carry alone, and it’s too much weight, and
it’s too many memories to bear alone. I can’t carry everything we
were—those things unseen that struck at the core of who we were, and who
we’re supposed to become. And now I’m left to carry the burden of my entire
family history, and I don’t think I can do it alone. Tears press from my eyes
in uncontrollable torrents of salt.

I’m
bawling, and my sobbing cries echo through the open stairwell. They reverberate
from its walls and amplify in its open corridors. And they can draw whatever
ears they want; I just don’t care anymore.

I
can’t handle it.

I’m
not strong enough.

And
I quit.

May 11
^th:
12:30 P.M.