The Infected: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (27 page)

“Me, too,” she confided. Leaning in close, she whispered. “I saw a woman and her kids killed this morning,” she said. “Out front, on fucking Tryon Street, for God’s sake!” She had glanced around to see if anyone was watching them. “An ambulance came and took them away, and a little bit after that, a fire truck drove up and hosed down the street.” She peered down the hallway, toward Linden’s office, Cutter knew. “What the fuck are we doing here? We should all just leave,” she insisted. “I’ve got family up in Brevard. My parents, a brother, his wife and kids. I’m going up there and holing up with them. It’s out in the country. Safe,” she added. “I wouldn’t be here, except that asshole not only threatened my job, he hinted that he could have the authorities either bring me in or haul me to jail. But fuck it. I’m thinking run now, while we still can.”

“Who’ll unlock the door for us?” Cutter asked, trying to make light of things.

Instead of answering him, the shapely Miss Penland had turned and walked away. He never saw her again, and he supposed that she had gone through with it and slipped out before all Hell broke loose.

In his office, Cutter had gone about the tasks left out for him. He had more than twenty accounts to cover that day and the list of each contact with whom he had to deal. As the company’s salesmen went, he wasn’t the best of the lot, but he was getting closer every month. A few times in the previous year, he had topped the team in total sales, and he was learning the ropes as well as anyone at Briggs. In a year or two, he might actually be the top salesman. Even at that point, things like that mattered to him. Somehow, despite everything he had been seeing and hearing, he still had thought the authorities would figure out a way to make things right.

Surprisingly, the first half dozen calls he had made that morning had actually gotten through to people who knew who he was and why he was calling. Three of the men on the other side of the line had ended up buying a tremendous amount on their accounts. He had topped $10,000 before ten in the morning, not quite realizing that he was dealing with people on the edge of hysteria and agreeing to whatever he proposed. Desks, chairs, filing cabinets, reams of paper, crates of ink cartridges—all went down on his sales sheets as he typed the numbers onto the screens. Well, at least Linden would be happy.

The last call had been the only sane conversation he had with any of the accounts. Someone picked the phone up on the eighth ring. Cutter had been about to hang up.

“Hello? Is this the police?” Cutter recognized the voice. It was Dan Stallings at Charlotte Digital. They were a mid-list client, but generally reliable for a decent purchase if you hit them at the right time.

“This is Ron Cutter,” he told him. A few seconds of silence was his initial reply.

“What the fuck?” Stallings said. “What are you calling for? They’ve broken in here. They’re breaking in everywhere. What the fuck are you calling about? I can’t help you. I need help.” His voice had started as almost a roar, but had suddenly cranked down several notches to barely a hiss.

“What’s happening there?” Cutter asked. “Things…things are okay here at Briggs. We’re…we’re all at work today. We’re holding the line,” he said, repeating something the governor had mentioned in one of her recent speeches.

“Holding the f…” Stalling choked. “Let me tell you something, Cutter. I’m on the 15th floor of the Union Tower. I can see the entire north half of town from up here. And if I’m not mistaken, I can see the Briggs Stationers’ warehouse…wait…” Cutter could hear sounds as if Stallings were moving across a room. “Yeah. I can see you guys fine. Only ten blocks north. The streets all around you are packed with what looks like crowds. You guys ain’t having any parades, are you?

“No, I’ll bet there aren’t any parades due anywhere in town today. So what I think is that all of those people ain’t quite people. And also what I think is that you and yours over there at Briggs are about to be as fucked as we are here at Digital.”

“Dan? What can you see?” Cutter asked. But there was a crash from Stallings’ end. It sounded as if a door had been thrown open. Stallings obviously had dropped the phone, but Ron heard a voice, a series of curses, followed by screams.

Then, of course, the phone lines went down.

Cutter’s office was windowless. He had one of the interior rooms, which had a little more space, but were in the center of the building. Hanging up the now useless phone, he opened his office door and stepped out into the hallway. The silence of the place stunned him. There wasn’t another voice. Nothing at all. Not even the muffled sounds of conversation coming from the break room where there were almost always a couple of people engaged in some kind of talk.

He went from office to office. Most of the doors were standing open and no one was in any of the rooms he checked. He called out.

“Ms. Penland?” No answer. “Anyone here?” They had all fled, he realized. While he had been sitting in his interior office making calls to people who were either clueless or insane, the entire population of his workplace had taken their leave. They had obviously gotten out while the getting was good, and not a one of them had bothered to warn him.

“Shit,” he said. But he’d whispered it. Because he had realized that, he could hear something new. A noise had arisen so slowly and so gradually that it had crept up on him, like a very nasty surprise.

Even through the windows and walls of the building, he could hear the tramping of feet from outside. As if thousands of people were, as Stallings had said, marching down the streets. But instead of looking out the nearest window, Ron went into one of the smaller cubicles near the break room. He knew that Stacy Drake usually had her computer linked to the Internet, chatting with her Facebook friends whenever she figured no supervisor was hovering around. He would check her computer screen and see what the news feeds were saying. She had been there that morning. Ron had specifically noticed her sitting at her desk when he had gone to his office.

As he had hoped, her computer indeed was logged onto the Internet. She had left it on, set at her Facebook page. Ron hadn’t meant to pry, but the last message from her mother was just…there. He couldn’t avoid it.

Stacy. Come home. Someone has killed your father.

Ron had peered down at his feet. His left foot kept hitting something. It was Stacy’s pocketbook. She had obviously just grabbed her car keys and fled. Sitting there, looking down at that pocketbook, containing everything that a woman of Drake’s station needed to move around—her ID, her charge cards, her license, her cash—he felt his stomach drop.

He had been an idiot. A total fool. He had allowed Linden to manipulate him. He had allowed the governor to convince him that he was holding the fucking line. The government had said they were going to handle this.

They were all a bunch of goddamned liars and he had fallen for it.

He went back to the screen and hit the bookmarks, hoping Stacy-the-office-clerk had at least one or two news site set up. CNN was on her favorites and he clicked the tab.

Ron stared at the screen. It was a still shot at Times Square. Dozens…no it was hundreds; hundreds of people were lying in pools of blood and entrails as an army of the dead were devouring them. Men, women and children were killing and eating men, women and children. Beneath the photo were the words: THE DEAD KILL

At that instant, the Internet crashed. The lights in the office flickered twice, three times, and then went dark.

Standing, Cutter had plucked his cell phone from his pocket. It was also dead. “Goddamn.” He just muttered it to himself and wandered out of his office into the hallway.

As soon as he walked out, he saw Lacy Morgan coming toward him. She was the best-looking woman in the building, and it was always assumed that Linden was nailing her. Of course, no one knew for sure, but the signs seemed to point that way. Immediately, Cutter could tell that she was dazed.

“Lacy? Are you okay?” he asked. He could see no one else, and it was definite by this time that, they had all fled. His fellow employees had left him alone with the main squeeze of his boss. Not even the laborers who loaded the trucks were making their usual noise from the warehouse.

“It’s Mr. Linden,” she said. “Vickie Penland told me that Mr. Linden was acting strange this morning. Out of sorts. I told her that I’d go speak to him. Mr. Linden always listens to me when he’s cranky, you know.” By this time, Lacy had come much closer, splitting the distance between them. She was wearing a short ocean-blue dress, showing off her great legs and a good bit of ample cleavage. Cutter could also see that her right hand was covering a wound on her left upper arm.

“Lacy?” Cutter stopped, seeing the blood seeping between her fingers.

Before he could say another word or move at all, Mr. Linden suddenly surged around the corner of the hallway, looming behind Lacy Morgan like the wall of animated flesh he had become. His own shirt was stained with blood. You could see that he had been injured at some point and had put a crude bandage over the wound, and now that crude bandage of gauze and tape had peeled away, blood soaking through his neatly starched white shirt. He’d come into work all the same, trying to pretend he would be just fine as soon as he dabbed on a little antibiotic.

With hardly a sound, Linden put his huge, bluish paws on his confused mistress. Before either, she or Cutter could say or do anything at all; dead Linden leaned forward and took a hideously huge bite out of Lacy’s long and flawless neck. Finally, realizing what pain truly was, she screamed. Cutter screamed, too, knowing now that everyone else had either run, or were perhaps bleeding and lying quite dead in some corner of the place, and perhaps about to get back up.

At that moment, he knew that he was on his own.

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