Evolution of the Dead (3 page)

Kim made it to the other side.  She started urging Scott to hurry.  More of the dead were coming up the ramp.  Some were already crossing the flooded pavement.

Scott imagined them right behind him.  He started to panic.

The cable was slippery and cold.  He felt his hands going numb.  He wasn’t used to this kind of thing.  He was an architect, not a rope climber.  He felt sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

Jackie was close enough to touch him.  As a last ditch effort, Scott kicked out with his foot, knocking her out of the way.  With every ounce of strength, he swung quickly forward, his heart thumping in his chest, clawing along the cable until he finally made it to the other side.  Kim stood on the up ramp, her chest going in and out as she caught her breath.  Scott jumped down next to her.

With a slight lean to the right, Jackie walked over to them. She reached for Scott and Kim from the floor below.

She was too far away to touch them.  Her arm remained motionless.  Her fingers didn’t move.  She looked like she had reached to grab something off a shelf and then froze in place.

Now that he was safely on the up ramp and should be able to get to his car, Scott set his sights on Executive Airport.  His dad and little sister would be there now.

Their plan was to meet there if ever an emergency or disaster took place in Orlando.  Scott would fly them to safety.

Scott said to Kim, “C’mon, let’s go! We gotta go!”

They ran side by side up to the higher floors of the parking garage.

At the patient receiving center of Orlando, Florida Hospital’s emergency room, Nurse Melissa Styles looked up from her computer just in time to see a very sick man come stumbling up to the nurse’s station.

“Oh God,” he said hoarsely, snot running freely out of his nose, blood pouring out of his eyes.  His skin was yellow.  “Help me.”

Melissa, a heavy woman, hurried around the nurse’s station only to find him lying on his face on the floor by the time she got there.  Kneeling down next to him she asked, “Sir, can you hear me?”

He didn’t answer.

He was wearing jogging shorts.  The back of his pants were covered in clumps of wet diarrhea.  His skin was a strange cracked peeling yellow color.  On his back, blood had soaked through his shirt.  Suddenly, the back of his shorts and underwear were lifted as more diarrhea burst out of him.

He vomited sideways across the tiled floor of the waiting room.  The vomit, mixed with blood and stringy mucus sloshed into a nearby wall.

Instinctively, Melissa reached for his pulse.  When her hand touched him, she felt a tingle on her fingertips.  The color of her skin changed to the same yellow color as the dead mans on the floor.  She felt nauseous and flushed.  Her nose started running freely.  She felt her body temperature rise quickly.  Barely able to stand, feeling faint and heavily overwhelmed, a major stomach cramp bent her over.  The pain was intense.  Her vision doubled. She began to urinate and defecate at the same time.  Her body temperature climbed to 114 degrees.

“I’ve got Ebola,” she whispered to herself as she slowly prodded along the front of the nurse’s station, hoping to make it to the other side to call for help.  Another massive stomach cramp caused her to projectile vomit across the room.  A long drip of heavy mucus ran out of her nose and dangled there.  Her tongue felt so dry…so
dry
.  “Help me,” she managed to say as another heavy hitting stomach cramp walloped her from inside.  She felt like she was being crushed from the inside out.  Her blood pressure skyrocketed.  She fell against her desk, dying as she slid down the side.

Rick Connelly, a patient with a severely sprained ankle who had been resting out in the waiting room witnessed the whole event.  Getting up, he limped over to the nurse’s station.

Leaning against the nurse’s station, Rick put his hand right in the middle of a large drip of snot.  Disgusted, he wiped it off on his shirt.  He felt a tingle on his palm.  Seconds later he was limping down the hall gagging, trying to breathe.

An elderly man who was having troubles with his hearing aid, Joe Nathan, came out of a restroom.  Rick bumped into him, leaned on him for support, and begged him for help.  Joe couldn’t hear what this kid was saying.  He leaned down to hear the kid better.  Rick vomited right into Joe’s ear.

Rick looked at Joe apologetically.  He ran away, limping down the hall, screaming for help.

Joe pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket to wipe his face, turning his head as he did so.

He didn’t see the overweight nurse attempting to stand up next to another man wearing jogging shorts who was already standing.

“Damn kids,” Joe whispered.  “Son of a bitch is going to get me sick.”

Passing a young couple, he left through the emergency room entrance.  He brushed the young man’s elbow as he passed.  The young man didn’t think anything of it.

Walking out to his car, Joe started to feel a bit nauseated.  He got into his car.

His wife asked him, “George, are you ok?”

“What?”

She asked louder, “
Are you ok
?”

He shook his head no.

“How is Brittany? Did you get up to see her?”

“What?”

She nearly screamed, “
How is Brittany
?”

She’s doing much better,” he said, grabbing his belly as a cramp pinched through him.  “They’re going to release her tomorrow.”

“Oh good.”  His wife put her hand on his arm.  “You sure you’re
feeling
ok?”

“No, not really.  I’ll be fine.  Some kid threw up on me.  I want to go home and take a shower.”

They barely made it out of the parking lot before Joe had to stop the car.  He leaned out to vomit.

Florida Hospital went from being a clean well-cared 450 bed hospital to a completely dead overrun hospital in less than forty-five minutes.

“Oh come on!” Nick Carson said under his breath as he brought his car slowly to a stop.  “It’s too damn early for a
fucking
traffic jam.”

He was on Florida Highway 4 on his way north downtown after having an early lunch with his girlfriend, Kaylee.

All four lanes of traffic heading downtown were at a standstill.  On his car radio he dialed over to a metro traffic station.  An emergency broadcast signal was playing.

“What the fuck’s going on?”

Jerking his head to flip some of his long curly blonde hair out of his eyes, he thumbed on his cell phone.  A news banner scrolled across the screen:

“DANGER! INFECTION RUNNING RAMPANT IN DOWNTOWN ORLANDO, FLORIDA.”

“The
hell
?”

He honked at a black guy in a car next to him.  He rolled his window down.

Nick yelled, “What’s going on up there? My phone says something about an infection.”

“Don’t know,” the black guy said. “Let me see if I can find anything on my radio.”

“Already did,” Nick said.  “They’re not saying anything, just an emergency signal.”

The black guy nodded. “Hold on a sec.”  He reached under his dash for a CB radio.  Turning it on, it was full of all kinds of chatter.  People were talking over one another about some kind of infection downtown.  “Some kind of infection, yeah,” he said.  “Might be a long wait out here.”

“Shit, alright, thanks,” Nick said as he flipped on his turn signal.

He drove onto the shoulder while rolling up his window.  He hated to drive on the shoulder; not only because it really wasn’t safe, but because his car was new.  He only had it for two months; and he really didn’t want to spend the afternoon in traffic.

In an hour he was expected to be at an important job interview.  He had been told that they weren’t going to do any more interviews until after the holiday and he didn’t want to miss this job opportunity.

He took the first exit down into the suburbs.  Other people followed his lead.

At a stop light at the bottom of the off ramp, he fiddled with the radio a little more to see if he could find some news about what was going on.

Something bumped his car.

“The fuck?” He looked up into the rearview mirror expecting to see that a car had rear-ended him, but the vehicle behind him wasn’t even close.

Out of his peripheral vision, a wall of screaming people came running toward him from downtown.

“The hell’s going on?”

People ran by screaming.  Someone hopped onto the hood of his car and leaped over the roof.  Other people bumped into his car.  Everyone had terrified looks in their eyes.  They all were looking over their shoulders as they ran.  It reminded him of scenes he had seen from 9/11 as the twin towers were imploded.  Nick followed their gazes further down the street expecting to see a major fire, but he couldn’t see anything other than hundreds of people
sprinting
for their lives.  His passenger door was opened.  A black girl in cutoff jeans and a loose white blouse with a gray undershirt underneath jumped in.

He yelled at her, “Who the hell are
you
?”

“Drive!” she said with a swallow.  Her dark skinned face looked as white as a sheet.  She had a dark mole on her cheek.  “We need to get out of here!”

“No.  You need to get the hell out of my
car.”

“Please,” she said, looking at him with wide eyes.  Tears were streaming down her cheeks.  “Please just drive, mister.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

She hollered at him: “Just drive asshole or do you want to die? There’s an infection down there.  People die right in front of you.  Go!”

Screeching the tires, leaving rubber on the street, he made a hard right turn following the fleeing crowds.  He laid on the horn so people would move out of the way.  People grabbed at the car door handles as he passed, trying to get in for a quicker escape.

“What’s happening?” he asked as he cleared the crowds.

“I don’t know,” she said out of breath.  Her face was covered in tears.  Her eye makeup had smeared.  “We just need to get the hell out of here fast.”

“I have business to attend to downtown,” Nick said.  “I have a job interview...”

“You don’t want to go down there,” she said shaking her head, her eyes wide.  “No.  You don’t want to.”

“Why not? What the hell happened?”

“I told you, it’s some kind of infection.  It spreads so fast…” She was breathless.  “You get touched and it changes you…it makes you choke to death and all your shit sprays out of you like you’re being crushed from the inside
out
.”

“How did
that
happen?”

“I have no idea! It happens so fast.”

“I gotta get back –“

“Watch out!” she screamed, bracing herself against the dashboard of the car with both hands.  A gold bracelet swung on her wrist.  Nick caught a whiff of body odor.

A man standing directly in front of them had his arm stretched out toward them.

Nick slammed the brakes on.  The car came to a screeching halt at the man’s waist.

The two of them looked at him, their mouths hanging open in shock.

“Fuckin-a,” Nick whispered.

The man’s eyes were gone replaced with deep bloody empty sockets.  His skin was ancient, creased with deep lines covered in blood.  All over his face, his skin was flaking away like a crumbling pie crust.  In spots the skin had fallen away revealing large orange veins.

Long thick strands of mucus hung from his nostrils, dripping down to the middle of his chest.  The strands hung, slowly moving back and forth as the man stood there, his arm reaching.

He had short white hair.  His teeth had fallen out.  From his neck down, blood covered his shirt.  His pants and shoes were covered in shit.

The black woman cried, “What the hell
is
this? It’s killing everybody! It took my mother! It took my sister! God help us all!”

With a shudder Nick said, “I don’t know and I don’t want to find out!”

Right at the man’s feet, Nick did a U-turn.  The man didn’t move at all.  The rear of Nick’s car came within inches of the dead man as it spun around and went speeding off in the other direction.

The black woman cried, “We can’t go back downtown! That’s where it started!”

Nick made a quick left down a side street.

There was nowhere to run.

More dead people stood in the street, their arms reaching.  They simply stood there.

“Now what are we gonna do?” Nick yelled.  “Where the hell are we gonna go?”

She didn’t answer.

“Hey!”

The black woman had fainted.

Jose Padilla knew that being a cab driver had its ups and downs.

During his 12 years of driving, he had come to expect the unexpected, but the lady he had dropped off ten minutes ago downtown was one of those
oddly
unexpected cases.  She had gotten sick in the back of his cab! Not vomiting sick, but
weird
sick.  How did it happen?

He shook his head.  He didn’t know what was wrong with her.  Maybe she had eaten something and it messed with her stomach - but why would she
eat
something? She told him she was meeting someone for lunch in a few
minutes!

He hoped she was ok.

“She better not report me for bad driving,” he said to himself.  “It was the other driver who pulled out in front of me.”

Someone on the side of the road leading into the airport hailed him.  They had two pieces of luggage.  He pulled over.

“Thanks,” a man said as he got into the cab.  “My car broke down out on the highway.  I need to catch my flight.”

“I can’t stop on the side of the road here, sir,” Jose said, leaning back to look the passenger in the eye.  “I would help you with your luggage if I could…”

“It’s fine,” the man said.  He pushed his bags into the back seat with him.  “Please step on it.”

Jose couldn’t step on it.  The roads around the airport had strict 35 mile an hour speed zones.  So many cops made so much money ticketing speeders here, and they especially like to catch the cabs.

Looking in the rearview mirror, Jose noticed that the man had sweat pouring off of his face.

Jose turned up the air conditioner.  He asked, “Need some cool air, sir?”

The man nodded slowly.  He wasn’t feeling very well at all.  Suddenly his stomach felt like it had been tied in knots.  Maybe it was from the sudden cool air blowing in his face.

“Pull over, please,” he said.

“I can’t stop here, mister.  I am sorry.”

The man vomited heavily from the back seat.  It splashed all over the front seat.  Some even hit the windshield.

Disgusted, Jose rolled his window down.  The man in the back seat started coughing.  He farted loudly.

Stopping at the terminal, Jose hopped out of his cab.  He wasn’t feeling very well himself.  He hurried around to let the passenger out.

The passenger fell out of the back of the cab.  Vomit gushed out of his mouth like a fountain.  It splattered all over the cement.

A security guard standing at the entrance to the airport ran over to assist.  He grabbed the man on the ground by his arm and helped him stand up.  When he grabbed the man, the guard’s hands started turning yellow.  The guard was confused.  He started feeling very ill.  In a panic, he grabbed his walkie talkie out of his belt clip.  He called for help.

Several other security guards came to assist.  By now, the man from the back seat of the cab was dead.  Jose was leaning against the front of his cab, vomiting, shitting himself.

“Stay back,” he whispered, his hands trembling.

One of the security guards yelled into his walkie talkie, “Clear the area!”

It was too late.  Another cab pulled up next to Jose’s.  The driver of the second cab knew Jose.  He got out, leaving his passengers behind.  He went to help Jose who was now on his knees, begging for mercy.

He laid a hand on Jose’s shoulder.  His hand began to explode in yellow.

Several other people standing by were deluged with vomit from Jose’s friend.  A few of the people passing by ran into the airport.  One of them yelled, “We got a sick man out here!”

More people gathered around.

Soon, vomit was flying inside the terminal.  People held one another as pain raged through their bodies.  A panic took over.  People ran for their lives, trampling others who were too slow.

At lines waiting to go through security, an infected woman who was overwrought with pain slammed into the end of the line.  This started a chain reaction.  The whole line of 250 people was infested in less than three minutes.

On the other side of security, people stood waiting for trams to carry them to their terminals.  Several people were lucky enough to get on the tram before doors closed blocking the infected from getting on.

However, one man had smeared vomit on his back.  His wife wiped it off.  Before the tram made it to its final destination of Terminal B, everyone on the tram was dead.

When the tram doors opened, a man inside who was covered in blood walked out.  He reached for a woman waiting to get on.  He touched her.  She angrily shoved him away thinking he was some kind of pervert.  The man didn’t put up a fight.  He simply walked away placing his hands on people as he passed.  Outside the tram, the woman’s hand started to itch madly where the man had touched her.  As she stepped onto the tram, severe stomach cramps bent her over.  Before the doors closed, she turned and projectile vomited out onto more people waiting to get on.  These others ran away from the tram loading zone and infected more people throughout the airport.

Terminal B became a madhouse of death.  People leaned on one another for help, infecting them, passing it down to the next in seconds.

Sirens began to blare through-out the airport.  Television screens started flashing warnings.  INFECTION! INFECTION! INFECTION! People ran down jet ways to escape screams from inside the terminal.  Doors latched, locking shut.  Doors to gates closed.  Metal gates throughout the entire airport shut automatically as a terrorist threat was announced and quarantined.

At Gate 99, a man stood with his twelve year old daughter as they looked out at the runway.  They had just watched a large jet liner take off.

Behind them, screams started echoing toward them.  Sirens started sounding.  Doors started to automatically lock at the gates.

He grabbed his daughter’s hand.  He pulled her toward the door to Gate 99 as it began to close.  He was able to slide through the closing door.  It slammed against his daughter’s upper body, breaking several of her ribs.  She fell onto her back unconscious.  The door bounded back open.

“Dee!” He screamed.  “
Dee
!”

She wasn’t moving.

A large group of dead people were approaching the open gate.

He leaned down to his daughter, distraught.  One of the dead approached.  A gentle touch was placed on the back of his neck.

The man stood up.  He shoved the dead person away.  Slapping a hand over the sticky wetness on the back of his neck, feeling a maddening itch burn through his hand, he ran down the length of the jet way.  The door at the end stood open.  A buzzer was whining madly.  He was able to jump through the door before it slammed shut.

Crying, feeling nausea rising in his throat, he grabbed a member of the ground crew by their shoulders, begging them for help as he was driven to his knees in pain.

Ground crew personal were scattering, avoiding the infection, running away from their idling vehicles.  One member of the ground crew was grabbed from behind by someone else.  A hand was placed on the side of his cheek.

He needed to get away from this insanity.  He drove away from the gate. He headed toward the center hangar on the other side of the runways, his cheek itching like mad.

He would wash it off in the restroom.

It took one hour for Orlando airport to completely fall to its knees.

With her legs now swung over the edge of the window, Carmen slowly convinced herself that she needed to jump down to the bus below even though the road around it was full of dead people.

It looked like a rally was taking place.  People stood literally shoulder to shoulder.

She knew she had to jump.  She couldn’t wait up here any longer.  Behind her in the hallway, the dead were lingering.  Even though they weren’t making a single sound or making any kind of movement, Carmen still felt their presence.  Her shoulders were shaking in fear.  She was so afraid.  She felt trapped in a box with no exit.

The dead people on the ground were reaching up for her like she was a god, a hero, someone they all desperately needed to touch.

It was utterly quiet.

There were no street sounds, no sirens in the distance, no wind blowing through the palm trees.

It was freaking her out because there were so many people only three stories below her.

That very thing was actually coaxing her to drop down onto the bus.  If all of the people were moving or clawing for her, then she wouldn’t jump, she’d stay on the ledge until the authorities arrived.  But these dead people weren’t even moving.  She thought her chances of possibly jumping down and running through them to her car just might work.  She might be faster than them.

She’d get away from the ones behind the door, too.  Those were the ones who really had her scared.  They were too close.

Biting softly on her lower lip, she pushed herself forward until she dropped off the window ledge.

She landed hard on top of the bus, leaving a small indentation in the roof, breaking her right foot when she hit.  She screamed in pain.  Her body rolled over to the side.  Luckily, she was able to snatch onto a railing on the edge of the roof with one hand before she fell off into the reaching group.  She hung there for a second in agony, tears stinging her eyes.

Regaining her composure, trying to put the searing pain out of her mind, Carmen grabbed the bus rail with both hands.  All of the dead had gathered right behind her, their hands reaching, almost touching the back of her feet.

She braced herself on the side of the bus with her knees.  Leaning her head back, stretching to the right as far as she could, she peered into the bus.  She couldn’t tell if anyone was inside.  There were too many shadows.  The swinging side entrance door of the bus was closed.  Leaning to the left, she noticed that the back emergency exit door was open a little bit.

She couldn’t hold onto the rail forever.  Her palms were sweaty and her broken foot was thumping like mad.  She was going to lose her grip if she didn’t do something quick.

She gripped the rail tighter.  With a quick shuffle, she moved left toward the back of the bus on her knees.  She bumped her broken foot against her other shin.  Pain boiled.  She held on, her eyes tightly shut, her mouth hanging open.  She shuffled again, ignoring the pain as her kneecaps scraped over the rivets in the bus’s skin.  She slipped around to the back of the bus, straddling the corner.  She reached into the gap of the barely open exit door while holding onto the rail with her other hand and pushed the door open, surprised how easily the dead were pushed back by the door.

They’re light, like leaves,
she thought
.  They could blow away.

Suddenly, a vision clicked in her mind:  A dark room.  A candle.  The smell of Christmas. 
Mistletoe?

“What the
hell
,” she breathed.  “It’s fucking
June
.”

She kneed over to the open door, swung down through it, stood up on her good foot, turned around and pulled the door shut.  It clicked loudly as it locked.

The dead outside looked in through the bottom of the door’s windows with their blown out eyes.

The inside of the bus was humid.  It stunk like vomit, shit and blood.  One of the dead sat in the front right passenger seat.  He stood up.

Despite the rocking pain in her foot, Carmen ran at the dead man.  She leapt into the air hitting him right in the stomach with both of her feet.  Vomit blew out of his mouth.  It spewed on her shoes, up the legs of her blue jeans and onto her jacket.  Carmen screamed, instinctively moving her hand to scrape the vomit off.  With a grimace on her face, she held herself back.  The dead man was coming to a stand again.  Carmen got back on her feet, sidestepping him as he stood.  He reached for her and missed.  Shuffling around to her left, she grabbed the bus’s manual door opener, pulled it open, and kicked the dead man out the door with her left foot.  She pulled the door shut.

Out of breath she sat down on the driver’s seat.  Shaking, she took her shoes off one at a time, careful not to touch any of the vomit.  Her foot was beginning to swell.  Sliding off the shoe on her broken foot was murder.  She took off her jacket and pants and threw them toward the back of the bus.

Under her breath she asked herself, “
What the hell are these visions? What do they mean
?”

She looked around the empty bus.  Sweat dripped from her chin.  She took off her ball cap, tied her hair in a bun, and put her cap back on.  Her foot was thumping.

Now she was only wearing panties and a white short t-shirt with no bra.  She said, “I wish I could get to my car.  I have more clothes in there.”

Keys were dangling from the ignition switch of the bus.

She licked her lips.

She reached for the ignition.  Using her broken foot to depress the brake, wincing as crackling pain splintered up her leg, she started the bus, dropped the gearshift into drive and the bus started moving forward.  It hurt too much to press the gas pedal.  Carmen let the bus idle forward at two miles an hour.