Gods of Anthem (4 page)

A warning cry builds in my chest, but is tamped down by fear of being noticed.

Before anyone can do more than flinch, he’s down the aisle that’s one over from Mimi and me, hunched low to find stragglers still in their bunks. Hunger makes him agile; a cheetah compared to the chicks limp in the wake of terror.

Some flee into our aisle. He follows and snags the smock of a girl trying to crawl underneath her bunk not but a few feet away. Screams overtake the alarms as beds crash aside in a tangle of sheets.

They struggle together like two wrestlers, her calling out to us for help, and the cries are fresh, young. Guilt burns like ants under the skin; not a new sensation, and one that promptly goes ignored.

Zombies are Herculean when sustained. One once lifted up three men as if they were mere kittens with their claws stuck in a sweater, and swung them into the walls. Trying to take on a zombie, let alone after it’s had a meal, is suicide.

Still, when one does nothing, they live with that.

The scuffle is used as a diversion to flee. Some rush like a horde of frightened buffalo past the two. The zombie reaches for them halfheartedly before turning back to his victim, whose wails of terror are quickly snuffed out.

In one bite, her throat’s a ripped mess.

“Over here!” Sharon yells.

I’m prepared to silence her, before I notice the guard rushing past the doorway. Sharon calls to him again, and he stops, turning back. She gestures over to the monster, and her beads accidentally clatter to the floor, drawing the zombie’s attention.

Slowly, the guard approaches the bloody aisle. Brave of Sharon to call out. My voice has become a strangled wheeze. The zombie’s risen from his kill, and now turns toward us. The human face is so unchanged but for the bright red eyes and blood gushing from his nostrils.

His life’s ticking away—the second one. His feet can’t seem to keep up, making him sway and crash off of bunks like a bumper car.

Hands gloved in black blood lift toward me. They match the blood-rimmed mouth and bring images to mind of paint on a clown.

Sharon prays fervently, lips trembling so her words tumble out in bursting jitters. The sound’s comical, like a child’s hiccups, and my laughter bubbles up inside before a modicum of reason trumps it.

Hysteria
, my brain supplies.

The guard lifts his gun behind the monster that was once a man, a thing still watching me with a peculiar tilt of the head. On the guard’s helmet is a visor fixed with a one-way mirror reflecting huge eyes and an open mouth: me.

But the burning-red eyes draw me into its gaze. He’s closer now, having scrolled forward three feet between blinks.

Gasps from the bloody lips take shape.

It’s saying …

It can’t be.

My voice is a dry husk of terror, and wonder. “What?”

The head explodes.

Mimi and I
are rounded up with the others. We’re brought into the hallway, and the chaos there separates us.

I weed through the melee, and find her once again. By the hand, I tow her along to a corridor that’s empty.

We run that direction until we are too winded to keep on.

“What do … we do … Liza?” Mimi huffs and puffs in my same rhythm.

“I—”

A gloved hand snags my smock in answer, and a guard lifts me off my feet like I’m a stray.

“You should be at attendance with the others,” his voice grates through the helmet’s filter.

He turns in the opposite direction from my block. East wing is the isolation ward, and he’s dragging me that way.

Mimi stares at us, frozen.

“Run,” I call back to her. “
Hide.
”

The guard’s oblivious to my weak attempts to free myself, but his footsteps slow toward the end of the hallway. When I look back, Mimi’s gone, while my captor leans against the wall as if to rest, air-filter hissing in time with his breaths.

“Hey,” I say, “what are you—”

A red droplet appears at my feet.

I want to step away, but I’m tethered. Confusion muddles my thoughts while I stare at the perfect circle on the floor before it occurs to me … I’m looking at blood.

Adrenaline aids my struggle this time. “Let me go!”

My screamed words echo. Prying his fingers loose is futile, and soon, more droplets have joined the first. The guard turns his visor toward me, red now running in a steady stream from the bottom of the mirrored portion.

Terror livens my limbs.

In the visor’s reflection, my head grows larger as he pulls me close. His shudder is felt even through the suit’s padding before he turns away so sharply, blood splatters the cement wall in a long spray. It paints a red line that runs, the drips racing each other downward.

Face to the wall, the guard stares at it as if fascinated. Then, he tips his head back in a solid yank, before smashing himself into the cement with a loud crack.

The material’s cutting off my air supply. He again brings his face into the wall with such force that the visor smashes, sending shards of plastic in every direction.

All I can manage are choked wails. “Help … me! Somebody!”

Finally, footfalls emerge in the corridor.

But the guard’s turning to face me already, blood spilling over the edge of the broken visor like a waterfall. His helmet had slowly filled like a blister. His eyes and nose run thick with red, though it’s not gushing because he’s not sick like us, and eventually the blood will clot and he’ll live forever as a zombie.

He lifts me, testing his supernatural strength, and the veins in his face bulge. I’m beyond screaming anymore as I’m brought—like his snack—toward his mouth.

Warmth spreads through my nether regions before I’m bitten. A dull burning sensation begins in my shoulder that soon blossoms into searing agony.

Heedless of my dangling body, the guards fire at their turned comrade. They catch the zombie with a few bullets that force us both to the ground.

One bullet’s grazed my arm, but the pain isn’t nearly as bad as the fire-poker feeling from the bite.

They surround me, counting down the incubation period.

Neurological side effects
cramp my entire body like one huge contracting muscle. The zombie love-bite doesn’t turn everyone, and I’ve been bitten before. Twice, actually.

First at the home where a kid named Jerry had turned. He’d chewed up my leg quite a bit before they’d come to take care of him. I’d silently allowed the assault, afraid of what would happen to the boy. I’d tried to stop him from chewing on our dead caretaker, and in the process, he’d pinned me down and started to … eat me.

The second time, I was on the train headed to the island. The food-cart man had locked us into a room with him and away from a passenger who’d turned after being bitten. Only, the food-cart man had then turned himself, and we were trapped inside. He’d bitten me on the finger, just a small pinch, before they’d pushed him from the train and into the green ocean.

Both bites were excruciating for twenty-four hours.

One in five people will die; they’ll get bit and immediately flip. I’m one of the other four, and I won’t turn even after I’m dead. An entirely different probability, there. But they burn the bodies here so it’s not even a chance.

The nurse bandaging my arm watches me warily.

“Don’t worry”—I check her nametag—“May. I won’t become one. I’ve already been bitten, see?”

She nods and dutifully glances down at the scars when I raise my pant leg. May peers with a grimace at the white skin pressed into an outline of tiny, perfect teeth.

Later, she crosses herself when she thinks I’m not looking.

After another round of spasms, I’m sweating buckets and shivering in a fever. The bite throbs, and the skin around it is itchy and hot.

When I twist to see it, it looks infected.

I am sick.
Before, I was very sick, as well. But now, something new has come that doesn’t quite have a name yet, but might look a lot like giving up.

Mimi shakes my shoulder, and when she pulls away, she wipes her hand on her smock.

“What’s wrong?”

I don’t answer. Instead, I roll over, trying to let the fire that’s burning deep in my shoulder catch the rest of me.