The Hollow Men (Book 1): Crave (13 page)

Scott believed that everyone was prescient in some form: warning whispers, flashes of inspiration, subtle guidance, heightened perception, and so on. He grew somber with the thought that their intuition told them the world was no longer on the brink of apocalypse—it had tipped over. From what he’d seen at the game the night before, he knew that things would fall apart quickly.

Abruptly he turned around and held Laura’s hands in his. “I think things are going to turn very bad, very soon. Last night, Tom and I talked about getting our families away. We have different ideas about where to go. Regardless of where, the time to leave is now. Today, if possible. In your dream, you and the girls suffered because of me. Swear to me that you will never let that happen. Not for any reason. If your lives are ever at risk, just leave me. Let me go.”

He said it with such force that it shook Laura.

“Scott, I…You are overreacting. It wasn’t real. It was a dream,” she stammered.

“No. Forget that. You swear it right now.”

“Nothing is going to happen, Scott.”

Time stood still; Scott let the heavy silence communicate his earnestness. “OK. I promise,” she said finally.

They felt drawn out, as if they had severe jetlag, internal clocks not just out of sync, but entirely smashed. They pasted smiles on their faces and left their bedroom.

CHAPTER 22

M
EAT

F
lames licked the charcoal stacked in the chimney starter. Scott stared into the coals for thirty minutes, lost in thought as the briquettes turned bright orange, white, and blue.

He recognized how dead wrong he’d been about the urgency in getting away. They needed to go today. He needed to decided where to take them.

Scott had seen many instances of the best coming out in people when put into severe circumstances: courage, selflessness, loyalty, patriotism, and vision. He had also experienced how the very worst could come out of them. He believed that each person’s capacity for good equaled their capacity for evil and that it could take a while living in hell before a person’s true character revealed itself. It would be hard to discern the benign neighbors from the blighted.

His moves were robotic and hasty in seasoning the pork and making the final preparation for the smoke. The charcoal glowed, covered by a blanket of white ash. Scott layered the bottom of the smoker with new charcoal and buried them in hot briquettes. He threw two chunks of water-soaked hickory in the hot coals. Steam sizzled from the wood.

Weighing Tom’s Lomazzo idea against his own, he was more convinced than ever that they should get far into the Adirondacks, away from other people at least until the world had been fired in the crucible long enough to separate the gold from the dross.

He had a strong compulsion to visit Tom. But he ignored the feeling, putting it off for another hour until he got his arguments straight about getting their families safely to his cabin.

He began a mental checklist of everything they would need to get there and make it livable for an unknown amount of time. At the same time, he mechanically closed the pork in the smoker. The aroma of cooking meat would soon suffuse the neighborhood.

So deeply engrossed in his own thoughts, he didn’t register Emily’s sweet voice as she ran out the door with a shouted good-bye. “Going to the park. Love you, Dad.”

Scott’s beautiful daughter skipped out of their house.

As each minute passed, he felt more anxious about grilling. Anxiety turned to a feeling of shame over making the wrong decision to stay. Scott finally capitulated to the intense need to visit his friend. He hoped to bring Tom around to his way of thinking. A part of him desperately needed an hour of friendly banter to restore a little warmth to his soul. He walked through the backyard gate and surveyed the street from the top of the driveway.

If the calendar hadn’t shown December, anyone would have assumed it was a hot Saturday in late July. People leaned on doorposts or sat on their stairs. A few neighbors clustered in lazy “how’s the weather?” conversations.

Though it had the appearance of a normal summer day, it was off in a way that went far beyond the time of year. It took a minute to pinpoint it: the sound was completely wrong. No cars. No lawnmowers. No dogs barking. It went beyond an eerie silence.

Tom sat on the steps of his porch with a coffee mug at his side. His head hung down as though he were asleep, and his body made jarring movements as if he were having an active dream but in a sleep so deep that the twitching in his body wasn’t waking him up.

It came like a punch to Scott’s chest. They hadn’t come from the café untouched; the girl having seizures last night probably had the Thapp virus. It may have infected Tom. All of them might be sick, but so far asymptomatic. Worse than that was the very real sense that something even worse had yet to reveal itself. His lips had gone numb. His mouth went dry.

It came quickly and violently.

CHAPTER 23

T
O
B
E
R
EVENG’D
O
N
M
AN

M
elissa lived down the street. She was in her early thirties, short and slightly overweight. She had light brown hair and a cheerful, cherubic face. He’d seen her at every neighborhood event for years, and she’d even brought them chicken soup when the girls were sick.

Scott watched as she joined five people that had gathered in front of her house. In her haste to get out of the house, she only had her toes in her white tennis shoes, her heels flattening the back of the shoe as she shuffled down the sidewalk. “Hi! What’s everyone up to?” she chattered loudly and tripped herself, falling to a knee in her hurry to get to them.

“Ow! These stupid shoes, I better…”

She’d fallen an arm’s length from them and raised her hand for someone to help her up. Whether she saw something or just instinctively sensed the danger, she stopped in mid-reach. Melissa’s friends turned toward her, slowly at first. Then they pulled her into their circle. It was too late for her.

Three began clawing ferociously at her torso. Two others tugged savagely at her arms. It took a second for Melissa to get past her shock and unleash a lung-bursting shriek. Her voice trembled as it ramped up in pitch and volume, finally becoming the open-throated cry of someone in excruciating pain.

Scott raced to help; his legs were already moving as soon as she started to scream. In his peripheral vision, he saw others running too. He didn’t know if Tom followed him or not.

Within a few seconds of sprinting, Scott got close enough to see Melissa’s attackers scoop their hands deeply into her, gouging her skin in jagged finger-width grooves, exposing slippery muscles underneath. One savage mouth bit into her, then several others joined in the feeding frenzy. Melissa’s screams were drowned in a thick gurgle of blood. She remained upright, held in place by the people pushing themselves on her, feasting on her. When Melissa’s remains finally tumbled to the earth, her killers fell to their hands and knees to shove their mouths into her and tug at her entrails like animals devouring a carcass in the wild.

Two others reached the slaughterhouse just ahead of Scott. One came to help. The other came to feed. One human meal turned to two. Melissa and her would-be rescuer were both reduced to flopping muscle, splintered bone and splashes of blood.

Scott almost came to the same grisly end. He came to a sharp halt only strides away from the massacre. He felt the psychological equivalent of sledgehammering not just his ulnar nerve, but every nerve in his body. Reflexively, he jerked himself backward in shocked recognition of what he saw in front of him…zombies.

“Zombie” was the right name for the creatures in front of him. The living were being hunted in his neighborhood. At the speed of thought, he embraced the impossible truth of it, shoved aside his revulsion, and reassessed his next move.

The odds weren’t good. He and the others who had rushed to join him made up an underwhelming posse to fight against the hungry zombies. A scrawny guy on his left stood next to a nervous teen-aged kid. A glance to his right revealed no one. The indomitable Tom Park wasn’t among the small group of potential saviors.

Instead of Tom, he found Bill standing behind him. Fate traded the person he trusted the most at his back for the person he trusted the least. Scott shifted to his left to keep a better eye on the man he knew would pounce on any opportunity to shove him into the trough of human meat.

Bill wheezed from the effort of his shuffle-jog to join the group. He wore a disgusting half-smile. His face had a dream-like expression that came close to rapture. It was clear to Scott that Bill hadn’t come to help. He had come to see the action.

He stared at the slaughter with his brown, piggy eyes. He was so captivated by it that he didn’t seem to notice the cadaverous stalker that lurched toward him, her right arm outstretched, fingers reaching. Her shattered left arm twisted behind her at the shoulder. Pockmarks of raw flesh covered her body. It looked as if animals had been gnawing at her. No blood issued from her wounds.

Tiny asphalt pebbles had ground away the left side of her face. Her left ear was mushy, as if it had been pureed in a food processor.

She was almost unrecognizable, but for the tattered red wig that defied the impossible, remaining anchored to her wispy grey hair on a mostly balding scalp. She also carried the familiar scent of her perfume.

Wilma had joined the gruesome block party.

She walked less haltingly than when Scott had seen her earlier that morning. Though she still moved like a marionette, it seemed her mastermind had learned to better operate the puppet; her gait had grown smoother, allowing her to reach Bill quickly.

“Bill! Watch out!!” Scott hissed, pointing to the danger. Bill waved his hand as if brushing a fly away and glared at him. He was still furious with Scott for unjustly assaulting him the night before. Besides, it distracted him from his fun.

Wilma was only inches away. Bill’s golf shirt was too small for him, offering the creature a buffet of bulgy choices.

Wilma sank her teeth into Bill’s upper arm. Her jaw locked and she shook her head the way a dog did a toy. She tore loose a mouthful of skin and meat from his arm. Bill yipped before he threw her down, kicked her in the face, and stomped on her head, over and over. Wilma tried to rise up. Bill’s hysterical rampage kept her flat as he devastated her body. A kick flattened her nose and cracked her cheekbones. The next one caved in her cranium. Chunks of grey matter glazed with puss-colored gelatin oozed from the cracks in her broken skull. She was dead–seemingly for good.

Bill stood up and wiped blood from his mouth where he must have bitten his lip. He stared at Wilma and jumped on her head again with a slurping and crunching. He gave a weird giggle, clutched his bitten arm and ran away.

Scott had no pity for him.

It was dangerous to stay. The feasting zombies were losing focus from their current victims in their insatiable hunger for fresher human meat.

Determining nothing could be accomplished by staying, Scott signaled to the teenager and the other man.
Let’s go.
He kept his eye on the zombies as he retreated until he’d established some distance. His legs were overworked from the morning, his calves were cramping, yet panic for his family kept him at a full sprint back to his house.

CHAPTER 24

C
HARNEL
M
AW

T
om sat on his porch, his hands interlocked behind his neck, clutching his head tightly as he gazed down. His body convulsed so severely that he’d knocked over the mug next to him. Cold coffee soaked his pants. He didn’t show any awareness of it. He didn’t respond to the screaming woman down the street.

In the predawn hours, his muscle spasms became persistent. He felt brittle on the inside, each muscle spasm threatening to crack him into pieces and shake the broken bits from his body. He had a few flickers of consciousness, like signals on a TV in a storm, picture almost materializing then lost in a wash of snow.

He had been sitting like that for three hours.

Katie felt much better. Her energy returned along with her color. After spending two days confined to her bed in a disorienting haze, she was determined to spend her entire Saturday outside. She asked to go to the park.

Her mother adamantly opposed it, concerned about relapse or another illness overwhelming her when her healing body was at its weakest. Katie would not give up. She argued, pled and promised the world if her mom allowed her to go.

Finally, she earned reluctant permission after committing to rest, not play; and that she wouldn’t stay more than an hour and that Chase would go along and watch her carefully for any signs of her illness returning.

One of the reasons Ridley had agreed was that she needed to be alone with Tom. He wasn’t himself. He came to bed preoccupied, even depressed. When she asked him if he felt OK, he got angry, barely keeping his temper in check. He shoved her away verbally, telling her to be quiet and leave him alone.

It hurt. He’d never spoken a sharp word to her. Nor had he ever shut her out.

He had been restless all night, getting in and out of bed. She thought she actually heard him leave the house once.

Tom hadn’t spoken a word to her since they’d gone to bed. Ridley gave him space, nursing her wounds by spending the morning in her backyard garden. She waited for him to apologize and then tell her what had happened in Syracuse. If he didn’t tell her, she would squeeze it out of Chase when he came back with Katie.

She checked the time. Her kids had been gone for two hours. She needed Tom to reengage with the family. “Fine, I’ll be the grown-up and break the silence,” she huffed to herself.

Ridley emerged from the backyard, oblivious to the slaughter taking place only yards away from her house. She called to Tom, “Can you please help me? Chase took Katie to the park, and they’ve been gone too long…” She trailed off, as she saw her husband hadn’t moved from the porch. His condition alarmed her. She rushed over to him and put her arm around him, starting to rub his shoulders. “Are you OK? Please tell me you’re OK.”