Dead World | Novel | Dead Zero Read online

  “She wasn’t there,” Brendan said, his mind clearly elsewhere.

  He’d noticed the fight down the hallway, and unless Brendan was blind, he’d also noticed the blood, pouring from the man’s finger like water from a busted faucet, creating a messy canvas on which the others kept painting with their scrambling feet.

  They’d moved quite far down the hallway; that’s why only Thom and Brendan, who were lined up just right, could see. It didn’t look entirely intentional. Those at the rear were using maybe too much force to hold the raging woman back, causing their overall trajectory to move away.

  The madwoman’s face was wild, ringlet hair mostly covering her eyes. Her mouth wouldn’t close. It stayed open with lips pulled back to display two bared rows of teeth.

  “Were you following me?” Brendan asked.

  “No,” Thom lied, then pointed and told him a truth. “I was just sitting over there.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Brendan sounded scared.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it that rabies thing?”

  “It’s not rabies, Brendan.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Thom considered. He knew Rip Daddy better than most people because he’d made it a morbid obsession. Every second spent reading CDC bulletins, even though the research excursions always left him in stomach-churning agony. He wanted to be prepared. He wanted to know what to do to keep himself and his family safe. And beyond that, once he reached the limit of things he could control, Thom wanted to know just how badly the world was planning to conspire against him.

  You were supposed to change the things you could and accept the things you couldn’t change, but Thom’s life philosophy had him sweating it all. No better way to be paranoid and afraid; that was Thom’s motto.

  “No, this is something different. Rip Daddy doesn’t … BRENDAN!”

  A man had emerged from the bathroom, seemingly in there the entire time and unaware of the struggle taking place just beyond the doors. He turned right, toward the mall atrium and away from the corner into which the struggling group had wedged itself.

  They were still grunting with their shoes making dolphin sounds on bloody tile, but the noises were too small or the man was too deaf or possibly he just wasn’t paying attention. Either way, his distraction was enough to unbalance it all.

  One man holding the woman’s arm looked up and shouted something, like maybe CALL SOMEONE!, but with his attention distracted, the struggler popped her arm free.

  A bubble of chaos followed. A second later the woman was fully free, sprinting like crazy.

  And Brendan — that little shit — was rushing the new arrival.

  At first Thom was paralyzed. People didn’t run toward danger; people ran away from danger.

  It was such a fundamental break with sanity that at first Thom couldn’t even move. In those moments he literally did not understand. He simply waited with his mouth still open, the last syllable of “BRENDAN!” held a beat too long before holding position on his lips.

  The N sound died, Thom’s mouth sagged, and still it’d been no more than two ticks on the overhead clock.

  He found his awareness again, too late now to grab his son and pull him back. Not only was Brendan fourteen where Thom was nearly forty, Brendan was also on the track team — the one spring sport Thom would allow him to play.

  Hard to hurt yourself running track.

  Unless you were running toward insanity.

  The bathroom was closer to Thom and Brendan than it was to the group. The man, emerging, was similarly closer to them than to the woman when she spotted fresh prey, broke free, and ran.

  The people who’d accidentally let go would never catch the woman before she tackled the newcomer.

  Brendan was even closer — and if he moved now, he could be the first of everyone. Brendan had seen all of this, deducing that the woman planned to attack, not run past the man or shake his hand, and if he didn’t move to prevent it, then the assault was inevitable.

  In the second before his scream, Thom realized he could no longer stop his son from doing something … well, something like his grandfather would do.

  You mean, noble? said a voice in Thom’s head.

  I mean stupid, said another.

  The woman couldn’t have Rip Daddy. The disease was incapacitating, not aggressive-making.

  But clearly she had something, and Thom for one wasn’t eager to bring it home. You called the authorities when people went nuts in public. You didn’t take matters into your own hands.

  Moot. All of it. Brendan didn’t so much as pause at the man.

  He barreled toward the chaos instead.

  Six

  Paranoid Fantasies

  Thom moved forward too slowly.

  Brendan was already atop the woman, while her original group approached from behind, trying to pin her shoulders the way Coach had taught him that single year he’d wrestled. He’d been good; they’d been thinking scholarship almost immediately. But Thom put the kibosh on it when Brendan sprained a wrist, considering them lucky for aborting when they did.

  Carly said, It’s just a wrist.

  And Thom responded, Exactly. Let’s quit while he’s ahead.

  But those skills were back in foolish force. Brendan looked a man about to clear a crowd: Stand back! I’m a trained professional. I’ll handle this!

  “Brendan, get off!” Thom cried out.

  The others were arriving, but Brendan couldn’t enlist help without relaxing his pin.

  Soon the area around the woman (with Brendan on top) was all splayed hands on tile: a lot of folks kneeling as if to help, but none of them able to do much of anything.

  Thom turned to tell the man Brendan had saved to go and get help, but he was scuttling off like a coward without looking back. Lucky bastard.

  Panic flight, Thom thought. If only that was us.

  “Brendan!”

  “Dad, I’m … OW!”

  Someone muttered what sounded like an apology. An elbow had struck Brendan on his chin. It seemed okay — he took the blow like a champ and the woman hadn’t moved.

  But then Brendan winced and the woman found the right leverage.

  A second later she was up, with Brendan dazed on the floor behind her.

  One of her group finally took charge with gusto; he tackled her outright, no punches pulled, and together the pair skid-rolled into the deserted bathroom, gliding on the drying slick of blood.

  The bitten man was still wailing behind Brendan and Thom. Or so it seemed until his senses returned and Thom realized the bitten man should be in front of him, not behind … and that the man wasn’t actually wailing.

  He looked scared and sheet-white, but no sound was leaving his mouth.

  No, that sound was coming from …

  Thom and Brendan both looked back at once. Whatever they’d heard was no longer happening. The mall had gone silent, just an average day for American consumers, if they kept their heads turned in that direction.

  Or maybe they hadn’t heard anything out there.

  The echoes were strange in here.

  “Dad, was that …”

  “Go.”

  “I thought I heard …”

  Thom was shoving his son. He had to move Brendan from Hero Pose, then worry about himself.

  He looked into the bathroom and saw only thrashing feet, until a fan-spray of blood suddenly bloomed on the exposed wall like impromptu graffiti. Then the feet seemed to shuffle and spin. The attached bodies began to rotate, only now one pair of feet was sluggish and dragging.

  Sounds from inside the porcelain chamber had turned animalistic. The last thing Thom saw before making a decision was the woman, now clearly holding the upper hand, arcing back with a red-smeared face.

  A pool of deep crimson was already wide and spreading with menace across the floor.

  The man’s feet finally stopped moving.

  Brendan stood to investigate, but Thom yanked
him back.

  There were others here. They’d caused this.

  “Dad!”

  “Get up. Go.” Thom kept shoving, not caring what his sloppy, desperate actions must look like.

  This was his son in front of him — no more than fifteen feet from either a dead body or one on death’s doorstep. There were cops for this; it wasn’t a fourteen-year-old’s job (or his out-of-shape father’s) to handle it. The others were already surrounding the bathroom entrance, all afraid but none leaving a gap. One had already smashed glass to grab a fire axe. Another wrenched a heavy fire extinguisher from the wall.

  “GO!”

  But of course Brendan was headstrong, like Rick, and he wouldn’t go under his own power.

  So Thom grabbed him and pulled. Brendan’s feet started to move on the slick floor. Thank God the kid didn’t play football. Track stars were lean and light. Thom, meanwhile, had put on more than a few pounds over the past decade. What he lacked in strength, he gained in mass.

  Within twenty seconds they were on the edge of the food court, then twenty after that they were back beside the atrium. Outside, everything they’d seen felt like a bad dream. There was no melee here in the real world.

  That had been an anomaly in the hallway — enough that a subversive presence inside Thom argued it hadn’t really happened at all. That presence suggested he go about his day: Step aside, folks — nothing to see here.

  The feeling was compulsively strong. Nothing, in the moment, was more tempting to forget. To reaffirm, once and for all, that the world was forever as it should be.

  But no. He wasn’t quite that cowardly.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Dad, we have to help!”

  “We’re helping.”

  “Someone might get hurt!”

  “Someone already got hurt, Brendan. Two someones. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt either, but even more than that I don’t want you hurt, son. That was brave of you to go after that woman, but it was stupid, too. The best way we can help is to find someone better equipped to—”

  “But, Dad—”

  “You saw what happened to the guy who tackled her. Someone armed needs to go after her next.” He thought of mall cop clichés. “Or at least pepper spray. More than a few semesters of wrestling.”

  They were moving fast again, Thom with a decent idea where he needed to go. Brendan’s combativeness had faded along with his brief spike of adrenaline. Now he was quiet. Almost somber despite all the lights and regular everyday conversations — despite the obscenely early pa-rum-pum-pum-pum of “The Little Drummer Boy” in the background.

  They arrived at the mall security office.

  Brendan gave his father a look, but the last of his bravado was gone. He still looked strong — still eager to do the right thing — but now he also looked drained. He was probably realizing what Thom already knew. What they’d just seen had been so shocking as to be all-consuming for two minutes of their lives, but still a singular incident. Any random day of the news would prove there were worse happenings everywhere and all the time.

  The world wasn’t as high-octane as Thom’s pulse kept wanting to insist that it was. This was still just the mall, the frozen-yogurt hassles with his overly obstinate father. They’d seen a problem happen, but being a witness to the event didn’t make it their responsibility, and there was no reason for his day to have turned as hostile as it suddenly felt.

  A uniformed officer emerged while they were pausing to enter. He looked at them with a mouthful of bagel sandwich, clearly not expecting to find anyone outside. “You guys okay?”

  Thom started. “We’re okay. But—”

  “Someone got attacked!” Brendan yelled.

  “What? Where?”

  Thom gave Brendan a look. The boy’s urge for action was decaying into mania. His glance broadcasted, Let me handle this. But to the guard, he said, “There’s a group by the bathrooms. One of them—”

  “She bit him!”

  The guard said, “What?”

  “A woman,” Thom said. “She’s … sick with something. It looked a little like—”

  “She bit his finger right off!”

  “She didn’t bite it off, Brendan.”

  Did she?

  The guard raised a hand, vying for his turn. “What exactly—”

  “Then she ripped this guy’s throat out!”

  “We don’t know what we saw,” said Thom, unsure of who he was even speaking to.

  “There’s blood everywhere, mister,” Brendan kept going. “And the guy she bit, the first one with the finger, he was looking crazy right afterward. Like he got the same thing that she got.”

  “That’s not what I saw,” said Thom.

  “He did! He was looking like he’d do it, too!”

  “Do what?” asked the guard.

  “Grandpa was saying it in the car, Dad. He said he heard some of those guys, you know from that company? They were talking about something like this. Like some secret formula that’s part of the experiment.”

  “What experiment?” asked the guard.

  Thom adopted an apologetic tone not at all appropriate to the emergency situation. “My father is in a drug trial, and he’s got Alzheimer’s, and he’s got these paranoid fantasies that—”

  “‘Paranoid’? Dad, we saw it happen!”

  “—that someone’s always doing experiments on him, and that the trial he’s in is actually a secret conspiracy, and—”

  The guard’s radio exploded with static.

  Someone on its other end said something, choked with distortion, that Thom couldn’t hear. But the guard did; he pressed a button on the mouthpiece clipped to his left-side epaulette and said he’d be right there.

  “Someone else saw it?” Thom asked.

  “No, no, nothing to worry about. Someone fell down near the Macy’s, is all.”

  Another burst on the radio. Thom heard the word paramedics. A few seconds later he swore he heard the word Hemisphere, too.

  “I have to go,” said the guard.

  “It’s not by the Macy’s. It’s by the food court bathrooms.”

  “Yeah. I’ll look into it.” He was already filing it under B-level Tasks, far behind his more-urgent slip-and-fall.

  “What if it’s zombies, Dad? I heard one of those people in Rosedale was stabbed but didn’t die, or something, and Grandpa was telling me tons and tons of stuff about how he saw—”

  “Brendan!”

  But the damage was done. The guard was already telling them to go inside and file a report if they wanted; someone would be with them shortly.

  Thom shouted for the guard to come with them. What they’d seen was a big deal — and real, and involving none of Rick’s supernatural, horror-movie dementia bullshit.

  In reply, Thom clearly heard the guard say, “Yeah, yeah.”

  When the guard was gone, Thom opened his mouth to tell Brendan to keep the crazy-ass theories to himself and stick to the facts. They’d gone for help, and spouting off was no way to get it.

  But the nightmare started before he could speak.

  Seven

  Diagnosed With a Mental Illness

  Rick heard a bellowing wail coming from down the Macy’s corridor.

  It started, then stopped, and for almost a full minute after, it was as if there’d been nothing at all. Everything, in that minute, just sort of returned to normal.

  Rosie was watching him. “What is it, Rick?”

  His eyes went to Carly, watching but not really. She was checking her phone at the fountain. Or more likely, judging by the sideways way she held it, playing that game she always liked to dick around with. She probably hadn’t even heard the scream. Carly had a way of hyper-focusing. Of blocking things out.

  “That scream,” he said. “Did you hear it?”

  Rosie looked, but there was nothing to see. “No.”

  “It sounded like someone’s hurt.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.” Wi
th the issue closed, Rosie’s face cleared of any lingering trouble and she lowered her head back over the yogurt. She’d gotten lemon, nothing mixed in. “This is lovely. Not overpowering at all.”

  “I think I should check it out.”

  “Check what out?”

  “That scream.”

  “I didn’t hear a scream.”

  “Rosie, I’m telling you, I heard something. Someone in trouble.”

  Rosie’s reply was a period at the end of the conversation’s sentence: “Well, this is the first I’m hearing about it.”

  Rick stood. He looked toward Carly, but her eyes were still down on the screen.

  “After this, we should go to Penney’s.”

  “Penney’s is gone, Rose. It went out of business.”

  “What? When did that happen?”

  “April, I think.”

  “Well, then. Macy’s. I want to get some brown shoes.”

  “What?”

  “Brown shoes. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, look at the shoes I had to wear today. Because they were all I had.”

  Rick didn’t want to look at Rosie’s shoes. All his old battle triggers were being activated and he couldn’t say why. His first theory was instinct. Despite the mall’s normal appearance, sounds, and feel, he’d sensed something amiss for a solid ten minutes, and the scream he’d heard (or at least thought he’d heard) was icing on the preparedness cake. The second theory was far less exciting, and Rick blamed Thom for it even being in his head: that the mall was normal, nothing was amiss, and the errant scream he’d seemed to hear hadn’t actually come. Sounds were squirrelly that way. Once they were gone, they were gone. There was no way short of a recording to prove they’d even happened.

  He looked at Rosie’s shoes anyway. Every nerve in his body was telling him that he needed to prepare for a rumble, but he still had that sneaking suspicion — a trifle of a possibility, really, and no more — that it was all an illusion.

  Thom’s suspicions about Rick’s forgetfulness had been followed by Thom’s putting Rick in a home, and at the time Rick could even see why. He had been forgetful and dazed back then, and maybe he really had suffered from Alzheimer’s. But that was no longer true.