“I’ll get the keys.” Joy walked over to the administration desk and started rifling through the drawers. “It’s really something. The master key opens every lock in the school. Maybe we should take a peek at our permanent records while we’re at it. Do you think those really exist, or is it a myth?”
“I sure hope not,” Jack said. “I peed my pants in the first grade. If that comes out I might never make it into university.”
A black office phone sat on the desk next to a pile of papers. Aries picked up the receiver and pressed the line button. There was no dial tone. She checked the box to make sure it was plugged in and tried again. Still nothing.
“Oh, God.” Jack’s voice was stilted. His fingers gripped the last blind sash tightly, frozen in midtwist.
Aries made it to the window first. Her eyes followed Jack’s gaze. Fifty feet away from the window, a body lay in the grass. The person was facing the ground, covered in blood, impossible to recognize.
Almost.
The bright green blouse gave her away.
“That’s Ms. Darcy,” Colin said.
Joy turned and promptly threw up all over the closest desk.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Colin chanted, putting his hands up against his ears as if he wanted to block out the sound of his own voice.
“What happened to her?” Jack said. “Why would someone do that? That’s gotta be more than just rioters.”
“It’s evil,” Aries said, and she finally understood fully what the crazy man on the bus meant when he said “game over.”
There would be no bonus lives to help them get a higher score.
“Someone’s out there,” Jack said.
Just beyond the grass, closer to the main road, stood three people. They were staring at the school. No, change that. They were staring straight at them.
Aries pulled Jack away from the window.
“We need to get out of here now,” she said.
No one seemed to listen to her. Time was moving too slowly. They weren’t going to be fast enough. Her heart thumped loudly in her ears. Jack moved away from her in slow motion, his eyes focusing back on the outside world.
“We have to leave,” she said again, louder, trying to block out her heartbeat. “We have to get Becka and Amanda.”
Jack finally looked at her. “Okay.”
But he still wasn’t moving. None of them were.
“Come on,” she screamed, pulling both him and Joy at the same time. “If we don’t go now we’re going to die.”
“What’s happening?” Joy said. “Who did that to Ms. Darcy?”
“They’ll kill us next.” That seemed to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s go.” Thankfully Colin didn’t argue.
They ran down the halls, almost making it to the theater before the screams started.
“That’s Becka,” Joy cried.
They all stopped and waited, frozen and unsure of what to do. The screams continued for what seemed like an eternity before abruptly stopping. Silence filled the halls, pressing down on Aries’s skull. She couldn’t speak; her tongue was glued against her teeth. She could feel Jack’s body pushed up against her from behind, tense.
“What do we do?” he said.
“We have to leave now,” Aries said.
“What about Becka and Amanda?” Joy whispered. She may have spoken the words, but she was already walking backward, away from the theater.
“We can’t help them anymore,” Aries said.
They heard the grinding noise of the theater doors opening. Footsteps echoed across the tiled flooring.
“Run,” Jack said.
They did.
NOTHING
I can feel them. All of them. Their thoughts. Their voices whisper in my ears. I hear their prayers, and their pain passes through my body like a million electric volts.
I know their crimes.
They will make sure I witness every last one of them.
In New York City, a janitor blocks all the exits and dismantles the power supply before setting fire to the building. He spends his morning going from building to building, committing several acts of deadly arson before he finally traps himself in his own explosion and dies instantly.
In Houston, hundreds of inmates escape a local prison and go on a bloody rampage through the streets. The police force isn’t capable of protecting the people, especially since many of the officers turn their weapons on the innocent crowds instead.
In Barcelona, a priest walks into a church with a gun and kills everyone during morning mass.
Riots in London stain the cobblestone redder than anything Jack the Ripper ever dreamed of.
A young preschool teacher in Toronto gives her students a deadly mixture of arsenic and fruit punch. When she comes back long enough to realize what she’s done, she downs the last remaining drops in two swallows.
Game over.
People are killing each other all over the world. Brothers attack sisters. Husbands and wives destroy their children. There is no explanation for the average person to understand. In the last remaining places where the media is able to reach the public, they have no answers.
But I know.
I can’t block it out. They have dug their claws into my skull. There is no place in the world where I can hide, because they know where to find me. They don’t even have to try. They’ve got the keys to my brain and they’re emptying my thoughts and refilling it with theirs.
Not too long ago I think I was normal. I had a mother.
She’d need to light a lot of candles to save my soul now.
Somewhere through the darkness I catch a thought. A small memory. There is a lot of white sand; it stretches in all directions, farther than I can see. In front of me is a blue ocean. It’s gigantic. But I’m very small. A child, perhaps, no older than three or four. I hold on to my bucket and shovel while my parents spread out a blanket over the white, pure sand. It’s hot on my feet.
My father calls out to me.
My mother is smiling.
She looks so happy.
And then it’s gone.
I want to grab these memories and hold tightly. I’m afraid that if they disappear, I’ll never experience them again.
There must be a way to fight this. To block out the black thoughts and make the voices go away. But with each memory fading, their hold on me strengthens. Soon the person I was, still am, will be gone. I’ll be hollow.
I am not the first and I will not be the last.
There are so many empty people walking around on this little planet. Lonely people. Angry people. Bitter. Forgotten.
They were easy to fill.
Three Weeks Later
MICHAEL
“What do you think?”
The binoculars were cracked, and Michael saw the world in two halves, both of which were colorless and slightly out of focus. It hurt his eyes and he blinked several times to try and make the world look normal again.
What did he think? They had stumbled across the ranch house just before noon. They almost hadn’t seen it; most of the building was hidden behind an overgrown acre of evergreens.
“Well?” Evans tapped his finger on the side of Michael’s head. Hard. To get his attention.
“Empty.” Michael scratched his head and raised the binoculars again. They’d been watching from the bushes for a few hours now. There had been no movement from inside, but that didn’t mean anything. Nothing was ever empty or free. But they were farther away from the city; there was always the possibility that they weren’t bothering to come this far out. They hadn’t seen anything for several days. This could be a free zone. “Maybe,” he finally said. “It’s worth looking at.”
“Maybe not.”
“We can’t take that chance.” They were out of food, having divvied up the remaining package of saltines for supper two days ago. They’d discussed hunting. There were plenty of wild animals, but lighting a fire to cook was too risky. They couldn’t take the chance knowing that o
thers would be drawn to the smoke. They were stuck. Who knew when the next meal might come? The last pizza had been delivered weeks ago. There would never be another. And they had a child with them. They’d found a mother with her four-year-old son a few days ago while searching through an abandoned lumber-jack camp. It was a miracle they’d survived. But the kid was sickly, and Michael didn’t think he’d last much longer without food, maybe some medical supplies, too, if they were lucky.
“There’s no such thing as chance anymore.”
Michael didn’t answer him. They all had their ghosts. Three weeks ago they’d arrived at Evans’s house to find his wife and baby daughter missing. His front door was kicked in and there was blood on the carpet. They never found out what happened.
“I think we should take a chance.” Billy, one of the other group members, jumped in on them from behind. Landing on the soft dirt beside Michael, he grabbed the binoculars from him in one swift move and raised them to his eyes. “These things are useless, man. How on earth have you been staring through them for the past two hours? I would have shot myself.” Tossing them back, he scratched his goatee. “Seriously, that kid don’t look so good. We’ve got to do something and do it fast, or he ain’t gonna make it till nightfall.”
“I know,” Michael said. “But we can’t go in until we’re absolutely sure it’s safe.”
“We’ve been here for hours,” Billy said. “If they were in there, we’d have seen something by now. Them Baggers ain’t gonna sit in there and wait for us to bore ourselves to death. They would have attacked by now if they’s here.”
Baggers. A hunter’s term. As in “I’m gonna go out and ‘bag’ myself a deer.” Only the Baggers were hunting something completely different. Billy introduced the word several days ago. He’d heard some poor guy mention it before one of the monsters tore him to pieces.
“Maybe.”
“How far are we till the next town?” Billy scratched himself again. They were all itchy. Showers were a luxury that none of them could afford or find these days.
Evans pulled out the crinkled map for the tenth time that hour. “Hard to say. We still don’t quite know where we are. Could be a few miles, could be a few hundred.”
“No ways.” Billy grabbed the map. “There ain’t a single place here that’s more than a few miles away. We ain’t that far up north. This here’s still civilization. You ain’t able to spit without hitting a Taco Bell or Jack ’n’ Box.”
Michael glanced back at the mother, stretched out on the ground, her child’s head resting on her thigh. The boy—Michael couldn’t remember his name—hadn’t opened his eyes in a long time. Shallow gasps escaped bluish lips, his chest barely rising against his shirt. His face was deathly white, eyes sunken deep into the recesses of his skull. The poor kid probably weighed as much as a small animal. Sure, they’d all lost weight, and most of them would probably run one another over for a hamburger, but this was different. This was a kid. They weren’t supposed to go hungry.
Children weren’t supposed to know that monsters existed either.
The mother didn’t look so good. Blond, matted hair that probably hadn’t been brushed since this whole ordeal started. She looked washed-out. Faded. There may still have been a sun in the sky, but its rays weren’t warming her skin. She was singing softly to her son, a song that Michael hadn’t heard since he was really young. He could barely make out the words.
She shouldn’t really be singing. The noise might attract the wrong kind of attention. But Michael wasn’t about to tell her to stop. It might be the last time the child ever heard her voice.
No one wants to go off into the darkness alone.
“Screw it.” He turned his attention back to Evans and Billy. “Let’s do it. Get the others.”
There were twelve of them in the group. Michael and Evans joined them two weeks ago, back when they were five. Since then they’d picked up a few more as they traveled the road. The mother and son were the latest find. It was getting difficult now that the group was so big. There was no safety in numbers, just more and more people to try to keep an eye on. Bigger meant more food was needed. It also meant louder.
But Michael liked being in a group. It made him feel wanted. He liked being a part of something. It was the type of person he was. Right in the center of things he was confident and strong. Dad said he was a natural-born leader, and if he were around he’d be proud to know Michael was coping. Michael knew there was still the possibility Dad was holed up somewhere in Denver. He knew a lot about survival. He clung to the idea that they’d cross paths again one day, and he looked forward to telling his father about how well he’d done. He was, after all, leading this group and he was younger than almost all of them. Evans had to be at least forty. Billy was thirty, but he looked older because of his missing teeth.
At seventeen, Michael was the one they looked to when they wanted answers. He’d never planned it that way. It just happened.
He got up, wincing as his knees popped. He’d been sitting for too long. Wandering over to where the mother sat, he knelt down beside her. Why couldn’t he remember the name of the child? He should ask her, but he didn’t want to look stupid. It was embarrassing that the leader couldn’t remember all the names of his flock.
“Hey.” He spoke quietly.
She stopped singing and looked at him. Her eyes were unfocused, staring right past him. Blinking several times, she finally managed to look at his face. Her eyes were bright blue but clouded.
“We’re going to go check out the house,” he said. “Do you want to come? You can stay here, but I think it’s better if we stick together. I can help you. Do you want help? I can carry him.”
He reached out his arms, but she pulled away, clinging tightly to her child. “No,” she muttered. “I’ve got him. Do you think there’ll be a bed? It would be nice to lie down for a bit.”
“We won’t be able to stay long,” he admitted. “We’re just going in to see if there’s food. It’s not safe to stick around.”
“Just for a bit,” she repeated. “He needs to rest. He’s not well.”
Michael nodded. “We’ll see what we can do.”
She stood up by herself, still holding the child, and started walking toward Evans. Her legs were shaking but she managed to keep it together.
There was something oddly comforting about her strength. Michael wondered, if he ever had a child, would he have the same determination to keep him safe? No matter how weak she became, she’d never give up.
He planned on being that strong. Who knew how long this war would continue. The Baggers had the upper hand, but if enough people banded together, they might be strong enough to regain power. Even if they managed to take down one Bagger at a time, well, that would be considered a good start.
Michael wanted to believe that. He had to believe that. Even with the entire population on the brink of extinction, he preferred to remain an optimist. It was impossible to tell how many people had died, since there was no more communication. It would be nice to find a short-wave radio or something. There might be other survivors using such devices. But so far the group had found nothing in the houses they’d searched except cell phones, computers, televisions, and all the other sorts of now-useless communication gadgets he’d grown up with.
Once upon a time he’d thought his cell phone was the one thing he couldn’t live without. Amazing how quickly the tides can turn.
The Baggers were definitely being smart. Rumors were, they were the ones who managed to shut down the networks so quickly. They were the ones who blocked the cell phone towers and destroyed the Internet. Without communication, the world was thrown into black panic. There was no one to tell them what was happening. No information on safe places to go or what sorts of steps to take to protect themselves. The only way to find out if your loved ones were alive was to get in a car and travel. That’s how the Baggers managed to kill so quickly. People put themselves out in the open and became sitting ducks.
&n
bsp; Or at least that’s what the group speculated about late at night while waiting for sleep. They also talked about why some people had become Baggers and others hadn’t. Why and how had the change happened? What would the Baggers do with the world they’d destroyed? And left unspoken was the fear. They weren’t Baggers. Yet. Evans figured if they hadn’t turned by now, they weren’t going to. Michael agreed with him. But the fear always crept in. Was it just a matter of time? Would he wake up one night with one of his peers about to rip out his throat?
No, he wouldn’t think like that. And whatever it was, it didn’t appear to be catching. He had to believe that. They all did.
But for now there were plenty of other people out there. Still normal, hiding inside their houses, taking refuge in whatever safe places still existed. Michael planned on finding them.
“We ready?” Evans appeared, folding up the map carefully and putting it in his pocket.
“Yeah.” Michael’s stomach growled, reminding him of the important things. “Let’s do it.”
They both made fists with their hands and lightly punched each other. It had become their mantra, their good-luck charm.
Billy and he took the lead, with Evans following at the rear. They were the three strongest and the least affected by hunger. At least that’s what they led the others to believe. In reality they were just better at pretending the grumbles in their guts didn’t bother them.
It wasn’t much of an army, but they’d managed to survive. They were tough enough. But they’d never gone this long without eating before. How much longer would their strength last?
They moved along the tree line, sticking closely to the woods in case they needed to run. Vigilance would get them only so far. Realistically, if they were spotted now, they wouldn’t all get away. They knew this—survival came at a price. Over the past few weeks they’d all survived a Bagger attack. Or two. Or three. They knew the consequences. Not everyone got out alive. They’d seen loved ones die. Even worse, some had watched the people they cared about turn on them. But as long as they stuck together in a group, they were still human. As long as they were human they were still alive. Michael watched the house carefully for movement. A tiny flicker, parting of a curtain—anything he might have missed before. A bubble of icy liquid churned away in his stomach. He was getting so used to being afraid, he barely noticed anymore. Goose bumps on his skin were as common as breathing. It was smart to be scared; it was the one thing that was keeping them alive. “Caution” was the new secret word.