A chattering from above hailed the start of the machinegun attached to the helicopter as it sprayed indiscriminately into the mess, felling Zombies and Humans alike. Part of Emma was outraged but the pragmatist knew containment had to come first at this stage.
Into this mess of flesh and bullets, Emma’s body dove - pushing and clawing at the nearest wounded and unwounded Zombies to get to the prize. Finally she caught a glimpse of the fresh meaty layer of humans and her mind was instantly sorry she had. The mass of pushing, shoving Zombies had practically turned them into a pulp - the fleshy underfoot was practically unrecognizable from a bubbly carpet with occasional human characteristics of hair, tooth or bone.
Emma was lifted backwards by an impossibly strong hand around her neck, her body hissing in primal rage though her mind was grateful to John for rescuing her from the nightmare - still, her body struggled because she lacked any form of dominion over her own form. Partially dropped from the imbalances created by her flailing limbs, Emma twisted and saw her rescuer was not John as she had surmised but a Zombie intent on his own kill.
The confused look in his eyes spoke a clear story – his mind was unable to grasp whether she was food or adversary. The smell of serotonin was all over the scene but on closer investigation he had probably realized less of it was from her. Seemingly semi-disinterested he began to choke the life out of her – she might make a poor meal but any relief from his agony was undoubtedly better than none.
Emma’s inner monster for her part clawed stupidly at his hand, leaving Emma incredibly frustrated at her inability to defend herself incapacitated as she was by her own need for CSF.
Feeling her reinforced neck bones finally start to give, Emma mentally closed her eyes. She had always struggled against focus and if she was to identify an enemy – apart from the one throttling her to death – she would believe it to be the control over her own mind that she had always lacked.
She took a deep breath and found her lungs mimic it a half second later, as if on a delay. Her vision cut out and then was restored - but hazy like she was seeing underwater. In her mind, she raised her arm and was once more rewarded by her body shadowing the movement. Bringing the dense mass of her limb down in a motion that was half chopping, half bludgeoning blunder she utterly smashed the forearm of her attacker.
Shaking and sweating from the effort of control, Emma dropped back to her own feet. Stiffly squaring her shoulders to the maimed Zombie she managed a final punch, her fist shattering through the ribs and pulverizing his heart.
She didn’t even have time to gloat before dropping to her knees, her body tearing at pink carpet for scraps of sustenance.
A moment later when she had just eaten enough squashed mess of oily brain to come to herself again, she was once more dragged backwards – this time by John. He had large ragged wounds along his left shoulder – the wound had sealed itself already but he was incredibly pale, suggesting he had first pumped a ton of his blood onto the street. He must have been caught in the line of fire from the chopper, bullets that had missed her entirely, somehow.
Yet more proof it is better to be lucky than smart she thought to herself, dazed. Realizing it was taking more than John had to pull her away from the mess, Emma signaled that she was once more in tenuous control and hobbled to her feet.
Hearing the thumping of blades get nearer, Emma and John looked up and were rewarded with the sight of the black hawk’s nose rounding the corner. Without a second thought, Emma dragged John around a different corner where they could both still see the pile of writhing feeding Zombies. A few looked up to the whirring of a minigun cycling to life before the relentless splatter of bullets mowed through the pile again and again.
When the sound finally stopped, everything was still.
Chapter 18
“Gaaaahhhhh!” John exclaimed, arching his back.
“Oh quit being such a baby,” Emma commented, sympathy was out for a coffee break at the moment.
“Wait – wait! give me a moment I need a few seconds to clear my head,” John asked while pushing aside Emma’s hand.
Three of the bullets that had torn through John had in actuality not torn through him and were consequently lodged deep inside. The worst part of extracting a bullet of this size was that they had a tendency to ricochet when they hit bone and travel up or down the affected limb. This particular bullet had ripped through his bicep but ended in his shoulder. This discovery had involved a lot of cutting, and she did not have access to pain relievers.
“Sure thing,” Emma said and started to turn away. As she saw John flop back to relax she swiftly turned and jabbed the knife she was using in place of a scalpel in a swooping motion. The bullet fell to the cement floor with a ting and an accompanying squirt of blood that Emma just avoided.
“JESUS!” shouted John, half sitting up to flop back again, exhausted.
“Well what do you want me to do? Do you want to heal around them?” the question was slightly disingenuous – he had already healed around them three times. She had to take time every 15 minutes to re-open the wound so she could continue digging. The rate at which he was healing was phenomenal – way faster than she did.
“Take 5, we still have one left up there somewhere” she said turning away, this time without duplicity.
Looking around, she took in the walls of the warehouse they had trained in earlier. Emma had half dragged John back the way they had come earlier, only to find the smaller barricade overrun and abandoned. Only a few corpses barred their way, arranged over some of the barricade’s metal sheeting.
Looking back at John for a moment as he lay back against the table, good arm over his eyes, she smiled slightly. It seemed so odd to think that not long ago she had hated him.
“You never did tell me the rest of Derek’s story,” she prompted, as much to take his mind off the pain as for any actual curiosity.
“Because you had to go,” he answered, incensed. Mission accomplished Emma thought to herself, smugly.
John paused for long enough, arm still draped over the top half of his face that Emma wondered to herself if he was going to continue. Just as she was about to check if he had drifted off to sleep, he dispassionately started talking – adding to where he had left off like the intervening time had just been long enough for him to take a sip of water.
“Mary was really fucked up in the head after that night. Her serotonin levels regulated quickly enough of course but the grief was way too much for her. She had already been pushed beyond breaking by killing her own son and the up and down of her condition. Adding the pressure of killing an innocent family and thinking however briefly that her John had come back to her snapped her like a twig.
Having nowhere he could safely put the child Derek took him in. The boy cried day and night, his wailing echoing down the halls of their small house like a banshee. At one point the neighbors came over to make sure everything was okay – Derek lied to them and said he was looking after his mentally disabled nephew for a few weeks and god bless them, they believed him.
Mary went into a near catatonic state. Derek had to feed her, bathe her and put her to bed. In between doing that, he tried to do the best he could to calm the child – telling him whatever stories he knew and more. Anything he could talk about just to try and quieten him down. Sometimes, it even worked.
After - I don’t know – a month or so? Mary started to slowly take care of the basic necessities again, she was sleeping better, even eating and bathing. When she weakly smiled at him over some breakfast eggs he decided she was well enough that he could run out to the grocery store for some much needed supplies – they had been living on whatever supplies Derek could order online, which made for interesting meal planning. He sat Mary down in front of the TV and locked the now sleeping boy boy into his newly inherited bedroom. His last image as he went out of the door was probably Mary sitting and quietly watching some meaningless infomercial on TV,
her eyes focused intently on the past.
It was all a ruse. He had no sooner pulled out of the driveway than she ran to her John’s bedroom, smashed the door into splinters. Within two minutes she had him in the warmest jacket she could find and squeezed the boy’s feet into a pair of his shoes that were now easily two sizes too tight. Without a glance back they were out of the front door and gone, never to return.
“Whoooa – she ran away?!” asked Emma incredulously.
“Yep. She had developed a wicked case of paranoid delusions – in her mind she still thought this child was her John. She now believed that Derek was systematically trying to confuse her so that she would give up her own son.”
From the couple of Psychology classes Emma had taken so far, she could kind of understand it. The core of Mary’s belief was somewhat founded in reality – Derek had imbalanced her with his experimentation. His interaction had led to the death of their son. A mind unwilling to accept that death could easily look past its own responsibility and blame the original progenitor of the whole situation.
“So where did she go?” Emma inquired.
“She drained the bank account of the few thousand dollars she could take out in one day and then trashed the cards and her cell phone. She was sure Derek could track her by them.”
He probably could have Emma thought to herself.
“She rented a car and drove the boy to New York – a city that size she figured there was no way he could find her. She rented a hotel room when she got there and that lasted a couple of months before the money ran out. She didn’t dare use her own name or credentials to apply for a job you see so there was no way in her state that she could find work. Within 3 months of her leaving, they were living on the streets.”
“What about her Serotonin deficiency? How did she handle it?” asked Emma, genuinely curious.
“Poorly,” replied John. “Her condition didn’t fit into her world so she would go as long as she could until she went crazy and killed whoever got in her way. Then she would pretend nothing had happened.”
“Didn’t she ever attack the child at those times?”
“No… I suppose he smelled wrong or something. Who knows, maybe it was some vestige of motherhood.”
“What about him? Was he immune from Serotonin deficiency?” prompted Emma.
“Of course not,” John replied. “Whenever she bludgeoned some poor passerby, he was there. The smell would drive him over the edge and he would pile in too, fighting for scraps like a dog.”
Emma was silent for a moment, almost afraid to ask the crazy thought that came unbidden to her mind. Finally, plucking up sufficient courage, she asked “Were you the child?”
John didn’t answer, looking up at the dirty, cobwebbed ceiling as if lost in a different time. The silence was answer enough.
“Why take the name of the dead child? Why keep it now?” she asked, unable to hold the questions in.
“It seemed… fitting. I guess I felt like the old me was dead. She wanted me to be John so much that over time I just… took on the role.”
“So what happened? They – you – were homeless,” she asked, completely unaware she was now the one prompting the story.
“A couple of years had passed. One day she saw this family walking past the alley - a mother, a father and a boy. He looked much more like her John by then. The look in her eyes was of hunger, but it was a different hunger.”
John shook his head, to Emma’s surprise he genuinely looked sad. “I hopped a cargo train that night, ended up here,” he finished quietly.
“How many years ago was that?” asked Emma sympathetically, understanding John so much better at last.
“Years? That was nine months ago.”
“NINE MONTHS? THAT WOULD MAKE YOU – WHAT? TEN?” Emma screamed.
“Twelve,” John corrected, indignantly.
“If you are twelve then I am the tooth fairy!” Emma answered, still loud and exasperated.
“About time you came. Can we talk about some back payments?” quipped John. “I thought you got it. When you contract this virus it ‘heals’ your body which includes of age. You got slightly younger, right?”
Emma said nothing, navel gazing as she remembering the wrinkle on her forehead disappearing overnight.
“In my case,” John continued “It aged me. It took just short of three months to get to peak age and it was awful. My remaining first teeth were pushed out in the first week and I grew daily – my bones ached so bad that Mary had to steal pain relievers for me. None of them completely eradicated the agony. If you are ever in the position of knowingly changing someone, I recommend against making it a child.”
“Twelve,” Emma replied, still shell shocked. “You are just a child. I got turned into a monster by a kid. I have been TRAINING from someone who isn’t even eligible for middle school!”
“Think of it in dog years,” he replied. “Then I am ancient.”
“But you don’t talk like – like some kid!” Emma answered in frustration.
“How should I talk, like a teletubby? I might not have finished school but I like to read and the virus makes us all quicker mentally. I am sure you noticed that you get new concepts more quickly now?”
“Well I-!” Emma blustered, remembering in an instant multiple occasions when she had wondered if she was linking more quickly – always assuming it was nothing. “I still don’t believe you are just some pre-teen!” she finished angrily.
“I lost my parents when I was eight. I then spent nearly three years living homeless with a crazy woman. I have had to kill and steal my sanity a week at a time for nearly four years. Do not call me a child again, it is insulting,” he warned.
Emma remembered watching a documentary about children – suddenly made orphans - who had to grow up fast living on the streets of Japan during WWII and paused. Pseudo- John is right she thought he has earned the right to my respect. She simply nodded in response.
It is funny she added but however old he is – in a weird way he set me free.
What an odd reality, where becoming a monster had made her a better human. The old life where she never fit in had been shed from her like a bad dream.
“So what now?” John asked; his voice far less strained.
Crap thought Emma, snapped from her train of thought. Looking at his shoulder it has almost completely healed over once more – time for more cutting.
“I think we need to go to the library,” she answered. John lifted the arm over his eyes to stare at her, incredulous.
“Hey don’t look at me like that,” she answered. “Cell signal has been down ever since the outbreak and my laptop is still in a seedy pawn shop.”
“But first,” she added, lifting the scalpel “I have to get that last bullet. If you are really good, I will tell you a story after.”
“Ugh I am never going to hear the end of this,” John said, collapsing back onto the table exasperated.
Chapter 19
“Did you ever try to find Derek?” Emma asked as they were walking. John’s step was improving almost every block, yet again proving how surprisingly fast he healed - yet he seemed to need far less Serotonin than her. She resolved to ask him about it, later.
“I am not sure I would want to and even if I did, I don’t really have a way of tracking him down. My parents were just passing through wherever Mary and Derek lived when Mary bludgeoned them to take me” he answered.
“I might have better luck with my real parents - we were originally from Philadelphia, I do remember that. I don’t particularly remember any extended family though so I am not sure who I would look for or ask about.”
“If I could find them though, then I might be able to track where they would have gone to. Even if I did manage all that – Derek Jones? I might as well be looking for a David Smith.”
“He was a Doctor,” Emma answered “That would make it easier.”
“
I suppose. I don’t know, I guess I am just afraid. I still remember the stories he told me, all the things he had hoped. But then I also remember Mary raving about him trying to take me away from her. I know she was deluded but I still have dreams about the man who wants to kill me because I was not the son he wanted.”
“And I thought my childhood was bad,” Emma muttered to herself.
“Mine wasn’t bad, just short,” replied John. The moment had passed and though they were still talking about a sensitive subject, Emma could tell his wall was back up.
“So why was yours bad?” he asked, as much to pass time as for genuine concern.
“Oh I .. suppose because too much was expected of me,” Emma answered, feeling thoroughly stupid. “My big sister died, which was – well awful of course. She was supposed to be the Doctor and suddenly I was the one who had to carry on the family legacy.”
“I know it is tough to believe but I was a vegan before I got the virus – I would vomit at the sight of blood!” She turned to John to find him starting to laugh and she couldn’t help but join in.
“A doctor who vomits when she sees blood? What kind of use is that?” he asked while laughing. “Were you a tree doctor?”
“I wish,” she answered, grinning.
“Well I am glad you toughened up,” he answered. “You were bad enough at getting the bullets out as it was, didn’t need you hurk’ing in the wound as well.”
Instead of a grin accompanying his jibe, Emma saw John duck into a doorway and frantically motion her in. She ran/dived the two steps and was up in a trice to check around the corner.
In the distance over Boston Common was a running figure. Even at this distance, Emma knew they were infected, bent impossibly forward as they were. Rolling over a small knoll a Humvee with a mounted gun swerved sideways and a passenger opened fire onto the figure. It dropped instantly and ceased all movement.
“Why are we risking being outside anyway?” Asked John quietly, obviously afraid of the army people trying once more to turn him into a fleshy colander.
“I want to try and dig more info on Steve,” Emma answered in a similar sotto voice, despite the vehicle being a good hundred yards distant. She followed the statement with a light cough, drawing a suspicious glare from John. She waved it away - her lungs were still healing.