The creature that sinks its teeth into the nape of Dr. Stevens’s exposed neck is enormous—probably a former field hand or stock clerk accustomed to loading sixty-pound bales of fertilizer or cattle feed into truck beds all day, day in and day out—and it latches down on the doctor’s jugular so firmly, a crowbar couldn’t loosen its jaws. Clad in moldy bib overalls, its thinning hair reduced to spidery wisps on its veined white skull, it has eyes like yellow pilot lamps and makes a watery, garbled coughing sound as it roots its rotten incisors into live tissue.
Dr. Stevens stiffens immediately, arms going up, eyeglasses knocked off his face, satchel flying, a horrid shriek bursting out of him in complete involuntary shock. He can’t see or detect the agent of his demise—only the Day-Glo red shade of hot agony snapping down over his gaze.
The suddenness of the attack catches everybody by surprise, the group bristling in unison, reaching for weapons, scrambling backward.
Alice lets out a scream—“DR. STEVENS!!”—and she sees the weight of the massive biter, combined with the doctor’s involuntary writhing and staggering, pull Stevens backward, off balance, and onto the ground.
Stevens lands on top of his assailant with a wet grunt, the blood washing over and baptizing the giant biter underneath him in a torrent of fluid as black and oily as molasses in the darkness. In a strangled, insensate voice, the doctor jabbers, “What—? What is it? Is it—? Is it one of them? Is it—? Is it a biter?”
The others lunge toward him, but Alice has already reached for the sentry’s AK, which dangles on its strap over Martinez’s shoulder, her voice booming, “GIVE ME THAT!”
“Hey!” Martinez can’t tell what’s happening, the tug on his shoulder accompanied by voices yelling all around him, and the other men pushing past him.
Alice already has the AK up and aimed, and then she’s pulling the trigger—thank God the kid on the wall keeps his weapon locked and loaded, the safety off at all times—and the gun barks.
A bouquet of fire sparks and flickers out of the short muzzle as the shell casings fly, and the tracers burst a chain of holes in the biter’s temple, cheek, jaw, shoulder, and half its torso. The thing twitches and wriggles in its death throes beneath the wounded doctor, and Alice keeps firing, and firing, and firing, until the magazine clicks empty, and the slide snaps open—and she keeps firing.
“It’s okay … it’s okay, Alice.”
The faint sound of a male voice is the first thing that penetrates her ringing ears and her traumatized brain. She lowers the gun and realizes that Dr. Stevens is addressing her from the blood-soaked heap of a funeral bier on which he lies.
“Oh-God-Doctor—DR. STEVENS!” She tosses the assault rifle to the ground with a clatter and goes to him. She drops to her knees, and reaches for his neck, getting her fingertips wet with his arterial blood as she feels for a pulse, trying to remember the CPR lessons he provided her, the trauma unit protocols, when she realizes he is tugging at her lab coat with his blood-spattered fingers.
“I’m not … dying … Alice … think of it … scientifically,” he utters around a mouth filling up with blood. In the darkness, his face looks almost serene. The others press in behind Alice and look on and listen closely. “I’m just … evolving … into a different … a worse … life form.”
The horror spreads from person to person hovering over him, from face to face, as Alice fights her tears and strokes his cheek. “Doctor—”
“I’ll still exist, Alice … in some way,” he utters in barely a whisper. “Take the supplies, Alice … you’ll need them … to take care of these people. Use what I taught you. Now go … go … go on.”
Alice stares as the doctor’s life drains out of him, his intelligent eyes going glassy, and then empty, gaping at the nothingness. She lets her head loll forward but no tears will come. The desolation in her core won’t allow tears to come now.
Martinez stands over her, watching all this with nervous intensity. A fist of contradictory emotions grips his insides. He likes these people—the doctor and Alice—regardless of their hatred of the Governor, their petty betrayals, their scheming and gossiping and sarcasm and disrespect. God help Martinez—he likes them. He feels a weird kinship with them, and now he’s groping for purchase in the dark.
Alice rises to her feet, picking up the satchel of medical supplies.
Martinez touches her shoulder, and softly says, “We gotta move.”
Alice nods, says nothing, stares at the bodies.
“People in town will think the shots were just the guard taking out biters that got too close to the fence,” Martinez goes on, his voice hurried and taut with tension. He glances over his shoulder at the other two men, who stand by, looking rattled. Martinez turns back to Alice. “But the sound will attract more biters—and we need to be gone before they get here.”
He looks at the doctor’s slack face, stippled with blood, frozen in death.
“I—He was a good friend,” Martinez adds finally. “I’ll miss him too.”
Alice gives one last nod, and then turns away. She nods at Martinez.
Without another word, Martinez grabs the AK and gives a hand gesture to the others, and then leads the three survivors down a side road—and on toward the town limits—their silhouettes swallowed within moments by absolute, unforgiving, implacable darkness.
*
“Damn it, honey—eat it!” The Governor lowers himself to his hands and knees on the foul-smelling carpet of his living room, holding a severed human foot by its big toe in front of the dead little girl. The Japanese sword lies on the floor close by—a treasure, a talisman, a spoil of war that the Governor hasn’t let out of his sight since the debacle at the racetrack—its implications now the furthest thing from his mind. “It’s not completely fresh,” he says, indicating the gray appendage, “but I swear this thing was walking not two hours ago.”