Sick Day, Part 2

He rubs his thigh gingerly, wincing in the cold before continuing, “I had the news on now. I suppose you did too. Everybody did. We all got to watch everything we built go down the pan live on CNN. Look, I know that this was just one more tragedy. I know that. Everyone’s got a story like this.”

He stops talking again, a man forgetfully considering his thoughts.
“Did you try to get her out?” I ask.
He appears not to hear me, ear cocked to the breeze he stands up and paces slowly, carefully on the icy cracked ground towards the front of the building. Stopping twenty metres away he says: “They wouldn’t let us past here. Any of us. There must have been one hundred soldiers here and not a damn one of them knew what to do. Well, besides shoot on sight anyone trying to escape from a window or door. Wasn’t just them they shot at either" he says, one hand still kneading the muscles around his thigh.
“Rick, I’m sorry.” I stammer the words out, and feel ridiculous for it, the utterances as flimsy and ineffectual as the mist that forms in the cold air as I say them. It’s how I feel with all the survivors I talk to. The mothers, the soldiers, doctors. The guys that went through hell.

But he just stands there, saying nothing, as still and cold as the burnt shells of the trees that used to line the courtyard, as the pocked and blackened pillars. At last he turns and gestures at the phone on the rim of the fountain.
“They’re your burden now. You want stories? You want to let the dead tell you what it was like in those days? You’ll get what you want kid. I just hope you want what you’re going to get. Those messages don’t go away once you’ve read them. There were real people in here. Lots of them and they all died. Every one of them.”

I pocket the phone without saying a word. The time for talking over and done with we are preparing to leave when we hear it, clear and awful, carrying through the frozen mist like a low breeze. No-one who survived the plague years ever forgets the sound and I instinctively rise and try to figure out its direction, aware that Rick has backed closer towards me doing likewise but it’s nearly impossible in the gathering mist and snow to isolate the groan.

“Just one. Rare, but you still get them around here sometimes. Probably washed up from the river.” Rick says, an alertness to his tone completely alien to the resigned and forlorn broken man I had just been speaking with. He puts his fingers in his mouth and before I can stop him emits a high pitched whistle that’s greeted immediately by a closer, louder groan.
“Don’t be afraid” he tells me, shaking my hand from his arm “better we drag it to us than panic and bump into it trying to get away.”
The thing takes shape, a silhouette moving from the corner of the building slowly but undeniably, straight toward us.
Even in the warmth of my Winter jacket I can’t help but shiver at the sight of it, “It’s so easy for us to forget what it was like in those days, when we were surrounded, outnumbered, and died in our millions. Killed by these things that move barely faster than a crawl.” I say, bringing a grunt from my companion as it hobbles closer.

I draw the revolver I haven’t used in years and am trying to stop my hands from shaking enough to aim at the thing’s head when Rick blocks the shot. I watch as barely using the walking stick he had been so hunched over earlier he strides towards the dead man who paces implacably onwards, arms raised like someone greeting an old friend. Nimbly stepping aside as it lunges towards him with that deceptive change in pace that caught out so many in the early weeks.

“Yeah, he washed up from the river. One of the last to be infected, still got plenty of meat on him.” Rick’s keeping the thing away from him using his walking stick, pushing it off balance and moving to the side only to watch it stand up and come around again in a slow and awful dance.
“Can you see that bite on his arm? Tiny, a slow burner. He won’t have got sick for a couple of days. It’s the only one too. I’m betting he threw himself off a bridge somewhere up-state before turning, maybe got caught up in some debris.” He pauses, before smashing at the wiry sinews around the creature’s knee with his cane. Knocking it to the ground where it howls pathetically.
“Hey, maybe he drove his car off and turned after he drowned... got loosened up by a storm and finds himself here. The river isn’t even a kilometre away” Rick says, absentmindedly rooting through a nearby pile of debris while the corpse drags itself along the concrete after him, open abdominal cavity leaving a dark wet trail on the stone that by law must be reported and incinerated.

I can see the weeds from the river sticking to the folds in its tattered jeans, its eyes dead and sunken in a skull that still has gaunt flesh in places and patches of lank hair that might once have been blonde and I just want to be somewhere, anywhere but here. Rick lets some gravel fall through his fingertips and looks up at me and I’m hit by how lonely, how broken he looks bent like that with the monster not three feet away. The earlier brief spurt of energy gone from his eyes so completely I have to remind myself it was ever there at all.

“It’s not like in books kid. There is no ending for this story. Not a sad one, not a happy one. You do what you want with those messages but don’t think they can make any of this mean anything. Look at him, how did he think things were going to end? Like this?”

With the sigh of a man with a heavy task ahead Rick lifts a brick from the rubble and in two deft strokes shatters the creature’s skull with a wet, anti-climatic splat. Forcing himself to his feet he leans heavily on his cane and without another word disappears into the mist.

I thought long and hard that day about whether or not to publish the messages on the phone, but telling stories is what I do. What I chose to do. No matter how hard the telling. People need to know what happened, why the world is the way it is. Rick was right, the dead should talk to more than cats and rats. Below is a selection of the messages from the phone, if I’d known how I’d be haunted by them I would never have taken the thing.

But I had a choice, and so dear reader do you. Read on if you feel you must.

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10:45 06/06/2010 Jess
That was one creepy ass presentation. Apparently there’s rabies or something going around, we’ve got to stay here until the CDC get here to do some tests. Looks like it might be a long day. A couple of the kids are pretty sick, but we couldn’t get through to the hospital. What’s the deal with the phones? Tony doesn’t look great either. If I was you I would take today off, I don’t think he’ll notice ;) x

10:48 06/06/2010 Jess
CDC stands for Centre for Disease Control. How could you not know that? Aren’t you supposed to be a teacher or something? :P Hey maybe I’ll get home early today. x

11:15 06/06/2010 Jess
The CDC guys are in those white suit things, they look like astronauts or something. The students were joking with them but I’m not laughing. If they’re in those suits doesn’t it mean it’s in the air?

14:23/ 06/06/2010 Jess
Three more of the kids are dying, the fucking assembly hall is full of them. There’s people talking, they say it’s contagious, that we’re all infected. Rick I’m scared, there’s soldiers here. They’ve told us we can’t leave. What the hell is going on?

14:37 06/06/2010 Jess
Tony is dead. At first I wanted him to stop coughing and then I prayed that he would start again. He didn’t. I love you. X

15:00 06/06/2010 Ray
Don’t listen to the news. It’s all true. Tony came back. He killed Gareth, we’ve tried to lock them in the Assembly hall. We can’t get across the foyer, the soldiers are shooting anyone they see.

15:10 06/06/2010 Ray
We’re trapped. There’s people spread out all over the building, sick, dead, alive. I’m coughing . Blood in it. Don’t come here.

16:00 06/06/2010 Jess
Just me now. They got in. Rick you need to make sure people know. This isn’t rabies, these people are dead. Sarah got one with that revolver her husband makes her take everywhere. I saw it hit. But it kept coming. Gareth bit me on the arm, it won’t stop bleeding and I know they will find me. I can’t stop coughing and I’m too weak to run anymore.

I have Sarah’s gun. I know what I have to do. Please try to understand and for the love of God don’t come here. Love you always. Jess x.