"The virus. It makes you someone else, someone worse. I'm not sure that person needs to keep going." She looked up at me with red, haunted eyes.
I don't know what it was, but her attitude pissed me off. The idea of quitting got under my skin. "That's great, lady. Our way out is staring us in the face and you get some kind of end-of-life crisis? I don't know why you bothered to help me in the first place."
"I wasn't helping you," she said. "I sat next to you because I hoped you'd wake up as one of those things."
"What are you saying? You wanted me to kill you?"
She didn't answer, but she was on the verge of tears. If she didn't get it together soon I would have to escape on my own. I maybe felt a little bad for her, but I wasn't about to give up my life for some woman I just met in a fucking quarantine.
Jeremiah was in bad shape. The big guy had both hands on the wall and looked like he was ready to fall down on his face again. I was at a loss, but then I noticed a detail about Alison I hadn't before: she wore a very small cross around her neck. "I can't take care of Jeremiah by myself," I said.
"I'm sorry I can't help you."
"I'll tell you what- just help me until he gets through the change. If he turns out to be one of them, I won't stop him from doing...whatever. But if he lives, then you did one last, good thing for someone. That's like a do-not-pass-go to heaven. What would Jesus do, am I right?"
The Bleeders were getting close now. I didn't understand why they didn't run at us like some of the others, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to figure out the logic of monsters.
Alison looked from Jeremiah to me and said, "Okay."
"Good. Now help me lower his big ass down there."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Alison carefully climbed down the pipes, proving to be surprisingly agile as she touched down in the dark basement below. I helped Jeremiah step through the open panel. He was just lucid enough to follow my orders and climb down. The large pipe groaned under his weight but managed to hold as Alison guided him from below. Meanwhile, I climbed through and reached back for the panel to cover our way out.
The two Bleeders following us had gotten distracted by the fresh body Alison left for them, so they didn't notice me grab the panel and pull it back into place behind me, shutting out most of the light and plunging us into darkness.
I waited until Jeremiah reached the bottom before I started my own climb down, not wanting to put any more stress on a pipe not meant to hold our weight. I couldn't see him but I could hear Alison guide him down to the floor and tell him where to step.
I didn't even get three feet down before a loud thump overhead made me jump. It came from the replaced panel, and it sounded like someone bumping into it. Then came the other sounds: hands, two sets of them, beating and clawing at the panel from the other side. The two Bleeders must have lost interest in the body and come to investigate, finding only a wall for their troubles.
The dead body back on the field was a Bleeder, was that why they didn't care about it? Did that mean they only liked chewing on uninfected people, not anyone who had the virus? It was worth thinking about if it meant some kind of safety. At the same time, that very same Bleeder had attacked Alison, and she was clearly harboring some serious Bleeder traits, so they must not have been too discriminating. Either way, it was time to go. The thought that I might not have secured the panel well enough to keep them out crossed my mind, so I pushed all the doubts away and concentrated on my descent.
At the bottom I dropped down the last few feet and found myself in a place I hadn't been in a few years, though it was a lot darker this time around. In power-down mode the basement was lit by one in ten overhead lights, and a chain of emergency lights near the ceiling and around doorways. It was enough to let you see if you were about to bang your shin on a steam pipe, and that's about it. "The army must have left everything turned off when they took over," Alison said. "Maybe to conserve energy."
"Or maybe they just forgot to hit all the switches," I added. "You want me to ask the next soldier I see?"
"Don't give me your attitude, you asked me to be here."
"Sorry, I get a bit grouchy after I come back from the dead."
Even in the dim light, I could see her shake her head. I still had it.
We left the steam pipes behind and I led the way down the hallway toward where we would eventually find a way out. The stadium's basement was as large as you'd expect, with corridors weaving past rooms devoted to plumbing, electric, storage, archives, and of course the team locker room and clubhouse. During a game, or any time it had a full staff, the place was alive with voices and movement, but now it had become like a ghost town. The only sounds were the hum of generators and electrical boxes.
I looked back to check that Jeremiah was still following us. He was like a half-blind dog following our feet as we made our way through the darkened corridor. "How's he doing," I asked.
"Quiet," Alison whispered.
"Relax, they can't-"
"Shh!" She grabbed my hand to silence me. I was about to yank my arm away when I realized what she was talking about- there was a sound in one of the rooms up ahead. It was a low thump that repeated every few seconds, and it came from what I remembered to be one of the janitorial closets. The next working overhead light was directly in front of the closet's doorway, like a stagelight at the world's shittiest play. I looked back at Alison for what to do. She shrugged as if it say, This was your idea.
I motioned for her to stay put and edged forward a few more feet. Again came the sound- thump...thump...thump...not quite evenly spaced where you could say it was mechanical. The room was about fifteen feet ahead of me now.
I cleared my throat, sounding more nervous than I planned. "Hello," I called out, barely above a whisper.
"What are you doing," Alison hissed.
"There's no way I'm getting any closer until I know what that noise is," I hissed back.
"What if you-"
THUMP. The noise came even louder, reacting to our voices. There was no way to turn back, the only way out through that corridor, yet we weren't exactly moving forward, either. I was about to suggest we duck into one of the electrical rooms when someone came stumbling out of the janitor's closet and into the light. He came out so fast he bashed into the opposite wall with a messy crash. He pushed off the wall and looked back and forth. In the flood of the overhead light, I made out his face and recognized it instantly. He wore the same overalls I remembered him for. The man who had been so nice to me when he didn't have to had a lot more gray in his hair now.
"Andre?"
He twitched in my direction. My stomach dropped. In the light his dark red eyes bled down his sallow face. He sniffed and coughed, his face angry in a way I never thought possible for him.
He was a Bleeder.
"Stay back," I told Alison, pointing to Jeremiah. "Keep him away." I was thinking as much for his safety as I was my own- the last thing I needed right then was the big guy going full infected while I tried to fight off another.
Andre ran directly at me, covering ten feet of hallway in a matter of seconds. He shouldn't have been able to move that fast at his age, but he was on the latest, greatest energy drink on the market, and it only came in one flavor: red. Before he could close the last five feet, I reached into the dark and grabbed whatever I could find in all the junk that cluttered the corridor. My hands found something with a weird texture, but I had no time for second choices so I pulled it back and held it over my head, ready to strike.
It was an over-sized foam hand. "Ahh, fuck," I moaned.
Andre tackled me. The foam hand flew from my hand as I fell back into the clutter and the dust and the shadows. He fell with me snarling and screaming for my blood, but I kept him from getting too close and taking a chunk of flesh. His breath stunk as his teeth chomped again and again. A face that probably never so much as frowned in all its time on Earth wanted nothing but to bite me open and taste me. With each chomp he got closer, clawing his way up me and to my throat. His teeth were an inch from my throat and I could feel his hot breath on my neck.
Andre suddenly lifted off me so fast it was like he had a bungee cord tied around his waist that had just snapped back. He flew across the hallway, bashed into the wall and crumpled to the floor a pile of bones and laundry.
Jeremiah stood over me looking pissed-off. His hungry expression made me think he'd only pulled Andre off me to claim me for himself. But the moment passed and he got dizzy again, nearly face-planting into the wall. Andre was already getting to his feet even though from the looks of him he had broken a few bones in the fall. His focus was on Jeremiah now, the man who was the biggest threat to him right then. Jeremiah was in no condition to fight him off- he had used up everything in him to save me.
I can't explain what happened to me next other than to say I was overcome with anger, but that doesn't do it justice. It was like someone shoved a stick of dynamite in my brain and lit the fuse. I even heard the explosion and then saw a flash of light that filled everything I saw.
The next thing I knew, I had Andre pinned to the wall and was bashing his skull open with a wrench. I heard it crack and then blood sprayed me in the face like a can of soda that had been shaken way too much. The anger drained from his face and his red eyes went still.
I let go of him and he slumped to the floor, dead.
"You took it from his toolbelt," Alison said, noticing how I was staring at the bloody wrench in my hand. Jeremiah was behind me, sitting with his back against the wall and his head in his hands, mumbling to himself. What a group we were.
"I don't remember anything," I said, but it was a lie. There were flashes, like cue cards of violence. I looked down at the bloodied corpse at my feet and thought of him from before all this, when he was just a guy with a job and an easy smile. "His name was Andre," I said. "He was probably the nicest guy I ever met. Even with the sickness I can't imagine him hurting anyone."
"It's the brain damage. It destroys pieces of the mind that control personality, inhibition, empathy, all the traits that make us people."
"And that includes you and I. People who come back from it."
"That's what I was trying to tell you. We don't come back completely."
Something about this chick didn't sit right with me. I walked closer to her, Andre's wrench at my side. "You sound like you know a little too much about what's happening."
"I'm a quick study," she said, dismissing me.
"You're a bullshitter, so why don't you tell me what your deal is, starting with that ring on your finger?" I pointed at it with the wrench.
Her expression changed instantly. Her eyes softened and her lips pursed. She looked down at the stone on her finger, taken off-guard by the question. Obviously she didn't intend to relive the memories.
"My fiance'. Frank. He was a doctor working with the WHO."
"That shitty classic rock band?"
She squinted at me. "The World Health Organization. It's the part of the U.N. that deals with communicable diseases."
"Oh. That makes a lot more sense."
"Frank was treating the early cases of Red Flu. His team was studying the virus, trying to figure out a cure before everything went south."
With the distant sounds of angry Bleeders in their air, she told me her story. She explained how Frank told her about the things he saw, all of them, even the things he wasn't allowed to repeat. How the virus caused encephalitis- swelling of the brain- much worse and at a higher rate than was common in the flu. That the effects were more like rabies or mad cow disease, but the doctors ran test after test and there was no such infection present, only what looked like a new strain of influenza, but one that didn't act like the ones they were familiar with. "Their brains formed lesions, which Frank said led to amnesia, muscle spasms, changes in personality, confabulations-"
"Sorry, what the fuck are confabulations?"
"The inability to separate dreams from waking life."
"Great. That's great. You know what, we can finish this creepy, little chat later, right now I'd like to get out of this goddamn basement. Sound good?"
"Fine."
I turned. "Jeremiah?"
Without picking his head up, he raised one, big hand and extended a thumbs up, though I doubted he'd heard a word we said. Alison and I helped him up and he continued on with us down the dark hallway. He was running on pure strength combined with stubbornness at this point. A lesser man would have laid down and died by this point.
I certainly did.
We made our way through the basement and up the stairs that led to the private back entrance where the players usually came into the club room. As I expected, it hadn't been locked or barricaded by the army. There wasn't much reason to block a door no one would get to in the first place. But they didn't know they'd be dealing with a dipshit like me.