The Dead Among Us (Chapter 6: With Love)
The day was going rather slowly. Nothing much was happening, and I was beginning to feel anxious. Someone special to me had only just tried to contact me over radio, and I never even got the chance to respond before they were gone again. Gone out of my life like nothing had ever happened. This seems to be a trend.I get up off of my porch and light my second cigar for the day before going on a little walk around the neighborhood. People are busy, building stuff, fixing things, keeping an eye on the kids (did I mention? We've got over a dozen children). Everyone has a job now. I guess the communists won after all. People have essentially given up on God. No one cares anymore. No one trusts in "Adonai Ehad." He's abandoned his creations and we have abandoned him. I never believed in him anyways, not after he struck me. The scar runs from the top of my shoulder, across half of my right pectoral, and part of my right shoulderblade. It looks like a beautiful tree sprouting new limbs, a beautiful pink tree, but in reality it's a sign that He does not exist. He is just a figment of people's imaginations. If he existed, these things wouldn't, see? We have a neurosurgeon. He knows how It works. It's a parasite that works its way into the brain, keeps the brain alive because it produces its own food using the flesh of the host. Wraps its thin, nearly invisible tendrils around the bones and through the muscles of Joe Average and sucks in all the nutrients, causing everything to rot. Only takes about 8 hours for it to start working its magic, and then maybe a couple more hours just to reboot the host's brain. As long as the ting can maintain motor function, it's A-Okay, it'll keep doing what it wants. The reason it eats? Food. More nutrients. The more flesh it can keep in a rotter, the more nutrients it can obtain. It holds in all the food with its tendrils for about a week before letting go, always preferring to take from the living flesh it just consumed rather than from the host; smart fucker, huh? The bites, yeah, they spread it, but that's because the saliva glands and the blood is where the eggs are produced. And the tops of the teeth, the tongue, everything. Storm had to give a speech yesterday morning, because our neurosurgeon, Remington Davis, told him that the reason the uninfected dead come back is because the parasites are everywhere. They crawl on the ground and since they're so hard to see, we never notice them. They travel through the ear canal or the nasal cavity and into the brain, and that's when they take over. Despite their size, they're fast, and give them 24 hours, they'll have you a walking corpse, no sweat. Someone came running at me this morning, one of the militiamen. Someone wanted to talk to me at reception. I put out my cigar, muttering. Watch it be her. Watch. It was. She was standing right there, a tear streaking down her face. I couldn't look at her. She
ran up to me, and hugged me around the waist. "Jack," she sobbed. "I made it... I made it, I never thought I would, I was so broke... I tried to call all summer, but you wouldn't pick up. Why did you pick up, Jack?" Because I couldn't, Natasha. How could I explain to my boyfriend that there was someone else? I'm sorry, I told her, but she needed to just go. Just get out of my life.But Gale was standing there, his hands on his hips. "How dare you?" He said critically. "This is a place where we, as living, breathing, people have to stick together... And you're just going to send her away?" I snarled at him and told him this was none of his business. "You're damn wrong! You are damn wrong! I TOLD HER she could come here! I intend to see that out, do you understand me?" I nodded, not wanting to respond. I looked back down at Natasha, grumbling out in her right ear, that if she muttered a word about what we did in St-Petersburg that one winter, I'd kill her. She didn't answer, but I took her silent sobs of affection as understanding. "I'm sorry, Jack," she mumbled, her speech muffled by my uniform jacket. She looked up at me, saying, "You know I had no way of knowing about him. I tried as hard as I could to get over here in time for your retirement, but--"But what, I snapped. But what?"-- but I had an accident. The medical bills were too much, I had to... I..." She began choking up in her tears, and then it hit me. It hit me just what I had done by leaving her their without a clue, and how much of an ass I was to her a minute ago. I touched my index finger to her lips and gently shh'd her. You don't need to say anymore, I told her. I motioned her over to the main reception building, and Gale was there waiting in his lab coat, fresh out of his radio persona, and ready to do his real job. He tenderly led Natasha to the reception clinic while I went to go punch something for being a hard-ass. I think it was a tree.I decided I'd take a walk over by Elm Lake, see if the Army had finally filled in Big Creek, or maybe the Horseshoe Lakes. Once my walking pace began to feel too slow, I broke off into a jog at first, then a full sprint up the asphalt trail. We did this often in the Special Forces; just broke out running like the devil from a bible, all for the hell of it. The sun was shining bright, all the way through the pale milky clouds with its powerful dandelion glow. I could feel my claws beginning to snag the inside of my socks in my boots just a little bit, enough to make it annoying. The warm summer breeze helped the trees shake off morning dew, but did next to nothing to cool off my sweating body; you'd think with fur, us human-animal amalgamates would stop sweating. Didn't happen. Needless to say, with how humid of a day it is, I'm sweating like a pig, and it's only April. I wouldn't have thought in a million years that all of this was going to slip through my fingers
faster than water.Felice was waiting for me when I got back to headquarters after my stroll; I was out a while, and left my walkie on my dresser. "Hey," he said to me, gently smiling. Hey, I smiled back. Such a fake smile. I was lying to his face and he didn't know it. "Who was that new guy?" I corrected him in the gender department, and he apologized nonchalantly. "Still, who was she?"I told him she was an old friend that made it out of Galveston alive. "O-oh... is she pretty?" he teased. I asked him to stop, and he kept on. "Come on, what species is she? What's her name, huh?"I told him she's a vixen, with copper-gold hair. Her name's Natasha. "How did you and Natasha meet?" I didn't answer. He pressed on, and I told him that I couldn't remember. "Some friend you are," he retorted. "You don't even bother to remember your first moments with people. I bet you don't even remember how we met."I know exactly how we met, I snapped. You and I met for real when you woke up chained upside down in my workshop. I would've killed you, I snarled, if I hadn't listened to you for FIVE seconds. Just remember that I saved your ass from some very nasty people. He scoffed, muttering something about popsicles and blowtorches, and I rolled my eyes, leaning over the banister of my house, one of the eight residential buildings that stood just across the street from HQ. I got off and went to sit down in my rocking chair, grabbing my small, six-ounce steel flask from the inside of my flight jacket. I twisted off the cap and took one long, slow swig before closing the damn thing and putting it back where I got it. "You had a relationship with her," he breathed, staring off into the distance. "Didn't you?" He gazed back at me and I avoided eye contact. "All those phone calls you kept dropping, the ones you laughed about, saying they were all from 'some telemarketer in Galveston'? What the fuck, Jack!?" My ears folded down when he shouted at me; I knew I couldn't avoid this moment, but I decided to not answer. When in doubt, don't say shit. He got up in my face and shouted, "What the hell did you do to her, Jack!?" I snapped back, screaming that I didn't do shit. I didn't respond to her because I had you. I didn't want to be involved with two people at once, I didn't have the heart to tell her that I found someone else. But that next moment, something absolutely out of the blue happened. A massive fireball had suddenly erupted into the sky to the south, and the sound of Fuel Depot Bravo exploding filled the ear. I stripped off my jacket, leaving it on the porch, and took off sprinting, leaving Felice behind. My left paw sat on my revolver, holding it place while my right arm swung back and forth as I kept running to where the explosion had happened. People were screaming, shooting. A black Dodge Challenger raced past me, and I knew they had
tried to run me over; if I hadn't side-stepped just in time, they would've. They kept on driving, and I didn't bother with them; my men would take care of whoever that was. I just kept running towards the fuel depot, running, running, because Storm was down there supervising the construction of a watch tower in that area to keep an eye on the fuel, the generator, and the solar arrays. I was panicking, my heart racing. When I had arrived, the flames had died down by a few feet. Gale was there, he had been faster. He was kneeling down by a large, light-grey body with singed fur and clothes. I knew. I completely ignored Gale as I scooped my arms under my friend and heaved him up off the ground with all my strength. I started a slow march to the infirmary with Gale at my side. He was shouting something, but honestly, I wasn't paying attention at all, and I barely registered the muffled vibrations of his exclamations. Two soldiers with medical bands around their helmets came to relieve me of the limp wolf, and when they did, I was in the worst state of shock that had ever come over me. The next few hours were a blur. Remmy and Gale were hard at work, but Gale came out of the operating room to tell me that Storm's injuries were beyond severe. "He has eight fractured ribs, a shattered scapula, a crack down the back of his skull, a shattered right radius and ulna, and several different bits of shrapnel in his back and the backs of his legs. One of them barely missed his femoral artery, but... Honestly, Jack?" His eyes were twinkling in the dim clinic light, and he finished, saying, "He won't make it."I told him he was lying. "I'm not. There's no way. Storm may have survived a lot, but he's not Superman. Keep in mind, Jack, he's 40 years old. Being a wolf, he might as well be 70 if compared to a pure human. His body is broken beyond repair, Jack. We've managed to set the bones in his arm, but now we've got to go about removing the shrapnel. I put him under, but Jack, good God... He's old, you understand?" I nodded non-complacently. "He can't heal from this one. Even if he made it through the night, there's no way he'll make it past the next week, and if he does, he'll be comatose." He sighed, running a paw through his hair."Look," he said, resting his left hand on my shoulder. "I know I'm supposed to be this amazing doctor, but I'm not. And I'm not a liar. You deserve to know the truth. You were just as much his friend as I was, and I know it hurts, but we're going to lose him. Remmy and I, we can't... We can't do this, Jack." He had locked eyes with me. No matter what he said, though, I couldn't believe him. I've seen Storm recover from amazing things, this was something that'd be no sweat, given a few weeks. "Jack, I'm sorry, but the responsibility of taking care of this place is going to fall onto you now. You're going to have to step up to the plate."No. No, I can't do that, I told
him. I'm not a leader, I can't make these people follow me, I'm just a damn pilot. "That's bullshit," Gale shouted softly. "Now, you need to go. You need to tell people what happened. Get over your timidness and just TELL them. Go, I've got work to do." Gale shoved me out of the clinic and went back into the surgery. I walked out, all alone, with the weight of the human race on my shoulders.Watch reset, new time 0543 hours.I heard a door in the foyer of the clinic open and click shut. Somebody was here early, probably Remmy or Gale, coming in to check on Storm. The heart monitor was beating faintly, to the rhythm of his heart. I was sitting right next to him, holding his hand and running my left thumb along his palm. I had no intention on letting him go, even when Gale had finally come into the room after a good twenty minutes with a new I.V. bag. "Have you been here all night?"I didn't say anything, but he must've assumed I had been (which I was), and he said, "Jesus, Jack... You need some rest, and so does he. But I need you to go around and see if you can find anyone on base with O-positive blood that's willing to transfuse." I was about to ask him why, until I saw a bandage around the crook of his elbow. I asked if he gave blood, and he shook his head. "No, I took a sample to test it. I don't match." After asking his type, he said he was A-positive. Holding up my arm, my smile must've looked pained, because Gale sighed, shaking his head. "I don't believe this," he said, and then I told him that I have O-positive. I pulled my dog tags out from under my shirt, and he nodded while hooking up the new bag. He left the room, and then the snow-white tiger, with his beautiful green stripes (that actually changed color now and then based on mood) came back into the ward with all the equipment needed to draw blood. The needle was... Uncomfortable, to
say the least. I had to keep my arm held completely open so I didn't tear anything, but I was willing to suffer that little bit of pain for the man who saved my life once; I owed him that much. I knew I couldn't take care of this place, not alone at least. After Gale had drawn the needle out and went off to make sure the two of us were a match, I laid my head down on Storm's chest, drowning out the sound of the monitor with his heartbeat. I must've fallen asleep, because Gale shook me awake and said I was a perfect match, and that Storm's already receiving my blood. I smiled faintly and sat up. Right then... He opened his eyes."Hey," he mumbled dreamily. Hey, I said to him. "How ya doin?" I should be asking him that. He chuckled and agreed with a calm nod. "How long was I out?" I told him he was going on twenty-two hours. "How's everyone else?" It's rough. I told them what happened. We're still trying to figure out who the hell that was, and he told me, "The Phillips twins... Richard and Rachel Phillips... Fucking sociopaths. They were supposed to make a court appearance, but then the outbreak happened... And they got away. Why they're showing up now, I don't know, but I think they were coming to take care of me, at least." Storm, I told him, you're an idiot. You should've just shot them. "I didn't see them. When the depot exploded, I had my back to it. Did you see where they went?" They left a long time ago, in a black Dodge Challenger. He sighed angrily, squeezing my hand. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know this is hard, but you're going to have to just... Take ov--" He broke out into a coughing fit and I handed him a tissue off the nightstand. He kept hacking, and I saw him folding up something dark red. I knew he wouldn't have long, but I didn't want to believe it. He smiled again, looking up at his stand. "Who's blood is that?" he asked. A single tear rolled down my cheek, and he knew. "Why?" I told him, because you saved my life, once. In Afghanistan. You saved me from those sick bastards. This is me just paying you back. "I know back then I said I was just doing my job, but... Well, I wouldn't call it love or anything, but I think I really liked you. But now, you see... I think I know the difference--" Storm, I told him. The tears where really coming. Don't say anymore.I laid my head down on his chest and I sensed him combing his fingers through my snow white hair. I know he was trying to calm me down, but I think he was just making it worse. I was choking up on my own salty tears and I tried to say something-- I wanted to say something, felt like I had to, but I just couldn't. There's no one else I'll ever let see me cry. He's the only one, and I don't know why. As much trouble as the two of us have had with each other, I think... I think I really do love him.I looked him straight in the eyes, drying up my tears. His eyes where closed and he had a faint, calmed smile on his lips. "I love you too, kiddo," he breathed out. He didn't breathe back in, just let out one long, deep sigh.And then there was the screaming flat-line tone of the heart monitor. NO, I screamed. I pounded my left fist on his chest. I clasped one hand over the other, and I was about to press on his chest, but three men were in the room faster than I could continue, one of them being Gale. The other two, big, burly bears, grabbed me on the shoulders, wrestling me back while I kept screaming at the top of my lungs, demanding they let me go. I fought so hard, SO HARD, but they were stronger than I was, especially in my broken state. I kept screaming at the wolf now going through cardiac arrest, screaming his name, while the two men pulled me out of the room just as Remmington Davis came in with the defibrillator. I heard him shout, "Clear," and the faint buzzing of the pedals. It happened a few more times, not muffled all that well by the walls and the door. The two bears wouldn't let me back in, but I knew they were trying to feel sorry for me. They were of different species, one a black bear and the other a panda that I recognized from the day we took over. He had me wrapped in a-- pardon me-- a rather tight bear hug, gently saying to just let it all out, and that's exactly what I did, let out all my anger onto his chest. I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I think I passed out.***When I woke up, I saw someone in a uniform by bed, leaning on a crutch with a cast on his arm and his leg. He smiled down at me."Hey, kiddo."