Till The World Ends: Dawn of Eden / Thistle & Thorne / Sun Storm

“Sure,” I whispered, and walked out, leaving him alone with his friend. As I ducked through the frame, I heard the thump of his fist against the armrest, a muffled, broken curse, and swallowed my own frustrated tears as the door clicked behind us.

* * *

Maggie and Jenna looked so disheartened when I returned to the main room that I told them both to get some sleep.

“I can handle the patients alone for a few hours,” I said as Jenna protested, though Maggie looked ready to fall over. “They’re not going anywhere, and I’ll call you if I need assistance. Get some rest.”

“Are you sure, Kylie?” Jenna asked, even as Maggie stumbled away, heading for the few extra cots upstairs. “Maggie and I can take turns, if you want one of us down here with you.”

I opened my mouth to answer and caught the subtle hint of rot, drifting from the beds along the wall. My stomach turned over, and the scent vanished as quickly as it had come.

“I’ll be fine,” I told Jenna firmly. “Go get some shut-eye. Lie down, at least. That’s an order.”

She looked reluctant but left the room after Maggie. When they were gone, I hurried over to Ms. Sawyer, slipping through the curtains to the side of her bed.

Her skin was chalky white, and the faint smell of decay clung to her, as it had to Nathan. Looking at her face, my blood ran cold. Though her chest rose and fell with shallow, labored breaths, her eyes were half open, and red fluid seeped from beneath the lids.

Just like Nathan.

As I went to wipe the blood from her other cheek, Ms. Sawyer jerked in her sleep, lunging toward my hand without opening her eyes. A short hiss came from her open mouth, and I yanked my hand back, heart pounding, as she sank down, still unconscious.

She didn’t move again, and about an hour after midnight I woke Jenna, helped her move the body onto a gurney, and took it down to storage. Then, because the freezers in the basement were full, we woke Maggie and began the painstaking task of moving all the bodies to the back lot, freeing up space for future victims. We didn’t know then how soon we would need it.

The epidemic began several hours later.

It started with Ms. Sawyer’s bed neighbor, a middle-aged man who had been clinging stubbornly to life and who I’d hoped had a good chance of pulling through. An hour or so before dawn, he started bleeding from the eyes and rapidly went downhill. He was dead two hours later. Then, one by one, all the patients began weeping the bloody red tears and coughing violently, causing Jenna, Maggie and me to scurry from bed to bed, trying desperately to slow the flood. By the time the late-afternoon sun began setting over the tops of the empty buildings, half our patients were gone, with the other half barely holding on to life. We didn’t even have time to move the corpses from their beds and resorted to covering them with sheets when they died. As evening wore on, the number of bodies under sheets outnumbered the living. With every death, my anger grew, until I was swearing under my breath and snapping at my poor interns.

At last, the flood slowed. The patients still bled from the eyes, and the smell of decay had permeated the room, but there was a lull in the storm of coughing and gasping and death. As the sun set and the light began fading rapidly, I called Jenna and Maggie into the hall. Jenna looked on edge, and Maggie had succumbed to exhausted tears as I drew them aside, fighting my own frustration and the urge to lash out at everything around me.

“Where is Mr. Archer?” I asked in a low voice. I’d never seen a roomful of patients decline so rapidly, and I had a sneaking, terrible suspicion. I hoped I was wrong, but I needed answers, and there was only one person who could give them to me.

“I think he’s still in the room with his friend,” Maggie sniffled. “We haven’t seen him all day.”

I spun on a heel and marched down the hall. Blood from the eyes, the strange bite marks, the rotten smell without the infection. Nathan’s symptoms had spread to my patients, and Ben knew what it was. He knew, and I was fed up with this hiding, keeping secrets. Less than a day after Ben Archer had stepped into my sick ward with his friend, I had a roomful of corpses. He was going to tell me what he knew if I had to beat it out of him.

I swept into his room, bristling for a fight, and stopped.

Ben sat slumped in the corner chair, eyes closed, snoring softly. Exhaustion had finally caught up to him, too. Despite my anger, I hesitated, reluctant to wake him. Sleep was a precious commodity here; you snatched it where and when you could. Still, I would have woken him right then if I hadn’t seen what had happened to the body in the room with us.

Nathan lay on the bed, unmoving. Unnaturally still. The faint smell of rot still lingered around him, and in the shadows, his skin was the color of chalk. I moved to his bedside, and a chill ran up my spine. His eyes were open, gazing sightlessly at the ceiling, but his pupils had turned a blank, solid white.

The chair scraped in the corner as Ben rose. I held my breath as his footsteps clicked softly over the linoleum to stand beside me. I heard his ragged intake of breath and glanced up at him.

He had gone pale, so white I thought he might pass out. The look on his face was awful; grief and rage and guilt and horror, all at once. He gripped the edge of the railing in both hands, swaying on his feet, and I put a hand out to steady him, my anger forgotten.

“Ben.”

He glanced at me, a terrifyingly feverish look in his eyes, and his voice was a hoarse rasp as he grabbed my arm. “We have to destroy the body.”

“What?”

“Right now.” He looked at the corpse of his friend and shuddered. “Please, don’t ask questions. We need to burn it, quickly. Does this place have an incinerator?”

“Ben, what are you talking about?” I wrenched my arm from his grasp and glared up at him. “All right, this has gone far enough. What are you hiding? Where did you and Nathan come from? He was sick, wasn’t he?” Ben flinched, and my fury rose up again. “He was sick, and now I have a roomful of dead patients because you’re hiding something! I want answers, and you’re going to tell me everything, right now!”

“Oh, God.” If possible, Ben paled even more. He glanced down the hall, running his fingers through his hair. “Oh, shit. This has all gone crazy. I’m sorry, Kylie. I’ll tell you everything. After we destroy the body, I’ll tell you everything I know, I swear. Just...we have to take care of this now. Please.” He grabbed my arm. “Help me, and then I’ll tell you anything you want.”

I clenched my fists, actually tempted to hit him, to strike him across that ruggedly handsome face. Taking a deep breath to calm my rage, I spoke in a low, controlled tone. “Fine. I don’t know what this is about, or why you want to deface your friend, but I will help you this one last time. And then, Ben Archer, you are going to tell me what the hell is going on before you leave my clinic forever.”

He might have nodded, but I was already marching back into the hall, fighting a sudden, unexplainable terror. The unknown loomed around me, hovering over Nathan’s corpse, the sick ward full of the newly dead. The body on the table looked...unnatural, with its pale shrunken skin and blank, dead eyes. It didn’t even look human anymore.

The sick ward was eerily silent as I walked in, searching for the gurney I’d left at the edge of the room. In the shadows, bodies lay under sheets in their beds, mingled with the few still living. Jenna glanced up over a patient’s cot, her cheeks wasted, her eyes sunken. Lightning flickered through the plastic over the front door, illuminating the room for a split second, and thunder growled a distant answer.

Something touched my arm, and I jumped nearly three feet. Bristling, I spun around to come face-to-face with Ben.

“Sorry.” His gaze flickered to the darkened sick ward, then slid to me again. “I just... How are we going to do this? Do you need help with anything?”

I yanked a gurney from the wall. “What I needed is for you to have told me why you were here the first time I asked, not when all my patients started bleeding from the eyes and dying around me.” He didn’t respond, too preoccupied with the current tragedy to take note of my anger, and I sighed. “We’ll transport the body to the empty lot,” I explained, pushing the cot back down the hall, Ben trailing after. “Once we’re there, you can do whatever you want.”

“Outside?”

“Yes, outside! Preferably before the storm hits. I’m not starting a fire indoors so my clinic can burn down around me.”

He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and followed me silently down the hall, our footsteps and the squeaking of the gurney wheels the only sounds in the darkness.

I sneaked a glance at him. His face was blank, his eyes expressionless, though I’d seen that look before. It was a mask, a stoic front, the disguise of someone whose world had been shattered and who was holding himself together by a thread. My anger melted a little more. In my line of work, death was so common, but I had to remind myself that I wasn’t just treating patients; I was treating family members, friends, people who were loved.

“I’m sorry about Nathan,” I offered, trying to be sympathetic. “It wasn’t your fault that he was hurt, that he was sick. Were you two very close?”

Ben nodded miserably. “He was my roommate,” he muttered, briefly closing his eyes. “We went to Georgetown together. I was working on my Masters in Computer Engineering, and he got me an IT job at the lab where he worked. I was never about that biology stuff. When the virus hit, the lab threw everything else out the window to work on a cure. They kept me on for computer stuff, but Nathan was with them for the really crazy shit. He couldn’t tell me much—everything was very hush-hush—but some of the things I heard...” Ben shivered. “Let’s just say there were some very dark things happening in that lab. Even before the—”

He stopped in the doorway of the last room, his face draining of any remaining color. Blinking, I looked into the corner where Nathan’s bed sat, where the corpse had been lying minutes ago.

The mattress was empty.

Chapter Four

I stared at the empty bed, the logical part of my brain trying to come up with a way for a dead body to vanish from a room in a few short minutes. One of the interns must’ve come in and moved it. Perhaps Maggie had whisked it down to storage, by herself, without a gurney. Improbable. Impossible, really. But that was the only thing that made any sort of sense. It wasn’t as if the corpse got up and walked out by itself.

Ben staggered back, shaking his head. I could see he was trembling. “No,” he muttered in a low, anguished voice. “No, it isn’t possible.”

“I’m...I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” I began, trying to ignore the chill creeping up my back. “Maggie probably took it away. Come on.” I turned, suddenly eager to leave to room. The silent, empty bed, sitting motionless in the shadows, was starting to freak me out. The once-familiar walls of the clinic seemed darker now, closing in on me. “We’ll check storage,” I told Ben, leading him back down the corridor. It seemed longer, somehow. I could hear the groans of my patients, drifting to me from the main room. “This is nothing to worry about. She’s probably down in the basement right now.”

Ben didn’t answer, and my words felt hollow as we reached the stairs to the sub-basement level. The door at the bottom of the steps was partially open, creaking faintly on its hinges, and the space beyond was pitch-black.

I fished the mini-flashlight from my coat and clicked it on, shining it down the stairwell. That faint smell of rot lingered in the corridor, but it could be coming from the bodies in storage.

I pushed the door to the basement open and was hit by a wave of cold, dry air that made me shiver. As usual, the scent of death was thick down here, like stepping into a tomb, and tonight it seemed even more ominous. There was no light, no need for electricity except to keep the freezers running, and everything was cloaked in suffocating darkness.

“Maggie?” My voice was a whisper as I eased inside, Ben following at my heels. The door groaned as it swung behind us, closing with a soft click. I swept the flashlight around, scanning the rows of cluttered shelves, the thick white columns that held up the building. I’d never thought about what a maze this place was until tonight. Against the far wall, barely discernible in the weak light, the huge freezers with their grisly contents gave off a faint, low hum.

“Maggie?”

Something clinked to the floor nearby, and an empty can rolled out from between the aisles, stopping at my feet. It caused a chill to skitter up my back.

“Maggie!” I hissed again, sweeping the light around. “Are you down here? Maggie!”

“Yes?”

Ben and I both jumped, swinging around as Maggie stepped between the aisles, holding several sets of folded sheets, a mini-flashlight stuck between them. She frowned at our reaction, looking confused. “Sorry, Miss Kylie. We ran of sheets to cover the bodies, so I came down to get some more. Are you all right?”

“Geez, Maggie!” I released Ben and slumped against the wall, my hand going to my heart. “You scared me half to—”

Something lunged between shelves and slammed into the girl, dragging her down with a screech. Her flashlight spun wildly, clinking to the floor before flickering out. Stumbling back, I caught a split-second glance of a spindly, emaciated creature that faintly resembled a man before it bent its head and sank its teeth into Maggie’s throat.

I screamed. Maggie’s body jerked and flopped to the cement, twitching, and the coppery smell of blood filled the room. My mouth gaped again, but nothing came out. In the flashlight beam, the thing raised its head and stared at me with Nathan’s face, no recognition in its dead white eyes, nothing but the flat, glazed stare of a predator. It hissed, and I couldn’t tear my gaze from its gleaming, jagged fangs, smeared with the blood of my intern.

My mind had gone blank. This wasn’t happening. That thing couldn’t exist, it was dead! The stress had finally gotten to me, and my mind had cracked.

Frozen, I stared at it, subconsciously knowing I was about to die. But the thing turned and started savaging Maggie’s corpse, tearing her open with long fingers, ripping into her with its fangs. Blood splattered everywhere, painting the walls with wet ribbons, and I threw myself backward, hitting the edge of a shelf.

Something grabbed my wrist, yanking me away. I cried out and fought to break loose, hitting the arm with the flashlight, barely conscious of what I was doing, until I realized it was Ben. He dragged me across the floor and up the staircase, his eyes hard, his mouth pressed into a thin white line.

We ducked into the stairwell, the smell of blood clogging our nostrils and the sound of ripping flesh following us out. Ben slammed the door behind us and leaned against it, gasping. I stood there, shaking, trying to gather my thoughts. Rain pounded the ceiling overhead, and lightning flickered erratically over the wall, reflecting the pulse at my throat.

Maggie. Maggie was gone. And that thing, that horrible, pale thing, had been Nathan. It couldn’t be real! I had seen him die. I knew he was dead, but now...

This had to be a nightmare.

“Kylie.” Ben’s voice was low, hoarse. I blinked, attempting to focus. “We have to get out of here, now. Do you have anything you have to take, anything you absolutely can’t leave behind?”

“Leave?” I stared at him, still reeling. “I can’t leave. What about Jenna?”

“We’ll take her, too.”

“But my patients! What about the survivors? I can’t leave them—”

“Kylie!” Ben pushed himself off the door and took my upper arms, forcing me to look at him. “They’re dead,” he whispered, his eyes dark with sorrow and guilt. “Everyone here is dead, or they will be. There’s nothing you can do for them anymore. But we have to get out of here now, if we want to survive ourselves.”

A crash from the main room startled me upright. Lightning danced over the walls, the flash revealing eerie dark spatters that hadn’t been there before. Fear, cold and acute, stabbed through me. Ben followed my gaze, his muscles coiled tight beneath his shirt.

“Come on,” he whispered, leading me down the hall. “My truck is out front. Let’s find Jenna and get out of...”

He stopped. I looked down the hall, and everything inside me went cold.

Ms. Sawyer’s gaunt, wasted body stood silhouetted in the doorway to the sick ward, still in the hospital gown she had died in. Blood stained her face and hands, smeared around her mouth and the fangs that protruded from her upper jaw. She carried something in her hands, something round and dripping, the size of a basketball.

Lightning flashed again, and I saw that it was Jenna’s head.

I might have gasped, or gagged, for the thing that had been Ms. Sawyer looked up, and her dead, blank eyes flashed to mine. Her mouth opened, fangs gleaming, like jagged bits of glass. She screamed, a wail unlike anything remotely human, and charged toward us.

Ben yanked me across the hall, ducked into Doc Adams’s office and slammed the door. A booming thud rattled the frame just as he threw the latch and looked frantically around for something to brace it with.

Another bang on the door, followed by the screech of the thing on the other side. I fell back in terror. Ben pulled me aside, dragged the old wooden desk from the corner and shoved it across the tile, pushing it up against the door.

“Kylie, come on!” His voice snapped me out of my daze. Crossing the room, he yanked back the curtain on the window, revealing the full fury of the storm outside. “Hurry, before it claws its way in.”

The door jumped inward a few inches, scraping the desk back, and nails clawed at the opening. More voices joined the one beyond the frame, terrifying shrieks and howls, as if a whole pack of the things were clustered outside. The door shook and began to open as pale arms and shoulders shoved their way inside.

Ben threw up the window with a blast of rain-scented wind. “Come on!” he yelled at me, and I threw myself forward. His hands grabbed my waist as I scrambled for the opening, pushing me through. I fell on wet pavement, gasping as my elbow struck the hard ground, and then Ben collapsed beside me, rolling to his feet.

He dragged me upright, and through the window, I saw the door burst inward and a host of pale, shrieking bodies spill into the room. Former patients, people who had died that very afternoon, reanimated and somehow transformed into bloodthirsty monsters. Their empty white eyes scanned the room, catching sight of us outside the window, and they lunged forward with vicious wails.

We ran.

My shoes splashed over the wet concrete, cold rainwater soaking my hair and clothes. The storm raged around us, forks of lightning slashing the sky over the buildings. Behind me, I heard the monsters’ savage cries as they leaped through the window and skittered after us.

I followed Ben around a corner, dodging a rubble pile, and nearly ran into a small white pickup parked between two buildings. I waited, heart hammering, as Ben fiddled with the keys, hands shaking as he tried to unlock the door. A monster leaped to the top of the rubble pile, hissed when it saw us and sprang forward.

Ben yanked open the door, reached in and pulled a shotgun out of the front seat. The monster leaped onto the hood, snarling, as Ben aimed the muzzle at it and pulled the trigger point-blank.

A flash and a deafening boom rocked the alley, nearly making my heart stop. The creature was hurled away, crumpling into the wall and slumping down, a bloody mess. But then it staggered to its feet, hissing, though there was a massive gaping hole that went right through its chest, showing jagged ribs. It shrieked again, sounding more pissed than hurt, and lurched forward as several others came around the corner.

Ben pushed me into the truck and lunged in after me, slamming the door just as Ms. Sawyer crashed into the glass. She shrieked at us, clawing the door with bony talons, as Ben jammed the keys into the ignition and the truck roared to life. The monster with the bloodied chest scrambled onto the hood again and lunged at me. Its head bounced off the windshield, and a spiderweb of cracks spread out from the impact. More creatures crowded the truck as Ben threw it into Drive. The vehicle lurched forward, striking several monsters as it roared out of the alley. The creature on the hood slipped and rolled off the side as Ben slammed his foot onto the gas and sped into the road.

I turned to look through the back window, watching the clinic and the pale, spindly creatures swarming from it like ants, until Ben turned a corner and the building was lost from view.

Chapter Five

We drove for nearly an hour in frozen silence. Ben kept his gaze on the road, swerving around rubble and debris, easing through oceans of dead cars that had clogged the street. The city loomed above us, dark and menacing in the rain. Except for a few flickering streetlamps and several dying traffic lights, the streets were black, the buildings empty and dark. I remembered, when I first came here, how bright and busy the city had felt, even at night. Now, it was like driving through a war zone. Most everyone had fled or succumbed to the virus. There were a few stubborn hangers-on, those who had nowhere to go, or worse, those who stayed behind to prey on what was left. But for the most part, the city was empty of life, and just a few short months after the catastrophe hit, it was already beginning to crumble.

But things moved in the shadows, pale and terrifying, skirting the edges of the light. They skittered through alleys and between aisles of dead cars, sometimes alone, sometimes in small packs. Every time I saw one, my stomach convulsed in dread, and I couldn’t move. How long had they been here, roaming the city, with me oblivious to the monsters right outside my door? Or was this something new, some awful, mutated side effect of the virus?

We drove on, through the city limits, though progress was slow. The road out of the city was clogged with cars, crashed into railings and each other, some upside-down or on their sides. Hundreds lay in ditches, and a few sat burned and blackened in the middle of the road. After weaving around this endless obstacle course of steel and glass, Ben finally pulled his truck off the pavement and drove through the dirt and trees.

It seemed to take forever, but the sea of cars finally thinned, then stopped altogether. After a few miles of nothing, Ben took the next off-ramp and parked the truck at an abandoned gas station.

“Stay here.” His voice was hoarse. Turning off the engine, he grabbed the door handle, not looking at me. “We’re almost out of gas. I’ll be right back.”

“Ben, wait!” My words came out harsh and sharp, startling us both. Ben flinched, then slowly took his hand from the door, turning to face me. His eyes, his face, his entire body, were slumped and resigned, as if he’d been waiting for this moment, dreading it.

“You promised me answers,” I whispered. The numbness inside was fading, the horror and fear slipping away into something that felt close to rage. I could barely force the words out, but I did. “You promised you would tell me what’s going on. I’m not going another step with you until you start talking.”

“All right.” Ben took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “All right, Kylie, I’ll tell you everything I know. I don’t have all the details, because I wasn’t close to it, not like Nathan. But what I did find out...well, you’ll see why I couldn’t tell anyone.”

“You know what those monsters are,” I guessed, and it was an accusation. Ben hesitated, then nodded slowly.

“I’ve seen them before,” he began, gazing out the window. “It was one of those things that attacked Nathan, in the lab.” He looked at me, suddenly pleading. “I swear, I didn’t know it was transferable. Not like that. Nathan was bitten, but I didn’t know the disease could spread to others, Kylie. If I’d known that, I would have never brought him in.”