Away From the Sun (10 page)

His coal-like eyes fell on me, his jaws chomping up and down as if he were already biting into my neck like the woman on the ground.
 

“Stop walking!” the officer shouted.
 

“Just shoot him,” I whispered.
 

Andy continued to trudge toward me. He acted as though he had no idea there was anyone else but me.
 

“Put your hands in the air!” the officer repeated.
 

“Just shoot him,” the words barely escaped my lips.
 

Andy was only a few feet away.
 

“Shoot him!” I shouted this time.
 

A loud
pop
went off and the bullet went straight through Andy’s head and he was dead on the ground. My hands were trembling in front of me. I couldn’t find the strength to stand. It was as if my legs couldn’t support my weight enough for me to pull myself up.
 

I turned to look up at the officer. He was shaking, too. All the color had drained from his face. In a small place like Elkhorn, he had probably never even had to pull his gun out, much less shoot a crazed lunatic. However, the officer didn’t have much time to comprehend the situation. People were still running all around us, trying to escape as though there were more people just like Andy.

“You need to get somewhere safe,” the officer told me. But as the words came out of his mouth, someone came up behind him and bit into his shoulder. His gun instantly fell to the ground next to my backpack.

Another crazed man had leaped onto the officer. This one was scratching and biting. In a matter of seconds, the two of them had clawed out his eyes and his throat was gaping. I grabbed the gun, trying not to look at the officer. That’s when they turned their eyes to me. They had the same eyes as Andy. Black and oozy. I didn’t hesitate. I shot the first one in the chest three times, and it came at me like it felt nothing. I aimed for its head and let the bullet fly. It died instantly. The other one came at me, and I aimed for its head.

Missed.
 

I hit its throat, but the next shot landed between its eyes. There were bodies all around me, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Should I be running? Hiding? Where can I go?
The thoughts raced through my head. Loud popping noises went off in the distance along with the sound of blood-curdling screams in every direction. This wasn’t an isolated incident. It was happening all over the campus.

I had to get moving.
 

I figured the basement of the science building was as good a place to hide as any. My first thought had been to get in my car and drive out of the madness, but I knew that was what everyone would try to do. If diseased people were doing everything they could to bite, maim, or kill more victims, what better way than to go after people stuck in traffic? I would have tried to get all the way back to the student apartments, but those places were filled with people. I just needed to hide away for a few hours. Surely all this would be resolved by then, and it would be all right for people to walk around again.
 

I slowly walked through the doors that opened to the steps descending into the basement. I had never been in there before. It had been mentioned in passing when I was on a campus tour in high school. The student ambassador told the group that it was one of the more advanced science labs in this part of the country. I couldn’t remember what it was for or who ran the lab, but I did remember that most students weren’t allowed to go down there. I figured that perhaps in all the chaos, someone might have left the door unlocked.
 

I was right.
 

However, it wasn’t so much unlocked as it was broken. My throat started to tighten when I saw that two of the hinges were snapped off the door. Had the crazy people been here, too? I slid through the opening, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Shattered glass was sprinkled all over the floor. Pieces of broken lab equipment littered the tables. Worst of all, there were three bodies on the ground. Lifeless.
 

The sight made my stomach churn worse than when I had seen Andy bite into the woman. It was dark, so it was hard for me to tell if these people had the same sickness.

I knew I should have just turned and left, but what I saw compelled me to move forward. When I got closer, I had to hold my breath, the smell was so bad. These bodies weren’t fresh. At least, not within the last few minutes. The one closest to me was muscular. He had a deep gash in his shoulder, maybe a bite mark, and there was a bullet wound in his head. Next to him was a much smaller man. Old-looking. He didn’t wear a shirt, and there were bullet holes in his chest and part of the top of his head was simply gone.

My mouth hung open, and I couldn’t look away. Beyond these two was another muscular-looking man. He lay face down on the floor, but the blood on the wall behind him indicated that he had been shot as well.
What could have happened here? Why were these people murdered?

It was time to leave. I don’t know what brought me here in the first place. I was looking for a safe hideout, but this clearly wasn’t it. I almost made it to the door when I heard a noise at the top of the stairs. My body froze in place, my ears straining to detect the movement. Was the sound coming this way? Was it a regular person or a sick person? I hoped that it was just a professor, searching the halls to make sure everyone got out all right.
 

A step.
 

Someone was coming down the stairs. My breath was shallow. I wanted to run, but fear kept me still. I didn’t want anyone to know I was down here, but if I stayed, they would find me.
 

I decided to take a small step backward. That’s when I
 
heard a guttural moan coming from whoever was walking down the stairs. The steps didn’t seem deliberate. If someone wanted to go down the stairs with purpose, they certainly would have already been in the lab. I took another step back. It had to be one of those diseased people.
 

Someone took another step down. I couldn’t keep myself from shaking. I had the police officer’s gun in my hands, but I didn’t want to make more noise than I needed. I figured if I did, there would be many more crazy people coming after me.

I got lucky. There was a sudden pop of gunfire echoing from another building and the diseased person stopped walking down the stairs. Instead, it seemed to turn around and walk back up, searching for the source of the noise. I finally let out a breath, relieved that the person had left, but still too scared to go back where I had come. I scanned the room. The wall on the other side was a mess. It seemed that a shelf had fallen. Broken, glass cages lay in a pile. They looked like cages that might have been used for lab rats. Directly in front of me, behind the last muscular dead guy was a room with a gurney. There were IV’s and monitors, though nothing was turned on. To the left, everything seemed pristine. Whatever had gone down in this room, never made it to the other side. I decided to walk that way. I passed by several large tables with microscopes, test tubes, and all kinds of lab equipment set up for immediate use. At the other end of the room there was a door. I assumed it was a closet. I was right.
 

When I opened it, I half expected something to jump out at me, but I was happy to find that it was a simple storage closet with more lab equipment. I looked at the mess behind me before going into the closet. For a brief second, I thought I was being stupid, trying to hide away like that. But a crashing noise somewhere on the floor above me changed my mind quickly. I fumbled for a light, but found nothing. I reached into my pocket to pull out my phone and it wasn’t there. I cursed at myself silently, remembering I had left it in my backpack. I had dropped the backpack near dead Andy and the dead cop. It was a rare feeling, but I wanted to call my family. I wanted to know if they were all right. I wanted to tell them that
I
was all right—at least for now. But I couldn’t. I wondered if this was one of those catastrophes where calls didn’t go through and the army would have to be brought in. Was this something going on just at Elkhorn University? Was this regional? Global? I knew nothing. I was in the thick of it, but people a hundred miles away probably had a better idea of what was happening.

I sat there in the dark for hours.
 

Hours.
 

Every time I thought I was clear to come out, I would hear another noise. Be it a gunshot, screams, or a crash, something would always keep me in the closet.
 

A day went by.
 

I remember falling asleep. Because it was so dark, I couldn’t keep track of the time. I braved opening the closet to get a glimpse of the outside world, but I heard more screams. If I went out there, one of those screams would become mine. Then my screams would keep someone else in a closet.
 

Another day went by.
 

I felt like I was going crazy. I started to wonder if the screams I heard were just in my head. I would go out into the lab every few hours to drink some water from the faucet. I even relieved myself in the corner twice. Other than that, I stayed hidden away.

I fell asleep again, but this time when I woke, it was from a noise right in the lab. Underneath the crack of the closet door, I could see the light from a flashlight. My first instinct was to cry out for help—to open the door and tell them that it was safe down here for now. But then I thought better of it.
 

What if this someone mistook me for a diseased person and shot me? A whole list of scenarios filled my mind and most of them were negative. I kept my mouth shut and my sore body still.
 

“This is him,” a voice said. It was a man.
 

The other voice came from a woman. “The one without the shirt? I know that already. Remember, I found him for you.”

“Yeah,” the man said. “Right, well I wasn’t sure you would recognize him.”

“Why, because you blew his brains out all over the floor?” The woman didn’t sound happy. “Who are the other two?”

“I hired them. They were meant to keep the girl here so she didn’t escape.”

“A lot of good that did you,” the woman said. “We really shouldn’t be here. Let’s get the canister and leave.”

The man laughed at her, but it quickly turned into a cough. “What are you afraid of?”
Cough, cough.
“The police aren’t coming here.”
Cough, cough.
“I hired someone to kill the police that were investigating the lab. Then
I
killed the man I hired.”
Cough.
“All other law enforcement is so preoccupied with the virus that’s spreading, they won’t come looking here for a long while.”
Cough, cough.

“Are you sick?” the woman asked the man.
 

“I think I might be coming down with something, yes,” he answered.
 

“I can’t believe you messed all this up,” the woman said. “The virus was supposed to spread, yes, but this is sloppy. This was the first trial run…” She ended her sentence with a huff.
 

I could feel my hands shaking again. This time it was because I knew I was in the same room as the murderer. Had he created this sickness…this virus? I held the pistol close to me as I listened.
 

“We’ve been over this,” he came back. “I know what kind of situation we are in now. We just have to work a bit harder.”

“I don’t know why you had to pick the girl,” the woman said. “You were infatuated with her.”

“Willow was the perfect test subject.”
 

Willow?

“She trusted me, and her family lives a thousand miles away,” he said. “These two were supposed to keep her here. I’m not sure what happened. I left for
one
minute.”

A thought hit me like a truck. The text I got from Willow. She was supposed to meet with a professor. They met. I never heard from her again.
This
was the man that she made plans with.
This
was the man that killed her. And now some virus had spread across the entire campus. For all I knew, it had spread further. I wanted to throw up, but I knew I had to stay silent. I held my hand against my mouth, trying to stifle my shaking body. What was going on here?

“Reporters are going to figure out it started in this lab,” the woman said. “They might even figure out that it was
your
super-vaccine gone bad.”

“And I will deal with them accordingly,” he said. “They may ask questions at first, but soon, the news will divert from here. This thing is going to spread like wildfire. The world won’t know what to do.”

“I don’t care about all that right now,” the woman said. “Let’s just get what we came for and get out of here. Where is the canister?”

The man didn’t answer, but I could hear his footsteps moving closer to the closet. I just knew that’s where he was going. Was he going to find me? I gripped the gun tighter in my hands. I might have been shaky, but it would be hard to miss from this short of a distance. I sat on the floor, waiting. The doorknob twisted and I held the gun up, pointing it to where I thought his chest might be when the door opened. Light broke through as the door cracked outward. My finger was on the trigger ready to pump him full of bullets.

But he stopped.
 

“Hold on,” he said. His hand let go of the doorknob. “That’s right, I moved the cooler over here.” His steps carried him away from the closet. I didn’t know I had been holding my breath until I finally breathed outward. I wasn’t sure who had been luckier—him or me.
 

“You only want the one?” he asked the woman.
 

“It’s the only one I care about for now,” she says. “I’ll make sure it is kept safe and stored away.”

“You won’t keep it with you?” he asked.
 

“It will be safe,” she answered.
 

“Things could get ugly out there,” he said. “What if you find out that you need it and you aren’t near it? I highly recommend that you keep it near you.”