Eaters (43 page)

When they pulled into the driveway of 1352 Mission Street, the rest of the air left Cheryl’s lungs. The screen door she’d helped him install last summer lay on the front lawn. It was mangled and covered with splatters of dried blood, and the front door was wide open.

Jameson parked the Jeep and left it running.

She couldn’t move. When he put a hand on her shoulder and said, “You alright, ma’am?” she was unable to respond. She felt like she was drowning. Her nose and eyes were filled with water causing a stinging sensation.

“We’d better check it out,” Reiser said. “We can’t stay long. We have to meet the rest of the detail at the hospital.”

Jameson stepped out and looked back at the both of them. “Stay frosty.”

She’d picked up some of the military slang and knew that wasn’t a sarcastic remark. He was warning her to stay alert.

Underwater.
That’s where she was. She felt like she was swimming as her body floated out of the Jeep. The two soldiers paddled up beside her, holding harpoons as their eyes darted from side to side, looking for sharks.

Reiser took the lead as they approached the gaping doorway. She followed him into the front hallway. Her feet crunched on glass and she looked down. Staring back up at her was her own face, a photograph that had been taken five years ago on a vacation to the Grand Canyon.

“What’s his name?” Jameson asked.

She turned at looked at him, not sure if she’d heard the question right. After all, it was hard to hear under water. “Jack,” she said. “Jack Malone.”

He started shouting. “Mr. Malone!”

Every cupboard in the kitchen was open. Trash littered the floor, and there was a fork stuck in the stucco ceiling. In the living room, the cracked television lay on its side and books covered the floor. Guns at the ready, they crept down the hallway towards the bedroom.

Cheryl motioned for Reiser to wait. Whatever had happened to her father, she wanted to be the first to get the news and not have it delivered to her secondhand. She stepped around him and into the room.

Unlike the rest of the house, this room wasn’t in disarray. The twin bed was neatly made; there was a Louis L’Amour book on the nightstand with a folded paper napkin for a bookmark, and there were eyeglasses and keys on top of the dresser.

Then she looked down and saw bloody footprints, which crisscrossed the room in multiple directions.

“I’m sorry,” Reiser said. “There’s no one here.”

She inhaled a lungful of water and felt herself sinking.
They took him
, she thought.
Cornered him in here then carried him off like a side of beef.
She ran a finger across the thin layer of dust on the nightstand. It had probably happened weeks ago.

Jameson lingered in the doorway and Reiser said something to her, but it came out warbled under the water. The words dribbled out like tiny air bubbles.

“I said, let’s go!”

She felt a clamp on her arm and let it drag her towards the door. One foot after the other, following the dark brown pattern of feet that blemished the tile.

They were halfway down the hall when she heard something. It was faint and raspy like the sound a leaf makes as it slides across the ground.

Not now, Mark. I need to be alone.

Then, she stopped.

Reiser dug his fingers deeper into her arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

She held her hand up. “Wait…”

She heard it again. “Sheh…”

Her heart sank. It was just the wind, a soft breeze blowing through the papery aspen leaves outside.

There aren’t any aspens here.

She realized that the sound was coming from the bedroom.

“Shehl…”

It sounded like more of a croak this time.

“I heard something,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

Reiser released his grip and followed her back to the bedroom. Inside, she heard the sound for a third time and realized that it was coming from underneath the bed. She got down on her knees and looked underneath.

Nothing.

A pair of sandals. A crumpled tissue. And dust.

She took her time rising back to her feet. This house was all that was left of Jack Malone’s life, and she was sure that she’d never see it again after this day.

“We’ve got orders to get back to the hospital.” Reiser motioned toward the door with his head and his gun.

It wasn’t more than a whisper again. “Shhe…”

Her head whipped around. She ran back to the bed and pulled it away from the wall with one hand, seeing nothing but a vent with a metal grate screwed over it.

“Here…” the papery leaves sighed from inside.

She pulled a flashlight out of her holster and shined it inside.

Two brown eyes stared back out at her.

Like a diver rising too fast in the water and getting the bends, she felt a giant air bubble rise in her chest and threaten to burst. “He’s in here!” she screamed. “He’s in here…”

She pried the grate off with her crowbar and found a nearly mummified version of her father inside. His skin was taught and papery thin, and his mouth was a slit with sandpaper lips that seemed barely able to move. Somehow, he’d managed to crawl in there and screw the grate back on from the inside. Eventually, he’d grown too weak from lack of food and water to get himself back out. Any normal person would have died a couple of weeks back, but Jack Malone was too stubborn to let that happen. She found out later that he’d eaten silverfish and beetles and slept as much as he could, hoping for a rescuer to eventually find him.

Cheryl heard Jameson on the walkie-talkie. “…that’s right…we’re bringing a survivor back. He’s going to need immediate medical attention.”

“Yeah. Him and a few thousand other people,” Reiser mumbled as he helped Cheryl pull the skeletal man out of the hole.

She ignored him as her father raised a shaky hand up to her cheek and forced a smile.

Jameson carried him out to the Jeep, and she sat in the back with him as they drove to the hospital where she hoped they’d find any intravenous supplies needed to revive his weakened body. She held his hand on the way and decided that maybe she did believe there was a god. If she’d found her father just one more day later, they might be on the way to a baiting station to dump his body.

Maybe some benevolent entity was looking out for her (and her father) after all.

That belief was bolstered when she discovered that the day had further surprises in store for her.

* * *

Her patrol was thankfully uneventful that night, because her emotions were volatile after checking her father into the fort’s triage unit where he was given a red tag to indicate the need for immediate attention.

When she went off duty, she decided to visit the all night cafeteria that was just for those who had earned the navy blue cards. Patrols were lonely, so after getting her tray, she scanned the room for someone to eat with. She saw Yvonne in the line and took two steps toward her then paused, remembering that she’d been such a Chatty Cathy, it was hard to get a word in between her monologues.

She panned the room again and noticed a tall man with shaggy blond hair in an Army uniform, hunched over the buffet, heaping mounds of mango and pineapple onto his plate. She hadn’t seen him before and was sure that she would remember if she had, because of his odd appearance. One shoulder was arched higher than the other giving him a crooked stance, and as he moved down the line he walked with a limp. She found herself staring, wondering if it was someone she’d met during the induction that had been wounded since then.

He grabbed a bottle of water at the end of the line and flashed his navy blue card to the attendant then walked towards the tables at the far end of the room. He settled at a solitary table in the corner—the furthest one away from the rest of the diners. After tossing a pack of cigarettes on the table next to him, he sat down on the bench with his back to her.

Cheryl moved in that direction. As she approached from behind, his face was bowed low over the plate. He began to eat ravenously, working clockwise around the plate. The hand that held the fork had a sickly pale color with pink scars raked through it like it had been through a meat grinder. His appearance and his voracious appetite startled her enough to make her pause and glance down at her gun.

His plate was nearly clean by the time she rounded the far end of the table and came to stand diagonally from him about four yards away.

When he turned around, she saw his face. One eyebrow was higher than the other, and his skin was pockmarked with long vertical scars.

His blue eyes locked into hers.

Her fingers suddenly turned into jelly, and her plate crashed to the floor.

Mark?

Chapter Twenty Six

He licked a dribble of juice off of his chin. Then his bottom lip began to quiver as he stared at her. She rushed around to him and collided into his arms. He held her and sobbed into her hair with a raspy voice. “Cheryl…my God…”

Every word she could think of remained balled up in the lump in her throat as a rush of tears flooded her cheeks.

They stayed locked together for several minutes, ignoring the murmurs around them. Then, he pulled away and looked into her eyes. “I’m so sorry…”

Sorry? Sorry for what?

Her mind flashed back to the instant that he’d shoved her out the church door, pushing her into the infected world to brave it alone. She wasn’t angry, but she had a hell of a lot of questions, especially considering the fact that his broken body seemed to be scarred from infection but not from flames. Her first words came out sounding stiffer than she’d intended.

“You lied to me.”

“I had to,” he said, shaking his head. “You would have died there.”

She realized that one of the military trucks that had passed her and Aidan on the road probably had him in it, and the thought made her sick.

He explained that he hadn’t gotten enough vaccine back in Afghanistan to prevent him from coming down with the infection, but it had been enough to slow the progression and allow a second dose, begged from a sympathetic soldier bearing a torch, to do some good.

They talked into the wee hours of the morning, long after a cleanup crew came by and mopped up the mess from her spilled tray.

“Someone said it was mosquitoes but in the movie the sergeant said—”

“It’s all a lie.”

“But the thing you said with the dogs, the genetic engineering, that can’t be true. It’s impossible.”

He slammed his fist down on the table. “It’s
not
impossible! People fuck with nature. It fucks back.”

“Shhh…” she warned, looking around the room. There was no one in the cafeteria now but a small crew that was starting to put out pancakes and cereal for the breakfast shift. No one seemed to be paying any attention to them.

He leaned in and whispered. “This disaster is no accident.
Somebody was responsible for this mess
!”

“Who?” she asked, wondering if the infection had affected his mind as much as his body.

“The truth would make your skin crawl.”

When he wouldn’t elaborate, she told him about Aidan’s theories that the government or the military had something to do with the epidemic. Her words caused flames to dance in the waters of his blue eyes. She knew that she’d never seen him so angry as his chest heaved up and down and his nostrils flared.

“That’s bullshit. This is the greatest war our country has ever seen. We’ve been turned on ourselves, and by someone from within.”

She desperately wanted to know what he was talking about, but now wasn’t the time to draw it out of him. Instead of pressing him further, she held onto him, feeling like Beauty embracing the Beast.

This wasn’t a fairytale, though, and she was not some helpless princess. Her struggle for survival had forged her into a new being. She felt like a soldier now, and she was ready to fight against whatever challenges the future held—against whoever had caused such misery for them and the rest of the world.

With Mark by her side, she felt invincible.

Bring it on…

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Eaters
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