Evolution of the Dead (4 page)

She made her way toward the lake, running over any of the dead in her path.  The bus crashed into a burning car.  Flames licked up onto the front of the bus, catching some of the dead bodies on fire.

They burn like leaves

Past the burning car, Carmen turned left onto the main road surrounding Lake Eola.

“Hell with my foot pain,” Carmen said.  She adjusted her ball cap, pressed down on the gas pedal, and mowed through the dead as she made her way out of downtown.

“Oops! She just fell.  Oh
shit
, she landed on the roof and almost fell off the bus - Jesus, that was
close
,” Matt McCormick said with a shuddery laugh as he stood naked in his hotel room watching Carmen drop from the ledge of the building on the other side of the street.  “I hope she’s gonna be ok.”

Behind him, sitting on their bed, his wife Maria, asked, “Matt, what are we going to do? We can’t go down
there
.”

“I don’t think we need to go
anywhere
, hon.  They can’t get up here.”

“But what if they
do
?”

“They won’t, babe.”

She nodded, “Alright.”

Seeing all of the people down on the street below vomiting and shitting themselves had made her queasy.  She had just thrown up her breakfast in the bathroom.

Doesn’t help with my morning sickness
, she thought.  She hadn’t told her husband she was pregnant.

It was their one year anniversary today.  They had planned to walk along the lakeside after finishing their late breakfast.  During the walk she was going to tell him – but the infection or whatever it was had put an end to that idea.

Instead, they made love until the mess outside cleared up.

In their suite, their TV was tuned to CNN Headline News.  Nothing was being broadcast about what was going on yet.

Matt walked out into the suite’s sitting area, passing a chair with clothes hanging on the back of it.  He smiled.  Maria remembered to bring his favorite blue t-shirt and sweats.  Was sweet of her to lay them out for him.  She must have done it last night after he went to sleep.

Another TV was tuned to CNN out in the sitting room.  Matt ran through all of the news channels.  Still, there was nothing being broadcast about the infection.

Matt opened a sliding glass door which led out onto the suite’s terrace.  He walked outside to get a better look.

“Ah shit,” he shouted to Maria.  “She’s driving the bus…oh crap she hit one of the burning cars! The bus is on fire now! It’s burning the sick people! Maria, the sick people are burning, come look!”

She didn’t get off the bed.  “Matt, get some clothes on!”

“No one can see me,” he said with a laugh.

Putting her bathrobe on, she hurried out onto the windy balcony in time to see the bus turn the corner.

“Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know.”

Something splatted on the ground next to Matt’s foot.  He stood on his tiptoes leaning further out over the balcony trying to see where the bus went.

Maria admired his bare butt and the muscles in his legs.  With a coy smile, she stepped right next to him.  She pressed her body against his.

He smiled.  “Wow.  Are you ready for round three already?”

She let her bathrobe drop off her shoulders.  She stood naked next to him with a crooked smile on her face.

He kissed her shoulder, ran his open mouth down the swell of her breast.  He ran a circle around her hard nipple.

Dropping down onto one knee to kiss her belly, he put his knee right in the dab of wetness.

“Ah great, I knelt in some bird shit,” he said as he stood back up wiping his knee off with his thumb.

“We can take a shower and wash it off,” Maria said sexily.

“That would be nice.”

Another splat landed on his shoulder.

“What the fuck? Stupid birds!”

He looked up.  A diseased man was leaning over the edge of the balcony above them.

His face was yellow. He was reaching for them.  One of his eyes dropped out of his eye socket and plopped down onto Matt’s chest.  It rolled down the front of his chest.

“What the hell!
Fuck!”

Matt’s skin changed color in a straight line from his right shoulder down to his nipple.

Maria screamed.

Matt shook his head no as he backed up into their suite.  “No, baby.  This can’t be happening!”

“No, Matt, no! Please! Go wash it off in the shower! Hurry!”

He quickly ran through their bedroom and jumped into the shower.  Before he could even get the water turned on, his skin begin to bleed from every pore on his back.  He tried to push the yellowing color away but it spread quickly up his arms, across his torso, and down to his legs.

He cranked on the hot water.  It was scalding hot.  His face grimaced in pain.  The water was burning his skin.  He vomited all over the inside of the shower glass.  Shit surged all over the shower floor.

Maria fell on her knees next to him as he begged for help, gagging, his eyes bulging.  He wouldn’t let her open the shower door or turn the cold water on.  He died screaming in pain in front of her.

The bathroom filled with hot steam.

It was mixed with Maria’s screams.

Behind her, out in their suite, CNN broke in with breaking news.  A newswoman said,
“There are unconfirmed reports coming in from Orlando, Florida that an unknown disease has broken out.  Reports are sketchy at this time.  Stay with CNN.  We will keep you updated.”

After crossing a sky bridge which connected two parking garages, Scott and Kim worked their way down a long infected hallway.

An elevator stood open at the other end.

“Step over here, this side,” Scott said as he stepped around a large pool of vomit.  He leaned his back against the wall.  “We can make it.  It’s not that wide.”

Kim was right beside him.  She leaned her back against the same wall, too.

The floor was caked with large splotches of vomit, blood and shit.  In it, trillions of thin five inch tall worms were standing up.  They had suddenly started to sprout up everywhere, like grass growing out of concrete.  Maneuvering around the shit splotches was like hopping across a pond full of wobbly shifting stones.

As she shimmied along a short strip of uninfected carpet, Kim asked, “Are you sure this is the way to your car?”

Scott said, “Yea it’s on the eighth floor of the parking garage on the other side of
this
hotel.”

In a small foyer in front of a locked hotel suite, Scott found enough room to jump across the hall to a larger clearer area of the carpet. A cleaning cart was lying on its side right next to it.

Kim hopped over the splotch.  She landed right behind Scott, too.  He hadn’t expected her to jump right away.  There wasn’t enough room for the two of them.  Kim lost her footing when she landed.  Scott reached out, caught her and held her close before she fell back into it.

“Thanks,” she said nervously.  Her eyes were even with his chin.  His body was warm.

A dead woman wearing a bloody nightgown came to a standing position on the other side of the cleaning cart.  She slowly reached across the cart to touch the two of them.

Scott kicked the cart into her.  She stumbled and fell backward into the worm covered shit.

Scott let go of Kim and quickly shoved the cart out of the way.  He jumped onto the fallen woman’s stomach.  A glob of puke erupted out of her mouth.  Scott avoided it.  He hopped off the woman’s stomach and over onto another clean section of carpet.

“Come on, do it!” he yelled at Kim.

Shaking her head, not believing what she was about to do, she hopped onto the woman’s chest as she was working to stand back up.  The woman was forced onto her back. Kim jumped onto the carpet next to Scott.

“Not so bad,” he said.

“Come on!”

The woman behind them slowly started getting up again.

The remainder of the hall was clean all the way to the open elevator.  Together they ran to it.  Once inside, Scott pressed the eighth floor.  Slowly the elevator doors closed.

They caught their breath.

When the doors opened on the eighth floor they were met with a hallway full of more dead people.  All at once they turned toward the elevator.

Kim yelled, “Shut the door!”

Scott hammered the elevator buttons with his fist.

The doors didn’t close right away.

“Shut it!” Kim screamed.  “They’re coming!”

“I’m trying!”

Finally, the doors closed.

Out of breath, Kim asked, “Was that the eighth floor?”

“Yea! Now we gotta get back down
to
it.”

Kim said shakily, “I wish I knew where my husband was.  The bastard dropped me off and went looking for a parking place.”

“It’s alright,” Scott said.  “We’ll get to my car.  We’ll find him.”

The ninth floor was unpassable as the elevator doors opened.  There were no dead people, only a carpet full of billions of tiny squirming worms.  When the doors opened, all of the worms leaned toward Scott and Kim like a wind had shifted them toward it.

“I wonder if we could run across it,” Kim asked.  “We have shoes on…it’s not like we’re barefoot.”

“I wouldn’t want to take the chance,” Scott said.

Kim nodded, “Ok, what do we do then?”

“Keep going up.”

He pressed the elevator button again.

The tenth floor was clean. Running out of the elevator, they took a quick left around a corner and ran along a hallway with large picture windows overlooking the city.  “Ok, the parking garage is two floors below us…right there!” Scott said pointing down to an open parking lot.  “If we can get to it, we should be able to get out of here.”

“And go where?” Kim asked.

Questioning, Scott asked, “I thought you were worried about your husband? I thought you wanted to find him.  Don’t you know where he parked?”

“No, I don’t want to find him,” Kim said quietly.  “I really hope he’s dead.”

“Ok, let’s go to the airport.  I’m supposed to go meet my family.  It’s something we planned.”

She asked, “But where would you fly to? I mean, what if this is worldwide?”

Scott looked at her, put his hands on his hips and said with a nervous shaky laugh, “Well then I’d say we’re pretty well fucked.”

Janet Williams sat in the passenger seat holding onto the dashboard, tears rolling down her cheeks.  She felt in her heart that she was going to die very soon.

Hundreds of the dead had their hands on the top of Nick’s car.  They weren’t trying to break the windows to get in, they simply stood there, not moving.  Their yellow hollowed eyes stared through the windshield at them.

“Just stay calm,” Nick said as he shifted in his seat.  “They see us, but I don’t think they know how to get in here.  If they did, I think we’d be dead already.”

“Why do they just
stand
there?” she asked in a shaky voice.  “Why don’t they try to get
in
here?”

“I don’t know, but it’s freaking me the hell out.”

“Try and drive through them!” she yelled, stomping her feet.  “
Try and drive through them! I can’t take this anymore!”

Nick pushed on the gas.  The dead were slowly pushed out of the way.  None of them
voluntarily
moved out of the way.  It was the force of the car pushing on them that made them move.

There was a thump as a body was run over, then another, and another.  Janet kept her hands plastered flat on the dash board.  Her eyes were shut.  Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

Dead people filled the whole street.  There was nowhere to walk.  All of their heads turned to watch as Nick slowly drove along, rolling over them with the tires.

Nick yelled, “What the hell are they waiting for?”

“They ain’t…they ain’t moving! Go faster!”

Nick pushed the car up to 20 miles an hour.  The front of the car was denting.  The windshield was cracking.

Janet yelled, “Take the onramp!”

“No, that’s going back downtown! That’s where it started! I’m not going back there!”

“Take it! Let’s get out of this!”

He took the onramp up onto the highway.  All four lanes of traffic going downtown were completely stopped.

“My god,” she whispered.  “Where are the people? Where did they all go?”

Slamming his foot down on the brake, he stopped next to an empty car.  The windows were rolled down.  The interior was smothered in thin orange worms.

“What the fuck is that shit? Drive on the shoulder!”

Nick threw the car into reverse.  Backing the car up, he squealed the tires, turned the car around and faced it into the dead on-coming traffic.  He drove on the shoulder.