High Water (6 page)

Heart pounding with alarm at the escalating situation, Pete tried to consider what was going on here. Years in the lab had taught him the importance of an investigative methodology, a series of steps to take before coming to a conclusion. In some ways, it wasn’t dissimilar from kung fu training, where technique was drilled over and over again in order to fix a certain outcome. Both mental processes, martial and scientific, synthesized after years of coexistence. Symptoms were feral rage combined with the discharge of the eyes. Some kind of swelling of the brain could cause that, perhaps encephalitis?

The infection could very well be protozoan: however a parasite that spread this quickly was unusual and in a word
supernatural
. Scientific method, normally a passive tool, now barged its way into in Pete’s thought process, demanding he interrogate that word. The concept that anything could be beyond natural was nearly indecent, offensive to the method that guided his mode of inquiry. But there was no time to investigate his thoughts. He had come here for a purpose.

Taking the empty plastic container from his pocket, Pete carefully leaned down to dip it in the water. He watched the figures in the pool warily. Hurriedly, he capped the bottle while making as little contact with the water as possible. Managing to get the cap on without getting his hands wet, he dried a few drips off the side of the container with his pant leg. It would have to do.

Out of sight of the watery slaughter, the area behind the bend in the slide was enjoying a moment of sanity. Liz had gotten the crying girl up and talking. Her black hair was matted with blood and she was shaky on her legs, but Liz had her moving slowly back under Slider Mountain.

“Come on, sweetie, you got this,” Liz said to the girl quietly. “We’re just going to move one step at a time, okay?” The girl whimpered, but moved a little faster. Bryan stood in a daze, rubbing his neck absently.

As soon as Pete had started to get used to the subwoofers’ pulsing beat, the music dropped out, revealing the sounds of the watery massacre. Dread dropped a cold chunk of pig iron into his gut.

“We have to go,” Pete said loudly. “Like right fucking now!” He moved quickly, trying to herd everyone back toward the locker room door. There could be hundreds of people infected, he thought, but kept the notion to himself for now. Liz looked backward warily as their group started to move a little faster. Pete could barely see the outline of the locker room door across the park from where he stood. The way was clear and they were headed in the opposite direction of the terrible shit behind them. Anywhere was safer than where they had been. Pete was still scared and jittery, but felt more in control on the move.

“The water is contaminated. It’s very important not to get into the water or otherwise get it on you,” Pete said loudly. Liz and Bryan both gave him blank stares, so he continued, “I can’t tell whether the infection goes through the skin or through mucous membranes. It kind of doesn’t matter, we just need to stay out of the water.” His speech elicited some nods from his party.

Movement became easier as they broke into a rhythm. Crying Girl was no longer crying and finally moving on her own, but Bryan was slowing down. A sudden fit of coughing erupted from the man and echoed through the dark room. Bryan doubled over in distress, his hacking cough getting worse.

“My throat, need water,” Bryan gasped before he started to cough again.

“Not this water!” Pete hissed. He slapped Bryan on the back a few times, remembering that he had done the same thing to Walter earlier today. Bryan shook his head, stifling another cough.

“Pete, up ahead,” Liz whispered, her voice wavering. He looked up.

Standing between their party and the door was a short, stocky figure. In the murky light of the water park, one could just make out pasty white legs and two floating orbs, disembodied eyes. The figure stared directly at them for a brief moment, blinked, and broke into a slow jog in their direction. Crying Girl was lucid enough to see doom coming for her and started to scream. She pushed past Liz and ran through the slide supports into the darkness. Liz looked like she wanted to follow, but Pete grabbed her arm.

“DON’T follow her. How do we get out of here?” he said, staring at Liz intently. There was no sense chasing the girl down when a threat was imminent. Pete felt something in his mind slip away. Maybe it was his conscience, he reflected grimly. These split second decisions for their survival were getting easier.

Liz looked surprised for a moment. Then she nodded nervously and answered, “The only exit on this side of the park is through the locker room. It’s locked but I have my keys.”

“We can’t make it without fighting that guy,” Pete responded. As the stocky figure got closer, Pete thought he heard Bryan say something.

“What?”

“Pump… access!” Bryan croaked, pointing just above them. They followed his gesture toward a deployable ladder a few yards away, stealthily painted to match the off-white of the support struts holding up Slider Mountain. The release mechanism wasn’t obvious to Pete. Liz went for it first, using some of the nearby struts to climb.

Everything happened all at once. Preparing for the imminent fight, Pete sized up the stocky man, whose eyes dripped a cloudy fluid from sickly blonde-colored sores around his eyes. As Pete studied his opponent, noting the thick, powerful arms and low center of gravity, he heard Bryan gasp. A tall, thin woman in a bright orange swimsuit,
hunter orange,
Pete’s brain registered dimly, darted out of the shadows to attack Bryan. She caught him with a powerful, wide strike from her balled fist.

There was no chance to do anything about it. The stocky man moved faster than Pete would have imagined, attacking him with a flurry of furious blows. He blocked a few, testing his enemy, unnerved by the uncanny grin on the man’s face. The same perverted perfume he’d experienced earlier reached into his awareness again, instinctually revolting. His squat opponent followed up with another barrage of attacks, allowing Pete to block two blows while taking one in the gut.

Earlier today, in kung fu class, he had told Adam to always give back what he got. The strike to Pete’s gut was exchanged for a left handed palm to the chin, raising the man’s head just enough for Pete to aim a crane wing at his neck, using the forearm as a weapon. Having trained with the principle of Iron Body, using repeated minor impacts to harden the bone, Pete’s forearm must have felt like a length of rebar when it slammed into the throat of the short man.

Kung fu didn’t hesitate to strike the vitals.

No longer grinning, a clenched fist missed Pete completely. The miss allowed him to sidestep and deliver a strong hammer fist to the man’s kidney. He followed up with a short kick to the knee, dropping his assailant to the ground. The stocky man’s face was already purple, his hands clutching at his neck. Pete turned his back on the stocky man knowing the punch to the throat was likely fatal. He stood panting after the painful blow to his torso.

Bryan was holding his own against the tall woman. Throwing some powerful but ill-advised punches, he was still staying on his feet. The woman lunged and grabbed, but he danced out of the way. Before Bryan could land another wind-up punch, a short girl with blonde pigtails materialized out of the darkness. She tackled him from behind, knocking Bryan and his two assailants to the ground. Bryan’s face hit the pavement hard. “You took MY JACKET, WHERE’s my JACKET,” Pigtails screamed from the floor, clawing at Bryan’s legs. It was less a question than it was an utterance without context, purely psychotic.

Blood thudded in Pete’s ears, and his vision narrowed to focus on the two women trying to beat Bryan to death. The tall woman pounded hard on Bryan’s temple before getting a kick to the face from Pete. The ball of his foot whipped her head backwards. With her jaw dislocated and tongue hanging out, she was dazed long enough for him to bring another sweeping roundhouse kick across the face of Pigtails. Enough of his awareness remained to hear Liz’s warning.

“Behind you, Pete!”

The warning probably saved him. Pete turned just in time to deflect some of the power of a punch aimed at the back of his head. Having sparred many times, with and without a helmet, he had been hit in the head before.  But there was a rage behind the bare-knuckle strike that made it particularly vicious. In its wake, Pete’s ear felt like it had been torn off. Accustomed to being hit, he lost no time, knowing how to ignore rising pain when action was needed. When he had started training,
Sifu
had told him that technique always overcame power. Strength of arms was not the only factor in a fight. As long as you were trained past the point of hesitation, skill was much more of a determinant.

Catching the opponents’ arm with his and using the mantis technique to make the arm a lever, Pete swept the newcomer, a Southeast Asian man, to the floor. Still holding the arm, he stepped over it and squatted down. Dropping his weight, he used his tailbone to break bone. The limb split easily, the shearing away of muscle from bone seeming as easy as pulling ripe peach flesh away from the pit. With a wounded ear and adrenaline pumping through his veins, the loud crack of the breaking bone barely registered.

There was no substitute for sloppy technique, Pete reflected coldly.

Settling into a zone of violent expression, activity around him seemed to happen in slow motion. The smell of blood mixed with the scents of rotten cantaloupe and chlorine was over powering. But his mind sorted the odor information out and set it aside as being extraneous. Instead of focusing on details, Pete let fighting instinct whisper to him that the punch was coming. He turned as Pigtails tried to hit him in the ribs, and deflected some of the punch’s power. He managed to ram an elbow hard into the girl’s arm. It was not enough to drop her, but staggered her momentarily. He chanced a look over to Liz. She had deployed the ladder and was beckoning him from some kind of catwalk. He could see she was screaming words at him, but couldn’t hear anything.

Two hands grabbed his shoulders, and he saw Pigtails getting ready to attack him again. Intuition told one to pull away from a grapple, but Shaolin and other arts preached the opposite. Rather than try to pull away, he stepped between the legs of the opponent behind him. Pete grabbed as much arm as he could and twisted his torso. For good measure, he roared a
kiai
, adding his
chi
to the throw. The tall woman sailed over his shoulder. Without waiting, he stood and sent another elbow in the direction of the smaller girl, viciously connecting with her temple as she charged into the blow. Pigtail’s feet buckled and she crumpled to the floor, as a pained expression lit up her face.

Pete gasped for air. A quick visual check on the tall woman splayed out a few feet away revealed a broken neck. The Southeast Asian man whose arm he had broken was cradling the ruined limb, bawling through brown-sugared eyes like a child. Whatever these individuals still felt, a compound fracture was too much pain for the infected brain to ignore.

“Pete!” cried Liz.

More figures plunged out of the darkness, one of them leaping over the body of the stocky man he had disabled earlier. Pete used the split second to lunge for the ladder, almost escaping another blow to his ribs. The breath left his lungs again, but he managed to get part of the way up the ladder. Liz’s outstretched hand grabbed his shirt and hauled him up to the catwalk.

Pete drew a deep breath, his pulmonary system lagging far behind the exertion of his muscles, but inhaling was not without some pain. Some harsh hits had been taken in that last melee. He watched Liz slash her knife across the eyes of Pigtails, whose head disappeared. Liz then raised the knife and bellowed her own primitive
kiai
, bringing it down in a glistening arc into the crusty, caked eye of a man in a black t-shirt. Rage and desperation drove the knife deep, burying it to the hilt, but the man’s fall wrenched the weapon from her grasp.

Having regained some of his breath, Pete shimmied over to Liz and helped her kick a different girl in the face until the girl fell down the ladder. Below, he saw a Hispanic man with surprisingly little ocular discharge lunge out of the darkness, making a beeline for the prone figure of Bryan. Several other figures joined the man in the ghastly execution of Liz’s friend. Achieved with nothing but bare hands, the thudding of fists on skin and soft tissue was unbelievably loud. The man tried to cry out when a kick took him across the jaw, blood and teeth spraying out to the side. A stab of empathy hit Pete as he watched Bryan’s face get stamped into the concrete, but there was nothing they could do.

Pete grabbed Liz and limped to the other side of the catwalk, passing various knobs and nozzles. They climbed another ladder to a second catwalk. As he ascended, he noted that the howls below them didn’t get any closer. He guessed that Bryan’s involuntary sacrifice had shifted attention away from them. As much as Bryan had been a prick, his grisly death was buying them time. At the top of the second ladder, among the howls of the infected, Liz grabbed him in an embrace.

“Those people, Pete, we killed them,” she cried, the cracking in her voice muffled by his shirt. “And Bryan…”

“… saved us.” When shit hit the fan, the big dude had not hesitated. Pete felt regret and guilt. It could have just as easily been him and Liz down there.

Liz clutched at his shirt. “What’s going on?”

“Something terrible, baby,” he said, touching the back of her head and holding her close. “You were right, there’s some horrific shit in the water,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything spread so fast. The whole place is an incubator.”