Night Plague: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (9 page)

Her green eyes blazed with black fire. “Some leader you are. What happened to democracy, huh?” She scoffed, nostrils flaring.

Dale pushed his lips into a solemn line, fingers curled around the handle of his gun. “I don’t want to see another murder until you need to feed. And with how many you’ve taken recently, I’d say that’s not for another three weeks. Are we clear?”

Alex glared a moment longer, chin held high, and walked away, not uttering another word. Dale sighed, returning his gun to his coat while his free hand wiped his clammy brow. Mason watched the woman leave, eyes following her bobbing red hair.

What had they been fighting about? Murder? A 1% chance? Reproduction? Successors? The hair rose on the back of his neck. He understood why they’d argued better than he let himself admit. He didn’t want anything to do with these people’s grisly affairs.

He was just about to slink away, taking advantage of the dying commotion, when Dale shot him a smile. “Well, hey there, runner. Decided to join in after all?”

Mason flinched. “I’m just here to talk to Cliff. If that’s okay, I mean.”

Dale heaved another, exaggerated sigh.
“Figures. Just don’t make a nuisance of yourself, you hear? He and Mercy are in the old infirmary.” He gestured to the left with a smirk. “Make yourself at home, now!”

****

Mason found the doctors bent over a long metal table. Cliff eyed a test tube while Mercy glared daggers into collections of paper. He stopped at the doorway. It almost felt wrong to disturb them. “Excuse me?”

Cliff looked up with a friendly smile. “Oh, Mason? What brings you here? You didn’t seem terribly fond of the place, what with the running off and all.”

He looked down. “It’s…I was wondering if you still had any medicine left from when, well, when you used to be a doctor.”

Cliff heaved a quiet laugh. “I still am a doctor, lad. I just work in different ways, now.”

“Right. Sorry.”             

“No need to look so down. You can’t let little things get to you if you want to survive a life like this.” He breathed a final chuckle before his lips drooped into a frown. “So what is it? Merril sick again?”

Mason raised his head. “You remember?”

“Of course.”
Cliff nodded. “She was one of my regulars.”

“We were going to take her to see the new doctor, but the clinic’s booked up over the weekend, and…I’m not sure she can wait.”

“What is she down with?”

Mason chewed the inside of his jaw. “I don’t know. She says she has a headache and feels really tired. She looked awful this morning – really pale and shaky.”

The doctor was quiet for a few beats, eyes flickering with thought like he was skimming a book that wasn’t there. “I can’t give a diagnosis without seeing her, but how about I lend you a catch-all antibiotic? I did take a handful of stuff with me when I left the clinic, and if she’s got any type of bacterial infection, it should knock it out at least until you can get a real examination.”

Mason smiled. “That would be great.”

Cliff just nodded, already rummaging through a dusty shelf. “You look like you could use some allergy meds, yourself. A pity they don’t work on us anymore. You should stay out of the sun as much as you can for a while.”

“Eh?” Mason blinked, bewildered until he remembered the welts on his hands. They hadn’t necessarily gotten worse, but they hadn’t disappeared, either. In fact, they were slowly sprouting on his lower neck. They’d been around for so long that he’d more or less stopped noticing them.

“Stay out of the sun for a few days and they’ll go away.”

He instinctively pulled down his sleeves as far as they would go.
“The…sun?”

The doctor heaved a hearty laugh that made his belly bounce. It looked out of place on a figure as thin and lanky as his. “It’s not like we’ll burn up or melt to ashes, but we are weak to the sun – it’s something like an allergic reaction.”

Mason’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”
Cliff shoved aside old boxes and bags while he spoke. “It can actually get quite severe, but you should be fine as long as you don’t spend hours under direct sunlight. It will sap your energy, though, so don’t overdo it.”

…This was just too much. Mason groaned, staring at the cracks in the floor and letting himself think about something else. “Umm, I heard Dale and some girl, I think her name was Alex, arguing –”

“Oh, was Dale trying to knock some sense into her again?” Cliff didn’t wait for him to finish. “Alex has some idea in her head that we need to drain as many people as possible to give them the 1% chance of rising. She says we need to make the vampire population as big as possible before humans all die out, but really, she just enjoys the power. Sick in the head, that one is.”

Mason shuddered, his toes curling.

“She’s managed to sweep quite a few of us under her wing, though. It’s best just to stay away from her and her ‘people’.”

Were there really people like that in the prison? People who’d kill without needing to? Sorrel hadn’t told him anything about that before. Something churned his stomach – he wasn’t sure if it was fear or disgust, but either way, he’d definitely made the right decision to run.

“They were also talking about, umm, ‘reproduction’. Dale said that you and Mercy were –”

“Ah, well…” Cliff stopped. “We’re tackling one barrier at a time. We clearly have the potential to outlive humans, but as we originate from them as well as feed off them, the extinction of our origin species poses quite a problem for us, as well. Without food, we’ll all
die, as they will. And without humans to rise, we’ll never grow as a people. Right now, however, we’re putting all our efforts into the synthetic blood program – we have a four year time limit at max on that one.”

Mason tapped his heel on the floor. “So…you mean we won’t have to hunt anymore?”

“Someday.” Cliff shot him a smile. “Or at least, that’s the idea. We’re working to uncover what exactly it is that keeps us alive, and why it needs human blood as fuel. The next step will be procuring alternate resources for it.”

Mason couldn’t help but return the smile slightly, a delicate surge of hope easing his tight chest. Not only would that secure their survival beyond the four year barrier, it would also mean that one day they would no longer have to kill. He could live the normal
future he’d never thought he'd have.

“That’s still a ways off, though, so you’ll have to make do for now. Do what you must to make sure you’re still around when the time comes. Those will be glorious days, indeed.” The doctor grinned, eyes lighting up even while they stared at something far away. “As far as reproduction goes… Well, not only do we not age, we’re also completely infertile. As ridiculous as it sounds, cloning is a possibility in the far future, or at least some form of ‘test
tube children’, if you will. It’s also possible that we will discover a method to reactivate just our reproductive organs, similar to how we can force activate our lungs. Then, of course, there’s the matter of how, and how much, the offspring would age.” He clicked his tongue. “Let’s just say that it’s not something me and Mercy can figure out on our own, but we can’t be the only scientists out there. The plague spread worldwide, so it’s only logical to assume there are others like us all across the globe. We simply haven’t connected with them, yet. I imagine that’ll get easier once the human population thins out.”

Silence.

He smiled. “But, we’ll worry about making more of us once we’ve saved those already here. After all, if we find an alternate food source, we’ll have our own eternity to figure it out. Time would be no demon to a people that can’t die of old age.”

Mason scratched the back of his neck. “I-I see.” He didn’t see, not at all. It all sounded so…out there. But he supposed none of it really mattered to him. If he was going to have children one day, he’d always imagined it’d be with Merril, but neither of them had ever been big on the idea of snot-nosed little spawns.

He let his eyes wander about the room while his head wandered elsewhere. Loose folders covered the tables and dotted the floor, lying amongst empty bottles and test tubes filled with liquids he couldn’t identify. “What about the opposite? I mean, we survived, so could humans study us to find ways to survive, themselves?”

Cliff rubbed his chin. “Don’t forget, we didn’t actually ‘survive’. If anything, the virus hit us harder than anyone else.” He licked his lips. “It’s possible, I suppose.
Possible, but unlikely. A walking corpse is something entirely different from a human being with a beating heart.”

“What is this really, anyway?” Mason asked. “What kind of virus turns people into monsters straight from fiction?”

“Well, there are all kinds of theories. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of them.” Cliff answered without looking back. “Personally, I’m inclined to believe it was engineered specifically to create people like us – I have a hard time accepting that it’s something nature would come up with. That we so closely resemble fictional vampires leaves a distinctly human handprint, doesn’t it? It’s a very specific mutation. We have more potent senses, heightened strength, and faster reaction speeds. Perhaps the strain was designed to produce a breed of biological weapons – super soldiers.”

Super…soldiers?

“I’m sure it was intended to work much more than 1% of the time, but I’m also sure that it was never intended to get this far out of hand. Perhaps a subject escaped and spread it, perhaps one of the creators came down with the virus without realizing it, or perhaps there was a simple leak. Either way, it spread like absolute wildfire once it got it out. By the time anyone realized what was going on, it was too late to contain a virus engineered to be unstoppable.” The doctor laughed. “Ironic, isn’t it? I guess it’s true – it was our greed that ultimately led to our downfall. Our governments are probably still trying to cover it up. Why do you think none of the papers talk about it much? The
real
stuff. Not just the deaths.” He blinked, and then slowly resumed his search through the shelf. “Of course…this is all complete speculation on my part.”

A strange, tense hush came between them. Even Mercy paused, standing there silently for a few beats before continuing through her notes. Something tugged at the back of Mason’s skull.

Was that…really just speculation? Was Cliff really just a doctor? After all, he seemed to be taking to the researcher role quite well.

“Why the blood, then?”
Mason got the sense that he wasn’t supposed to ask any more questions, but couldn’t stop himself. “Why not design for some other type of food?”

“How should I know?” The doctor just stood there a while, shaking his head. “Perhaps it was to give us a reason to fight? Why would we refuse when we already have to kill? At least then we’d have enemies offered to us instead of innocent civilians. Combat isn’t murder, right?”
Another bitter chuckle. “Besides, a literal bloodlust never hurt on the battlefield.”

Cliff grabbed a pink bottle and held it out for Mason before he could argue. “Here. Hurry on home and give this to Merril.”

It was clear that the doctor was ready for his visitor to leave. Mason tucked the bottle into his pocket. “Thanks.”

“Make sure to come on back and tell me how she’s doing, all right?”

Mason nodded, but already knew he wouldn’t.

****

Mason hurried down the dirt road winding away from the prison, as eager to get out of there as ever. The day’s conversations clung to the back of his head and blotted out the footsteps behind him. He didn’t realize he was being followed until cold fingers wrapped around his collar.

“Aww, what’s the hurry?”

He startled, wiping around. A red-framed, freckled face. It was that girl, Alex. His anxiety sunk into the dread building in the pit of his stomach.

She giggled. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

He looked her over. She seemed just a few years older than he was – in her early twenties, perhaps. Her dark brown eyes narrowed, but his fell on the pale, round breasts peeking from a low tank.

She leaned closer and flicked his cheek with a sharp fingernail. “It’s not polite to stare, you know. How about you at least answer my question first?”

He winced, stepping back. The mild ache on his cheek left him strangely uneasy. It was too much like something Merril would do. “Mason.” He finally answered, somehow feeling that ignoring her would make it worse.

She smiled. “Alexandra Abbot, but let’s just go with Alex. I’m about to do some scouting for our hunting trip tonight. How about you come with me, Mason?”

“Hunting?” He tensed. “But didn’t Dale just say you weren’t allowed to for the next three weeks?”

Her lithe limbs stiffened. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed his presence during the argument. “
Allowed
? As if that blow hard actually had authority. He talks big and barks loud, but he’s just a bully trying to take advantage of our situation. Don’t fall for it.”

Mason’s grinding teeth chewed silent words in his mouth. “But…”

She frowned, leaning so near her nose almost touched his. “Besides, no one’s going to tell him, are they?”