Scorchers

Laura’s grip on the wheel wouldn’t loosen. Her foot crushed the accelerator. The country road melted into a blur. Lying on the backseat, her son was caught in a loop of torturous screams. Heat came in waves on the back of her neck.

           Between the screams and spasms, Tommy’s face was the same her students made when clueless. But add pain, a lot of it. Triple the despair. And flood it with fear.

           Laura choked on the tears she refused to let out.

           A meditation technique she had learned, label your thoughts or feelings as such.

           Crippling dread — just a feeling.

           Tommy’s going to die — just a thought.  

           The shrieks said otherwise.

           Trickles of blood poured down the leather. Tommy had given up on holding his wound. Sweat streamed along the crinkles of his contorted face. He had ripped his shirt off. His belly glowed red. The skin had become translucid, revealing the guts, the stomach, the throbbing heart.

The ice she’d put on him, in bags snatched from an abandoned gas station, had melted. Maybe they won ten, fifteen minutes. It varied, the time it took to turn.

At the chalet, they’d be safe. She’d be able to think, make her decision. She could use the Remington if she had to fight them. Or give her son a quick, painless death. If she chose that. If it wasn’t too late.

           Tommy’s turning into a monster.

           Just a thought.

           She had seen it happen. The fever, the glow, the transformation, the fainting…

#

           Her colleague Denise had said she got stabbed, that there was fighting in the schoolyard.

           911 didn’t answer.

           In the nurse’s office, Denise shouted that she burned. Sweat soaked the exam table.

           On the intercom, the principal yelled to stay inside.

           They stared as Denise’s torso glowed red. Heat filled the room.

           From all over the school, screams rose.

           Chaos flowed down the corridors.

           Vaguely human shapes tore their way through the crowd of fleeing students.

           After Laura had found Tommy and brought him to the infirmary, she barely recognized Denise. Her fingers had mashed together into a pointy stump. Torn flesh hung around the footlong claw shaped from her transmuted bones. She was passed out, only livened by sporadic trembles. The nurse recoiled her hand after touching her forehead. Tommy asked Laura questions she couldn’t answer.

When Denise opened her eyes, she was one of them. And the nurse’s neck didn’t stand a chance. And Laura dragged Tommy out of the room, through corridors filled with ravaged corpses, or twitching, transforming ones.

#

           Focus on the road.

           In the corner of Laura’s eyes, hints of death detached themselves from the blur as the SUV sped by. A car off the road with a bloody windshield. Another one sideways across the right lane. A house with the front door opened, a broken window.

All those fates could have been theirs.

           The closer she got to the chalet, the more she dreaded getting there. Where the choice awaited.

           Was her son better dead or a monster? Could she pull the trigger?

Or she could lock him in a room and wait. For what? A cure? Help? From whom?

           Laura knew next to nothing about those monsters. That illness, that curse, whatever it was. It spread fast and it hurt, that she knew. Their minds were wiped out, or maybe they went insane from the constant burning pain their condition kept them in, their brains unable to comprehend what happened.

It felt wrong to call her colleagues, her students, people she’d see on the streets, in parks, at the mall, monsters. Some called them stabbers. Some, scorchers. But you had to make a separation. They were no longer people.

           Or were they? One had reached for her cellphone, out of reflex, before biting it. Laura had seen one trying to get into his car. His car. They still had shadows of memories, instincts. A trace of humanity. Would Tommy call her name in a fit of agony? Would there be consciousness left in him?

           Such a good kid. So good it doomed him.

#

           About twenty survivors had gathered in the school’s cafeteria. Lights off. Tables stacked against the doors and windows. Sitting on the floor, Laura held her shivering son.

           They had made sure no one in the room had got stabbed.

           Within the first hour, they had watched a first-grade teacher change. They had to throw her deformed, searing body out the emergency exit, under the protests of some horrified onlookers.

           Sometimes, a commotion surrounded them. Sometimes, one would pound against a window. Sometimes, a dreadful silence reigned.

           A raspy, desperate voice called out from outside.

           “Olivia.”

           The last syllable stretched as if dragged across concrete behind a speeding pickup truck.

           A girl answered — “Dad?” — and before anyone could stop her, she dashed to the emergency exit door and pushed it open.

           Daylight spilled in. The girl ran out of view, only to return into the doorframe after a long, gut-wrenching cry. The lanky figure that was once her father lifted her, the end of his right arm plunged into her stomach. The muscles on his naked body seemed about to tear, the veins in his neck about to burst. All hair had fallen off. His melted face had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. Shreds of drooping flesh hung over his chin, his gums and teeth forever exposed.

           He bit into her neck, ripped a large chunk of it.

           Both disappeared, leaving only blood-covered grass in the doorframe.

           Before Laura could hold him back, Tommy ran to shut the door. As he neared it, two, four, six of them rushed in. Tommy was stabbed above the hip and thrown aside. 

           The survivors who made it out did so because others got killed first.

           Laura spared a thought for them as she sprinted across the parking lot with her son in her arms.

#

           Don’t think about an accident.

           The road had turned rougher, uneven. The car skidded now and then.

           Laura slowed down.

           Don’t think about the choice. About the what-ifs.

           About the accident that had sent Tommy’s father into a coma.

About the choice she made, after months of bad news, of hope fading on her son’s face, when she told the doctors to pull the plug.

About how the comatose in the next room, as a miracle or a bad joke on her, regained consciousness the following day, against all odds, against her.

That decision haunted her ever since.

           “We’re almost there,” she said.

           A beige and red shape darted on the road, jumped on the car.

           The windshield shattered. She hit the brakes. The wheels screeched.

The SUV slewed and smashed against a tree in a clash of crushed metal.

           It was the wind on her cheek that let her know she was still alive. Then the pain, everywhere. Her little finger bent backward. She turned her head. Her neck cracked.

           Tommy was between the seats. Face down. She saw him in a red blur.

           With as much caution as her quivering hand allowed, she plucked a shard of glass out of the corner of her eye. Blood ran down her eyelid.

            After three tries, she opened the door. Once she had pulled herself out, her dazed mind recalled the cause of the accident.

           The scorcher lay still on the road, his body contorted in ways beyond flexibility, bones sticking out.

           In a crescendo, Tommy let out a scream.

           Laura pulled him out of the car, slowly. Blood trickled from his nose.

           “I see everything red,” he said.

           “It’s gonna be fine,” Laura said. “Can you walk?”

           He shook his head no, but tried a couple of steps before he bent at the waist, seized by another wave of tremors and torture, another scream that scraped his throat.

           Yells answered in the distance.

           “Quiet,” Laura said.

           A farmhouse stood at the end of a dirt path. They headed for it through a field of scruffy grass that crept up to their knees. Within a minute of tedious tottering, Tommy dropped.

           “It’s in my head now,” he said through his teeth.

           He gripped his skull and shrieked.

           Running footsteps on the road.

           Laura dove into the grass, put her hand on Tommy’s mouth.

           A stabber jumped on the crashed car, peeked inside, and pounded the roof with his bony stumps.

           Tommy’s muffled groans seeped from under Laura’s hand, as he wriggled in her arms, as his flesh burned hers.

           The stabber stood straight on the car and let out a guttural scream. More than six feet of charred tissue and bloody flesh. His frantic chest pumped large inhales, the organs waving under the thin, glassy layer of red.

           The one lying on the road responded with gurgles. His broken limbs twitched on the concrete. The one on the car leaped toward the wounded and battered his face and body.

            Laura pulled her son up and they staggered across the field. Halfway through, Tommy went limp. Laura carried him to the farmhouse.

           She burst inside and laid Tommy on a couch. A patch of his hair stuck to her palm. She checked for breath — thin and hot on her cheek — and watched his lungs feebly expand. He quivered in silence, eyes empty.

           Laura paced the house, making sure the place was safe. There were holes in the walls, broken glass, shattered dishes. Blood on the floor, on the splintered cabinet doors, on smashed family pictures. An old couple with two children. Probably their grandkids. Love and life had once filled this home.

She grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter and rushed back into the living room to kneel on the old, bushy rug in front of her son.

           What was there to say? She wanted to hold his hand, but they weren’t hands anymore. She wanted to reassure him about death, but had nothing but tears.

           “I’ll meet you there someday,” she whispered.

           He was out. Unconscious and assaulted by spasms. Her trembling hand brought the knife to his throat.

           A shriek came from somewhere in the house. Somewhere low.

           She stared at a door she had thought to be a closet.

           Another scream.

           Laura sprinted to the door, closed the little hook lock, pushed an armchair in front of the door, and ran back to Tommy.

           Come on. Do it.

           But what if? What if, what if, what if…? What if it was temporary? She could picture herself alone in a crowd of survivors reuniting with their still-alive, back-to-human relatives.

           Feet up the steps. Thumps on the door. The hook shook. The armchair jerked. 

           The blade drew a thin line of blood on Tommy’s throat. Laura dropped the knife, fell backward. She let out a scream of desperate frustration. 

           The basement door burst open.

           Laura picked up the knife and stood.

           What was once an old man kicked the armchair out of the way and stared at her with hateful, raging eyes. Nostrils flared above clenched teeth. The stench of burnt flesh pervaded the air. In a fit of overheating, he had torn his flannel shirt, exposing his body charred with third-degree burns, large veins throbbing all over. Red patches covered his naked scalp.

           He charged. 

           Laura slashed.

           His arm hit her on the side of the head, knocked her down.

           The old scorcher screeched. A cut widened across his belly. Red liquid poured out. Smoke hissed on the wooden floor where the juice fell.

           The puddle reached the carpet. Flames rose out of it.

           Laura braced herself for another attack. But the scorcher collapsed on the flaming rug.

           A jolt of burning pain pierced her flank.

           She dropped.

           A new Tommy stood next to her. Blood dripped from one of his pointy stumps. He bellowed, recoiled from the spreading fire, and jumped out the window.

           Laura dragged herself to the front porch. Heat emanated from her side.

           She watched her son run away, crushed by her failure.

Her hand clutched the knife. She had another tough choice to make. Before fate made it for her.