They Call Me Daring

Chapter 4

    Fwoom.
    The minute I stepped from my room, Jess nailed me with his Nerf gun.
    "Dude," I plucked the suction dart off my forehead, and hoped there wouldn't be a red dot there. "What's your problem?"
    Fwoom. I dodged the next bullet just in time, and made my way to Jess. I looked down into his maniacal blue eyes.
    "Jess, go shoot Clark. He likes to be shot." I said tiredly.
    Fwoom. Jess shot me one last time, right where it counts, then ran off screaming something about candy. I was doubled over, gasping, when the next character came around the corner. I heard the footsteps, and didn't even bother to look up.
    "What!" I snarled, glaring daggers at... the cleaning girl....
    "Jeez, someone's moody." She raised an eyebrow, and I straightened immediately, trying to ignore the pain.
    "No- I mean- I- Sorry," I said forcedly, trying to slide past her. She caught my wrist as I was slipping past, and my heart stopped. Did she see past the watch, the two tiny holes in my wrist that made me feel so exposed?
    "Whatever." She rolled her eyes, released me, and began to polish the door handles.
    "Right." I raced down the rest of the hall, wondering how I hadn't sent her running away screaming by now. I'm just good with people, I guess.
    I sprinted down the stairs, and down into the big room. We had named it that for lack of a better term... well, one that Jess could pronounce, anyways.
     It was, well... it was a big room. Being the center of the mansion, the ceiling was open up to the roof, with a huge glass staircase in the center, leading up to the second story which looked down over the room. Both two-story white walls were riddled with doorways to many rooms filled to the ceiling with stuff like toilet paper, toothpaste, any clothes we've salvaged from places over the years, everything we could possibly use.
    I bolted out through the front doors, and felt relief hit me along with the cold wind and sunlight. I could escape my housemates for a few hours, finally.
    I began to jog down the side walk. Soon I fell into my normal pace, and the familiar movements soothed me. One thing I could do right, at least: running. I would be the first to admit I was pretty average as far as most things went.
    Looks? Eh. I considered myself the norm. Okay, I actually thought I was good-looking, but I'm being modest here. Doesn't everyone secretly think they're the most attractive person on earth? And maybe that's necessary, me being modest, because nobody else ever called me handsome. Or even cute.
    I was an average build. Not tall, not short. I thought I was well-muscled; I mean, I ran every couple of days and sometimes broke into Clark's room- when he was away, mind you- to bench press a few times a week- But even if I had worked out for hours a day, I guess I just wasn't built to be heavily muscled. So much for my Abercrombie modeling career. I was just naturally lanky and lean, light on my feet and easily quiet.
    I rounded an old apartment complex, which was luckily a safe house filled with survivors. Cony (The guy who wanted my hat) was leaning out from one of the windows. As I ran by, he called out:
    "Yo, Liam!" He threw a baseball at me, because obviously yelling my name and flailing his arms wasn't enough to catch my attention. I jumped, and threw up my arms to cover my face... And it nailed me in the chest.
    "OW!" I grunted. The ball hit my chest with a dull thud and fell to the ground, where it sat deceptively still. "Hey.... Sup." I called breathlessly back up to Cony, massaging my sternum.
    "You survived!" He said, like I might somehow not have noticed this.
    "Thank you, captain obvious." I muttered under my breath. I'm not sure if he heard me. If he had, he probably just didn't care.
    "So... Does this mean I can't have your hat?" He cut to the chase.
    "Yeah, about that... I thought I said you could have my hat when I was dead," I clarified.
    "So how long?" He said this without any humor at all- Which was what concerned me.
    "Um... I'll get back to you on that..." I frowned, and I began to jog again. Honestly the hat wasn't anything super special to me- I liked to, but it was too fun listening to him try to reason with me.
    I rubbed my chest where the baseball had hit. It didn't hurt as much as it should've... though there was no doubt there would be a bruise there.
    Yeah, as far as hand-eye coordination goes, I don't have much to boast about. Actually, I have nothing. When I go out and play basketball with some guys, I'm mostly the seat-warmer, because my hands don't seem to comprehend the idea of catching the ball. My penmanship sucks, I can't even draw. No, I fail in that department. Epically so, perhaps, but still, fail.
    I ran by the old Hannaford's. All the lights had burned out, except for the H. So most of us just called it the H, because there was no need to pronounce all those extra syllables. It was a large, flat square, piled with every ounce of food we'd managed to horde over the years. The basement was also full. It made me shiver every time I went in to look at the huge dent we'd made in the past ten years, though.     When you put it into perspective, that much food isn't going to go very far with five-hundred mouths to feed. And Clark, who was worth maybe another fifty more. And me.
I bolted across Green St., one of the last infested blocks in the inner city. I knew the creatures would be sleeping, but after last night I wouldn't be taking any chances. My feet pounded on the tar, echoing through the metal and cement structures to my sides.
    Again, I won't lie. I can run. Maybe it's my lighter build, or maybe my instinct to get away. I don't know. I've always been fast, for no real reason. It's just come naturally, and I definitely took advantage of that, knowing that with my luck I would probably end up breaking both my legs soon enough or being paralyzed for the rest of my life. Something along those lines.
    And now that I knew my life was pretty much over, that Liam Trackerson would come to an end more or less in a week despite anything I could do, I ran. I ran faster than ever before. I savored the cold autumn air whipping through my hair, how my eyes watered when the wind gusted hard in my face, the throbbing sore on my chest from being hit by the baseball...
    I hurdled over a trashcan in the middle of the road and skidded to a stop on the steps of the old YMCA. Besides being our water storage, the upper floor held our lab, where zombie specimens were brought in to be experimented on. I felt a pang in my wrist, and tried not to think about how I could soon end up in there... No, best not to think about it.
    I hurried up the stone steps. The giant marble lions glared down at me from either side. I had absolutely no idea why those were there. Maybe for a library it would make sense, but a gym, really? I'd always thought they looked hungry, which was an unerring feeling when you turned your back, so I quickly cleared the last step, and flew into the old brick building.
    It had a sort of small suburbia feel. It was just a large brick of a building, no architectural wonder. There was a simple little lobby and a check-in desk for the LAB. Then there was a narrow carpeted staircase against the wall, next to the hall which led to the pool and the unused locker rooms.
    "Sup, Bert." I greeted the man behind the counter, a big balding dude with a potbelly. He grunted and raised an eyebrow at me as I scribbled down my name.
    "Yeah... Kid." He shook his head. I turned away and took the stairs two steps at a time. The man had worked at that desk for as long as I had known, and yet he still didn't know my name. Again, I'm invisible.
    The 'lab' was in just about the same sort of state as the rest of the downtown area. It was caught halfway between the transition from workout room, to hospital/ lab. It was just a long, low square room, with no variation in the walls or shape. One wall was completely glass, looking down over the side into the street.
    Scattered randomly over the floor were a number of wooden desks, desk-top computers and laptops, ranging from sleek iPads to ancient blocky Windows systems. There were also a lot of treadmills, which we all knew we needed to get rid of, but couldn't figure out a way to move them, so at the moment they were just being used as extra desks.
    I wove my way through the haphazard chaos, being careful not to touch anything, because it all looked like it could topple over with the slightest breeze. Stacks of papers were piled to the roof, old newspaper clippings tumbled across the floor. I saw a dude hooked to a monitor, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, as he delved into what looked like a pretty intense game of Tetris™. Not ten feet away from him, there was a half-conscious, groaning zombie held down by an enormous barbell. Seriously, it was nothing but random chaos.
    After I was hit in the head by a giant pink pool noodle hanging from the ceiling for no apparent reason, tripped over a dumb-bell and accidentally turned on a treadmill which in turn spewed hundreds of papers into the air, I finally spotted the Doc's crazy white hair over a glass case containing a zombie skeleton.
    "Doc!" I called to get his attention. He looked around him, until he saw me, and then beckoned me forward.
    "Ah, Tony-"
    "Liam."
    "Liam," He corrected himself. "I was going to say Liam. Yes. I see you survived!"
    I just grinned at him like an idiot. Right then, surviving wasn't seeming like the best option.
    "Yeah, yeah, I was just, you know, thinking-"
    "Good for you, son!" He clapped me on the back, genuinely pleased. Like I said, high standards.
    "Yeah... Anyways, I remembered what you said, about the relations between zombie venom and the heart of the infected pe-"
    "Indeed!" The Doc slammed his fist on a nearby table in triumph, and without looking, his other hand typed in a protocol to a black and green monitor, and a bunch of numbers popped up to a series of binging noises. "Results just came in! Take a look-see!"
    I leaned forward and squinted at the thin columns. The Doc flicked me in the back of the head.
    "Ow!" I jerked backwards, rubbing the nape of my neck. "What was that for?"
    "It was too tempting." He gasped, doubling over in laughter. "Anyways," He sucked in a deep breath and was completely (ab)normal again. "Those aren't really the results from the lab."
    "Wh-" I began, and he leaned forward and tapped a button on the keyboard. A picture of a zombie wearing a bonnet came up on the screen, and I didn't want to know why. Then a code manuscript with tiny, bunched-up letters came flickering into existence. The bottom bar read 1245 pages, and my jaw dropped as I stared at the screen in disbelief.
    "Did you really think I would make you read that?" He said, chuckling again. "Those are just the results from last night's Poker game! Ha!" He began to wheeze, then abruptly pulled a large book from one of his paper stacks. Except it was at the bottom, so all the paper on top fell right on my head.
    The weight of the five foot tall stack knocked me off my feet, and the Doc fell over from laughing again.
    "Whooeee!" He cried, somewhat hysterically, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. Obviously he was having a great time. I, however, wasn't.
    "Okay, that's great," I said soothingly, trying to get up from under the hundred pound stack of papers on top of me. "Can I just see the results?"
    "Okey-dokey, then, party-pooper..." He chuckled cheerfully to himself, and opened the large volume. He puffed out his cheeks and blew off the dust, into my face, naturally. After having a coughing fit, my eyes cleared enough so I could read the title on the book's spine. "Chicken Soup for the Scientist's soul"
    I was still struggling to escape from the clutches of the giant paper stack, when the Doc shoved his book in my face.
    "Right there! Look!" I peered closely at the margins of a page entitled 'Disturbing bowel movements: Dark tales from inside.' Then I squinted at the numbers scribbled in blue pen on the side.
    "Why on that page in particular?" I said as I tried to commit them to memory.
    "Oh, because that was the page I was reading when they called me up from here, and I didn't want to forget." He answered cheerfully.
    "Too much information..." I muttered absently, my eyes zinging back and forth across the seemingly random numbers. Heart rate of 80, three days... 70 beats per minute, four and a half days... 50 bpm, and six days... I frowned, and scanned the page again, but there was no data for a 40 bpm.
    "Um, there isn't anything on here for a heart rate below 50..." I queried, looking again to make sure. But the shaky column ended at 50 bpm's.
    "That's because we don't have any data for below 50 yet." The Doc admitted, snapping his book of bowel movements shut. "To have a heart rate below 50, you've got to be pretty in shape, and people like that are less prone to being bitten, because they have a better chance of protecting themselves."
    Yeah, see how that turned out.
    "Couldn't you just estimate? Roughly?" I added, finally shifting free of the stack of papers, which slid back to the ground when I clambered up to my feet.
    "See, that's just it," The Doc growled. He ran a hand through his crazy white hair. I could tell the subject must have been very frustrating to him. "You can't! It's so random! There's no constant variable, or a pattern of any sort!"
    He threw his book at the wall, which it hit with a whopping thump, and fell to the ground.
    "It just doesn't make sense," He muttered, collapsing into his desk chair. "Even those numbers aren't constant! I'm trying to make sense of it all, but I've seen plenty of patients who had heart rates of 80 or even higher, and lived for even a week! It just doesn't add up!"
    He dropped his head onto his desk, and after several minutes of not moving, I decided he needed some alone time. I backed away and meandered aimlessly through the lab for a while, shuffling through papers to see if I could find anything. I stopped and examined a couple of diagrams of infected people.
    There were charts that showed how long until their eyes turned red, until their hair would turn white, when their skin would become ivory, when they're body would become cold and their fingernails would turn to black claws. I skimmed over these, but it wasn't what I was looking for. There was nothing on when the mind would be taken over by the venom, and that was all I cared about.
    After browsing around for almost half an hour, I finally forced myself to go before I could get too depressed.
    I ran into Clark on the stairs. I bent my head and tried to slip past, but an arm shot out and grabbed me by the shoulder.
    "What're you doing here?" He demanded.
    "Minding my own business." I replied cooly. "What're you doing here?"
    "Looking for my gun," He snarled in disgust and released me.
    "Why would your gun be in the lab?"
    "Because someone could have brought it back, idiot!" He roared, pushing me into the wall, hard. He was pretty ticked off about the whole gun thing. "I should never have let you use it.... You ruin everything." He spat, and then disappeared up the stairs.
    I just stood on the bottom step, dumbfounded. Funny, I was completely used to Clark calling me names and beating me down. Heck, even Jess did that. But that time.... The anger in his eyes, the unspoken accusations.... Those words bit, man. Hard.
    I finally unfroze myself and started back down the stairs. Obviously the gun had meant a lot to him... Hadn't it been the one Dad had given him at his rite of passage?
    "Hey, Liam. Nice job last night!" One of my Dad's friends (Wasn't his name Chuck?) called to me as he passed me out front.
    "Wh- Oh, yeah, thanks..." I shot a look back over my shoulder. As I was turning away, my peripherals caught him catching the door, and turning back to me, so I stopped.
    "Hey... You feeling alright?" He frowned at me.
    "Um, yeah.... Why, don't I look okay?" I raised an eyebrow, nervously running my hand through my hair.
    "Y-Yeah... It was just- Never mind," He shook his head. "Trick of the light, or something.... Go home and get some rest, kid.... You look pale." And the door slammed shut, leaving me standing outside in the cold early spring air. How many times had that been said to me so far that day?
    I started off for my home at a slow jog. My wrist began to throb as my blood started to pump. So, mission fail. I had no idea how long I had left to 'live'. At least a couple of days... I should probably write a will or something.
    It would go something like this:

    Sup. I've been bitten by a zombie, so I'm writing this to make sure Jess doesn't destroy all my possessions.

    My laptop, I give to Clark, mostly because it's password protected and will frustrate the heck out of him trying to get in to it.

    To my dear, loving father, I give back my broken watch; It's stuck on 1:37 p.m., so... yeah, don't base anything important off it.

    Cony can have my hat, because he wants it so badly. Just let him know he'll have to pry it off my cold, white, zombified head, and that if he dies in the process, which is likely, know I warned him.

    All my clothes, I give to the zombies, because they're always running around naked and, quite frankly, it's gross.

    Jess, my dear, dear, dear little brother, give him that old muddy pair of running shoes in my closet, so he'll remember me as the brother he liked to torture most.

    And give my room to the dog, if we ever get one.

    Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. Bye for now, and see you soon,
    Liam Trackerson
    I totally should've written that down. I would just like to see everybody's faces when it would be read.
    I passed down Green Street at a full out sprint, the Hannaford's flew by, and next thing I knew I was rounding that old apartment complex, and the Trackerson mansion was dead ahead.
    I took the front steps two at a time, and barreled through the door- And slipped on a rug that didn't belong there.
    "Yowp!" Was about all I could manage before I smacked into the floor. I groaned, and blinked stars out of my eyes.
    "Dude, seriously, are you freaking blind!" Somebody shouted. Three hands entered my vision, and I reached out and took the middle one.
    Once I was up on my feet, and my head had cleared again, I blinked in stunned disbelief at the cleaning girl.
    "Wh-Why is it always you?" I groaned. Then I realized this could have come across as a little rude. "I- I mean- Never mind."
    "Hey," She caught my arm as I went to turn away. "Wait a minute."
    "What?"
    Her huge brown eyes seemed to take up most of her face. They looked me over, seeming slightly concerned.
    "What?!" I said again, impatient. I felt like she could see the poison drifting through my body.
    "I-" She shook her head. "Nothing. You look tired... You ought to get some sleep."
    "But it's only, like-" I checked the grandfather clock in the corner- Which, ironically enough, had belonged to my grandfather. "Quarter to two."
    "Whatever, your health is not really my responsibility." She shrugged and walked off, leaving me to wonder where the rug had come from in the first place.
    I raided the kitchen, which was full of a lot of crap along the lines of Twinkies and sardines.... Stuff that would probably never go bad. Maybe the reason I was so skinny was because I just flat-out refused to put any of it in my mouth.
    I cracked a can of preserved peaches, and plopped it's contents into a bowl. I looked out the big window above the sink, but our garden was just beginning to bloom. No fresh, real food for a couple of months yet.
    I began to spoon up the gooey fruit. Hey, it was food, and I was starving. I wondered if the zombies were always starving like that... guess I'd find out soon enough.
    "Liam!" I jumped, and immediately dropped into defensive stance. It was Jess, standing in the doorway like a murderer about to kill me.
    "Yeah?"
    "Dad says I'm in charge." He boasted, puffing out his miniature chest.
    "Oh, yeah? Where'd Dad go?" I asked.
    "Looking for Clark."
    "Why?"
    "Because he wanted to find Clark."
    "Yes, we've established that, but why?"
    "Because-"
    "Never mind!" I roared, angrily eating my peaches.
    "No, you never mind!" He screamed back. Okay, worst comeback ever.
    "That doesn't make sense." I said in exasperation. I finished my gross, run-of-the-mill food and washed the dish in the sink.
    "No, your face doesn't make sense!" He shrieked, then ran off in a fit.
    "I'll keep that in mind." I muttered, placing my hands behind my neck and taking deep breaths as I gazed out the window.
    The sky was a pale, washed out grey. The clouds were few and far between, thin and wispy. It gave the downtown an overall washed out look, like God had run out of colors when he was painting our zombie-infested city.
    I wondered if the transition would be painful. So far the only real physical pain I had felt had been in my wrist... but would it get worse as the venom transformed my body?
    And that brought me back to the question that had been nagging me since this morning; Exactly how long did I have?