PROJECT PALLID

This is a work of fiction. Names characters, places, and events are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

Copyright  © 2013 by Christopher Hoskins

PART I:

FIGHT THE WHITE

May 8th

This is a root cellar, that turned into a bunker, that became my prison. It’s hard saying when I’ll be able to climb back up again. Maybe never. I keep waiting for the time to pass when I no longer hear them searching the floor, but it’s been seven days already and they just keep coming. The rapid inhales and exhales of disease-ravaged noses still sniff between cracks of planks overhead.

Can they smell me?

Do they know I'm down here?

There's never more than one at a time anymore, but there used to be. The blood from above reminds me of that. It collects in pools that swell and stretch, and it speaks words that my silence can’t.

The sounds they make now are as identical to each other, as they are different from the people they used to be. By the fourth day of infection, words turned indistinguishable, whirling together into metallic, grinding pitches—like circular saws fighting through sheet metal. I hear them all around me; they echo through the trees, rattle the windows, and pulsate through the walls of my sealed-up house. And even though they’re less and less with each passing day, they’re still there. And as alone as I might feel, I know I’m not. Not entirely. Not yet.

In my first days of hiding, ten, twenty, even more, would show up at the same time—all day, every day. There was always a fight to the death, and only one would scramble back out. By the third day, there were fewer than a handful at any given time, but even those numbers only lasted another day or so.

And now that it’s been almost a week, and even though they’re still out there, I can’t imagine there’s too many left; it’s been two full days since one last scurried through our door.

But she was different than the ones before.

She was more desperate.

Hungrier.

The soft light that filtered through the wide, overhead planks—blocked out in parts by the distortion of bodies that continue to accumulate above—told me it was early morning.

She came in on all fours, sprung to two feet, and moved back to four before she was upright again. She covered the entire kitchen in seconds. Her breathing, deep and deliberate, was clearly targeting me. She was tracking, and I worried she’d find me down here.

Her fingernails clawed at the floor.

They sunk into the boards above, and there was an audible tear of tissue as nails ripped from her fingertips. A hardened, white one fell through and landed by my feet, but she … it … whatever they are now … was totally unfazed. There’s no pain. There’s no feeling left inside them.

She came closer to finding the door than any of them had before, and that has me worried the most, now. How long before the need to feed eventually leads one to finding me? They used to give up easily and move on, but the few that remain are more committed now. They stay longer. They search harder.

It’s like I’m becoming one of their final options.

If it does happen, and if they are able to find the entrance that’s built seamlessly into our kitchen floor, will they figure out how to get it open? Will the jam I’ve rigged actually hold? I look to the stairs and to the hunk of wood, shoved through the iron door handle and across what would be the opening, and I doubt it.