PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
"Going home?" The cab driver asks me.
"Yeah," I say, closing the cab door as I settle into the backseat. I give her my address, and she clicks on the directional and veers away from the curb.
I rest my head against the window, the glass cool against my warm face. She probably thinks you're one of the drunks out tonight, I think. I want to tell her that I'm not, that I haven't had a drop of alcohol, but I don't. I don't tell her that my roommates dragged me out to the club, and I don't tell her how unclean I felt when guys came up behind me to dance against me, or the way they touched my body like it belonged to them. I don't tell the cab driver, her worn but kind face focused ahead in the dim of passing streetlights, that it was my first time being out since my last relationship. Or that I hated it. That I don't feel guilty for leaving my roommates early, even if it means going home and watching another Harry Potter movie and eating pizza alone on a Friday night.
Being alone isn't so bad. Not really.
I'm finally out of that rat hole, and I'm glad. I don't need that kind of attention. Don't want it. It's not that I'm not ready for them, like Danny and Kylie think. I simply...don't want them.
I thank the cab driver for taking me home and cross the sidewalk to my apartment complex. With a mastered slight jiggle that makes the gears collapse just right and a turn to the left, I enter the silent building and start climbing the stairs. Danny, Kylie, and I are on the fourth floor. Far away from the streets and with nobody living above us, it's always nice and quiet.
"Home sweet home," I mumble, barely through the door before I take off my jeans. The bottoms of my pant legs are soaked from spilled alcohol. I go to my bedroom to pull on my sweats.
Not long later, I insert the fifth Harry Potter DVD into our old PlayStation and crash down onto the sofa with my leftover pizza.
Home sweet home.
"I can't believe they actually did that."
I wake up to the sounds of my roommates coming in, their voices high with excitement. "Can't believe what?" I call, rubbing my eyes. I wonder how many times the DVD menu loop replayed while I dozed.
"Oh, did we wake you?" Kylie asks, dropping her purse and keys onto our kitchen table, which is already overburdened with a mountain of random belongings. It's less of a table and more of a place for us to throw anything we want onto it. Coats, mail, iPods, keys, school supplies. And they wonder why we can never find anything, or why I paid our last gas and electric bill late.
Yes. "No," I respond. "What time is it, by the way?"
"Almost three," Danny tells me, her big eyes bright and full of energy despite the late hour. "And we definitely saw two guys getting kicked out for getting into a fight in the club, and then saw them fighting with the security guards, and then the police came, and, well, you can imagine how that went down."
"They got arrested right in front of the club," Kylie chips in.
"And why were you watching all of this?"
"Well, we had sort of been dancing with them at the time..." Kylie and Danny look at each other and laugh.
"You sure pick the good ones, don't you?" I laugh, believing them for every word. They have a habit of keeping, at best, "questionable" company. But in reality, they're good girls who have managed to stay out of trouble. Never understood how that worked.
"They seemed nice. One was from Milwaukee," Kylie says, stretching out her legs. She notices the TV. "Oh, Harry Potter! Press play, let's go! Which one is this?"
"Fifth one," I respond. "So you guys had fun?"
"Definitely," Danny opens her laptop and plops down next to me on the couch, probably off to report her night to all of her online friends. "That club was pretty good. You should've stayed longer, it got a lot livelier after you left."
"I'm good," I tell her, because I knew both of them are concerned about me.
We start the movie, but twenty minutes in both the girls and myself begin to nod off. I jostle them awake, turn off the TV, and usher them to bed.
"'Night, Mom," Kylie jokes as I hustle the two down the hall and into their bedrooms.
"Sweet dreams," I reply. I head past both of their doors to the end of the hall, where my unkempt bed waits for a ready sleeper such as myself.
"Have you heard about this yet?" Kylie asks me, motioning to her laptop, the screen lighting her face.
Despite the late hour, I just woke up. I stroll over to the coffee machine. "What is it?" Danny sits near Kylie, her face fixed in a scowl.
We had two rules that regarded sleeping in the apartment. One; I am not to be woken up. Ever. There is no good reason for me to wake up. If I am not awake when I should be in class, don't wake me up. If there is a tornado and the sirens are going off, do not wake me up. If there is a fire, a hurricane, a strangler in my bed, do not wake me up. Once, a boy that stayed with Kylie overnight called up to me in the morning. At eight A.M. On a Saturday morning. He hasn't been welcomed back.
Rule two; do not speak to Danny in the morning if she has not yet showered or eaten, particularly if you're a morning person like myself. Only bad things—specifically, one really grumpy Danny—can come from breaking rule number two. Kylie and I used to tease her in the morning because it was funny when Danny got pissed, but we stopped a few months ago. Because she seriously got really pissed. Which, naturally, was funnier.
At any rate, Danny clearly hadn't had her shower yet, because at the sound of my chipper voice, her scowl deepened and she hunched her shoulders.
"This...disease? Sickness? I don't know what to call it. It started in Minnesota."
"Damn Minnesotans," I muttered, mixing creamer into my steaming cup. Rule three: The weather is never too hot to have coffee and it is never too late to have coffee. Coffee is always welcome in our apartment. "What kind of disease?"
"Can't really say," Kylie replied. She scrolled fervently on her touchpad. "It seems bad though. Or should I say...it seems like it's bad, but everyone's trying to make it sound as though it isn't as bad as it actually is."
"Government censorship, do you think?" I asked, lowering my voice instinctively. It wouldn't be the first time our government tried to keep something important hush-hush. It was only six months ago that we went into a pointless war with our once-sister country. Then a website, famous for leaking confidential information, let it known that the war started as an excuse for our young soldiers to practice their aim, and to mine for oil, a rapidly diminishing resource. All of the propaganda saying that the country's residents had attacked our country's two major cities, or that they tracked those alleged plane hijackers to their origin; all of the lies that led us to believe that this war had a purpose were unraveled before our eyes in a short twenty-minute video that had gone viral in a matter of hours.
"Anyway, it just happened recently. Last night-ish. Reports of..." Kylie's face scrunched up at the word. "Cannibalism?"
Even Danny looked up in interest. "What kind of disease is that?"
I sat down with my coffee at my own laptop and opened up the Internet. We were all quiet for a few moments before I found more headlines. "'Incident in Minnesota thought to be the cause of a disease spreading rapidly through Midwest towns.' 'Cannibalism as an infection; what the government isn't telling you.' 'Your children are in danger, your government officials are fleeing to the International Space Station and underground security fall-out shelters.' 'President nowhere to be found; virus touches Wisconsin towns.'" My heart beat in my ears so loud I have to stop reading. I look up from my screen. "Is this some kind of a joke?" April Fool's Day passed several weeks ago. And if it was a joke, the pranksters were thorough; for every article, every blurb, there was a reliable source at the end of the page.
"Doctors don't know what this is, how it started, or how to cure it," Kylie whispers, her eyes scanning pages of articles on her laptop. Danny leans over to search with her, her long hair falling over her shoulders. "What do they mean, 'cannibalism'?"
"People eating people..."
"I mean, I know, but is it for real?"
"Oh, God," I whisper. From the corner of my vision, Danny and Kylie both look up at me, but my eyes are locked on the screen. A cell-captured video plays, horrific images filling my vision. I throw my computer off of my lap and jolt down the hall, instinctively pulling back my hair. I'm barely on my knees in front of the porcelain bowl when I begin to retch.
The images replay again and again, looping like the DVD menu from the night before. I hear Danny and Kylie's cries; they're no doubt sitting at my computer, watching what made me run from the room and vomit.
I weakly pull myself up, flush the toilet, and rinse my mouth out with water. Stop thinking, I order myself. Erase it from your memory.
But I can't.
The man looked like a walking, desecrated corpse. For being such a poor-quality video, the details are painstakingly sharp in my mind. The shallow breaths of whoever held the phone fill my ears as I remember, and I lean against the doorframe, squeezing my eyes shut. I saw that man; dead or alive, it was impossible to tell, dragging one foot behind him as though it were too heavy, walking on a broken ankle. His speed was confounding. He sprinted across the street, jumped on a middle-aged woman, and with no hesitation at all, buried his teeth into her neck and ripped the muscle out of her throat. Blood poured into the street; the woman's screaming came out jagged and disconnected. She collapsed, and several more like the man—pale and grotesque-looking, wounded and awful, their arms hanging limply as though they had forgotten how to use them—leapt onto her, into the feast. Her blood-curdling screams paused only between fits of bloody gurgling. The monsters ripped her to shreds, greedily scooping her insides into their mouths. The cameraman's hand shook hard, the picture trembling as though the person fought to stay standing.
The cameraman turned hard to the left, and one of the cannibals' faces filled the frame and froze.
If he had looked healthy, he'd be in his mid-twenties. His hair was greased with blood—his own or maybe another's. His eyes were sunk deep in his sockets and his cheeks sagged. His jaw was broken so that his mouth was fixed in a never-ending scream of agony, and his eyes...
His eyes were dead.
That was how the video ended, at one minute and four seconds.
I turn to the toilet and throw up again.