Till The World Ends: Dawn of Eden / Thistle & Thorne / Sun Storm

“No.” Ben sank down in the chair, running his hands over his scalp. “Nate’s family all lived here and...they were gone before we started out.” I put a hand on his shoulder, and he stirred a little. “Sorry, but could I have a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I whispered, and walked out, leaving him alone with his friend. As I ducked through the frame, I heard the thump of his fist against the armrest, a muffled, broken curse, and swallowed my own frustrated tears as the door clicked behind us.

* * *

Maggie and Jenna looked so disheartened when I returned to the main room that I told them both to get some sleep.

“I can handle the patients alone for a few hours,” I said as Jenna protested, though Maggie looked ready to fall over. “They’re not going anywhere, and I’ll call you if I need assistance. Get some rest.”

“Are you sure, Kylie?” Jenna asked, even as Maggie stumbled away, heading for the few extra cots upstairs. “Maggie and I can take turns, if you want one of us down here with you.”

I opened my mouth to answer and caught the subtle hint of rot, drifting from the beds along the wall. My stomach turned over, and the scent vanished as quickly as it had come.

“I’ll be fine,” I told Jenna firmly. “Go get some shut-eye. Lie down, at least. That’s an order.”

She looked reluctant but left the room after Maggie. When they were gone, I hurried over to Ms. Sawyer, slipping through the curtains to the side of her bed.

Her skin was chalky white, and the faint smell of decay clung to her, as it had to Nathan. Looking at her face, my blood ran cold. Though her chest rose and fell with shallow, labored breaths, her eyes were half open, and red fluid seeped from beneath the lids.

Just like Nathan.

As I went to wipe the blood from her other cheek, Ms. Sawyer jerked in her sleep, lunging toward my hand without opening her eyes. A short hiss came from her open mouth, and I yanked my hand back, heart pounding, as she sank down, still unconscious.

She didn’t move again, and about an hour after midnight I woke Jenna, helped her move the body onto a gurney, and took it down to storage. Then, because the freezers in the basement were full, we woke Maggie and began the painstaking task of moving all the bodies to the back lot, freeing up space for future victims. We didn’t know then how soon we would need it.

The epidemic began several hours later.

It started with Ms. Sawyer’s bed neighbor, a middle-aged man who had been clinging stubbornly to life and who I’d hoped had a good chance of pulling through. An hour or so before dawn, he started bleeding from the eyes and rapidly went downhill. He was dead two hours later. Then, one by one, all the patients began weeping the bloody red tears and coughing violently, causing Jenna, Maggie and me to scurry from bed to bed, trying desperately to slow the flood. By the time the late-afternoon sun began setting over the tops of the empty buildings, half our patients were gone, with the other half barely holding on to life. We didn’t even have time to move the corpses from their beds and resorted to covering them with sheets when they died. As evening wore on, the number of bodies under sheets outnumbered the living. With every death, my anger grew, until I was swearing under my breath and snapping at my poor interns.

At last, the flood slowed. The patients still bled from the eyes, and the smell of decay had permeated the room, but there was a lull in the storm of coughing and gasping and death. As the sun set and the light began fading rapidly, I called Jenna and Maggie into the hall. Jenna looked on edge, and Maggie had succumbed to exhausted tears as I drew them aside, fighting my own frustration and the urge to lash out at everything around me.

“Where is Mr. Archer?” I asked in a low voice. I’d never seen a roomful of patients decline so rapidly, and I had a sneaking, terrible suspicion. I hoped I was wrong, but I needed answers, and there was only one person who could give them to me.

“I think he’s still in the room with his friend,” Maggie sniffled. “We haven’t seen him all day.”

I spun on a heel and marched down the hall. Blood from the eyes, the strange bite marks, the rotten smell without the infection. Nathan’s symptoms had spread to my patients, and Ben knew what it was. He knew, and I was fed up with this hiding, keeping secrets. Less than a day after Ben Archer had stepped into my sick ward with his friend, I had a roomful of corpses. He was going to tell me what he knew if I had to beat it out of him.

I swept into his room, bristling for a fight, and stopped.

Ben sat slumped in the corner chair, eyes closed, snoring softly. Exhaustion had finally caught up to him, too. Despite my anger, I hesitated, reluctant to wake him. Sleep was a precious commodity here; you snatched it where and when you could. Still, I would have woken him right then if I hadn’t seen what had happened to the body in the room with us.

Nathan lay on the bed, unmoving. Unnaturally still. The faint smell of rot still lingered around him, and in the shadows, his skin was the color of chalk. I moved to his bedside, and a chill ran up my spine. His eyes were open, gazing sightlessly at the ceiling, but his pupils had turned a blank, solid white.

The chair scraped in the corner as Ben rose. I held my breath as his footsteps clicked softly over the linoleum to stand beside me. I heard his ragged intake of breath and glanced up at him.

He had gone pale, so white I thought he might pass out. The look on his face was awful; grief and rage and guilt and horror, all at once. He gripped the edge of the railing in both hands, swaying on his feet, and I put a hand out to steady him, my anger forgotten.

“Ben.”

He glanced at me, a terrifyingly feverish look in his eyes, and his voice was a hoarse rasp as he grabbed my arm. “We have to destroy the body.”

“What?”

“Right now.” He looked at the corpse of his friend and shuddered. “Please, don’t ask questions. We need to burn it, quickly. Does this place have an incinerator?”

“Ben, what are you talking about?” I wrenched my arm from his grasp and glared up at him. “All right, this has gone far enough. What are you hiding? Where did you and Nathan come from? He was sick, wasn’t he?” Ben flinched, and my fury rose up again. “He was sick, and now I have a roomful of dead patients because you’re hiding something! I want answers, and you’re going to tell me everything, right now!”

“Oh, God.” If possible, Ben paled even more. He glanced down the hall, running his fingers through his hair. “Oh, shit. This has all gone crazy. I’m sorry, Kylie. I’ll tell you everything. After we destroy the body, I’ll tell you everything I know, I swear. Just...we have to take care of this now. Please.” He grabbed my arm. “Help me, and then I’ll tell you anything you want.”

I clenched my fists, actually tempted to hit him, to strike him across that ruggedly handsome face. Taking a deep breath to calm my rage, I spoke in a low, controlled tone. “Fine. I don’t know what this is about, or why you want to deface your friend, but I will help you this one last time. And then, Ben Archer, you are going to tell me what the hell is going on before you leave my clinic forever.”

He might have nodded, but I was already marching back into the hall, fighting a sudden, unexplainable terror. The unknown loomed around me, hovering over Nathan’s corpse, the sick ward full of the newly dead. The body on the table looked...unnatural, with its pale shrunken skin and blank, dead eyes. It didn’t even look human anymore.

The sick ward was eerily silent as I walked in, searching for the gurney I’d left at the edge of the room. In the shadows, bodies lay under sheets in their beds, mingled with the few still living. Jenna glanced up over a patient’s cot, her cheeks wasted, her eyes sunken. Lightning flickered through the plastic over the front door, illuminating the room for a split second, and thunder growled a distant answer.

Something touched my arm, and I jumped nearly three feet. Bristling, I spun around to come face-to-face with Ben.

“Sorry.” His gaze flickered to the darkened sick ward, then slid to me again. “I just... How are we going to do this? Do you need help with anything?”

I yanked a gurney from the wall. “What I needed is for you to have told me why you were here the first time I asked, not when all my patients started bleeding from the eyes and dying around me.” He didn’t respond, too preoccupied with the current tragedy to take note of my anger, and I sighed. “We’ll transport the body to the empty lot,” I explained, pushing the cot back down the hall, Ben trailing after. “Once we’re there, you can do whatever you want.”

“Outside?”

“Yes, outside! Preferably before the storm hits. I’m not starting a fire indoors so my clinic can burn down around me.”

He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and followed me silently down the hall, our footsteps and the squeaking of the gurney wheels the only sounds in the darkness.

I sneaked a glance at him. His face was blank, his eyes expressionless, though I’d seen that look before. It was a mask, a stoic front, the disguise of someone whose world had been shattered and who was holding himself together by a thread. My anger melted a little more. In my line of work, death was so common, but I had to remind myself that I wasn’t just treating patients; I was treating family members, friends, people who were loved.

“I’m sorry about Nathan,” I offered, trying to be sympathetic. “It wasn’t your fault that he was hurt, that he was sick. Were you two very close?”

Ben nodded miserably. “He was my roommate,” he muttered, briefly closing his eyes. “We went to Georgetown together. I was working on my Masters in Computer Engineering, and he got me an IT job at the lab where he worked. I was never about that biology stuff. When the virus hit, the lab threw everything else out the window to work on a cure. They kept me on for computer stuff, but Nathan was with them for the really crazy shit. He couldn’t tell me much—everything was very hush-hush—but some of the things I heard...” Ben shivered. “Let’s just say there were some very dark things happening in that lab. Even before the—”

He stopped in the doorway of the last room, his face draining of any remaining color. Blinking, I looked into the corner where Nathan’s bed sat, where the corpse had been lying minutes ago.

The mattress was empty.

Chapter Four

I stared at the empty bed, the logical part of my brain trying to come up with a way for a dead body to vanish from a room in a few short minutes. One of the interns must’ve come in and moved it. Perhaps Maggie had whisked it down to storage, by herself, without a gurney. Improbable. Impossible, really. But that was the only thing that made any sort of sense. It wasn’t as if the corpse got up and walked out by itself.

Ben staggered back, shaking his head. I could see he was trembling. “No,” he muttered in a low, anguished voice. “No, it isn’t possible.”

“I’m...I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” I began, trying to ignore the chill creeping up my back. “Maggie probably took it away. Come on.” I turned, suddenly eager to leave to room. The silent, empty bed, sitting motionless in the shadows, was starting to freak me out. The once-familiar walls of the clinic seemed darker now, closing in on me. “We’ll check storage,” I told Ben, leading him back down the corridor. It seemed longer, somehow. I could hear the groans of my patients, drifting to me from the main room. “This is nothing to worry about. She’s probably down in the basement right now.”

Ben didn’t answer, and my words felt hollow as we reached the stairs to the sub-basement level. The door at the bottom of the steps was partially open, creaking faintly on its hinges, and the space beyond was pitch-black.

I fished the mini-flashlight from my coat and clicked it on, shining it down the stairwell. That faint smell of rot lingered in the corridor, but it could be coming from the bodies in storage.