Melanie awoke with a start on the cold bathroom floor. She’d fallen asleep sometime during the night. She pulled herself up by the bathtub’s side.
The tub was empty, save a few inches of water in the bottom. The white washcloth floated in it like a dead fish. The bathroom door yawned open. Tiny, wet footprints traced a glistening path across the tile.
Her mouth went dry.
She rose. With silent steps, she crept down the hallway. She’d seen the infected, knew what to expect. She felt defenseless, exposed. The idea of grabbing a knife from the kitchen occurred. She ignored it.
She entered the dining room. Aiden sat at the table, back to her, in a T-shirt and underpants. Several sheets of paper lay spread out across the tabletop. His right arm swept up and down in broad strokes as he ran a crayon across the page. His head bobbed in time with his arm, like a mechanical toy.
Melanie sighed in relief. The rage hadn’t set in. Everything she’d read, seen or experienced said the infected were universally, unstoppably violent. She crept forward a few steps.
“Aiden, how are you?”
She didn’t expect an answer. She just wanted to keep from startling him. She came up behind him and rested her hands on the top of his chairback. She looked past him at the papers on the table. Her jaw dropped.
These weren’t Aiden’s usual stick-figure specials. These were art executed in crayon. A bluebird in three dimensions, in perfect scale, spread wings colored with seamless shading and shadow. Another picture showed Jones Beach at low tide, an almost impressionistic take, with the sand as a perfect mixture of browns and white. Beside that lay one of Aiden’s school on a bright spring morning, roses blooming along the walkway.
She stepped past her son and picked up the bluebird picture. Even close up, it looked amazingly realistic.
“Aiden honey…” she turned to her son, “…this picture is beautiful.”
Aiden paused and looked up at her. She jerked and shredded the bluebird in half. Aiden’s eyes were a deep, rich red. The black veins covered his face like the road map of Hell. But that face was as impassive as ever, with no hint of the fury that drove the infected. He spun the picture in front of him around and slid it toward her. He began a new picture without waiting for her reaction.
The drawing was Aiden’s eye view of the attack on the Jeep. The crazed, infected woman had ahold of the side of the vehicle, teeth bared, red eyes filled with hate.
The clarity of these pictures meant one of two things. Either Aiden’s autism-tinged view of the world wasn’t any different from her own, or this virus had rewired his perception into all the normal receptors. Whichever was right, the virus had turned her son into an artist.
A key scratched at the blocked deadbolt lock in the front door.
Crap, Melanie thought. This was the last thing she needed. Didn’t she tell Eddie that she’d let him know when to come back?
Three knocks on the door.
“Mellie? You up and awake?”
“Eddie, I told you I’d let you know when Aiden wasn’t contagious. Go back to Tamara’s.”
“Melanie! Come over to the door now.” Tamara’s voice this time, in her toughest no-nonsense tone.
Double crap. She told Eddie not to bring her over here. Couldn’t that old man follow any directions? Melanie went to the front door.
“Eddie, I told you not to drag her over here. I don’t need any help.”
“He didn’t come to me,” Tamara said. “I was on my way to the dayroom and rousted the old coot from a sound sleep on your porch. He gave me some line of BS about Aiden having the flu and how you told him to leave.”
“Well, I don’t want him sick. Aiden’s probably contagious.”
Tamara’s voice hushed, and it sounded like she’d put her mouth up against the crack in the door. “What Aiden’s contagious with isn’t the goddamn flu. He was bitten yesterday. Now you let us in, or I’ll take a rock to your window, and we’ll both come in that way.”
Melanie sighed and flipped the deadbolt. She opened the door. Tamara and Eddie entered. Melanie closed the door and locked it. Tamara had a messenger bag over her shoulder.
“Where is he?” Tamara asked.
“In the dining room.”
“Restrained?”
“No. He’s normal.”
“He can’t be normal,” Tamara said.
“He’s better than normal. C’mon.”
They entered the dining room. Aiden sat at the far end of the table, drawing a picture with fierce intensity. The crayon bent to an unnatural angle in his fingers. Melanie slid his other drawings to their side of the table and spread them out.
“Whoa! That’s some artwork,” Eddie said.
“How long has he been like this?” Tamara said.
“Hours probably. I fell asleep beside him in the bathroom last night, woke up, and he was in here being Rembrandt.”
Tamara took a laser thermometer from her messenger bag and tested Aiden—98.7 degrees.
“Aiden, can you look at me?” Tamara asked.
Aiden looked her in the eyes. Tamara did a double take. Aiden rarely looked even her in the eyes. Aiden’s eyes were red, but not with the earlier fire of the infected, more a rose color.
“Can you pull up his shirt for me?” Tamara asked.
Melanie came up behind Aiden. “I’m just going to raise your shirt for a moment. No one’s going to touch you.”
She raised his shirt to his chest. He flinched and squirmed. Blackened veins made a twisted tapestry of his skin. Tamara nodded and Melanie dropped his shirt then pulled Aiden’s collar away to expose the red, swollen bite marks. Tamara directed Melanie back to the living room with a flick of her head. Eddie followed them.
“Well, he’s infected,” Tamara said. “But he isn’t displaying a fully symptomatic response. I had a patient at St. Luke’s who came out of her sickness into a creative state like this for about half an hour. But she went into the rage phase like everyone else.”
“But Aiden’s been this way for hours,” Melanie said. “So he’s not going to turn like she did, right?”
“I wish I could tell you that. Everyone responds at different rates to this virus. It could still happen.”
“Then you two need to leave,” Melanie said. “Just in case.”
Eddie sat down on the couch with a thud. “Don’t know about the two of you, but I’m staying.”
Tamara smiled and joined him. “Well if he’s staying, I’m certainly staying.”
She pulled a syringe and a vial from the messenger bag and filled the syringe with a clear liquid. She placed it on the coffee table.
“And in case things go south, I’ll administer a tranq.”
“And if things go smooth,” Eddie said, “I’ll take her up on the shot, just so it doesn’t go to waste.”
“No, I can’t put all of you at risk,” Melanie said.
“You aren’t,” Tamara replied. “We are.”
Melanie sighed with relief and sat beside Eddie on the couch. Aiden walked in, placed a finished drawing on Tamara’s lap and walked out. She gave it a quizzical look.
“I could place the other ones,” Tamara said. “But who’s this a picture of?”
She placed the picture in the center of the coffee table. The likeness was a man with no hair and a horrible set of scars that crisscrossed the top of his swollen head. Blood coated the lower half of his face and dripped from a close-cropped goatee.
In rough letters along the bottom it read BAD MAN.
In Belle Pointe, Jimmy Wade jolted up in bed. A buzz saw of a headache wrenched him wide awake. Visions filled his head. An apartment, a Jeep, a man with a deer rifle, a nurse with an eye patch. He moved past the cascading images and swam upstream to the source. He sensed a mind of such profound clarity that he actually gasped.
He’d touched many minds these past few months, blindingly smart, hopelessly stupid, chaotically infected. But never one like this. One with such power, one that possessed the same duality as his own—infected by the virus yet not mastered by it.
The link broke. Jimmy lurched backward as if the connection had been a rubber band and had snapped. His head howled worse than it ever had. Blood trickled from both nostrils.
His hunger announced itself. This one he felt, this…boy…was a prize, the answer. The piecemeal improvements he’d felt with each dose of infected brain paled in comparison to what this future volunteer offered. In one meal, he’d have the power to master the uninfected and the infected. He’d receive deliverance from the skull-splitting headaches. He’d complete the evolutionary path. Homo sapiens would become Homo superior.
Somewhere on Q Island, a second survivor of the paleovirus lived. Just not for long. Jimmy could practically taste this boy’s brain already.