No one yet. Passing a dark stairwell, he didn’t see the furtive shape rising up the stairs… 

Until it was too late. A leprous green arm shot between the rails to seize his leg. Jerome screamed, loud and hard. He tore away from the claw-like hand but the bony fingers had already dug through his jeans and deeply into the muscles just above the knee — a handful of meat stayed in that vile grip.

Leg pumping out blood, Jerome half-crawled, half-ran across the debris. 

Behind him, a hideous ghoul clambered over the rail in one uncanny, almost graceful movement. It had a green complexion, black-pit eyes and long stringy hair. The stink of well-advanced decomposition was stomach-churningly rank. This guy had been dead for awhile.

As the grotesque creature shambled toward him, Jerome found that he could put no weight on his injured leg. Wriggling desperately for the daylight, his plaintive scream gave voice to the certainty that a terrible death was only moments away.


#


Hearing the boy’s scream just instants after he disappeared into the crumbling hulk on the corner, Winter shared a grimly knowing glance with Nic. It was doubtful the boy had only tripped.

Confirmation came in a sharper, more ululating cry from within the building. A telltale sign. 

They ventured inside at a trot, snapping halogen torches onto their gun-barrels. 

Their high-intensity beams roved the space in quick, controlled sweeps until spotlighting the decomposing corpse marionette-walking toward the screaming, crying teen.

In tandem they lifted their rifle-stocks to their shoulders and in a single burst, cut down the sickening monstrosity. 

It crumpled near the teen, putridly liquid brain matter oozing from a shattered skull.

Winter panned his flashlight over the whimpering kid. His leg was torn open. A glance at the corpse revealed fresh blood smeared on its hands. But the kid shook his head, fear and a wrenching desire to live making his eyes pulse with desperate energy.

“Please,” the teen begged, clutching his bleeding leg. “Don’t.”

Winter tried to aim his weapon at the kid’s head, training robotically kicking in, but the barrel was unsteady. He tickled the trigger. Wiped the sweat from his face.

The report of a gunshot made even Winter jump. The teen flopped on his back, shot through the head. 

Winter looked over at Nic. Her eyes were fixed, almost blankly, on the teen’s still and forever-silent body. Her weapon was still extended as if another bullet might be necessary.

“There is no cure,” she whispered softly, monotone voice as empty as a library after hours. Ever so slowly, she lowered her weapon. But her stare never left the dead boy.

“Come on,” Winter said huskily. He tried to touch Nic’s arm and winced inwardly as she shied from him, moving away without expression.

They left the building. No one would come for the remains — the threat of infection in an unsecured area was too great for the niceties of burial. A shroud of dust would be the only covering for victim and attacker where they slept forever, joined here by a dread disease for which there was indeed no cure. 








CHAPTER THREE


BONE TIRED


EVALUATION CENTER 14 was located in the Ravenna district of Seattle, formerly a quiet bedroom community favored by families and retirees. The cyclone fences that ringed the converted hospital were capped with greased razor wire. Sentries with rifles manned guard towers on every corner and atop both gates. For good measure, each tower was equipped with a tripod-mounted, 60-caliber recoilless rifle.

The measures were not designed to protect the facility from invasion, though there were ample supplies of morphine, epinephrine and other desirable drugs within its walls. No, like a prison, Evaluation Center 14 was designed to keep its patients in. Unlike a prison, more than half of its charges could be described as “on Death Row.” Figuratively, anyway.

An Evaluation Center was where you brought people who might need to be removed from the population.