The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak Read online

  After filling the truck with gas, Carl hustled towards the door of the gas station and was thankful that once inside he was at least briefly free of the gamy odor. The inside of the gas station was set up like a small convenience store, four rows of salty and sugary treats led to a wall of coolers filled with soft drinks and beer. He snatched two pre-wrapped chocolate chip cookies and a bag of pretzels on his way to the cooler. Pausing in front of the beer section he contemplated a six pack of Coors light to turn this little road trip into something more pleasurable. The thought of being popped for a DUI while driving a marked government vehicle changed his mind and he settled on a 20oz coke as well as two more energy drinks. Satisfied that this would hold him over until he could stop for a more nutritious lunch in a few hours, he carried his bounty to the counter in the front of the store.

  He had thought the clerk was just out of sight behind the tall counter covered with cases of candy, gum and magazines, but when he stood in front of the cash register he could see that there seemed to be no one manning the store at the moment. There was a small office just behind the counter, but the door was wide open and he could see that it was empty as well. He had to assume that the clerk must either be back in the stock room and didn't hear him come in or had stepped off their post to hit the rest room. Carl waited for several minutes pondering how long was a reasonable amount of time before he should just leave enough money on the counter to cover his gas and junk food when he heard the distinct sound of a toilet flushing from down a short hallway off to his right. A moment later a young female attendant appeared, she looked up at him in surprise and made her way around the counter through a door marked for employees only. Carl thought she was probably a student like himself, maybe around twenty one or twenty two, she had a nice slender figure and the brief view he caught of her backside as she disappeared through the door peeked his interest. When she finally reappeared on the other side of the counter he quickly discounted any attempts at flirting, she was a blond, normally his preferred type, and had what was probably an attractive face, but this morning any of those features which he would have found appealing were masked by a flushed red hue and beads of sweat. The poor girl obviously had a nasty bug, but for whatever reason had dragged herself into work anyways. When she looked up at him he saw that her delicate blue eyes were red and puffy the whites of her eyes festooned with zigzagging red blood vessels.

  "Sorry about that, I am afraid I am not feeling very well all of a sudden," She said as she tried to force a smile.

  No shit, Carl thought as he hoped she was not contagious. The last thing he needed on top of being forced to drive all the way out here chasing an earthquake was to catch some funky stomach bug and end up bed ridden for the last few days of his internship. He still needed to pack and finish writing his final paper and doing so while running back and forth to the toilet was not a pleasant thought.

  "No problem...," he glanced down at the name tag pinned to the front of her work shirt, "Samantha. I'm sorry you aren't feeling well, hopefully it’s nothing serious."

  "I don't know what it is, I felt just fine when I got into work two hours ago. It has just really hit me all of a sudden. Two other customers before you also looked like they were coming down with something, so I guess there is a bug going around." She noticed the ID badge hanging around his neck. "You are a geologist?"

  The question made his swell with pride a little bit, coming from her the title actually sounded somewhat important. "Student, actually, I'm working on a summer internship with the Geological Survey office in West Trenton. I'm on my way to the sand mine just south of here. There was a minor earthquake in that area early this morning that I am going to investigate. Did you happen to feel it or hear of any damage from it?"

  She turned her head to the side as she was hit with a throaty bout of coughing. Carl was a little disturbed to see a fat juicy chunk of phlegm shoot from her mouth and splat on the back of a case of gun along the display counter.

  "Arrgghh, sorry again, this is really kicking my butt all of a sudden. But, you were saying something about an earthquake? I hadn't heard anything about it before. The sand mine? Yeah I know where it is but I thought it had been shut down for a while now."

  Under normal circumstances he would have tried to impress her with a long technical spiel about how the last round of storms probably flooded some of the shafts in the mine and caused a collapse that either triggered a minor quake or was large enough to resemble a quake on their instruments. But with the fresh glob of brownish colored Phlegm still dripping down the back of the case of gum a few inches from his head and now seeing droplets of snot starting to dribble from both of her inflamed nostrils, he decided to wrap this little exchange up as quickly as possible and get back on his way.

  "It’s probably just a tunnel collapse, no big deal," Carl said as he handed her cash for his food and a government credit card to cover the gas purchase. "By the way, what is that lovely smell outside?"

  "That? I wish I knew, probably what is making me sick to tell you the truth. I have never smelt anything like that around here before."

  Carl had thought it was an odor familiar to this area, he was surprised that it was something new.

  "Are there any livestock farms or other places with large animals nearby? It reminds me of a dead cow or something similar."

  "No, nothing like that anywhere near here, no farms, no factories, the smell just came out of nowhere all of a sudden this morning." She replied.

  Before he could say something in return she doubled over again with another bout of hard coughing that ended up propelling the twin tendrils of dangling snot from her nose onto the keys of the register. When she recovered she once again apologized and finished running his transaction through the snot infested machine. He carefully tracked her hands as they danced around the specks of nasal discharge coating the keys, he cringed as he saw her fingers sliding through the glop and then use those same fingers to hand his credit card back to him. Carl reached out for the bag of items she had prepared for him and simply held the bag open and motioned for her to just drop the card inside. She shrugged her shoulders in understanding and dropped the credit card along with his receipts into the open bag.

  Carl nodded goodbye and mumbled something about hoping she felt better as he hustled his way out the door. Just as he reached the door handle he heard her starting back into another hard fit of coughing and sneezing, he resisted the urge to turn back around, with the smell outside he was about to deal with he didn't want the image of flying snot also fresh in his head. He took a large gulp of fresh air inside the shop and then opened the door and hustled his way across the lot to his waiting truck.

  #

  Samantha could not remember the last time she had felt so terrible. She was also shocked at how fast it had hit her. She felt just fine during her short walk to work at the gas station. Less than an hour after clocking in she had started feeling the onset of a fever, her stomach cramped in knots and she couldn't stop coughing and sneezing. The young man who had just left had obviously been put off by her apparent condition, that was too bad, he was kind of cute and from the official looking badge he wore around his neck and a government issued credit card she figured he was probably an intellectual type which was a far cry from the guys close to her age in this little dump of a town. It was too bad he had seen her in this condition, she thought they might have actually hit it off if she hadn't looked like she was at deaths door. She was actually glad that he rushed out when he did, she was worried that the smell from the bathroom would start making its way out into the store and if her condition hadn't turned him off she had little doubt that one whiff from down that short hallway would have done the trick.

  She had worked at this same job on and off since her sophomore year of high school, mostly during the summer, but sometimes on weekends or after school during the year if the owner found himself short of help, which happened a lot. It wasn't a bad job, he paid her a little over minimum wage and allow
ed her to help herself to free soft drinks or coffee whenever she wanted. The best part was that her boss didn't mind that she did her homework at work when it was slow. This enabled her to get all her work done while getting paid so she was actually able to make the most of her free time. She had three more weeks left of summer before she was to head back to school and she had been trying to get all the hours she could so she would have enough spending money to get her through the fall term and even be able to buy some new clothes before classes started. Suddenly coming down with this bug was really starting to change her mind about those extra hours, she was thinking about calling her boss and asking him to either come in and cover for her or let her close the shop for the rest of the day. After seeing that her first two customers, both locals, also appeared to be afflicted with similar symptoms she thought closing for the day might be the best idea. No need to keep letting sick people wander around inside touching things and spreading more germs.

  She was reaching for the phone when she once again doubled over in a violent fit of coughing and hacking, this time it felt like razor blades were ripping through the wall of her stomach. This was not the first time in her life she had been sick with a harsh cough, but she could not ever remember one that tore at her innards like this and was so incredibly painful. The agony from her coughing fit forced her to drop to the floor and curl into a fetal position. As the fit started to subside she was able to open her eyes, through the pain induced tears she saw the first real indication that she was in trouble. The floor and chair directly in front of where she lay were coated in a film of wet mucus expelled from her mouth, what really worried her was that mixed in with the slimy goo was an alarming amount of rich dark blood. Not just a few speckles, there was enough blood splattered about that it looked like a stabbing had taken place there. Instead of calling her boss to ask permission to close the store for the rest of the day she now thought she needed to call for an ambulance, if her insides were hurting this bad and she was coughing up that much blood something must be terribly wrong. The phone was mounted on the wall just across from the cash register, she tried to pull herself to her feet using the tall stool behind the counter for leverage, but her body was no longer responding to her impulses to try and stand. Her hand connected with the stool but she could not command her fingers to close around and grasp the leg. Even her neck was starting to feel strange as she found it more and more difficult to keep her head raised, her head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds and it continued to dip forward until her chin connected with her upper chest. It seemed that whatever the virus was doing to her it had increased in intensity in the last few moments. She was sure that her fever had also suddenly spiked much higher, her breathing was becoming ragged and strained, it felt like someone was kneeling down with all their weight on her chest and it was becoming increasingly difficult to catch each subsequent breath. Another round of even more intense coughing hit her, this time it was accompanied by a thick buildup of fluid in her throat and at the back of her mouth that restricted her breathing even more, to the point she thought she was about to choke. When the coughing attack finally passed she saw that this time she had spit up even more blood than before and that just about every surface within range of her vision was coated with a slick layer of dripping blood and oozing mucus. It was at this point that she finally realized she was dying, she could actually feel the life draining from her body. Her vision was becoming clouded and she could feel a thick sticky moisture leaking down the side of her cheeks from her eyes, she couldn't raise her hand to wipe at her face but she was sure that she was actually bleeding from her eyes.

  Samantha spent the last few moments of her life shaking violently from the all-consuming pain that encompassed her entire body but unable to cry out either in agony or for help as her throat was now totally clogged with bile, blood and the sludgy remains of the last of her stomach contents. She died thrashing and convulsing in a lake of her own bodily fluids and excrement.

  #

  The GPS readout showed Carl that he still had another twelve miles until he turned off onto the road leading back to the sand mine. With the circuitous route he was forced to take along different back roads he was sure it would take at least thirty to forty more minutes before he finally made it there. That rank odor from his last stop continued to plague him and for a while he thought that maybe it had somehow attached itself to his clothing, but when he rolled down the window to try and air out the truck, he was assaulted by the stench from outside several times stronger than what he had been barely able to endure back in Browns Mills. He gagged hard against the rising bile in his stomach and knew that he was going to lose it this time. Clamping him jaw shut tight, he slammed on the breaks and skidded off the road onto the shoulder where he flung the door open wide and spewed his guts as if it was the morning after his heaviest night of bar hopping. After a solid minute of retching he gasped for breath only to draw in another lungful of the overpowering musk, once again his stomach announced its displeasure and started him into a second round of attempting to disgorge its contents only to find his tank was empty and he could only dry heave over and over. He had learned his lesson though and before his straining lungs forced him to gulp for another breath he threw his body across the trucks bench seat slamming the driver’s door shut behind him. He groped for a dirty towel left on top of the small pile of rubbish on the passenger side floor board and used it to cover his face as he gulped in a filtered breath of stagnant air. The towel reeked of something stale mixed with a fragrant scent of what he thought might actually be urine. But no matter what had been on that towel it was several times better to breathe through than trying to choke down the noxious fumes outside the truck. He was lucky that he had been driving with the outside vents closed or the AC would already be sucking in the outside air and suffocating him. As it was he had turned on the blower only and that was just enough to circulate the air inside the cab to a barely tolerable level.

  Carl remained sprawled out across the seat while he waited for his stomach to settle down. As he stared up through the windshield he started to realize that something appeared wrong with the sky outside, it was like he was seeing it through a hazy filter. For a moment he thought that maybe the windshield itself was just in need of a cleaning until he saw tiny particles of what he thought might be ash gently floating down just outside the window. He thought that his stomach was now under control enough that he could risk sitting back up in the seat, but he kept the dirty rag firmly clamped across his mouth and nose just in case enough of that foul stench remained inside the truck cab to knock him down again. Looking skyward he could see that there was a low layer of fog or haze settling in all around him, looking to the east and west he could just make out the edges of the cloud where the sun pierced threw as if penetrating a cloud layer. As he scanned the horizon he thought he could make out what looked like a plume of light colored smog rising into the sky in the distance. He studied the plume for a while thinking that it was possible he was seeing the result of smoke from an industrial complex of some type, but a glance at his GPS told him what he already knew and that was that there was nothing but a handful of scattered houses between where he was parked at that moment and the sand mine. Even looking beyond the mine there was nothing of any significance until he saw a small regional airport about ten miles to the south of the mine.

  "SHIT!" he suddenly exclaimed to himself as he realized that whatever that cloud was it was originating from the mine itself. That had to be it, not only was that discharge coming from the mine but he was willing to bet that it also was tied to this morning’s earthquake. He racked his brain thinking of what it could be that was now spewing out into the sky above the mine. During his studies of earthquakes and geological anomalies the only thing even close to something like this related to volcanic activity and sometimes short lived bursts of underground water pockets that could shoot geysers high into the sky following earthquake activity. But neither of those scenarios applied here, number on
e, there was nothing even close to a volcano above or below ground in this region and secondly any displacement of underground water would have been a short lived event, maybe up to ten minutes at most following the quake. Something else clicked in his head, that damn smell, he now thought he understood why it had been growing in intensity, it had to be related to this event. He knew that in a volcanic incident he should be smelling heavy traces of sulfur in the air, which was not the case here. The only recognizable sensation he could attribute to this particular rancid odor was of decay, it was along the exact same lines as something that had died and was in the mid to late stages of decomposition when gases built up in the body as the internal organs decomposed. Nothing in any of his studies ever discussed a smell like this or the expulsion of this fine mist like sediment he was seeing.