A feeling she couldn’t ignore, no matter how hard she tried was the feeling of ants crawling over her skin. What was worse was that she knew what it meant. What it represented. It was the things that were still lurking in the tunnels and a hundredfold in the streets above. She could sense them. Unlike how the smell of blood made her feel she hated feeling any link with those that existed in the shadows. They had lost their humanity, completely. Given over to what they had become. But she… she wasn’t one of them. That much she was sure of.

  Morgan walked up to her, bringing her out of her own thoughts and handed her sunglasses.

  “Oh, umm—”

  “They’re not for you.”

  “Okay…”

  “They’re for the little one. Might make her less conscious of how her eyes look.”

  Evelyn nodded. “Thank you. I’m sorry that… this happened.”

  Morgan looked across those that had already passed and those she suspected still might. “I’m not a doctor. I did one surgical rotation and spent some time in triage. The rest I’m picking up from books I downloaded before the web went down.”

  “I’m sure they appreciate what you’re doing for them.” The young woman looked older than her years, thought Evelyn.

  Morgan shook her head. “He asks too much…” Then turned back to the mother. “If it’s not too much trouble, I would like a blood sample from you and your daughter. That’s why I asked you in here.”

  Evelyn suspected it wasn’t the only reason she was asked into the blood filled room. “Um, yes to myself, but I want to keep Zoe away from—” she waved a hand. “— All this… I’m sure you understand.”

  Morgan briefly looked like she didn’t, but nodded regardless then started to move away.

  “I can help.” It was a suggestion that leaped from Evelyn’s lips before her brain truly understood why she said it.

  “Umm—”

  The door to the lab opened and in walked August, behind him was Todd and Karl, who forced a smile. Evelyn could tell her son was scared of her, and that was the worst feeling of all. But it didn’t matter, whatever had befallen them the night before had passed now. Her eyes just being an unfortunate reminder for others.

  August looked across the result of the attack and let out a resigned sigh. He then turned to Evelyn. “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel… rested. My mind… is clear.”

  The door opened again, this time it was Callum that entered, immediately staggering slightly against the wall, his gaze not leaving the woman sat on the stool with the dark eyes.

  August frowned without turning around. “Is there something I can do for you, Callum?”

  “Er… yeah. I thought you might want to look at the camera feeds we have on the building up top.”

  August looked at Evelyn once more, ignoring the younger man. “Are you… hungry?”

  She shook her head. “You want to know if all this blood is making me hungry?” His expression remained, waiting for an answer. “I’m a little hungry, yes. But not for what you are suggesting…”

  “Good.” He turned away, to leave. She ignored her son’s not-so-subtle attempt to hide his revulsions at her nonchalant reply to such a strange question considering the surrounding devastation.

  “I—” He turned back. “— Want to help. I think I might be useful.”

  Todd’s brow tightened. “You should stay with Zoe.”

  She frowned, slightly annoyed at the suggestion that she wouldn’t. “I am. I will. No, I mean. I can be a lookout or something. I… just. I can’t just sit in that room all night.”

  August looked at Morgan who nodded, and he turned with a smile to Evelyn. “Okay. Then that is what you shall do. Come with us.”

  The group moved into Callum’s room. The long-haired, young man woke his computer, tapped some keys and his multiple monitors sprang to life with shifting patches of dark pixels.

  “Is that what I think it is,” said Morgan.

  It was a question not aimed at anyone in particular but Karl answered. “There are thousands of them…”

  Callum leaned forward on his desk, clicking and moving his mouse. “Yup, but take a real close look at the roof of the building opposite.” He zoomed in slightly. The top of the five story building came into focus, the moon providing some scant light to the figure that stood on top of it. He zoomed in more. “Good thing I convinced you to let me shell out for the NVG’s on these bad boys.” He clicked and suddenly the figure came into sharp monotone focus. A young man was standing on the edge of the roof, looking down, a rifle over his shoulder. And he seemed to be smiling.

  “His eyes…” said Evelyn. “Are they dark?”

  Todd nodded. “Yup.”

  “Maybe it’s the night vision,” said Karl.

  “Let me go out there.”

  Everyone looked at Evelyn, including her daughter. Her mother smiled at her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”

  Callum looked confused. “Fine? You do see the football sized stadium amount of vamps, running around just four floors above us, right?”

  Todd shook his head. She could sense his disapproval, but didn’t care. “It’s not safe for anyone up top, right now,” he said.

  August though remained silent. He looked at Morgan. “Will they think she is one of them?”

  The scientist let out a breath. “I… don’t know. They might.” She looked at the older woman. “But it’s a risk. If they think you’re still… you. Still human, then…”

  “I’ll be careful. I can come straight back if I’m not sure.”

  Todd scrunched his face in frustration. “This is insane. We’re safe down here. Why go to the surface? Because of some crazy, on the top of a building? Why is that so important to you?”

  Now it was Evelyn’s turn to look away. “I… think he’s like me. I think I can talk to him. Maybe he can be useful to us…”

  Todd didn’t like the term ‘us’ but August did. He nodded to Evelyn. “Take a gun.”

  “I’m going with—”

  She cut Todd off. “No, I’ll move faster alone.” She wasn’t sure how she knew that. It was just an instinct. She was beginning to trust them more than usual.

  Zoe wrapped her arms around her mother’s stomach. “I don’t want you to go, mommy.”

  Evelyn kneeled. “I’m doing this for both of us. I know I’ll be okay. Even with all the monsters. They won’t harm me. I’m sure of it. You don’t want to always be scared, do you?”

  With a glum face, her daughter shook her head.

  “That’s why I have to do this. I need to know.” She stood and nodded to August.

  *****

  Bradwick Jenkins, looked down upon the sea of humanity. Or rather what it had become. He figured the Northside streets were full of at least a hundred thousand beings. He cut short of calling them ‘people’ a long time ago. Ever since he saw the result of his father’s experiments on the suckers who signed up to become ‘super soldiers’ or whatever the sales brochure his father’s company sold to the DOD said they would become.

  He also felt no sympathy for the hordes that scurried along the scorched, blackened sidewalks. Partly due to the side effects of patent number 100548, numbing those kinds of emotions. You don’t want to send your highly trained, dosed up killing machine in to war and have then still give a shit about the enemy. And partly due to he was witnessing Darwinian theory in action. The world had literally been reduced to survival of the fittest, and right now, that meant those that had survived the end, had emerged even stronger. In the early days he did care. Even contacted some journalists and activist groups to warn them about what Meditech was doing in their black site locations.

  Back then, the results of the failed trials were stacking up, the furnaces going day and night to remove the traces of what the trillion dollar a year company was doing. But those who were incinerated were the lucky ones. The true ‘failures’ were those that lived to the end of the five stages. Most tried to kill themselves but were unable, due to a combination of being kept in a semi-conscious state and their new improved physiques not being capable of being damaged, like a ‘normal’ human. So instead they took the only other option left open to them. They went insane.

  He wasn’t meant to know any of this of course. The bullshit his father told him about the nature of his work was easily pulled apart by a hundred K dropped in the account of one of the scientists that worked for the poster child of the medical scientific community. Namely, Randall Jenkins.

  Eventually though, he learned that after almost seven years of research, a few thousand mutated bodies, Randall and his team cracked the last hurdle and they had a workable solution for the DOD. There were though, a few ‘downsides.’ The biggest one being, if you didn’t take another Meditech drug to stop the reactions from running away within your system, you would burn up in direct sunlight. Something about some compound being created that reacted to UV. He never was much for the science his father was obsessed with.

  Rather than being a negative this was seen as a positive. A way to control those that could otherwise rule the world with their newfound strength, speed and agility. Even his father’s mistakes were genius.

  This was the point that his father told him some of what he had been doing. Of course he left out all the deaths of the ‘volunteers’ and just focused on the ‘good’ part. That he had produced something that will be of great benefit to the country. He also said they would be producing a less potent version of the new drug. Wouldn’t make you a super soldier, but it might improve your test scores enough to get you into an Ivy League college, or take all those aches and pains away if you were of a certain age. A neurological and physiological upgrade, Randall called it.

  His father tried to impress upon his son, how much of a help this breakthrough would be. At the time, Brad nodded, smiled and then used his contacts within the company to get a secret supply of the drug for himself, and sold it to the rich kids, or the ones that pretended to be rich. He didn’t care. The money was too good to care. He even started taking it himself, at higher and higher doses. Did his father know what he was up to? Who knows.

  And life was everything he hoped it would be. He rapidly forgot about the dark secret behind his father’s company and instead enjoyed the constant supply of money which flowed into his account, the top grades and all that came with being a football star.

  And then he got the final email from his contact. The one that sounded like a conspiracy from some online video. The one that meant the good times were coming to an end. For everyone, if the crazy story he was being told, was true. He refused to believe it at first. Couldn’t be it was real. Had to be a prank. But his contact had never steered him wrong and insisted it was the truth.

  The population were to be infected with a modified virus. Someone high up, had made the decision to find the immunes. Those that genetically were a perfect match for his father’s research. Those that the DOD tried so hard to find. These ‘immunes’ held they key to something even more powerful than his father’s drug. What that was Brad never learned. Not even his contact knew, but someone even higher had decided that the ‘downside’ of this virus, which was to be allowed to run wild across the world, namely the sun instantly turning people into a pile of ash, was worth it. It was all being coordinated by a pan national group called the ‘council.’ And Brad knew there was nothing he or even his father could do to stop it. The wheels were in motion. It was then he realized his father had been a pawn in a greater game all along.

  But even that concern faded with each pill he took. Each tiny dose of compacted sugar and gene altering drug that piece by piece striped away his humanity. Changing him into something else. He also knew he had no choice if he wanted to survive what was coming. His contact also told him that the pill had already inoculated him. Made him artificially immune. If he kept taking it. At the time he had no idea what that meant. It took witnessing seeing his friends become engulfed in flames for him to fully understand that the world was changing and there was no going back.

  He still thought there was a chance the sun would turn him to ashes though, so he ran and hid.

  By time the flames had died down. He found himself in a strange part of the city, not really knowing how he got there. The sun was just a memory and the cool night had taken its place. He walked out into it, and watched the others emerge too, except they were different to him. Their minds were not their own. Replaced with rage, madness and incessant hunger to feed, similar to what his contact had shown him of the early trials. Those in the city that had been lucky enough to be immune to the Nutri virus, were then placed at the mercy of those that were not. He watched those made delirious from what was raging through their systems, hunt them down and if the vamps didn’t succeed in getting to them, the silver vans would appear and scoop them up, anyway. He hid from both.

  He learned a lot about himself and his place in the new world during the first night.

  During the day after, when the star burned in the sky, he slept like the others did and once it fell below the horizon he awoke… like the others.

  He followed some of these vamps, because that was as good a word as any to describe them, around the city. Watched them sniff out the last remaining pure bloods and tear them apart as they screamed. And now here he was, standing high above where those that needed blood had brought him. To where they could sense what was below ground.

  He flicked his head to the right. An instinctual but to anyone watching, animalistic movement. Someone or something was climbing the fire escape at the back of the roof. He sniffed the air and listened against the din of the hungry horde, at the heart that beat too quick to be of natural origin. Those in the street below had found him. He pulled the gun from his belt, turned and raced across the roof, covering the fifty feet in a few seconds then stood at the top of the old creaking steel structure as the grunting figure climbed.

  He took aim and fired.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Twenty-two minutes earlier.

  Evelyn could hardly feel the weight of the handgun hanging from a holster on her waist. Or the small camera Callum had attached to her short brown jacket. Zoe said she looked like a cowboy. Todd had given her a few quick lessons on how not to shoot herself, and then after checking the strange young man was still watching from the opposite roof she stepped into the large elevator.

  It rattled and creaked, but quickly made its way to the lowest level of the underground parking garage, the door sliding open.

  To the others below, ahead was only darkness. She suspected that, but her eyes allowed her to see the abandoned cars and concrete walls with some clarity. Not as if they were lit by the non-functioning lights, but enough for her to clearly see the space and where everything was.

  She stepped out of the large steel framed box onto the cold concrete and immediately sniffed the air. Another instinctual but new behavior for her. It was filled with chemical fumes, smoke, sweat and an odor she had come to savor. The unmistakable metallic smell of blood. She could almost see it. As if It hung in the air like particles of dust caught in the morning sun. The parking garage was swimming in the tiny droplets, no doubt the ember remains of the millions that had perished.

  Not that she cared. She had a job to do.

  She touched the tiny plastic box attached to her ear. “Can you hear me? Umm, over.”

  “Loud and clear,” said Todd. “I think the camera’s working, but we can’t see a thing through it. It’s too dark. Over.”

  “It’s okay. I can see. Over.”

  Silence came through her ear bud.

  “I… can hear them above. I think I can avoid—”

  A clunk sound reverberated off the solid walls above her, the change in air pressure being obvious to her, even if knowing that was a little unsettling.

  “You okay?” said Todd. “You shuddered, or something. Over.”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Just, getting my bearings. Thought I heard something. Over.”

  “We didn’t hear anything… Remember, if you see those things, return to the elevator. Over.”

  She stepped forward, conscious of those watching through the small device attached to her collar. She wanted not to care, but she knew Zoe and Karl were also watching and that did matter. She needed to show them that the night was not something to be afraid of. She wanted to shout into the mike that the air smelled sweet and bathed her skin like a cool shower. But she also knew all of those sensations weren’t natural. That those paying attention on Callum’s monitors wouldn’t understand. And would see her, and therefore her daughter, as even more different to them than they already did.

  If she was honest with herself, she knew she wasn’t the same woman that feared her life was about to end in her offices, watching the passenger plane heading towards her. Or more recently, in the old man’s kitchen. When the flame on the stove burned her vision and all she wanted to do was rip Todd’s throat from his neck.

  When she and Zoe awoke hours earlier in the small room in the bunker, she knew Evelyn Simmons, one of the best litigators in the city had passed, like so many others.

  This woman, who had volunteered to go out into the abyss, amongst the things, had become something new… and she hated to admit it, improved. She felt younger, invigorated. More alive than any time she could remember. Which made no sense. The world had ended. Why wasn’t she crestfallen with remorse and grief at what had been lost? Instead, she only felt excitement and… hunger. But for now, new Evelyn was a good thing. It was what was needed to keep her family alive.

  She walked quickly forward, moving past a dark-colored van, its rear doors open. Then arrived at the first ramp and ascended, increasing her pace.

  “What’s that noise? Over.” said Todd.