Afternoon (The Daylight Cycle Book 3) Read online

  “Fourteen.”

  “What is ten plus three?”

  “Thirteen?”

  “What is six plus six?”

  “Twelve.”

  “And what mathematical pattern can you determine in the questions I’ve just provided?”

  “The answers are going down by one number each time.”

  “Good, good. Do you know where you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the name of the current president?”

  “If she’s even alive,” Erik said, and gave the woman their commander in chief’s name.

  “I want you to follow my fingers and tell me if you can sense where I’m pressing down on your body while I do so.” She lifted one finger and began to move it from the left, to the right, then up and down. She pressed down on Erik’s knee and he jerked, nodding as he cleared his throat and said, “Knee.”

  “Good.” She looked down at his feet. “Would you please remove your shoes so we can examine and photograph the wounds?”

  As Erik did this, the student assistant walked into the other room and returned with a Polaroid camera. The doctor—who’d been waiting in eager anticipation—immediately crouched down and took hold of first his left, then his right ankle, ‘oohing’ and ‘awing’ as she looked upon his recent injury. “I see,” she said.

  “How is it, Doc?” Erik asked.

  The student photographer took a picture and withdrew as the doctor took hold of his ankle. “It appears aggravated,” she said, “and appears to have suffered irritation as a result of the socks and shoes you’ve been wearing. Lydia—do you see how the veins are turning purple around the wound?”

  “Yes,” the student assistant named Lydia said.

  “These are signs we normally see during the late stages of the virus, when necropsy is beginning to set into the patient and the surrounding blood vessels begin to break down and die. Mr. Roberts—can you feel how I’m handling your foot currently?”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor leaned back and gestured Erik to pull his feet back onto the stretcher he’d been set up on. “We’re going to leave you in this room to monitor your progress,” she said as she and the student assistant retreated toward the door. “Though I am currently unaware of your body’s state, it would appear that you are either in the late stages of the disease and will die soon, or your body has rejected the virus and is simply reacting based on how the human body normally does to such an infection.”

  “Will you know from the bloodwork if I’m going to live?” he asked.

  “I can only do precursory bloodwork under a microscope at the current time. If the findings are of any relevance… we may have to consider transporting you to a lab north of here in Canada.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “They closed off their borders as the outbreak started. They’re doing much better than we are.”

  Good to know, Erik thought, wishing he could high-tail it out of here to let his friends know the scoop on the current state of the world.

  The student assistant left the room and Doctor Hernandez was about to do the same before she gestured to a room at her side. “There’s a covered bucket in that room if you feel the need to relieve yourself. Please—do call if you need anything. The laboratory is just across the hallway.”

  “Thank you,” Erik said.

  When the door closed, then locked behind them, Erik sighed and leaned back in the stretcher, finally glad to be able to rest on a comfortable surface after two days of agonizing travel. While he didn’t particularly mind sleeping in random places, his body was fighting him for sleep—was trying, desperately, to pull him into the land of dreams and nightmares. It was any wonder he hadn’t passed out during the examination.

  That little bit, he thought.

  The inklings of a migraine began to flicker at the back of his skull.

  Rather than try to fight it, he leaned back, closed his eyes, and succumbed to what he knew would be either be a slight nuisance or a major problem.

  He fell asleep soon after.

  *

  Rose woke later that evening, after the sun had just fallen and the guys had already risen and departed the room. Not knowing whether or not she should rise and attempt to venture out alone, she huddled down into her cot and sighed as the cool air from outside the nearby window threatened to pierce through the slowly-cracking glass.

  You’re high, her conscience said, off the ground, on the second floor. Safe. Secure. Sheltered.

  Regardless, she still felt trapped—cornered, it seemed, by the situation and the snarl-toothed monsters whose actions had caused it. She wanted so desperately to run—to walk away from the settlement and through the city and back toward that rest stop and get to the truck—but she knew she couldn’t. Jamie had the keys, and besides—it wasn’t as though she would leave the people who’d taken her in behind.

  Not when they’ve been so gracious, she thought.

  And definitely not when one of them had someone to go back to.

  She thought of Lyra then—of her beautiful dark skin, eyes and hair—and wished nothing more than to hold her friend close. While she knew E.J. would be taking care of her, the thought of her friend being alone in a strange place was enough to bring shivers to her body and tears to her eyes.

  “Everything’ll be all right,” she whispered. “I’ll get back to her. Someday.”

  Someday.

  But when would this someday come? And when, she wondered, would she finally be reunited with her best friend?

  She startled when a knock came at the door, then as Steve entered, his face freshly-shaven, save for a slight smattering of hair that he’d been growing as a goatee. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she replied.

  “You sleep ok?”

  “Until the nightmares stared,” she replied, pushing herself into a sitting position.

  “You’ve been through a lot over the past few months, haven’t you?”

  “I dream of drowning sometimes,” she said, “or of wasting away and starving to death on the shores of Rhode Island.”

  “What about the zombies? Do you dream about them too?”

  “Surprisingly, not really. I’m never attacked in my dreams, but sometimes I’ve been bitten. And I’m just slowly dying… slowly turning into one of those creatures that would so willingly kill the next human that came walking by. The worst thing about those dreams is that I don’t even have a gun.”

  “So you can’t end it,” Steve said.

  “Not easily,” Rose replied, then sighed. “Sometimes I jump off buildings in those dreams. Or try and cut my head off. Or tie myself to something on the top of a roof so I can freeze or melt or get eaten by the birds when I finally do succumb.”

  “That’s some pretty hardcore stuff.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She hated those dreams—knew, in a million, billion years, that she never would’ve had anything like them had she not been separated from her friends and left to wander the continental United States from one side to nearly the other. But what would’ve happened had she not left? Would those people have lured the horde to Fort Hope? And what would’ve happened then?

  People would’ve died, she thought, because that horde had been huge.

  Sighing, Rose wrapped her arms around herself as the cold threatened to bite at her skin through her sweatshirt. In response, she stood, grabbed her winter coat from the edge of her cot, and wrapped it around herself as she turned to face Steve. “Where’re Dakota and Jamie?”

  “In the cafeteria, scrounging up some food.”

  “Should we join them?”

  Steve shrugged and followed her out the doorway.

  *

  They ate from an assortment of canned foods and the bagged supplies that would soon be going bad. Not knowing whether to speak or to remain in relative silence, Dakota kept his mouth shut and concentrated on chewing his food—knowing, based solely on Jamie’s silent demeanor,
that he was worried about his friend.

  No use in trying to talk when he’s not really going to respond, he thought, sighing. He reached across the table to set a hand over his boyfriend’s and nodded as Jamie looked up and offered a smile. “Thanks,” the older man said.

  “It’s no trouble,” Dakota replied. “Are you sure you’re—”

  A knock came at the nearby threshold.

  Dakota raised his head to find Rose and Steve standing there. “Need any company?” Steve asked.

  “We could use some,” Jamie replied, looking back at Dakota. “It’s been quiet in here.”

  Don’t look at me, Dakota wanted to say, but bit the inside of his cheek instead.

  Steve settled down beside him and Rose across from Steve, who then began to divide necessary portions of food between one another. As they ate, they remained silent—mostly, it appeared, for lack of anything to talk about. The fact that it was occurring even now, after the discomfort had been so plainly spoken, was somewhat unnerving, considering, but Dakota believed they all had only one thing on their mind.

  Erik.

  Dakota cleared his throat and said, “Has anyone seen Erik yet?”

  None of them replied.

  “So that’s a no,” he continued, nodding at each of them as they lifted their heads to look at him. “Does anyone even know where he is?”

  “Somewhere on the second floor,” Jamie said.

  “Should we go find him?”

  “He’s probably asleep after everything he’s been through, babe. We should leave him be.”

  “You’re not worried?”

  “Of course I am. I—”

  “I mean, we don’t have to go into the room he’s in,” Dakota replied, cutting Jamie off before he could continue any further. “If there’s a window that looks into the room—like there are in most of the doors—we could just check in and see how he’s doing. To see if he… well…”

  If he… what? Dakota thought. Was still alive? Was still breathing? Was still… human?

  He didn’t want to think that Erik was dead—didn’t even want to begin to imagine it after what he’d seen Jamie go through within the last few days. He didn’t know the man personally, but by God, he knew Jamie, and if him being this sick—and having the potential to die—was enough to make him like this…

  Dakota closed his eyes.

  Immediately he saw Jamie’s sad eyes, his boyish fringe, his bearded face pulled into a perpetual state of misery.

  When Dakota opened his eyes, he found the small group looking at him. “What?” he asked.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Steve said. “Maybe we should go see how Erik is doing.”

  “Just to make sure they’re not hurting him or doing anything that’s making him particularly uncomfortable,” Rose replied.

  “So… we’re agreed then? To check on him after we’ve finished eating?”

  Everyone nodded.

  They found Erik sleeping in a lone room in which a single stretcher sat. Hooked up to several monitors near which a generator ran, vital readouts pooled from their surfaces to chart not only his heart rhythm, but his blood pressure, pulse rate, and even the oxygen that was being supplied to his body. He looked, to Dakota, like a human machine, as from one arm entered an IV drip and on another an assortment of objects lay.

  “They really hooked him up,” Rose said as she peered in through the thin window that looked into the room.

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “They did.” He tested the door handle and frowned when he found it was locked.

  “To keep him in,” Steve said. “If he… you know…”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “I know.”

  The army man backed away from door, slid his hands into his jeans pockets, and sighed, tossing his fringe from his eyes before looking back into the room. “I just hate to leave him in there all by himself,” he said. “What if he needs my help? Someone to help him to the bathroom, or worse—something to eat?”

  “I’m sure they’re taking care of him, Jamie,” Dakota said.

  “You don’t have a thing to worry about,” Doctor Hernandez said, startling all of them as her voice shattered the silence of the night. She drew up alongside the door and fumbled through a ring of keys before grabbing one and inserting it into the lock. “We’ve been taking excellent care of him.”

  “How is he, Doc?” Jamie asked.

  “It’s hard to say. His wound is either entering necrosis—or a stage very similar to it—and he is dying, or he’s simply persisting through the disease without making any true recovery.”

  “How was his blood?” Steve asked.

  “The virus continues to attack healthy blood cells. Only a few at a time aren’t being penetrated.”

  “Which means—”

  “Erik is not fully immune to the virus”

  The news was devastating—comparable to the great wall falling upon the entirety of the kingdom it was meant to be protecting or the orbiting fixture in the sky falling to decimate the world beneath. As from the heavens it fell, its single tower aiming for the nexus of the world and the people that existed upon it, there was one single sigh that came from but one person. That person, in this instance, was Jamie; and as the reality of the situation began to settle in like a hot coal burning beneath one’s foot, tears sprung out along the man’s eyes and his head bowed to the floor.

  “Jamie,” Dakota said.

  “I expected it,” Jamie replied, turning and starting toward the stairwell. “I just didn’t think—that it would be this soon.”

  “He’s lived a long time,” Doctor Hernandez replied. “I’m sorry to say that your friend won’t likely survive the night.”

  “But his vitals,” Rose said.

  “Are slowing. Look.”

  Everyone turned.

  The heart monitor was slowing, the blood pressure rates were dropping. Even Erik’s oxygen levels were beginning to fluctuate.

  It wouldn’t be long, Dakota knew, before Erik was dead. And then—

  Before he could finish his thought, Jamie turned and began to make his way down the stairs.

  “I should go after him,” Dakota said.

  “For what?” Rose asked. “It’s not as if you’re going to be able to do anything for him. His best friend is dying. What can you do that’ll make that any easier?”

  “Comfort him,” Dakota said. “Try and talk to him, explain that Erik might still have a chance, that he—”

  Inside, the heart rhythm dropped dangerously low.

  “Go,” Doctor Hernandez says. “All of you.”

  Dakota, Rose and Steve turned and began to make their way down the stairs.

  There was nothing they could do.

  Erik was going to die.

  *

  Doctor Rosalita Hernandez waited until the three individuals were gone before she unlocked the door and made her way into the room.

  Inside, the air was alight with static, the sound of monitors and the incessant drones of readouts as the dying man began to succumb to what was ultimately the seventh largest mass extinction. From sky, to land, to sea, nothing was immune to its power and its ability to decimate an entire population.

  Nothing, that was, except the dark ones.

  She and her associates had begun to call them plant walkers after noting their particular inclination toward the fruits and vegetables that populated the land. Past experiments had shown that they did not care for meat, even when offered, nor did they seem interested in pilfering corpses that had not been infected with the virus. To their recollection, they were simply the undead whose states had not reverted to animalistic tendencies—and who, through some act of natural adaptation, had allowed them to exist in a world of cannibalistic monsters.

  The regular corpses—the shamblers and runners—did not bother the walkers, and the walkers—when noticing the shamblers and runners—would make a conceited effort to avoid them at all costs. They had even been found to warn travelers away from highly-
infected areas, though whether or not they were simply driving them away or actually trying to communicate she did not know.

  Doctor Rosalita Hernandez did, however, know that they were intelligent—and that their blood acted as a sort of antigen for the virus.

  It won’t stop him from turning, the doctor had said, but it may turn him into something else.

  A hybrid? her assistant had asked.

  A hybrid, she had confirmed.

  Of course, this was only a hypothesis.

  Until now.

  She withdrew, from the delicate lining of her scrubs, a single syringe filled with black blood, then approached the dying man and slid it into his intravenous drip.

  Black immediately tainted the yellow and began to swallow it whole.

  The blood—potent in its amount and fresh as could be—snaked down the patient’s IV tube and into his arm.

  She waited—wanting, hoping for something to happen.

  His vitals began to stabilize.

  His breathing began to return to normal.

  The doctor smiled.

  Erik Roberts, of the United States Military, was fighting back.

  Chapter 6

  Erik opened his eyes.

  “What,” he started, “is happening—”

  The icy sensation running through his veins was comparable to the saline he’d once been given during one of his more severe migraines. It began at the base of his wrist, traveled up his arm, then entered his elbow. But unlike the saline, it continued from there, coursing throughout his body all the way down to his toes. When it finally circulated through his system and began to hit his head, a calm he had never before experienced encompassed his brain and almost made him fall asleep.

  “Mr. Roberts?” the familiar voice of Doctor Rosita Hernandez said. “Can you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I,” Erik started. “I don’t—”

  “You have been given an experimental treatment in order to delay the advancement of your virus and prolong your mortality,” she said, setting a hand on his arm as she began to use a pump to circulate the mixture into his bloodstream. “This is in an effort to not only save your life, but to see if we can counteract the virus through a different form of treatment.”