Roy stood away from the corpse. She had been obese in life, and the transformation her body was undergoing now was making her even larger. It was like watching a human balloon being filled before his eyes. He tried rationalizing it; bodies swell up after death—and he’d seen plenty of dead bodies in the last few days to know—fluids and gases collect. Not like that, they don’t. Not that fast.
Roy reached down and tucked his now flaccid penis into his pants. The urge to murder had passed. One of the woman’s cheeks started to bubble. The white skin turned a bruised purple and popped open. Black liquid sprayed out and splattered across the far wall ten feet away. The gooey deposit started spreading out in every direction, like a crack in a sheet of glass, blossoming and growing.
The dead woman’s body made a farting sound in the chair and a flood of black gushed out from between her legs, dropping to the floor in clumps and streams. It collected in a puddle and started moving towards him.
Roy had seen enough. Green Forest Haven had lost all of its appeal.
Louie looked up at the staircase. He could hear Roy’s thunderous feet thumping down the steps. “Sounds like he’s done up there. Are you sure you’re going to stay here?”
Tracy nodded. She wasn’t going anywhere with the two mad men.
Roy started screaming at Louie from the second floor. “We gotta get the fuck out of here! There’s black shit coming out of people! It’s coming after me!”
His rambling would’ve made no sense to Tracy Klausburg, or almost any other person left on the planet, but Louie Finkbiner knew full well what he was screaming about. A hot fist punched into his chest, causing his heart to hammer. The fear spread down into his gut and up into his throat. He pushed the chair Tracy was in against a filing cabinet with enough force to snap her head back, and fled around the desk. Roy was only a few steps behind him when he reached the front doors.
This was impossible, Louie thought as they ran down the steps and into the parking lot. They’re microscopic, they can’t move that fast. We’ve kept ahead of them. How did the swarm get this far out of the city?
He found the answers to his questions lying in a ditch less than a hundred yards up the road.
“Jesus Christ,” Roy panted. “Is that a deer?”
“It was,” Louie whispered back.
There was nothing left of the animal’s back end. It clawed away at the grass in front of it, trying to stand, unaware its back legs were gone. It slipped and collapsed in a puddle of its own blood and entrails. The blood was black, and it was moving.
“The fucking things can take over anything,” Louie said. “I thought it was just people... but they can take animals, too.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“LDV3! Ticks! Goddamned microscopic wood ticks! It’s what they were working on back in the disease center.”
A woman started screaming from the building behind them. Roy looked towards the entrance. “The nurse I punched.”
“She’s dead, or she will be soon.”
The fat dead corpse from the third floor lurched out onto the steps. Moments later the old lady Roy had murdered with his hammering fists followed. The upper part of her body was hanging forward, flopping from side to side, with only skin and a bit of spine left to support it.
“I killed her,” Roy whimpered. “I fucking smashed her chest in. She can’t be alive... she just can’t be.”
“She isn’t.” The comatose man stumbled out after them. His face was black from the throttling Roy had given him, but he was back on his feet nevertheless. “None of them are alive anymore. Only the things inside are keeping them going now.”
“Don’t you have some kind of spray to use? Didn’t your scientist buddies develop a repellent for the little fuckers?”
The question was so ridiculous it actually made sense. The DSC would have undoubtedly been working on a way to kill the spread of something so vile. If they were weaponizing the swarm, surely they would have developed a counteragent—or as Roy had put it, a spray—to neutralize them with. HR was right. I would’ve made a shitty disease research scientist.
The puddle of black fluid from the deer was headed for them. The dead residents of Green Forest Haven were headed for them. Louie ran out into an open field, and Roy followed. “We have to keep out of the forests,” he gasped. “These things can travel faster than us now. Open ground... we have to stay in the open so we can see them coming.”
Roy had caught up to him. “Monsters. You and all the assholes you worked with. No better than the fuckers that dropped the bombs.”
Louie wanted to point out that Roy had a monstrous streak of his own, but there wasn’t time to argue. They had to keep ahead of the swarm, and that was going to be a difficult thing to do.
Tracy hid in the small space under the desk and waited. She had dove under there when the remains of Mrs. Brown rolled down the stairs from the second floor. The woman had always been large, but the thing she had become was a tank—a bloated, purple mass of dripping flesh. Mr. Combes, the comatose resident in room 207, had also put on an extraordinary
