The woman lunged at the man like a cat to a mouse, slamming him onto the bonnet of a car and pinning him down with a superhuman strength unlike anything Lori had ever witnessed. Here was a six foot man being slammed and held down by a woman only three quarters his size and less than half his mass. She grabbed his face in the palm of her hand and slammed the back of his head into the windscreen as he tried to fend her off. The man filming and others around him gasped in shock at what they were witnessing.
“Shit, she has this dude pinned, what the fuck?” The man filming continued.
The woman continued smashing his head into the windscreen until it began to crack behind him and eventually splitting open his skull like a watermelon, to the eruption of screams on the bus. As he lay there semiconscious and losing the strength to fight back, she leaned in and ripped his throat out with her teeth, spraying blood everywhere.
“Ho… ly fuck!” The man filming yelled, as screams only grew louder and more hysterical around him, especially with the sound of glass smashing. More crazed people akin to that woman, threw themselves through the windows of the bus with a complete absence of self preservation and just below the man recording, people could be heard trying to escape, crying out for help, trying to fight back, all in vain.
“Fuck this shit, it's time to go”, the man proclaimed, ejecting from his seat with an invigorated sense of purpose and determination and making his way towards the staircase of the bus, just as more crazy blood covered people stormed up with missing limbs to meet them. That's when the video cut short, the fate of the man left up to interpretation. The video was uploaded 20 minutes ago and with no follow up, one was left to assume the worst.
“That was… intense”, Rachel proclaimed.
“Understatement. What happened to him? Did he survive? My brain just won’t allow me to believe what I’m seeing, it’s too much!” Lori confessed.
“Me too. What happened to those crazy people? They looked possessed”.
“I don't know”.
“I’m scared, Lori. I’m worried sick, about my friends, about my family still at home, about everyone”.
“I know how you feel, but we can’t lose our heads. Now what’s the first thing we should do?”
CHAPTER 14 - CHRISTINE, MARTHA & IRINI
12:21pm - 5 hours, 35 minutes since outbreak in London
. . .
. . .
Having finished making her calls to frantic friends and panicked associates, Christine needed to clear her head, so she decided to take a walk and tend to her mother's blouse whilst her mother called the hospital.
This was all too much and taking a walk would probably result in very little, especially given the hysteria right across the ship at the moment, but it would at the very least ease her mind a little.
She did wonder what sort of ship proceedings there were for these sort of unforeseen circumstances. Would they be able to return to port? Were there procedures in place for if they weren’t allowed to disembark either at their own port or any other country’s? Worst case scenario, what were the diplomatic ramifications for docking at a foreign country they had already travelled most of the way towards?
Perhaps she was getting ahead of herself, she thought, leaving the cabin with the blouse in hand.
Just as she had thought, mass hysteria like she had never witnessed before. Those aboard were demanding free Wi-Fi so that they could continuously connect with family members and friends, others sought someone to distract their screaming children whilst they attended to problems back at home, it was all absolutely preposterous. There was the time flights were grounded throughout Europe because of the volcanic ash threat and she was stuck at a foreign airport for hours at end, but that was about it.
She arrived at the corridor of the number 1062 and noticed several members of staff standing guard outside a cabin door with face masks akin to what doctors wear.
As she drew closer, she quickly realised that this was the cabin she was supposed to visit to resolve the saga of the blood stained blouse. Bemused, as well as nosey, she stopped before the staff and the closed door to ask what was going on.
“Ma’am, you can't go in there. Their son seems to have contracted a virus and is having cold sweats, has gone pale, is twitching profusely and his nose won't stop bleeding”, a male staff member explained.
“Ah, okay, well I only need to collect something from the mother for this…”
“Ma’am, as I said, you can't go in there, his parents appear to have contracted it as well, which means you could, so in the interest of your safety and that of everyone on board, we have quarantined them to this cabin until further notice”.
“Are you serious? They just have to stay there the duration of the trip?”
“Precisely”.
An on board doctor dressed head to toe in medical garb, shoved past her repeatedly saying “excuse me” and entered the cabin, opening the door just long enough for her to catch a glimpse of the ginger haired boy in a fetal position on the bed, shaking and twitching erratically as what looked to be his mother sat next to him holding her head and shaking whilst his almost deathly pale looking father creepily stared at his own reflection in the mirror twitching, not unlike his son.
As the door slowly closed, his eyes caught hers and they locked. It was a mere fraction of a second, but it felt like an
