Prologue: Till Death do Us Part

 

Exhaustion had befallen Corneliu Galca long ago, yet he kept running through the gloomy woods. Though tattered, his clothes reflected a man of fair wealth in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred eighty-eight. But it wasn’t the fiery razing of Brasov by Austrian soldiers that had spurred Corneliu to flee his estate and homeland without possessions. It was what stalked amid the chaos, unnoticed by conquerors until too late.

“Papa, don’t leave us!” Corneliu heard his son and daughter cry out, far behind him.

Their voices invoked terror in him that overrode feeling fatigued, and Corneliu shifted to a staggering sprint. Each misty huff of breathe came with a whimper and the smell of the dinner he’d eaten nine hours ago. Despite a frigid winter’s night, his chest, shoulders and legs burned. Many backward glances he cast in fear of what may come from behind.

Neither the soft pounding of dogs’ paws nor the hard thump of horse hooves did Corneliu hear. What swished were deft feet lighter and faster than his heavy booted steps. They knew Corneliu had one avenue of escape. He couldn’t count on help from fellow Romanians, who dreaded the advancing Austrian banners, nor the aid of the invaders. He had to leave his country behind, if he could.

“Papa, we love you! Help us!” His children’s desperate pleas sounded from either side.

“No!” Corneliu’s lips trembled as he begged under his heaving breath.

Even with gaps in the forest canopy, Corneliu couldn’t be sure in which way he headed. Clouds consumed the starlight, leaving him only to hope he had maintained a roughly north-west heading. Anywhere else meant being boxed in by the Carpathian Mountains.

Nearly falling several times more during his panic-fueled run something caught his next rasp in his throat. He frightfully clutched at a tree. It was sobbing. A woman sounding like her face was covered by her hands and her heart buried by grief. Corneliu knew that wail too well.

Cautious as to avoid making any sound, Corneliu advanced with slow steps, feeling out where to plant each foot. Though his eyes adjusted to dark as best they could, he strained to see the ground under the abyssal night time forest. He couldn’t risk being found by his children. That would only draw the others who had wrought the disaster in the night.

Yes, he was sure now, it was Alina who wept. Corneliu’s beloved wife, whom he thought lost.

“They’re dead,” she wailed, allowing Corneliu to home in on her. “All dead!”

At last came the relief of light, for Corneliu found Alina kneeling next to a weakly burning torch she’d brought with her. The torch had been stabbed solidly upright into the frozen ground. Alina too had fled, but she couldn’t bring herself to run any further, when her grief burst through. She rocked on her knees, her bare feet uncovered by her simple nightgown. Hugging herself against the cruel night’s chill, Alina cried alone.

“I can’t believe they’re dead!” She screamed so loud at the heavens that it gave Corneliu a jolt.

Feeling his own tears well up, Corneliu approached with assuring hushes.

“Dead, dead, dead,” Alina sobbed, beating the cold earth.

Corneliu gently gripped her shoulders, which brought no start from his devoted wife.

“Yes, my love, our children are dead. I know,” he whispered, giving her a soft shake to bid her stand.

In a furious spin at waist level, Alina flashed her bloodless face and a morbid gaunt grin at him. But it was her eyes that foretold Corneliu’s end: opaque grey irises and pupils encroached by inky black at the fringes. In the failing torchlight he saw that Alina too had become a walking plague.

“No,” her corpse hissed with in sadistic glee at the ruse. “Me! I’m dead!”

Before he could think to get away, she grabbed Corneliu’s head and drew him in.

He felt many stabbing pinches, as a mouthful of sharp teeth sank into his neck. In a backward rip of her head, Alina tore away a sheet of skin, a strip of muscle and much of his windpipe, slashing open his artery in the process. Warm blood splashed them both, as his dead wife plunged her face into his gaping flesh.

Unable to help himself, Corneliu tried to scream and thrashed wildly. The only ones to hear didn’t come to his aid. No, Corneliu’s own children rushed in to have their fill, before Alina drained away all of his living red essence. As with his wife, all seven of his progeny had been slain by vampires. Yet two children had refused to remain in the earth. They had come straight home once risen, and must’ve bled their mother dry.

So too was Corneliu’s fate as his strength evaporated and his body stilled. The horrified expression on his face and filling his eyes remained long after he breathed his last in the dead of night.

 

 

Chapter 1: Lupercalia Day Massacre

 

Maybe it was fitting, Hayden Cornell thought, as he texted into his phone. The sandy-blonde chemical engineer, his hair speckled with gray and more grayed at the temples, had set up an online messaging account a minute ago. Fitting that the outbreak started on the fourteenth of this month of all months.

He heard a distant metallic clink and turned his head. He had crouched down in the hall. Hayden shifted from one heel to the other. His white dress shirt sliding against his skin and the crack of one knee were the only sounds he made.

To each end of the hall, most of the overhead lights were off, but not those at the corners. It revealed to him that the office building he’d broken into was on emergency lighting, and that meant most of the building’s power was off. The city’s power grid remained up for the time being, but a number of documentaries he’d seen and books he’d read warned how short-lived that might be. Hayden wasn’t sure if the backup power here would’ve lasted as long as that of the chemical engineering lab where he formerly worked. Regret over his choice of hideouts welled up. He needed to find the main breakers for the building.

However, the ground floor of the office building appeared, upon first entering, to have few entrances. He lucked out on finding keys that proved to belong to a security guard, because they worked on all the building’s doors. The basement floor, into which he retreated further, had but one stairwell now locked off, and two elevators that he had since shut down.

Reassured just a little more now than a moment ago, Hayden still found himself nervously rolling the knot of his black, silver and gray tie between fingers. After rereading his text, he posted it, and began drafting another.

Today, people think of Valentine’s Day as being about love, Hayden keyed in with his right thumb. Well, hearts are involved. That’s the number one organ to stab or rip out.

Another sound, one Hayden couldn’t identify, came from the floor above somewhere. He glanced to the metal door next to him, and wondered what people would think if they saw what he brought with him. Terms like sick, insane and death- wish would enter loud conversation.

It’s not just people that come back, Hayden began his third post. Animals too, or at least mammals. And there’s no rhyme or reason for why some species are susceptible and others not.

Here’s a clue, he entered a fourth posting. Don’t waste your time on apocalyptic pathogens, mutant DNA, ancient curses or space aliens. This is more world changing than any of that shit.

After sending that to his account, Hayden stopped and shut the phone off. He had to consider how much more survivors could handle at this point. For that matter, Hayden wondered if it would be good for him to spread so much so quickly. A lot of people looked suspiciously on those well informed.

With joint-creaking sloth, Hayden stood up in the hall. He listened with intensity to the sound as his gray slacks shifted. Putting the phone in his pocket, he gripped the door handle and braced his other hand between it and the doorframe. Half-expecting someone to burst around the corner, he eased the door open and went back inside.

Hayden entered the mailroom again, and gazed down its length to the freight elevator he’d used to move everything he brought. That included two gurneys with partial human outlines under several heavy white sheets. Lacking the lab’s best equipment and facilities, Hayden asked himself, yet again, why he had brought these two bodies. As widespread and crazy as things got throughout the city, the chemical engineer doubted he could produce useful answers in time to help anyone, maybe not even himself.

And to think yesterday morning it all seemed like a normal day—.

* * *

After parking in the staff-reserved lot, Hayden shut off his car and grabbed his briefcase before heading into work. On the way through the front door, he unbuttoned his crimson and white sport jacket Inside, Hayden spotted James, the security guard behind the desk as usual for the morning shift.

“Season’s over, you know,” James called out, having noted the large, white stylized ‘A’ on the left side of Hayden’s coat. “And ‘Bama took a beating last year. Don’t look too good next year, either.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hayden dully accepted, holding out his ID badge with emphasis on his answering middle finger.

James scanned his badge with a chuckle and buzzed him in. Hayden left behind the reminder of just how the Crimson Tide got rolled, and headed first for his office.

Several folders, many more individual sheets of paper, and scores of Post-Its covered his desk in a haphazard arrangement around the computer, obscuring the keyboard. He peeled off the one sticky-back memo that looked new and read it. Afterward, he pulled out a felt tip marker to scribble the entire piece black and then drop it into a shredder. A full sheet printout caught his eye, which Hayden picked up to read as well.

A knock at his open door drew Hayden’s attention to one of the lab aides who stopped at his office. “The shipment’s in.”

“Alright, I’ll be down to sign off in a minute,” Hayden said, and sat at his desk. He noticed that his computer monitor showed black rather than being off, indicating the power saver mode had kicked in after he’d left it on again last night.

“Son of a bitch,” Hayden cursed, while reaching under the mess of paperwork for the mouse.

Waving the mouse back and forth on the desk brought the monitor up, and a moment after that, the computer. There appeared the progress report file that he had left open. Over it was an automatic timeout notification for his log-on. Given the subject of his report, Hayden wanted to bang his palm against his forehead.

Instead, he logged on to access his profile history between then and now.

Satisfied nothing undue had taken place in his absence, Hayden logged off. Then his cell rang with Vincent Price’s laughter.

“Yeah, hello,” Hayden said after pressing talk, standing up and placing his other hand on his hip.

“We need results,” the cryptic voice ordered.

“We just got these things a month ago,” Hayden explained. “Half the equipment I requisitioned hasn’t even shown up yet. You’re just going to have to give me time, like I said from the start.”

“We’re out of time,” the man’s low tone countered. “It’s already becoming a problem in Eastern Europe, and heading your way at one thousand, seventy miles an hour.”

“Whoa,” Hayden said in mild alarm with his hand out, as if the caller could see. “Wait a sec. I thought the outbreaks were few, isolated and sporadic.”

“That was last week,” the unknown caller informed him. “The situation’s changed.”

“Look,” Hayden pressed his case, absently turning around. “We’re barely starting here.”

“Do you think the lab is safe?” the mystery voice asked.

“What’s not safe? Electronic locks, mandatory ID checks, armed security...” Hayden listed.

“Safe from them.” The other man emphasized just enough for Hayden to get his point.

“Oh,” Hayden caught on, and paused for grave consideration. “No, I imagine not.”

“Grab what you can and get out,” he warned, sounding hard but not cross. “You got nine hours.”

The connection died on that, and Hayden lowered the phone slowly. At first, he eyed the confines of his office, and then stared at the floor gnawing at a thumbnail in thought. Then he walked out at a brisk pace. He headed for the makeshift quarantine lab, formerly a walk-in freezer. Inside, lay two gurneys and some of his lab equipment, around which his lab aides and a Fed Ex driver were standing.

Hayden accepted the electronic clipboard and scribbled a rushed signature. “Cornell,” the driver asked, after reading the LCD copy. “Like the university?”

“Yes, the spelling’s the same,” Hayden said.

“Did you go there?” came the driver’s inquiring attempt for small talk.

“Does it look like I went there?” Hayden said, showing his jacket letter.

He waited for the driver to leave before grabbing a roll cart and starting to pile on the new boxes.

“Where do you want that to go?” one of the assistants asked him.

“Take this down to that armored truck in the garage,” Hayden said, and pointed around. “This other stuff too. Everything we were setting up here’s going with us. I’ll handle these two.”

“Going where?” the other aid asked.

“Apparently,” Hayden prefaced. “They think the effect’s going to escalate and hit us tonight.”

“Serious?” the second aide questioned.

“Yeah,” Hayden nodded, starting to feel his breathing rate increase. “We can’t do this here.”

Hayden loaded up a second cart and sent the aids on their way. Then he walked to the front security desk to see James still alone, but flipping through security cameras on his terminal.

“Who all else is with you?” Hayden asked.

“Just Sarah,” James answered, turning in his seat. “Why?”

“Shit’s gonna hit the fan, and I need you guys riding shotgun.”

Familiar with the possibility of an epidemic but not the nature, James asked, “When do we leave?”

“Soon as I get things loaded up,” Hayden informed him. “We’re taking the armored truck, so grab a set of keys for it and meet us down there. Bring whatever weapons you got.”

James shot up from his chair and left the front desk, while Hayden returned to the lab for the first gurney. He passed the aides with empty carts, one at a time, heading toward the elevator, and told both to reload them with everything else that was portable. Down in the warehouse floor, Hayden rolled the gurney up to the security truck. James, who stood six-four, easy, waited next to a woman in matching security uniform, with high cut, dark curly hair, who stood nine inches shorter.

“What’s that?” Sarah asked, pointing to the bulge under the many sheets.

“Never you mind,” Hayden admonished, more curtly than he intended. “Just stay up front.”

Hayden pushed the gurney into the open back, which caused the first set of wheels to fold up underneath. Halfway in, he came around and folded up the second set before rolling the gurney all the way to the back. Lifting the sheets just enough to see whether the straps were tight, Hayden dropped them without looking at what they held down. Looking around a moment, he found some bungee cords he then used to secure the gurney in place. Then he went back for the second.

“Comet UFO cults, evangelical raptures, Mayan doomsday, crazy polygamists,” Hayden muttered on the way to the elevator while rubbing the knot of his tie. “Guess this one’s for real.”