High Water Read online

  As soon as Pete had started to get used to the subwoofers’ pulsing beat, the music dropped out, revealing the sounds of the watery massacre. Dread dropped a cold chunk of pig iron into his gut.

  “We have to go,” Pete said loudly. “Like right fucking now!” He moved quickly, trying to herd everyone back toward the locker room door. There could be hundreds of people infected, he thought, but kept the notion to himself for now. Liz looked backward warily as their group started to move a little faster. Pete could barely see the outline of the locker room door across the park from where he stood. The way was clear and they were headed in the opposite direction of the terrible shit behind them. Anywhere was safer than where they had been. Pete was still scared and jittery, but felt more in control on the move.

  “The water is contaminated. It’s very important not to get into the water or otherwise get it on you,” Pete said loudly. Liz and Bryan both gave him blank stares, so he continued, “I can’t tell whether the infection goes through the skin or through mucous membranes. It kind of doesn’t matter, we just need to stay out of the water.” His speech elicited some nods from his party.

  Movement became easier as they broke into a rhythm. Crying Girl was no longer crying and finally moving on her own, but Bryan was slowing down. A sudden fit of coughing erupted from the man and echoed through the dark room. Bryan doubled over in distress, his hacking cough getting worse.

  “My throat, need water,” Bryan gasped before he started to cough again.

  “Not this water!” Pete hissed. He slapped Bryan on the back a few times, remembering that he had done the same thing to Walter earlier today. Bryan shook his head, stifling another cough.

  “Pete, up ahead,” Liz whispered, her voice wavering. He looked up.

  Standing between their party and the door was a short, stocky figure. In the murky light of the water park, one could just make out pasty white legs and two floating orbs, disembodied eyes. The figure stared directly at them for a brief moment, blinked, and broke into a slow jog in their direction. Crying Girl was lucid enough to see doom coming for her and started to scream. She pushed past Liz and ran through the slide supports into the darkness. Liz looked like she wanted to follow, but Pete grabbed her arm.

  “DON’T follow her. How do we get out of here?” he said, staring at Liz intently. There was no sense chasing the girl down when a threat was imminent. Pete felt something in his mind slip away. Maybe it was his conscience, he reflected grimly. These split second decisions for their survival were getting easier.

  Liz looked surprised for a moment. Then she nodded nervously and answered, “The only exit on this side of the park is through the locker room. It’s locked but I have my keys.”

  “We can’t make it without fighting that guy,” Pete responded. As the stocky figure got closer, Pete thought he heard Bryan say something.

  “What?”

  “Pump… access!” Bryan croaked, pointing just above them. They followed his gesture toward a deployable ladder a few yards away, stealthily painted to match the off-white of the support struts holding up Slider Mountain. The release mechanism wasn’t obvious to Pete. Liz went for it first, using some of the nearby struts to climb.

  Everything happened all at once. Preparing for the imminent fight, Pete sized up the stocky man, whose eyes dripped a cloudy fluid from sickly blonde-colored sores around his eyes. As Pete studied his opponent, noting the thick, powerful arms and low center of gravity, he heard Bryan gasp. A tall, thin woman in a bright orange swimsuit, hunter orange, Pete’s brain registered dimly, darted out of the shadows to attack Bryan. She caught him with a powerful, wide strike from her balled fist.

  There was no chance to do anything about it. The stocky man moved faster than Pete would have imagined, attacking him with a flurry of furious blows. He blocked a few, testing his enemy, unnerved by the uncanny grin on the man’s face. The same perverted perfume he’d experienced earlier reached into his awareness again, instinctually revolting. His squat opponent followed up with another barrage of attacks, allowing Pete to block two blows while taking one in the gut.

  Earlier today, in kung fu class, he had told Adam to always give back what he got. The strike to Pete’s gut was exchanged for a left handed palm to the chin, raising the man’s head just enough for Pete to aim a crane wing at his neck, using the forearm as a weapon. Having trained with the principle of Iron Body, using repeated minor impacts to harden the bone, Pete’s forearm must have felt like a length of rebar when it slammed into the throat of the short man.

  Kung fu didn’t hesitate to strike the vitals.

  No longer grinning, a clenched fist missed Pete completely. The miss allowed him to sidestep and deliver a strong hammer fist to the man’s kidney. He followed up with a short kick to the knee, dropping his assailant to the ground. The stocky man’s face was already purple, his hands clutching at his neck. Pete turned his back on the stocky man knowing the punch to the throat was likely fatal. He stood panting after the painful blow to his torso.

  Bryan was holding his own against the tall woman. Throwing some powerful but ill-advised punches, he was still staying on his feet. The woman lunged and grabbed, but he danced out of the way. Before Bryan could land another wind-up punch, a short girl with blonde pigtails materialized out of the darkness. She tackled him from behind, knocking Bryan and his two assailants to the ground. Bryan’s face hit the pavement hard. “You took MY JACKET, WHERE’s my JACKET,” Pigtails screamed from the floor, clawing at Bryan’s legs. It was less a question than it was an utterance without context, purely psychotic.

  Blood thudded in Pete’s ears, and his vision narrowed to focus on the two women trying to beat Bryan to death. The tall woman pounded hard on Bryan’s temple before getting a kick to the face from Pete. The ball of his foot whipped her head backwards. With her jaw dislocated and tongue hanging out, she was dazed long enough for him to bring another sweeping roundhouse kick across the face of Pigtails. Enough of his awareness remained to hear Liz’s warning.

  “Behind you, Pete!”

  The warning probably saved him. Pete turned just in time to deflect some of the power of a punch aimed at the back of his head. Having sparred many times, with and without a helmet, he had been hit in the head before. But there was a rage behind the bare-knuckle strike that made it particularly vicious. In its wake, Pete’s ear felt like it had been torn off. Accustomed to being hit, he lost no time, knowing how to ignore rising pain when action was needed. When he had started training, Sifu had told him that technique always overcame power. Strength of arms was not the only factor in a fight. As long as you were trained past the point of hesitation, skill was much more of a determinant.

  Catching the opponents’ arm with his and using the mantis technique to make the arm a lever, Pete swept the newcomer, a Southeast Asian man, to the floor. Still holding the arm, he stepped over it and squatted down. Dropping his weight, he used his tailbone to break bone. The limb split easily, the shearing away of muscle from bone seeming as easy as pulling ripe peach flesh away from the pit. With a wounded ear and adrenaline pumping through his veins, the loud crack of the breaking bone barely registered.

  There was no substitute for sloppy technique, Pete reflected coldly.

  Settling into a zone of violent expression, activity around him seemed to happen in slow motion. The smell of blood mixed with the scents of rotten cantaloupe and chlorine was over powering. But his mind sorted the odor information out and set it aside as being extraneous. Instead of focusing on details, Pete let fighting instinct whisper to him that the punch was coming. He turned as Pigtails tried to hit him in the ribs, and deflected some of the punch’s power. He managed to ram an elbow hard into the girl’s arm. It was not enough to drop her, but staggered her momentarily. He chanced a look over to Liz. She had deployed the ladder and was beckoning him from some kind of catwalk. He could see she was screaming words at him, but couldn’t hear anything.

  Two hands grabbed his shoulders, and he sa
w Pigtails getting ready to attack him again. Intuition told one to pull away from a grapple, but Shaolin and other arts preached the opposite. Rather than try to pull away, he stepped between the legs of the opponent behind him. Pete grabbed as much arm as he could and twisted his torso. For good measure, he roared a kiai, adding his chi to the throw. The tall woman sailed over his shoulder. Without waiting, he stood and sent another elbow in the direction of the smaller girl, viciously connecting with her temple as she charged into the blow. Pigtail’s feet buckled and she crumpled to the floor, as a pained expression lit up her face.

  Pete gasped for air. A quick visual check on the tall woman splayed out a few feet away revealed a broken neck. The Southeast Asian man whose arm he had broken was cradling the ruined limb, bawling through brown-sugared eyes like a child. Whatever these individuals still felt, a compound fracture was too much pain for the infected brain to ignore.

  “Pete!” cried Liz.

  More figures plunged out of the darkness, one of them leaping over the body of the stocky man he had disabled earlier. Pete used the split second to lunge for the ladder, almost escaping another blow to his ribs. The breath left his lungs again, but he managed to get part of the way up the ladder. Liz’s outstretched hand grabbed his shirt and hauled him up to the catwalk.

  Pete drew a deep breath, his pulmonary system lagging far behind the exertion of his muscles, but inhaling was not without some pain. Some harsh hits had been taken in that last melee. He watched Liz slash her knife across the eyes of Pigtails, whose head disappeared. Liz then raised the knife and bellowed her own primitive kiai, bringing it down in a glistening arc into the crusty, caked eye of a man in a black t-shirt. Rage and desperation drove the knife deep, burying it to the hilt, but the man’s fall wrenched the weapon from her grasp.

  Having regained some of his breath, Pete shimmied over to Liz and helped her kick a different girl in the face until the girl fell down the ladder. Below, he saw a Hispanic man with surprisingly little ocular discharge lunge out of the darkness, making a beeline for the prone figure of Bryan. Several other figures joined the man in the ghastly execution of Liz’s friend. Achieved with nothing but bare hands, the thudding of fists on skin and soft tissue was unbelievably loud. The man tried to cry out when a kick took him across the jaw, blood and teeth spraying out to the side. A stab of empathy hit Pete as he watched Bryan’s face get stamped into the concrete, but there was nothing they could do.

  Pete grabbed Liz and limped to the other side of the catwalk, passing various knobs and nozzles. They climbed another ladder to a second catwalk. As he ascended, he noted that the howls below them didn’t get any closer. He guessed that Bryan’s involuntary sacrifice had shifted attention away from them. As much as Bryan had been a prick, his grisly death was buying them time. At the top of the second ladder, among the howls of the infected, Liz grabbed him in an embrace.

  “Those people, Pete, we killed them,” she cried, the cracking in her voice muffled by his shirt. “And Bryan…”

  “… saved us.” When shit hit the fan, the big dude had not hesitated. Pete felt regret and guilt. It could have just as easily been him and Liz down there.

  Liz clutched at his shirt. “What’s going on?”

  “Something terrible, baby,” he said, touching the back of her head and holding her close. “You were right, there’s some horrific shit in the water,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything spread so fast. The whole place is an incubator.”

  “Do we have it?” she said, choking back a sob.

  “I feel pretty decent.”

  A small laugh escaped through her sobs and she squeezed him tighter. From his vantage point, Pete had a bird’s eye view of half the water park. He could see bodies lying still and strewn across the floor, with continuing scuffles raging between half naked individuals in the stage pool. A sudden pain in his arm brought Pete’s attention to a tooth lodged just above the spur of his elbow. Grinding his own teeth, he yanked it out and maroon blood pulse out of the wound. He watched as his blood dripped off his elbow, through the catwalk and into the dark below.

  Patting his pockets, Pete realized his phone was in the car. But Liz had already broken away and had her cell phone out, focused on getting them deliverance. It took several tries because of poor reception in the building, but somehow Liz was connected and he listened to one-half of her conversation.

  “Hello yes, my name is Liz Boyer and I’m at Tahitian… yes… yes, they attacked us... yes, it’s me and my boyfriend, Pete… no, we don’t have it… look, what the hell is going on? When are you guys going to get here? ... no, wait!... NO!” Liz pulled the phone away from her ear, looking at the device as if it was infected too.

  “They put me on hold!” she said in disbelief.

  In the Name of the Funk

  The Cutlass drifted down the middle of the empty freeway, grey smoke billowing from the window. Walter turned the levels up for “Machine Gun Funk”, absent mindedly rhyming along as he tried to take a hit off Challenger, a parting gift from Pete. Biggie Smalls bombastically rapped about his imminent death as Walter thought about the massacre that just went down at Crescent City Diner. It had been way too long since he’d had a burger, though the meat had been runny and rare. Still, pretty delicious. As Walter clutched the bong between his knees, his phone rang out a notification. He considered not taking it, thinking twice about committing three offenses simultaneously. But the roads were clear and, being honest with himself, he didn’t really give a single shit.

  The phone displayed several missed calls and texts, all from Liz, and some as long as twenty-five minutes ago:

  Need help at tahtin water adv something in water dead people infected

  Walter, please come

  Pete and I are trapped

  cops put us on hold, and we can’t get out

  please

  “What the… fuck…” he said aloud. Keeping an eye on the road and balancing the stem of the bong with his elbow, he thumbed back:

  You need me to come?

  He coasted for two miles, barely able to keep his eyes on the road, but there was no reply.

  Attentive to his phone, Walter only saw the cat out of the corner of his eye. Streaking out of the darkness of the road’s shoulder, it made a perpendicular line across the street. Swerving to avoid it, he barely managed to miss a hanging tree branch before regaining control of the car. In the process, Challenger tipped over, spilling hot coals and bong water all over his lap.

  “Son of a…!” The cherry would have seared through his pant leg if it wasn’t drenched with dirty water.

  Sirens and brilliant flashing lights made Walter look up. A line of squad cars raced past, hauling ass in the other direction. He knew where they were headed and pulled his parking break, swinging the car around. The Cutlass’ engine hesitated only momentarily when he slammed on the gas. He sped toward Tahitian Water Adventures, hoping he’d be there in time.

  Caliginous Night

  “How long has it been?” Liz whispered.

  “At least an hour,” Pete whispered back.

  She didn’t reply. Liz’s phone battery was running down fast as the device tried to find service in the building. Almost everything came back as undelivered, including texts to her parents who lived the next town over. Clutching her bricked device, Liz looked down the ladder. Prowling shapes below fought and carried on among themselves. Pete was done looking. He knew there were many more down there in the dim abyss below, baying like dogs on a scent. Even more disconcerting was that occasionally you could catch them murmuring to themselves with a frightening single-mindedness.

  Ever since they had escaped immediate danger, Pete’s wounds had paraded into his awareness one by one. His fists were swollen up like hams and his ribs had taken a beating. Despite his form when he kicked, his foot felt tweaked as well. Stone cold sober, body and mind alike implored him to stay still, to wait out of danger for his wounds to heal. It wasn’t a choice since they had nowhere to go. N
ot wanting to make noise, Pete and Liz had kept their speaking to a minimum. The practical response to the danger around them rubbed his psyche thin, forcing him to confront his hurts and demons on his own. He sat in pain pondering his next move. Or whether there would be one at all.

  It didn’t help his idle fears that most of the lights from the stage had gone out a few minutes ago. All that remained was this already murky building plunging into inky darkness along with their waning hope.

  What were the cops waiting for? Were they sealed in? If the authorities were smart, they’d quarantine the building and shoot anyone trying to exit. That’s what the feds, perhaps even the CDC, would do. It was anyone’s guess how local cops were handling the situation. Pete did not imagine it would end well for anyone stuck in the building, infected or uninfected. That reality kept creeping into his mind, unbidden and unwanted.

  The only choice was to settle in for a long wait. For what, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps some change in the situation that would give them a fighting chance. He shifted trying to find a more comfortable spot, but the metal walkway was not meant for sitting.

  Pete thought through what he knew, trying to settle the unease and paranoia that gnawed hungrily at his already raw nerves. He was looking for something that resembled an answer to Liz’s original concern: what was in the water? The park was warm, wet, and untreated, perfect for carrying to gestation an organism of a sort that Pete had never seen. Nor his colleagues, he suspected. When, or if, they ever got out, he was determined to get to the bottom of what made it tick.

  His graduate work had been on the dominant strain of the malarial protozoa, Plasmodium falciparum, which had spread havoc over multiple continents and affected countless millions of people. The strain was well researched, but still had properties that made it difficult to deal with efficiently. For Pete, it had been both a moral and scientific obligation to find novel ways of combating the evasive, complex disease.