Чак Хоган - The Blood Artists

She crept along to the corner where he had stood. She looked down the two narrow blocks and saw a number of yellow suits moving about, lit by car headlights. Maryk’s men had converged on Zero’s car. In doing so, they had cut off his only means of escape.

She turned toward the busier street, seeing his skinny, shadowed back against its bright lights as he shuffled off the sidewalk. A large structure of concrete stairs faced him across the street, rising, and there were people crawling all over the steps, and great, elevated train rails running from the building. The bright sign in front read MARTA, and even without understanding the acronym, she knew that it was a mass transit station.

She looked back down the two long blocks to the BioCon agents. Her yell would not be heard. And if she ran to them now, she would not be able to tell them where Zero had gone.

She turned and hurried after him to the bright, busy street, and across it toward the bustling station. Every commuter there was a potential host. Zero’s only form of safe transportation was gone now, and he was desperate, and in pain. He had been forced to flee, and doing so, to infect.

He remained hunched over, head down, moving to the far curb as cars dropped off and picked up passengers around him. No one seemed to notice him at first. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked up at the MARTA station above him as a sleek subway car slid away on an elevated rail like a centipede.

She slowed and waited for cars to pass before reaching the sidewalk, wheezing as she hit the curb. She looked around frantically. She had lost him.

She pushed ahead through the evening commuters, onto the stairs. She hurried up a few more steps, then stopped and looked back, and Zero was right behind her. He was gripping the handrail and climbing the stairs one step at a time. Somehow she had passed him, and she froze now as he moved up to her step, moving right next to her. She could see right into his bleary red eyes, and the pain fluttering his lids.

He moved right past her, pulling himself step by step up the high stairs. She exhaled and looked around her as though she were invisible, then brought her hands up to her face. She felt the odd strands of fiber there. Her wig. Zero hadn’t recognized her without her cranberry hair.

The commuters were now becoming aware of this gaunt, sick-looking figure rising through them, and ceding him ample room. He used the handrail to haul himself over the top step — this sick, hobbling thing — onto the mezzanine, into the Atlanta subway system.

Melanie pushed through to the top. She didn’t see him there, only the turnstiles ahead. She looked back from the landing high above the street, and could see a Mack truck blocking a road two blocks away, part of Maryk’s plan to cut off Zero’s perceived escape. She scanned the street below, but there were no yellow suits from the BDC following her.

She clambered over a turnstile, jumping the fare. She stumbled as she landed but righted herself and pressed along a rising, spiraling brick wall, a walkway leading to twin open-air platforms.

Zero was there. He was standing at the yellow safety line at the edge of the platform, sagging slightly like a drunk. Others were cleared away from him, though not far enough. This was it. They were all being infected. She was witnessing the spark of what would be a catastrophic urban outbreak.

She searched the platform desperately. A sign on the wall told her she was on an outbound track, and she found a wall map and searched madly for a “You Are Here” arrow as the platform began to rumble. A train was coming. She wanted to scream, and finally found her station on the map as the subway cars approached. She was at the second-to-last outbound stop. She traced the line to its next and final destination.

Hartsfield International Airport.

The lead subway car glided in behind her, and she looked frantically for a policeman or subway official, anyone wearing a shirt of authority or carrying a two-way radio, even a custodian. The train doors opened and commuters were bunched up on the platform, waiting for passengers to disembark. All were hosts and carriers, every jostle an exchange. She watched as Zero entered the side doors of one of the central cars.

There would be no stopping him once he got inside the airport. Twenty infected people, boarding twenty different flights, and the human race was dead. Viruses love airports, Maryk had said.

She could go to the token booth and tell them to stop the train, but no one would pay any attention to her. Maryk could make them, but she could not get to him in time. By then Zero would be colonizing the airport and spreading city to city.

Why? Why? Why? she was thinking as she hurried toward the car Zero had entered, slipping aboard just as the doors closed behind her. She immediately turned and faced the opposite end so that she did not have to look at him, and only then realized that it hadn’t been necessary to board the same car he had boarded. But the doors were closed and the train started with a jolt, rising, gaining speed along an incline. She looked out the side window and could see the BDC roadblock on the streets below, small and shrinking away.

They cleared the lights of the station and the car windows darkened into mirrors. In the window of the door at her end she could see the reflection of Zero standing behind her. He was wavering, feet planted evenly, moving with the motion of the train.

People sitting near him began to stir. At first they were merely uncomfortable in the presence of an obviously ill man. Then they noticed the smell. Politeness crumbled as first one young woman rose from her seat and moved toward Melanie’s end, then a professional couple, then an elderly man making a face.

They were all going to die. The distasteful smell was carrying microbes into their lungs to poison their blood. And Melanie was their only antidote, standing right there with them — and there was nothing she could do. These thoughts dizzied her, and squeezed her lungs. Her nerves were jumping. She went to her inhaler again, but using it was like trying to inflate a lead bag.

Some sixth sense of trouble had kicked in, beyond his stink and odd appearance, and the people thrown together on the subway car stared in silence at the quiet marauder facing them. Melanie watched his reflection in the flickering light as he glowered back at his victims, red-eyed and knowing, his head low and bobbing and the mask covering his face dark at the edges, seemingly wet with his own saliva. He was not holding the pole now. He was standing free, his gloved hands trembling at the ends of his hanging arms. She wondered fleetingly why he still bothered to wear the mask and gloves.

The car began to slow and the riders edged around the doors on Melanie’s end, anxious to exit and in doing so spread the disease to the airport and the rest of the world. How long did Melanie have before they were actively infectious? A few hours, perhaps.

The train stopped and the doors opened, and the carriers quickly scattered away.

Melanie was the last to leave, even after Zero. He lurched across the platform ahead of her, people granting him wide berth, and then he was through the revolving doors, inside the airport and into the bloodstream of civilization.

Melanie followed behind. She hoped to see suited BDC agents and airport security people waiting to pounce, but there were only travelers, hundreds of them, rushing this way and that. Parents toting luggage and children, couples with pet kennels and garment bags, business travelers, all moving with quiet, airport determination. She was the only one there who knew what was happening.

The main lobby of Hartsfield airport was a high, ornate, circular glass-roofed atrium surrounded by concessions and decorated with tall trees and an elaborate display of ivy. She shadowed Zero through it, past the baggage carousels, past car rental stalls and a vacant shoe shine stand, waiting for some burst of inspiration. But he just kept pulling himself ahead. He moved beyond the concessions, and she stayed with him, tracking him past the ticket counters, moving deeper and deeper into the airport. He had to be stopped. She kept praying to see Maryk come rushing up behind her.