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“No you don’t,” Kyle said and reached toward him.
“Stay back!” Bobby said and pointed his gun at Kyle for a moment before pointing it back toward the Arby’s.
The sounds of running grew louder.
And then Annie saw them.
A dozen ragged people sprinting right toward her. Their clothes and faces and hair were drenched in blood and mud and gore, their faces snarling in vicious expressions of hatred and rage. They ran straight at Annie and Kyle and Bobby, and they ran as though they would never get tired.
And when they laid eyes on Annie and Kyle and Bobby, they screamed. Every one of them belted out war cries loud enough to burst their own vocal cords.
Bobby gasped and fired his handgun—pop pop pop—into the oncoming pack. He gripped the two crowbars in his left hand while firing again with his right.
Now Annie understood why everyone else called them those things. They looked like people, but they sure as hell weren’t acting like people.
One of them fell, but Bobby fired wildly and missed most of his shots.
Annie couldn’t believe how fast they were. She expected them to be slow. Weren’t they supposed to be sick? How could sick people run like that?
“Bobby!” Kyle yelled. He came up behind Bobby and wrested the crowbars from his left hand. Bobby released them, but too late. Those things were nearly upon them.
Annie took one of the crowbars from Kyle. Bobby dropped three more of those screaming things before his gun dry-clicked.
“Shit!” Bobby said. And the pack was upon him.
Kyle smashed one in the side of the head while another threw itself at Bobby and bit hard into his forearm. Bobby screamed and fell on his back, the thing still latched by its teeth onto his arm. Kyle smashed it in the head. Then smashed another. The now-dead one that bit Bobby slumped to the ground while Bobby rolled away from it.
One of them, a man, ran right at Annie. She swung her crowbar as hard as she could and shattered its arm. It fell to the ground, made a sound between a grunt and a roar, and looked at her with hatred. Its eyes seemed intelligent. Full of hate, but intelligent. No, it wasn’t intelligence she was seeing. It was focus. Then it stood up and lunged for her. She swung again and clipped it in the shoulder. It staggered.
“Help!” she said.
Bobby was on the ground, useless, bleeding, and moaning in pain.
Kyle faced two by himself.
No one could help her.
She backed up. The thing in front of her just stood there, wounded and stunned with its arms broken. But it still had its teeth like the one that had just bitten Bobby.
She wanted to say something. This thing wasn’t a thing. It was a human being. A man. It was a he. She instinctively wanted to reason with him, but she could tell by the look on his face and in his eyes that he was beyond understanding or caring, like a cornered, aggressive animal.
He stared at her, hating her, yet looking strangely detached at the same time. He—it—looked at her as if she were food.
It was going to lunge again. She could tell. It bared its teeth.
She went straight for the head and heard a sickening wet thwack as she burst its skull like a melon.
It went down like a marionette with its strings cut.
Annie heard three things. Her own rapid breathing, her heartbeat in her ears, and Bobby moaning in agony on the ground.
She looked around. Dead bodies everywhere. Dead people stricken with some awful disease that made them violent. None remained standing, but two were still twitching and one was trying to crawl.
She hugged Kyle. She hugged him hard and couldn’t stop shaking.
“God,” she said and gasped. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. You?”
“I think so.” She could feel her heart slamming inside her chest and against his.
Kyle let her go and turned to Bobby. “He’s bitten.”
Bobby lay on his side now, clutching his wounded arm and whimpering.
“He’ll be okay,” Annie said.
“No, Annie,” Kyle said. “No, he won’t.”
Kyle helped Bobby up while Annie stood aside nervously. He no longer felt any hostility whatsoever toward Bobby, nor did Bobby seem to feel any toward him. But he wondered if Bobby would feel the same way if he hadn’t been bitten.
Bobby closed his eyes hard and blinked as if he couldn’t quite focus. Kyle realized the poor man was in shock. Bobby’s face had gone white, his hands clammy and cold. He covered the bite wound with his good hand. Sticky blood seeped between his fingers. The wounded arm was drenched in the stuff, as were his shirt and his pants.
Kyle needed to be damn sure not to get any of Bobby’s infected blood on himself or on Annie.
“Don’t tell Lane,” Bobby said and winced.
“He’ll know, Bobby. Look at yourself.”
Bobby didn’t look at himself. Instead he raised his gun and pointed it in Kyle’s general direction. Kyle knew Bobby’s magazine was empty. He’d heard the dry click of the firing pin just before that thing sank its teeth into Bobby’s arm. Bobby must have remembered because he holstered it and staggered off to the side.
“Why don’t you give me that,” Kyle said.
“No.”
“We might get attacked again.”
“The fuck do I care?”
“Bobby!”
“I mean, here, take it.” Bobby unholstered the weapon and handed it over. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a full magazine and handed that over too. Kyle loaded the weapon and checked the safety.
“I can’t go back there,” Bobby said. His lips trembled. He was more afraid of returning to the grocery store than staying out on the street.
“Why not?”
“Lane.”
“He doesn’t seem like the easiest person,” Annie said.
“He’s fine,” Bobby said. “He’s great. He saved my life. I’d be dead if it weren’t for Lane. But I’ve been bit. I know what he’s going to do.”
“We don’t kill people who have been bitten,” Kyle said.
“Then you’re an idiot,” Bobby said. “You should shoot me right now.”
Kyle motioned them along.
“The virus is transmitted through bites!” Annie said as though she had only just now figured it out.
“Well, yeah,” Bobby said. “Where the hell have you been, girl?” He grimaced in pain and stopped for a moment. Then he looked at her squarely. “I’m sorry for … you know. For everything.”
“It’s okay,” Annie said. “Let’s go back and get your arm bandaged up.”
“You really shouldn’t touch me,” Bobby said and stepped away from her and from Kyle. “Don’t get any of this blood on you or you might turn too. I couldn’t go back in the store like this even if Lane would let me. It wouldn’t be fair to you guys or the others.”
But he kept walking toward the store with them. He wasn’t ready to sit down and die yet. Kyle didn’t know what he should do, because Bobby was right that he shouldn’t go back to the store. He was infected. His blood was contagious. And he’d turn soon. Into one of them.
Kyle shuddered when he imagined what Bobby would look like after turning. He would be both Bobby and not-Bobby. Mostly not-Bobby.
There was something deeply and terribly wrong with those things, something aside from the obvious, something Kyle couldn’t quite put his finger on, something that made them things instead of people with a disease that made them violent. They looked different in ways too subtle to identify consciously but that were somehow obvious all the same.
A friend of Kyle’s from the high-tech industry in Portland worked on computer animation at home on the side. He hoped to eventually land a job making video games. And he once told Kyle about something all advanced computer-animation artists had to beware of, something they called the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley refers to the instinctive revulsion people feel when they see something that looks almost human but isn’t quite. A robot that looks ninety-nine-percent human will make people far more uneasy than one that only looks seventy-five-percent human. The same applies to animated characters. They need to look 100 percent human or they need to be obvious fakes. Otherwise they’ll be creepy.
The part of the human psyche that feels wary of the almost-but-not-quite human was what recognized the infected as the infected. Their aggression made them obvious too, of course, but Kyle was certain he’d be able to spot an infected even if it was just standing there and not doing anything. He’d seen a few of them briefly standing around before the aggression kicked in, and they stood at weird angles in odd postures that didn’t look comfortable,
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