Caught in the Web Read online

  And why the hell did he have some expensive Euro-trash model rather than a good ol’ American made car like he had growing up? Because Euro speaks success, especially when your clients and marks were expecting you to show that you were successful.

  Yeah, and he was left to suffer.

  He brought his hand back to the leather wheel of the car and started to impatiently tap on it.

  He shouldn’t even have had to sit there as long as he had. This was supposed to have been a quick run up here to pick up his son, Ryan, from his basketball game. Then drop the little rug rat at home to make a tee time with a new client. That was at four, and it was nearing one now. He still had plenty of time, but he didn’t like to wait.

  The damn basketball game was supposed to have been over a half-hour ago. His son knew he wasn’t supposed to shower. He was to hurry out. Luke already had a towel draped over the passenger seat for his sweat-soaked son, and leather treatment for the seats once he dropped him off at home.

  He didn’t like to wait. Clients who made him wait got charged for it. His son making him wait, well…that punishment would come later tonight. He was sure Ryan would have an excuse just like he always did. Damn, when would the boy learn that excuses didn’t do anything but get him into more trouble?

  Luke heard the slamming of the large metal door and looked up in time to see a figure stumbling out the door of the gym.

  It wasn’t his son, but some people coming out meant the game was over, so his son should be following soon enough.

  Little pissant better hurry his ass up, Luke thought as he reached forward, grabbing for his phone.

  * * * *

  Her breathing had slowed, and she no longer felt her heart trying to burst out of her chest. Denise guessed she must have been calming down, but it didn’t feel like she should be. She was still paranoid about what she had just seen. She couldn’t stop herself from looking in the rearview mirror. Were they back there, still following her? Had she driven far enough for them to give up?

  Would she ever be able to run away far enough? She could still see the face of her husband…or what was left of it. Most the flesh had been ripped away, one eye hanging down and touching the bone that had been all that remained where his unshaved cheek once was. That face had been coming after her. That jerky, contorted corpse, covered in what had been his blood, forced its way through the back door of their general practice office.

  She knew the others had been there…the ones who had infected her husband. There had also been that CDC guy, but she only remembered her husband. Her eyes had locked onto his one eye, and she had wanted to see him in there and know that some of him remained. There had been nothing, so she ran.

  She knew she was lucky and had barely gotten away alive.

  She looked in the rearview mirror again. In her mind, she saw him on the road, trying to walk towards her, coming after her. When she actually checked, though, the road behind her was empty. The day was quiet, the sun burning hot, and life seemed to have faded away from the town…as well as her husband.

  She looked down at her phone laying on the floor on the passenger side. She wasn’t one to typically give in to her anger, but after repeatedly trying to call her brother after he hung up on her and getting no signal was something she just couldn’t handle. She had to take her frustration out on her phone so she threw it. She wanted to get out of the car and take a damn hammer to the thing for betraying her.

  After all, how in the hell could her phone do this to her when she needed the damn thing the most?! She needed it. She needed to talk to someone. Even if her brother, whose help she needed so badly, would not talk to her, she could still call someone else, anyone else, who she knew wouldn’t think she was crazy. She just needed to talk, needed to find someone who would listen to her and be there for her. Someone who would wrap her in his arms and tell her all of this was going to be okay.

  She needed her husband.

  She couldn’t stop them this time. The fountain of tears she thought had already flowed through her and had dried up was coming again. She could feel it. She could feel the itch in her nose as the sadness tried to consume her again. He was gone. There were those things, and he was gone. He was infected. He was one of them…whatever the hell they were.

  She wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t let herself cry, but why not? What else did she have now?

  No, no, no, no, no.

  She had to find her brother. She already knew where he was. She just needed to go there and find him.

  Looking around, she hadn’t even realized she had pulled into the parking lot of the middle school. There must have been something going on as the parking lot was nearly full. She absently tried to remember if she knew about it. She had some vague memory, something that Lucy girl mentioned this morning.

  She thought it was odd to have a game at the school on a Saturday after school had already let out for the summer. She did remember reading somewhere about it being some special make-up game against their rivals. The previous game had been canceled due to bad weather or something.

  Denise tried to focus on remembering. It helped get her mind off of what was really going on, but she couldn’t quite remember the full reason as to why.

  She passed a man sitting in his car, then she looked up and watched as the doors opened. A couple people were coming out… Wait, they weren’t people. She noticed how they walked, staggering in that awkward motion of someone who didn’t have complete control over their limbs. Their shirts were covered in a mass of gore, ripped and partially torn away to expose ripped skin underneath.

  In disbelief, she nearly stopped the car to stare at them. How had the things gotten there, as well? Were they all over the town? Had it really spread that far, that fast? That couldn’t be right. Whatever it was, there was no way it could spread like that.

  Not that it mattered. There was no time to stop and think about it. She needed to get out of there and find Tom. He would have to know something about what was happening. She didn’t stop when she hit the edge of the parking lot. She just barreled out into the street amidst a roar of horns from the traffic around her.

  She hadn’t cared if she got hit, and she didn’t know how she hadn’t. Oh, well, she thought. She had to find her brother. He had to know. He had to call someone because this was getting bad.

  She looked again at her phone on the floor, giving it a dark glare, accusing it of being the evil traitor that it was. Damn it!

  * * * *

  Luke felt the car shake as something slammed into it and he finally looked up from his smartphone to see just what in the hell was going on. He had heard the metal doors slamming open, and people had been coming out of the gym. His son, the lazy slob, should have been one of them so that he could get the hell out of there. He had business to take care of, dammit.

  Part of him figured the shaking of the car may have been his son, excitedly rushing because they had won the game. But even he wasn’t that stupid. His son knew that this car and its appearance meant more than his life. He wouldn’t dare run into it.

  Luke looked around and saw that someone had, indeed, slammed into his car, and was now looking at him from the passenger side window.

  “What the fuck?!” he yelled over at the woman. Luke could see she had a dazed look, as though she was staring at him, but not really seeing him. Her mouth was open and it looked like drool was running down in a dark streak along the ridges of her mouth.

  Great, another fucking special ed to deal with, he thought as he looked at the woman. As if his son wasn’t enough to deal with. And was that…? Was she drooling on his car?!

  “Get the fuck away from my car!” he screamed. Part of him wanted to get out of his car, rush around to the woman and shove her away. However, public perception and sales were intertwined, and he couldn’t afford to take a hit on his perception meter. He had too many “big fish” locally so he couldn’t afford nasty talk about him attacking some retarded woman just for drooling on his car.

>   Wait, was that ketchup on the front of her shirt. Great, she was going to rub up against his car and smudge that shit all fucking over. He bet Ryan had put the bitch up to it. There was no way someone could be this messy, and there she was, grinding up against his car. She lifted her head and it looked like she was trying to bite his window when he noticed… No, that couldn’t be. There was not a large part of her throat exposed. It must be some kind of new, in-style tattoo. Like those guys who have parts of their lips and chin removed and rings put in so you could see their teeth. He tried to tell himself that, even as he knew he was looking straight into the trachea and saw that her vocal chords were just hanging by threads of flesh.

  The gym must have had some excellent face painters. That’s all it was. It was nothing more than make-up effects and face paint. In fact, he remembered when his son was at a church lock-in once, and this one guy made it look like he had been shot and part of the bullet was exposed. It was creepy for being at a church function, but it was fascinating how the guy did it. This was just another one of those make-up jobs.

  “Get off the car!” he yelled again. He hadn’t noticed that his hands had balled into fists and his knuckles were white, so he started to stretch them out. He was mad, but he wasn’t afraid. This was all normal. It was just some nut that probably knew his son and was trying to play some bullshit prank on him since his son didn’t have the guts.

  Come on, Luke. Just breathe, he thought as he put his hands back on the wheel. He closed his eyes, blocking out the world around him…the sounds, the sun-filled schoolyard…and mentally started counting to ten.

  He made it to five when his car shook again. His eyes shot open and he turned to look. It wasn’t the woman, though. She was still standing there, looking at him, but now there was another person. This one had slammed against his passenger window and had his face pushed up against it. Both of them stood there, their hands on the glass, the dull eyes looking at him. Their eyes were blank… No, they weren’t quite blank. They were hard to read, but there was something there. It was hard to tell what, though. Where these people stoned? His fingers twitched as he looked at them and he found himself nervously tapping his thighs.

  Just past them, he saw that there were more people coming out of the gym. They were all walking strangely towards his car. They were unbalanced, staggering. Some of them nearly tripped over each other, and some actually fell into others.

  There was another one at the front of his car, walking around towards the driver’s side. When he came around the front of the car and was shuffling up to the driver’s side, Luke could see the right half of his face was missing. Blood still oozed and dripped down the exposed cheekbone. His right eye was hanging outside the socket, held there by what looked like a thin piece of string. Luke couldn’t stop himself. His stomach suddenly lurched and before he could do more than turn his head, he felt the remnants of the morning’s breakfast explode from him and onto the passenger seat. The acrid smell filled his nostrils and when he stopped, the smell made him cramp and vomit some more. Coffee, eggs and sausage… Their strong smells, combined with the smell of his stomach acids, and he couldn’t stop himself from losing more and more of his breakfast.

  More of them slammed into his car. He pulled himself back up, his stomach now only left with the ability to dry heave. The smell just made him want to continue to launch everything he had ever eaten. He had already lost all that he could, but the smell just made it so much worse.

  He looked up at all the bodies that were now around the car. There were at least twenty out there now, slamming into the car. It wasn’t like they were shaking it, like crowds did at riots, pushing to shake and rock the car to get it on its side. No, these things, were reaching their arms out towards him. The ones around the front of the car were hitting it with their bodies as they were trying to climb over to get him, but they seemed to have forgotten how to climb. They were slamming into the car as though they were trying to walk through it to get him. The ones on the sides were trying to reach through the glass, but they were still slamming their bodies into the car. It didn’t seem to register to them that it was there. They just continued to try and grab him through the glass.

  When he looked at the ones on the passenger side, he noticed that the doors were unlocked.

  “Thank God,” he mumbled as he turned back to the door panel to quickly lock the doors. These things weren’t normal, and dumb as a box of rocks. They hadn’t even tried to open the door. They just wanted to keep slamming against it. Well, they could slam into the door all day. It didn’t matter if the door was locked or not. They weren’t getting in.

  He felt the door give way. That comfortable feeling of having the door closed was gone and the door was opening.

  He looked over, but didn’t get the chance to see what was happening before he felt the pull of hands tearing at him, pulling him in different directions. He was being pushed and pulled back and forth like a rag doll. One hand had trailed downward across his face and gripped just below his chin. It was pulling hard. He could feel the nails of the hand dig into the soft flesh of his upper neck

  He knew he was screaming. He felt his lungs exploding. It was hard to hear over the pounding on his car, but he felt the vibrations all over his body.

  Then there was a sharp, searing pain on the side of his face, and he could feel hot liquid streak down his cheek. There was another sharp pain on his arm again, followed by the warm liquid. The nails under his chin moved, then he felt one last searing pain. He saw as one of them, one who looked like she had once been a woman, was moving down to bite his throat.

  The last thing he saw before the darkness took over was her open mouth. Inside, there was a moving darkness. Pouring out of the darkness and crawling around the edge of her mouth were hundreds of little spiders. Then he felt her mouth touch his neck. The pain was almost pleasure as he felt the release of the flesh and the hot, gushing blood that left him.

  Then there was nothing.

  * * * *

  The sergeant stood outside of his command tent and looked across the road at the high corn stalks surrounding them. It was too close to harvest time for this to be happening. The stalks were all too high. They stood there, reaching for the sunlight, basking in the summer heat. With the lack of rain, the corn was a yellowish-green, but it would still support and keep a family fed for another year.

  He didn’t like the problem the corn being so high caused, though. It took away so much of their view and it would be so easy for the very people they were trying to quarantine to just wait until night and sneak past them. He had patrols endlessly going through it, but people could still get through. It was like playing a game of hide-and-seek, but those playing were carrying automatic rifles with orders to shoot. Still, it was easy to get through. All he had to do was remember his childhood when his brother, sister, and himself would run through those cornfields, hiding from each other.

  He turned to look back at the farmhouse that was on the “safe side” of their barrier. More than likely, the field belonged to that farmer, or he owned the house and rented out the land. Either way, the family that lived there was responsible for it. That also meant he probably either owned the equipment or housed the equipment on his land to take care of it. He hoped it didn’t come to him having to-

  He broke off the thought. He didn’t want to think of having to take any drastic measures. Not yet. Not when they still had no idea as to why they were out there, what type of threat they were up against, and why they had to keep people in and away from Hammond.

  The wind blew a subtle gust and he watched as the corn swayed. It was just starting, and he was grateful to feel it as the summer heat had been unbearable without it. He heard the corn as it rustled, and as it mingled amongst one another, he felt like he could hear faint childhood laughter. He heard them, his brother and sister, running away from him because he was “beca

  It wasn’t the first time that day he thought about his sister. Her and her family were
in there. He wanted to call her. He wanted to see how she was, or to try and get her out before anything bad happened. The town was quiet so far, right? Nothing could be happening. There had to be parts of it that were safe. Maybe he could sneak in, leave the corporal to watch the barricade. It wouldn’t take long. He could rush in, maybe take a private or two with him, and he could get them out. It would always be his duty to protect her. She was his little sister and it was up to him.

  However, if he did, it would cost him more than just his position. He could easily get jail time, or worse. If something happened while he was in town, it would be even more on his head. Then there was also not knowing what was in there. He didn’t know what possible danger he could be letting out, or why the town was being quarantined in the first place.

  “Sergeant!” he heard his communications specialist yell. The man hurried to stand and to make his way out to him. The sergeant glowered at him, letting his glare be the command to speak.

  “Sergeant, there is a bunch of chatter on the police band. There seems to be some kind of riot breaking out. Right now, the cops don’t know much. They just know there is a madman killing people in a department store and, just now, there has been a new report of a bunch of people killing and going nuts during some sporting event at the local gym.”

  Wade knew it was a basketball game. He knew because his sister and her son were there. Her son, a pretty good basketball player, was on the team, but Wade thought he wasn’t playing today. He knew about some trouble the kid had gotten into, and he had actually been the one to talk to the coach. Being old high school friends, Wade had talked Sam into keeping his nephew on the team, but making him sit out what would be the most talked about game in a long time. However, he’d only sit out the first three quarters of the game. There was no use in being completely cruel to the boy, but it would teach him a lesson about being a good team player and not torturing his teammates.