Tooth and Nail (Draft In Progress - Book One)

Chapter 9 - And On The Seventh Day

Allen stood dumbstruck, and Jezebel did not move. The spongy ground beneath began to feel warm and not as pleasant as it had when it was still fresh and cold. The walker stayed curled up on its side, crying it eyes out, and making a moaning sound that could rival the noise Allen made when he fell down the stairs in the dark the previous Halloween. Pitiful.

Jezebel opened her mouth to speak, but only inhaled before closing her mouth again, giving her a confused bulge-faced look, as a child would while walking down the hall, instructed by their teacher to "Catch a bubble", to not speak. She stepped forward cautiously, and put her hands on Allen's shoulders, hiding behind him, and rested her cheek on his shoulder. He put his hand around her arm, pulling her against his side. They stared at the boy, crumpled and shaking, until he stopped. He stopped his groaning and teary weeping, then stuck his head out to look and see why he hadn't been killed. They were standing maybe eight feet away, looking befuddled at him. He reflected this. He unfurled, letting his legs out, but stayed in defensive stance, ready to jump. Allen did not move to attack him. The Walker did not move to attack Allen. He stood, faced them, and stared.

And then he did the most human of things: he cocked his head, and furrowed his eyebrows.

And Jezebel laughed.

-~-

The Professor pulled over shortly after sundown. The girls and Connor had fallen asleep under Erissa's blankets. I walked to the front of the bus, and sat down quietly in the front row. He didn't look at me, and I didn't have the courage to break the silence. We looked out the front window at the 46 we'd been riding for a few hours, the outermost ring of the San Antonio layer cake. And I could see the stars. Living on campus between Austin and San Antonio, the light pollution was such that I wondered if anyone would ever see the stars again. I'm sure someday Professor Spooner will wonder if my desire for stars fueled my interest in mass-plague viruses like I was studying. I'd only experimented on rats, and I wasn't searching for a bioweapon. My research only took that turn after the incident on the second floor. Nevertheless, this was not my dream outcome. Perhaps Erissa would be sickly satisfied by the slow cleansing of the world, she's the environmentalist. I'm a virologist. And I didn't need the world to be sick to be satisfied.

"Are you going to tell them?" He finally broke the silence.

"I'm not sure, sir," I began. "I'm not even sure that it's my fault."

"Oh please," Spooner spat. "We both know this reeks of the second floor."

I turned my head down and rested my forehead on the bar in front of me. "I don't know how it could have gotten out of the lab, sir-"

He interrupted, "You were drinking, Jason."

I looked up at him, trying to hold back tears in my guilty red eyes. "A little, sir, but I wouldn't take vials out of the lab, I wouldn't-"

"Jason," he sighed, "I know it wasn't intentional. But you were hungover when I picked you up on Thursday morning, and you're the only person who would have had any knowledge or interest in that vial. You simply wanted to know if you could survive it, well congratulations, you did."

"I didn't mean to, Spooner. I'm sorry," I couldn't hold in my tears any longer.

He raised an eyebrow and shook his head. "Don't apologize to me, apologize to Survivor One back there. The poor kid thinks it's his fault."

"What? Connor? Why would he think that?" I turned to look back into the rows, and saw Connor's head tilted against the window, his hair ruffled and knotted from bouncing and sliding on the glass.

"Because whatever you threw in the trashcan, he was involved in getting it to it's first mouth."

"How do you know that? Has he talked to you?"