An Ordinary Call Led Us to a House of Carnage, and Now I’m On the Run | Part 2
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I awoke to the sound of a phone buzzing, pulling in a breath and pulling myself up at the waist. I peered around in surprise, looking for Donovan. My skull throbbed like a jackhammer was inside it, pounding into my brain. The last thing I remembered was Donovan firing a gun directly at my head. I raised my right hand to my face, feeling for damage. My face was fine.

Then I realized I was using my right hand, holding it out and looking down at it. I saw no evidence that it had ever separated. The only logical explanation was that I'd hallucinated the whole thing. I heard my phone vibrating. I reached for my phone. I pulled it out to see that I'd missed several calls from my boss. But there was no call coming through now. Yet the buzzing continued.

Getting to my feet, I peered over the fallen tree to see Donovan lying on the ground. His face discolored and his throat collapsed. He was dead. His gun lay nearby, and it was his phone that was vibrating. It was clear I hadn't hallucinated anything, but that left many questions to be answered. I recalled Donovan and Winslow's plan, and I guessed the phone ringing was Winslow calling to say he was finished at the house.

So, it was only a matter of time before the guy came looking for his partner. After jumping over the fallen tree, I grabbed Donovan's phone and his pistol. His body was still warm, and his bulging, bloodshot eyes stared past me as I went through his pockets. I looked for car keys but found none. I also looked for a wallet, but he didn't have one on him. Once I was done, I moved through the woods, heading away from the neighborhood where it had all started.

I was tempted to call 911, but something Donovan had said gave me pause. He'd said something about Todd and me arriving at the house only minutes after the initial call went out, and about us not listening when dispatch told us to wait. How could he know that, unless he had some sort of inside information? Maybe he was using a police scanner. If that was the case, I knew Winslow would hear any call that went out over the radio.

So instead of calling 911, I decided to call a woman I knew from dispatch. A woman who owed me a favor. I knew that Teresa's shift had ended not 15 minutes ago. She'd be on her way home. I pulled up a map of the area on my phone and started heading to a neighborhood on the other side of the woods. Then I called her. "Curtis? What the hell-" She said. "Guys, where are you?" I asked Teresa. "I'm just leaving this station." "I need your help. Someone's after me. They killed Todd."

"Jesus Christ, Curtis! Are you serious?" "I can't. I think they're monitoring the radio frequencies. Just listen. Something strange is going on," I said. "I need you to come pick me up. Now. No more questions, okay?" Teresa sighed. She said, "Give me the address." I told her where to meet me and then continued on my way through the woods, looking back over my shoulder every few steps. As I went, I realized that my upper arm no longer hurt.

I reached up and felt the hole in my uniform sleeve, but the skin underneath felt intact. Whatever had hit me when Todd was shot was gone now. What the fuck was happening to me? Donovan's phone buzzed in my pocket. I switched the pistol from my right hand to my left and then retrieved the phone. There was a text message on the screen. There were only three words on it that I could see, but it was really all I needed to see. Winthrop, you're infected.

The message was from a number without a name, but I knew it could only be from one person. Winslow. He must have found Donovan. Since the phone was locked, I couldn't open it to answer the message. Not that I wanted to. But still, those words sent a freezing chill down my spine. The blood. It had dripped from the ceiling into Todd's eye. Then, when he'd been shot, his blood had splattered on my face.

And maybe it had even gotten into my system when a bone fragment or bullet hit me in the right arm. But they were only minutes between those two events. What kind of disease could travel through the body that fast? No, it wasn't possible. None of this was possible. The phone buzzed again with another message. "You're putting everyone in danger." I swallowed, thinking about how my arm had come off. The thought of it made me giggle. "I'm going crazy." The phone buzzed again. "Come back. I can help you."

I thought for a moment about calling the number on my phone. After all, I could see the entire number at the top of each text message. But when I looked up, I spotted a line of houses not far ahead. I was almost to the neighborhood. Once I was safely in Teresa's car, I could think about what to do. I knew Winslow didn't want to help me. He wanted to kill me. But what if I was infected with some crazy disease? What if I had hallucinated my arm coming off? To deal with killing Donovan while I was blacked out?

"This is crazy, fucking insane," I thought, looking down at my arm. I put the phone away and tucked the pistol in my back waistband as I came to a home's backyard. I hopped the fence and ran through to the front yard. When I came out on the street, I looked at the numbers and saw that the address I'd given Teresa was several houses down. I hustled down the street and stood in a spot between two streetlights where there was some degree of darkness.

A few minutes later, headlights came around the curve. Peering at them, unable to tell if they belonged to Teresa's RAV4, I reached for the gun at my back. When the vehicle slowed as it approached, I saw it was Teresa's. I jumped in as soon as she stopped. "Curtis!" she said, staring at me. "It's not my blood," I said, realizing she was looking at the blood on my face. "It's Todd's. We really need to go." "Where are we going?"

The nearest police station, I guess. If I can talk to them in person and tell them the situation, maybe they can do something without alerting the guy. What guy? Tell me what the hell is going on. Okay, just drive and I'll tell you. Teresa nodded and turned around in a driveway. As we made our way out of the neighborhood, I told her everything. Even the stuff about my arm and the guy shooting me in the face. You obviously weren't shot in the face, she said when I was done. And your arm didn't come off.

So it's gotta be a hallucination. Exactly, I said. Maybe something inside that house? Some kind of poison? I don't know. Teresa started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. What? I said. Spit it out. Todd's really dead? She asked. Her voice quivered. I nodded. Yeah, he really is. Teresa and I had dated for two years before calling it quits six months ago.

Although we didn't see much of each other anymore, we still talked fairly often and we still had to work together. Her in dispatch and me in a rig. But during our time dating, she got to know Todd and his family just as well as I did. We were always over at their house on days off, cooking dinner and playing with the kids and sharing war stories. And now Todd was gone. Even though we dealt with death pretty much every day, it didn't make things any easier when someone close to you died.

In some ways, it made things worse. Because there was always that lingering thought that there was something more we could have done. We were in the business of saving lives, after all. We drove on in silence for several minutes. Then Donovan's phone buzzed again. I pulled it out and looked, and the bottom fell out of the world. It was an address. Todd's address. Where Gina, Roy, and Wayne were at right now. "We need to go to Todd's house."

I said, barely able to get my voice above a whisper. "What? Dodd's house?" I said, a little louder. "We need to get there. Fast." I held out the phone for her to see. "Curtis, we need to go to the police," Teresa said. "You can't do this on your own. We can't do this. This isn't some movie. We need help from people who know what to do in these situations. He's going to kill them!" I shouted. "And he'll kill you too if you go there without the police!"

I glared at Teresa, keenly aware of Donovan's pistol pressing against my lower back. My friend kept her eyes forward as she drove along the near-deserted street. She was probably right, but I played that out in my mind. Would the police be able to negotiate with Winslow? Or would he just kill Todd's family and then himself when he saw he was cornered? What if he truly was a spook? Would he be able to call in some favor and get the whole thing covered up? What if he was right, and I really was infected with something?

I had hallucinated in the woods, there was no doubt about that. And somehow, I had taken Donovan out, or someone had. I just couldn't remember what had really happened. I reached up to my uniform shirt and dragged my pack of smokes out of my breast pocket. But as I reached for the Necronomicon lighter in my pocket, Teresa stared at the cigarettes. I froze for a moment, then said, "Pull over." "What? Why?"

After sticking the pack of cigarettes back in my pocket, I reached behind my back and pulled the gun out. I didn't point it at her, not directly, but I aimed it near her. "Pull over, Teresa, now." "Jesus, Curtis," she said with disbelief in her voice. She pulled to the side and slowed to a stop. I forced her out of the car and said, "Call the police. Give them Todd's address. You remember where it is?" "I think so." I recited the address as I moved around and got behind the wheel.

"Sorry," I said out the open window. "But it's just better this way. Just call the police." "You know their response time in that area," Teresa said. "You know they won't get there before you." "That's what I'm counting on." I hit the gas and pulled away, leaving Teresa on the side of the two-lane road, standing in the uncut grass. Without thinking too much about it, I pulled a cigarette out of my pack and then reached for my Necronomicon lighter. But just as my fingers touched the lighter,

I saw myself in the mirror. I still had Todd's blood on my face. I pulled my hand out of my pocket without the lighter and then crushed the unlit cigarette in my hand, tossing it out the window. "God damn you," I said. "You better not touch them. You better leave them the fuck alone." I kept my eyes on the road as I closed in on Todd's house. "What guarantee do I have that you'll let them go?" I asked Winslow over the phone.

I had called him on my phone, getting the number from the texts I saw on Donovan's. Winslow said he'd already let me hear Gina's voice. He had them all right. He was holding them hostage. "Running around out there, infecting other people. You haven't infected anyone else, have you?" "How the hell should I know?" "Anyone?" "No." "Has anything strange happened?" "What does that mean?" I asked. "The only thing strange was you two assholes killing my partner in the damn hallucinations."

"What hallucinations?" Winslow asked. "I'm not hearing any kind of guarantee," I said. "How do I know you won't just kill them if I turn myself in?" "You're talking like you hold the cards," Winslow said. "But you and I both know that I have the royal flush, while you have a pair of twos." "Bullshit," I said. "I can always go find someone to bleed on. Would you prefer that?" Silence answered me over the phone. It lasted for long enough that my guts started to coil into themselves.

going to shoot the little one if you're not here in 10 minutes winslow said i'll be there in five and god damn it you better let them go i hung up the phone and raced through todd's property heading the back way toward the house he lived out in the country on 15 acres of land but i knew the area and i knew where the trail was and i knew how to get to the house from the back road i just had to hope that winslow would be too busy watching the front to notice me coming up the back

I carried the gun in my right hand, but I hoped I wouldn't have to use it. I wasn't any kind of marksman, I hadn't even fired a gun in years, and when I last had, it was a rifle. Five minutes later, when I reached the back of the house and peered through the window, I saw that I was screwed. Because it wasn't just Winslow in the house. He had brought friends, two of them dressed similarly to him.

From where I was, I could only see the two men standing nearby and Gina, and I couldn't even see all of her, just the top of her head. They were all in the living room, of which I could only see a slice through the doorway from the kitchen. The top of Gina's head was visible over the back of the recliner there. The two men paced back and forth in the living room. For all I knew, there were several other men around. I had no choice but to turn myself in and hope for the best.

"Goddammit," I muttered, taking a breath and setting the gun on the ground. "Well, here goes nothing." I reached up to knock on the window, but before I could, my arm extended up of its own accord and grabbed the top of the window frame. I tried to pull back, but my fingers refused to let go. The skin stretched at my elbow, just like it had back before Donovan died. I watched as my arm separated from my body and crawled up the side of the house to disappear onto the roof.

The waxy skin sealed itself over my nub, leaving no blood or exposed bone. I stared at what was left of my arm, trying to convince myself I was hallucinating. But when I brought my other hand up and felt the nub, I knew it was real. A sound came from the roof, and my right hand came into view, jumping down to land gracefully on the patio near the back door. It quickly scurried over to the pet door, moving through the flap and into the house.

I snapped to my senses, finally realizing what was happening. Banging on the window caught one guard's attention, and he pointed his gun at me from the living room as Gina raised her head and turned to look at me. "It's inside!" I shouted. A moment later, the guard shifted and fired twice toward the floor. I changed my angle to see my hand on the floor. It had taken a couple of bullets, blasting two of my fingers away. The limb lay twitching on the floor.

The guard who'd shot it ran into the kitchen, approaching the limb even as Winslow shouted from elsewhere in the house for him to stay back. But it was too late. Before the guard could correct his mistake, the limb exploded, sending blood and meat everywhere. Much of it splattered the guard, getting all over his face. I looked at Gina, who was still turned in the recliner, peering with wide eyes over its back and into the kitchen. Her face was splattered with blood too. My stomach lurched.

"Oh no," I said. Winslow appeared in the doorway, gun pointed at Gina's head. He pulled the trigger, blasting her brains out. Then he turned and shot the guard in the kitchen, killing him. Moving with swift efficiency, he located me in the window and fired. The glass shattered and the world went black. I awoke to the smell of gasoline. I looked up at the familiar ceiling, realizing immediately that I was in Todd's kitchen and that I was covered in gasoline.

My head pounded like it had after Donovan shot me. I knew now that it hadn't been a hallucination. I'd survived being shot in the head twice. The guard's body lay nearby, where he'd fallen after Winslow shot him. Bits of my exploded arm were all over the place. I sat up and looked through the doorway to the living room. I couldn't see Gina, and I didn't want to. I looked down at my uniform.

seeing that it was soaked in gas. The whole place had been doused in the stuff. "Don't move or I'll shoot you again," Boyce said from behind me. I turned to see Winslow standing outside the window I'd been looking through earlier. The glass had been smashed out, and Winslow held an unlit road flare in one hand, a pistol in the other. "The boys?" I asked. "Oh, so you're being reasonable now?" Winslow asked, still pointing the gun at me. "Are they okay? Or did you shoot them too?"

"They're fine," he said. "Why didn't you just tell me?" I asked, reaching up from my breast pocket with my one remaining hand. "I said don't move," Winslow shouted. "They're just smokes," I said, pulling the hard pack out of my gas-soaked pocket. Winslow tensed, but he didn't fire. I retrieved the one smoke that hadn't been soaked in gas and stuck it between my lips. "You're gonna like that," Winslow asked. "I will in a second."

Just tell me why you didn't explain things to me in the first place. You think that would have worked? Excuse me, sir, but I'm afraid you've been infected by some kind of alien organism. If we don't burn your body, you will eventually explode and infect anyone nearby. But only after one or more of your arms or legs separates to try and find new hosts. Sorry, but hold still while we set you on fire. You think you would have agreed to that? I considered this for a moment.

"No, I guess not. You're right. If you and your partner would have just waited to go in, like you were told, we could have avoided this whole mess," Winslow said. "But you just had to go in early, didn't you? A couple of regular heroes." I reached awkwardly into my right pocket and pulled out the Necronomicon lighter. "Why explode? What's the purpose of that? That just kills the host, right?" "The organism can't survive long in the human body.

or any terrestrial body for that matter. So before it dies, it tries to spread itself through the blood by exploding. That's the theory anyway. The scientists were the ones studying this thing before it escaped. I'm just a guy sent out to clean up a mess. So why didn't it infect your partner back in the woods? Why did it just kill him? And how could I have survived a gunshot in the head?

I was shot, I said. And you just shot me in the head, didn't you?

"So how come I survived getting shot, but Todd didn't? He was infected too." "He did survive," Winslow said. "What do you mean?" Winslow sighed. "You're going to make me say it? I shot him five more times in the head to give us some time to deal with you. By the time I got back to the house to set it on fire, his head had nearly regenerated. But you… you seem to regenerate much quicker. You must be the best host that thing has found yet."

swallowing. I looked down at the lighter in my hand, then back up at Winslow. "You swear the boys are okay?" "I swear. They're fine. I had them removed as soon as I got here. I wasn't about to put a couple of kids in danger, no matter what I told you over the phone." I nodded, then looked back down at the lighter in my left hand. I could feel my right leg doing something funny. It was trying to separate. "I always figured smoking would kill me," I said.

Then I opened the Necronomicon and sparked it up. My gas-soaked hand lit on fire, and the flames moved swiftly over my body as I lit the cigarette. I inhaled the evil as I tossed the still-lit lighter toward the living room. Flames whooshed to life there. Soon, I was engulfed. I took one last drag at the cigarette before I could no longer breathe.

As the flames sizzled in my flesh, I could feel the organism in my blood thrashing around, as if my blood was trying to escape the heat, but it had nowhere to go. I wanted to scream from the pain, but I had no oxygen to pull into my lungs. The fire was taking it all. So I thrashed until I suffocated, and the world went black once again, this time for good.