The silence in the motel room was a physical thing, thick and suffocating. It had been hours since Leo had climbed back through the broken window, his face a mask of grim finality. He'd said nothing, just retrieved the bat from his room and now sat cleaning its dark wood with a terrifying, ritualistic focus.
Chloe jumped as the cheap clock radio on the nightstand crackled to life, spewing static before a harried local newsreader's voice cut through.
"...again, residents are advised to remain indoors. Emergency services are overwhelmed with reports of... of violent altercations. The Sheriff's office is calling it a... a mass public hysteria event, potentially linked to a contaminated water source. Please, do not approach anyone acting erratically. Stay in your homes..."
"Hysteria?" Jake whispered, his voice hoarse. He'd been staring at the same crack in the wall for an hour. "They think people are just going crazy?"
"What else can they call it?" Chloe replied, her voice barely audible. She was hugging her knees to her chest on the edge of the bed. "'A curse'? 'Zombies'? They have to call it something that makes sense." But the word hysteria felt like a pathetic blanket thrown over a gaping, bloody wound. This wasn't madness. It was a metamorphosis. A violent, painful unraveling of the self, paid for in agony and a hunger that consumed everything in its path.
The phone on the nightstand had a dial tone that was nothing but a mocking, empty hum. Cell service had died with the power. They were cut off. The isolation was a cold hand closing around their throats. Their families, their friends back home... they had no idea. And Fall Creek was now a locked box.
The Fall Creek Diner was a petri dish.
Dave the cook, sweating over the grill, felt a wave of dizziness so strong he had to grip the stainless steel counter. His head throbbed. The world took on a sharp, painful clarity. The sizzle of the bacon was a needle in his ear. He looked down at the stew he was prepping for the lunch rush, and for a second, the chunks of beef swimming in the broth didn't look like food. They looked like... something else. Something that made the new, strange hunger in his gut twist eagerly.
His hand, trembling with fever, slipped on the knife handle. The blade sliced deep into his finger. He cursed, watching the blood well up and drip, drip, drip into the large pot of stew. He stared, mesmerized by the dark red swirls dissolving into the gravy. It seemed... right.
Janine drove home from her shift feeling worse than when she'd left. Lacey's cough was stuck in her mind, a wet, ugly sound. Her headache was a pounding sledgehammer behind her eyes. All she wanted was the comfort of her home.
She walked in the door to her two young children running to greet her. Their usual squeals of "Mommy!" felt like shards of glass in her brain. She hugged them tightly, burying her face in their hair, inhaling their sweet scent, trying to drown out the phantom smell of blood and bleach from the diner. She kissed her husband hello, her lips dry and hot against his cheek.
She was unknowingly painting her love with a poison brush. The pathogen, passed from Lacey's lungs to hers, now bloomed on the cheeks of her children, on the lips of her husband. The infection settled into the walls of the house, a silent, patient guest.
And in the woods, away from the town's nervous energy, the campsite was anything but silent.
Flies buzzed in a thick, ecstatic cloud over the remains of the two campers. The scene was one of unimaginable carnage.
But then, a finger twitched.
A disembodied hand, lying near the cold fire pit, clenched into a fist.
The torso of the man, ripped open and emptied, shuddered. There was no breath, no heartbeat. But a different kind of energy was at work. The curse, denied the finality of the bat, was doing the only thing it could. It was knitting.
Tendons in a severed leg tightened, pulling it a fraction of an inch across the bloody soil. The jaw of the woman's detached head unhinged, clicking softly. They were not alive. But they were not done. They were entering their long, grotesque sleep. And they were lying close enough to one another that their ruined tissues had already begun to... smudge together at the edges where they touched. A slow, unconscious merge had begun.
Leo moved through the back alleys of Fall Creek like a ghost, the bat a familiar, hated weight in his hand. The town had a strange, held-breath quality. Curtains were twitched shut. Doors were locked. The only sounds were the distant wail of a siren and the frantic barking of a dog.
He was looking for food, water, anything. He rounded a corner and froze.
On the sidewalk ahead, a mailman was on his knees, vomiting a black, viscous fluid onto the pavement. His partner stood a few feet away, hands on her knees, her face pale with concern. "Frank? Frank, talk to me, man!"
Frank looked up. His eyes were wide, the whites shot through with a sickly yellow. "It hurts..." he moaned, clutching his head. "Make it stop... it hurts so much..."
His skin was slick with sweat, his muscles twitching and jumping under his uniform. He was enduring a private hell, his mind fraying under the onslaught of the transformation.
"It's okay, Frank, just hang on, help's coming," his partner said, taking a hesitant step forward.
"NO!" Leo shouted, stepping out of the shadows. "Get away from him!"
It was too late.
The sound of her voice, the proximity of her life, was the final thread to snap. Frank's agony twisted into rage. With a guttural roar that was nothing human, he launched himself from his knees, tackling his partner to the ground.
Leo was already moving. There was no time for thought, only a horrible, practiced instinct. He crossed the distance in three long strides.
The mailwoman was screaming, Frank's hands clawing at her, his teeth snapping an inch from her face.
Leo raised the bat. He brought it down.
THWUMP.
The sound was wet, final. Frank's body went limp.
Leo stood over him, breathing heavily. The golden vein in the bat pulsed, drinking in the essence. He felt the faint, damning click.
He looked up. The mailwoman was scrambling backward, her uniform torn, her face a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. She wasn't looking at Frank's body. She was looking at him. At the bat. At the wild-eyed stranger who had just caved in her partner's skull.
Across the street, a curtain in a second-floor window flicked shut. But not before Leo saw the pale, horrified face of an old woman staring out.
The secret was out. He was no longer a rumor. He was a witness's nightmare. The man with the bat.