To the End

The woman used her entire body to force the doorway of the back entrance open, the momentum of her shove sending her sprawling onto the warm concrete outside. As she slammed hard against the ground her vision turned black. Her stomach twisted. Blindness. She’d seen some of them with milky pupils. She’d always hated them the most, hated what they represented, the idea that she could lose the only tool she’d ever known that had connected her to the world. Even in death this was reprehensible. If one could even call it death.

Seven minutes left and she’d spend them in darkness.

But darkness was blue. Darkness was blue? Maybe a midnight blue, but this was baby blue. Why was the darkness baby blue? And white. Fluffs of white. And what was that big ball of pale-yellow light? It hurt her eyes to look at it … Oh! It was the flag!

The vivid aqua of the Argentinian flag, often draped around her mother as they watched football on their boxy TV. She secretly loved that boxy TV, though she had always mocked her mother for it. Stupid boxes. Why could her mother not just throw old things away? It was so infuriating when people couldn’t change with the times. But Mami certainly hadn’t minded ridding herself of the old as she’d carved that machete down Oma’s throat.

Oh, that had been funny. The way her Oma’s eyed had widened, the number of hacks it had taken to break through her spine, the moment she’d stopped moving. If she’d had to guess which of the world’s people would finally take out her belligerent grandmother, her timid, petite Mami wouldn’t have even made the list.

Laughter ripped through the air around the woman, a deep and guttural and terrible thing. Ice lanced through her heart in an instant and she looked around, but the carpark was empty. Where was the laughter coming from?

She stood up quickly. Why had she even been on the floor? The laughter continued, so close, like it was right near her ear …

She whipped her head around. But there was nothing there. Just an open doorway. Into a hallway. Where did that lead? Where was she …?

The paper …

The paper!

A large gust of wind of dry air blew tentacles into her face and she shrieked. She had to move before she was killed.

She didn’t stop to look where the hellish creature was that was attacking her, choosing to book it in favour of finding the red car. She had to make it.

Seven minutes. No. It would be less now. Five. Maybe three. But it could be four.

Laughter chased her, filling her insides with numbness. Then a piercing scream that jolted every nerve she owned. Her vision blurred and she could only see vague shapes around her, nothing distinct. They all jumped at her. As they got closer, they got clearer. Crimson teeth and acid green snakes.

No, she needed red. Red car. Just red.

Red. And the paper. Two minutes.

The laughter had turned into sobbing. It was so desperate. She wanted to help whoever it was. They were in so much pain, she didn’t have to look at them to see. She’d never heard such a sorrowful thing.

But this was more important. More important than whoever was sobbing.

So, she kept running. Looking for red.

Nothing held a shape anymore. They were all trying to hurt her. All of the lumps, the lines, the curves, and harsh edges. They leapt at her like she was a meal.

One of the thin, spindly edges finally made contact with her and tore through her arm. Her blood flooded out of her like a scene out of Alice in Wonderland, and it was red!

But … the wrong red. The red she needed was blockier. This one was too wavy, too many watery lines, and the shading was all wrong.

One … minute?

There was too much. She had run for miles. She had looked everywhere. But she couldn’t find it. She fell.

The angry lines stopped moving now. All except for one form. It glided over to her, nothing but blocks and streaks wobbling before her. It had to be a demon. It moved like a demon. Unnatural.

The woman shook as it approached, her own lines shaking. Was she a demon?

The being took her arm, shifting her sideways. Her eyes disappeared, and then they came back. And she saw red. Blocky red!

Sharp, angry pain clawed at her legs as she tried to stand. She kicked it back and a fierce roar poured into the air. She had to make it to the red before the lion found her.

A last burst of speed, her lines almost left behind as she ran. But she had made it.

Now to finish. The circle string with the curves and point. Paper went in the piece. Circle went over her head. Her lines joined with its lines. The lines of what was once her neck.

She wanted to kill Oma.

---

Clara had never thought she would see anything worse than the madness that consumed a person after the infection had run its course. She’d been wrong, yet again. Watching someone go through the process was truly sinister.

Seven minutes. That’s all she needed to make it through.

Clara watched through the flat screens that adorned the security room a replay of a video earlier in the day, recognising the woman scrambling through the screens. They had run into the woman outside and had to shove two bullets through her forehead after she’d tried to rip her throat out. Watching her twitch until she couldn’t anymore, knowing she must have freshly turned, all of it crushed her soul into jagged shards. She didn’t know why but she’d felt inclined to take the woman’s locket, heart-shaped, engraved with a pair of initials, and a little too big. It felt wrong to leave such a sentimental artefact out in the open on a corpse that would take months to fester, another gruesome feature of the cruel virus that had waged its war on humanity.

Now Clara clutched that same cheesy locket as she watched the woman that she’d just killed inhale a lethal dose of infectious gas. The woman was admirable enough to immediately realise what had happened, but the grim determination on her face spoke of something else …

The woman burst outside through the back entrance. She fell to the ground, stilling for a moment as she stared at the sky. And then she started laughing.

This seemed to bring her back to life as she stood, seemingly afraid of her own laughter. She turned and looked around her, paranoid. Davidson was controlling the views of the footage, and so offered a close-up of her face. Clara wished she wouldn’t – the woman’s tears gushing down her face would likely stay with her now, as would the wicked, cackling grin that she’d somehow managed to pair with the weeping.

The woman’s dreadlocked hair blew into her face and she shrieked and stumbled back. She managed not to fall and, still laughing, stumbled through the few useless cars that littered the lot. She seemed to be looking for something in the tiny space, but Clara had no idea how she could have a coherent thought in her mind, particularly when all she was doing was shifting between laughing and screaming like a lunatic.

Frigid water dripped into Clara’s stomach with every tear that fell from the woman’s eyes; how quickly the virus took hold. She felt herself holding back her own tears as she watched woman rip out one of her dreadlocks, her laughter morphing into sobs. These symptoms were so unique to her, and yet she was just like the rest of them.

The woman scarper her arm against a rusty fragment torn out of a battered car. The blood weaving down her arm seemed to startle her and she fell, hyperventilating. Clara sighed. This had to be near the minute mark. Surely there was nothing left for her to do as she sat on the ground, heaving. Life would end for her in a supermarket loading bay.

One of the stray trolleys rolled towards her, gently knocking her to the ground as she struggled to catch a breath. When she fell, her eyes lost focus for a moment before returning back to whatever reality was for her in that moment. And there it was. That determination. What was that?

The woman forced herself up, barely fifteen metres from the doorway she’d stumbled out of, but somehow releasing a victorious cheer as she stood. She made it through the last few metres and Clara found herself leaning forward to see what in the world she wanted with the red car.

The woman fumbled around within the car for a few seconds and Davidson zoomed in once again. And then the woman pulled out the locket, the very locket that Clara felt herself clutch tighter in her hand.

‘Maybe it was an important enough memento she could remember through the madness?’ Davidson suggested, finally breaking their silence.

‘No,’ Clara said finitely, nodding back to the screen.

They both watched the woman place a paper in the locket before draping it over her head and she stilled. Her job was done, it seemed. At least until Clara and Davidson would show up in a few hours and she would try to kill them.

Davidson swivelled on her chair to watch Clara and her locket expectantly. Clara frowned and took a final glance at the offending article. A heart-shaped locket. So unbelievably cheesy.

And then she opened it. A small piece of paper fell onto her lap, the same scrap she’d just watched the woman shove into the locket on the screens to her right.

She unfolded the paper and on it read a pair of coordinates and two sets of passwords. A final statement at the bottom said, ‘To the End.’