Heinrich grew increasingly pale as the guards approached. He looked between them desperately, seeking for any sign of hesitation he could exploit.
“Why come after me first?” he asked, apparently trying to replicate Noah’s feat of convincing them to switch targets. “Why not go after the other person? She doesn’t have a chainsaw!” He waved the bladed tool around as if to remind them of its existence.
The guards didn’t seem to consider his words for even a second, though they eyed the weapon warily. Their faces were masks of hunger, and Heinrich was food. No argument could turn them away from him now.
On some unspoken cue all four darted forward. Each of them had picked up some wounds from the grenade, but the dust they inhaled had been enough to remedy the most debilitating effects of their injuries, and they moved with startling speed.
Heinrich slashed forward, catching one of them on the teeth of the chainsaw, but the other three reached him without issue. Each of them tore a small piece away from his left side. Not lethal wounds, but certainly painful ones.
The man struck by the chainsaw, however, was not so lucky. The blades bit into his neck, and the damage he was accruing was too great to be overcome by the healing power of the dust. If he could steal a bite out of Heinrich, he would be able to recover, but the doctor was clearly aware of this. He pressed the injured guard away with the edge of the blade even as the other three tore at him from his other side. Blood was beginning to drench Heinrich’s shirt and his face was rapidly losing color beneath his respirator.
Without warning Heinrich whirled away from the man, swinging the chainsaw like a club to dislodge the three other guards from where they hung onto his side with their jaws buried in his flesh like leeches. One of the guards took the brunt of the attack and fell back with a cry, while the other two were forced to step away, managing to evade the blow.
Heinrich crouched slightly as he faced them, his whole body shaking, his breaths shallow and quick. He raised the chainsaw again, barely managing to bring it to chest height. He was holding it with one arm; he had sacrificed the functionality of his left to buy himself time to take down the first guard
Noah was surprised Heinrich was still upright at all; he was losing blood at a tremendous rate, mostly from a wound one of the guards had managed to inflict on his neck.
The two guards left standing stalked forward. Heinrich stumbled away, nearly tripping over the body of a woman who had been fatally injured by the initial blast of the grenade.
“Fine,” Heinrich growled. “I’m not playing this stupid game.” He grabbed his respirator and tore it away, revealing a face plastered with sweat.
Before he could inhale, one of the guards was on him, hands around his neck. Heinrich’s eyes bulged and he fell backwards to the floor, though he still somehow maintained his grasp on the chainsaw. Tremors wracked his entire body as he fought to bring it up against the back of the infected man.
Then the second guard reached him. She grabbed the discarded mask from the floor and brought it back into place over his mouth.
Heinrich’s hand went to his face, finally letting the chainsaw drop to the ground. He barely had the energy to grip its handle, let alone wield it as the weapon he intended it to be. His only hope now was to become infected. The spinning saw chain hit the floor and jerked away across the room where it idled quietly.
“Let me go, I command it,” Heinrich wheezed. His fingers dug at the edge of the mask, weakly fighting to create even the smallest gap that would allow dust to flood in.
“I’m not letting you get infected,” the guard said. “You’re done.”
“Why?” Heinrich asked, seeming genuinely confused. He stared desperately at her, then switched his gaze to the other guard, but neither of their faces betrayed any sympathy. “If you’re not going to eat me, you might as well let me go.”
The male guard rose to his feet and stared down at the man with disgust. He nodded at the other guard, who lifted a hand to clear the blood off from her face.
“Do you know my name?” she asked.
Heinrich squinted at her through bloodshot eyes. “Is this really the time?”
“I’ve worked for you for twelve years. I see you every day.”
The doctor sighed. “Jane?”
“Sumati,” she said with a flat look.
He coughed. “That’s what I meant to say.”
Sumati just looked at him.
“What’s the point of this? Why aren’t you doing anything?”
“I just killed my best friend.”
“...My condolences.”
“And then you tried to kill me with a chainsaw.”
“You were going to eat me!” Heinrich rasped. “You did eat me! You can’t blame me for defending myself. I’m bleeding out because you ate half my neck.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“It was hardly half. More like a sixteenth, at most. I can assure you that you wouldn’t be missing any of your neck if I hadn’t been infected by a weapon you designed. Nor would my friend have died.”
“I don’t understand how that detonated,” Heinrich mumbled. “It was decommissioned.”
“You should never have made such a thing in the first place.”
Noah wanted to yell at the guards to get on with it and finish the man off already, but they seemed to be having a moment, so he just stayed silent and watched. Heinrich clearly wasn’t long for this world, anyway.
His attention was momentarily diverted as Clarissa began meandering her way across the room to where the chainsaw had fallen. She picked it up, gave it an appraising look-over, then shut off its idling motor and stuck it into her coat. She did all of this with Brian still draped over her shoulder with his rear in the air.
When Noah looked back at Heinrich only a moment later, the man’s eyes had closed and he no longer seemed to be breathing. He was unconscious and fast approaching death. The guard named Sumati was still talking to him.
“When I attacked you earlier, my actions were driven by hunger. Now, my actions are driven by spite. You could have survived this day.”
Heinrich died as she went silent.
Noah wanted to clap, but he thought it would probably be inappropriate, so he settled for giving the two guards his best smile. “Well done.”
Sumati looked past him at Clarissa. “You took the chainsaw. May I borrow it for a moment?”
Clarissa hesitantly drew it out and stepped forward to pass it over. “What are you going to-”
The guard flicked the chainsaw on and pressed the trigger to its limit, then leaned down and separated Heinrich’s head from his body.
When she was done, she turned the tool off, wiped both sides of the guard bar off on Heinrich’s shirt, and handed it back to Clarissa handle-first.
Clarissa accepted it with a startled expression.
“Now he cannot rise again,” the guard said. She looked around at all the other bodies scattered around the room and tilted her head. “Actually, can I have the chainsaw back?”
“How about you just keep it,” Clarissa suggested, handing it over. “We’re about to leave; you can deal with the bodies once we’re gone.”
“Don’t forget that there’s one person still alive and uninfected in here,” Elias said, glancing across the room to where she quietly lay. “Please don’t cut her head off.”
That’s right, Noah realized. He stared over at the woman. She was still playing dead, clearly unaware that it was entirely pointless.
Leah elbowed him. He nearly fell over, and when he recollected himself, he gave her an affronted look. “What?”
She just shook her head.
“Would you like to be cured?” May asked Sumati. “We can do that for you before we go.”
The male guard looked over. “Me as well, please.”
Noah helped May cure the two guards, as well as three others who had been infected and soon thereafter immobilized by their uninfected comrades. Or in the case of one of the guards who had attacked Heinrich, wounded nearly to the point of death. The man had taken a nasty gash to his side and had almost managed to fully heal it before he ran out of energy and was reduced to little more than a skeleton. He was alive, however, which was more than could be said for most others in the room. Included among the dead was the guard who had led the attack against Heinrich.
When the vacuum’s dust bin was full he brought it to the pendant and opened it up, forgetting that the guards had been infected by altered dust.
To his surprise, however, the pendant had no trouble suctioning the particles out of the air.
“Not that I’m complaining,” he said as he watched the dust disappear, “but how is this working?”
Elias looked over at the dust flowing between him and May and immediately understood what was puzzling him. “Interesting. The dust is behaving as if it’s in its unaltered, neutral state, despite having been inhaled in its ‘attuned’ form. Do you suppose something about it being exhaled or otherwise pulled directly from a person’s lungs somehow resets it to its unattuned state? Assuming that attunement to human blood renders it incapable of infecting other life forms, converting back to normal would give it the greatest chance of infecting another being upon being expelled from someone’s lungs.”
Leah glanced at him. “You’re pretty smart, aren’t you.”
Elias blushed faintly. “Thank you.”
“With all this talk of attunement and whatnot,” Brian said from his position over Clarissa’s shoulder, “should I be worried about random animals getting infected? Or what about people’s pets? If the dust has to attune to a person, it stands to reason it would be able to attune to just about any respirating creature.”
“Probably,” Elias said.
“I ate a raccoon a couple days ago,” Noah said. “I already mentioned that, right? Anyway, it tasted pretty awful, so with any luck the same will be true the other way around, and whatever animals that hypothetically get zombified will only act like zombies to others of their own species.”
Clarissa clapped her hands. “Alright, I think we’ve veered sufficiently off-topic. Can we go now?”
“There’s still some dust in the air,” Leah said.
“It’s getting better, though,” May observed. “The pendant gets stronger the longer it’s surrounded by dust, and we’ve been in the room long enough that it’s actually beginning to do a somewhat decent job at clearing the air.”
Noah peered at the pendant and realized she was right, though there was a somewhat unpleasant side effect of it absorbing the altered dust, in the form of blood beading at the bottom of the metal square. Red droplets formed one after another at the center of the small siphon of dust being continually pulled into the pendant. Each one was immediately wicked into May’s shirt.
“It’s filtering out the blood,” Noah said. “It must only be able to store unattuned dust.”
“Fortunately, your shirt is already covered in blood, so you won’t even notice the extra stains,” Leah said drily.
They waited around for another minute, letting the air clear.
“Alright, enough’s enough,” Clarissa said. “It’s not going to get any better than this. And for all we know, the dust has already gotten into the vents and spread to half the building.”
“Don’t say stuff like that,” Leah muttered.
The six of them made their way to the exit, and with a final wave at Sumati and the other unnamed guard, left the room.
They headed towards the end of the hall, past the gaping hole in the wall where Noah had destroyed the door. The keycard unlocked the treatment room and the six of them filed inside. The vacuum had been disassembled and pushed into a corner.
They went through that room into the main waiting area, where the dimmed lights and empty chairs made for a somewhat eerie scene, and then out into another hallway. A right-hand turn took them through a pair of double doors out into the long entrance hall. The exit lay at the end of the corridor.
Noah smiled. Almost there, dad.