Rage Within (7 page)

They’d also seen some regular people too. At least she assumed they were normal. Michael had his binoculars out
and they’d watched the two girls sneaking from one building to another. They too were taking great care to hide from the Baggers. But they’d disappeared before Michael and she could actually cut across to talk to them.

Clementine realized that it would probably take several weeks to properly explore the campus. But she was determined. If her brother, Heath, was there, she’d find him. She’d search each and every building before she gave up.

She still had the letter he’d written to her that she found back in his dorm room in Seattle. She kept it safe in the pocket of her jeans.

Dear Heath, I know you’re there. I can feel it. You said you were coming here because you’d heard Vancouver was safe. I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that it wasn’t true, but I hope you didn’t go anywhere else. The university’s large enough; I can’t imagine how long it’ll take me if I have to search all of Vancouver and Canada too. But if you left a message, I’ll find it. And I’ll come for you. I’m not giving up, no matter how difficult it seems.

If only he’d make it easier for her. Maybe he could set off fireworks or set up a big neon sign with her name on it.

Until then she’d continue to talk to him inside her head, as she’d been doing since this whole thing started. Before she met Michael and the others, Heath had been the only person she felt she could communicate with. For some reason it made her feel safer and less alone. When she chatted with Heath in her thoughts, he was still alive.

When they arrived on campus, they immediately ditched their bicycles again in some bushes just off of West Mall, by the parking lot. Their goal that day was to search some of the buildings down the road. The girls they’d seen yesterday had headed off in that direction. If there were people holed up there, maybe they could find them.

Clementine looked up at the hundreds of windows as they passed the psychology building. Yesterday they’d tried going in, but the doors were all locked. She made sure to mark that off on the tiny map they had. Each day they hoped to block off another section, making notes on the places they’d gone and which ones they’d have to come back to.

“Do you think anyone’s watching us right now?” she whispered.

“Maybe,” Michael said. “Maybe there’s some mutated psychology experiment gone bad checking us out with his dozen eyes.”

“Rage-infected monkeys,” she said, bringing a hand up to cover the giggle trying to escape.

“But you’re right. It’s like a ghost town within a ghost town,” Michael said. “I can’t imagine anyone hiding out there. What would they eat? Also look at all the garbage that’s been blown up against the doors. No one’s been in or out of there in a while.” He paused to study the windows for a few seconds, and then looked back down at the map. “Didn’t Aries say there’s a clothing-optional beach here? Maybe that’s where everyone’s hiding.”

“End of the world,” Clementine said. “Might as well show it off.”

“Exactly.”

Joking aside, it still didn’t change the feeling of eyes on the back of her neck as they walked along. She decided to take it as a good sign. The Baggers wouldn’t just watch. They’d swoop in for the kill. If there were people inside, they were hiding, too. That put them on the same team.

They cut across the park and onto Main Mall, where, according to the map, was the Koerner Library. They’d decided earlier that morning that it would be the building
they wanted to search. It was a large place with several floors and plenty of places to hide. And it was close to a food court area. It made sense that people might be staying there.

Tomorrow they planned to search the bookstore and the Student Union Building, as long as it looked like the Baggers were no longer ransacking it.

“Maybe we can find a store,” she said as she noticed a paper cup in the gutter. “We’re out of coffee and that just makes me cranky.”

“I’ll buy you some more for Christmas,” he said. “And one of those really fancy mugs that keeps your coffee nice and hot.”

“I keep forgetting,” she said. “Christmas is right around the corner. My dad used to love saying that. Even in July. It seems so weird to me. It doesn’t feel like December.”

“It’s the lack of snow,” Michael said. “I used to believe that all of Canada was snow covered all year round. And then I came here. All this rain. It’s changed my perspective on reality.”

She laughed. “I miss the snow. And I miss the colored lights. Christmas is supposed to be pretty and warm inside. Maybe that’s why it’s so surreal now.”

The doors to Koerner Library were wide open. Someone had started to spray paint some sort of message. They didn’t get to finish. The few words they might have written had obviously been painted over, so the whole thing was an undistinguishable mess. On the ground were several cans of spray paint, and Clementine bent down and picked one up. Shaking it, she discovered it was still at least half full. She walked back to the main road and shook the can several times to mix it up. Kneeling down on the ground, she began to write her own message. She sprayed the words carefully in big, jerky letters.

HEATH. I’M HERE.
CLEMENTINE

When she was finished, she put the spray paint can into her jacket pocket and walked back to the front of the library, where Michael waited, leaning against the security rails.

“Not going to leave a number?” he asked.

“You’re not funny.”

“Yeah, and that’s not paint,” Michael said, pointing to a rusty Rorschach splotch on the ground. He looked back at the painted mess on the library doors. “Wonder what
they
were trying to write? It must have been good for the Baggers to block it like that.”

“Maybe it was some sort of warning?”

They both stared into the blackness that was the library. The afternoon light only went so far, and Clementine couldn’t see anything beyond the information desk. The shadows swallowed everything up.

Clementine reached into her backpack and pulled out their flashlights, handing one over to Michael. Keeping their baseball bats raised and ready, they entered the building. The smell was bad and instantly assaulted her nostrils. There were bodies here. Coughing, she pulled her bandanna up to cover her face.

A building with the dead inside? How odd that she was prepared for such a thing. Even weirder was the fact that it was normal.

They moved past the main desks and toward the wooden doors that led into the actual library. Now that they were inside, neither would talk to the other unless it was absolutely necessary.
Voices carried, especially in large places like this. A whisper could echo off the walls, and who knew who might be listening.

Michael pointed to the stairs and made a walking motion with his fingers. Clementine nodded. They should start at the top and work their way down.

The top levels were empty. Nothing but books and study rooms. Many of the books had been pulled off the shelves, and journals littered the aisles. They found fresh blood in the bathroom on the top floor but no bodies. They wandered around carefully but turned up empty-handed.

It was on level three that they saw the light. Someone else was wandering around. Quickly they turned off their own flashlights and ducked into one of the study rooms. The stench of decay was stronger; Clementine had to slowly breathe through her mouth to try and keep from gagging. Small gasps.

Dear Heath, I read somewhere that when you smell something, you’re actually inhaling the particles. So that means I’m not just sniffing the dead; those itty-bitty tiny specks are going down my throat and into my stomach. I’m eating them. And if that’s not enough to make me want to barf up my morning protein bar, I can’t help but wonder if I’d recognize your decay if I smelled it. You’d better not be here, brother dearest. I don’t want to think that I might have tasted you. That’s just too creepy for words.

The light was coming from the back of the library. They couldn’t see who was there, but it didn’t seem to be more than one person. Clementine watched the shadow moving around from behind the bookshelves. Too far away to tell what side they might be on. But he or she was making a lot of noise and that made Clementine wonder suspiciously just how careful this person felt they needed to be. She nodded at Michael and the two of them left the study room and slowly took the long way around toward the mystery person.

She tripped over the first body. One second she was moving carefully with one hand out against the wall to help her through the darkness, and the next second she stumbled, knees collapsing. She couldn’t really put her hands out to block her fall either; she didn’t want to risk the noise the bat would make when it hit the floor. Twisting her body sideways, she managed to land on her hip, keeping the metal weapon up in the air instead of having it bang into the tiling.

She came face-to-face with a blackened corpse. Opened her mouth to scream, but Michael was there, pulling her up and into his arms.

The noisy mystery person stopped making noise. The shadow stopped moving. Several terrifyingly long seconds went by before a scuffling noise ensued and the guy or girl went back to their job in progress.

Michael held her tightly until her heart slipped back down from her throat and into its rightful position. Finally she nodded and waved with her hand to let him know she’d regained her composure and he helped her to her feet.

He mouthed “Are you okay?” at her and she nodded.

Together they moved deeper into the building. When they rounded the last bookshelf, they could make out the mystery person from fifty feet away. He had his back to them but it didn’t take long before he turned around and let them see his face.

He wasn’t very old. Midtwenties maybe, he’d probably been just another student at the university. His hair was short and curly, his jeans and shirt clean. He didn’t look like a Bagger; he was too jumpy and his eyes kept nervously darting between his job at hand and the empty darkness surrounding him. Like them, this guy was watching for what else lurked in the shadows.

He had good reason to be scared. Not just because of the Baggers. What he was doing wasn’t exactly honest.

The light wasn’t a flashlight. It was a small kerosene lamp with a little flame. He had it positioned on the floor beside him, tucked between several bodies. The guy was walking among the dead, reaching down to check their pockets. She watched as he pulled something from the front jeans pocket of what used to be a girl with long black hair. Keys. Studying the set, he tossed them aside and moved on.

Stealing from the dead!

Clementine was horrified. She’d seen a hell of a lot of bad things over the past six weeks. She’d even done some of those unmentionables herself. But taking personal items from the dead, well, that seemed wrong on levels she couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Clementine didn’t think. Red rage filled her vision, blocking her sight. What if Heath was in that pile? What if he’d left a letter for her and this guy had already stolen it? The anger surged forth, forcing her into action. Raising her baseball bat—she charged.

Vaguely she heard Michael call out her name, but it wasn’t enough to stop her. She ran straight for the guy. He was still hunched over another body, a decomposed body with blond hair that could very likely be her brother.

He saw her coming but tripped over his feet when he tried to stand. He fell backward, his eyes wild with fear as she waved the bat.

Someone came from behind her, wrapping their hands around her waist. Michael grabbed the baseball bat as she tried to aim at the stranger’s face. She tried squirming away from his touch, but Michael still managed to snatch the weapon from her hands. The bat fell and hit the ground,
bounced twice, and then rolled underneath a table.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Michael screamed, their vow of silence broken. If there was anyone lurking, they’d have heard the scuffle.

“He’s stealing from the bodies!” she said as she struggled. She elbowed Michael in the gut and he grunted. But he still managed to keep his arms tightly around her waist.

“He’s not a Bagger.”

“He’s a thief.”

“But he’s not a Bagger. Think about it. He’s not a killer.”

“It’s just as bad.”

“Just chill out a second, will you!”

Clementine stopped struggling and all the rage inside of her slowly began to drain out the bottoms of her heels. Michael was right. It wasn’t worth it. Suddenly she couldn’t understand what had brought forth such anger in the first place. Whatever it was, it was gone now.

She was left feeling tired. All she wanted to do was sit down for a bit.

Michael let go of her, and her knees buckled but she didn’t fall. Instead she leaned up against a desk, trying to catch her breath.

The guy on the ground hadn’t said a word throughout the whole scuffle. Once he realized it was unlikely Clementine was going to smash in his head, he scrambled to his feet and backed up until his head smacked into a shelf. He yelped and looked around frantically in all directions for an escape route. But he was cornered.

“I’m not a thief,” he finally said with a strong English accent. “I’m not. I wasn’t stealing. I’m just looking for something. I need to find the keys. Just the keys. I didn’t take anything. You can even look in my pockets.”

“What keys?” Michael didn’t lower the bat. He kept it pointed right at the stranger’s chest.

The guy swallowed, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down in his throat. “The chemistry lab. I’m trying to find the keys to the lab.”

“Why?”

That seemed to stump him. His eyes widened and one eyebrow rose in the air as he thought. “I’m a chem major. I belong there.”

Michael couldn’t hide the grin at the corner of his mouth.

“Look,” the guy said as he inched forward. “I’m not one of them. Baggers, right? I’ve heard that term before. It seems to be the name that’s caught on. Anyway, I’m harmless, as you’ve probably figured out. Chem majors don’t usually pack their own heat. I can’t even bench-press my own body weight.”