Free The Calm Before The Swarm by Michael McBride Page A

trash can. The wind chased newspaper pages and plastic
bags down the center of the snow-covered street, marred only by the
sparse tracks of the few cars still left on the roads with gas
prices as they were. Anders crawled until he could reach the
wire-mesh receptacle and used it to drag himself to his feet. He
vomited into the trash can and forced himself to continue down the
street.
    He had to move faster. This was an aggressive
disease that waged an internal war on his body's defenses, which it
was already winning handily.
    Faceless people shuffled past him down the
street, bundled in rotting clothing and fraying scarves, walking
not because they had somewhere to be, but simply for the warmth
that moving provided. Not so long ago, the apartments rising into
the sky to either side of the road had been filled to capacity with
waiting lists as long as his arm. Now, only the penthouse suites
were formally occupied, while the street trash did everything they
possibly could to crawl through broken windows and pry away the
graffiti-laden plywood, if only to bed down inside for a single
night.
    Anders turned down the alley to his right. It
was covered since it once served as the valet entrance to an
upscale hotel. Where once uniformed bellhops stood sentry with
gold-gilded dollies and valets in burgundy vests waited behind
velvet ropes there were now heaps of humanity huddled together for
warmth, buried in newspapers, towels, and blankets to the point
that they looked like piles of refuse themselves. The front doors
to the hotel were hidden behind sloppily-mortared walls of cinder
blocks. The empty building ratted inside while the people shivering
against the storm outside did the same.
    Eyes opened and peered out from beneath trash
covers, leering up from beneath wool caps pulled down nearly to the
bridges of their noses, at the sound of the limping footsteps
crossing from the snow onto the merely iced cement. Those who
recognized Anders, those who weren't so stoned they couldn't move,
arose from the ground and scattered like roaches into the shadows,
willing to brave nature's wrath rather than be tempted by Anders's
proposition. They all knew him... what he did.
    "I have..." Anders said, doubling over and
grabbing his stomach. He felt something warm drain into his shorts
and down his leg. "I have three thousand dollars."
    More faces appeared from where they were
hidden in plain view, newspapers and blankets shuffling and
sloughing off to confirm that he had their undivided attention.
Usually, this was the point where one of the hardly-conscious
zombies would trade his life for the cash to buy enough smack to
overdose on anyway.
    Anders fell to his knees and tried to puke,
though this time the dry heaves brought only a strand of mucus and
saliva to slap the ground.
    "Will it be quick?" a woman's voice called
from somewhere against the wall behind the others.
    "Mommy, no," a smaller voice whispered.
    "Shh!"
    Anders crawled forward and groaned as he
rolled over onto his rear end, his head lolling back against his
shoulders. He tried to remain focused and conscious.
    "No," he said plainly.
    There was a moment of silence in which Anders
feared he would need to crawl through the bodies until he found a
junkie on his last legs to put out of his misery. He abhorred the
prospect of giving such a terrible gift, but his was a power that
brought life and hope to the desperate. That was enough to outweigh
the fact that for each life he saved, another must be taken. Every
disease he removed from the dying needed to be transferred into
another body before it consumed his own. Hope was a dangerous
thing, but it was infectious. And right now, as the world came down
around their ears, it was the most valuable of all commodities.
    "How long...?" the woman called. "How long will
it take?"
    "Hours... days...weeks...There's no way of knowing
for sure."
    "Does it...hurt?" she asked, rising to her
feet. A small child grabbed her hand, gloved in a dirty