Free Blood Water by Dean Vincent Carter Page A

to get him to a hospital as soon as we can.'
    'Nigel? Where is he?'
    'In the staff room. But we have to find the parasite
first, before it gets into anyone else.'
    'Well, where is it now?'
    'It's inside Dr Morrow – he's one of my colleagues
at the centre. It jumped from Phoenix to him,
then . . . jumped through the window.'
    'It did what?'
    'It doesn't seem to care about the body it inhabits. It
just uses it as a vehicle and a way of gaining information
and knowledge.'
    'But we don't know what it wants,' Sean added,
'though it seems it's after something specific – I think
it'll keep attacking people until it finds it.'
    Waites looked from Sean to James, waiting for one
of them to give him the slightest sign that it was all a
big joke. No such luck. 'So this thing is outside somewhere?'
    'Yeah, unless it's already got back in.'
    'I don't much like the idea of going out there,' Waites
said, turning to the window. 'But—' He stopped as he
heard a bloodcurdling scream from above. 'What the
hell was that?'
    'I think it was Mrs Rees,' Sean said.
    Confusion more than horror had gripped Mrs Rees initially,
but now she had made some sort of sense of what
her eyes were seeing. She was barely aware of Morrow
standing very close behind her, almost breathing down
her neck, as her eyes continued to dart all over the dreadful
scene. It looked as though all the blood in Phoenix's
body had evacuated itself, along with blobs of slushy
matter – his liquefied organs. His face was a pallid death
mask, pocked with sores and streaked with the blood
that, in his final moments, had poured from his eyes
– which were now staring, yellow and misshapen, while
his mouth, agape, still oozed blood and matter.
    Part of Emily Rees wanted to walk forward just to
check that Phoenix was definitely dead; the other part
of her wondered how she could be so stupid as to even
entertain such a notion. Of course he was dead. And
whatever had killed him could be highly infectious,
possibly airborne. She could already have caught it,
but touching him would surely be the most idiotic
move imaginable. She was reminded of pictures she'd
seen in biology textbooks of the effects of the Ebola
virus. This was similar, though it couldn't be Ebola.
Not here.
    'Oh God,' came a voice over her shoulder. 'What a
mess.'
    She slowly turned to face Morrow, wondering as
she did so what this strange man had to do with the
appalling death of her colleague. As she looked into
his eyes, she realized that this was not the same man
she'd met earlier: something about him had changed
drastically.
    'You . . . you've got something to do with this. What's
going on? What happened to Nigel?'
    'Please,' Morrow implored, wiping blood and drool
from his chin. 'Don't panic. I'm going to fix this somehow,
but we have to make sure that no one leaves the school.'
He moved towards her, his arms outstretched in an
effort to placate.
    'Keep away from me.' It was no longer his behaviour
that frightened Emily Rees; it was the fact that he
looked very ill, and could well be suffering from whatever
had killed Nigel Phoenix. She didn't want him near
her, much less touching her. She wanted to get as far
away as possible.
    'Just listen,' Morrow said, still moving forward.
'Please, just listen—'
    But Emily Rees had heard enough: she turned and
bolted out of the room and straight into the men's toilets.
She went over to the smashed window, rain still blowing
in, and looked out, down to the ground. It was too far
to jump – she could break her legs. She heard Morrow
approaching from the staff room, still offering words of
comfort, so she entered one of the toilet cubicles and
locked the door. Morrow shuffled in and stopped. She
could hear his breathing.
    'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm so sorry about all of this, but
you have to listen. We are all in danger. We have to think
of the children.'
    'Please! Just get away from me.'
    'I will, I will, I just . .