Free Artifact by Shane Lindemoen

bitten?”
    “I – I don’t know.” I rasped.
    “Fuck –” he slowed the car to a grinding halt, sending more flares of pain shooting through my torso. “Try to remember. Check yourself – arms, legs, hands…”
    I looked over my arms and legs but didn’t find anything.
    “It’s the bites,” he said. “Everyone who I saw get bitten ended up like the others.” He nodded at the blood–soaked bandages around my chest, which were ripped loose and tangled around one of my legs.
    “It’s a burn.” I said, “I had it before all this.” I looked out of the window, finally allowing myself to see the extent of what was happening. He waited a few minutes, and I noticed his hand slowly move away from a gun that was wedged into the cup holder. After a few tense moments, he seemed to have come to the conclusion that I was safe, at least for the time being, and stepped on the accelerator again.
    “What’s happening?” I asked.
    The driver looked like a lost child – disoriented and terrified, dried clots of blood around the collar of his tee shirt. Besides the revolver, he had an aluminum baseball bat between his legs that was smeared with blood.
    “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve been trying to listen to the radio, but all I’ve been getting for the past half hour is this–” he raised a media screen in the center console and cycled the channels – the vehicle was flooded with an influx of emergency broadcasts.
    “Someone will occasionally break in to tell people where it’s safe – that’s when I heard about the National Guard at Camp Ripley. They’ve only been allowing in a certain capacity, so I was heading that way when I saw you in the road.”
    We drove in silence for a few minutes, trying to catch our breath. Everywhere I looked, something was burning, or there was a gruesomely injured corpse lunging at our car as we passed.
    “Paramedics started carting off the bodies to the hospital, not really understanding the extent of what was happening. The earliest autopsies revealed encephalitis and myelitis in the brain – something about black bodies in the pyramidal brainstem and purkinje fibers in the cerebellum – they said it was a novel variant of the rabies virus.” He caught me staring and shrugged, “I teach biology…”
    “Physics,” I said, tapping my chest.
    “You teach physics?” He asked halfheartedly, distracted by some horror on the road. “Well, how about that.”
    I used the interface on my armrest to turn up the console as a woman broke in to tell us to head to Camp Ripley – that there was food and shelter, etcetera.
    “Last thing I heard,” he continued, “just before the news cut out for good, was that it started with some car accident at a lake a few miles from the hospital – somebody launched their car off of a dock – and then it spread from there to the whole metro area within a matter of hours.”
    The car accident at the lake. Images of Joseph’s dead body lurching toward me with half his head blown off flooded my mind.
    “You don’t remember me,” the driver said. I pulled myself away from the burning landscape. The man’s face was deliriously focused on the road, sweating so much that it stained his seat. In some ways he did look familiar – mid thirties, short cropped red hair with a little blond around the temples, medium build and fit – but I couldn’t remember.
    “No,” I said finally. “I’m sorry – I’ve recently had an accident. My memory is all screwed up.” I shook my head and looked away. “You could be my best friend for all I know.”
    “Well, I’m not your best friend.”
    He braked pretty strong for another road, and I was able to brace myself in time against the window.
    We were turning onto a frontage road.
    “Or you’re not even real,” I added. “You could simply be another figment of my imagination.”
    “You gave me a ride once,” he said. “When my car broke down on the highway.”
    I looked at