Step by Step/Issue 12

This is Issue #12 of Step by Step. It is the sixth issue of Act Two.

THIS IS A PREVIEW.

Across the Sign
Malcolm watched the soldiers struggle to produce the yellow floodlights. The collection rattled as they dispersed out from a storage room sitting at the far side of the gymnasium. The floodlights clanged across the waxy floor as they were gliding past icy layers. With two soldiers at each floodlight, about eight for the four corners of the gymnasium, soon there were four floodlights erected and mounted at each side.

Together as one, the floodlights zapped to life. Their white light lit up the school gymnasium and shoved the darkness away. As if on synchronized time, thunder boomed and rumbled the red brick walls of the gymnasium. The shock waves shook the floodlights, but they continued to cook the gymnasium with warm light. A worthy replacement for the absent sun.

The floodlights sent Malcolm's hands for his eyes. He squinted and turned around to deter the blinding light. He wiped at his aching sockets and allowed his assault rifle to remain across his chest. Resting there. Waiting for its one job.

It had been five months since the plague was hailed to be deflected through force. Those who reanimated were lethal beings, had stated the bunch of amateur researchers, were to be detained immediately. They were contagious. Pus-riddled sacks of dragging flesh with legs.

Malcolm checked himself. Then he looked up. Straight up to the hidden ceiling where the darkness had crept into for its survival. The same ceiling he had looked into when he was notified that his wife had gotten the disease. Malcolm tensed up and sucked in a large breath of air.

She hadn't a fortnight left to live. He remembered still being at the school and unable to leave. Stuck to the school's military station like clouds to the blue sky on a Wednesday morning. Malcolm held back his lips. Rubbed his temples.

He had been so stupid. So dumb. All he had done was go to the barracks and lay his back on a bent, twisted chair. The starry night of that time did not much to please him. All he had done was stare out into the exposed creases of the windows which had been freshly bolted to the wall with nails. Blocking off any sort of ensuing chaos which had, by then, crept into the city.

It was that day that Malcolm questioned himself. His sanity. Why he was at the military station and allowing for people to die every second. Particularly, Malcolm couldn't grasp it. He couldn't hold his mindset together. Like a plate broken into millions of pieces and the owner trying their best to keep it together. Malcolm quite wasn't sure if he could trust himself at all.

The scattered, shiny dots of distant stars was the thing that molded him into shape. With his dry eyes gawking out the peeks of window film, he eased up on the chair. He had spread his back out on the chair's latitude and rested back his head whilst the chair whispered out a cracking groan. Those stars. Out there.

Acting like Malcolm was small. A little, puny speck in the city. Malcolm didn't care. He did not want to. His wife was another number added to the sum of thousands who had perished in the great inferno of the disease. He wondered why he did not shed tears that night. Would it have been the right thing to do?

He was being himself now. A man. A soldier needing to a platoon in a wild mess of a school. Malcolm twisted a glance to a commune of people who had which gathered around. Frankly, Malcolm could have cared less. But the guttural sounds released not a moment later attracted him like the opposite ends of magnets.

The crowd of a little more than a dozen refugees shuffled. Malcolm could barely edge a view from his distance of ten feet. He recognized a voice from the center escape the tendrils of crowd's body. It was that paramedic. Lilian. Most likely with her novice companion. He spun his head to the side. Facing two soldiers at their posts. “Stay on high alert!”

Malcolm found himself skipping across the gymnasium in a hurried fashion. He unshackled the assault rifle from his next. It took three seconds for him to realize the horrid patient that was stapled to the crowd's nucleus. “Make a path!” He shouted in a fury of tone. On the fifth second, he nudged through the crowd and prodded a way until he found the blonde paramedic.

Then the soldier in camouflaged drab. A beard hanging on the lower portion of his face. It took Malcolm a second longer for it to sink in. “Gordon?”

Lilian swiped a hand across her face. The sweat hung drenched across her face. She had tried to conceal the stress that was consuming her essence. Her fingers fiddled hastily with the medical instruments she held. A morphine injection. Looking up, she found Kerry all open eyed and struggling to drown out the growing murmurs that surrounded the two.

“I'm going to put this into him, now,” she said to Kerry, hoping that her apprentice would observe the lesson. Lilian checked the needle again. Loaded with the pain-numbing drug. Her face fell to the one of Gordon. “This should help.”

“What is that for?” Kerry locked her eyes on the morphine.

Lilian retracted back, pulling on the needle to let the fluid drain out into position. “It'll stop the pain receptors in his spine.” She paused and scanned Gordon. About six feet. Maybe more than two hundred pounds of weight minus the baggage of equipment and clothing that had wrapped itself around the poor man's body. “Perfect dosage.”

“Does he really need that?”

Lilian pursed her lips and found her way back to the fragile needle. Gordon had said nothing through the pain except muttering the word cold. She was sure the pain reliever would help him. “He'll be okay. Once we get him stabilized it'll be easier to get him away from this place.”

Kerry scrunched up her nose. “Where's that then?”

“Hopefully we can move into the cafeteria and lay him down,” she paused and pointed to the pant leg around Gordon's only uninjured, fully working thigh. “Lift it up.”

Shaking from the minimal, yet strong cold, Kerry obliged. “Don't you have to remove the bullet?”

Lilian scoffed. She felt Gordon's thigh with her index finger. Tried to find a blood vessel. She tapped her finger against the thigh several times, mostly out of impatience. Where did that one girl go? She should have been here by now with the ice. Something, rather than the intense morphine drug, else to keep Gordon from going into shock.

She looked up and shook her hand, nearly to her own amusement. “That's only in the movies, but if we have the time...” Lilian reeled back the needle after shooting out the liquid into Gordon's bloodstream. Nearly right after, she realized the morphine was beginning to kick in. The soldier's chest let out hoarse, double-stepped breaths.

“What did you give him?” Malcolm said from the sideline.

Lilian heard the grumpy, low voice and shot her eyes up, Not much of a surprise to see the deep words leave the lips of a man about twice her height. “Morphine,” she said. “And nothing more.”

The cigarette fumes puffed out into the stench of moisture in the gymnasium. Lyle let the cancer stick rest out the corner of his mouth. The smoke shook his arms as they rustled down his gray hoodie cap. It wasn't the right time to think about the meaning of life and how one cigarette would put an extra nail in his coffin.

When it was time.

It had all started with Wyatt. The humble informant. Lyle laughed to himself at the irony. All the days of supplying the refugees at the school were gone. Deleted. The rug pulled right from the soles of their bare feet. No more blankets to give out, no more bottled water to quench a lucky soul's thirst, and hell, not even another cancer stick to chew on.

Lyle picked the burnt cigarette from edge of his mouth. For a moment, he pondered on where everyone had gone. In general, there were a cluster of people wandering around the gymnasium. The majority were refugees. Most bunched up around the where that guy had fell with the gunshot.

He sighed, releasing a strain of smoke from his spent lungs. His throat burned, but he rested his back against the gymnasium wall. Up in the bleachers, he had a full front view from afar. Nothing could hurt him from where he was.

If whatever even contemplated on that even had the fucking guts to carry it out.

Nolan was probably in either the cafeteria or the main office. Lyle was beyond positive. Besides, the white boy wasn't like Wyatt. Not a soldier ordered to his death by an erratic leader. Lyle held himself back from drawing his eyes over to Brock, who laid in harmony with his maimed leg being inspected by a nurse in blue.

Trying to refrain from the glance, he found Joseph slumped in a bleacher seat at the lowest row. The fool was just sitting there staring off at the heavens. For god's sake, Lyle felt embarrassed by looking at the poor dude. Lyle tapped his cigarette against the bleacher's metal and hopped over.

“Yo, Joseph.”

Joseph took a second before turning around. “Jackson?”

“The one and only, baby.” Lyle popped his fingers in the air. “You sticking out like a sore thumb.” Lyle continued tossing down leg after leg over the bleacher space. He stopped near Joseph's back and took a long inhale of the death cigar. His arms tingled. “You ain't gonna go be with ya boys?”

Joseph cupped his hands on his neck. “There's no point.”

“Oh hell, man.” Lyle patted Joseph's right shoulder and dropped to Joseph's right on the black and cold bleacher metal. “That's what I like to hear, but I don't think you've noticed; this is your job, brother.”

“No it isn't.”

“I beg to differ. And to be honest, the fact that there's dead people walking around this school sure is frightening me.”

Joseph said nothing. He looked past the gymnasium's harsh lighting and into the doors that branched out into the halls. “You didn't see what I saw.”

Lyle grinned. “I saw enough to know that I'm capable of shitting my pants.” Lyle took another go at the cigarette, flicking some ash to his own right side. “I'd kill for some Dr. Pepper, man.”

Joseph balled his hands into fists and wiped the exhaustion from his face. “Me too,” he said.

“Ah, see? This shit's contagious!” Lyle whooped in joy, cracking a smile with more emotion than everyone in the vicinity put together. His hands jerked like they were being shocked with electricity. Another success for the gangster.

Brock mustered up a low groan as he shifted in position. His leg hurt like a bitch. Twice over. He nearly gagged from the excruciating, burning sensation ripping throughout his leg. Brock's face was a sweaty mess and his eyes were had glossed over.

His nurse had left not ten minutes before. He had awoken to the clash of a crack of thunder rampaging through the streets. Streets containing the dead. He had to get up. Back to work and right where he left off. Bashing their heads in.

Blinking several times, his vision cleared into a quite blurry state. Then, Brock realized the idiots had commissioned all of the floodlights. They were really pushing it. Whoever was in charge of them sure had a power outage in stock.

“You look like you need a shower.” Lyle's voice came to Brock's ears.

Brock craned his neck up and towards the dark brown irises of Lyle C. Jackson. They lacked the contents of fear and even repulsion. Disgust for Brock and his mutilated leg. “W—what?” He was cut off as the criminal reached for something and lifted It to Brock's mouth. Now that he felt the object drop into his weak hands, he found the strength to down the water. Lyle had given him water.

Who knew that two atoms of hydrogen and one oxygen atom could spring the life back into a person? Certainly not Brock.

The pristine water flushed away the dryness from his brittle throat. He muttered a thanks after emptying the entire bottled water. It crinkled up as Brock squeezed for more. But it had ended. Just like the rain had begun to do that same moment.

“Normally, I would have let you turn into sandpaper here and not have had a second thought,” Lyle said, “but I need the competition, y'know?”

Brock pressed a stare onto Lyle. A sudden bitterness took hold of him. He should be dead. Gone with the wind like his family. Mary and the boys. Oh god. No. He should have been left there on the weed-filled soil and left to die.

He tried to keep a smile up. “Yeah, yeah.” Brock didn't know what to feel. He had the pain biting at his leg. The unrelenting destructive thoughts escaping his mind and recycling themselves. ''Dead, dead. Should have died back there.''

Lyle took the rumpled up plastic bottle from Brock's swollen fingers. “I'll go call the nurse, the one with the sweet butt.” And then Lyle went off.

Brock lowered his brows. His teeth clenched together and grinding. But at what? He had no idea if it was at his coward sense of hope. Or Lyle. The damned criminal. It was all his fault. Lyle had set him up. Destroyed everything Brock had lived for.

“You'll regret not letting me die...”