Chapter Seven
"Breathe Bella!" I heard Edward urge.
I hadn't noticed I was almost hyperventilating. I tried to regain control of my lungs that heaved as if I've been running 5 miles an hour.
"I think we lost them," Emmett said, Eric knocked out by him, hanging over his shoulder.
"We have to get to Carlisle!" Alice said. I looked at the strange-girl. She was limp on his back. He just looked like a blown up version of a regular dog. Was it strange it didn't scare me?
"The hospital was overrun. It was filled with those fuckers!" Rosalie added.
"Are we going there?"
"No, we're meeting at the house." Edward said. "We have to get out of sight and far from here or they'll find us." He glanced behind him quickly.
Forks Hospital was only 9 minutes from the school so that horde could make it onto the street we were running on, if they weren't ahead of us already. Leading, Edward turned onto the field that surrounded Forks High School and the elemntary school that sat behind it. Angela's twin brothers went to school there. It was empty now. But what happened to the children bsck there...?
Trespassing on the property of the homes here, we crossed into the forest and ran in a corner, seemingly north, not slowing down. Jacob and Edward traveled over the knocked down trunks and boulders carefully, everything was wet from the early morning rain and the moss slippery. I shivered from the cold, my clothes wet from the sprinklers and the 50 degree weather keeping them cold.
"Should we stop?" Edward asked.
"No, I'm fine. Is Eric?" He had been out for a while now.
"He'll be waking up soon." We stopped, apparently not far from the Sol Duc River we had to cross to get to the Cullen's house. Eric and strange-girl were laid on the wet ground and Jacob shifted back into himself, or human form. He was both. I looked away because he was naked. He was given something and I heard him pulling it on. Looking back, it was Quil's shirt he had stretch to wear as a skirt. He looked like his ancestors might have, in their leather 'skirts' and loose, long black hair.
He looked at me intensely.
"W-what?"
"You're the one looking at me." I blushed and turned away. I had always thought he was beautiful in his own way, perhaps at the same level as Edward if I allowed myself to be honest.
"Like what you see?"
"Gross Jake."
"What, I'm not you're type of monster? Isn't that a double standard?"
"What? What's that supposed to mean?"
"They're vampires, they feed on humans, kill them, and it's me you're staring at."
"Sh! Keep your voice down or they'll hear!" I said, gesturing to the two knocked out bodies. "The Cullens never killed, or fed on anyone."
"Do you honestly believe that?" He then looked at them. The others didn't look at us, or moved, or made any attempt to defend themselves; Edward had turned his head.
"Of course we have, we all did, but that doesn't mean we aren't sorry." Edward said. Jacob scoffed.
"We regret it and work hard everyday to resist." I stared at him. His expression was somber, his eyes that have now turned pitch black made it seem as if I were seeing a diffferent side of him.
"How many." Jacob demanded, obviously disgusted.
"Nine." Edward's eyes shifted to me.
"And then you...you come into Forks and try to live with your food."
"They aren't food to us, it isn't lost to us that they're people! It isn't lost to me that I could kill her any second if I wasn't careful enough." He growled, baring his fangs at Jacob. I barely got out of the way when he charged, picked him up from the floor, and pinned him to a tree behind us.
"Our nature is part of the reason why I left. I tried to stay away. I tried. You don't know anything mutt so you best keep your opinions to yourself!"
"Edward, don't!" I said, a hand gripping his forearm. My hand slipped off when he let him go, and he shook his jacket, still angry.
"I don't think we should fight right now, we're all in a lot of trouble; there's no time for whatever this is." I said.
"Vampires and Werewolves were always mortal enemies, since the begining of time. Our curse is because of them. So long as they exist, so will we."
"It's no curse from us but one passed down to you by your ancestors."
"Both of you shut up! I don't give a fuck who came first, the chicken or the egg; it doesn't matter!"
"He's waking up." Emmett warned. Eric started waking up, groggy as if he'd been asleep for ten hours. When he could see us he started backing away.
"Whoa! You-gah!"
"Don't freak out-"
"How do I not freak out-why are you...!"
"Do I knock him out again?" Emmett asked. Eric jumped away from him.
"Did you see that!"
"Yeah, I didn't know either."
"I mean he-he turned into a...a..."
"Werewolf." Jacob said for him.
"More like shapeshifters." Edward corrected. I stared them down.
"What about you?" He looked from Edward to Emmett who he was running beside until Emmett knocked him out because he was slow.
"Vampire." Emmett answered.
"No way..."
"Look where we are, it's not impossible." Quil said, arms at either side as if to say 'look where we are now'. Eric was silent but his mind wasn't.
"We don't feed on humans. We have a common enemy, those back at the town. So let's try to keep calm or they'll have an advantage over us."
"You can read my mind?" Edward shrugged.
"Are you a vampire?" He asked me.
"No, of course not. We'll explain later, right now we have to get to the Cullen's house." I said, walking towards strange-girl who was coming too now.
"Who's that?" I shrugged as I helped her to sit up. Her hood had fallen off and I could see she was in her mid-twenties with disheveled short hair hanging over her face.
"Here," I said, unscrewing our bottle of water. It was barely half full but enough for her.
"Thank you. You're Charlie's daughter; sorry about what happened." I let that last bit go over my head.
"I'm Bella, these are my friends-"
"I know, they're Dr. Cullens children and..."
"That's Eric, a classmate." She made an odd expression as she took another swig when her eyes moved to Jacob.
"I'm Nikki, short for Nicole. I used to work at Forks Hospital," She said it as if it was long before the attack.
"I left the hospital when suddenly we were putting in another patient in each room only meant for one. I figure something was wrong; we were getting inundated fast. A few weeks ago, someone with the same symptoms like the others was admitted. He got increasingly worse and would spit out liters of blood. It covered most of the floor and there were even splatters on the windows. A big range which definitely isn't normal.
He was moved into a quarantine unit but really it was just a room on the far side of the hospital, because of how much of the stuff he'd cough up. But it didn't seem to affect his motor skills, loosing so much blood. He coughed up blood a few times and seemed to do it on the personel on purpose. Those people got sick too. Carlisle was doing his best, telling us what to do, seperating patients. But it spread fast and I left because I was scared I would be next.
I saw them face to face, when I was trying to load my grandparents into the car, trying to leave. But I couldn't..."
"You don't have to tell us," I said, as she took another swig, blinking her tears away.
"I wanted to hide in Forks high school, thought I'd pass for a teen." She explained, pulling the large hoodie she wore. "The point is, that guy was already contagious within the day he was admitted. And 'died' 10 days later."
"I thought they said with took 24 days?" She shook her head wildly.
"The symptoms are similar to that of rabies. 24 days is the longest recorded time that someone took to die from it, but it varies widely; 2-12 days even with the standard procedure to treat it. I don't think it's regular rabies though. We were told to keep up the lie the government told the news to say, an order passed down to hospitals, to avoid mass panic.
They're infected immediately, either as soon as they're bitten or within 24 hours. It bypasses the immunue system by going into the nervous system, not the circulatory system, and moves straight to the front part of the brain which controls memory, emotion, problem-solving, apetite and motor function. That's why all of those people were acting strange:running or acting strange in the streets, attacking people, trying to eat them, or were suddenly more reckless than usual, eating more.
It must also be able to get into the brain stem if they can run like a normal human. They must still be getting oxygen and their heart must still be pumping blood throughout their body. The brain stem controls that.
Some had mildler symptoms, you would think it was the cold or flu and not this 'rabies strain' that has been spreading around- It mutates like the cold, the symptoms are different in everyone. It could take longer than a day for someone to exhibit symptoms and people get close to them. If they kissed...it's over. Afer infecting the brain it moves on to the salivary glands; that's why they bite and it infects their victim."
Like vampire venom...
"Like I said, it mutates; the virus changes so it can infect the host faster. And when it does, when that person infects another, that new victim gets sick even faster, their 'death' closer. And so the time frame gets shorter. Back at the school, it took five days for them to be completely lost; but they were infected since they were bitten, spat on or whatever by them. Meaning that even though they're still human, they've already been hijacked. That's the fucked up part. They're not exactly brain dead, they just don't have control anymore."
"So then..." Quil started, voice wavering. He didn't finish but Kikki nodded as if knowing what he was going to say.
"Soon it will be instantaneous. I give it 24 hours max."
It was kind of fun researching viruses, finding a good one, and how it infects people. But I found surviving is harder.
I've been thinking of renaming this fic In A Heartbeat. Like the 28 days later theme but also because in a heartbeat, the virus washes over the brain, in a heartbeat they're infected, and in a heartbeat someone could be lost forever. If you have any ideas, feel free to put them in a review, thanks.
PS: I hope you like the cover photo for the fic, it's actually trees with red leaves but I chose this because it looks like blood splatters and to continue the theme of nature from the twilight-verse. Also, sorry if there's typos and I hope you comment something, it's almost 2k words this time.