Spoiler
I have a previous version of this story posted, in Romantic Fiction Short Stories, but this is the most recent draft of the story. I'm trying to enter it in a contest, so I'd appreciate any and all criticism!
I have to cut some 580 words to meet the contest guidelines, so I'd very much appreciate any thoughts as to what could be cut. I'm also not entirely sure which genre to classify this as, so any ideas would be great for that too. The title is kind of horrendous in my eyes as well. xD
Thanks!
-Lauren-
I have to cut some 580 words to meet the contest guidelines, so I'd very much appreciate any thoughts as to what could be cut. I'm also not entirely sure which genre to classify this as, so any ideas would be great for that too. The title is kind of horrendous in my eyes as well. xD
Thanks!
-Lauren-
The booming echoes of gunfire didn’t shake Kyleigh anymore. She didn’t know when they had stopped signaling that compulsive portion of her psyche – the one that used to set her into hour long panic attacks that could only be calmed by Jay holding her to the floor and shoving an oxygen mask in her face – that registered that they meant everyone she knew was dying. Maybe it was the knowledge that everyone she knew was already dead, or the quarter mile of concrete that separated her from the rest of the world that allowed her to stay sane.
The gunshots still echoed through the ventilation, though. If she wanted to hear, she would stand by the vents that connected the tiny underground laboratory to the surface and listen. And she would know, again, that the world she had once known was falling apart.
She didn’t much like to listen anymore.
It wasn’t as if she had time to stand around under dusty ventilation ducts and listen to the distant rumblings of bombs being dropped in far away cities. It was a waste of her valuable time. Especially when she had seven years of research to complete in a little over three weeks.
She stared at the cluttered lab table; beakers and test tubes of chemicals and concoctions she had been watching for hours filled every open space. Her right hand moved of its own accord, scrawling notes in the blue spiral notebook she kept at her side through every waking moment.
Her eyelids drooped, her breathing shallow. She was suddenly exhausted, too exhausted. The muscles in her back spasmed and she tipped backwards on the stool. She crashed to the floor, mid-seizure, the metal stool clanging against the white tile floor.
“Ky?” Jay’s voice called from the end of the hallway outside the open laboratory door. His footsteps sounded on the linoleum floors. “Ky, I heard a crash…” He came through the doorway to find her convulsing on the floor. He jumped over her frail, disease-ridden body and grabbed a syringe from the lab table.
Kyleigh held out a shaky hand for it, but he held it away from her. “Tell me how to do it.”
“N-N-Now is n-not the t-time, Jay-y,” she choked out. “D-Do you w-want me to d-die-e?” Her vision blurred and terrifying, crazed images flashed through her mind’s eye; pictures of death, anger, bloodlust.
“I’m just gonna wing it, then.” He grabbed her around the shoulders, holding her steady, and jammed the needle into her forearm. Thick orange liquid shot into her bloodstream, and after several minutes her convulsions slowed and she regained her presence of mind. Soon she was sitting upright, eating saltine crackers Jay had dug out of a supply closet down the hall.
“When I turn,” he said as he cracked open a bottle of water and handed it to Kyleigh, “don’t mess around with this antidote shit. Just put a bullet between my eyes and be done with me.”
She cringed and took a long drink of her water. She didn’t like hearing Jay talk about the epidemic like he did. He refused to believe anything could be done about the disease. He didn’t think they – the diseased, or Zombies as Jay so intolerantly called them – had any of their old selves left in them, or that they could be returned to their former states of being.
“You know I couldn’t do that,” she said, brushing a wavy strand of brown hair away from her thin face. “And don’t talk that way. You won’t contract anything so long as we’re down here.”
The bunker was at least a quarter of a mile beneath the surface, and that space was almost entirely filled with concrete. There were only two ways between the bunker and the surface: a service elevator that had broken down before they moved in, and a dimly lit stairwell.
“That’s what we thought,” he said, leaning back on his hands. “But they got the others. And you.”
Kyleigh closed her eyes, gripping the half empty water bottle in her hand, the plastic crinkling. She hated thinking about the day they came to the bunker. She felt so incredibly guilty. She had only been able to bring a few people down with her, and Jay was the only other person who had made it down alive, and the only one safely at that. One of the diseased that killed the rest of their party bit Kyleigh before Jay could knock his head off. That’s how the disease was transmitted, saliva to blood.
The only thing keeping her alive – and healthy (well, to an extent) – now was the serum developed by the scientists that had worked down in the lab bunker before Kyleigh and Jay. It was a miracle, really, the serum. It could delay the symptoms for several weeks per dose. Though it hadn’t been properly tested, and Kyleigh had begun to suspect that the effects of the serum couldn’t last forever, that they would eventually begin to fail to keep her healthy.
Those scientists had known more than she did, though, and had more training. Kyleigh was only a graduate student at the university, and Jay hadn’t even studied medicine. He’d studied literature. He was the only one without medical training in their party, and deep down Kyleigh knew he loved the irony.
“Feeling any better?”
Kyleigh looked back at him, bringing her thoughts back to the present. He watched her with shining green eyes under his tangled locks of dark brown hair that spilled over his forehead. While Kyleigh made semi-regular use of the chemical showers, she didn’t think he had bathed in weeks.
“Yeah I guess,” she said. “I’m not making much progress though.” She looked up to the lab table and sighed. Nothing she had done so far left her with many promising results. She couldn’t stop trying, though. She imagined she only had about three weeks and some days before the disease would over take her, serum or no serum, and Jay would pull out his shotgun and blast her through the head.
“I don’t know why you even bother,” he said, shaking his head and crumbling the empty plastic saltine sleeve into a ball and tossing it across the room. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Kyleigh took another sip of water. Jay was insensitive about the entire epidemic. She supposed it wasn’t his fault; when they ran across him he was curled up in an abandoned convenience store mumbling something to himself about an ambush. She didn’t press him about it, but it was obvious something terrible had happened to him because of the epidemic.
“I have to try, Jay,” she said. “It’s—”
“Stop,” he said, grabbing her wrist. “I know what you think, you know what I think.” He linked his fingers with hers. “I’m sorry. We really shouldn’t be wasting our time, or our breath, trying to convince each other differently.”
She fidgeted, pulling her hand away from his. She turned away to hide a light blush that crept across her cheeks. “But, Jay—”
“Ky.” He laughed, shaking out his shaggy hair. “Don’t make me dump the rest of the serum down the drain.”
Jay had become some sort of friend to her over the past few months, thrown with her by circumstance. They weren’t the types of people who would ordinarily be friends. Kyleigh was calculating, sure, scientific. Jay was reckless, and part of Kyleigh – a startlingly large part – believed he would do it, dump the serum down the drain and watch her succumb to the disease while he loaded his gun.
“Chill out, Ky!” He fell over on the floor, laughing. “You ought to see how white your face just got! Damn, Ky, I like you enough not to kill you when you still have time left.”
“Jay…” She let out a long breath and lay on the floor, facing him. “Sometimes I really hate you, you know that?”
He grinned and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her across the linoleum lab floor until she was pressed against his chest. “Aw, you’re just a crazy near-Zombie,” he said. His face was close to hers, his breath smelled of crackers. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kyleigh rolled her eyes, but her stomach flipped inside her. She felt weird lately when she was close to Jay, and it scared her. A large part of her believed it was a part of the slowed progression of the disease; she was beginning to desire human flesh. However, as she looked into his laughing eyes, a tiny part of her feared it was much worse; that what she desired was him – unrelated from the diseased desire to consume him, but not in an entirely different sense – that she was feeling something for him.
“Why did I follow you down into this dungeon anyway?” he asked, locking his eyes with hers. She hated when he did that; it was like he saw right through her, into her thoughts, her soul – if she even still had one. “It’s a wonderfully awful place to be, and you’re lousy company.”
“Oh thanks,” Kyleigh said, shooting him a glare. “You’re not the greatest company either.”
Mocked insult spread over his face. “How dare you say something like that,” he said, pouting. “I’m delightful.”
Kyleigh burst into laughter, tears streaking her face. Jay tightened her arms around her, his shoulders shaking as his strong laugh accompanied her squeal. They laughed for a long time, harder than either had in months. After a long time, their laughter subsided into giggles and then into contented silence.
Kyleigh’s face rested against Jay’s threadbare t-shirt as he continued to hold her to him. He smelled like sweat and laboratory, never a pleasant combination, but it was somewhat comforting at the same time. Perhaps because Kyleigh knew she smelled the same way; it was familiar.
“Hey Ky,” he said after a while, his words muffled as his face was pressed against her hair.
“Hm?”
“I don’t know why I followed you down here,” he said. “All I know is there was no way I was going anywhere else. Not if this is where you were going.”
“It’s not like you had anywhere else to go,” she said. She pushed herself back from him, expecting a taunting smile to be plastered over his face, but his lips were drawn in a tight line. “I…I’m sorry,” Kyleigh said softly.
“I know I say I don’t believe you can figure out a cure for this whole Zombie thing,” he said, meeting her eyes with one of his soul-piercing stares. “But, you almost make me believe it can be done. For your sake.” He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. “I don’t know what I’d do if you were gone.”
She pushed herself up and lifted her stood from the ground. “I have to get back to work,” she said quickly. She pulled on her gloves and grabbed a test tube and her notebook, throwing herself back into her calculations.
Her face burned as she heard Jay get up and walk out of the room, mumbling something to himself. Her stomach turned, her heart thudding in her chest.
#
Jay started hanging around the back corners of the laboratory, a ragged copy of some poet’s work in his hand and an old radio he’d found some five months back sitting by his feet blasting nothing but static.
Kyleigh suspected his sudden interest in the laboratory wasn’t simply boredom with the rest of the bunker, which was no more than a few storage rooms and a tiny lounge that doubled as a bunk room. Rather, she suspected he knew her attacks were coming closer and closer now – several times a day – and wanted to be around to play hero if she needed him too.
While it made her uncomfortable to feel so, her spirits were considerably raised knowing he was lounging around in within her sight now. He had dragged in an old couch from the lounge down the hall and lay on it, the old radio sitting on the floor by his head. He’d finally managed to get a signal all the way down there, and listened in to a broadcast sent out by a group of survivors who’d managed to get together and form some kind of understanding of what was happening out there.
Jay was addicted to it. He always had it playing, listening to lists of deaths and cities bombed. It was the UN’s newest strategy. The epidemic was centralized in North America, but slowly spreading overseas. They were shipping anyone suspected to have contracted the disease over to America and slowly bombing the living hell out of the place.
While Jay saw hope in it, like if all the diseased were destroyed, they could be rescued and taken someplace untouched by the epidemic. Kyleigh, on the other hand, only saw loss. If a bombing was strong enough to destroy their bunker, or if the UN destroyed the rest of North America, all her hard work would have gone to waste.
After days of static-ridden death tolls, she couldn’t handle it anymore.
“Jay, shut that goddamn thing off!” she shouted, throwing an empty test tube against the wall. It shattered; she shuddered at the sound and grabbed a syringe, jamming it into her arm. Any outlash terrified her anymore. The diseased were prone to drastic emotional outbreaks, and though she had always had a short temper, she wasn’t taking chances.
Jay dropped his book on the couch and ran to her. He pulled the syringe from her arm and threw it to the floor. “You’re going to kill yourself,” he said. “You just took some; it can’t be good to take more.”
She pushed him back. “I’m fine,” she spat. “I just can’t listen to all the suffering anymore!” She pointed to the radio. “We both know people are dying, that the world is giving up on any survivors still here. Do we really need to hear about it?”
“Calm down, Ky,” he said. He pulled the gloves off her hands and led her away from the table. “You need a break, you’re working too hard.”
“I can’t stop working,” she said, but didn’t struggle. “I need to find a cure; I don’t have much time.”
He unbuttoned her lab coat, pulled it off her, and threw it to the floor. She wore a thin tank top and old jeans underneath. “You have time for a break,” he said. “Come on. Come hang out with me.”
“Jay, this isn’t the time for hanging out,” she said. She bent to pick up her lab coat but he grabbed her hand and pulled her away before she could.
“Ky, come on,” he plead. “If we’ve only got a week left, I want to spend them hanging out with my only friend left, my best friend. Not watching her stress over chemicals I don’t even know the names of.”
He pulled her into a tight hug, despite her struggling, and held her for a long time. “Please,” he said. “You’re killing yourself over this when we’re both going to die anyway. We could be having the time of our lives.”
“The time of our lives while the world is dying?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s life if all of our friends and family are already dead?” he asked. “We have nothing to go back to up there. Even if you were, somehow, able to find a cure, what would it do? We’d only get to look out on what used to be our world. There’s nothing left for us there. All that’s left for us is right here, between me and you.”
“That was very poetic,” she said. “But you’re wrong. There’s nothing for us down here either. What can we do? Listen to that goddamn radio? Or, as an equally terrible alternative, sit under the vents and listen to gunfire take down anyone left that we might have known up there?”
“Wait right here,” he said. He turned and ran out of the room. He came back a minute later with a bottle of wine in each of his hands. “Here.” He uncorked one and handed it to her. “Whoever was down here before us must have liked cheap-ass wine, so why not make use of it? They’re not coming back to drink it.”
“I really don’t think this is the time for drinking,” she said. “I have work to do.”
He took her hand. “Listen,” he said. ‘I know you still believe you can find a cure, but maybe you’re not meant to. Maybe we’re just meant to live out these last days like humans were meant to,” He lifted his bottle of wine, a goofy grin on his face, “in a drunken stupor.”
Kyleigh rolled her eyes and turned back to the lab table, but Jay pulled her back again. “Ky, I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t want you to regret anything.”
She looked down at the bottle of wine in her hand, wondering if maybe he was right. She lifted the bottle to her lips and took a small sip, swirling it around in her mouth like her mother used to do when she hosted wine tastings at the country club back home. It was a vibrant array of tastes for such inexpensive wine, especially compared to the stale water they had been drinking for weeks. “Not bad,” she said.
Jay laughed, wrapping an arm around her waist. “You only say that because you’ve never had any better,” he said. “You’ve always been dryer than a desert.”
“I’ve had my fair share of drinks,” she said, taking another sip as if to prove a point. “You didn’t know me pre-epidemic, you have no room to talk.”
He took a long drink from his bottle and laughed, spinning her around a few times in a strange sort of dance. He rested his forehead against hers and exhaled, blowing wine-breath over her face. “Well, what was pre-epidemic Kyleigh like?”
“A med student,” she said, laughing. Her heart drummed in her chest, but something kept her from pushing herself away this time. Maybe it was the alcohol and the serum mixing inside her, shutting her body down. “I had fun, though.”
“Mmm, fun with sutures and test tubes?” He laughed at himself, always imagining he was funnier than he actually was.
“Regular people fun,” she said. “I went out, danced, drank, had sex, did things young people do.” She was exaggerating, of course. She hadn’t been out to a bar since undergrad, and even then it was more like once a month with her celibate roommate. A social life had never been her top priority.
“Did pre-epidemic, regular people fun Kyleigh happen to have a boyfriend?” Jay asked. His face drifted closer to her, his nose brushing her cheek.
Her face flushed bright red, but for some reason she didn’t mind if he noticed. “No,” she said. “She didn’t.”
“Well good,” he said. He lifted her face to his as pressed his lips against hers. Kyleigh’s head spun, her heart raced. She urged to push herself away and run for the lab table, to grab a syringe and jam it into her arm. She was near sure she was finally losing it to the disease, but she couldn’t tear herself away.
After a moment, he broke away, locking his eyes with hers. “I love you, Ky,” he said. “Maybe not in the way two people usually love each other, but it’s there. I know you feel it too, but you’ll never say it. So here I am, saying it for you, all you have to do is let it happen.
She bit her lip, the taste of wine thick in her mouth. “Okay.” It was all she could say, all she could give of herself, but he understood. She saw in his eyes that he understood. He saw right through her, right into her very core.
He pulled her close, kissing her again, and slowly pushed her backwards, back across the lab to where the chemical shower was concealed by a makeshift wall of crates.
#
There were only a few days left. Only a few days before the serum would be ineffective. Jay had caved, letting her get back to work, and Kyleigh let him keep his radio in return. It was the only thing keeping him sane anymore, and she tried to understand that.
One day, Jay jumped up from the couch and ran to her. He grabbed her from her stool and swung her around, kissing her and laughing.
“What?” she asked, irritated. Every day she felt the disease, and her own failure, weighing on her more and more.
“There are others, Ky!” he shouted. “Others working on a cure! They’re not far from here, we have to go.”
“For all we know they could be dead,” she said. She picked up her overturned stool and sat back down.
“No, Ky, they’re broadcasting, live, right now,” he said. “They’re close, so close. What if your research is all they need? We have to find them.”
“We’ll never make it,” she said. “We have no idea what it’s like up there now.”
“Ky,” he said, turning her around, holding her face in his hands. “We have to try. We have to.”
She looked back at her notebook, filled with research. There was no way she’d finish, no way she’d survive. If there was some shred of hope now, could she really pass it by. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He quickly filled a backpack with food, serum, and ammo for his shotgun. He was ready in minutes, standing by the door, holding his hand out to Kyleigh. She shed her lab coat and took his hand, following him to the barricaded stairwell.
He pulled back the barricades and undid all the locks. The door opened into a musty stairway that stunk of dirt and disease. Kyleigh coughed and looked back to the clean air of the bunker, knowing they couldn’t turn back now. Jay pulled the door closed behind them.
They travelled upward for a long time, what seemed like hours, before finally breaking the surface. It was night, and the air wasn’t fresh like Kyleigh remembered night air being. It stunk worse than the stairway. Like never-ending death.
“Where to?” she asked, peering down the street they had appeared on. Jay didn’t respond. “Jay, where are we going?” She turned to face him and immediately felt as if the air had been knocked out of her. She could see in his face right then that he had lied.
“How could you?” she demanded. She threw her fists against his chest, knocking him back. He dropped the backpack, its contents spilling over the pavement. Syringes of serum rolled over the sidewalk, along with a small silver pistol she had never seen before. “How could you?”
“Ky.” He grabbed her by the shoulders. His eyes flickered with something she had seen many times before in the lab. “We couldn’t stay there,” he said. “We would have suffered. We were suffering.”
“Jay, how could you do this?” Her head spun; she could feel the virus coursing through her bloodstream. She reached for one of the syringes spilled over the ground; Jay moved to stop her, but she pushed him back.
He sat silently by and watched her shove the needle into her arm. She let out a long breath and gathered everything back into the backpack, refusing to meet Jay’s gaze again. She would go back to the lab. She would keep working. She would hope that maybe the serum would work longer than the research suggested. “Just go,” she said, fighting back the tears. “If that’s what you want just put the gun to your own head.”
Jay placed a hand on her shoulder, searching to meet her eyes. “I can’t abandon you,” he said. “But I can’t sit by and watch you suffer either.”
“I don’t,” she choked back a sob, “I don’t want to see you suffer either, and I know that you do. But I can’t just give up, Jay, I can’t.”
He pulled her to him, resting his cheek on her hair. “There’s only so much time, Ky,” he said. “There’s only so much you can do.” He was quiet for a few minutes; the only sound the gunshots in the distance. “Even if you did find a cure, who would it help? Listen; the government is killing everyone.”
She sobbed into his thin t-shirt. Control was being ripped from her by the virus, by Jay, by the government and she was helpless.
“We aren’t giving up, Ky,” Jay said. “We’re getting ahead. We’re taking control away from everything else. We’ll have control, we’ll be in charge of our fates.”
Kyleigh knew, then, that he was gone. They weren’t in control, no matter how Jay wanted to think about it. They hadn’t had control for months. Everything was in the control of the disease now. It chose every step they took now.
She pulled back from Jay. “Okay,” she said. He took her face in his hands and kissed her deeply. He put the pistol in her hand and stood, picking up his old shotgun and taking a few steps back from her. Kyleigh stood and they raised their respective arms.
“I love you,” Jay said. There were no tears in his eyes, no fear. He was decided.
Kyleigh nodded, allowing the tears in her eyes to do the talking. For once, her resolve was weaker than Jay’s.
“On three,” he said, cocking the shotgun and taking his aim. “One.”
“Two,” Kyleigh said, cocking her own firearm.
They spoke the last number together, and in that instant between the word and the pulling of the trigger tears washed down Jay’s cheeks. “Meet me on the other side,” he mouthed. Kyleigh’s bullet hit him between the eyes and he hit the pavement, but she still stood.
She clasped a hand to the side of her head where Jay’s bullet grazed her and fell to her knees, a sob racking her body. He had missed, whether accidental or on purpose, he had missed and now she was completely alone.
She grabbed the backpack, pulling out her notebook of research. The gunfire and explosions that were once in the distance grew nearer. She pulled the shotgun from Jay’s dead hands, refusing to look at his face – or what would be left of his face – and left her pistol behind.
She walked down the street, shotgun in one hand, spiral notebook in the other. She turned onto third street and stopped, standing under the busted traffic light. Within minutes, a tank appeared, rumbling down the road toward her, uniformed men walking beside it.
She counted. “One.” The men saw her, raised their weapons. “Two.” She raised the notebook above her head, holding her place as the men ran at her. “Three.” Bullets flew through the air, tore through her. She tumbled to the ground, the notebook flying out of her hands. In her last living moment, she watched one of the men stoop down and pick it up.
As realization spread over the soldier’s face, Kyleigh smiled. “We did it, Jay,” she mumbled, though she wasn’t sure any sound actually made it out her mouth. “I told you it wasn’t a waste of time.”
This could fall into a couple different genres...science fiction and romance, but I'm leaning more towards science fiction because there wasn't a 
This is a great story and I really hope you win your contest! I don't have anything else to critique; everything was just so well done. 
