Night Zero (Book 1): Night Zero

by Horner, Rob

  “Don’t shoot,” a man’s voice said.

  Three forms approached them through the intervals of light and darkness.

  “It’s Brandon!” Tina said, moving through the small crowd to get at the big CNA.

  “Be careful,” Buck hissed. “He might’ve been…you know.”

  “Like me?” Rose asked.

  “I’m…we’re okay,” Brandon said. “It’s me and Jordyn and Caitlin. We’re okay.”

  “Where’s everyone else?” Jessica asked.

  Buck winced.

  “They’re all—” Jordyn began, then stopped, forcing herself to take a deep breath.

  Dr. Crews stood for a moment, thinking. Buck wondered if he was thinking about crossing to the other side of the hospital, making a try for the birthing area.

  “All right then,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”

  Once again taking the point position, Dr. Crews led them farther up the hallway, where the doors for Med-Surg lay waiting, open and wrapped in shadow.

  The hospital can’t be this big! Tim thought as he was hauled like a mattress up the center corridor until they reached a T-intersection.

  None of his captors spoke, though he didn’t really expect them to. What would the dead have to talk about?

  Hey, Jim. I see you lost part of your nose today.

  Thanks for noticing, Bob. I’m thinking about going for the flat-face look.

  It is all the rage with the girls. Maybe you should try it.

  Tim laughed at his cleverness, then had to suppress a sudden urge to vomit. Was he losing it? Cracking under the pressure? Or maybe he was already cracked, knocked loopy by the hit to the head and this was all a fever dream. He might be on a stretcher rolling to surgery, rather than being carried by a bunch of dead guys to be stored in a meat locker for later consumption.

  They turned right, carrying him around the corner.

  This is the direction we’re supposed to be going, he thought. Maybe they really are going to store me for safe keeping. Sorry boys, we’re all out of Tim-sized Tupperware containers, but he should keep fine in the freezer for a while. Just wrap him in one of those bags.

  This time he couldn’t stop himself from vomiting. He barely got his head turned to the side in time to spew all over the swooped Nike shoes of a ripped-jeans clad man who had him under the left arm. If his captors noticed, they didn’t make any comment.

  Of course, they didn’t. They wouldn’t know good humor if it splashed on their shoes!

  He vomited again and the world spun.

  No, that wasn’t right.

  The world hadn’t spun. He had. They’d pivoted and made a turn into a small side passage, which had a single door on one side and another at the end. Both doors were open and standing in the first one was…

  “Cliff?” Tim asked.

  His partner stood like a statue, head up and eyes forward, not so much as a flicker of recognition passing over his features as Tim was carried past him.

  “Cliff! It’s me! Tim! Help me!”

  And then they stopped. Tim gave up trying to raise his head to look back at his partner and just let it hang, eyes finally closing in defeat.

  “Look at me,” a voice said. It was soft and breathy, like a four-pack-a-day smoker sucking on an oxygen pipe just to stay alive, able to get out one word with each desperate inhale and exhale.

  Tim looked. There was a man dressed in nurse’s scrubs standing over him. He had a pleasant face topped by a mop of brown hair, though it was hard to tell his age in the emergency lighting. His color was off, but that might be the lighting too. He didn’t seem to be wounded.

  “Who are you?” Tim asked. “Why aren’t they attacking you?”

  “I am…become. I am…more.”

  A shiver of fear wormed its way into Tim’s spine. He’d been afraid the whole time, but that was fear of death, fear of the pain he might have to endure before the end. Something in this guy’s voice made that fear seem childish, the fantasy fear of the monster in the closet that forced you to hide under your blankets with a flashlight and a whispered prayer for salvation.

  This was the terror of the monster made flesh, out of the closet and standing on the side of your bed, backlit by the moon outside your window and silhouetted on the side of your blanket.

  “You will become too,” the man said. “You will become…something else.”

  Then the man leaned forward, as slowly and as intimately as Tim leaned over his wife that morning to kiss her good-bye.

  His mouth opened as he came down, and Tim began shaking his head back and forth, never minding the zinging pain each twist sent through his brain, ignoring the nausea that threatened to make him empty his guts of every meal he’d ever eaten. A scream of pure denial wrenched out of him, smothered into silence by the mouth that covered his. Tim tried to inhale to scream again but all he got was dead air from the lungs of a dead man, and before he could try to push away again, the mouth closed, teeth pinching his lower lip, almost pleasurable at first—Janey does it just like that—but then hard and piercing, popping through the tender flesh like biting into a juicy hotdog.

  Tim managed to contort his mouth to open at the side, drew in a desperate breath, and screamed one more time.

  It was already too late, but that was no reason not to scream.

  Chapter 30

  The open doors into the Medical-Surgical wing beckoned. No lights illuminated the doorway itself, but the emergency lights on the walls of both corridors, as well as one a few feet inside the ward, brightened the area enough so that Buck could tell there wasn’t anyone hiding just inside, waiting to spring an ambush.

  Do I really think they could do that?

  As they got closer to the corner, where the final crossing hallway met theirs, he was able to see why the doors remained open, rather than swinging shut.

  The body of a young woman sprawled across the entrance longways, as if she’d lain down to die with the sole intention of holding the doors open for others. She wasn’t dressed in scrubs but wore jeans and a halter top. Not a nurse, then. She looked too young by a few years anyway. Probably just a high school kid coming to visit a parent or grandparent, maybe even a football player boyfriend. Her fresh face hadn’t relaxed with death. Her features remained twisted in their final agonizing scream. As they approached, it wasn’t immediately apparent how she’d died. Her lower body lay in shadow. Only upon closer examination was it possible to see that it wasn’t shadow over her stomach and legs, but blood. She’d been ripped and torn from her abdomen to her pelvis, and large pieces of her anatomy were missing.

  Buck reached the corner first and checked the crossing corridor, anything to keep from looking at the dead girl. A dozen feet away was another small hallway and milling outside of it were a dozen of the crazy people. Someone screamed from over there, a man’s voice, though raised in a wail that elevated it beyond the necessity of a gender label. It was a person in dire need of help, and it raised in him a primordial desire to rush to the rescue. But there were others that needed him. So, when Dr. Crews moved up, angling to come around him, Buck was able to hold the doctor back.

  “Get them inside Med-Surg,” Buck whispered, not daring to take his eyes off the people down the hall.

  Reaching into one of the front pockets of his lab coat, the doctor quickly ejected the magazine from his pistol and replaced it with the spare.

  “Come on,” Dr. Crews urged the others, and they came. The doctor had them rush, one by one, across the crossing corridor and into the medical wing. Only one of them made a comment as she passed the corpse on the floor, and that was quickly silenced, like someone else had slapped a hand over the woman’s mouth.

  Four, then five, shadows passed through Buck’s peripheral vision, quick stepping to the body of the young woman, then daintily stepping over it.

  The tall form of Brandon was the sixth.

  “Let’s go, sugar,” one of the receptionist’s whispered at his elbow. He didn’t know wh
ether it was Grace or Rose until he looked down and saw the bandage on her arm. Rose hung back a few feet but stayed close to her friend.

  “Go ahead,” he said back. “I’ll make sure none of them see you.”

  The two receptionists walked ahead while he kept his eyes on the dead guys. The screaming had stopped, but they remained fixated on the side hall. Wasn’t that where the morgue was supposed to be?

  “Come on,” Dr. Crews whispered at him from across the hall.

  Buck eased himself away from the wall, walking sideways to the doors, eyes still watching to make sure no one saw them.

  The police officer still struggled, but he was trapped in a metal chrysalis from which he would emerge forged anew, transformed. Austin had no sense of him yet, just the muffled curses and hollow thuds as he swore and thrashed inside the morgue drawer, but it wouldn’t be long. In the meantime, there were still some who could become running loose in the hospital and he wanted to find them.

  All his eyes and ears were with him, however, and that wouldn’t do.

  Except one.

  There was one nearby who hadn’t come, maybe because she wasn’t fully become when he sent out the message.

  Wake up, he called. And she did.

  The others were nearby.

  Smiling, Austin set her to attack.

  As Buck stepped over the dead teenager, her eyes snapped open and her hand grabbed his trailing leg. The paramedic fell forward with a curse, landing on his hands.

  “What the hell?” Jessica said, turning as Buck went down.

  “Shit! She’s alive?” Caitlin said, coming back to the doors.

  Buck yanked again, succeeding only in pulling the girl free of the doors, which began to close.

  A second hand grabbed his leg, and the girl started pulling herself, trying to climb up faster than he could pull away.

  Buck kicked out with his free leg, catching the girl in her face. Once. Twice. Then again.

  “She’s doesn’t feel it,” Caitlin said, as she and Jessica began grabbing at the hands, prying them away one finger at a time.

  “Don’t let her bite you,” Buck warned.

  “No worries there,” Jessica said. “Just quit squirming.”

  Buck couldn’t resist tugging again and was surprised when his leg came free. Hurriedly rising to his feet, he grabbed both women and pulled them back.

  The girl didn’t rise to her feet, just used her arms to pull herself forward, a strange scrabble with the upper body not mirrored by the lower.

  Her back is broken, Buck realized. When they dug into her insides, they must have damaged her spine.

  With a mixture of pity and revulsion, Buck pounded down with the brass knuckles, hitting her skull so hard it slammed into the floor and bounced back up a few inches before settling again. For good, this time.

  “We need to keep moving,” Dr. Crews said softly.

  “He’s right,” Tina added. “Those doors don’t require a keycard or power to open.”

  Buck, who had never been in the Medical-Surgical wing of the hospital, asked, “Where do we go?”

  “And if you say we need to check each room, I’m gonna hit you,” Grace offered.

  “We should though,” Tina said. Seeing Grace’s glower, she added, “It’s only six or seven rooms.”

  “I’m with Grace,” Rose said.

  “Of course, you are,” Tina muttered.

  “Look, this stopped being about our jobs when people went crazy and started attacking us,” Rose continued.

  “And it ain’t about protecting other people anymore, either,” Grace said. “Not since we’ve already seen patients and other staff coming at us no different than the crazies from the ED.”

  “Jenny came for us on the other side,” Brandon said. “Her and a couple of patients. I even saw the old guy, Sprugg.”

  “But he was already dead,” Dr. Crews said.

  “Don’t I know it,” Brandon replied. “Who do you think put the toe tag on him?”

  “Where is he now?” Buck asked.

  “Dead again,” Caitlin said.

  The group moved away from the doors as Caitlin gave a quick description of the skirmish in the central hallway. Jordyn was strangely silent, not at all the “want me to get it” nurse he’d seen when they were examining Danny.

  Unlike the Emergency Department, which was shaped like the tip of a bullet, Med-Surg was a true ellipse. One of the long arms crossed their hallway a short distance from the doors. If they turned to follow it, they could eventually move all the way around the unit and end up back where they started. Their entrance was near the center of the oval, with the hall continuing across to the other side, bisecting the ellipse. The primary nurses’ station lay on the center line, with secondary stations at either end. After the staffing cutbacks, only the center station was used, and only the patient rooms near it were routinely occupied.

  “Billy and Josh, they—” Brandon began, but stopped himself with a palm over his mouth.

  “It’s all right,” Grace said, patting the tall man on the arm.

  Brandon shook his head. “It’s not them dying. I mean, that’s bad enough. But to watch them just get up after and go join the others—”

  “Say what?” Buck asked.

  But it had to be that way, didn’t it? He’d seen the woman on the ground go from a bloody mess to grabbing his pants leg, so it made sense. He’d just been hoping for something different.

  “Check behind the desk,” Dr. Crews ordered. “Looks for car keys and weapons.”

  “What’s the matter, doc?” Rose asked. “Don’t want to go digging in a woman’s purse?”

  Dr. Crews issued a dry chuckle, “After living through the eighties and seeing the things women can pull out of one of those, I figure you’ll be better at disarming the traps.”

  As if he’d been reminded of her injury by her question, the doctor added, “And why don’t you come over here into the light, Rose? Let me take another look at that cut on your face.”

  “I’ll get some bandages out of their supply closet,” Jessica offered.

  “Okay,” Buck said. “Me and Jordyn will go with you.”

  Danny raised his head from the neck of the old lady in room 122. Her name was Beatrice Starnes, according to the dry erase board on the wall. It hadn’t taken much to get people out of their bathrooms, once all the screaming died down. Just the ability to speak. He wasn’t aware that Austin also retained the ability, nor had he given any consideration to what it meant. Truth be told, he hadn’t considered much of anything since becoming.

  It was enough to be. It was enough to share.

  Mrs. Starnes wouldn’t become. Danny didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. Something about her was different than everyone else on the unit.

  He’d been sent down to the cafeteria at first, where he shared with a few people talking near the vending machines. The cafeteria itself was closed and the workers gone. After sharing, he found it impossible to stand around waiting for something else to happen. There was another become with him who didn’t share his impatience. As far as Danny knew, the woman remained in the hallway between cafeteria and Maternity Ward, ready to share if someone came near her.

  He’d felt the call to assist with the police officer but resisted it. It wasn’t quite the same as forcibly telling himself to ignore a nagging thought, but it was similar. In doing so, he also blocked out his awareness of the other, the one who’d shared with him and made him become. He didn’t worry that the other would no longer be able to sense him as well.

  As his life had changed when he became, so were all other things. It was because it was, and no other reason was needed.

  The girl whose body blocked the door to the unit was his doing. He didn’t care how she avoided the initial sweep. Perhaps she hid, and only dared tried to escape after the other become left. He met her coming out and left her torn and dying on the floor. It didn’t matter what he did to them. Becoming erased all pains.
/>   Now there were others here in the unit. He could hear them walking around, talking, opening drawers and rifling through their contents.

  Several voices were present, perhaps more than he could share with.

  Safety wasn’t paramount to him; he had no fear of dying. But he did possess a modicum of self-interest and a desire to remain able to share. There was also a sense that more was expected of him. Not just sharing with those who hadn’t yet become, but building something, sharing in a different sense, with those who had. What that meant, he wasn’t sure. Like many of the changes in him, he had no answers and could only wait for explanation to dawn. It would, eventually.

  All that mattered was following his instincts. And for now, that meant not risking himself attempting to share with this many people.

  Carefully opening the door to the hallway, he checked left and right for any witnesses, then darted out and across to the short hall that led back out to the main corridors. A curse and a shout told him he’d been seen by someone behind him, but he didn’t slow. The woman he’d shared with was down on the ground near the doors, which had been closed. Smiling grimly, he reached for the bar on the doors, intending to slam them open and call for his fellow become.

  A loud noise sounded behind him, mixed with more shouting and cursing, but he was at the door now, reaching for the crash bar.

  Something slammed into him at the exact moment he hit the bars. The loud noise repeated, somehow terrible. He knew what it meant.

  He’d been shot.

  It didn’t matter.

  The doors flew open.

  There were others waiting outside, ready to help him share.

  Tim Reynolds dreaded the moment when his lip stopped hurting and his thoughts strayed from finding a way out of his current predicament to a welcome understanding of the rightness of everything that happened. He feared it, yet he wasn’t aware when the shift occurred.

  For a moment, all was forgotten. The pain in his head receded. His face no longer ached. The lip was just there, nothing to worry about.

  He floated in darkness, at peace, without concern, and with no sense that the lack of concern should be frightening.