Blood Type Infected (Book 5): The Departed

by Marchon, Matthew

  The headlights cast their glow over the front entrance. You can tell by the architecture that everything’s new here. It has that modern vibe, that feel of being new before mankind ruins it. In a few years it would have been old news, they’d stop taking care of it and updating it, let it fall apart until it’s absolutely necessary to fix. And by then it’s no longer modern, it’s dated and we’ve moved on.

  It’s weird seeing a hospital dark. You don’t think about it until it’s right there in front of you. It brings with it this feeling of impending doom. It’s a hospital, even when the power goes out, there should be generators keeping it operational. When even the hospital’s gone, you know things have taken a turn for the worse.

  It’s eerily quiet when Marty cuts the engine. A silence that shouldn’t be here, just gentle groans of the infected traveling on the wind, carried throughout the picturesque streets of this miniature metropolis. I can’t see them, they could be anywhere, but the fact that they’re not rushing towards us right now means only one thing, they can’t.

  The able bodied corpses made their way up the mountainside. The stragglers aren’t here because they didn’t want to follow the herd towards food, it’s because their bodies are ravaged to the point of decomposition. There’s not enough left of them to get up and move.

  We pile out of Sami’s door, leaving our window ornament right where he is, grabbing flashlights from Maxwell’s handy dandy duffle bag. Man am I glad she had the foresight to bring this stuff, especially the night vision goggles, they’ve saved my ass a few times already.

  “You guys alright?” Marty asks, placing one hand on my shoulder, one on Felecia’s. “That was close back there, hanging outta the car like that. Sorry man, you know I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t life and death. It’ll all be over soon enough. I know you’re run down, because I am, and I ain’t done half the shit you guys have been through. Almost there. Stay with me.”

  How bad do we look right now? Everyone’s treating us like we’re cancer victims on our deathbed. Like we’ll break if they touch us too hard. I haven’t seen myself in a mirror since… the hospital, yeah, since sneaking out of the other hospital this morning. I’d say we’ve been through a lot since then, I’m sure we look like shit. We just don’t see it on each other because we’ve watched it gradually get worse over the course of the day.

  Now that I’m looking for it, my hands are kind of trembling. I feel like I’m squinting into the sun at all times, despite it having set hours ago. Every breath is a struggle. Hell, I’m fighting just to swallow my own saliva. I’m pretty sure I’m limping but I don’t even know on which side because they both hurt so much. My right hand won’t stop throbbing, it feels like I’m milking a cow but not getting anything. I can actually see the muscles contracting with every heartbeat.

  Felecia doesn’t look any better. The bags beneath her eyes make her look like a racoon, the hottest racoon I’ve ever seen, but still, a racoon. I kinda get what Neil was talking about now, with her breathing, it sounds like her lungs are whistling with every inhale. Her posture’s changed. That whole model thing, where she kind of struts with her chest out, back straight, it’s been replaced with this slouch like she’s going to topple over at any second.

  Asking if we’re alright seems like a legitimate question, all things considered. We just haven’t had time to stop and feel it yet. I wonder how bad we looked after the whole river crossing fiasco, when we practically had to be fed just to stay alive. Is my head wobbling? I feel like a bobblehead on a washing machine. Something tells me it is.

  “Stay behind us, alright,” he says more than asks, taking the bag from Maxwell. “We’re gonna have to take the stairs, even if the generators are going, the elevators’ll be down. You two think you can make it up four flights?”

  “Exactly how bad do we look?” I croak out, eyeing the four story building.

  “You know the things we’re fighting? You look kinda like them.”

  “It’s exhaustion,” Maxwell says, preparing her sword before we enter. “We can only produce so much epinephrine, once that adrenaline wears off, you crash. You guys have been on a five day adrenaline rush. I’ve seen it before, I’ve been there, not to this extent but, your bodies are just starting to shut down, whether you want them to or not. Not enough food or water, barely any sleep. We lift off, you rest, and you eat. There’s gotta be a water cooler in here somewhere, we still got a bunch of MREs. Stay close.”

  Maxwell forces the sliding glass doors open, releasing the stench of death from inside the building. Hospitals always kinda have that putrid smell, they try to cover it up, but it’s there. It’s a mixture of pus and vomit, dead bodies and urine.

  Sami turns away from us to hurl, coughing up chunks in a stream of bile she couldn’t hold in if she tried. I can hear her last meal splatter off the bloodstained tiles. We’ve all been there before, but this is her first. You don’t ever get used to it, but when it’s all you’ve smelled for days, the effects aren’t as traumatizing.

  Felecia reaches out to rub her honorary sister’s back as we make our way to the staircase, stopping momentarily for Maxwell to grab a jug of water off a cooler in the hallway.

  There must be generators powering the equipment because machines are beeping and flatlining left and right. Over the high pitched, irritating sounds meant to make you take notice, I can hear the groaning and growls. The cries of those who turned too late, after the majority of their bodies had already been devoured. Their remains crawl the dimly lit halls, strapped to wires that once kept them alive, too frail to fight free.

  The emergency lights buzz above us as I quietly pull the door shut. The echo of the click interrupts the silence of the stairwell, we all freeze, not so much as breathing.

  Nothing. We’re alone. They’d have come running by now, and if they couldn’t run, they’d at the very least groan. They groan when they don’t intend to, like every breath is too much for their throats to contain.

  “Empty,” Maxwell whispers, clutching the five gallon jug to her chest like a baby. “Go, go, hurry, let’s get the hell out of here before something goes wrong.”

  Our feet pound off the rubber that coats the cement staircase, each step ricocheting off the walls. I expect to see a herd of them around every corner, like they’ll be waiting for us on the next landing, with its emergency light just bright enough to lead our way.

  No one says a word, worried they might change our good fortune. It’s about damn time. We’ve earned this. Me, I’m not a believer in superstition, only reason I’m not talking is because no one would hear me over my wheezing. I swear to god, I used to be a track star, once upon a time, in a past life.

  I’m gonna blame it on the fact that we’ve been running for days, but these stairs are really kicking my ass. I do have to admit, the rubber grips are a nice touch, very ergonomically pleasing for my feet.

  They put a lot of thought into this place. The artwork on the walls gives it a nice touch, it’s not drab like the stairway at the army base. I wonder what Norwood and Neil are gonna do to decorate. I can’t stop thinking about going back for them. How can we leave them behind?

  Okay, I counted four floors, why does it feel like we’ve gone up sixteen? We better not be going in circles because I don’t know how many more steps I have in me. I’ll have to fake it like Doug did with the Fitbit his mom made him wear. It measures swings of your wrist, they thought he was walking miles a day. Douglas Chen, man I’m gonna miss you.

  “Fifth floor,” Maxwell chokes out, as winded as the rest of us, which makes me feel a little better, despite the fact that she’s carrying an extra forty pounds. At least it’s not just me. We’ve all been through hell and back today. “End of the line.”

  We all prepare our swords, too winded to speak, as Maxwell opens the door.

  CHAPTER 26

  We couldn’t just be alone up here, could we? Knew it was too good to be true.

  Their eyes lock on us before we’ve even made
it out onto the roof, where there is a helicopter that appears to be from the future. Did the one back at the dam have wings? Because those look like wings. Does that mean it’s one of the superfast ones?

  Two zompire pilots and a handful of infected hospital staff stop staring at their hands simultaneously and sprint towards us, one woman tanking it after a couple steps in all her excitement. They must have been up here since Tuesday morning, trapped on this side of the door, desperation evident in their every step.

  I wonder how many tossed themselves off the roof in search of food, or, I suppose drugs, or whatever it is they look at us as. We’re their next fix.

  What’s crazy is, from the beginning, we’ve all thought of them as zombies, probably because of movies and books, tv shows. We never looked at them as vampires, because they don’t look or act like the vampires we’re used to seeing, despite never having seen one. It’s like we’ve been desensitized to things that never actually existed.

  What we’re really dealing with here, are addicts. But we’ve been desensitized to them as well, because we see them everywhere. They’ve been all around us. We passed them on street corners. We’ve seen them confused and tweaking out in stores, thinking to ourselves I’m gonna walk over this way and avoid them. They invaded our world long ago, because they were already a part of it.

  I think mankind needs to have some sort of epidemic to keep it in check. It’s just, well, we’ve always found a way to combat it. It took time, but they found cures for all the diseases that have wiped out humans in the past. And that’s what they were doing at Preventasis Labs.

  The only difference between the drug epidemic and every other killer of our species we’ve known, is that addiction was completely voluntary. They essentially said, yes, give me the plague. Give me Polio. I want tuberculosis. Let me die a slow and painful death.

  And then you have people like us running around, doing everything they can to live.

  Screw my exhaustion, we are not getting taken out by a bunch of junkies, involuntary or not. Zombies, vampires, that’s almost understandable, we’ve romanticized them so much in our culture. But druggies, to be eaten alive by a bunch of addicts? I don’t fucking think so.

  I pull my blade from its sheath, wishing I had the other one that’s tucked away inside the duffle bag. I could really use two right now.

  I race towards the incoming hospital staff, wondering if they came up here to escape. Or if they were trying to transport someone who was already infected and it all went wrong.

  I spin for momentum, still running, like I’m throwing a discus. My backwards spin is enough to slice through a nurse’s neck, but barely. Our swords need sharpening. I don’t think they were meant to decapitate humans in the first place, yet that’s all they’ve been used for. Oh and cutting through the air duct back in the dam, that certainly didn’t help matters any.

  A flying kick to the young doctor’s abdomen sends her crashing into the two nurses behind her. With nothing but the light of the stars and the moon peeking over the ridge, it’s hard to make out faces. I’m okay with that, faceless enemies are better. When they have backstories and lives that were ripped away from them, it makes them so much harder to kill. You don’t think about Stormtroopers losing their lives, because you never see their faces. It keeps it impersonal. I don’t wanna know that this woman runs a free clinic for underprivileged children on her days off. No, stop it Noah!

  But I don’t need to stop, because we’re so close to being out of here that I can taste it. It tastes a lot like blood and sweat, pretty much all I’ve tasted for days now. The inside of my mouth may as well be one big canker sore. I don’t know where the sweat is coming from but it certainly isn’t me, no way no how.

  I can still see them as people because it means I’ve managed to keep my humanity. I was terrified I was losing it, that by the time this was over, if it was ever over, I’d never truly get to be me again.

  Yeah, I’m sensitive.

  My blade tears through the doctor’s neck before her ass hits the ground.

  I have emotions and I’m not afraid to show them.

  But it doesn’t tear all the way through. When she’s not saving underprivileged kids, she must be hitting the gym doing nothing but neck strengthening exercises.

  And I’m sick of my friends teasing me for being an emotional dude.

  I hack through a nurse’s face, taken down by the falling doctor. Her jaw bounces off her unicorn scrubs before hitting the ground.

  The tears stinging my eyes right now aren’t a sign of weakness.

  A second swing from the other direction takes care of the heroic doctor before she has a chance to get back to her feet.

  I’m crying because I’m strong enough to admit this hurts me. These aren’t monsters I’m killing, they’re you and me.

  The other nurse wriggles out from underneath her while I’m busy beheading the woman in unicorn scrubs that might actually be pegasuses. Pegasi? I hope wherever she is right now, she’s riding one into the sunset.

  I’m crying because I’m worried that’s not what’s happening. What if she’s watching the edge of my sword mutilate her throat, and she feels every second of it? Does she feel her jawbone disconnect on contact? Or see it bounce off her chest? Does she hear the dulling blade tear through her flesh where she was hoping the beautiful doctor would kiss her? What, I got a lesbian vibe. Does she know it’s slicing through a second time because the first wasn’t enough? They don’t get to pass out from the pain or die from blood loss or blunt trauma. What if she’s witnessing all of it, and feeling every excruciating moment?

  I hate this.

  I dodge the other nurse when he lunges for me, nearly losing my balance. He tries to skid to a halt and reverse direction but I’m able to ram my foot into his ribs mid turn. The impact sends him stumbling backwards in an attempt to regain his footing.

  But it’s too late, he tumbles over the edge of the building. I haven’t gotten close enough to look, I don’t know if there’s another roofline below us or if he fell all the way to the street.

  One of the pilots, accompanied by a man in a hospital gown are barreling down on me. He must have been infected when they got to the roof, thinking he was in need of medical services they weren’t equipped to provide here. They were probably taking him to the city, maybe Redding, or more likely Sacramento. His hands are missing. How much you want to bet they’re sitting on the gurney by the chopper, attached to restraints?

  I sidestep his attempt to grab me, I don’t think he realizes his arms now stop at the wrists. A swipe of the blade at his kneecap sends him spiraling over the edge, his leg flapping behind him like a tail.

  With the pilot a couple steps behind, I’ll be able to dodge him as well, slowed down considerably by the fact that someone ate both his thighs. Beneath the torn fabric of his flight suit, I can see bone through his decimated muscle tissue. He must have been sitting, preparing for takeoff, screaming as someone chewed through his legs, shredding them to bits.

  He jumps, throwing himself at me, but with so little muscle left, he barely leaves the ground.

  Apparently, ducking wasn’t the best idea. I didn’t have enough time for anything else, I thought he was moving a lot slower than he was. I’ve barely finished de-legging the patient before he reaches me.

  And now his disgusting hamstrings are pressed against my shoulders. I’m trapped here between him and the little brick wall at the edge of the building. Should have gone to all fours, then at least his gross legs wouldn’t be eye level with me.

  I grab his ankles as he teeters on the wall and give a little nud–

  Shit, no no no!

  My hands wrap around his ankles at the last second, dropping my sword beside me. He’s a pilot. If boats have keys, and lawnmowers have keys, there’s a good chance helicopters do too. We are not having another Delivery America incident, where I had to crawl into the sewer of burnt bodies to fish the key out of the driver’s pocket. Nope, nuh uh, not happe
ning again. I am not running down four flights of stairs to dig something out of his splattered body’s flight suit.

  I don’t know if I can hold him. Does he not realize I’m trying to save his life here? Just hold still! I’m gonna need help, with two of us, we might be able to hoist him up.

  I can’t see much from my current position. Where is everybody? Wait, there’s Felecia, she’s got her hands full. And Marty, yep, definitely Marty, he’s fighting off what appears to be a man in a suit. What the hell’s a businessman doing up here? Unless, yep, one of Felecia’s is in a suit as well.

  They’re US government, that’s what was going on here. It has to be. They’re CIA or something, probably trying to take back a live specimen to study. That’s why he was cuffed to the bed, still assuming here, I haven’t actually seen his hands on the gurney but I assure you, they’re there. And he tore through his wrists without a moment of hesitation. I bet these guys came from one of the black SUVs parked in front of Preventasis.

  Sami’s running over to me. I don’t know if she’s strong enough to help me pull him up but I know she’ll give it absolutely everything she has. And I’ll take that over my old friends any day.

  She drops her sword and grabs onto the pilot’s leg, no clue why we’re trying to save a dead person’s life but giving it her all nonetheless. Because this is what friends do, they help each other, knowing they’re doing the right thing. Not questioning each other’s motives and second guessing them at every turn. Hell, half my supposed friends would have raced to my side just to push me over with him.

  “I don’t think I can pull him up,” she grunts after a few seconds of struggling and not getting anywhere. “He won’t stop squirming. Want me to go find Max?”

  “I don’t think I can hold him up alone. They’ll see us and come running as soon as they can, we just gotta hold on a little longer.”

  “Okay, I’ll try. Hey, Noah, my sister makes fun of me for being sensitive too. And I hate it. I like that you see them as people. I do the same thing, giving them stories. Mom told me to stop but I couldn’t, they’re still people to me.”