Dead Last (Vol. 1): Dead Last

by Quaranta, Marc

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  High in the sky, out of sight, were three loud bangs like something had just blown up or been shot off. It echoed in the air which only meant that the original source was quite far away.

  “What the hell was that?” Emily asked.

  “That was the same sound we heard before Nick…before he fell.”

  “Okay. Let’s make this real quick,” I said to them.

  I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  XXVII

  Jack Scoville

  I watched Kurt push the door open and step into the hospital. I put my foot in front of the door to stop it from closing but didn’t step in right away. I had seen, in SWAT movies, where they have a technique of entering buildings. One guy would always go in and make sure things were clear to enter before the rest of the group followed. I don’t think Kurt realized I was doing that.

  “You coming?” he asked me.

  I nodded and waved at Emily to go in next. I was being polite and opening the door for her. Once she was in, it was my turn. I stepped in and let the door close behind me. The light in the room vanished some when the door closed. Now there were only windows to provide light. Luckily, we could still make out the halls and rooms, and each other. But we only had a little bit of time left before the sunset. I would have guessed, just by looking outside, that we had about an hour before it was almost dark…two hours until it was pitch black.

  “Alright, doctor. Where do we start?” I said to Emily.

  I heard no response. I watched her head turn on a swivel. Back and Forth. Looking up the North hallway and back to the West hallway.

  “We’re gonna have to just pick one,” Kurt said.

  “The stairs,” Emily said.

  “Huh?”

  “What?” Kurt and I were almost simultaneous with our response.

  “Most of the stuff we need will be up on the third and fourth floor.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. That’s just the way it is,” she said with an attitude.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s go,” Kurt said. Before he moved down the hall he looked at me. His eyes grew wide and intense like he was trying to tell me something.

  “What?” I yelled quietly.

  He didn’t say anything. He looked down at my waist and then pulled the gun from the back of his. He held his up around his chest and clicked off the safety. I guess he thought he was really going to need to use it. I didn’t argue. Whether we were going to or not, I felt safer with it in my hand. I pulled it from the back of my pants and turned my safety off as well.

  “Do you really think those are necessary?” Emily asked. I think they made her nervous.

  “Judging on our last meeting with a group of strangers, yes, it is,” I said.

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to use them.”

  Kurt and Emily moved quickly down the hall. I followed a few paces back. I didn’t want to run by something and miss it. Something valuable that we might need, or someone dangerous that needed to be put down. I didn’t want to miss anything.

  When they got to the end of the hall, they waited for me to catch up. But I took my time. Making sure to check every door and look down every hallway. I finally got there and Kurt quietly counted to three.

  I opened the door for him to step in and aim his gun. There was nothing there. I stepped in after him and started slowly walking up the stairs taking the lead. I didn’t even realize that we had somehow started moving up the stairs like the SWAT men in the movie. Emily followed closely behind.

  We continued that formation until I got to the third level. I stopped at the door and poked my head through the small window leading into the hallway. The darkness of the stairwell made the hallway look bright as hell, but it really wasn't. Once my eyes adjusted, the hallway wasn't much brighter at all.

  The hallway looked the same though. Empty. Hadn’t been used in days. It had me wondering where the rest of the staff was. Did everyone get scared and leave the building? Was there nobody here taking shelter? There had to have been a couple of doctors that were going to stay in case someone needed medical help. Doctors are usually planted with good morals. They wouldn’t run away when people were in need, but…if they stayed…where were the bodies?

  I answered my question when I looked down a few feet in front of the door.

  “Holy fuck,” I said looking through the glass.

  “What? Jack, what is it?” Kurt asked.

  “What the hell does he see?” Emily asked. Neither of them gave me a chance to answer.

  “It’s a girl.”

  “A what?”

  “Did he say girl?” Emily asked Kurt.

  “Is she okay?”

  “No,” I answered.

  The girl was lying face down, the right side of her body was pressed up against the wall. Blood on the floor next to her face. She was still. It looked like she had been lying there for a couple days…most likely from the moment the attack started.

  I turned away from the window when I started to feel my stomach grow queasy. Kurt came up next to me and looked through the glass. At first, he looked down the hallway, skipping over the girl just like I did. When he looked down, I could tell that he saw her. His eyes thinned and head tilted to the side like it does when you get bad news.

  “Dear mother of God.”

  “What do we do?” Emily asked.

  “This is the floor you need to get on.”

  “You want us to walk by her? What if we get sick?” Emily said.

  “We can go downstairs and move around to the other stairwell…in the dark,” I pointed out.

  “We’ve got masks on. It should be fine. Just move quickly,” Kurt said.

  I spit into the corner of the stairwell and cleared my throat. I didn’t feel satisfied with the last one, so I spit again. I wiped my mouth and noticed that Emily was grossed out by my “manly” ways.

  “There’s a dead girl in the hall,” I said to her.

  “Will you show some respect,” she replied.

  “I didn’t know her.”

  “Shut up,” Kurt shouted. Again, I said shouted cause he raised his voice, but we were all still so quiet. “We’re all going to need a stronger stomach for this. Okay? Here we go.”

  He put his hand on the door and again counted to three. He pulled the door open and quickly moved passed the girl and down the hall. Emily hesitated like only a woman would. She pressed up against the frame of the doorway like she was going to have its baby. I wasn’t ready for any pansy-ass bullshit. I pushed her on the shoulder and got her walking. She let out a small ‘yelp’ and moved down past her.

  I didn’t run by. I walked…quickly, but slow enough that I could see the girls face. She looked like she died in fear. Panic. Her mouth was open like she was in the middle of biting an apple before she met her maker. I had to look away again for the same reason I did before. I felt my small, potato chip of a lunch coming up. I put my hand over my mouth because I really thought I was going to puke, but I didn’t. I looked back at the girl and almost didn’t see Kurt and Emily turn into a storage closet.

  “Okay, pick some stuff out,” Kurt said to her.

  “Just throw whatever you can into two of the bags,” she said.

  Kurt opened up the small bag that he was carrying and I opened up my bag. Together we tossed a couple of boxes of crap into the bags. Syringes, fluids, bandages, medicine I couldn’t identify, more wraps and bandages. We threw all kinds of crap into the bag. When his was full, and mine was half empty, we zipped them up and closed the storage closet.

  Emily didn’t look good. Her ass up against the wall, her hands on her knees, and her head bent over. She was breathing slowly. I felt the same way not too long ago. If she had to puke she had to puke.

  “You alright, Em?” Kurt said.

  For a second, I wondered when they became so close that he could use the shortened version of her name. It kind of made me think that these two were fucking each
other, but I didn’t care. Whether they had or they hadn’t, there were much more important things to worry about. I threw the bag over my shoulder and waited for orders. I grew impatient when I didn’t get any.

  “So, have you guys ever tried sushi?” I asked them. I hoped they’d recognize the tone of my voice. I wasn’t really about to start small talk, but I felt sarcasm was the best way to tell them to make up their fucking mind.

  “Now where?” Kurt asked.

  “The lab. We need to get to the lab. It’s down the hall,” Emily pointed and I helped her stand up off the wall. I hadn’t known her that well, but after this we had something to bond over. And I spent plenty of time pulling her and pushing her around the hospital that I’m sure we’d grown closer. Psh.

  We came to the lab and after Kurt looked through the door’s window, he opened it and we stepped in. Just like most of the hospital, notwithstanding the hallway, the room was empty. Magazines were on the floor and the glass that the secretary sat behind was cracked.

  “What the hell do you think did that?” Emily asked.

  “I can tell you who doesn’t give a shit,” I said as I made my way down the office hall into the room where the shit we needed was.

  “Okay,” Emily said catching her breath and following us into the room. “We need the blood analyzer, more empty vials than you can count, some rubber bands, those tubes,” she started pointing out things that I’d never heard of. I didn’t argue its importance I just cupped my hand and pushed it off the counter into the bag. Kurt worked on stuffing the blood analyzer into his bag.

  “Okay…let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “Not yet,” she interrupted.

  “Why? What’d we forget?” I asked her. I looked at Kurt who was also thinking it was time to go.

  “We need to head to surgery.”

  “Let me guess…” I said pointing to the ceiling.

  “Fourth floor,” she said.

  They headed out of the room and were now almost at a full sprint down the hallway, past the dead girl, into the stairs, and up to the fourth floor.

  I followed closely behind the whole way, “Fuck the air, man. I’m so out of shape that this may kill me,” I joked. I was in pretty good shape. I had a body that I knew the ladies wanted, but I did very little cardio. I was a weight lifting guy, not a runner. Long distances were the death of me.

  XXVIII

  Kurt Elkins

  “ Okay, go. Come on, come on,” I said to Emily as she was taking her time picking out each cutting tool.

  “Emily, I know they’re shiny, but make up your fucking mind,” Jack blurted out.

  She dropped the last of what looked like numbing medicine into the bag and zipped it up, “Okay. That’s the last thing. I guess we didn’t need another trip,” she said with a smile.

  “Yea, that’s fantastic,” Jack said with sarcasm.

  We ran down the hall, guns in hand, and headed back toward the same stairwell we’d come from. I held the door open for both of them to go through and followed closely behind them. So, close that I had to slow down before stepping on Emily’s feet. She was carrying the heavy bag filled with the knives, blades, and numbing medicine. It looked heavy, it had to be heavy, but she seemed to be handling it fine so I let her continue carrying it. I had a bag of storage supplies and one with a blood analyzer. I was carrying my part.

  We turned past the third-floor ready to head down, but something caught my attention…a lack of something caught my attention. I stopped running, and I think Jack heard the disappearance of a pair of footsteps. He turned up to me.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he quietly said.

  After a moment of my silence, Emily asked, “Kurt…what’s wrong?”

  I didn’t answer. I turned around and headed back up to the third floor. I slowly placed my head in front of the glass window and looked down the hallway. My jaw dropped and became so heavy that I had to use my hand to close it. I kept my hand over my mouth because I felt like screaming.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jack asked a little louder.

  I could only wave at them to come look. When I heard them walking up the stairs, I moved out of the way and dropped my back onto the concrete wall. The tingle it left in my spine didn’t even bother me. My brain was too much out of whack.

  “Holy shit,” Emily said looking through the window.

  “What? Let me see,” Jack said lightly shoving Emily out of the way.

  As Jack continued to look through the window, Emily said, “The girl’s gone.”

  She said it out loud because it was such a ridiculous idea that she could be gone, but she was. We all saw it and we all heard Emily say it. It was true.

  The girl that way lying dead in the hallway, brain appearing to be smashed in, was no longer lying in the hospital. I felt my knees give out and had to sit down, but Emily grabbed my arm to make sure I stood on my feet.

  “Okay. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jack said. He grabbed my other arm and pulled me to the front of the pack. He shoved me in the back to get me moving and once I was, I heard Emily grunt. He probably pushed her to get her moving too.

  We shot out of the stairwell on the first floor and sprinted down the hallway. I didn’t care about checking for any other materials. Everything we had was fine.

  I turned the corner and ended up on my back.

  I felt like a couple of seconds had passed, but blacked out. I didn’t remember how I ended up on my back. A fierce shot of pain made its way through my nose. I put my hands up to my face and cupped my nose like I was going to sneeze.

  I rolled over onto my side and looked back to see if Jack or Emily were feeling the same weird sensation. They weren’t. They had their hands in the air and were backing up slowly. Emily put her bag on the ground and then they both got down on their knees.

  I looked up, directly above me, and saw a man walking closer to them. He held a shotgun and pointed it at the two of my friends. He was directly over my line of sight now. He looked down at me and saw that I was somewhat awake. I don’t think he liked that very much.

  He said something, but I was too blurry to make out what it was, but it couldn’t have been good. He turned his shoulder away, only to get a good amount of force behind him, and stuck the butt of the shotgun directly into my face…I didn’t need a third shot. My visions increasingly grew blurry and shortly after, my eyelids were the weight of a cement brick. I closed my eyes and fell unconscious.

  XXIX

  Haylea Meyers April 19th, 2013 6:42 p.m.

  B eing homesick is a funny thing, really. I remember growing up, my family and I would go on vacation and in a matter of days I would be homesick. I'd want to leave whatever paradise I was in and head back home.

  My dad was never rich, but he was comfortable. In all honesty, we were probably a few notches above comfortable. We went on a couple of family vacations that we paid for out of his own pockets, but a lot of them were company retreats that the whole family was invited on. We've been to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun, we've been to a resort in Disney World, and the Bahamas. We went to Dallas, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona. We went to a lot of places that were...well, paradise. But it never ceased to amaze me that after a couple of days inside each magnificent hotel, I'd want to pack up and head back home and see my friends.

  Everyone is like that, so that is not the strange part. The funny part is that everyone begs and prays for a vacation to get us away from our normal, everyday, boring lives, but the second we get that prayer answered we just want to...pack up and get back to reality. It's because as great as a vacation is on paper, it is missing so much. We don't have our friends, our families, and we don't have that sense of what's familiar. We need our regular cars and our regular routines. We need to get back to our jobs. It is because we need our life to have some sort of purpose. Sitting on a beach or at an amusement park and resort all day, every day, wouldn't be enough for us. We want to know that we matter to so
mebody. Whether it's our significant others, our families, or a client that we just got off the phone with at our jobs. No matter who it is, we want to live our lives giving something back.

  I was homesick. I wanted to get home, pull back the blankets, and lie in bed with the covers over my head until this all blew over...or until I slowly faded away. Kurt and I had just bought a two-bedroom house out in an up and coming neighborhood. That's the place that Kurt was hiding out in for the first couple of days before he came back over to WTIX. He secured the door to the basement and taped up all the windows. He sat down there for almost three days by himself with no food. I'm shocked he survived. That's Kurt, though. He's a survivor. We both were. That's why we were drawn to each other.

  "Haylea," a voice interrupted my thoughts.

  I turned to find Elyse. It looked like she had been crying. If she had been, nobody would blame her for getting a little emotional. Her dad was becoming deathly ill and her mom was outside looking for a way to save her dad. She was young, too, and wasn't as strong as the rest of us.

  "Hey, Elyse. How are you doing?"

  "I'm alright," she said as she came and sat down next to me.

  I was in the kitchen having a cup of coffee. It was coffee that the station always bought and while it was nowhere near a cup like Starbucks' coffee, it was doing the trick. It was hot and soothing. I wasn't craving a cup, but the kitchen was finally quiet so I decided to sit down and have one. And it turned out to be exactly what I needed.

  Scott was sitting over by the stragglers making sure that they weren't going anywhere. He put a stool about twenty feet away from them and decided to stand guard. He said he would watch them for the first couple of hours and then somebody else would. I wasn't sure who else I trusted to watch them. There was Scott, myself, and Sam. We were the only ones left that I trusted enough to hold the gun. Sam was sick, Kurt and Jack were out at the hospital, and Nick was...