Duncan grimaced at the visual brought on by just hearing the former pro footballer’s name evoked. The visual even brought back the telltale snap-heard-round-the-world that day when the quarterback’s leg folded unnaturally. Then, thinking back to all the time he had spent ferrying broken and dying nineteen-year-olds out of the jungle and to faraway field hospitals, Duncan dismissed the latter part of Charlie’s statement as false. Running on adrenaline and a will to survive, the human body could keep on keeping on for some time after suffering horrific injuries—greenstick fractures the least of them. However, though Duncan hated to admit it, where the blood loss part was concerned, Charlie probably hit the nail on the head. Because more often than not, after returning to base with an empty chopper, he had personally hosed buckets of blood off the litters and floor of his Huey’s troop compartment. And as he recalled those horror-filled tours in Vietnam, the hose work usually came right after bringing back a bird full of KIAs leaking out under flapping olive ponchos, not a compartment full of walking wounded likely to survive long enough to board a Freedom Bird home.
“Let’s check on Tilly,” Duncan said, pushing the decade’s old images from his mind. “Nothing we can do about Lance Armstrong.”
“That’s wrong, Duncan.”
“Looks like he’s gonna live strong.” Duncan chuckled and headed for the stairs leading up to the compact bungalow.
Chapter 17
Downtown Portland
By no choice of her own, Mary Palazzo, in her mind already formerly employed by Victory Medical Transport, found herself sitting by a window beside one of the gawkers she had had words with on the sidewalk in front of the Unico parking garage.
The moment she boarded the commandeered Tri-Met city bus and looked down the narrow aisle and saw at least twenty sweaty people already taking up the last four or five rows, a lump had formed in her throat. In the next beat, as she shuffled past empty seats, a cold runner of sweat trickled down her spine and she began to mentally berate herself for making the unsanctioned stop that got her partner killed and led to her being here in the first place.
That thought naturally led her to replay the events outside of the garage, which brought her to the conclusion that Captain Castle’s offer of a ride out of the newly expanded quarantine zone did not come from a position of benevolence. This was no quid-pro-quo transaction meant to reward her for relinquishing the ambulance without a fight. She was so much cattle like the others in various stages of shock and staring doe-eyed from the back of the bus.
The more she thought about it the angrier she became. And once she processed all that she had seen so far, the trickle of sweat became a deluge because in choosing her seat by the window she had unwittingly put herself between a rock and a hard place.
The former being the twenty or so people at her back, many of them possibly infected. While no better, the latter consisted of the fifteen or so people herded onto the bus after her, at least one among them who she knew was already infected—the suit who had inadvertently fed a fingertip to the undead street kid.
Now, settled into the hard plastic seat, her upper body matching the bus’s swaying motion, Mary white-knuckled the grab bar on the seatback in front of her and peered out the windshield, trying to guess where the soldier at the wheel had been ordered to take them.
The commotion started a few blocks from the bank building. Passengers in the front of the bus began haranguing the driver and demanding to be told where they were being taken.
At first the driver ignored the one woman and two man tag-team who didn’t seem to know each other, but were still of the same mindset, and acted nearly in unison, even jumping out of their aisle seats at the same time when the bus stopped to let an ambulance blaze by.
Mary watched the ambulance, lights flashing but running silent, as it disappeared around a corner and sped off with a whoosh in the direction of the Square. In her mind’s eye she saw the driver and partner in the zone and just doing their job, all the while questioning in the back of their minds—just what in the hell was really going on. Which was exactly what she and Kenny had been doing on their first three round-trips between what at that time had been an ongoing and very bloody melee in the Square, and Emanuel Hospital just over the Steele Bridge in inner Northeast Portland. The first to fill up with the recently deceased and dozens of badly injured police and protesters, Emanuel quickly closed its doors and began diverting casualties to other nearby hospitals with open beds. Not that beds were needed. A fact that had become abundantly clear the first time she and Kenny had rolled up to the clogged emergency entrance at Providence and saw the entire medical staff performing triage on new admits, who were still under sheets on gurneys pushed against walls and basically taking up every available square foot of the avocado-green tiled floor. There were soldiers there lending a hand, and at times taking ambulatory patients with suspected bite wounds to a separate quarantine tent set up on the lawn between Inpatient Services and the Cancer Services building.
Having run out of supplies necessary to sterilize the ambulance on the turnaround, Mary was behind the wheel on yet another unassigned run downtown when Kenny talked her into pulling over for the pedestrian waving them down in front of the Unico Tower. A detour from the norm that ultimately saw him in the back of the same unsterilized ambulance and on his way to a meeting with the cold slab, bone saw, and unyielding scalpel awaiting him up at the Oregon Health Sciences University—the de facto northwest front in the fight against some never-before-seen viral pathogen.
Knowing what she knew about what her late partner had begun calling “the sickness” she wanted to be nowhere near the suit three rows up when he came down with it.
Sickness. The word alone reminded her of two things. First was a metal song popular in the nineties. Hard driving music she had once been into. Second, she recalled the eighties B-movies where a comet’s tail passed through the Earth’s atmosphere, seeding her population with a sickness necessary to bring about one calamity or another. From vehicles and machines that suddenly and inexplicably automated. To an alien spore that killed the majority of people outright. And lastly, the one where something riding the comet’s tail quickly turned everyone it came into contact with into blood-thirsty cannibals.
It was the latter premise that this thing resembled most. Only this was no B-movie. And as far as Mary knew, NASA hadn’t mentioned anything about Earth coming anywhere near a comet—past, present, or near future.
So that left as a plausible explanation, either a flu strain’s split-second mutation in the wild—as had been reported about extensively abroad before cropping up in Portland—or, some kind of a manmade virus gone wild.
The shouting at the front of the bus increased in volume, snapping Mary back to her current predicament. A virus she couldn’t see. However, the suit doubling over and falling into the aisle, knees first, face down on the adjacent passenger’s lap, was all the proof she needed she was about to be in the thick of the shit she’d so far kept at arm’s length.
As if they were all part of the same organism reacting to the threat, a ripple went through the passengers up front. The ripple preceded full-blown panic as the people near the moaning suit leaned away and where possible pressed their backs to the windows.
In the next beat the driver was standing on the brakes and the only other soldier aboard was ordering everyone to remain seated. As the bus lurched to a halt, a twentysomething four rows back on the right side of the bus wrapped up the soldier from behind, causing them both to pitch forward and land face down in the aisle opposite Mary’s row. And as a result, the man beside her who had been casting glares her way for blocks let out a shriek several octaves too high for his age, gender, and put-upon disposition.
“Get ahold of yourself, Nancy,” she bellowed into his left ear. Then, without thought to the consequences, she stood on her seat with her back exposed to the panicky man. Tuning out the frantic chatter rising all around her, she calmly ran a hand around the window in se
arch of some type of lever or button that might let the thing swing out in case of emergency.
“Right here,” said a mousy-looking elderly woman in the next aisle back. She was stabbing one bony finger at the metal plate riveted to her seatback.
A piercing scream sounded from the front of the bus.
Mary leaned over the seatback and glanced at the metal plate. After committing the upside-down picture to memory, she quickly craned around toward the commotion and saw the suit rear up from the screamer’s lap, a mouthful of quivering meat sluicing a trail of blood down his chin and once-white button-down oxford.
“Open the fucker,” howled the man beside her.
She shot him a look that said get off of my back, fucker and she meant it, literally, because he was crowding her to the point that it took a shot from one of her sharp elbows to create enough space so that she could pop the window release mechanism depicted on the instructions.
The wails rose in volume and now everyone was standing and crushing forward, trampling the soldier and his attacker.
As Mary watched the newly freed window pane tumble away to the street, out of the corner of her left eye she saw a pulsating jet of crimson spatter the wall and ceiling. Without a second thought she knew it was coming from the helpful elderly woman. She’d seen the same thing dozens of times after responding to horrible auto accidents or the occasional knife attack. And it never got easier to look at, for the spray from a carotid artery, no matter the size of the owner or depth of the wound, was a very messy affair.
With the old woman in her prayers, Mary tumbled face first behind the freed window. She broke her fall with both arms outstretched—wrists, elbows, and shoulders taking up most of the shock from the impact. Her palms and face, however, didn’t escape the hasty egress unscathed. Though but a hundred and five pounds dripping wet, the five-foot plummet ensured that dozens of glass kernels from the shattered window became embedded in her palms. And on the follow through, as she instinctively tucked and rolled to keep from breaking her neck, her right shoulder and face bore the bloody brunt of the remaining broken glass.
Adrenaline coursing through her veins, and ignoring the hot blood stinging her left eye, she popped up and sprinted headlong for a twenty-foot-tall wall of dense shrubbery just beyond the nearby sidewalk. Once there, she burrowed through the tangle of gripping branches, squeezed sideways past a pair of narrow trunks, and was instantly arrested by a less-forgiving lattice of tautly wound steel.
The chain-link rattled furiously upon contact and only stopped when she laced her fingers through the holes to steady herself.
As she gulped air, the throaty screams coming from the direction of the bus rose to a crescendo. Then gunshots. Of which she lost count before the firing ceased. However, much to her horror, the moaning and screaming did not. Soon, the shrill animal-like peals of people dying reached her ears.
She felt her pulse rate and respiration coming back to base line. Just being off that bus and away from the carnage was a miracle in itself. Now, with blood flowing from her palms and following the twists and turns of the chain-link in little gravity-aided spurts, she realized what the cryptic words Captain Castle had uttered really meant. Lima, Hotel, Sierra was an acronym in military phonetics for Lincoln High School. And spread out horizontally before her, ringed by an oval running track, was the LHS football field. The field’s left end zone all the way to the fifty-yard line dead ahead from Mary’s vantage point was taken up entirely by black body bags, all of them full, a good many of them gently undulating and tenting up in places.
All it took was that one quick sweep of the eyes and the full breadth of the outbreak became crystal clear to Mary. This was no longer a quarantine with decisions of triage and transport resting on the shoulders of first responders like herself. The hospitals and morgues were filled to capacity with the dead and dying, and she was staring at the place people were being brought to die. She saw a handful of armed soldiers in hazmat suits guarding the gate near the far end zone. Parked near the soldiers and surrounded by walking wounded were a half dozen city buses like the one she’d just escaped. Sadly there were no nurses or doctors in scrubs walking the gridiron amongst the amassed casualties. No care was being given to the stricken. She guessed, from what she had witnessed during the many transports she and Kenny had made to the various hospitals, that there simply weren’t enough medical personnel to go around. And of the skeleton crews who had been on duty since the outbreak of violence in the Square—if they were half as mentally and physically spent as her—even taking care of themselves would be a chore unto itself.
Mary let go of the fence, turned a slow one-eighty, and steeled herself to face whatever was on the other side of her impromptu hide. But first she moved her hands over her face. Once smooth and youthful, it was now rough to the touch and slickened with blood.
She probed her right cheek with her fingertips and found that it now felt like a topographical map of the Cascade mountain range. The glass there was embedded deep and would take specialized tweezers and a certain skill set to excise. She steadied her shaking hands as best she could and examined her palms. The glass there was ground in and the wounds continually wept blood. Same deal as her face: they would need attention from a specialist, too. Once she made it to a safe place. Which wasn’t at her back. That was for sure. Many of the body bags contained reanimated infected. And many of the casualties laid out on the turf appeared to be dying or already dead. Which meant that in time, they too would be joining the already turned.
In a bit of a panic now, and wanting to get as far away as quickly as possible from the downtown core, Mary exited the bushes much like she had entered them—wide-eyed, mouth agape, and arms outstretched. Only this time there wasn’t a chain-link fence standing in her way on the other side. Worse. There was a trio of men in black. They each wore a sleek, form-fitting gasmask that revealed only their eyes, nose, and upper cheek. The two nearest were Caucasian. The one kneeling behind them by the Tri-Met bus was African American. All three were armed with black rifles sprouting long, like-colored cylinders on the end. And all three men spotted her within the span of a heartbeat. Simultaneously their bodies stiffened and their rifles swept up to track her.
Still processing what it all meant, she broke out onto the sidewalk arms fully outstretched, bloody palms leading the way. In the next beat electrical signals were jumping synapses in her brain and her lips parted. But instead of delivering her intended heartfelt thanks to the soldiers for sorting the mess in the bus, a half-dozen bullets silenced her. Stitched from belly to throat, she was lifted off her feet and tossed sideways to the sidewalk, where she twitched violently then curled into a fetal ball.
As the shrubs towering before her began to blur at the edges, she heard a familiar voice bark: “Remember the ROEs. Center mass is no longer effective.”
She detected faint scuffing sounds from somewhere behind her. Someone crossing the street? Boots on pavement?
Then she heard the soft tink-tink of metal hitting on metal. Keys perhaps?
Finally, on the edge of her fading vision she saw one of the black cylinders sweeping her way. She saw a black nylon strap of some kind swinging in unison with the black boots clomping her way.
“Headshots only,” was the last thing Mary Palazzo heard before the darkness took her. The pair of muffled reports reached her ears after she was already gone. The spent brass skittering down the street was reflected in her staring dead eyes, but seen only by the man who, acting on the assumption the bloodied woman was turned and escaping zone Lima Hotel Sierra, had cut her life short a day before her thirtieth birthday.
Chapter 18
After pausing at the top of Tilly’s stairs to listen for sounds coming from within, Duncan hauled open the flimsy wooden screen door, its rusty spring announcing his presence. Holding the door open with his left shoulder, without hesitation, he rapped three times on the center of the sturdy oak door. He waited a few seconds and, when there was no reply verb
ally, nor the usual sound of his adopted aunt’s sensible shoes clicking across the wood floors, he knocked again.
Nobody answered after his second volley and best he could tell, nothing was stirring inside.
“Take a peek,” Charlie said.
There were a trio of small square windows above Duncan’s line of sight. Framing the door on two sides were two more windows, narrow and rectangular and hung with floral print curtains. Not wanting to ask Charlie for a leg up so he could see through the smaller windows up top, instead, Duncan craned sideways and peered into the darkened home through a sliver-thin parting of the curtains near the right side door jamb.
“What do you see?”
“Shadows.”
Hand in a fist and poised to deliver a final knock, Duncan glanced at the side window again and caught a reflection of Charlie at his back. The man was shifting his weight from foot-to-foot and nervously eyeing the street the way they’d come in.
“Something’s eating at you.”
Stepping forward and craning his head near Duncan’s shoulder, Charlie said, “Damn straight it is. Helluva wreck with what had to be a fatality and I still haven’t heard a siren closing in.”
Knowing the response time this close to downtown shouldn’t have exceeded the three or four minutes that had elapsed since they passed by the scene, and, calculating the odds in his head which were skewed wildly in his favor, Duncan extended his hand. In it was the wad of money won playing Keno earlier at the bar. “Hundred bucks says the hills will be alive with the sounds of sirens by the time we finish inside … or three minutes, whichever comes first.”
“Police, Fire … EMTs?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Duncan said, nudging a rolled-up Oregonian newspaper with his toe.
Without hesitating, and by no means practicing what he liked to preach, Charlie said, “I’ll take that action.”
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) Page 9
