by M. Van
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Next
More
Ash
A novella in the
Wheels and Zombies series
M. Van
Ash
A novella in the
Wheels and Zombies series
M. Van
Copyright © 2016 by M. Van. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.
42Links Publishing
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www.42Links.net
Cover design by Shezaad Sudar
Edited by Book Helpline
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-90-824472-3-1
| 1
The pumping beats pummeling my ears weren’t enough to block out the annoying presence of, well, everyone. You might think people would be sympathetic to the sick, but no, they have to be bugged with needles, pain meds, or changing IVs. If it isn’t the poking and prodding, it’s the are-you-okay questions executed with just the right amount of false concern to haunt you until you eventually die.
Tammy walked around my bed to check a monitor and wrote something on her pad. Her oversized fish-eyes peered through a set of thick glasses that offset the rest of her appearance. If it weren’t for those dreadful goggles, I’d bet she’d have a chance at a more exotic career than changing bedpans. She seemed to know it too. I had often seen her hunched over a little too far, leaving some good-looking smug a decent view of what her too-tight nurse’s uniform had to offer. Yet she didn’t do it for everyone. Over time, I noticed looks didn’t matter that much, but deep pockets seemed a necessity. She wouldn’t be the first nurse to search for riches among the dying.
Thank God, she wouldn’t do that to me. Tammy wouldn’t flash her boobs at a thirteen-year-old girl with a nearly bald, fuzzy head of hair and stage 4 cancer. The doctors figured I had a couple of months left, which sucked.
Tammy’s mouth moved, and she gestured for me to remove the earplugs.
“I’ll need that back in a while,” she said, pointing a finger at the phone on my lap. “I’m running behind on my social calendar.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said as I took the plugs out. Tammy had been the only nurse nice enough to lend me her phone. I never made phone calls, but I liked to listen to music. The others must have been afraid I’d steal their property or make long distant calls. As if I had any means to run from this damn hospital with the spoils or know anyone to call except my social worker.
A botched lumbar puncture had left me paralyzed. So making a quick getaway wasn't on my resume anymore, not that I would ever steal from someone.
When Terrence entered, he passed the old geezers sharing my room without acknowledging them, as if looking at them would ruin his (in my opinion) too-cheap-to-wear-in-public suit. Not that the two old men could have noticed him. Old man Jarrod had come out of surgery that afternoon and was out cold. Gary had refused to die when the staff had removed his life support. The old man just lay in his bed, waiting for his heart to give up. Even his wife had stopped coming after a while.
Sweat plastered Terrence’s forehead. He looked as if he had run up the five flights of stairs, but with a body about fifty pounds overweight, I figured even walking could mean a challenge for him. I followed his waddle across the room from the corner of my eye—the decision to ignore him made.
Terrence had become an obligatory visitor when they appointed him my caseworker. Besides failing miserably at his job because he still hadn't cleared up the mix-up that had put me in a room with these two old geezers and the strange odor that wafted around him, Terrence wasn't my favorite person in the world.
It wouldn’t be long before they’d stick me in a box, so was it too much to ask for a room with people a little closer to my age? These old geezers were sixty and sixty-three years my senior. Never mind Gary, but the effects of Jarrod’s Alzheimer’s had started to get on my nerves.
Tammy entered the room as Terrence stopped at the foot of my bed. I used the phone to check the time and realized Tammy’s shift was up. This screwed up my plan for ignoring Terrence.
“Sorry, girl,” Tammy said. “I have to go.” An annoyed sigh escaped me as I handed Tammy the phone.
“Thanks,” I managed to say. Tammy hovered for a moment. As it brought forth the opportunity to ignore Terrence a little longer, I gave Tammy’s fish eyes my full attention. Her mouth shifted into a thin line before her arms spread wide and surrounded me in a tight hug. I froze in shock—she must have lost it.
“Take care, girl,” she said. As she let go, I looked at her, still in shock.
“I’ll see you tomorrow—right?”
Tammy didn’t answer my question. Her gaze shifted uneasily between Terrence and me. Terrence cocked his head with a motion to the door. Tammy took the hint and left with a slight wave of her hand. My eyes lingered on the door after Tammy had left, unsure of what had just happened.
The shift of metal over linoleum caught my attention. Terrence grabbed a chair from the far corner of the room and dragged it to the side of my bed to park his oversized butt on it. I glared at him incredulously. He had never taken the time to sit with me. A white handkerchief appeared in his hand from a pocket of his cheap suit. He daubed at the sweat on his forehead. He looked anxious.
“Listen, kid—” he started to say, but I stopped him before he could finish.
“I’m not a kid.” My voice was firm and a bit loud, but I was sure my roommates wouldn’t mind.
“Rebec—”
“Don’t call me that either,” I said in a harsh tone. Terrence cocked an eyebrow. “Call me Ash.” My sister had come up with the nickname because of the color of my skin. She did it to annoy our parents, and it had become the only name I responded to. Terrence let out a deep sigh.
“All right, Ash,” he said as if it cost him a tremendous amount of effort. “I’m leaving town tonight.”
I shrugged without a reply. Why should I care if he left town?
“I should have known you’d be all heartbroken about it,” he said as he stood up from the chair. “I don’t know when they’re pulling you out but have a good life for what’s left of it.”
“Wait, what?” I said. “What do you mean, ‘have a good life’? You’re not comin’ back?” The man is pretty much a douche, but a familiar one at least.
“Things are getting out of control,” he said. “I have to get my family out of town.”
“What things? And what did you mean, pull me out?” I asked. I heard about some riots, but what else is new?
“Haven’t you watched the news? They’re evacuating the city.”
I blinked.
“They’re evacuatin’ Brooklyn,” I said, more as a statement than a question. My words must have come out a little too cynical, because Terrence dropped his shoulders with emphasis.
“For a smart kid, you are pretty dense sometimes. The world did not stop moving because your life turned to shit; people are dying out there.”
“Well, if you had done your job, Terrence, I might have had a television to watch. How the hell am I supposed to know what’s goin’ on out there? And don’t call me kid.” The words rushed out, the anger building inside me
. Red spots broke out on Terrence’s neck as his hands gripped my bed’s railing.
“Well, maybe if you hadn’t been such a foul-mouthed brat, I might have put some more effort into it,” he said.
“As if my life is worth anythin’ to write home about,” I said. “If I had a home.” I could hear my voice break, and I hated it. I hated feeling sorry for myself. His grip on my bed relented, and the blood returned to his white knuckles.
“I don’t have time for this. Figure it out.” With that, he turned on his heels and stomped out of the room.
“Screw you,” I shouted at his back, but he ignored me.
Except for the beeping and wheezing of machines that kept Gary and Jarrod alive, the room fell silent. My mind whirled at what had happened. Tammy’s emotional goodbye, Terrence’s, what, eviction notice? For a brief second, I wondered what douche the state would assign me next, but then Terrence’s words started to filter in. He said they were evacuating the city, but how could that be and why? I needed to find out what was going on, but it had to wait until the night shift thinned out the staff. I rubbed a hand over the hair that barely covered my skull as my gaze shifted from the beds of the two old men to the window.
The orange glow of an invisible sun bounced off the window and reached my room. There was nothing to see but bricks and a sliver of blue sky fading into darkness.
I glanced at the legs hidden underneath the covers. They wouldn't even notice if a bus ran over them. That botched lumbar puncture that had left me paralyzed had been in the interest of my sister Alison’s health. It wasn’t so much the lumbar puncture, which as a procedure isn’t supposed to be that invasive, but performed by a doctor on call for forty-eight hours with an appetite for synthetic drugs and alcohol, it had become a whole different ball game. He’d had a little trouble locating the lumbar vertebrae. The screw-up had left my parents busy with a potentially lucrative lawsuit, my sister depressed to the point of suicide, and me alone.
The only reason my parents even had me was to use me as a lab rat in an attempt to save Alison. I’d never blamed Alison—it hadn’t been her fault she’d gotten sick. And she’d made it easy. Alison had been my favorite person in the world. I would have done anything for her. Instead, she had turned it around. For her, taking her own life had felt like the only thing she could do to set me free.
My parents had blamed me for Alison’s death. It hadn’t helped that her condition had turned out to be genetic, and I’d had the same thing. It had been the reason I hadn’t been able to help her. My parents hadn’t been able to handle it. After a while, they’d walked away from each other, and then from me.
| 2
The chair Terrence had left by my bed made it easier, but it was still a struggle to get to my wheelchair. When I had made from the bed to the chair, I slid to the ground. The nurses tended to make sure my wheelchair was well out of reach. They didn’t like when I roamed the halls at night.
The linoleum felt clammy and sticky against my bare legs. The flimsy hospital gown they made me wear wasn’t ideal for crawling around the floor, and what made it worse was that my naked butt stuck out. Refusing to think about it, I dragged my body across the room. My arms trembled with the effort. By the time I reached the wheelchair, my breaths came in hard and ragged. It took me a couple of minutes to regain my composure, and I managed to climb into the chair. Then I had to rest again.
There was nothing to tell the time by inside the room, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that little trip from the bed to my chair had taken me thirty minutes. While I waited for my breathing to calm, I cursed the relentlessness of chemotherapy, then smoothed the thin fabric of my hospital gown over my legs, and set the chair in motion.
At the door, I stopped to listen, but the hall seemed empty. Most of the time, the night staff had waited around for a patient to ring the bell. That’s when they’d jumped into action. The rest of their shift they had hovered around the lounge, watching television or playing cards.
I wheeled past the nurses’ station, keeping my head low. The chair maneuvered almost soundlessly. I had gotten the hang of it this past year. This chair was the only thing besides some ragged jeans and a couple of sweatshirts that I actually owned. Well, Mom and Dad had paid for it, but that didn’t prevent me from cherishing it. It kept me mobile, and it wasn’t like those beat-up fifties’ models provided by the hospital. I rolled past the open doors. With the lights off in most of the rooms, they looked like dark, gaping holes in the wall. Some of them had the bluish sheen of a television set that made me curse Terrence once again.
At the end of the hall, I pulled on the brake and whirled around the corner into the patients’ break room without checking to see if one of the nurses had seen me go in. The wheels squeaked on the linoleum. Light from the television illuminated the room. I paused at the sight of smoke rising over the couch.
“Come on in,” a broken voice with a heavy wheeze said. “I could use some company, watching the end of the world.” I pushed my chair around the couch to face an old man, smoking a cigarette.
I glared at him. Not only was one not allowed to smoke in the hospital, but an air hose stuck up the old man’s nose that looped around his ears before it drifted down to connect to a metal canister with a big “Flammable” sign on the side.
“Well, don’t just sit there gawking. Come closer so I can see you.” A bit put off by the possibility of blowing up, I hesitated. Then I figured, what did I have to lose. As I rolled the chair closer, I noticed a woman fast asleep in the far-end corner of the room. I recognized her as one of the elderly ladies who spent their afternoons knitting around the television set. She'd been the one spreading all the new gossip while an IV filled her veins with some sort of liquid. The other chairs situated around the TV were empty.
“Don’t mind her,” the old man, who I had seen before but couldn't remember his name, said. “That old hag could never hold her liquor.” Surprised, I saw that the old man held up a flask, saluted me, and chugged it down. The sight made me grin. The man might be old, but he surely knew how to entertain himself.
Light from the TV gave me a better view of him as he sat up. His head was almost square, and he had the air of a man who might have been tough as nails in his prime. White hair sat on his head with a touch of grease to keep it all slicked back. He reminded me of the gangsters from those old movies.
“You’re a scrawny little thing, aren’t you,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” I replied. The old man almost choked on his snorted laugh.
“You can’t fool an old fool,” he said, still coughing a laugh. “You don’t look a year over ten.”
“Thirteen,” I said with a sigh. The old man smiled without the added throat noises.
“The name’s Chuck,” he said with a delighted grin. The cigarette switched hands, and he held the empty one out to me.
“Ash,” I said, and I couldn’t help return the grin. He held my hand for a moment and peered at it as he shook his head.
“Thin as a feather,” he said. “The one thing it doesn’t do is discriminate, does it? God knows I’ve done my share of bad in my life and might even deserve my fate, but look at you.” He shook his head again.
His gesture made me feel uncomfortable, and I turned away to inspect the floor. As if he noticed, he refrained from saying anything else.
He sat back with a sigh, followed by a nasty cough that made my stomach turn. When he regained control of his breathing, he gestured to the TV.
“We might have found our end in this,” he said. The moisture in his eyes made me turn to watch the screen. What I saw on that screen made the blood drain from my face and hide in my toes.
An aerial shot made from a newscast helicopter showed a war zone in downtown Manhattan. Fires lit up the screen—buildings engulfed in flames. People scrambled up and down the streets. Fear rained down like a monsoon. At least, that’s what I thought until the camera zoomed in. It wasn’t fear that had overtaken these pe
ople—it was rage. They went at each other like rabid dogs.
The image switched to a pale-looking broadcaster. The sound on the set was too low for me to hear, but the expression on the man’s face said plenty.
The news ticker at the bottom of the screen gave instructions for an evacuation. Then the screen changed to show buses driving off towards the highway. Military roadblocks denied any other vehicles the chance to reach those highways. Miles and miles of cars blocked every street and alleyway. People were desperate to get out of the city, but the military didn’t allow anyone to leave without inspection.
“That takes the light right out of those pretty blue eyes of yours, doesn’t it?” Chuck said. I gasped, unable to speak. Most of the carnage caused by a viral outbreak, according to the news ticker, was situated around the Manhattan area. However, they said it was spreading fast.
“What is this?” I said under my breath. Chuck eyed me curiously.
“You haven’t seen this?” he asked. “This has been building for days.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. That’s what Terrence meant when he told me off that the world hadn't stopped moving when my life turned to shit. I’d been so busy wallowing in my own misery, using music to cut myself off from the world, that I had missed this.
“I, eh …” I started to say, but my voice faded.
“I wonder how we’ll get ourselves out of this one,” Chuck mumbled under his breath.
We watched in silence when the old man wasn’t coughing his lungs out. I lost track of time while I sat there, my eyes glued to the screen. A door clicked shut somewhere down the hall, and it pulled me out of my trance.
Chuck eyed me wearily and then said, “I’ll tell you, half pint: this won’t become any prettier.” He extended his hand for me to shake. “Still, it was nice meeting you.” He pointed a thumb at the door. “You better beat it before Nurse Ratched comes sniffing around.”
