Wheels and Zombies (Book 1): Ash

by M. Van

  “You doing okay there, Ash?” Jonesy’s voice pulled me out of my haze of thoughts. I couldn’t read the expression behind his shades, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he thought I was losing it.

  “Yeah, fine,” I replied.

  “Half pint here is tough as nails,” Chuck commented. I returned a half-smile.

  “Why do you call her half pint?” Jonesy asked. Maybe he wanted to lighten the mood.

  “Ah,” Chuck started, “my grandson always resented it when I called him kid.” A smile lit up Chuck’s face at the memory of his grandson. “Kept telling me he wasn’t a kid by the time he was ten. One day his mother sent him to pull me out of a bar, and the name somehow came to be.”

  Tears welled up in the old man’s eyes. For the first time, I noticed they were a soft gray.

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “His mother refused to let me see him when he was still a boy. She was right, too—nobody likes a drunk,” he said as if the words weighed him down. “But he came to see me a few months ago, him and his little boy. He called him Charley.” The old man’s face brightened for an instance, but then simmered down into a frown.

  “He and the rest of his family live up in Canada,” Chuck added with a deep sigh. “Perhaps things aren’t as bad up there.”

  “I’m sure they’re not,” Jonesy said. “We have gotten the worst down here where it started.”

  Chuck nodded but diverted his eyes to the floor.

  “Listen to him,” I said, placing a hand on Chuck’s arm. “Jonesy’s been out there; he knows.”

  Footsteps came up from behind me. I had almost forgotten about Burke.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Burke exclaimed. “This thing is going to eat the world, and we’re babysitting some goddamn Hail Mary.”

  “Shut up, Burke, and take your post,” Jonesy said. Burke paced up and down the hall.

  “I have to get out of here,” Burke said, clamping his rifle to his chest.

  “Just calm down, son,” Chuck said. But it was as if Burke wasn’t there anymore. He stared straight through us as if he had X-ray vision.

  “Burke,” Jonesy said with a wary undertone.

  Burke spun on his heel and walked off to the end of the hall. He raised his rifle to his chest and peered around the corner. Jonesy got to his feet as he shot us a worried glance. At least, I think it meant worried. Those shades started to unsettle me. He followed Burke a few paces but stopped when Burke stepped around the corner and out of sight. His fast-paced footsteps echoed back to us as he sprinted down the hall.

  “Burke,” Jonesy called out in a low voice.

  “Shouldn’t you go after him?” I asked as he watched Burke run down the hall. Jonesy shook his head.

  “He made his choice.”

  We waited in silence for a couple of minutes until the frosted-glass doors opened, and Angie reappeared. She shook her head at Jonesy and then stopped in surprise. She lifted her shoulders and dipped her head, clearly wondering where Burke had run off. Jonesy shook his head with a shrug. The gesture seemed to explain all, because from her expression, I could read the curse words singing around in her head.

  “Stupid idiot,” she muttered when she neared us and kneeled next to my chair. “That way is blocked. The place is crawling with infected.”

  Without another word, they all looked at me. My eyes widened, and I had to swallow hard. All my nightly excursions ran inside my mind. I knew this hospital like the back of my hands. I’d practically lived in this place for most of my life, but now I had trouble remembering.

  My chest tightened at the expectant glances, and I had trouble sucking in air. Chuck’s nostril plugs caught my eye. I wondered if I could borrow them to release the strain on my lungs as an image of my sister smiling in the sunlight rammed into my thoughts.

  “I know a way,” I said with a gasp. Relief washed over me when their worried expressions changed into half-smiles. Angie’s face lit up even more when I told her about a maintenance exit I had used sneaking out with my sister. It let out into a small courtyard that connected to the hospital grounds.

  My sister and I had used it once to sneak out after some bad procedure had left her in tears. She was too exhausted to get very far, but a patch of grass and the sun on her face had done the trick to change her mood.

  Chuck had gotten to his feet. We were ready to move when we heard footsteps stomping down the hall. Incoherent screams followed when Burke’s form spun around the corner where it came to a halt. Wild eyes shot from Angie to the door and back. They went even wider when he said, “You’re back. It’s clear.” He sounded like that ten-month-old again, and then he sprinted to the door.

  “Don’t,” Angie shouted. Jonesy tried to tackle him, but Burke was too fast, and he slammed his body into the frosted glass. With a crack, one of the doors splintered in several places. In shock, I peered past the opened doors. Crazies stood shoulder to shoulder and packed the room.

  Growls erupted from the room, along with a high-pitched scream that had to have come from Burke as the crazies piled on top of him. I looked at Angie in search of answers—how had she been able to get out of there? But there was no time. The growls didn’t stop when the screams died, and the open door gave the crazies an excellent view of the four of us.

  “Go, go, go,” Angie said as she ushered us to move. “Jonesy, help Chuck. Ash, you’re driving on your own. I’ll take the rear.” With that, she spun and fired several shots.

  Jonesy had one of Chuck’s arms draped around his shoulders. He forced the old man to a quicker pace. In my chair, I could have been faster, but I decided to stay behind them. What I saw at the corner of the short hallway would have knocked me off my feet if I’d been able to stand.

  An army of crazies had followed Burke. That's why he had come charging around that corner like an idiot, and now he had led them straight to us. They plowed down the hall in a parade of snarls and snapping jaws, in a variation of hospital gowns, doctors’ coats, and pink nurses’ outfits, combined with a mixture of blood and gore.

  Jonesy stopped in the middle of the junction and fired his rifle, one-handed. Chuck didn’t hesitate as he pulled the handgun that Angie had given him from the pocket of his bathrobe and fired.

  “Angie,” I shouted when I had lost sight of her in the confusion. Fear of the oncoming horde made my heart pound in overdrive. I didn't think I could stand if we lost another one of our little group, and I felt relieved when I heard her voice. I would probably never say it out loud because of my own damn pride to admit it, but I needed them.

  “Move,” she retorted and took Jonesy’s place. Her rifle fired in quick succession as I rolled my chair to follow in Jonesy and Chuck’s footsteps. I chanced a glance behind me. Angie had managed to stop the advance.

  Bodies lay in heaps of entangled arms and legs, which gave the ones still upright trouble enough to follow us. Jonesy gave Chuck quite the exercise. They had made it around the corner and vanished from sight. I hurried after them, spinning my wheels as fast as I could, almost bumping into them.

  “Where do we go, Ash?” Jonesy asked. He glanced down the hall that looked the same as the one we had just come from.

  A combination of loud, clustered gunfire made me jump. A handful of lumbering bodies fell to the ground. Jonesy kept his weapon at the ready as he stepped into the hall with the grayish-white linoleum floor. Along with the floor, the white walls with a yellow finish now had a dark red almost black splatter pattern where the bodies had crumpled to the ground and drenched in their own blood.

  Every dozen feet or so, there was a door, some open, some closed. About halfway down the hall, I made out a reception area for this specific ward. At the end of the long hall, I spotted what I was looking for.

  “There,” I said pointing it out. “That red door on the left.” Without hesitation, the men sprang into motion. Footsteps alerted me to Angie’s approach, and I rolled my chair back to peer into the hallway we had come from.<
br />
  “We found it,” I said, unable to hide my enthusiasm. I instantly registered my reaction as stupid. I read it in the smile that wouldn’t reach her eyes. I wasn’t helping myself here, or Chuck, but what was I supposed to do, let us all get killed by a bunch of bloodthirsty, infected crazies?

  “Go,” Angie said, with a hand on my shoulder. Then she spoke louder so Jonesy would hear. “Don’t you stop for anything. You hear me? Get them out.”

  With my wheels in motion, I glanced back as Angie fired the first shot. The crazies must have gotten past the barricade of fallen bodies.

  Jonesy and Chuck reached the door, but they seemed to have trouble getting it open. Jonesy inspected the door for a second while the repetition of gunfire behind us increased. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a few had already breached the corners. A body crumpled to the ground with every shot, but with every mutilated figure that went down, another took its place. They started to push Angie into retreat.

  “Son,” Chuck said impatiently, with an eye on the crazies that were forcing Angie back to us with every second.

  Jonesy glanced up with a smirk, and then without a word, he lifted his boot and kicked in the door. A brief smile lifted the corners of my mouth when the door opened with a crack, until I heard the click, click of an empty rifle.

  | 6

  When I turned, Angie had disappeared. A pack of dazed-looking crazies milled around the hall we had come from, just beyond the information desk area. They seemed lost as they stumbled and crawled like drunks around the fallen bodies. Without thinking, I pushed my chair forward. I heard Chuck call out my name, followed by several footsteps, but I picked up speed quickly. I almost made it to the reception area when my common sense kicked in. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t have a weapon, and I wasn't exactly the right person to help Angie. All of a sudden, I remembered Angie didn’t have her backup weapon. She’d given it to Chuck, and her rifle had clicked empty. I swallowed hard when the crazies who were mere feet from the reception area found something interesting rolling toward them and charged.

  I couldn’t make it, not without being shredded to pieces. White foggy eyes had set their sights on me. Fingers clutched the air. Carcasses of human bodies moved in a shuffle of the dead, pulling and tugging at each other. My heart pounded in my chest while I shouted Angie’s name. She didn’t answer. Shredded to pieces by bullets, bodies littered the ground in front of the reception desk. I pulled on the brakes, and I came to a stop before I reached the desk. There were no green army fatigues visible on the floor, but I couldn’t waste time searching—I had to get out of there. Pushing down a vast range of emotions that threatened to spill from my eyes, I turned. Through blurred vision, I noticed Jonesy and Chuck had disappeared from the hall. Couldn’t they have waited for one damn minute?

  I pushed the wheels, setting the chair in motion. Deep-rooted, gut-wrenching sounds closed in on me. I fought to speed up when my chair jerked to a stop. What the hell! I looked down to see that one of the crazies who I had thought to be dead by Angie’s hand had stuffed his arm between the spokes of my wheel. Its body lay limp on the floor, but its head perked up. A woman, who must have been beautiful at one time, eyed me with half of her face missing. I screamed.

  With frantic tugs on the wheel, I tried to wrench free, but the arm wouldn’t budge. Over my shoulder, I saw others right on top of me. Two limped by as if they hadn’t seen me. A man in a green uniform lunged for the chair. I leaned forward and dropped myself out of the seat. My chin connected hard with the linoleum floor. The infected soldier came crashing to the floor with my chair. I scrambled on my arms to get away before he crushed me, or worse, ate me. The soldier crawled after me. The rifle still hung across its chest. Lucky for me, the rifle made its movements even more awkward. I gripped a doorpost to get some leverage, but it was no use—I couldn’t get away from the man. My arm lifted, as if that would be any kind of defense. When I felt its awful breath on my arm, I screamed my throat raw.

  Something yanked the crazy off me, and its face smacked against the ground. Through teary eyes, I saw Angie lift her arms and smash the butt of her rifle into the crazy’s head. The head cracked open. A second later, Angie was on me, and she lifted me off the floor. She dragged me into a room and slammed the door shut. We both slumped to the ground, breathing heavily.

  “That was a stupid thing to do, kid,” Angie whispered near my ear. My heart had stopped and restarted with a jolt. It felt as if it wanted to jump out of my chest.

  “I’m not a kid,” I said in a low whisper between breaths.

  “As long as you act like one, you are one, kid.” Ready to chastise Angie, I turned, but a finger covered her lips before it pointed to the door. I followed its direction and gasped. A shadow passed the light where it filtered in underneath the door slit. As it shuffled by, I felt Angie’s body relax. I took the moment to take in our surroundings.

  Fortunately, the patient’s room we had entered sat empty. Another one of the crazies shambled past the door. Its shadow stopped, followed by a muffled moan. My body pressed into Angie.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “They won’t bother us once they have calmed down.”

  I looked up at her dumbfounded, and nothing more than a “Huh” fell from my mouth.

  “Cancer perk,” she said. I blinked. A smile that for the first time reached her eyes spread across her face. “People like us have to find the positive in the little things.” Before I could demand an explanation, she got to her knee and peeked out the door.

  A man in a hospital gown stood near the door opening. Dark red splotches ran from his mouth down to his gown. A bloodied hand had a firm grip on an IV drip while he stood shuffling from foot to foot. Several others passed the door, and after a moment, the one in our door opening followed. Ignoring them, Angie stepped out, righted my chair, and rolled it into the room before closing the door behind her.

  When she had me seated in my chair, she dropped down on the bed. I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes at her, ready for some answers. A crooked smile lifted her mouth to one side, taking some of that hard focus away from her eyes, which in the dim room almost looked black. She leaned back on her hands, and the smile disappeared.

  “The infected don’t eat cancer patients. They might attack if they’re agitated, but usually don’t,” she said. “It’s something in the makeup of the cells that doesn’t compute with the virus.”

  My eyes widened at her admission. Mouth open, I glared at her. When I had collected my thoughts, I managed to speak again. “But they ignored you as well, just now, and back there on the balcony.”

  Angie sat up and shifted uncomfortably on the bed.

  “I went in for an annual checkup about two weeks ago. It didn’t pan out that well,” she said as her gaze shifted from me to the floor. “It was quite a shock. I’d been cancer free for over ten years, so …” Her voice drifted off.

  I wanted to feel sorry for her, but her reason for being here kept me from doing so. My hands gripped the wheels on my side so tight that my knuckles went white. Between gritted teeth I said, “They don’t know.” She shook her head, diverting her eyes again.

  “I was going to tell them, but then this happened.”

  “And now you’re collecting their lab rats while you’re supposed to be one yourself,” I said. I couldn’t withhold the venomous tone, but I managed not to spit on her.

  “It’s more complicated than that, I …” She looked at me and then cut herself off as if she decided I wasn’t worth the explanation. My temper flared.

  “You bitch,” I said. The crazies stirred outside the door at the sound of my loud voice, but I didn’t care. My whole body shook in anger, and my nostrils flared to accommodate the extra air I needed to circulate the rage pumping through my veins. I had come to admire her bravery, but she was just a backstabbing coward to save her own ass. “You’re just a coward.”

  “What would you want me to do, huh? Tell them, ‘Hi, here I am, you forgot one
’?” she said as her arms went up to make her point. “‘Now cut me open like a fish.’” She slid from the bed and bent down to face me. “Is that what you want me to do?”

  Her eyes bore into mine as she spoke in a low tone that barely reached a whisper while she shredded my resolve. She was right; it wasn’t that simple. My eyes dropped to my hands where I had folded them in my lap.

  “You could have left,” I said in a whisper.

  “That’s the complicated part.”

  I looked up at her, but she shook her head and stood up straight.

  “What am I supposed to do here,” she said, more to herself. “I don’t want to hand you over, but I can’t leave you here.”

  “Why not? I’ll be fine,” I opined. She shook her head again.

  “I’m not going to leave a kid in a hospital surrounded by infected,” she said in anger. “You’re in a wheelchair, for crying out loud.”

  “I can get around,” I interrupted. She lifted her arms and then dropped them in defeat.

  “Come on,” she said as she opened the door. “Maybe we’ll figure something on the way out.”

  Angie walked beside me in silence while I pushed the wheels of my chair. I noticed her nervous glances that made me wonder if she was anxious about what to do with me, or whether I would tell someone about her own illness. I had already decided I wouldn’t tell, but I hadn’t told her. Exposing Angie wouldn’t help my situation, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.

  We weaved past the shuffling bodies without incident. While they all had a similar, crazed look on their faces with those fogged-up eyes, some with bloodied hands and clothes, they had remained mostly human. Others looked as if something had pulled them through a shredder. Blood oozed from their tattered necks and torn flesh. I avoided looking at any of them for too long.