“Well, this was a waste of time,” he said to the empty room. Without the hum of the powerful operating room lights, the whir and beep of machines, and the sounds of cutting, chopping, and low conversation from working doctors, the room was deathly quiet. He was beginning not to like it.
He stared up at the ceiling and looked for holes. Nothing. The ceiling tiles were all intact. No exposed ducts, no exposed pipes. It was the way it should be. He turned to walk out and then stopped. There was a drain in the floor. And another by the sink. Both had biohazard symbols on them.
You just dump the offal on the floor? he wondered. So unhygienic! Mathis grunted. He turned to walk back into the hallway. At least it was warmer in there. For now, anyway.
Gurgle. Gurgle.
He stopped and then slowly turned his head. The room was silent again. He stared at the sink at the back of the room, but he didn’t think that’s where the sound had come from.
Gurgle. Bloop.
Gooseflesh vibrated across his skin. His spine rattled with fear. And worst of all, he had to piss.
Bloop. Bloop.
He finally knew where the sound was coming from—the drain in the middle of the room. Mathis watched as water slowly rose from the drain, and then sucked back into it.
Maybe the rain had finally invaded the gutters. Maybe there was a break in the building’s water main. Hell, maybe water was rushing up from the sewers and this particular drain led to them. Maybe, just maybe, everything was fucked but fine. They could drown. That would be better than the alternative.
Please be flooding, please be flooding, please be flooding…
Then there was another sound, like static coming through a pipe. Or maybe, just maybe, it was sizzling.
“Okay,” he said to the room, “that’s bad.” He tapped his headset. “Earth to Harrel, earth to Harrel. Come in Harrel!”
Chapter 40
At the opposite end of the building, a drain gurgled. A streamer of jet black rose through the waste system, through the metal colander, and into the room. It was little more than a liter in volume. The moment it finished pulling itself out of the pipe, it coalesced into a small, trembling puddle.
The storeroom was darker than pitch. It paused for a moment, and then slid forward. The tile beneath it sizzled as it vacuumed up every dust particle and stray bit of biological matter. It encountered something hard, but consumable. The creature didn’t bother producing limbs—no reason to. Yet.
It continued sweeping the space for more to eat and found a treasure trove of plastic, cardboard, and protein. The storeroom was filled with boxes of birthing supplies, snacks for the staff, diapers, and other nursing paraphernalia. In the darkness, it fed and grew. When it had finally cleared the room of everything it could eat, the large black oil slick trembled like a bowl of jelly. An eyestalk slowly rose from its surface with a crackle and surveyed the surroundings.
The pitch-black room might as well have been well lit. It saw the unnatural light glowing beneath the door and the imperfect seals on either side of the jamb. Freedom was through the door. It slid forward to the crack at the bottom and retracted the eyestalk. Once it was on the other side, it would search for more food.
Chapter 41
Dr. Jennifer Harrel walked down a wide, dimly lit corridor. Weak, bare incandescent bulbs hung from a line of cords directly in the middle of the ceiling rendering a single, bright stripe of illumination. The rest of the corridor was clothed in shadows. It seemed to go on forever.
Her own shadow followed her and then passed her only to drop back again as she passed from bulb to bulb. And then her shadow stopped being in front of her at all. She turned her head. The lights behind her were going out one at a time.
Click. Click. Click.
The rapid chatter of claws or talons against the concrete echoed eerily. She walked faster. The sound increased as if more limbs had joined the pursuit. Harrel broke into a slow jog, fighting the urge to turn around and look, to see just how far behind her the thing was. And how long she had before it devoured her.
Click. Click. Click.
The lights in the tunnel were fading. Not going out, but fading. The incandescent bulbs’ glow decreased. Harrel started running.
Faster, faster, faster!
The clicking sounds behind her became a thrash metal drumbeat. She felt the thing getting closer, its obsidian maw and claws ready to tear her—
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Harrel opened her eyes and flinched. The bright lights of the trauma surgery hallway made her squint, but she saw the glass wall in front of her, Mathis standing behind it. He had a peculiar look on his face. Confused, she cocked her head and waited for her eyes to adjust. It looked as though he was saying something, but the soundproof room made his words nothing more than mouth movements. Then she snapped to it. The look on his face was fear. He pointed to the door leading to the surgical theater and then tapped at his wrist where a watch would normally be.
She stood upright, groaning as her knees popped and her back complained. Her left leg had practically fallen asleep and the pins and needles made her clench her teeth. She shuffled over to the door and opened it a crack. Mathis had backed away from the wall and was in front of her. “What’s—” And then she heard it—the tell-tale sound of something frying. “What the hell?”
Mathis turned and pointed at the drain. She followed his finger and then watched as more water poured through the holes in the metal circle embedded in the floor.
“We have to cover it! Find me something!”
“Like what?”
Mathis put his arms on her shoulders. “Go ask those assholes next door! Glass, metal, I don’t give a fuck. Just give me something to cover the goddamned drain!”
She nodded and then ran back into the hallway to the other door. Swinging it open, she saw Sharma and the others huddled together at the far corner of the room. Sharma looked up at her with a slightly disinterested glance. And then he saw the look on her face and started to his feet.
“Quick! What can we use to block a drain? Something metal or glass!”
Sharma blinked at her and then his face drooped into a mask of terror. The nurses and trauma surgeons looked panicked. “I, uh—”
One of the nurses raised a hand. “Instrument tray?”
“Gimme!” Harrel yelled.
The nurse sprang from the floor and ran to the operating table. Metal surgical instruments clattered to the tile floor as she pulled the tray from the stand. A scalpel nearly clipped her toe on its way down. She ran to Harrel and handed her the tray.
In spite of her terror and adrenaline-fueled desperation, she still managed to thank the nurse before returning to the other surgery. Mathis had retreated from the drain, his back against the glass wall. When the door opened, he practically jumped.
She held out the tray. “Will this work?”
He glanced at it and then growled. “Well, if it doesn’t, we’re dead anyway.”
Mathis took it from her fingers and ran to the drain. More water spilled out and the sizzling had turned into the sound of an old television set tuned to a dead station. Mathis dropped the tray over the drain and then stood atop it.
For a moment, neither of them breathed. In the deathly quiet surgery, the sound of the creature in the pipes was still too loud for her liking. She couldn’t tell if it was still coming, or had already left the drain.
Mathis stared down at his feet and the warped tray. So did she. “Moore said it had moved upstairs!” Harrel said.
Mathis continued staring down, his chest barely moving from short breaths. His voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. “I think maybe she was full of shit.”
The sizzling sound suddenly departed. Even as muted as it had been beneath the metal tray, it had still managed to sting their ears. But now it was completely gone.
Mathis exchanged another glance with Harrel before returning his eyes to the steel tray. “Think maybe it’s gone?”
Harrel shoo
k her head. “I don’t know. Maybe it moved to another drain? Maybe—”
Something hit the tray. Mathis flinched, one foot nearly coming off the metal barrier. An upraised dent appeared in the steel. “Oh, shit,” Mathis said, voice shaking nearly as bad as his hands and legs. Another dent appeared and this time he felt it through his shoes. “Shit, shit, shit, shit!” He looked up at Harrel. “Think fast. I want to get the fuck out of here!”
She looked around the room. There was nothing they could drag onto the tray to hold it down. She wasn’t certain the wheeled surgical table would hold the tray firmly; the tray wasn’t wide enough for more than a single wheel to hold it in place. She stared at the table and then at the corpse laying in the corner. Her stomach slowly rolled. “I have an idea,” she said, a look of distaste frozen on her face.
Another dent appeared, larger than the last. “Well,” he shouted, “don’t hold back. Let’s hear it!”
“We put the stiff on the tray. Its weight should hold it in place.”
“The fuck? Are you—” Three more dents appeared in rapid succession. “Do it!”
Harrel moved as fast as she could. The corpse’s chest had been cut open, ribs spread to allow the surgeons access to the punctured lung, the nicked kidney, and the soft tissues rent asunder by a shotgun blast. She lifted the sheet and tried to ignore the blood still oozing from the dead man’s wounds.
She bent at the knees, lowered herself, and grabbed the corpse’s hands with her own. The dead man’s cool, clammy flesh made her wince with disgust. She grunted with effort as she dragged the body next to Mathis and the tray, leaving a long, wide streak of half-congealed blood on the bright tile floor. More dents appeared in the stainless steel, each one a metallic ping that echoed in the otherwise silent surgery.
“Hurry up,” Mathis said. “This isn’t going to hold for long.”
“How do you want to do this?”
Mathis stared down at her. “See if you can drag him up on my foot. Then I’ll help you move him into position.”
She nodded.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
The thing was trying to get out, determined to get out. And all they could do was slow it down before it came out of the drain and ate them both. Her skin prickled and adrenaline crackled through her blood stream. Harrel heaved one more time and brought the heavy body up on the tray and on Mathis’ foot.
“There we go,” he said in a breathy rasp. “Put some weight on him.” She looked up at him, a question on her face. “So the damned thing doesn’t knock him off of it!”
She felt slow. Her hands seemed to move in slow motion as she pulled herself atop the dead man’s chest. The stiff’s remaining ribs crackled like kindling as they shattered beneath the pressure. Mathis groaned and pulled one foot out from beneath the corpse. As his boot escaped the body’s weight, he waved his hands in the air, trying to keep his balance. For a long second, Harrel thought Mathis would fall off the tray and on to his ass, but he managed to steady himself. He blew out a sigh of relief and then bent down. Mathis rolled the body slightly until it was almost off the tray, pulled again, and then pushed.
The corpse stared up at the ceiling with dead, glazed eyes. Its back completely covered the tray. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Mathis yelled.
Harrel felt frozen until the body moved slightly from the creature’s frenzied efforts to come through the tray. Then it all snapped back to her. At any second, it was going to puncture the metal with its talons. And then it would stream through the hole and into the surgery dissolving everything that wasn’t metal or glass. She rose from the floor and ran right behind Mathis.
The two CDC doctors reached the door, bolted through, and then shut it behind them. “Get the others,” Harrel said as she held the door closed.
Mathis didn’t wait. She felt his presence disappear and heard the other surgery door open. The dead body atop the tray shivered again. And then it happened. An obsidian talon shot through the corpse’s chest. It hesitated a moment, the black scalpel-sharp appendage twitching as if testing its new found freedom; then it slashed downward through the body. Impossibly dark liquid bubbled upward through the corpse’s chest cavity. She watched the dead body dissolve before her eyes.
Harrel couldn’t hear through the soundproof glass, but her ears filled with the sizzling sound anyway. The body was nothing more than black liquid now and the stuff continued pouring into the room and across the floor. A single eyestalk rose from the two-meter-wide pool. It swiveled and then found her.
“Hurry up!” she yelled to no one.
The pool of liquid shook and then a leg slowly grew from one side. She turned back to the other surgery. Mathis was leading the group from the room and into the hallway. “Hurry the fuck up!”
Mathis left the threshold and then stared through the glass. He stopped suddenly, the nurse behind him running into his back. All color drained from his face. Harrel turned around fast and looked back into the room. Then she understood what had stopped him.
The pool was no longer a pool. It had coalesced into a squat thing with several legs and more growing. Two hook-ended tentacles waved from its torso. Two more eye stalks had appeared. The creature was the size of a Great Dane and growing. It took a step toward them.
“Run!” Harrel yelled.
She turned to run, but bumped into a screaming nurse that launched herself down the hallway. Mathis waved the other doctors and nurses through the threshold. All of them were running. They made it to the hallway door and fled. Mathis grabbed Harrel’s shoulder. “Let’s go!”
With Mathis on her heels, she ran down the hallway. Their suit helmets sat on the floor near the glass entry door. Harrel bent and scooped hers up without breaking stride. Mathis tried to do the same, but nearly fell on his face. He stumbled into the back of her and the pair of them fell into the ER hall. And then the trauma hallway was filled with shattered glass.
Chapter 42
The metal drain top jostled, vibrated, and popped upward on one side. It wasn’t enough so that a normal person would even notice it unless they were looking for the aberration. Through the small gap in the drain plug, black liquid streamed out across the floor. The pool smoked where it touched the tiles as it absorbed dead skin cells and the leavings of other microorganisms.
The creature slithered across the ancient-tiled floor of the storeroom. It touched metal, melted plastic, and consumed insect droppings. The further into the room it traveled, the more food it found. It probed the boundaries of the impassible metal walls and then resumed its foraging expedition in a deliberate shrinking rectangle. It mapped the obstacles in the room while continuing to eat. When it was finished, the creature had consumed every molecule of biological matter as well as the plastic.
The meal provided more mass, more mind. Over two meters in length now, it coalesced and sprouted an eyestalk. The creature surveyed the environs and then grew three short, thin legs. A single hooked tentacle grew from its front. Its talons clicked on the tile as it headed to the room’s door. The sharp tentacle skated across the surface of the metal, but not before leaving a solid dent.
The eyestalk bent forward to the door and examined the narrow sliver of light escaping the doorjamb seam. The orb determined that the light wasn’t hazardous, and that the seam was something it could leverage. The creature thrust the tentacle’s hook into the gap and pushed sideways.
The metal groaned slightly. The creature reabsorbed its legs and spread the regained mass back into the tentacle. A thin crust of solid matter formed on top of the liquid. The metal plate embedded into a wooden stud groaned again. The creature swung the tentacle in the other direction while holding the hook fast. It wrenched back and forth against the metal and wood, holding it captive.
The door began to bend against the strain, but before it could fall off the hinges, the metal plate tore free from the wood screws. With a grinding screech, the metal door opened inward and sagged. The creature’s tentacle lashed out again, the hook
embedding itself in the metal. It pulled the door backward in a hard arc. The door opened wide enough to slam into the opposite side of the wall. With one last wrench, the creature pulled the door off the hinges. It hit the floor with a crash.
The creature grew another eyestalk and another tentacle. Its legs, a little longer than before, reappeared. It rose from the floor and scuttled through the open doorway and into the hall beyond.
Chapter 43
The thudding of combat boots on the concrete and metal steps was loud. Too damned loud. But Sarah didn’t give a shit. She didn’t think the things could hear. And if they could? So the hell what. If nothing else, maybe they’d distract the creatures and keep them from eating pregnant mothers and newborns.
Givens stood at the door, Perkins right beside it. On a silent, synchronized count, Givens opened the door and Perkins stepped partway through. The former soldier covered one side of the hall and then the other. “Clear,” he said in a muted, dead voice.
Sarah and the rest of the team went through the door and into the main hallway. Givens shut the door behind them. They had come through a corner stairwell and the hall was empty. She tapped her radio. “Moore? You got some idea where we should head? Over.”
Pause. “Yes, Lieutenant. Two things. You should go to the high-risk nursery. They have UV lights for treating jaundice. Don’t know how portable you can make them, but that’s your best bet. Based on what we saw on the cameras, I believe the entities are on the other side of the floor from you, but we cannot confirm. Over.”
Sarah looked at Givens. “Find me a map.”
He grinned and then pointed at a sign hanging on the wall. She followed his finger and wanted to kick herself. The words “High-Risk Nursery” glared back at her in bold, all capital letters with an arrow pointing in one direction. The “Neonatal ICU” was in the same direction. The “Mother and Baby Units” were in the opposite direction. Givens was still grinning at her. She winked at him.
The Black: Outbreak Page 19
