by C. J. Sears
The resonating beep of a keycard sliding through its reader was unmistakable as she crossed the bridge over to the next building where the operating theater would be. Someone was alive, and they had the means to move through locked rooms. Quickening her pace but still wary of danger around every corner, she entered the west wing of the hospital.
There was no sign of whoever had used the card or any indication what room they had gone into. Donahue was uncertain if it was a member of the staff or someone who’d lifted the keycard off of a dead body, but she knew they had to have gone toward the operating theater. That was at the end of the hall, to her right, and any other path taken would’ve been visible to her from the bridge.
This corridor was more shadowed than the others, as if the hospital was recreating the encroaching darkness in her mind, but neon bulbs continued to light her way. When she arrived at the door, she examined the lock. Electronic, hooked up to a card reader as she’d thought. No fingerprint scanner, however, which surprised her. She could have sworn that the last time she’d been at Lone Oak Regional Hospital this door had two-step verification.
Now there were only two empty holes drilled into the wall where the mechanism used to be. Still, without a keycard, she couldn’t get in without making noise. Bracing for the worst, she knocked on the door. No answer. She peered through the reinforced window, but all she saw inside were the vague outlines of medical equipment and empty seats. No bodies huddled up against the walls, no nurses or doctors hiding under the operating table, nothing.
Donahue frowned. The operating theater had been a sure thing in her mind and the beep had to have come from nowhere else but this hallway. None of the nearby patient rooms needed a keycard to enter. She’d have to double back, try the east wing where the staff lounge was. Evelyn and Michael hadn’t fallen off the face of the Earth. That was the next most likely place. With any luck, the dead end she’d come to wouldn’t be repeated.
She started down the hall again, aware that putting so many unchecked rooms at her back was a risk. If the person she’d heard skulking around lingered in one of them and wasn’t friendly, she was exposed. Whoever it was, they weren’t infected; he or she was too quiet to have been one of the monsters they’d been fighting, single-minded and brutish as the creatures were. No, this was a person who didn’t want to be seen, and someone who knew the hospital well enough to do that.
With the operating theater barren, Donahue guessed that most of the staff and patients had evacuated. With no blood and no bodies, nothing but a swift retreat could account for the mess in the front hall and the silence that seized the facility. Their absence cemented in her the idea that the station was where they had to go. In a city-wide emergency situation, townsfolk were instructed to meet in the parking lot outside the police department to await further orders. That had been the case as long as she could remember, dating back before her father’s tenure as sheriff.
Turning the corner, she spotted three figures at the end of the skyway. The lights were so bright it was difficult to distinguish who they were beyond gender; two men and one woman. With their backs turned, it would’ve been easy to get the jump on them. She didn’t want to alert them, but she couldn’t take the risk they were people and not infected.
She called out, “Friend or Foe?”
A man’s familiar voice replied, “Friend.”
* * *
The resilience of Rick Mason amazed Finch. A normal man would’ve died from the blood loss, but the deputy persisted, continued to breathe. Short, shallow breaths, worrisome breaths, but he was alive. Whether it was because of the tourniquet or the stitches, it gladdened Finch that someone he’d gotten to know in this town hadn’t kicked the bucket. His sheer willpower alone was worthy of a grudging respect.
He wished he’d talked Donahue out of leaving the room. He’d seen the look of despair on her face when her brother passed out. He knew that like the deputy she was capable of putting herself through the ringer and coming out the other side smelling like roses. Her choice was reckless, the infected could be inside the hospital, yet he understood why she’d done it.
Minutes had passed since her departure, but heightened as his senses were, each one felt like an hour. She was no tulip, could take care of herself, but the danger she’d placed herself in was paramount. There were blind spots everywhere, negligible freedom to run if things got hairy, and with so little ammo, fleeing was the best option. If a horde cornered her or blocked her path, she’d be dead in seconds.
The agent shut the door to the emergency room with a gentle touch, taking care not to make anything aware of his position. He regretted ditching Mason, but if Donahue died−no, he couldn’t think that way. As far as Finch was concerned, no one else would perish on his watch. If that meant his own watch had to end so that the sheriff and her brother could make it out of Lone Oak’s hospital alive, then that was the hand he’d been dealt.
Medical documents, pens, and clipboards crunched underfoot as he walked to the front desk. He and Donahue had been in agreement that things went sideways in a hurry, but the lack of bodies, infected or otherwise, bewildered him. If the chaos of the streets had spread to the hospital, Finch rejected the notion that what he was seeing supported that. The mess was made in haste, but an attack didn’t match up. The door was locked, the lights were still on, and not a single soul uttered a word in the dead of night.
Had they been forewarned? The implication that the staff had been informed well enough ahead of time troubled him. Even if the call had been instantaneous, the likelihood they’d vacated the hospital without casualty…no, that didn’t jive. An evacuation on a scale that large had to take at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to reconcile the number of patients on record. The knot in Finch’s gut twisted as he scrambled to find alternatives to his suspicion. He could think of none.
A quick perusal of the map told him what he needed to know. He wasn’t as familiar with the building as Donahue, but if her thinking was anything like his, then the operating theater sounded perfect. Large capacity, rigid security; if he were searching for unarmed civilians trying to escape massacre, that’s where he’d start. There were no guarantees she’d found Evelyn and Michael, and Finch was certain hospital staff and patients were long gone, but it was the optimal path.
He checked the room where he’d prodded Jeb for information out of curiosity, but the bootlegger had vanished. Crumpled sheets and a thick pillow were all that remained.
For him, as he began the ascent to the second floor that would take him to the covered bridge, the pieces were coming together. A small town, boxed in by geography, was home to an ancient parasite. Wealthy patrons poured money into illogical ventures with no hope of profit. A bootlegging ring infected the population both rural and urban with the parasite, all under the nose of a watchful police department. Widespread in Lone Oak, religion was contentious, plagued by a history of sudden disappearances and upticks. Connections formed, but Finch still needed the thread that bound them together.
He pushed the door to the second floor open and turned toward the bridge, conscious of the innumerable hallways at his back. A lack of infected didn’t make him any less nervous, and it sure didn’t make him forget his training. Clearing your corners was rule number one in a hostile environment and exposing his rear flank never sat well with him. With the skyway being visible from over a hundred yards in both directions, he felt like a soldier surrounded in no-man's-land, incapable of escaping the sight of the enemy and the barrel of his gun.
Crossing the bridge, he caught a glimpse of burgeoning light. The sun was rising, the earliest rays bouncing off of the police car parked outside. If the station was as safe as Donahue believed, now would be the time to move. Under cover of what little darkness remained, they should be able to arrive undetected while still having enough light to work with to spot incoming infected. He had to find her first.
Finch had expected he’d at least need a keycard to open the door to the operating thea
ter. To his astonishment the door was ajar, propped open by an ECG monitor. Donahue must be inside. He sidled through the door, didn’t want to bring unwanted attention raining down on him if the infected were here and smarter than he’d given them credit for.
The room was circular with rows of seats that sloped downward to the center. A raised gurney was encircled by surgery equipment including an anesthesia machine and a pulse oximeter. The tray at the foot of the table contained scalpels and other cutting tools. For all its modern flair, the look of the operating theater was decidedly historic, authentic to a late nineteenth century medicinal practice. Finch assumed that this room must have undergone several minor renovations over time rather than being rebuilt from scratch.
Scanning the theater, Finch’s thought was that he’d been duped by some humorless prankster and he had half a mind to turn around and leave. Someone had propped open the door and then vanished into thin air. The only other exit out of the room led further into the west wing of the hospital, toward the morgue, but that door was locked. Donahue wasn’t here. Throwing caution to the wind, he banged on the door with the butt of his gun. No one answered, friend or foe.
Unsure where to go next, he collapsed into one of the student’s seats and closed his eyes. He’d gone longer periods of time without sleep before, but never under this level of danger. The fatigue had worn him down. If he could just rest for a few seconds, rejuvenate his mind, he would think of something…
…he was in neither the confines of the cult’s chamber nor submerged in the white sea of light in the nightmare last visited in his dreams. This room was solid wall all around, no doors to speak of. It was empty except for himself and the great crow. It stared at him as it always did and Finch realized what it wanted, what it was after from the start.
“You want to talk to me?” he asked the bird.
The crow inclined its head as if to say yes. Finch found that the words he spoke came not from his head but from some core deep inside, at once eternal yet brittle.
“You’ve been watching me. Why?”
It turned its head so he could see once again the yellow eye. Finch peered into it, like it was a mirror of his soul. He saw, deep in the black dot of its pupil, her image, green-eyed and smiling.
“Anna?” Finch whispered.
The crow nodded.
“You’ve been trying to help me? All this time?”
The crow nodded again.
“Can you tell me who did this? Who is controlling the parasites?”
She shook her head, raised one of her wings. He saw a red and broken crucifix carved in her dark feathers. The same kind had been at both Harley’s murder site and in McAlister’s rituals. Then Finch watched as the crucifix reformed, no longer bloody or broken. The etching rose higher on the crow’s wing and outlines of people appeared below the cross. Praying. Singing.
“Is this the last piece?”
The crow cawed and lowered her wing. She hadn’t given him the answer, but it was enough to go on. Flashes of the case passed before his eyes, threads untangling and weaving back together. He knew that when he awoke, his subconscious would hold new answers. All he had to do was show a little faith.
She shuffled her feet, preparing for takeoff, and Finch knew that once she left the dreams would end. He couldn’t let her, not when they had spent so little time together. He needed her to know that he was sorry. It was his fault he brought death with him everywhere he went. She’d died for him. Susan died because of him. And Donahue was good as dead already and he didn’t want any of that.
“Anna!”
She peered at him, the monstrous yellow eye rooting him to the spot. She couldn’t leave him, not now, not when he’d learned the truth. He heard a soft chirp and knew that this was her way of letting him know. She was alright, he could let go of her final moments and end his pain.
“Did it hurt?”
She didn’t answer with a nod or a squawk. Instead she wrapped her wings around him, pulled him close. The warmth of life spread as his sister hugged him. It was like his blood was laced with some kind of ethereal happiness, consuming him for as long as they stayed locked in that embrace.
He watched her leave with a contentment he’d never known…
…a screech, the squeal of steel grinding on tile, came from below him. The door must have unlocked. Groaning as he awoke from his chair, Finch crept forward, aimed his gun over the railing. At this angle, anyone unfriendly who emerged was marked for death.
He waited, but there were no footsteps, no warning that anyone planned to come into the theater to investigate the person who had knocked. Finch gave it a full minute before he proceeded down the steps and approached the door. Whoever had opened it gave him enough space to squeeze through to other side, having shoved a folding chair between it and the locking mechanism.
Finch ducked under the chair, Desert Eagle at the ready. He heard the whirl of machinery grow louder as he moved down the hall and remembered that the hospital’s generator room was across from the morgue. Perhaps his mysterious “friend” had hidden there, hoping that the excess noise would drown out anything he did. It could be Kruger, which he hadn’t considered as a possibility until now, so intent on finding Donahue. The old German had displayed his ingenuity by trapping the parasite in the jar.
A sharp pain in the back of his head was all he could register as he stumbled forward onto the floor. He rolled onto his spine, fired wild and high into the air, striking one of the ungodly bright lights. His vision clouded, the bulbs’ glare obscuring the shape that hovered over him. Finch readied himself to fire again.
And heard the click of his empty magazine.
CONTAINMENT
Donahue awoke with reluctance from the sleep she craved. Bleary-eyed, she pushed herself off of the cot and sat up. Blinking into the darkness, she noticed a throbbing pain in her neck when she turned her head and guessed that she must have slept wrong. Though her eyes were still unadjusted to the lack of light, the sheriff knew where she was: the police station’s holding cells.
The trip from the hospital to the station was a blur. She remembered seeing Michael and Evelyn on the other side of the bridge with some other man. She remembered walking up to him, his voice had sounded like someone she knew, but Donahue couldn’t recall his name. They had gone back down to the first floor to get Rick and Finch, but the agent was missing and her brother was…dead? He had to have died, couldn’t have made it through the night without a doctor. But if he was dead, she’d have remembered seeing his lifeless body and feeling empty inside. She remembered getting in the car, or thought she did, and then…waking up in the station.
Massaging her neck, Donahue stood up. Lightheadedness overtook her, caused her to stumble forward into the open space where the cell door should be. As it receded and her eyesight returned, the first thing she noticed was the presence of multiple people in the room with her. Passed out on the uncomfortable benches reserved for those under arrest were several civilians she recognized from around town. She couldn’t recollect their names, but their faces were ones she saw often in the diner or when she used to be on patrol. And like her, none of them seemed to be prisoners despite their surroundings.
The backup generator should’ve kicked on when the power went out, but based on the lack of auxiliary lights something or someone must have sabotaged it. The fuel couldn’t have dried out; she’d had an officer check the reserves last week. If it weren’t for the infected, Donahue might have thought of another explanation, but she wasn’t in a skeptical mood. She couldn’t afford to be.
Careful not to wake the others, she crept out of the room. She hoped that one of her men remained in the building and had taken charge of the situation in her absence. The headache persisted as she walked and Donahue wondered if she could have been drugged. Michael and Evelyn didn’t seem capable of that sort of thing, and if the other man had done that to her why couldn’t she have fought him off? None of it added up. It was times like this that she wish
ed she’d gone to medical school; at least then she could have given herself a proper self-diagnosis.
Muffled voices came from the conference room. Donahue meandered toward them, using her knowledge of the station’s layout to guide her where her eyes couldn’t. Bracing her hands against the wall, she felt for the door latch. She pressed her ear against the door, but the voices had stopped. With a firm grip, she jostled the lock, and tapped the door forward.
Eight flashlights were arranged in a haphazard oval on the table, casting dusty light on the people seated in the chairs. From left to right, she identified Plinkett, Wilkins, a doctor from the hospital named Carl Robinson, Patrick Rhinehold, Evelyn, and Michael, as well as a waitress from the diner whose nametag spelled “Amy” and a technician by the name of Walker Travers. Evelyn rose to greet her but Rhinehold beat her to the punch.
“Sheriff,” he said, coming around the table and extending his hand, “have a seat. We were just talking about a plan to get out of here.”
Wary yet still feeling the effects of her headache, Donahue took him up on his offer, sat in his place.
“How did I get here?” she asked. “Last I remember I was at the hospital.”
“You passed out. I don’t think you’ve slept much this week, sheriff,” said Rhinehold.
“Is this all that’s left?”
Robinson spoke up, “Of the town? There’s probably some stragglers here and there and we rescued who we could from the hospital, but this is all that we know of.”
“That’s forty-seven of us, by my count,” said Travers, answering what would’ve been her next question.
She glanced around the table at the grim expressions occupying what remained of Lone Oak, of her town. Finch had been right in his assessment of the damage to a point, but he’d underestimated the culling of the town’s population. How many were infected? How many were dead, beaten to a miserable pulp on the concrete sidewalks or caked on the wall of their own homes?
