Nobody seemed to be guarding the front. The automatic doors swished open and Kyle stepped into the lobby.
Backup lights illuminated the floor and the walls, but it was still mostly dark inside the hospital. Nobody was at the check-in desk.
Kyle made an immediate right and headed down the hallway away from the reception area.
The hallway was empty. So were the rooms.
Kyle saw no guards, no doctors, no nurses and no patients, though he did hear a man and a woman on the night staff talking behind a closed office door.
He searched the whole building. Nobody stopped him. Nobody even saw him. Almost every bed was empty and Annie wasn’t in any of them.
His head spun. Hughes might have already rescued her. Maybe she walked out herself if the guards got pulled off during the fighting the previous night. Or perhaps the guards moved her.
She could be anywhere.
She could be with Hughes in the Suburban and halfway to Nebraska by now.
Kyle should be with them. He would have been with them if it weren’t for his juvenile feud with Parker.
He ran out of the hospital, stopped on the sidewalk out front and forced himself to stop hyperventilating.
Annie was gone and he’d never see her again.
Swenson’s house was so cold when he woke up in the morning that he could see his own breath in the bedroom. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes.
It was 10:30 in the morning. He usually got up at 7:00, but he was up half the night staring at the ceiling and thinking about blood and fire.
His throat hurt from sleeping in a cold room and mild dehydration. He had to ration his bottled water until the power came back on and he could boil more.
He reached for his radio on the nightstand. His partner, Hastert, would wonder why he hadn’t called yet.
“You up?” Swenson said into the radio.
“I’m up,” Hastert said.
“You go out yet?”
“I’m out now.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Where are you?”
“City Hall.”
“And?”
“And nothing. There’s nobody here.”
“When’d you get up?” he said.
“Couple hours ago,” Hastert said. “I radioed but you didn’t answer. Even knocked on your door.”
Swenson wasn’t about to apologize or explain himself. “You check on the guys at the power plant?”
“Power’s still off,” Hastert said.
Swenson sighed. “I can see that. You check on the guys at the power plant?”
“Can’t do shit without the vacuum tubes. You wanna toss Earl Flanders’ place again? Those things gotta to be around somewhere. Wouldn’t make sense to throw ‘em away.”
“He probably handed them off to one of the other rat bastards. We’ll need to toss every one of their houses. Starting with Elias Sark’s.”
“We’ll need a truck to get up to his place.”
Their truck was so shot full of holes it wouldn’t even start.
“So get one.”
“I checked the hospital.”
“What for?”
“Annie’s gone.”
Swenson had forgotten all about Annie. “She’s not important right now.” She probably wasn’t even in town any longer. Not that it mattered. “You eat yet?”
“Yeah, I ate,” Hastert said. “Ray’s Place is open. Milk’s gone bad and the freezers are out, but the meat’ll still keep a while.”
“All right, find a truck. I’ll grab breakfast and call you. We’re going up to Elias’ place. Vacuum tubes are sitting right there on his coffee table for all we know. Keep your radio on.”
“Roger,” Hastert said.
Swenson rose from his bed still feeling groggy. He body did not want to be awake yet. He padded into the bathroom, loaded his toothbrush with toothpaste, wetted it from the tap and brushed his teeth while taking a piss. One of his molars hurt. He needed a dentist. He flushed the toilet, rinsed the toothbrush in the sink and swished water around in his mouth.
He spit it out. “Shit,” he said.
He hadn’t boiled the water.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
He looked around the bathroom. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but a hand towel would do. He stuck it in his mouth so it would absorb all the moisture. He hadn’t swallowed anything, so he was probably fine. He should have brushed his teeth with some of the bottled water in his kitchen but he was tired and forgot. Habit.
He padded back into the bedroom and radioed Hastert again. “You talk to Cook?” Cook ran the jail.
“Cook’s dead,” Hastert said.
“He is?”
“His whole crew was killed on Main Street by Sark’s guys.”
“All right. I’ll call you again in an hour.”
So Swenson had yet another thing to do that day. He’d have to go check on the jail. Nobody else was going to do it. For all he knew, the place had been unguarded for a day and a half. Either way, it was time to shut it down and let everyone out. Steele was the one who’d arrested everybody, it hadn’t done the least bit of good, and now he was dead. There was no point keeping all those people locked up, and guarding them was a waste of manpower and resources.
He put on yesterday’s clothes and opened the front door to check the temperature. It was the same temperature outside as inside, which meant his house was cold and the air outside was warm. Around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. He didn’t need his parka. He didn’t even need to put on a hat. Just a light jacket.
He grabbed his AR-15, locked up his house and heard the crack of rifle shot somewhere on the north side of town.
His neighbor Janice across the street appeared in her front window and waved at him with both arms. She ran outside wearing jeans and a heavy jacket.
Swenson always liked Janice. She was hot in that housewife next door sort of way. Too bad she was married.
“Rick,” she said breathlessly. He loved that she called him by his first name.
“What’s up, Janice?”
“What’s going on?” Fear in her voice.
“I slept late,” he said.
She looked up and down the street as if something terrible might be coming.
“Janice?” he said.
“My husband went to the store to bring back some food and hasn’t come back yet. He left an hour and a half ago. And there’s gunshots.”
“The lines are probably longer today.”
“Why would the lines be longer?”
He had no idea what to tell her. “Just stay in the house, Janice. He’ll be fine, but I’ll check it out.”
He was not going to check on her husband.
His stomach did a couple of somersaults and he felt a heat flash.
“Are you okay?” Janice said.
“Fine,” Swenson said. “I’ll go check on your husband. Which store did he go to?”
“Well, Ray’s is the closest.” She said it like he was stupid. He and Janice lived right across the street from each other. Of course he knew Ray’s was the closest.
“That’s where I’m headed. I haven’t had breakfast either.”
He lost his balance and the world seemed to tilt sideways.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“My blood sugar’s low,” he said. “I need to eat.” He felt like he was going to be sick, but he had nothing in his stomach. “I’ll tell your husband you’re waiting for him when I see him.”
She nodded, but he could tell she didn’t believe him. “Alright,” she said. “Thanks, Rick.”
He watched her go back inside. He turned toward Main Street but the world kept spinning even after he stopped moving and the sidewalk rose up and smashed the side of his body.
He was on the ground and couldn’t breathe. Somehow he’d fallen and got the wind knocked out of him.
Janice must have seen from her window because she ran back outside.
He violently dry-heaved.
“Are you okay?” Janice said.
He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. No, he wasn’t okay. He wasn’t even remotely okay. He’d never felt so sick in his life, yet he felt perfectly fine less than five minutes earlier.
Then he remembered.
He’d brushed his teeth with the tap water that morning.
32
Cody Austin’s family would die if they didn’t drink something. More than a day and a half had passed since he, his wife Brooke and his kids Ashton and Isabelle had so much as a drop.
Brooke was a tough lady, but Cody could hardly bear to look at Ashton and Isabelle. Their eyes were sunken, their lips like chapped leather. Ashton was beyond lethargic. Isabelle looked like she wanted to stab somebody. Cody himself felt like he wanted to lay down and sleep his way to oblivion.
Another day and a half and they would be dead.
They had no electricity, no fireplace, no barbecue, no camp stove, no way to heat and boil water without setting one of the trees in the back yard on fire.
Cody could do that. He could bust out his hatchet and have wood ready to go in a couple of minutes, but he wasn’t going to chop down his yard. If everyone in Lander did that, the whole town would be disfigured for years, and for what? A week’s worth of firewood and boiled water?
How dangerous could the tap water be, anyway? The doctors and the mayor were just guessing when they said there was a small chance it might be infectious.
Until a couple of days ago, Cody’s family had been drinking from the sink all along and none of them had gotten sick. Not a single person on his street had gotten sick from the water. Cody wasn’t convinced that anyone in town had ever gotten sick from it.
He didn’t mind boiling water in the microwave as a precaution. It wasn’t that big of a deal. It wasn’t labor intensive, and it forced him to cool it down in the fridge, which made it taste better than it did lukecold out of the tap.
The power should come back on soon enough anyway and everything should be back to sort-of normal.
He could be wrong—he knew that—but if the power never came back on and the water truly was dangerous, Lander would burn through the trees and bushes in town in no time. There was nowhere near enough vegetation in the desert beyond the city limits to use for fuel. People would have to burn furniture. Then they’d have to burn houses.
They’d all eventually die.
The warm weather couldn’t last much longer. Winter was coming again, and if the power wasn’t back on when it happened, Cody and his family would have bigger things than tap water to worry about.
If they didn’t have some water right now, though, they’d be dead in a day and a half.
So fuck it. They were drinking out of the sink.
Cody went first. He intended to drink only one glass, but one glass had no effect. The water just disappeared inside him, so he drank another glass while Brooke and the kids watched in the kitchen.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and shrugged. “Same old water.” He filled three more glasses and passed them around.
He kept an eye on the kids and monitored his own body for symptoms. He felt fine. He felt a lot better, actually. Fatigue slipped away as his cells hydrated.
The kids felt better too, and they got restless after a while. The couldn’t play video games without electricity and they wanted to go outside.
“It’s too dangerous,” Brooke said, and Cody agreed. He hadn’t heard any gunshots since two nights before, but Lander hadn’t exactly stabilized. Nobody seemed to know who was in charge. Cody wasn’t sure anyone was in charge, and he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if more fighting broke out.
“You can play outside,” he told the kids, “but stay in the backyard.”
Cody himself felt a bit restless, and he had to hit the grocery store anyway. It was still open, as far as he knew. He didn’t want to leave his kids, though, in case something did happen.
“Go ahead,” Brooke said. “I’ll keep an eye on them.”
What if you get sick, Cody thought, but he didn’t say it. His wife wouldn’t get sick. Nobody had gotten sick in Lander for days, and Cody didn’t believe for a moment that he was the first person out of 8,000 to say fuck it and drink from the tap.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” he said. He kissed Brooke on the cheek, put on a light jacket and headed out.
He felt a sinking feeling of dread as soon as he hit the sidewalk. A great force seemed to be pressing down on Wyoming from above. The town was so quiet he may as well have been out in the desert. His mind interpreted the occasional noises he did hear—ominous gusts of the Chinook winds in the trees, a screen door slamming shut, a dog growling, an axe swinging into wood—as if they were dangerous.
A sense of urgency drove him toward Main. He wasn’t sure why. It was just a feeling. Hurry. Move. Now. He needed to eat. Maybe his blood sugar was crashing.
He heard a gunshot a half-block before he reached Main and stopped in his tracks. Thank goodness he hadn’t brought his kids with him.
Then he heard it.
The scream.
Followed by two more gunshots and more screaming.
He knew that sound. He’d heard it not once before but twice.
It was not the scream of a person who had been shot. It was the scream of an infected.
Cody ran toward home.
Glass shattered behind one the houses on the other side of the street, followed by another scream, this time of someone in terror.
Cody ran harder. Toward his wife. Toward his kids.
Hitting a moving target with a firearm is a lot harder than most people think, especially when that moving target is trying to kill you. There’s no good way to train for it either. Shooting paper cut-outs at a gun range is no substitute for armed combat. Some military veterans got plenty of real-world experience, but even many of them returned home without ever pulling the trigger in anger or self-defense.
Hughes had lost track of how many infected he’d put down during the outbreak. The vast majority of people in Lander, however, were virgins.
Hughes was no kind of expert on Wyoming, but he knew more than most about guns, and he knew more than most about America’s cultural relationship with guns. City folk didn’t like firearms the way people out in the sticks did. Many of them saw guns as some kind of plague. They felt safe enough knowing that the police were never more than a couple of minutes away. Hughes understood, but he was a gun guy. He’d always been a gun guy.
Out in the countryside, the police could be an hour away. Even the neighbors could be a long distance away. People had to take responsibility for their own security, so attitudes about guns in a state like Wyoming were very different from attitudes in a city like Chicago.
Still, most people in towns like Lander didn’t own any firearms. Hughes didn’t have to inventory every house and gun rack to know this. That’s just how it was everywhere in America. For every gun nut who owned nine, ten people didn’t own any.
So Hughes knew without really knowing that somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of Lander’s population was unarmed. And he knew without really knowing that the majority of even the armed people in Lander had no experience shooting a moving target, especially not a moving target that was trying to kill them.
So what happened in front of Dr. Frank Nash’s house while Hughes watched through a gap between the curtains didn’t surprise him at all.
A woman ran down the street screaming while two infected men chased her.
Hughes heard them coming from a couple blocks away. He knew exactly what was happening just from the sound of it. A woman’s terrified scream sounds nothing like the furious screams of those things.
Hughes wasn’t the only one who heard the three of them coming. It wasn’t humanly possible to not hear them coming unless you were deaf.
So Hughes went to the window and peered outside. So did everyone else
on the street. He saw curtains being drawn up and down the block, and a man in the house across the street stepped outside with a bolt action rifle just as the fleeing woman and the infected came into view.
The man was doomed.
Hughes knew it. The man didn’t.
Hughes could tell just by looking that the man had no idea he was doomed. The man’s hands shook only a little as he raised the rifle and aimed down the sights. He wasn’t new to shooting. That was clear. His stance was okay and he held the weapon correctly. He probably went deer hunting once in a while. He might have shot at running deer a couple of times, and he might have even hit a running deer once or twice.
He just didn’t have enough time.
By the time the man reached the sidewalk and aimed his weapon, the terrified woman was nearly upon him.
She wore a pink bathrobe and slippers. Both infected—both men—wore work pants, long sleeve jackets and boots. They were only a few dozen feet behind her.
She stopped when she passed the man on the sidewalk with the rifle and hid behind him like he was a shield.
They were both going to die and Hughes could do nothing to save them.
His shotgun was handy. He’d stashed it next to Frank Nash’s front door. He just didn’t have time. He’d need at least six seconds, and he only had three. Nor could he shoot from the porch without killing the man and the woman with a wide spray of buckshot.
If the man in the street had a shotgun instead of a rifle, he and the woman would probably make it, but he did not have a shotgun.
It takes a couple of seconds—at least two—to fire a shot with a bolt-action rifle, chamber the next round, and fire again. The man had at most three seconds, and the odds that he could hit and put down both moving targets were vanishingly small anyway.
He fired once and missed.
The first infected hurled himself at the man and tackled him on the sidewalk.
The second went for the woman.
The first bit the man’s throat.
The second bit the woman’s arm. She managed to tear herself free, though. Bleeding and shrieking, she ran.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 30
