Bone grated on bone. It was like sawing glass with another piece of glass. A gasp, and then a small cry escaped her, as tears ran down her face. She balled her right hand into a fist and thumped it repeatedly against the metal rail that shot away upward.
The pain was a roar inside of her, muting the world beyond. She tried her best to cry in silence, but she’d been heard.
From below, a moan cut across her pain-filled mind. A zombie came up to the elevator doors and stood swaying slightly, looking in. Anna leaned back from the hatch for fear of being seen, however her morbid curiosity didn’t allow her to lean too far. There was a question on her mind: Did she know this person? The hospital wasn’t very large after all.
It had been a woman. The scrubs she wore narrowed it down to one of the medical staff. From her face it was impossible to tell who it had been since it was mostly eaten away; there was a lip hanging from her gaping mouth, but her nose was nothing but a ragged hole and the single eye she had left was black as the shadows in the elevator shaft. She still had most of her blond hair left on her head and since there were only three blondes on the med staff it narrowed it down somewhat.
Before Anna could figure it out, the zombie turned away. Another one took its place: from the blue work shirt and the belt at his hip, she knew it had been one of the construction workers. She was sure he’d deserved his fate. For the past week she hadn’t been able to walk ten feet without one of them making kissy noises at her ass, as if that would possibly turn her on in the least.
The construction worker zombie was shoved out of the way and another stuck his head into the elevator. “What the fuck?” it muttered. “What was that?”
At first Anna shrunk even further back, terrified. It was Von Braun and his evil reputation preceded him; he was the boogieman being whispered about on the fourth floor. With his ability to think apparently somewhat intact, he was the most dangerous zombie of them all and if Anna hadn't been in such a dreadful position she would've remained completely silent, however it wasn't a secret how much he hated Dr. Lee.
Maybe I can use that, she mused. Injured as she was, she knew she needed help.
“Hey you,” she said in a low voice.
Von Braun spun and glared up at the hatch his black eyes searching, his nose snuffling. Her perfume was pronounced in his nostrils, however he did not connect it with a human scent. The perfume was too sweet. What made him hungry was deeper, mustier.
Beneath the perfume he caught a whiff of her. “You’re a girl,” he said. “I like girls. I like them soft. I like them pure.” His hunger came across unmistakably, almost sexual in its potency—this was something she understood.
“You can’t have me,” she said, in a sultry voice. “But you can have the others. I can get them for you."
His face squinched in puzzlement. “Who? Who can you get? The gook? The nigger? I’m so fucking hungry I could even eat a goddamned nigger!”
Anna didn’t know the term “gook”, she was too young to understand the racial slur, but she knew “nigger”. She found it extremely distasteful, but that didn’t stop her from using it as a tool. “You can have the nigger and all of them. I just need your help. It’ll be like a trade. See that key?” She pointed at the elevator control panel where a silver key sat in a slot.
He turned and squinted. “This?” He slid the key out and held it up to the hatch.
“Yes! Just drop it on the floor and then press the button with the three on it. The number three, do you understand?”
“No,” he said, truthfully. The gook and the nigger and all of them were on the fourth floor. Why did she want to go to three? He didn’t understand and that made him nervous. His Diazepam was running down. He could see the little bag pinned to his hospital gown; there wasn’t much left and he knew that when it was gone he’d turn dumb like the others. The thought scared him and nothing ever scared Von Braun.
“The three is right in front of you,” Anna insisted. “Just reach out your hand and I’ll direct you.”
“I know what a fucking three looks like you fucking whore, bitch, shit! I want something out of this.”
“What are you talking about? You’re getting plenty. You’re getting the nigger and the goot.”
“It’s gook, you dumb fuck!” Von Braun yelled in a rage. “Gook! Like slant or slope or fucking chink!”
Now Anna understood. “You mean Dr. Lee.”
“Yes, I want her, badly, but there is something I need. I have to be able to think. I can’t be like all of them.” He pointed out into the hall.
She peered down through the hatch trying to decipher his meaning. There were two things which set him apart from the other zombies: the fact he could speak and the IV bag that hung from his shoulder. It was almost empty.
“You need some more medicine, don’t you? What’s the name of it?”
“How the hell-fuck should I know?” he cried, his diseased spittle flying. “I can’t fucking remember. I just know it makes me normal.” He tried to smile to show how normal he was. It was hideous. Not ten minutes before he had torn the throat out of one of the Middleton deputies and now his mouth was an ugly hole filled with black spores and congealed blood.
Anna coughed and turned her chin. “Just…just hold up the IV bag so I can read it. Oh, Diazepam. That’s just Valium. Weird.” Why would Valium make him lucid? It certainly didn’t make him normal. He was far from normal. The scientist in her wanted to figure out the puzzle that Von Braun represented, however the criminal in her, who was on the verge of getting caught, wanted to please him long enough to escape.
“I can get you some more Diazepam,” she told him. “Just hit the three button.” He stretched out a hand and then paused. “Right in front of you," she said.
“No. It’s on two. I know that much. Who do you think you’re fucking with, whore-dick? Who do you think you’re trying to trick?”
“No one,” she said, thinking fast. “They have meds on both floors, but we can go to the second if that will make you happy.”
“Getting the fucking gook who did this to me will make me happy,” he replied.
“Ok sure. Hit the two and we’ll get you fixed up.” Now that the key was out of the control panel, Anna didn’t think that she needed Von Braun and figured she would ditch him as soon as possible. He hit the button. Anna cringed as an awful screech struck her ears. “What the hell?” she asked. The sound was grating. It made the hair stand up on her arms. And it was a second before she realized what it was: it was the sound of metal on metal, it was the knife she had stuck up under the counter weights. “Thuy was wrong,” she said with a smirk. “The knife didn’t stop anything.”
Thankfully, it was a short ride, only a single floor. “Go check to see if there are any zom...I mean anyone out there,” she said, as the chime sounded and the door slid open.
He stared out into the hall for nearly a minute, ignoring the doors that kept trying to close on him. He was having trouble counting the three zombies walking about; saying three and counting to three was not the same thing. “There’s, uh, some of them. I’ll get rid of those fucking retards.” He left, snarling curses at the other zombies.
“About time,” Anna said under her voice. Hurriedly, she slipped her feet through the hatch and dropped down into the elevator, making sure to clutch her injured hand to her chest while holding her good hand over the surgical mask to keep it from slipping.
“Move your ass!” Von Braun was screaming. “Come on, move it!”
Curious, Anna snuck a look down the hall and was surprised to see him herding three zombies before him. As docile as sheep they accepted his abuse. He slapped, punched, and kicked them to the north stair and then shoved them through the door.
“Wow,” she said. A minute before, she had been all set to leave him there but, after what she had just seen, she changed her mind, realizing that if she could control Von Braun, then in effect she could control all the zombies. That was power.
She stepped into
the corridor and he immediately charged, forgetting everything at the sight of her perfect skin. “Stop!" she ordered. "Remember your medicine. Von Braun, remember I’m the only one who can keep you thinking straight. I’m the only one who can get you back to normal.”
This stopped him and for a few seconds he stood in confusion. “I am normal, damn it! I’m not like them.”
“And you can stay that way as long as you do what I say. Now, point to where the meds are and I’ll get them for you, but you have to stay put.” He pointed at an odd collection of sheets, blankets, and shower curtains hanging off the side of the hall. Anna went to it, walking on her tiptoes, ready to race away if Von Braun even so much as twitched in her direction.
He looked like he wanted to do much more than just twitch. His hands were opening and closing and he had begun to drool. “Stay,” she warned as if talking to a dog.
“Just give me my meds!” he screamed.
In order to get them, she would have to turn her back on him which meant she had to trust him. A shiver went down her spine as she turned to step through the curtains. There was no time to waste; she went straight for the med locker and began looking for Diazepam. The drawer was clearly marked and clearly empty.
There was plenty of Valium in pill form. She took one of the bottles and measured out triple the normal dose: six pills. They seemed so small and inadequate that she added four more to the med cup. The bottle went into the pocket of her lab coat for future use.
“This is for you,” she said to Von Braun. “But if you want any more you have to do what I say.” She set the pills on the linoleum and backed away. He ate them greedily, chewing them and then swallowing them dry.
“You’ll give the gook to me?” he asked. She nodded and he smiled a mishmash of black spore, red blood, and white powder. “Then name it. What do you want?”
Chapter 14
//9:16 PM//
1
In the fifty-six minutes before Gerald Brunson’s migraine forced him out of his chair and onto the ground where he rolled around moaning, he did his level best to go through the CDC checklist, item by item. Yes, he was interrupted three different times as troopers went berserk and had to be restrained, and then there were the endless, tedious phone calls from his boss and his boss’s boss, and this mayor and that dignitary and even someone from the governor's office, all wanting to know what was going on.
To each, he replied with a simple: "When I know, you'll be the first person I'll call."
Then he'd go back to his precious checklist because that was what he'd been taught. Follow protocol! Don't deviate from procedure. Stay the course, and all that. It had been drummed into his head, and now when there was simply no time to waste going page by page, he kept his team on task and focused on the manual. He even had them read each page aloud so that nothing would be missed, knowing that in the long run, it would pay off.
It cost them precious minutes; minutes they desperately needed and minutes none of them were ever going to get back. No one inside the white tent knew that their quarantine was on a countdown.
Even before Gerald and the second CDC team arrived, Sergeant Foster had accidentally infected half the troopers. After he spat in Brunson’s mouth and went nuts, he got the other half good and germy as well. The CDC people, including Brunson, though it was obviously too late in his case, quickly suited up head to toe in their plastic bio-suits. They were safe against the Com-cells, but not against the infected troopers who gradually fell under the hateful spell of the disease and grew suspicious, angry and above all, jealous of the agents in the plastic suits.
When Gerald's migraine made it impossible for him to go on with his protocols, Rachel Jergen, the second in command, took over and she too "stayed the course", picking up where he left off, attempting to catalog who was infected and where they may have gone and with whom they may have come in contact, but she, too, was interrupted.
Trooper Paul, his face twisted into a grimace from the pain in his head, came stumbling up to her. “How come we don’t get a fancy suit?” The nasty look he wore, coupled with his size made him extremely intimidating. It didn’t help that in order to see the face behind the plastic he had to stand very close to her. He was also armed with an extremely large gun on his hip, something Rachel glanced at every other second. “Where’s my suit?” he demanded.
The CDC people looked back and forth at each other but they weren’t trained to deal with such belligerence. They were used to throwing their weight around, not being cowed by the local "authorities" who they usually didn’t feel were much of an authority on anything besides the locations of the local Dunkin Doughnuts.
“We...we have some coming,” Rachel answered in a jittery voice. “It’ll just be a few more hours before they arrive. We have additional agents on their way and they are bringing extra suits and extra, uh, uh extra of everything.”
Paul had just begun to feel the paranoia. It wasn’t yet the raging voice in his head that it would soon become and he allowed himself to be soothed by her words. He went back to sit with the other troopers, most of whom had been nodding along at his outburst. He sat and watched Rachel, gradually coming to the realization that there was something not right about her. The feeling built in his mind gradually, keeping pace with the growing numbers of replicating Com-cells.
Twenty-eight minutes later he got up, walked to her chair and without warning, punched her full in the face with all his strength—something that was extremely satisfying and good in his mind. Like a ragdoll, she flopped backwards out of her chair and lay on the ground unmoving. None of the troopers batted an eye, not even when he took out a utility knife and slashed open her mask.
“She’s not human,” he whispered. Behind the plastic shield her eyes were all wrong. She was either an alien monster that looked like a human or a fake, like a cyborg or a replicant, he couldn’t tell which, but he was going to find out now.
“Get off her!” one of the CDC men screamed, pulling at Paul’s broad shoulder.
“I have to see,” Paul said. “She’s not real. She’s not one of us!” With little effort he threw the man off him. He bent again to the unconscious woman and without a qualm slit her face from forehead to chin. Blood gushed up, pooling in her eyes, and running to settle in her suit. Using both hands he peeled back her flesh. It didn’t come off easily. Beneath were blood and bone and stuff he didn’t recognize beyond the fact that he knew it was human stuff.
“Must be deeper,” he said. The bone that made up Rachel's nasal ridge was harder than it looked and he had to punch the knife through it to get at the secret below. Someone screamed. “It’s ok. She’s not one of us,” he said to reassure the screamer, he glanced back and saw the plastic people, and wondered if they were indeed real people. The CDC agents didn't look much like people to him.
“Keep an eye on them and someone untie Foster," he demanded of the other troopers. After his run in with Gerald Brunson, Foster had become increasingly irrational, but now Paul was seeing that his words had been more prophetic than crazy. "Foster was right all along about them. They can't be allowed to keep living like plastic fakes. We have to open them up, too.”
At this, the remaining CDC agents broke for the exit with the troopers hot after them. In accordance with protocol, the door was zippered shut. The first agent got the zipper halfway down before the troopers were on them in a paranoia-fueled madness. The agents scattered like sheep, running around the tent uselessly screaming and begging for mercy.
“Don’t listen to them,” Paul ordered. “They ain’t real. They’re like her, underneath.” He pointed to Rachel who, in truth, no longer looked human.
Since the troopers weren't full-on zombies yet, the CDC agents were spared the agony of being eaten alive. Instead they were stomped and beaten into a semi-unconscious state. Even then Paul wasn't sure about them. He mutilated their bodies with his knife, trying to find the hidden truth. "I'll find it," he whispered, growing hungry at the sight of all that red
, red blood.
2
Outside the tent, time ticked uselessly away. The other troopers sat in their cruisers strung out in a wide circle around the hospital and shivered from more than the chill night.
The bloodcurdling screams of the dying CDC agents could be heard by everyone, even those on the other side of the hospital. They radioed back and forth to each other wondering what to do.
"No one does anything," Lieutenant Darrel Ford said. He'd been on scene for all of fifteen minutes, having driven down from Albany to take charge of the quarantine. "No one is to approach that tent. Maintain your intervals and keep your eyes open."
"But it sounds like people are getting skinned alive in there," someone said.
"I don't care!" Ford barked into the radio. "Our job is to enforce the quarantine. No one goes in and no one goes out for any reason." His orders were clear.
Eight minutes later things changed.
People in the little cottages had been waiting out the quarantine in relative comfort, watching TV or playing board games. It wasn't until the sun went down behind the clouds that things became unnerving. First it was the muffled gunshots, and then it was the ring of police cars with their flashing lights, and then it was the screams as Andy O'Brian and his mother-in-law were killed, and now there were people lurking around the grounds. Strange, scary looking people.
Instinctively, the people in the cottages turned off their lights and barricaded their doors. They also began calling the police over and over again until they got through. Their frantic pleas moved Courtney Shaw, who, on her own volition, ordered them to be evacuated.
"We have commandeered a warehouse for exactly this reason," she told Ford. "It's just up route 24 about fourteen miles."
"We don't have suits for everyone," Ford replied. "In fact I have only six available. That's not enough."
The Apocalypse Crusade (Book 1): War of the Undead Day One Page 30
