The infected patients in the corner of the room hadn’t been shot and thrashed violently in their beds, handcuffed to the headboards.
Richard stared at one patient in particular, a greying old woman, as she viciously snarled and snapped her toothless mouth at him from one of the beds in the far corner. Her eyes were cold and listless and her curly hair bobbed as she trashed against her restraints. She didn’t seem to mind as the metal handcuffs tore into her wrists.
Get us out of here.
Richard flinched at the sound of Andy’s voice and then quickly scanned the room, struggling to peer through the thick smoke. The flickering bonfire revealed a second set of doors at the opposite end of the room. He trudged towards the doors.
The handcuffed cavalcade of infected clamored, snarled, and bit the air like rabid animals as Richard crept past their beds.
The doors he was walking towards creaked open and a nurse shambled into the room. She was wearing a paper germicide mask speckled with droplets of blood. She fixated her gaze on Richard and darted towards him, closing the distance quickly.
Richard raised his pistol in a panic and fired three shots at her at point-blank range.
Two shots sunk into her chest and simply made her flinch, but the third struck home.
It tore through the paper mask covering her nose and mouth, sunk between her lips, shattered her front teeth, ripped into the back of her throat, and erupted out the base of her skull in a burst of blood and bone.
The nurse collapsed backwards in a lifeless heap, arms flung over her head.
Richard took deep frantic breaths and coughed as the smoke filled his lungs. He hurried towards the door, lowering his pistol.
A CDC white-suit darted through the flames in the center of the room. The flames rolled off of his flame-resistant environmental suit. The white-suit sprinted behind Richard and wrapped his arms around him, snarling.
Richard gave a frightened cry and bashed his pistol against the white-suit’s mirrored faceshield.
The white-suit’s faceshield shattered and exposed a pale lacerated face. He gave a feral scream and hurled Richard across the room towards the shackled infected in the beds.
Richard slammed hard against the wall between two beds and the pistol slid underneath the bed next to him.
The infected patients on the beds thrashed lividly and leaned towards Richard, as close as their cuffed arms would allow anyway, as they tried to bite him.
Richard sat with his back pressed tightly against the wall, well out of their reach, terrified.
The white-suit sprinted towards him. The glow from the flickering flames made the reflective blue ‘CDC’ lettering on his chest glimmer.
Richard grabbed the bed to the left and quickly rolled it out in front of him, sending the man cuffed to the headboard into hysterics.
The CDC white-suit crashed into bed and toppled with it against the wall. Both the white-suit and the handcuffed patient began scuffling with each other.
Richard spotted the pistol. It was lying underneath the hospital bed next to him. He crawled underneath the bed as quickly as he could, keeping pressed tightly against the wall. He grabbed the pistol off of the floor, but didn’t turn around. Instead, he continued crawling underneath bed after bed, terrified.
The patients handcuffed to their headboards thrashed wildly in their beds as Richard crawled underneath.
Richard managed to distance himself from the CDC white-suit by ten beds in that manner when his path was blocked by a glass divider that separated a section of the room. He gritted his teeth, turned, and aimed the pistol shakily at the CDC white-suit standing ten beds away.
The CDC white-suit stood frozen and looked confused. He appeared transfixed by his own shadow on the wall provided by the flame’s flickering glow. He stared at his shadow with his arms hung limp at his sides, unaware of Richard’s presence.
Richard slowly lowered his gun. The smoky air was irritating his sinuses and made his eyes water. He tried to hold back a–
He sneezed and the sound echoed throughout the room, rising above the sound of the snarling shackled infected.
The CDC white-suit’s head snapped towards Richard. He charged towards him, hurling the hospital beds out of his way in the process, ignoring the handcuffed patient’s feral protests as they were flung across the room.
Richard hurriedly aimed the pistol at the advancing white-suit and fired multiple times.
The rapid gunfire cast the CDC white-suit in white strobe from the muzzle-flash as he dove towards Richard, arms flailing.
Richard kept firing relentlessly until he exhausted his ammo.
The CDC white-suit stumbled forward and collapsed against the glass divider. His bullet-riddled body left a bloody streak as it slid down the glass and landed next to Richard.
Richard scooted away from the corpse and sat trembling in his own urine. He forced himself to stand, shakily slid a fresh clip into the pistol, and chambered a round.
Fighter jets passed overhead and the entire room shook once again. Something inside the ceiling conduits made an audible click and the overhead emergency lights flickered back on and the monitoring equipment next to the patient beds powered back on as the computers rebooted. The smoke-filled room slowly became filled with dulled light and fire alarms started chirping once again.
Richard saw that hospital gurneys were lined across the opposite side of the room. Each bed had a corpse handcuffed to it, and each corpse had been executed by a single gunshot to the head. The heads of the handcuffed corpses undulated back-and-forth as the room shook as the jets passed overhead. The cardiac monitors next to the beds gave an alarm tone as they all flat-lined.
Richard turned his head and looked towards a set of double-doors, an exit. Gripping the pistol tightly, he ran towards the double-doors and burst through them into the middle of a long windowed hallway.
The hallway was long and stretched out in both directions. One side of the hall was lined with doors and large soot-covered windows and overturned benches lined the opposite side. The windows were covered with thick soot from the outside that filtered out most of the light coming through.
Richard slid the gun under his belt and started at the darkened window in front of him. He walked over to the window and pressed his hand against it. He couldn’t even see the ground below through the soot. He picked up one of the benches lying in the hall and hurled it against the window.
The bench bounced off the window pane and landed in the middle of the hall while a web of fine glass crackles formed across the broken safety glass. Small fragments of glass fell loose and pelted against the charred plastic tarp outside.
Richard stared at the soot-covered tarp outside, confused. He reached out and pressed his hand against the blackened plastic tarp. The charred plastic crumbled away with his touch and created a large hole.
He stepped back in horror as he peered through the hole at the downtown Raleigh skyline.
Most of the skyscrapers in the middle of the city were reduced to burnt steel skeletons. The skyscrapers along the edge of downtown were mostly intact and were covered by charcoaled plastic. The noon sky was hazy with ash and black smoke, and behind the downtown skyline, plumes of smoke rose into the sky from all over the city. The building he was standing in appeared to be at the far edge of downtown sprawl and was afforded some safety from the inferno that had engulfed the heart of downtown Raleigh.
Far, far in the distance, he saw a flickering orange glow that extended across the entire horizon. Unbeknownst to Richard, he was staring at the military’s attempt to corral the outbreak many miles away.
The whole city is burning! And you’re stuck in the middle of it all!
Andy started to laugh.
Some savior you’re turning out to be! I’m going to die in this fucking prison!
Richard shook his head and tried to ignore Andy’s intrusive nagging. He forced himself to step closer to the window and look down at the hospital’s parking lot five floo
rs below.
The lot was full of burnt vehicular skeletons and smoldering military transport vehicles. Infected soldiers, civilians, and rescue personnel aimlessly shambled amongst the vehicles and stepped across blackened corpses. A badly burnt man wearing a tattered suit stood next to a smoldering police van and looked up at Richard, snarling.
In the distance, a commercial helicopter took off from the roof of a low-rise apartment building. It banked away from the edge of downtown Raleigh and headed in an eastwardly–
Two fighter jets approached the helicopter and fired two missiles at it.
The helicopter erupted in a billowing explosion and crumbled to the ground in a cascade of flaming rubble.
Richard flinched from the flash of the explosion.
The infected in the hospital parking lot started staggering towards the helicopter crash site.
I’m never going to get my body out of that prison…
“You can’t say that for sure, Andy.”
Oh stop being so goddamn optimistic! Look outside!
“You’re inside a modern fortress you–”
You really think you’ll find my body there alive?
“I’m sure of it…”
Then get your ass to Butner and save me!
He turned and stared down the hallway. At the end of the hall, he saw an elevator. He gripped the pistol in his hand and ran towards it.
A door a few feet ahead of him swung open and a male nurse stumbled out of the room.
Richard fired a volley of rounds at nurse as he ran continued to run towards the elevator.
The shot blew out the side of the nurse’s head and splattered gore across the wall. The nurse collapsed face-down.
Richard leapt over the nurse and continued sprinting.
Fighter jets flew overhead and caused the windows to rattle and plaster ceiling tiles to fall loose. The hallway lights flickered out as the power died once again.
Richard sprinted faster, sucking smoke-filled air into his lungs desperately. A door swung open next to him and a sweaty hospital security guard leapt out into the hall. The guard grabbed Richard by the sleeve, mumbling incoherently–
Richard tore himself free from the guard’s grip and kept running, pushing the frightened guard aside.
Ahead of Richard, a CDC white-suit without a facemask staggered out of an open room. The white-suit bared his teeth and ran towards him.
Richard jolted to a halt, aimed his pistol, and–
The white-suit pushed past Richard and tackled the security guard. The two men tussled on the floor until the guard gave out a horrific scream as the white-suit bit into his jugular.
Richard turned away from the two men and bolted to the elevator. He pressed the elevator call button repeatedly, but nothing happened. He panicked and searched frantically until he found what he was looking for; he found the stairwell door.
He ran towards the door when a frantic pounding coming from the other side of the door froze him in place and made his stomach knot.
He glanced back down the hallway and saw a growing horde of infected nurses, patients, and CDC whit-suits closing in on him.
He knew there was no going back the way he came.
He turned his attention back towards the stairwell door, aimed the pistol, held his breath, and swung the door open.
A man, clothes blackened with soot and skin badly burnt–
Richard fired the pistol point-blank between the man’s eyes and shoved the man’s corpse out of the way. He ran into the smoky stairwell and slammed the door shut behind him.
He bounded down the stairs, hardly slowing as he passed the fourth-floor and third-floor landings. His pace was reduced to a stagger on the second-floor landing, nearly suffocating on the thick smoke. He kept low as he crawled underneath the black smoke, coughing. He made his way to the first-floor and staggered back in horror.
Numerous soot-covered corpses were huddled together near the first-floor stairwell door. They were not plague victims, but rather–
“Smoke inhalation,” Richard whispered to himself, throat raw from coughing.
Thick smoke crept into the stairwell from underneath the door. A housekeeping cart had been overturned and jammed under the doorknob, preventing anybody from entering the stairwell.
Richard kicked the overturned cart away from the door.
As he turned the scolding silver knob and cracked the door, flames entered the staircase and immense heat enveloped his body.
Richard quickly slammed the door shut and leaned against it, coughing violently. Slowly, he sunk down along the door to the floor and hung his head between his legs. Tears ran down his soot-covered cheeks.
He felt trapped, useless, and afraid.
Richard stared at his pistol a moment.
It would be an easy way out and a sure way to silence the voice inside of his head forever.
Richard closed his eyes and stuck the barrel under his chin.
What are you doing, Richie? Have you forgotten about me?
“Stop it,” Richard hoarsely choked, barrel pressed underneath his chin. “You’re not even really him, so just shut up and let me do this.”
Tears welted in his eyes.
I’m not real? Then who the fuck am I, Richard?
“I don’t know!” Richard spat between his clenched teeth. The pistol shook in his grip. “I don’t fucking know what you are!”
I know what you are, though. You’re a murderer.
“I’m sorry… I’m so fucking sorry, brother. I never meant to hurt anybody,” Richard mumbled. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter as tears ran down his ash-covered cheeks. His whole body trembled.
Don’t be sorry. I understand you. You’ll never have to apologize to me for what you are. You’re my brother and, despite it all, I love you. I understand why you want out of this wretched life.
Richard’s grip on the pistol tightened.
At least I thought I understood you…
Richard’s eyes slowly opened.
“What- what do you mean by that?” he asked, tears clouding his vision.
I just never pegged my own brother as a selfish coward.
“I’m not selfish! I’ve never been selfish! I gave you everything! EVERYTHING I DID WAS FOR YOU!” Richard screamed.
Andy laughed.
You get to take the easy way out while I sit here and waste away inside a prison cell and starve to death. That seems pretty selfish to me…
Richard abruptly stood up and hurled the pistol in the back of the stairwell.
“Well what the fuck do you want me to do, Andy!?” Richard shouted up the stairwell, afraid. “I can’t even get out of this goddamn hospital much less navigate my way to Butner! So what do you want me to fucking do?! TELL ME!”
TRY! I want you to at least try! Fucking try! Stop being a frightened bitch and at least try to save me! After all you’ve done to me… it’s the least you can do!
“It’s a goddamn suicide mission and you fucking know it!” Richard shouted, tears streaming from his eyes. “I’ll fail you! I’ll fail you like I always have!”
But at least you would have tried. Do the right thing… for me… for mom… for dad… and even for Stacy.
Richard’s face flushed with anger upon hearing his sister’s name.
“Not for her. Everything that ever happened… it’s all her fucking fault,” Richard said.
Andy snickered.
Then do it for me. Save me to spite her. Be the man they never thought you were. I always had faith in you. Prove me right and prove them wrong. Don’t let me waste away in there…
“Goddamnit…” Richard muttered, shaking his head. He started to pace in the small stairwell, rubbing his neck. “I can’t let you die in there. It’s just not fucking right.”
That’s right, be a man, little brother.
“I’m sorry…” Richard said shamefully, closing his eyes. “I was being selfish… afraid to fight on. I was being a selfish pussy. You deserve better tha
n that. I’m fucking sorry… I will. I will save you. I will save you even if it kills me.”
Richard gripped the scalding doorknob and opened the–
Intense heat and thick smoke billowed through the doorway and made Richard cough violently. He forced his teary eyes to open and peer into the flame engulfed first-floor hospital lobby.
The lobby was engulfed in flames. The inferno had spread across the ceiling and ate holes into the drywall. Bolted metal rods were all that remained of the melted plastic waiting room chairs that filled the lobby. The sliding glass entrance doors had been barricaded from the outside. Half-melted silver lettering on the wall read: ‘Emergency Department and Admittance’. Sections of the second floor had collapsed throughout the lobby and blocked off access to the rear halls and the reception area.
The smoke was inundating and the flames were blinding.
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t see.
Richard slammed the door shut and collapsed onto his knees inside the stairwell, gasping for breath in-between violent coughing fits. Mucus dribbled out of his nose and tears flowed down his ashen cheeks profusely.
“We–,” he struggled out between gasps, “–we can’t… can’t go out that way, Andy”
Then think of another way before that fire guts the whole building.
Richard slowly got back onto his feet. Jets passed overhead and the building trembled. He stumbled against the side of the stairwell and steadied himself.
“We’ll go up to the second floor,” he said and then erupted into a coughing fit. “We will have to jump from the second floor, that’s the only way.”
He struggled his way up to the 2nd floor landing and cautiously grabbed the stairwell doorknob.
It was cool to the touch.
He tried opening the door, but something was weighed against it from the other side. He slammed his bodyweight against the door and the toppled the overturned supply chest that was propped against it tumbled backwards as the door flew open.
Richard staggered through the door and cautiously entered the hall.
The hallway was short, dark, and narrow. Smoke hung near the ceiling and plaster ceiling tiles lay shattered on the floor. Fluorescent light fixtures hung from their housings in the ceiling and swung side-to-side. Shell casings littered the floor and bullet holes peppered the drywall. A silver door stood at the far end of the hall.
Degeneration Page 15
