Z Ward

by Jay Mouton

  Robey and Buddy looked, sheepishly, at one another. Buddy shrugged his shoulders. Robey, at the same time thinking Susann Beckett was the prettiest lady he’d ever seen, also managed to get out a simple, “okay?” As his luck seemed to be going south recently, his voice cracked. He felt the heat of a blush creep up his neck, then adorn his, lightly, freckled cheeks.

  “No, guys, I’m just putting this together,” she said, the excitement her voice picking up, again. “Buddy, you did mention to me that you saw something very similar to what I experienced when Doctor Huddleston attacked Mr. Sawyer, right? Didn’t I hear you saying something about that man that was driving the car that nearly hit Robey? He attacked somebody, right?”

  Buddy nodded, but he wasn’t sure what connection Susann was trying to make to him. Then it hit him!

  “You’re right!” Robey blurt out, no longer aware of his embarrassment. He was sure he’d just made the connection that Susann had, and wanted the two boys to make.

  “You think the meteor shower had something to do with Doctor Huddleston’s,” Robey searched for an appropriate term, stumbled on a couple of mumbles, then uttered, “change?”

  Susann was rapidly nodding her head up and down.

  “Yes! Guys, think about it,” she exclaimed. “Doctor Huddleston was telling me that he and his wife had both been on their back veranda, last night. He said they’d watched the whole shower from start to finish. He said that they’d been out there, under those stars, for over an hour!”

  Even Buddy seem to have yet another of his growing number of epiphanies.

  “You think that the meteors caused that guy to go crazy down at the CVS this morning? Maybe the same thing that just happened to Doctor Huddleston?” Robey asked. Again, he couldn’t help but think about his mother. When she worked the graveyard shift at the convalescent home, she often took some of the more restless residents outside into the courtyard there at all hours of the night.

  “I don’t know, guys! I don’t know,” Susann repeated herself. The, in a rush, she went on with her hypothesis.

  “What I do know,” she said, then she stopped. She added, “scratch that. What I suspect, is that all that screaming and yelling we’ve been hearing on the other side of that door. All those sounds we’ve been listening to. All of it! It doesn’t seem to me that it could all be caused by one man,” she said. She paused, and took another, excited breath.

  “Doctor Huddleston is only one man. There are dozens of doctors, nurses, and employees of all kinds in here. Hundreds of patients. And we’ve, also, got security guards! Here, in this hospital! Security! And some of them have guns. But I haven’t heard any gunshots. Have either of you?” she asked them, looking first at Robey, then Buddy, then back at Robey.

  In unison, they were both shaking their heads from side to side.

  “No. No gunshots!” Susann said, her voice dropping a register, falling into that tone of conspiracy Robey had heard earlier that morning. “Not one, single shot!” she all but hissed.

  “I think she’s right,” Buddy said, looking at Robey. “I ain’t heard any shooting, Robey,” he said. “And, I know what gunfire sounds like, up close and personal,” he added, referencing the shootout he’d witnessed before he and his best friend had been whisked off to Baptist Health.

  “Me, too,” Robey agreed, but it was agreement made in a mental protest with himself. A growing sense of foreboding kept crawling its way deeper into his thoughts. He could not shake his apprehensions about the safety of his mother. That thread of worry that had been dangling loose in his mind was, now, trying to wind its way through the labyrinth. Somewhere within that maze inside his skull was the growing thought that he had to find his mother. He had to find her. And he had to, somehow, protect her.

  At that moment, Robey knew what he would have to do once they escaped from the room in which they were, temporarily, holed up.

  Captive—!

  *****

  Susann suggested that the first thing they needed to do was, simply, get into a room with a television. She told them, as she tried to convince herself, that unless they immediately found somebody that could get them the hell out of this nightmare they found themselves in, they needed information.

  The boys agreed. The first leg of their simple plan was, as Buddy astutely put it, “just, too, damn easy to fail.”

  With that, the boys slid the hospital bed away from in front of the door and brought their respective weapons to the ready.

  Each of them took a deep breath. And without any more hesitation, along with Susann, reached for the door. Holding the table top in one hand, the young nurse grabbed the metal doorknob with her free hand and turned. It didn’t move.

  She realized that she’d been so scared that her hands were sweating. Quickly, she wiped the sweat off against the front of her scrubs, and took hold of the knob once more. This time her grip held and the knob turned.

  All three of them heard the soft click of the lock release. Slowly, Susann opened the door to the world on the other side of the door.

  The hallway was lighted by various fluorescents that ran along the high ceiling above them. As they crept, silently as possible, out into the expanse of the hall, it still felt they were entering a shadowy cave. A cave that was, highly likely, now home to creatures that should only live in the deepest recesses of a nightmare.

  Three sets of eyes peered up and down the length of the hallway.

  Six eyes saw—nothing.

  They stood, huddled close together, frozen in place.

  How was it that they had kept hearing all of the commotion out here, while they were still inside the room? Surely, they were thinking, each a different set of thoughts, there had to be something that had happened? Or was happening?

  “This is creepy,” Buddy whispered.

  “Yeah, you nailed that one,” Robey said, and spiced it with some impromptu sarcasm that Buddy would love by adding, “Captain Obvious.”

  Buddy started to laugh at Robey’s dark joke. Susann, quickly, gave him a gentle stab in his ribs. She gave him a look that reminded him that they had best stay as quiet as possible until they found out what was going on.

  As if to reinforce her unspoken directive to stay quiet, she, softly, shushed them by bringing a finger up to her lips once more. And, just as he did the last time she had shushed him, Robey felt a strange feeling surge through his whole body. As scared as he was, as crazy as things were all around him, somehow the boy managed another crazy thought. Maybe, just maybe, he had a crush on the beautiful angel crouching next to him.

  “Sorry,” Buddy said. And, as if to prove that he was not going to let them down, he pointed his window glass and bed bar constructed spear a couple of inches higher in the empty confines of the hospital hallway.

  “All of the rooms on the other side of the hallway have a flat screen television,” Susann said, her voice holding onto its hushed tone.

  Robey felt a momentary blip of childish irritation that he’d not had a television in his own hospital room, and then it was gone. He wondered how, under the circumstances, he could even think like a child.

  Something else told him that his time as a child had, abruptly, come to an end.

  “Okay, I’m going to open the door,” Susann whispered, “Y’all be ready for anything.”

  She reached for the doorknob of the room and then, subconsciously, brought her hand back up towards her body and, once again, wiped her sweating palm against the front of her scrubs. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

  Before she could grip the knob, Buddy’s fingers clamped around her wrist.

  “What about Doctor Huddleston?” he whispered.

  Susann, turned to the boys, in her still hushed voice, whispered, “don’t worry, this isn’t Huddleston’s patient.”

  As the nurse turned the knob of the room door and began to push the door open, it occurred to all three of them that there might just be another Doctor Huddleston inside.

  ***
**

  It was too late to do anything but defend themselves.

  In the span of only a couple of seconds, two creatures came lunging across the room and right toward the three of them.

  They could hear the frantic sounds of both ugly things. The teeth inside both their chomping jaws clicked and snapped as the noise, loudly, echoed within the room.

  Somehow, Robey and Buddy were both able to keep their wits about them. At the same time, they brought their weapons, both the spear and the ax, up and in front of them. The smallest of the two creatures, one that appeared to be a woman, made it to them first.

  The glass shard embedded at the tip of Buddy’s spear effortlessly drove deep into her belly. A dark, red stain, immediately began to dampen the complete front of her hospital gown.

  At the same time Buddy began to pull back on the spear, to take another stab at the still moving woman, Robey swung his battle ax neatly across the woman’s neck. In less than a fraction of another second, the razor-sharp edge of the glass ax sliced the woman’s head from her body. The lifeless orb dropped to the floor and, if not for the circumstances of the horrific reality, almost comically, rolled under the hospital bed.

  As a torrent of blood sprayed across the room before them, both boys heard a wild grunt from nurse Beckett. They turned toward the sound. At the same time, their eyes caught up with the noise that alerted them to her. They captured the sight of the petite woman swinging her table top as she hammered it across the chomping jaw line of none other than the good Doctor Huddleston.

  When the aluminum table top contacted the flesh of the man’s face, it sounded with a wet thud. All three of them could see the man’s lower jaw move, horizontally, across the bottom of his face. Several white objects flew away from his head, and crossed the room. Several of his teeth bounced against the far wall, off, then clicked across the tiled floor. Doctor Huddleston’s dentists’ best work, now lay, like bloodied chicklets, beneath him.

  Swiftly, Susann brought the table top back across the other side of the man’s face. She slammed it into him once more. Now, the man’s lower jaw was hanging from the rest of his skull. A thin strip of flesh dangled on the right side of his head. It held his broken and nearly disintegrated jawbone to the rest of his battered skull. It hung there, swaying back and forth, for a moment as the deranged doctor just stood there as if he wasn’t quite sure what his next move should be.

  Then the lower part of the man’s jaw simply tore free from his shattered and bloodied face. It dropped to the floor, dramatically but harmlessly.

  Doctor Huddleston, as if he’d been stunned back to awareness, stepped toward his former nurse. Susann, stared up at the monstrosity in front of her. She froze.

  The boys, too, seemed unable to move. They were fixed in place, mesmerized by the sight of the monster that was, seemingly, unfazed by the battering he’d just received.

  As the good doctor took another step forward, his foot came down, directly on top of his torn, blood-soaked jawbone. The same jawbone that had torn Mr. Sawyer’s throat from the man’s body, now slid out from beneath the weight of the creature upon it. The tattered hunk of meat, bone, and blood shot out from under the sole of his leather shoe, and followed the same path of the severed head as it disappeared under the hospital bed.

  With a tremendous thud, Doctor Huddleston’s body hit the floor as he slipped on the remnants of his own jaw.

  Robey and Buddy were startled back into action. With no more hesitation, they didn’t give Doctor Huddleston one more second to contemplate another thought. If, indeed, the man was any longer capable of thought at all.

  Simultaneously, both boys brought their blood-stained weapons forward.

  Buddy’s spear head made a pointblank, direct stab into the monster’s heart. Robey’s ax came down, just under the row of upper teeth of what remained of the monster’s jaw. The ax nearly severing its second head of the day.

  The good doctor. The creature. No—the monster, now lay, unmoving. It was, apparently, dead.

  *****

  Robey and Buddy slid Doctor Huddleston, and the dead woman’s body, over by the window. Susann yanked the sheets off the bed. She laid them across the areas of the floor where most of the slick blood had pooled. She didn’t want any of them to, accidently, slip on the slippery surface.

  The sheets, spotless only moments before she draped them upon the floor, were blotched with dark, ominous stains.

  The boys, carefully, made their way into the small bathroom inside the room to wash the mess from their hands. Susann scanned the room, which now looked like a crime scene photo of a mass-murder spree, and found the flat screen remote near the head of the bed. It must have been perched atop of the sheets before she’d ripped them from the bed, and slipped between the metal headboard and the mattress.

  She aimed the remote at the flat screen, and pressed the power icon.

  As they had in Robey’s room, he and Buddy slid the bed across the little room, and shoved it up against the door. They’d not heard a single sound emanating from the hallway since they’d left the comparative safety of Robey’s room, but they were not taking any chances.

  As soon as the boys started pushing the bed toward the door, Susann noticed the dead woman’s head, and what was left of Doctor Huddleston’s broken, lower jaw. Before the two of them had turned around from their efforts, and back toward her, she had, efficiently, used one of the bed pillows to slid both grizzly items over by the corpses near the window.

  Then she left the pillow atop the discarded body part, and walked over to the only chair in the room. She turned away from the seat, and then she plopped down.

  Robey and Buddy, having secured the entrance, stood behind Susann’s chair and stared up at the flat screen with her.

  The nurse kept the volume as low as possible, but they all wanted to hear.

  Susann only had to hit the channel up icon one time and it landed on a local Jacksonville network.

  They watched, with rapt and growing terror, random scenes of carnage that glowed upon the screen’s surface.

  A crazed looking woman, her face drenched with what could only be blood, was ravenously feeding upon the torn-up body of what looked like something that might have, once, been a little girl. The only hint really being the long strands of bloodied and matted hair that protruded from both the little body’s skull as the chewing mouth of the creature ripped into the mess beneath it.

  The segment of film that followed was even more graphic.

  The screams and cries of a woman and man filled the flat screen’s speakers. They appeared trapped inside what appeared to be a green Volvo station wagon. They were fighting to keep several creatures from entering the vehicle through the broken front window and the passenger side door. The man, who’d only a moment before been belted behind the steering wheel, was, now, being pulled out of the car. One of the monsters trying to extract the man managed to, literally, pull one of the man’s arms from his body.

  The woman, who’d been fighting from the shotgun seat, was yelling out names that had to have been those of her children. Another of the monsters was able to yank her, completely, through the front of the broken windshield. In a furious blur of speed, the creature dove at the woman’s throat. Then it made a powerful lunge at the woman’s slender, pale neck. It ended her life in mid-scream as blood shot forth and, temporarily, blinded the beast atop her. It didn’t slow down the rabid attack.

  They listened to the nightmare soundtrack of confused and terrified pleas, yells, and screams. A woman reporter gave random bits of information as they, apparently, were provided to her. The newswoman’s voice came through the speakers sounding harried, frightened, but clear as the bell ringer she was.

  “While the messages we’re receiving from federal contacts are sketchy, it does seem apparent that the terrifying phenomenon that we are experiencing, throughout Jacksonville, all of Duvall County, and surrounding communities, is, sadly, happening on a national scale,” she announced. He
r voice cracked, mid-sentence, only once.

  As the boys and Susann continued to watch, they remained silent.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we will continue to cover this catastrophic, breaking event as long as it is possible. But we’ve just received an extremely disturbing memo from CDC officials in Atlanta, Georgia,” she continued to read the announcement. Her words, also appearing, simultaneously, on the close captioning blocks below the mainframe of the studio cameras streaming, live, from the Jacksonville station.

  In the right-hand corner of the screen, in another small frame, the animated hand signals of an individual trying to explain all of the bedlam to the station’s hearing-impaired audience. Robey wondered if sign language was equipped to explain a world going crazy. Once more, the image of his mother’s face jumped to the forefront of his thoughts. At that very moment, although he was, currently, having his doubts, he whispered a short prayer for his mom’s safety. And, he hoped that God wasn’t too upset at him and Buddy for skipping school on the morning the world was coming to an apparent end.

  The newswoman’s voice jolted him out of his daydream. Or, he thought, perhaps more aptly, a nightmare?

  “CDC officials have determined that the rapidly spreading virus seems only to have effect upon adults, and post-pubescent teenagers. There have been various symptoms to watch for reported, but only over the short duration of time since post-symptomatic signs have been, ah, obvious? But, but individuals, have been, well, ah,” the woman seemed to search to find the right words, and then continued, “tested for the virus. Unfortunately, at this point, all tests for the virus have had to be post-mortem,” the woman, faltered a moment. She sighed. Then she added, “Folks, ultimately, the CDC has deduced that the origin of the virus is, as many of you have already suspected, from the meteors that entered the Earth’s atmosphere.” She sighed, once more. Then, her voice almost trailing off into the edge of nothingness, she simply said, “last night.”