by Anthony Izzo
“My friend Elise was up and walking by now. Why aren't I walking?”
“Give it time.”
Emma's nose itched. There were vases filled with roses, tulips, and carnations, all placed on her mother's hospital tray and any surface that would hold them. It was like a goddamned flower shop up here.
“Time?” I need to be on my feet.”
“You need to rest that knee. They'll do plenty of work with you in physical therapy.”
“Last time I did that it just made my knee hurt.”
Emma said, “No one said it was easy.”
“I wish you could feel one tenth of the pain I have right now.”
“Believe me, I do,” Emma said.
“Don't be a smart ass. I should sue that doctor.”
“You're not even twenty-four hours out of surgery.”
“Big time surgeon. He had stains on his tie.”
“Well mom, I should get going. I'll be back up tomorrow.”
“You didn't stay long.”
As Emma was about to leave, a voice came over the hospital intercom: “Code Black, Emergency Room. Code Black, Emergency Room.”
That was the security code, or one of them, which meant Marty hadn't been behaving himself. Emma gave her mother a quick hug and hurried out of the room. She made it to the elevator and jammed the button. The elevator took forever, but finally the doors opened and she jumped on.
From inside the elevator she radioed George.
“We got a situation,” he said.
“Define situation,” Emma said.
“Marty freaked out. Knocked me silly in the CT room. He's loose in the hospital.”
“Jesus George,” Emma said.
“He tossed me like a crumpled piece of paper. Like super strength.”
Emma was trying to hide her annoyance with him. He was a good deputy and rarely screwed up. “Find him and put him under wraps. I'm on my way down.”
“Sorry, Sheriff.”
“Quit being sorry and fix it. I'll be right there.”
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, tried to steady herself. Emma had a bad feeling that this was growing beyond their control, that this flu bug was no such thing, and that maybe the military had dropped some sort of superbug on their town.
The elevator reached ground level and the doors opened. Emma heard screaming and broke into a run.
Since they had taken that guy down to radiology, three of Weiss' patients had coded. He was presently standing over the fourth, a Frank Madison. Madison had flatlined and Weiss was about to administer the paddles when he heard a huge crash. It was followed by a woman screaming. He turned to one of the nurses and said, “See what the hell that is.”
Before the nurse could go, something slammed into his back. The paddles flew from his hands, and the force of the blow knocked him into the gurney, which tipped over, sending Frank Madison to the floor. The shrill beep of monitors filled his ears. He got to his feet saying: “What the goddamned hell?”
He turned around to see Marty with his hands around a nurse's throat. Marty drew the woman towards him, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth into her face. He tore off a chunk of flesh and spat it out. Blood spurted from the nurses' face and the thing that was Marty bit into her throat, again tearing off a chunk of flesh. Then he tossed the dead woman to the floor.
The thing – it really stopped being human – wiped blood from its mouth. Its pale eyes darted back and forth, as if looking for another victim. He had to call security. And where the hell was that cop?
Weiss started for the front desk, where he could get a hold of a security guard. As he moved past one of the emergency room bays, one where a body lay under a sheet, something moved. That body should've been taken to the morgue. He'd declared the person dead, but still the sheet jumped and danced.
Weiss approached the sheet-covered body. “Hey. Hello.”
The sheet was thrown aside and a woman whom he'd declared dead from the flu not fifteen minutes ago sat up. She jumped from the gurney and shrieked. Weiss set himself as she charged. With a long-nailed hand it swiped at him, but he managed to dodge the blow. She came at him again, and he threw her aside. She crashed into an empty gurney, and face full of rage, she prepared to charge him again.
The woman got to her feet and charged. Weiss backpedaled until something hard slammed into him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. Reaching behind him, he removed it from the wall bracket. The woman came at him, and he swung the extinguisher. The bottom of it connected with her skull, and she staggered backward. Weiss followed up with another blow to her jaw, and he heard the bones crunch. The blow sent her to the floor, where she remained, twitching. He tossed the extinguisher, now caked with blood, onto the floor.
This was getting crazier by the second. From behind him came more screaming and crashing. He looked down the hallway and saw Mark Buznik, one of the other docs. He was running from someone. One of the creatures. It leapt on his back and twisted his head almost one hundred eighty degrees. Weiss heard the bones pop.
Where the hell was security?
He made it to the emergency room doors and hurried to the security desk, which was empty. There were normally two guards on duty, but they may have gone outside. The guards were responsible for escorting female staff to the parking lot if asked.
He would have to go back into the emergency room. People dying in there.
George hurried down the hallway that led back to the emergency room. He was hoping Emma would get back soon. The backup would be welcome, and this would go quicker with her around. He wanted to be home working his way through a six pack of Yeungling and devouring a microwave pizza. Instead he was chasing after a freak who was intent on single-handedly fucking up the hospital.
He heard screaming and crashing coming from the ER, and he reached the corridor with the patient rooms. At the end of the corridor another creature - like Marty- hunched over a dead doctor and was tearing through his guts. It ripped out handfuls of guts, loops of intestine. It threw them against the wall and they spattered.
The thing turned its gaze toward George and charged. He dropped into a shooter's stance, two hands on the gun, aimed and fired. The Glock sounded like a cannon in the hallway. The thing's head snapped back and blood painted the wall. It kept coming, crawling at him, and he put another round in its skull. It twitched a few times and stopped moving.
He approached the thing, which had been human not too long ago. It had been a man in a pink polo shirt, jeans, and loafers. Now, the shirt was painted red. He studied the thing for a moment. There were bit of flesh stuck in its teeth.
Chapter Six
Emma caught up with George, who was standing over a dead man with jelly for brains. “What the hell happened?”
George told her how Marty had gone apeshit in the CAT scan room, and how he'd found one of these humanoid bastards tearing someone's guts out.
“The virus. Whatever it is. It's changing them,” Emma said. “How many more in the emergency room?”
George said, “Don't know. We'll want to find the doc and ask him how many infected.”
There were six bays in the corridor. If you turned the corner, there was an open area with room for seven more gurneys around the walls. From this area came a series of crashes and screams. They couldn't wait any longer. She drew her Glock and said to George, “We've got to go in.”
George nodded. They turned the corner and saw five more of the things. Two were hunched over dead bodies, chewing the necks and stripping away muscle and flesh. Emma drew a bead on one of them, put two shots in its head. The other one, hearing this, turned its head. She blew half its face off. That left three more.
The other three tore out of the main room, busting through the double doors. Emma followed to the door, opened it, and squeezed off three shots. They missed, and the creatures loped around a corner and disappeared. Son of a bitch.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and was
wound so tight, she spun and backhanded the man across the face. Her face went red as she realized she'd just clocked Doctor Weiss. He stood rubbing his cheek, which had sprouted an angry red welt.
“Hello to you, too, Sheriff,” Weiss said.
“Sorry. Wound tight.”
“Why are you at the door?”
“Three of those freaks just took off that way. Towards the main lobby.”
“We can't let them get to the upper floors.”
Emma said, “How many patients with this. Would you guess?”
“We have a hundred beds. Almost all full with this...whatever it is. So figure at least eighty to ninety, plus what was in the emergency room.”
“Dammit. That's a lot to handle.”
George sidled up to Emma. “I just called for backup. Orr's tied up?”
“I sent him to the Ramsey building,” Emma said.
Their backup choices were thin to begin with. Orr was the only other one on duty tonight. Her other deputies were either off tonight or away on vacation. And she didn't have time to track people down.
“We need to get the riot guns from the cars. Doctor Weiss, what floors would the non-infected people be on?”
“Generally seven and eight. Those are the surgical floors. There's a kid on nine, too. I've seen him a number of times. Chris. He'd be in peds.”
“What about the military?” George asked.
“The nearest base is two hundred miles away,” Emma said. “We need help now.”
“Might be worth calling,” George said.
“The shotguns, George. Time's wasting. I'll have Orr call them.”
Tim Orr pulled his cruiser up in front of the Ramsey building. He parked, got out, and headed for the front door. Chief Ross had sounded panicked on the phone, telling him something about a pervert assaulting her daughter. And that some weird stuff was going on at the hospital. She couldn't say what, though.
Tim was the newest member of the force, on for a little over two years. He liked the job well enough, but you could only break up so many fights at Yancy's Tavern or write so many speeding tickets before things turned deadly dull. Maybe this case would be different, something exciting. He might even get to chase a suspect.
He radioed to the Chief that he was on scene. The building seemed quiet and he approached the front doors and went inside. The building didn't seem much warmer inside. In fact it almost matched the cool October air outside. The lobby was all marble and granite, giving the place a cool feeling.
He heard an elevator ding and then some voices. From a corridor off the main lobby, two men and a woman appeared. One man had white, bushy eyebrows and dressed in a suit that probably cost more than a month's pay. The woman was in her early twenties, wore a short skirt, and walked like she was advertising ass for sale. The other guy was a twenty something with a nose piercing and spiky hair.
“Someone had a problem here?” Tim asked, and they all stopped.
The old man said, “One of my employees. He's up on eight with his daughter. Says she got assaulted by our maintenance guy.”
“Where were you all headed?”
“Home,” the woman said.
“Not yet. I'll need you to stick around.”
“Why? It doesn't involve us.”
“Just stay put, huh? You said he's on eight?” Tim asked.
“Yeah. Suite eight-ten,” the old man said.
“I'm going up. I want to see you all here when I come back.”
Chapter Seven
Maria Gilardo had never seen anything like it in her years as an ICU nurse. Two patients who had been brought in with the bug had coded. A third was on his way out. She'd had the bodies sent down to the morgue, not wanting to cause a panic. It seemed a little late for that.
Now, she rushed with a crash car down to ICU number fourteen. Her twelve-year-old had asked her if she'd ever seen someone die, and she'd said no. Lied to the kid. She'd seen plenty, tried to help them as they left this world. He didn't need to know that yet.
The patient in question was Alexander Hammas, who was a healthy thirty-five-year-old male up until two days ago when he started becoming sick with a sniffle. He'd come up here nearly comatose and just flatlined.
She went into the room where two of the nurses were working on him.
Maria said, “Page Doctor Stanton.”
She wheeled the crash car up to the bed. As she did this, Hammas – to her surprise – sat up. When he opened his eyes, they were white.
“Call security,” Maria said. “Everyone out.”
The other two nurses backed out of the room and Maria made a break for the nurses' station, where she intended to call security. In the corridor behind her there came a crash and she glanced over her shoulder. Alexander Hammas stood in the hallway.
The other two nurses had lagged behind, and Hammas pounced on the one closest to him, driving her face-first into the floor. He twisted her neck and it snapped with a sickening crunch. Hammas then sprung onto the second nurse, catching her from behind and biting her face.
At the nurses' station, which had monitors showing each patient's vital signs, buzzers went off, the heart monitors flatlining. She could only guess that whatever flu this was would cause them to turn into monsters. She was the last nurse left on the floor. They'd been short-staffed tonight, and her co-workers were dead.
She had to get help.
Looking down the corridor, she saw Hammas loping towards her. She had to arm herself and spotted a pair of scissors on the desk. They sure as hell didn't teach anything like this in nursing school. Hammas reached the waist-high desk, and she backed up. As it started to climb the desk, she thrust the scissors into its eye, which dripped an ugly black goo. The thing howled and grabbed at the scissors.
She ran for the elevator, reached it, and punched the button. As she looked over her shoulder, she saw the thing fall to the ground and convulse. Spittle flew from its lips. Hopefully she had hit the brain and it was going into death spasms.
The elevator door opened and she stepped on. Her first instinct was to go downstairs, get to the lobby, and get out. But there were other patients on the floors above. She had to warn them. She pressed the Up button. As the elevator ascended, she thought she heard a chorus of shrieks and screams. It sounded like tormented souls suffering in Hell.
Doctor Lori Weiss strolled through the basement corridors of St. Mary's hospital sipping watery coffee from the vending machine. From overhead came the hiss of steam pipes and the knocks and groans of the heating system. Despite the bright yellow walls, the place made her want to start taking Prozac. A basement was a basement. She hoped to transfer out of here soon.
She reached her office and sat at the desk. A pile of papers awaited her, autopsy reports and death certificates to fill out.
“Doctor Weiss?”
She looked to the door, where an orderly in green scrubs stood peeking his head inside. “What is it?”
“Just wheeled two more down for you. They're in the morgue.”
“All right, thank you.”
“Sign this please,” the orderly said, entering the office with a clipboard. She signed in the necessary spots on the forms. He ripped off the top copy and gave it to her. “Have a good night.”
“I'll try.”
Lori took off her classes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. A hot headache had settled in behind her eyes and all she could think about was getting away to the Finger Lakes with Mike for the weekend. They had reservations at a hotel/spa, and planned on hitting wineries all over Keuka Lake. No dead bodies. No stink of blood and shit from open abdominal cavities. Just her, Mike, and a ton of great wines.
The orderly strolled off, whistling a tune. She looked at the paperwork. These were patients who'd succumbed to the flu that was flooding the hospital. She could guess the cause of death:fluid in the lungs. This bug was nasty, and paranoia had spread in their little town. The high school and middle school had been closed for the last two days. She actually
saw a handful of people walking around with paper dusk masks on. The world was getting crazy.
The families would likely want an autopsy.
She'd have to get someone down here to help her move the newly dead into the cooler. She got up and strolled across the hallway into the morgue. The sheet-covered bodies lay on gurneys. She should've had that orderly help her move them into the drawers. Have to call someone.
One of dead, whose belly jutted out, making the sheet look like a snow mound, twitched. Lori continued to watch. It twitched again. Then a hand dropped from beneath the sheet. Perhaps it was too close to the edge.
