LZR-1143: Infection

by Bryan James

  I pushed the rest of the sandwich aside and scanned the binders still set back against the credenza; most seemed to be visitor and patient logs. Some were medical manuals dealing with recommended dosages for various diagnoses. Only one binder lay open on the desk. It was today’s intake chart complete with the intake notes from the last nurse on duty.

  I scanned the list. It was like reading a plot summary for one of those television crime dramas. Or at least the writers’ collective brainstorming for the criminal de jour.

  September 15, 0415: Sykes, Trevor. Multiple personality disorder; double murder; one personality extremely violent, other personality female. Latter personality friendly but no awareness of disorder. Convicted felon. 2F, 202E.

  This guy would fit right in.

  September 15, 0805: Williams, Seymour. Acute schizophrenia; murder, rape; requires constant sedation; use caution when handling needles. Patient has exhibited violence toward orderlies, nurses and all other authority figures. Patient has violent sexual impulses. Convicted felon. 2F, 206W.

  Seemed harmless enough.

  While I read, I caught myself wondering vaguely what the alphanumeric codes at the end of each note meant. I read on.

  September 15, 0930: Hickman, Travis. Suspected bipolar; triple murder, attempted cannibalism; animalistic ideations. Patient seemingly identifies as wild animal; keep isolated. Admitted from County Sheriff for holding; pending arraignment. 1F, 126E.

  Attempted cannibalism and animalistic ideations? Now this was something. If the news reports were true, there were people out there infected with some sort of sickness that made them act like this. Because I was an adult, I didn’t exactly buy the “risen dead” angle, but the shots they showed on the news of the infected really made a case for some seriously fucked up people on the outside.

  Maybe this guy had it, and they admitted him before the psychotic crap hit the societal fan. The last entry on the log was the illustrious Mr. Hickman. At nine thirty in the morning.

  I checked the clock again. Seven hours since they admitted the last patient, and still neither hide nor hair of another person. Other than A-team, of course.

  Even if Hickman had the disease, it wouldn’t take a whole facility to subdue him, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have sprung the rest of us to do it. So he wasn’t the entire reason for the deserted wing. More likely, whatever was going on outside had caused some sort of spur of the moment campus-wide evac, and rather than rounding us dangerous criminals up by the book and spiriting our rowdy asses away to safety, they just popped the gates and let us fend for ourselves, leaving the doors wide open. Much more plausible. Also much more disturbing.

  The power flickered briefly, as it did on occasion; the wiring in this place was probably reaching its centennial. The brown-out caused the television to flick off, plunging the room into silence.

  My head jerked up in surprise. Something was moving outside the doorway to the hall. I almost wrenched my arm out of the mental socket patting myself on the back for locking the doors.

  Whoever it was, they were moving slowly. I scanned the room, looking for something to use as a weapon in case it was one of those lunatics.

  I laughed as I examined my name-calling hypocrisy. Dear Kettle, you are surely as black as midnight. Love, Pot.

  Of course there were no weapons. Rule number one in housing violent psychotics: don’t leave anything laying around that you wouldn’t want to see used as an incidental murder weapon, such as forks, knives, sporks, cotton candy, rolled up newspapers…well, you get the drift. The furniture was bolted down, the desk held only papers and binders. Even the trashcan was attached to the wall.

  I turned in place, looking around somewhat frantically. I walked past the orderly’s desk again and realized that in my initial giddiness at being released, I had failed to notice a faint-but quite clear-hand print on the wall. It wasn’t unusual to find out of place marks or stains in the Park, especially in this room, where my compatriots were often allowed finger paints, water colors and canvas. But this was different.

  I moved closer to the print, which bore the appearance of an elementary school Thanksgiving project where you press your hand in a blob of paint and make a turkey out of the hand print. But this was slightly different. I was fairly sure this picture was pressed in blood.

  I picked up the pace at that point. I remembered the utility closet I had seen across the hall from my cell. It was probably locked, but worth a shot. We didn’t exactly have free reign of the place, so I hoped that someone had been careless and left it open. I skirted around the edge of the desk (it sat precipitously close to the frosted glass windows spanning the tops of the locked doors) and walked quickly and quietly back down the hallway toward my room. I naively hoped that whoever was shuffling around outside would just pass right by, not recognizing that the adjacent room was occupied.

  Trying the door to the closet, I realized my trust in the incompetence of my fellow man was misplaced. Locked. Just like it was supposed to be.

  The hallway dead-ended in a glass block wall that allowed the ghost of daylight in, but not a view of the grounds below. No way out that way. The bricks were too thick, and I couldn’t see how far it was down, even if I could break them. I turned back toward the rec room and my eye caught on the sign adorning the door frame to my cell: McKnight, Michael. 1F, 132W. First floor, West wing, room 132. Now those codes on the log made sense.

  Shit. Now those codes on the log made sense. The last new intake was on this floor, East wing. Room 126. If he did have the disease, he was as loose as I was, and very close. I was starting to grow… concerned.

  I walked slowly back to the rec room, putting each foot down slowly on the marble tile, trying to mute my progress as much as possible. The A-team theme song continued to infuse the room with an audible sense of absurdity, and I resisted the ludicrous urge to join in as I evaluated the windows, judging their suitability for an escape route. Unfortunately, owing to my home’s unique internal security features, the windows were barred, and the glass was unbreakable.

  As I scanned the room frantically, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t hear anything from the hallway, and for a moment thought that the potential danger had passed. It was a fleeting moment.

  Our tenuous calm was shattered by a pounding from the hallway on the doors to the room. Delivered in the same implacable cadence as the hammering I had heard when I first awoke, a body was being slammed with considerable force against the gateway to our temporary sanctuary. A-team didn’t like this new development, and he loudly shrieked his objection.

  Distraught, he shot up from his crouch behind the sofa and bolted to the doors, frantically making a play for the deadbolt. Bolted to the ground in shock like a piece of loony-bin furniture, I watched, unable to move. I couldn’t believe my eyes; there was no way to get between him and the doors, and no way to stop him from damning us both.

  He struggled with the locking mechanism for a split second, and yanked on the brass handle at the same time the doors were being shoved inward from the other side. His foot caught in the corner of the rapidly opening door. He fell to the floor awkwardly, still wailing his displeasure.

  Our guest stood in the doorway, illuminated by the light from the barred windows.

  I dropped instinctively to a crouch behind the desk, which blocked his view of me but afforded me a sheltered observation of our new friend. Too stunned to move, and with no chance to impede his progress into the room, I stared.

  His skin had a light gray cast to it, and his face, fixed in a rictus of what could only be described as ravenous hunger, with the mouth slightly agape, and the cloudy eyes unblinkingly focused on A-team, wore no expression found on a living man. He was dressed in white pants and a white shirt, both articles straining to cover his massive girth. A bite wound adorned his massive neck, with the remnants of a crude bandage hanging lazily from his collar.

  It was Conan.

  His white canvas sneakers, one of which was stained
with a dark red fluid, stood awkwardly cockeyed to one another, as if the two were acquainted but had never formally been introduced. He didn’t pause when his gaze fixed on A-team; his massive bulk simply fell heavily on the hapless lack-wit with a speed not befitting his shambling gait.

  A-team screamed once, before the creature brutally severed his jugular vein with his teeth and tore into the tissue around his neck, pulling skin from flesh as blood poured onto the floor. His jaw moved slowly as he chewed the first bite, blood trickling down the side of his jaw, eyes staring forward and unblinking, hands pressing down on the still-twitching shoulders of A-team.

  “Fuck. That.”

  Conan looked up, dull glazed eyes searching slowly for the source of the distraction.

  Had I said that?

  Shit. That was genius. I ducked my head and cowered behind the nurse’s station, hoping that I had hidden myself quickly enough. Fearful and confused, I listened intently for the sounds of a shuffling approach.

  Then a moan and the sound of sniffling, like the thing had a cold. Then nothing. Could these things smell? Like a dog? For several long seconds I waited, holding my breath. I knew that if I moved, if I even twitched, I’d meet the same fate. My neck itched suddenly, anticipating dull incisors pressing into my arteries.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I heard the horrific sound of Conan returning to his meal. Like a large dog gnawing blissfully on a bone, the gruesome sounds of flesh being sloppily pushed into an open mouth reached my ears clearly. The blood pooled across the floor, and I stared at its spreading stain as it intruded into my space, making its way toward me under the desk. There was so much blood.

  My head split in two, fire from inside cracking my skull like a hammer blow to the forehead. Pain ripped through my consciousness.

  Maria’s face was suddenly before me, her mouth and eyes bearing the vacuous look of that thing on the other side of the desk, as she leaned toward me in a crude semblance of a lover’s embrace. My hand was on something: a flashlight dropped under the desk. How did I miss that?

  I was on my feet, and in the distant clouded vision of my mind’s eye, I saw that I had been discovered. Maria’s ID badge, still fashioned to her lapel, flashed in front of my eyes. Her eyes, unblinking, stared at me with no light of recognition as she came for me. The flashlight came up. The face I no longer recognized disappeared in an explosion of color. It was suddenly dark, and I was alone.

  Again.

  Chapter 3

  The words on her badge were stenciled into my awareness as I struggled against the darkness. Starling Mountain. For the second time in the last two hours, I woke up. This time, I was sprawled in a pool of blackened, sticky blood, with the name of Maria’s employer barely and inexplicably beating out a crushing headache for dominance of my skull.

  I hadn’t been out long. Light still streamed across the floor, casting shadows against the far wall and highlighting my unique predicament.

  Conan lay atop my legs, his massive, crumpled torso trapping my feet, his head laying inert against the cool tile of the floor. A large flashlight was on the floor next to my hand, slick with blood and other matter.

  I gently probed my head, feeling through my overgrown hair for contusions or bumps that would explain my nap, but I discovered nothing. I looked back down at Conan, slowly and laboriously removed a foot from beneath his massive chest, and rolled his weight off of my legs.

  As the body flopped to the floor, the head pivoted to the side, allowing a glimpse of the trauma that had felled this tree of a man. He bore a massive head wound on the left side of the head.

  This was too much. I must have blacked out when he attacked me, either from fear or exhaustion, or both, but still managed to hit him hard enough to drop him. But why did I remember seeing Maria’s face? A voice that lived in a foggy corner of my mind was whispering to me, but I suppressed it.

  Even if the voice was right, and I was imagining everything, even if this wasn’t real, even if, as I lay here, feeling the pain, staring at the blood, I was in my cot, back in my room, doped up on meds, I lost nothing by surviving the hallucination. I lost everything if it was real, and I did nothing. I shook my head.

  Escape first, existentialism later.

  Rising slowly and shakily to my feet, I stuck the flashlight into the pocket of my standard-issue scrubs, and moved to the doors leading to the exit hallway. I was dizzier than a drunken sailor at the end of three days’ leave, and the room spun until I managed to grab hold of a desk for several minutes. This was really bizarre.

  No head wound, but I was blacking out and getting dizzy? Either I was really crashing hard from being doped up, or I was as crazy as they said I was.

  Looking down at the crumpled bodies before me, I decided to reserve judgment for a later date.

  The passage to the front exit stretched in front of me; corridors to more rooms extended to either side. I stared towards the exit, to the Plexiglas antechamber, and tried to make out the movement I could see in the distance. I looked to either side hallway, but discarded them as an escape option, the corridor to my left dead-ending in a wall past several rooms, the corridor to my right culminating in a stairwell, unpromisingly lacking the magic red Exit sign that I was searching for.

  Nope, no doors to the outside that way, my friend, and it was the greener pastures of the good outdoors I was headed to right now. As I moved toward the security room, a fire extinguisher hanging from the wall caught my attention, and I ripped it from its mounting bracket. Oh, yeah. Now you’re a bad ass.

  In my movies, I always seemed to find a grenade launcher, a man sized pistol, or a shoulder mounted tank at the last (and most opportune and convenient) moment. Like during a romantic dinner, or while on the john. No such luck today. I guess if I want some help, I need to write it in to the script. The little voice in the back of my mind tried to add to that thought, and I heard amused chuckling sound from the recesses of my brain.

  As I approached the plastic chamber, I could see through the open exterior doors that there were definitely people moving around outside, some of them in the white uniform of the facility, some in street clothes. They were all moving very, very slowly. Either very unconcerned, or very sick. I wasn’t liking my odds on it being the former.

  While I still couldn’t bring myself to buy into the story on the news, the pictures made for a compelling case of some seriously f’d up individuals on the outside. But there still had to be a better explanation for this than reanimated corpses. Rabies, maybe? People act weird all the time-it doesn’t take some sort of zombifying plague to cause that, right? More likely a whole shit load of people just got their tax bills or their alimony was due or something.

  Tax bills. Definitely. I could stick with that for comfort’s sake. For now, at least.

  I half-heartedly checked the door to the guards booth to my right which, naturally, was locked. Not only locked, but keypad controlled. I needed a code. I glanced back toward the rec room; I could ask Conan, but I doubted he’d be much help. I checked the door to the antechamber on a whim, but no go on that front either. How much did I want to go outside anyway, given that it looked from here like at least twenty of those things were wandering in the yard? I walked back to the crossroads between the hallways, contemplating my next step.

  Why had Starling Mountain come to mind? I know Maria worked there, but what the hell did that matter? She had worked there for years before it happened, and I never gave it much thought. Despite the many discussions we had about her work, I really didn’t have a good idea what she did there. So why wake up with it in my head after beating a zombie to death.

  I just used the word: zombie.

  Jesus, I was crazy. No other excuse. I chuckled to myself. At least I least I was where I belonged.

  The place was so damn quiet, especially since I had lost my theme-song soundtrack, that at first, I thought I was hearing things. From the hallway to the right, I thought I heard the faint sound of voices. Half-
believing I made them up in my desire to normalize this oh-so-fucked up situation, but for lack of a better option, I moved cautiously down the hall to investigate. I stepped carefully to avoid the squelching sound my blood-soaked sneakers were making on the well-polished tile floors.

  Definitely voices; real, live voices too. Not moaning or shrieking or an imbecile humming television theme songs. Sounded like two people having a conversation. I moved to the outside of the room and looked through the observation glass in the door. Sure enough, two men, seated in chairs facing a television, were tuned to the cable news. An anchor was interviewing a disheveled older gentleman in a uniform of some sort. The volume was up high enough to carry into the hallway.

  The door was closed and latched, but unlocked, and moved easily enough when I depressed the latch that I could push it open with a toe and step in without calling attention to myself. Against the wall to the right, a chair lay overturned, and a remote control lay broken on the ground, having apparently fractured when it hit the floor.

  Suddenly, a thought that should have come much earlier: Where had Conan come from? And why had he stayed when everyone else had fled?

  I instinctively stepped backward, and my foot caught the leg of the overturned chair, slamming the back of the chair against the wall. The two men jerked, as if a noose around their necks had been pulled abruptly back, the spell of the television broken; their heads turned toward me, almost in unison.

  He hadn’t stayed, I realized too late. He had been left. Along with these two.

  I backpedaled too fast and tripped, sprawling on my back in the hallway. I scrambled to my feet, as the creature on the left rose from his chair and shambled to the doorway, and his companion simply crawled over the back of his chair, sending he and the chair to the ground in the process. They each bore hand-cuffs that at some point been attached to the wooden chairs, but which now hung loose from their graying wrists. I caught the name on the breast pocket of the guy on the left: it was Mr. Hickman.