by Munson, Brad
And again – God, the smell.
It wasn’t hard to clear the room, not even terribly dangerous. The gunfire and bladework ended in less than five minutes, and the team was free to move carefully into treatment areas two-by-two, checking each room, eliminating threats. It was almost businesslike, in a sad way. It was something all of them, even the new members of the team, had done many times before.
It got bad, really bad, only when Kline called out to her.
“Ma’am!” he said, and she heard his call through the open air and through her comm unit with only the tiniest lag time. “You better come see this. One more room to clear.”
She moved quickly through the door marked TREATMENT AREA, past the already cleared spaces, to a single door at the back of the hall where Kline and the rest of her team were waiting. The door was a flimsy hollow-core made of blonde plywood. The plastic panel mounted on the wall next to it said BREAK ROOM, STAFF ONLY.
A hand-written sign was taped to the door itself. It read SURVIVORS INSIDE. KNOCK IF YOU CAN READ THIS.
Castillo looked at her people and wiped the sweat off her forehead. The others looked back at her, waiting for a cue.
She didn’t speak. She just put out a hand, made a fist, and knocked on the door: rat-tat-a-tat-tat...tat tat! The classic “shave and a haircut” that no shambler or sprinter could possibly execute.
Nothing. Not a sound.
Lassiter cleared her throat. “Do you think there could—”
“Shut it,” Castillo said, listening as hard as she could. There was no sound at all, no sense of movement. She took a step back and looked at Kiley, the largest man still on the team. “Kick it open if you can,” she said, and raised her weapon. The rest did the same.
Kiley set himself in front of the door, took a breath, and kicked it, flat-footed, as hard as he could. The door cracked down the middle with a tremendous crash, but it didn’t swing open. They could all see through the gap he had created: more furniture had been stacked against the door. An effective if crude barricade.
“Kline,” she said, “Help Kiley. Push it open, but go slow.”
They put their shoulders into it. The others ranged around them, picking different angles, ready to shoot at anything that appeared in the growing gap. The broken hinges and the carefully arranged wreckage beyond groaned and shrieked as they pushed, but it moved, slowly, until the opening was big enough for a single man to enter.
“Enough,” she said. They pulled back, panting.
Waiting.
Castillo could hear nothing but silence inside. Silence and the powdery shadows that came from a single source of light – a window, she guessed, at the far side of the room, high enough to be safe.
She thought it through. If there were shamblers inside, the noise of their entry should have jolted them from hibernation. But there was nothing. If there were somehow survivors, nearly a year after the hospital had sent out its last emergency-radio transmission, they should be rushing forward and cheering. But still: nothing.
The silence chilled her more than the sight of the shamblers.
“I’ll take point,” she said. The others nodded. Castillo stepped forward, careful but determined, and entered the break room.
She stopped five feet inside. That was as far as she needed to go.
There were fifteen of them. Humans, not shamblers or sprinters. They were all sitting on the floor, leaning against the walls, dressed in identical scrubs that seemed oddly unstained, almost clean.
Every body was wasted away, nothing but bones and a brittle shell of desiccated skin that was beginning to crack with age. There were no wounds on most of them. No splattered blood.
They had died of starvation or thirst or both, months earlier. All but the last three, the ones nearest the windows. Those three each had careful, almost precise cuts across their throats from one side of the jaw to the other. Self-inflicted. Expertly done.
Castillo stared at them a moment longer. Not self-inflicted, exactly, she corrected herself. Voluntary. The man on the far right, a middle-aged fellow who would have been stout in life, with a fine head of steely hair, had taken care of the other two, then slit his own throat as well. The scalpel was still in his motionless hand. It rested on the strangely clean floor, right where it had fallen in the last moments of his life.
She had no trouble reconstructing the scene. The last of them had barricaded themselves in the lunch room, thinking it was only a matter of time before help would arrive. They were careful with whatever food there had been in the cupboard and refrigerator. They had somehow acquired plenty of clean scrubs, and water didn’t seem to have been a problem. Piped down from the tank on the roof, she guessed. Plenty to go around. So they laundered and cleaned and kept things civilized, while the shamblers filled the ER beyond their door, and the infected roamed free in the devastated world outside their window.
You did good, she told them. You were smart. You didn’t fall apart. You didn’t start feeding on each other, you didn’t let yourself go crazy. You just waited, exactly as you were supposed to. You just waited … and we never came.
We let you down.
There was nothing worth salvaging in here, she thought. Obviously. They had used or eaten everything they had and stretched it as far as they could. All they could do …
Castillo faltered. She lowered her head and pushed a tear off her cheek with the heel of her gloved hand. “So sorry,” she said. “We ...”
She couldn’t finish. Castillo forced herself to stand tall, squared her shoulders, and turned back to the gap in the barricade.
The five remaining members of her team were waiting impatiently outside. She could see they were getting jumpy. “Well?” Lassiter said, ready to move in.
“Nothing there,” she said. “Seal it up.”
Lassiter looked baffled. “But we might—”
“Nothing there,” Castillo said sharply, and skewered the younger woman with her look. “Seal it up.”
Lassiter took a full step back. “Yes, ma’am,” she said almost breathlessly. “Sealing it up.”
While she and Piper took pains to restring the chain and weld it in place, Castillo moved back from the door and took the others with her, stopping a few steps away from the door to the break room and speaking in a low, determined voice. “So: McCartney and Lassiter are going after the portable x-ray unit in Radiology, on Two. Piper and Kline, you two take the third floor. I’ll work with Kiley on the fourth.” Because O’Toole is dead was the unspoken part of that sentence, but they all heard it.
Because O’Toole is dead.
McCartney and Piper straightened up. She turned to them and Piper said, “We heard. We’re on it.” They stored the last of their gear and turned away, heading for the staircase. Getting the heaving light tree up two flights would be a pain in the ass for each of the two-person teams, but they all knew it would be worth it. Darkness was the enemy. Light was a weapon.
“Slow and easy,” she reminded them as they moved away. “Back in the lobby in one hour.” She knew how unnecessary it was, but she couldn’t stop herself. “They could be anywhere. They’re waiting.”
She was lucky, she knew, that no one said, We know that, Angela. Shut the hell up. But they didn’t. For some reason she couldn’t quite understand, they still respected her.
Each of the teams went their separate ways without another word.
*****
McCartney had always been bad with maps. He was great with directions, rarely got lost, but maps were just gibberish to him, random lines scratched on a scrap of paper. Maybe that was why – even after all the drilling and orientation – he told Lassiter to turn right instead of left as they entered the second floor from the staircase, and walked them straight into hell.
Lassiter had her doubts, but they had agreed that McCartney, all of six months older than she was and
a former hospital orderly, should be the point man on this excursion. Besides, she was concentrating on towing the heavy and uncooperative light tree along with them, and getting it up the staircase had been no easy task. Like dragging a wheelbarrow, she thought as she dragged. But their goal was clear: the Radiology Lab, the portable x-ray machine, and all the supplies that went with it.
She hauled the light for a few yards, then muttered under her breath and stomped the switch mounted on the base. It sizzled roughly as light exploded, but his time she had her wraparound sunglasses in place before the bulbs flared so painfully.
McCartney was already at the thick security door at the end of the hall. There was a plastic sign on the wall next to him that read SPECIAL CLEARANCE REQUIRED, and he was using the butt of his bladed pike to slam at the security-card lock that held the door shut.
“David,” Lassiter said. “Wait a second, I think—”
One hard stroke popped it off. The door itself unexpectedly unlatched and swung open, and McCartney lunged back and brought his gun up, expecting a stinking tide of shamblers to come at him the way they had at O’Toole.
But nothing moved. Not at first. They both stood stock-still, barely daring to breathe, as the door swung open and a single horror shambled into view.
The creature had been a woman in her twenties when alive. Now it was just a twist of flesh and scar tissue propped up on two staggering, unsteady legs. Its eyes had melted away. Its hair was a pasty mass that crawled down one side of her raddled face. The opposite ear was missing entirely. It had only a single arm, and only two hooked and trembling fingers at the end of that slowly convulsing wrist.
Lassiter had never seen anything as awful before – not even after a year of looking the infected square in the face.
“Oh,” McCartney whispered, more to himself than anyone else. “Oh, fuck.” He shot the shambler in the head – a single round that entered its cheek and exited at the base of the neck. The force of the close-range round spun it to one side; it bounced off the door frame and fell to the linoleum inside the treatment room, out of sight.
They could both sense movement inside now. They knew they had to investigate.
“How … how could it look so bad?” McCartney asked in a low, unsteady voice. “How could it even keep moving?”
“I have no idea,” Lassiter said as they moved slowly though the wide, broken door and into the room beyond.
The answer waited for them there, on a huge sign, almost wall to wall, that read FRANKLIN BONNER REGIONAL BURN & WOUND CENTER, and the line underneath, Made Possible by Your Generous Donations to the Roland T. Bonner Memorial Fund.
“Oh, shit,” McCartney said. “A burn ward.”
“We went the wrong way,” Lassiter said. “This isn’t the Radiology Lab”
“No shit.”
The noise and movement had awakened the others. Now they were wandering in from the far corners of the room, from the smeared windows that provided the gray illumination in the room, from the beds where they had rested, waiting for new victims. Fifteen, maybe twenty in all.
None of them should have been able to move.
Two of them fell to the floor when they tried to stand. Their leg bones and knees had been burned away before they had become infected; Morningstar had stopped the decay – as it did in all corpses – but had done nothing to restore their wasted and brittle bodies. Lassiter could hear the dry-wood snap! of their skeletons as they fell, could see the blackened splinters thrusting through the papery skin.
And still they moved. Still they came on, driven by the virus that wanted only to spread, spread.
One pulled itself forward on the stumps of its knees. Two other dragged themselves towards Lassiter using only the scarred-over palms of their hands. One had a face that was all exposed cheekbones and teeth, what looked like endless teeth that seemed to crawl all the way down its throat. Another, just emerging from a corner, was only a cratered torso and a half-collapsed head. All it could do was roll towards them, its nearly toothless jaw working and hissing as it tumbled and pushed and turned against the floor, its own gore leaving a sticky trail as it advanced.
If there had ever been any doubt about how little brain and tissue was required to reanimate a corpse, they had their answers now. Even a skull that was half-gone, even if it was connected to nothing more than a few strands of nerves and muscles … that was enough. The virus was endlessly hungry, absolutely determined. Leave anything in place, and it would come back to life. It would live again to kill again.
It should have been easy to put them down, Lassiter knew. They moved with almost absurd slowness; the scavengers could have escaped them at a slow walk. But they had been human once. Humans in horrible pain, cheated out of normal lives long before Morningstar came to America. And now …
“Fuck,” McCartney said softly, as if it was wrong to speak loudly in this place. “Fuck.”
Lassiter was the first to shoot. She put a round into the nearest one, a shambler who had been an old man in life, his chest nothing more than a caved-in mass of stringy scar tissue. Behind him was a one-time soccer mom whose glorious head of russet hair had somehow escaped her injury; it was still carefully tied back and smooth as fine silk, though the right side of the face below had melted away, leaving long tear-drops of flesh the color of candle wax, and a lipless mouth with a single, curved tooth.
That one was the target of Lassiter’s second shot. The sound of it seemed to release McCartney from his paralysis, and he began firing as well. The shambler with one leg, lost above the hip. The two crawlers. An armless creature who was already doomed: Its mouth was sealed shut by its wounded flesh, but still it came to them, compelled by the virus, still struggling to spread its infection.
With every creature he put down, McCartney took another step back, closer to the door. Lassiter stood her ground instead, but she stopped cataloging, stopped looking at the nightmares that lurched and tottered out of the shadows and just put them down, put them down, put them down.
The rolling torso was the last. The hardest. McCartney had already backed out the entrance to the Burn Ward, was already standing in the center of the corridor beyond and staring at the door he had broken open, while Lassiter forced down the bile that was writhing in her throat, lowered the muzzle of her M4 until it almost touched the twisted flesh of the creature’s bobbing forehead … and fired.
The room was cleared. They had done their job.
She closed her eyes for a moment and then turned back to the entrance. They still had to get the x-ray machine and supplies. She would have to chew McCartney’s ass for getting them lost in the first place, they’d have to work together to get the damn machine down to the loading dock, even if it did have one of those stair-climber things that—
She looked around just in time to see a shambler in a nearly immaculate white short-sleeved shirt come up behind McCartney and bite him, deep and long, in the nape of his neck. McCartney yelped as much in surprise as pain, lunged forward and spun around.
The shambler was wearing a necktie. His trendy eyeglasses were still in place. He had a name plate on the breast pocket of its shirt that read STEVE.
Without thinking, McCartney pistol-whipped the creature with the butt of his M4. It spun away and fell to the ground with a splat, and its killing wound was visible for the first time: The back of its neck was a sticky tangle of blackened, gummy tissue. Obviously the shambler who found him had done exactly what Steve had done to McCartney: come up behind him, bitten him once, and moved on.
McCartney shot the shambler in the back of the head at such close range it turned Steve’s skull to mush. But the damage was done.
McCartney had been bitten. He was infected.
He turned back to his partner, white-faced and panting. “You don’t have to do it,” he said. “Really, you don’t. Just leave me here. Let me turn. I’ll lock myself in the b
urn ward, you don’t have to do anything.”
“I can’t do that, David.”
“You can. You can just let me alone. You—” His breath hitched. He caught a thread of drool as it leaked out of the corner of his mouth. It was happened very quickly, Lassiter realized. Maybe from the depth of the bite, or its location, right at the base of the skull. Like a power-injection of Morningstar, straight to his brain.
“We have to clear the building,” she said, though she still didn’t raise her weapon. “I can’t leave you for the next crew to—”
“You can!” he shouted. “You absolutely can!”
“No.”
“YES!” He lunged for her, arms up and fingers like claws. In that instant she didn’t know if it was the virus or just his desperate need not to die quite yet, not yet, though he knew it was only a matter of moments away no matter what.
Her M4 came up almost on its own, and she shot David McCartney, her partner, her buddy, the guy she played poker with, the guy who flirted with her, the guy who had a girlfriend named Sally waiting for him back in a cottage they’d fixed up together, the guy who hated spaghetti but loved homemade ravioli …
She shot him in the eye and he fell hard, like a sack of meat dropped from a two-story window.
She didn’t look at the body again. She walked past it, past the shambler who had bitten him, down the long hallway past the light tree to the now-obvious door to the Radiology Lab at the far end. She kept her eyes moving, kept listening hard, but there were no signs of other shamblers, no hint of movement at all. She almost didn’t notice the sign on a final side-door that read STEVEN CARMICHAEL, CHIEF RADIOLOGIST.
“Thanks for nothing, Steve,” she muttered as she passed it. “I appreciate you going down with the ship and all, but Jesus, dude. Terrible timing.”
The door to the Radiology Lab was wide open. The room inside was deserted. It took her all of ten minutes to find the portable x-ray machine that was stored there and to load every scrap of supplies and equipment she could find onto a second rolling platform that she found in the janitor’s closet just down the hall.
