This Dying World: The End Begins

by Dean James

  The room was suddenly quiet again. He took Faith’s warm hand in his own and leaned his head on the mattress next to her. The stillness of the room was only broken by the near hypnotic rhythm of her sleeping breaths, and the beeping that threatened to lull him to sleep earlier.

  Faith was going to be okay, and for the first time that day he was able to let go of his fears. Holding his daughter’s hand, he closed his eyes and slipped into a comfortable sleep.

  **********

  Chris shot up in his chair as a shrill scream echoed through the E.R. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he glanced at the clock. Somehow he managed to doze until the early afternoon. Faith’s forehead was cool to his touch. To his relief, the fever had broken while they both slept. He stood, back cracking as he stretched the stiffness from his joints.

  More screams, this time sounding more distant than before. Chris guessed the screamer was being moved. He figured it was probably a woman in labor or some dumb ass that cut off his own hand with a chainsaw. He turned to sit when every muscle in his body froze. The pop was like thunder in the enclosed building. It was as if someone had dropped a telephone book on the tiled floor.

  Chris knew a gunshot when he heard it.

  He drew his weapon and charged a round in one fluid motion. He crouched down, moving silently to the blue curtain hanging between him and whatever was happening on the other side. He sighted his field beyond the black irons of the pistol firmly seated in his hands. He opened the curtain enough to see a small portion to the left of his room.

  Slowly and methodically he opened the curtain a little more, his weapon sweeping to the right as his field of view widened. The ER was empty. The nurse’s station, normally the center of activity was now devoid of humanity. Phones continued to ring but went unanswered. In a place where people should be buzzing around like a hive of pissed off bees, there was no one.

  Two more quick pops erupted to his right, just outside of his view. He spun in the direction of the sound. He saw the E.R. staff halfway down a wide hallway leading to the main hospital lobby. He leaned his head out a little further and found the source of the gunfire. A Wisconsin State Trooper stood on the other side of the group, still clutching his service pistol.

  “Shit!” Chris said. He holstered his weapon, relieved that no one had seen it. Getting himself arrested for carrying a gun in a hospital would not earn him any points at home. He would have to return his Father of the Year mug that he bought himself at Walmart.

  He stepped into the main room and walked towards the crowd after checking to be sure Faith had not been disturbed. The group was eerily silent, save for a few quiet sobs breaking out here and there. A nursing assistant that had turned to leave was clearly startled at Chris’ sudden presence. He pushed his way through without a word and made for the exit.

  Chris weaved his way through the group, craning his neck to see over the tightly packed gathering. The air was heavy with spent gunpowder. The iron tinged smell of blood filled his nostrils as he approached the center of the crowd.

  His stomach roiled as soon as he came face to face with the grisly scene. Two bodies lay on the floor, their blood merging together in a large pool onto the highly polished tiles. They both wore hospital scrubs, and after a quick double take he realized he knew one of the victims.

  Dr. Urban lay on his side, his face locked in a grimace of pain. Tendrils of red raw flesh hung from his throat, torn open as if an animal had chewed it off. The pink pulpy mess of his esophagus had been pulled through the opening in his throat. The shredded end oozed juices into the bloody puddle.

  Nurse Wolerton, as her name badge displayed, lay next to the doctor’s remains. The hue of her skin was like a gray ash had settled on it. Her mouth was painted with blood, staining her chin and neck with crimson streaks. The front of her blue scrubs was soaked with blood and clung to her body like a wet blanket. A chewed piece of Dr. Urban’s throat remained clenched between her teeth. There was a neat red hole punched into her skull an inch above her left eye.

  “What the hell happened here?” he asked the first person who faced him. She looked dazed, leaving him with little hope that she had the mental faculties to answer.

  “She came out of the room and just bit him!” she answered in a thick Russian accent. “She kept biting! Why would she do that? They were friends! Why would she do that? He couldn’t even scream. Why would she do that?” She shook violently as her voice rose. Chris saw that if she didn’t leave the area soon, the woman was likely to break down into hysterics.

  “Go sit down,” he said, spinning her away from the horror and gently pushing her towards the nurse’s station. He watched as she shuffled away, shaking her head and mumbling to herself.

  “Excuse me officer,” Chris said over the voices of the quickly departing staff. The trooper looked like he was in shock. He glanced up at Chris shaking his head.

  “It’s the damndest thing I’ve ever seen. I shot her. Twice. I know I winged her the first time, but the second was center mass, through her heart. She acted like it was nothing. She should have gone down, but she kept coming at me. She came at me, and she was still chewing!”

  “Drugs maybe? PCP?” Chris asked. His eyes went from the cop to the bodies and back again.

  “I don’t care what she was on, a center mass shot to the heart would have knocked her down. I had to put one in her head before she stopped,” he said, finally holstering his weapon. The officer snapped out of his daze, setting his eyes on Chris. “Who are you anyway?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m Chris Foster. My daughter is sleeping in the other room. I get a little jumpy when I hear small arms close by. In the Army I saw a lot of people do a lot of crazy things, but nothing like this.”

  “Well Mr. Foster, I appreciate everything you have done for this country, but this is a police matter. I’m going to need you to step away now so we can handle this.” The officer started to key up the radio on his chest.

  “If there’s anything I can…” Chris began.

  “Sir, I’m not going to ask you again. Move away or I’ll have to arrest you for impeding a police investigation.”

  Chris put his hands up and backed away. He choked back the urge to remind officer douche nozzle that he was the one that started popping off rounds in a busy hospital. It wasn’t worth the night in jail though, especially since he had already decided to leave anyway. The last thing he wanted was his daughter to wake up to the scene he had just witnessed.

  Faith was sitting up in her bed by the time Chris had returned. She looked more like herself, her pale skin regaining some of its pinkish color. She held out her arms for him to pick her up. He hugged her tight, stroking her hair as he set her down on the floor.

  “Are you ready to go home?”

  “Yes. Can I have McDonalds? I’m hungry,” she said with manufactured sad eyes.

  “Only if you promise not to tell mommy. Now you have to be a good girl, and close your eyes until I say you can open them again. Can you do that?”

  “Like a game?” she asked excitedly.

  “Exactly like a game. If you win, you get to choose anything you want at McDonalds. But if you peek, we’ll go straight home. Understand?”

  “I want chicken nuggets and honey!” she said. Had she not looked so weak, he was sure Faith would be hopping for joy.

  “Okay, let’s get you out of here,” he said.

  Chris wrapped Faith up in one of the heavy blankets from the hospital bed. He took special care to cover her head to try and block her from seeing the horrors outside her room. Faith’s vomit crusted clothes and blanket were bundled and stuffed into a plastic belongings bag. He grabbed the bag and left the room.

  A hushed tension had fallen over the ER as they made his way towards the exit. The staff had slowly begun to return to their duties. Shaky voices answered phones while others tended to the patients that were too sick or injured to flee during the shooting. He caught sight of Nurse Medina pushing a frail old man in a wheelchair dow
n a hallway and out of his sight.

  He walked through the small waiting room on the way to the parking lot. The room that had been mostly empty when he arrived was now packed with grieving ER staff. Some cried, either in groups or alone while others sat in silence, staring at nothing in particular. A small circle had formed in the back corner of the room, whispering silent prayers with bowed heads. He nodded at one of the women silently praying over a rosary before heading outside.

  The cold bit at him as a stiff breeze blew nicotine tinged smoke into his face from the large group of smokers gathered together. He hadn’t smoked in years, but events of the last half hour made him want to ask for a cigarette. He fought off the craving as he quickly made his way to his truck.

  Chris secured his daughter into her booster seat after first covering it with a blanket. He had not had the chance to clean the vomit out of his truck, and now it was frozen in place. He gagged at the smell when he climbed behind the wheel and started his long drive home. He rolled down the windows to wash away most of the stagnant stench. He was almost to the main road before the icy wind forced him to close the windows again.

  “Daddy, I cheated.”

  “What do you mean? How did you cheat?” he asked.

  “I didn’t win the chicken nuggets. I peeked when we left. Was the doctor dead?”

  Chris’ guilt hit him like his wife’s chili, deep in the gut and with lasting effects. He slowed down until he could pull off the road and stop.

  “I wish you didn’t do that kiddo,” he said, looking at her innocent face. “That was a bad thing you didn’t need to see. How do you feel? Are you scared?”

  “No daddy, why would I be scared?” she asked, tilting her head to the side.

  “Well, that can be a very scary thing to see. It’s not meant for little girls, it’s a very grown up thing. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause I’m hungry. I can talk better with chicken nuggets,” she said with a coy smile.

  Chris guilt subsided a little as he laughed. Here he was tallying up the mental health bills in his head for the trauma she had witnessed. There she was blackmailing him into McDonalds.

  “You’re a little stinker aren’t you? How’d you get so smart?”

  “Mommy.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Can you bring Mr. Harper up to his room? I need to catch someone before he leaves,” Rosa said, handing off a clipboard to one of the new interns.

  “Sure nurse Medina! Why not!? Cause I’m not busy or anything!” the young woman snapped, snatching the clipboard from Rosa’s hands. She grabbed the wheelchair without any care for the condition of the old man and marched over to the elevator.

  “Someone forgot to take her anti-bitch pills today,” Rosa said under her breath. She heard a snort behind her. She turned to see Ted Pool, a middle aged maintenance department employee making his daily inspection of the ER equipment. He kept his head down as he passed her, but he wore a smile that threatened to crack his face in two.

  “Busted!” she smirked. “You didn’t hear anything!”

  “No ma’am!” he called back to her.

  By the time she made it back to the ER nurse’s station, the person she needed was nowhere to be found. His paperwork still sat on the desk, along with a prescription that had been sent up from pharmacy just before Jenny tried to eat Dr. Urban.

  She shuddered for the hundredth time since it happened. Sure, Urban was a pompous ass that spent his time screwing every intern and nursing student that walked through the door, but even he didn’t deserve to die like that.

  “Well Mr. Foster,” she said, reading the name on the pill bottle. “I owe you a phone call later.” She stuffed the bottle in her pocket and looked into the waiting room to find a steady flow of new patients.

  “Much later,” she sighed.

  **********

  Patient intake increased steadily as the afternoon wore on into the early evening. The flu appeared to be making a huge resurgence in the area. The hospital was overwhelmed so quickly with flu patients that they put themselves on bypass, accepting only the most critical patients. The rest were diverted to smaller local clinics that could handle a few cases of vomiting induced dehydration.

  Not everyone that came in had a fever though. It seemed that trauma intakes were on the rise as well. They were the region’s only level 1 trauma center. As such, they didn’t have the luxury of sending severe traumas anywhere else.

  On top of the heavy influx of real patients came those that had a very advanced case of hypochondria. They always showed up in droves whenever there was an uptick in any kind of illness. If there was a higher than normal volume of broken arms, there would be an army of nitwits claiming their bones were ready to spontaneously explode.

  Distraction was a fortunate side effect of the pandemonium. The nonstop work allowed the staff to forget the events of that morning and move on as a cohesive group to tend to their patients. There would be time to grieve when they left for the day.

  Rosa was a machine. She was beautiful by any standard, owing her permanent tan to her Venezuelan father and piercing green eyes to her Irish mother. She was also fiercely dedicated to her career, and that day was no exception. She buzzed around the ER the entire day, stopping only once to scarf down a grilled chicken salad and Dr. Pepper, fortified with blessed caffeine.

  Rosa’s marathon shift finally came to an end at 9:30 that evening according to the digital clock in the waiting room. She said her goodnights to her fellow nurses before retreating to her locker. She thought of nothing more than going home and propping her feet up with a beer, pizza, and whatever bad sci-fi flick she could find on Netflix.

  She was halfway to her locker when she saw a single morgue technician stumbling out of a stairwell door near where Dr. Urban had died. He was covered in blood and talking incoherently. Two of his fingers were missing at the knuckles. A deep tear in his throat pumped blood in steady streams into the air. He collapsed on the other side of the hallway, leaving red streaks along the wall as he slid to a sitting position on the floor.

  For the second time that day, the hallway became ground zero as they worked to save the doomed man’s life. Memories still fresh in their minds, the staff worked frantically to stop another of their own from dying in that hall.

  Immediately, Rosa spun on her heels and ran back to the nurse’s station to call surgery. If the man had any chance at all, he would need a surgeon to piece his blood vessels back together again. She started to dial the morgue to find out exactly what happened when a cacophony of screams erupted just beyond her view. She dropped the phone and ran back towards the rescuers.

  She came dangerously close to completely toppling over when she rounded the corner and skidded to a stop. The horror she faced was unlike anything she had ever seen before. Patients and staff alike spewed from the open stairwell, attacking everyone within their reach. They clawed at Rosa’s coworkers like ferocious animals. Their teeth sunk into their victims, tearing chunks of flesh away as if in a feeding frenzy.

  She stood there dumbfounded when she realized that she was witnessing the impossible when Dr. Urban stepped out of the stairwell. His milky white eyes glared back at her through the melee. Bloody froth dripped from his open mouth. His mottled skin bore the bruises of post mortem lividity across his naked body.

  Her bladder emptied itself. He was dead. She knew he was dead. But he was there, staring through her. She wanted to run, but her legs refused to obey. Her worst nightmares could not have conjured up what was before her. This was something reserved for late night horror films, and cheap novels written by gore obsessed weirdoes. Not something that should ever actually stand in front of her.

  Urban shuffled past the bloody frenzy, his bare feet squeaking as they dragged across the tile. He was joined by a woman that appeared as if she had gotten up for a short stroll in the middle of her own autopsy. A rib spreader sat in her chest, the ribcag
e spread wide enough to expose her lifeless heart. Forceps swaying from flaps of skin clanged against the spreader, adding to the horror approaching her.

  She stopped short of fleeing when she turned to see the waiting room bathed in the same carnage. Patients that she had triaged no more than twenty minutes prior were now attacking their own family. Even patients that had been resting in treatment rooms were shuffling out, the same dead milky features in their eyes.

  She heard the dead doctor’s foot squeak behind her, and turned back to see him standing only few feet away. His hands were out, grasping towards her in anticipation. Her breaths came faster, sobbing as her terror drove her to near hyperventilation. She had no direction she could run. She was trapped.

  “No! No! No!” she mouthed, shaking her head.

  Something raked against her foot, drawing her attention downward. She looked on with wide eyed horror as the morgue tech wrapped his icy fingers around her ankle. She kicked at his head as he pulled his mouth closer to her calf. She pulled away with everything she had in her to break free from the dead thing’s grasp. Her shoe hit a bloody spot on the floor. Still firmly in the monster’s grip she had no chance to recover.

  She fell backwards. A bright light flashed as her head landed heavily on the floor. Pain thundered through her skull as it bounced off the floor. Confusing and disconnected thoughts swam across her mind. She was aware of ear splitting screams, but they seemed distant and muffled.

  Her vision doubled and blurred. A tan boot passed within inches of her face. A sharp jolt around her leg jerked her body downwards. She tried to focus though her fogged mind. Lights trailed by as strange fuzzy sights rocketed past. She was being dragged backwards, but her misfiring brain couldn’t register why. She felt a sense of danger, but it was miles away from her thoughts. She instead tried to puzzle together what the strange sounds were that buzzed around in her ears.