Dead, But Not For Long (Book 2): Pestilence and Promise

by Kinney, Matthew

  ~*~

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Jack, who was head of hospital security.

  “I know it isn’t, but that’s not going to stop me from doing it,” Keith informed him.

  “Have you missed the fact that the city is under attack?” Jack asked. “Not to mention that there are about a hundred thousand zombies out there. You’d have to make it all the way across town on roads that are choked with cars or that have been outright destroyed by the bombs. How are you planning to do that?”

  “I’ll manage. Snake’s guys do it all the time,” Keith said. He worked at the hospital as a registered nurse, and he’d helped Jack clear the upper floors of St. Mary’s when the outbreak had happened, just nine days earlier.

  “That was before the bombs started falling,” Jack pointed out. “They barely made it back alive last time.”

  “My mind is made up. I need to see for myself that Shanelle’s building was destroyed. For all I know, she could still be there, waiting for help that’s never going to come.”

  “Keith, you’re not thinking straight. Lt. Reynolds already verified that your wife’s building was destroyed.”

  “I need to see it. You know you’d do the same thing.”

  Jack frowned, looking away for a moment. His wife had been murdered years earlier, and she had meant everything to him. He would have done exactly what Keith planned to do.

  “That’s not fair,” he finally said.

  “Sure it is,” Keith replied.

  Snake had been silently following the conversation as he leaned against the wall. The burly, gray-bearded man was the leader of a group of local bikers who had helped to secure the hospital.

  “Keith,” the big biker said, “just hold off until the jets stop pounding the city. We’ll need to do some recon after the bombing stops, anyway, so I could send a few guys out with you. It’s a lot more dangerous out there alone.”

  Keith shook his head, “We have no idea how long the bombing will continue. I’ll take a bike, and I can probably get there and back in a few hours.”

  “Can you ride?” Snake asked.

  “A bicycle,” Keith clarified. “I’ve seen how the dead follow you when you take the motorcycles out. I need to do this without attracting a bunch of attention. Besides, I don’t need anybody slowing me down. No offense, but most of your guys are out of shape and couldn’t keep up with me.”

  A heavily accented female voice said, “I will go. I will not slow you down.”

  The men turned to look at Helga. The Ukrainian woman was six foot tall and almost solid muscle. She could handle herself in combat with the dead better than most.

  “Thanks, Helga,” Keith said, “but this is my battle, and I don’t want anybody else getting hurt.”

  “I go with you,” Helga said, frowning. She continued in her broken English, “I am tired being stuck inside this building.”

  The look on her face said that she dared anybody to tell her she couldn’t go. She looked at each of them then nodded her head in satisfaction.

  “Good. It is settled.”

  Nobody argued.

  ~*^*~

  ~02~

  Demolished Office Building near St. Mary’s

  Chuck opened his eyes, hoping that it had all been a dream. The pain that was shooting through his body let him know that it was real. He groaned and pushed himself into a sitting position, though it took considerable effort to do it.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but it seemed that the periods of unconsciousness were getting shorter each time. Maybe that wasn’t all good, he thought. Being trapped under a collapsed twelve-story building was something that a person might want to sleep through. In fact, the unconscious periods were almost a relief for him. His best guess was that it had been several hours since the jets had bombed his building. It could have been longer, but he really had no way of knowing. The darkness of his tomb was absolute, and he didn’t know if it was day or night.

  During the times he’d been awake, he’d managed to move around enough to explore the boundaries of his vault. He seemed to be trapped in a small area about half the size of his apartment. The fact that he’d come across some of his furniture and other belongings had led him to believe that the building had pancaked with his penthouse suite landing on top. Some of the walls had obviously fallen in on top of the penthouse, covering it completely in rubble.

  Since his apartment was somewhat intact, then he knew it was possible that his stash of supplies was also near. Hoping to find food and water, he’d been spending most of his waking time searching the area. His entire body was covered with scrapes and bruises, and he was sure that he had a broken rib or two. More than once, he had wondered about internal damage that might have been done.

  His injuries had made it difficult to move around, but he had done so anyway, knowing that he would need food and water to stay alive. He had even found a small tunnel in his explorations. Though the pain had been almost debilitating, he’d dragged his battered body through the tight space as far as possible before he’d gotten stuck. He’d been certain that he was going to die, wedged between a collapsed wall and a piece of furniture that had once adorned his living room. The panic he’d felt had taken his breath away, and darkness had encompassed him beyond the physical lack of light he’d already been experiencing. Once he’d calmed down, he’d finally managed to free himself, and had made it back to the open area where he now lay resting.

  The worst part of his situation was not the pain or even the knowledge that he was trapped. It was the sounds of the moans around him. Though he couldn’t see the dead, he knew that they were near. He wasn’t sure if they were somewhere in the rubble with him or if they were outside, waiting.

  Having prepared for almost every catastrophe except for the one that had actually happened, Chuck had thought he was ready for anything. Who would have ever guessed that the end would come in the form of the living dead? When the outbreak had occurred, he’d been prepared to stay holed up in his luxury penthouse suite for as long as was necessary. He’d been told that the jets were going to steer clear of the hospital, so his natural assumption had been that his building would also be spared. He’d been dead wrong.

  There had been others in his building for a while; people who had worked in the offices on the first eleven floors. He had been communicating with a woman named Claire through the vents. When she had told him that they were going to be rescued by those at the hospital, he had not answered, hoping they would think he was dead. He’d had no desire to leave when his penthouse suite had held everything he’d needed to survive. Now, with his building collapsed, he lamented over his decision to stay.

  His fingers brushed against a wooden corner, and he frowned, trying to figure out what it was. A cupboard, maybe? He moved his hands over the wood, trying to find a way to get it open. He was ravenous, but the thirst was worse. The thirst was killing him. After several minutes of futile effort, he leaned back against the wall again in frustration. A loud crash outside made him jump, and for a horrible moment, he was sure the building was compacting even more. It took him a few minutes to figure out that it was a thunder storm. At least it would drown out the sounds of the dead, he thought. Closing his eyes, he drifted off into unconsciousness again.

  ~*~

  St. Mary’s Hospital, Lansing

  Two men opened the gate, allowing Keith and Helga to slip outside on foot as others distracted the undead. Before the gates were even closed, heads began to turn, but the two warriors were fast and deadly. Using a sledgehammer as his weapon of choice, Keith plowed his way down the street, picking off anything that got too close.

  Just yards away, Helga made short work of the dead with her crowbar, careful to stay out of Keith’s way. Once they cleared a path, they quickly left the small horde behind, though more began to emerge from the side streets and alleys to greet them.

  “I don’t want to lead them to my house,” Keith said, pausing to slam the ham
mer through the head of a particularly gruesome-looking dead man. “We’ll cut through a few yards then take the alley to my place.”

  They made it another block before they encountered a problem. There were several zombies lingering in the street, though they hadn’t noticed the two live humans yet.

  Helga began to move forward, crowbar raised, but Keith stopped her with a hand on her arm.

  He picked up a rock and flung it at the stop sign at the end of the street. It took him three tries to hit his target, but once he was sure that he had diverted the attention of the dead, he and Helga hurried across the road and into another yard. Behind the house was an alley, and he was glad to see that it was empty. They quietly made their way down to a house with a small wooden fence around the back yard. The grass was already beginning to grow long.

  Keith eased open the gate then used his key to unlock the back door, shutting it quietly behind them. Before doing anything else, he checked the other rooms to make sure that they were alone.

  “This is a good house,” Helga said, giving her approval.

  “Thanks. It’s been in my family for a long time,” Keith said, walking toward the garage. They stepped inside, but he kept the light off, knowing that it might attract attention. Peeking outside through the windows in the top of the garage door, he could see at least one figure in the street outside, though it was several yards away. Still, the slightest noise would probably be heard through the garage door and would bring curious parties toward the house.

  Keith motioned to Helga with a finger to his lips, letting her know that they had to be silent. He made his way to the back wall where two bicycles hung on hooks. Carefully, he lifted one down and pushed it to her before taking the second one off the wall. He also took a small loop of wire from his workbench.

  When they were back inside the house, Helga looked at the bikes warily.

  “You do know how to ride a bicycle, right?” Keith asked, concerned.

  “Yes. Like riding a motorcycle, except with pedaling. I rode bike when I was a child in Ukraine,” she assured him.

  “Do you know how the gears work?” he asked her, pointing to the handlebars of the bike.

  Her curious stare told him all he needed to know.

  “Why don’t you take this one?” he said, trading her for his beach cruiser. “It only has one gear so all you have to do is stay on it, steer and brake.”

  She looked it over. “It is much like the one I had as a young girl. My mother took it from me because I hit a boy with it.”

  “Intentionally?”

  “Over the head,” she explained.

  “Oh,” Keith said. “Well, I suppose we should get going.” He checked the tire inflation on both bikes and looked over the small repair kit that hung from his bike. Everything seemed to be in order. Taking the wire he’d brought inside, he twisted it around his bike frame, making a loop for the sledgehammer. He checked to make sure the hammer wouldn’t be in the way while in the makeshift holster.

  “This bike — it belongs to your wife?” Helga asked, throwing a leg over the bar and carefully lowering her weight onto the seat. “It may break.”

  “No, it’s mine,” Keith said. “It’s got a heavy-duty frame, and if it’ll hold me, it’ll hold you.”

  Keith weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, though it was almost all muscle. It was the main reason nobody ever teased him about being a nurse, at least not to his face.

  “Wait,” Helga said, looking at him. “Your hair.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Keith asked, reaching up to touch his long braids.

  Helga reached over and grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled it. “This is why I am wearing hat.”

  “Ouch! Okay, I get it,” Keith said.

  Helga pulled her baseball cap off to show him how her long, blond hair had been braided and pinned up on top of her head. She put the cap back on.

  Keith went into his bedroom and came out a few minutes later wearing a knitted cap.

  “My grandma made this for me,” he said, stuffing his braids up beneath it. Helga checked it to make sure none of his hair was hanging down.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Keith asked. “I’ll never forgive myself if you get hurt.”

  “Me? You worry about yourself. I lived on streets for days before I came to hospital,” she scoffed.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  ~*~

  Lindsey carried a tray to a table while Autumn followed with a cup of coffee and a glass of milk.

  “Is this table okay with you?” Lindsey asked the girl.

  “I guess a window view is out of the question,” Autumn said, setting the two cups down.

  Lindsey laughed. There had once been a large window in the cafeteria, but it was now filled in with cinder block, just like all the other windows and glass doors on the first floor. The overhead lights were on in the room, but the generator was on its last legs, so about half of the tables were adorned with lanterns.

  “Maybe we should paint a mural there, so we could pretend to have a view,” Lindsey said. She sipped her coffee and looked around the room. The cafeteria was filled with at least two dozen people, as it was most early mornings, though few of them were hospital employees. Little remained of the hospital staff. There were a few doctors and nurses, one CNA, and Jack, the head of security. The rest had either been killed or had chosen to go to the shelters when they’d been given the opportunity.

  Like some others, Lindsey was wearing scrubs, but not because she was on duty. There was little need for a physical therapist with only a dozen patients left in the building. Many of the survivors were wearing scrubs because there was nothing else available.

  It was hard to believe how much had changed in such a short time. It hadn’t even been two weeks since the plague had hit the hospital, though it had been brewing in the jungles of Colombia for several months. From the little information they’d been able to get on the TV, they had learned that many large cities had been hit, from Canada all the way down to Argentina.

  The plague was far worse than any pandemic previously experienced in recorded history. Besides having a 100% mortality rate, the parasite caused its victims to get back up after they died. Once reanimated, the corpses attacked other humans, spurred on by the tiny parasites that were driven to produce more of their kind. They were extremely efficient and managed to control their human puppets well, though the dead were not as agile as they’d been in life.

  Autumn had taken it all in stride. The girl had already been through a lot, having lost her parents to a car wreck a few years earlier. Since that time, she’d been shuffled from one foster home to another. To make things worse, she suffered from a rare form of cancer. The good news was that she had been given an excellent prognosis. The other bright spot in an otherwise dismal situation was that she had found her niche in the new world. Dr. Doune, who was researching the parasite responsible for the plague, had taken Autumn on as an unofficial assistant, and she loved the work.

  “Can I have my own room now that we’ve got some empty ones?” she asked, adjusting her beanie over her dark brown hair that was just starting to grow back.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Lindsey said to the girl. “We’ll go see what we can find after we eat. My only stipulation is that your room needs to be next to mine.”

  Autumn rolled her eyes.

  “Look, you may be way more mature than any nine-year-old I’ve ever met, but you’re still a child, and you still need some adult supervision.”

  “Why did they move the patients to the fifth floor?” the girl asked, changing the subject.

  “That’s where the ICU is,” Lindsey told her. “They have a lot of specialized equipment up there that would have been hard to move, so it made the most sense.”

  “I’ll bet the patients like all that gunfire from the snipers up there,” Autumn said, clutching her chest as she pantomimed someone having a heart attack. “Most of these guys ar
e pretty sick, right?”

  Lindsey laughed at Autumn’s comment. “Don’t worry. They already thought of that,” she explained. The location that had been chosen on the fifth floor gave the snipers the best vantage point of the parking lot. It had been quickly dubbed the crow’s nest. “The snipers are in the west wing, overlooking the parking lot, so we’ve moved the patients to the back side of the building, mostly in the south wing. The gunshots won’t be any louder to them than they are to the rest of us. And if any shooting has to be done on the other side of the hospital, it can be done from the roof.”

  The remaining patients were all on life support, except for one. From what Lindsey had heard, it was expected that most of them would not survive much longer. The hospital had a limited supply of medications, and those on life support were constantly in danger because of the faltering generator. They’d already lost several patients due to the power outages.

  Autumn made a face after finishing off her glass of milk. It was powdered, and Lindsey knew that the girl didn’t like it, but it was all they had.

  “Dr. Doune is doing a surgery this morning, so I’m bored, but I’ll bet he’s more bored,” Autumn said. “He hates being away from the lab.”

  “At least he’s in surgery,” Lindsey said. “He could be keeping an eye on the patients like Dr. Sharma and Dr. Martinez are doing.”

  “He has to do that sometimes, too, so they can have a break. He hates it, and he says that his talents are wasted on babysitting bedridden patients. He thinks someone else should do that,” Autumn said.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Lindsey asked, standing.

  Autumn walked with her to drop their tray and dishes off at the counter.

  “Let’s go see about that room,” Lindsey said to Autumn.

  ~*^*~