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

by Kinney, Matthew

  “C’mon, we’ll show you.”

  The two siblings ran out into the corridor, and Michael followed.

  “Watch for pedestrians!” Jack yelled.

  “Is that okay?” Michael’s mother asked, concerned.

  “Some of us try to give kids a little leeway around here,” Jack said. “Most of them have been through hell.”

  “Do they have family here?” the woman asked.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that,” Jack replied. “Their mother’s recovering from some sort of breakdown. She was in pretty bad shape for a while, but she seems to be snapping out of it. She just recently moved into our general quarters, but we’ve been trying to keep an eye on her, just in case.”

  “What’s her story, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Her name is Cheri, and she had to empty a clip into her infected husband’s head to protect their kids.”

  “I can see how that would stick with you for a while,” Jessica said.

  “She’s been through a lot,” Jack said, “and to make it worse, she had an ex-boyfriend who was bothering her, though that problem has been resolved. She was at one time the fiancée of one of my employees, a man named Eric. She dumped him more than a decade ago, but Eric never seemed to get over her. I guess he was hoping to get back into her good graces by rescuing her. At least he had the sense to bring her back here for treatment.”

  “Is Eric helping with the kids?”

  Jack laughed. “Eric doesn’t help with anything. He’s a pain in the ass; excuse my French. Fortunately for us, his mouth got him a one-way ticket out of here with the military. Apparently he convinced someone high up that he knew a lot more about aviation than he really did. They took him away, thinking he was a pilot.”

  “You didn’t tell them any differently?” she asked.

  “Lady,” Jack said, “if you knew Eric, trust me, you would have done the same thing.”

  The woman smiled and said, “I’d be happy to keep an eye on Cheri. It’ll give me something to keep my mind busy.”

  “Come on. I’ll take you over to meet her,” Jack said, leaving the room. He knocked on the next door, and when Cheri answered, Jack introduced Jessica to her.

  Cheri was polite, but distant, which seemed to be normal for her since the incident.

  “Well, I guess I’d better get settled into my room,” Jessica said after it was obvious that Cheri wasn’t going to say anything more. “I’ll be right next door if you need anybody to talk to.”

  “Thanks,” Cheri said, managing a small smile before going to look out the window.

  Jessica and Jack walked back out, and Jack thanked the woman.

  “It’s good to know there will be someone nearby at least,” he said to her.

  “I’m happy to help,” Jessica said. “I won’t smother her, but I’ll make sure to check on her now and then.”

  “Perfect,” Jack said, thanking her again before heading back downstairs.

  ~*~

  Bull leaned his chair back against the wall, feeling calm after taking a second pain pill.

  Hawk, on the other hand, was getting anxious for another cigarette. He got up to pace then talked to Debbie for a while, his hand unconsciously going to his pocket again. Pulling out a cigarette, he began to roll it between his fingers.

  “Do you know what time it is?” he asked the RN.

  She told him and added, “Just about time for me to go on break. Marla should be here any minute.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “At least I had someone to talk to with you here.”

  “You don’t want to talk to Marla?” Debbie asked. “Most guys love to talk to her, though they mostly just stare at her.”

  “I tried talking to her,” Hawk said. “It hurt my brain.”

  Debbie laughed. “Try working with her sometime.”

  Marla had only kept her job at the hospital because she had been dating the administrator. Rumor had it that she’d used similar tactics to get through school and to pass the exam needed to become an RN. It was a bone of contention with all the other nurses who had worked hard to get their degrees. Since Marla knew less about nursing than the CNAs did, it was rare that she was allowed to handle patients on her own. Normally, the other RNs handled anything difficult and just allowed Marla to keep an eye on the patients when it was her turn.

  Hawk and Debbie both turned to look when they heard the stairwell door open. Instead of Marla stepping out, it was Moose.

  “I’m here to take over,” he told Hawk, glancing at Debbie before looking down the hallway. “Marla’s not on duty?”

  “Any minute now,” Debbie said, barely refraining from rolling her eyes.

  “I’m going to go have a smoke,” Hawk said.

  “I’ll meet you up there when Marla shows up,” Debbie told him.

  “I’ll wait for you. I’d love the company,” Hawk said, giving her a smile.

  A few minutes later, the stairwell door opened again, and Marla stepped out, looking confused.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, flustered. “I totally forgot that the patients are on the fifth floor now, and I got off on the third floor. I walked into a room, and there was no patient, but this guy was in there and we chatted for a while, and then I remembered, oops, I should be on duty now, so here I am.”

  “Here you are, and here I go,” Debbie said. “I’ll be back in half an hour. You shouldn’t have to do much unless the new patient calls for you.”

  “We have a new patient?”

  “In there,” Debbie said, pointing toward the room that the two big bikers were guarding. “I’ll change his IV bag when I get back, so don’t bug him. We’re trying to let him sleep.”

  Marla turned to regard Moose and Bull. “Why are you guarding him?” she asked the bikers.

  Bull’s eyes had started to drift shut, and he jerked awake at the sound of the woman’s voice.

  “They found him under that collapsed office building. They couldn’t put him in quarantine because he’s all banged up,” Bull said.

  He stood to try to shake off the drowsiness, but he wasn’t having much luck. Hopefully he could pass off his stupor as lack of sleep, but he was worried that Moose would see his eyes and know that he was on something. Then again, Moose wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Hawk, on the other hand, would know, but if he could catch a quick nap while Hawk was gone, he thought he might be all right by the time the other biker returned.

  “I’m going to sit inside the room for a while,” he told Moose, knowing that it was dark. “I can keep a better eye on him that way.”

  “Good idea,” Moose said. “I’ll stay out here so we’ll have the inside and the outside of the room guarded.”

  Bull blinked, not sure exactly what that meant, but he dragged his chair into the room and placed it against the far wall. Sitting down, he closed his eyes immediately.

  ~*^*~

  ~20~

  Lansing, Michigan

  It was almost forty-five minutes before Snake got the call from Wrench.

  “Dude, where you been?” Snake said, impatiently. He was watching the dark clouds that were moving in, and he didn’t want to be stuck outside in the rain.

  “Sorry, Boss. Would you believe we couldn’t find a single phone book in the entire hospital? We finally had that computer geek get us some directions online, and there are actually a couple generator stores that carry our model. The closest one is about six miles west of here. Hopefully they’ll have the parts because the other one is just as far, but it’s to the south, and you’d have to go through the most populated parts of the city.”

  “How’d Jackson get online with no power?” Snake asked.

  “He’s got some kind of a back-up device that he attached to his satellite modem. I guess it runs the system on a battery or something and gives him enough time to save what he’s working on. He was able to surf the net for a parts store. Pretty slick, if you ask me. Lucky we found these guys,” Wrench s
aid.

  “Luck,” Snake scoffed. “Ain’t no such thing.”

  Wrench gave the directions to both places, along with the information on the injector pump. He also included a short shopping list for other parts that he thought may come in handy for future repairs.

  After ending the call, Snake gathered the others together. They were in the parking lot of an electronics store where they hoped to pick up some equipment for the computer room, as well as a TV and some DVDs. They decided that it was going to take too long to cross town if they brought the trucks and the front-end loader along.

  “Someone trade me vehicles. I’m gonna take a small group on bikes,” Snake said. “I want the rest of you to finish up here then take the trucks back. You know the drill. Don’t take any stupid chances, especially not over video games and crap like that.”

  One of the bikers got off his bike and took the truck keys. Snake hadn’t even gotten the bike started before the first raindrops began to fall.

  “Figures,” he muttered.

  Snake and his small crew traveled for miles without incident, although a steady drizzle made the roads slick and hazardous. The clouds seemed so heavy that they threatened to swallow the city. The path they had chosen consisted mostly of highway, and the bikes were maneuverable enough to weave around the abandoned vehicles that cluttered the road. As they got closer to their destination, Snake noticed that the highway had actually been cleared. Vehicles had been pushed to the sides, leaving a wide path down the middle. Unlike in the heart of the city, the few dead they encountered posed little threat. The wide roadway gave them ample time to react when the occasional zombie was enticed their way by the rumbling of the engines. As they neared the western edge of the city, the rain turned to fog, giving the bikers reason to slow down. When Snake got close to the turn-off, he stopped and motioned for the others to gather.

  “We’ll take the next exit,” he said pointing ahead. “Don’t know how bad the dead will be around here, but we’ll be entering into an area of residential and some commercial, so it could get hairy.”

  “Lead the way, Boss,” Wolf said, as they all checked their weapons.

  After leaving the highway, they found themselves on a tree-lined street with large homes that sat back in the mist. Snake stopped to look at the directions he’d written down.

  “Isn’t this area kind of rich for your taste?” Wolf joked, noting the affluence around him.

  “I don’t know,” Snake smiled. “I hear property values are plummeting. I just may be able to find something in my price range before long.”

  Snake pulled the throttle and continued on, turning at the next road. A few high-end shops lined one side of the winding road while a row of upper crust homes graced the other. If it were not for the vehicles scattered haphazardly about and the occasional flesh-eater turning their way, Snake would have thought the area untouched by the apocalypse. Weaving around the serpentine route, he slid to a halt as an imposing, gray, concrete wall appeared out of the mist, bringing the road to an abrupt end. Dismounting his bike, he stared intently ahead. The others walked over to join him.

  “What the hell?” Wolf asked.

  The ends of the wall seemed to disappear into the fog, and Snake wondered how long it was.

  “What do you think it is?” Lindsey asked.

  “Looks like a freeway barrier,” Snake said, looking the structure over.

  “I think they had the same idea we did,” Wolf said. His gaze moved down the wall to the chunks of asphalt that littered the ground. “Except they had better equipment.”

  “It’s good to know that there are other survivors around here who have managed to make a stand,” Lindsey added.

  “Problem is we need to be on the other side of the wall,” Snake said, looking at the map.

  “Maybe we should make sure,” Wolf suggested. “The wall might not go that far.”

  “All right, dudes,” Snake said, “but let’s shut off the bikes and do it on foot, just to check it out. Keep a close eye out for the flesh-eaters. As thick as this fog is, we won’t have much warning if we come upon a mess of them.”

  “Flesh-eaters?” Lindsey whispered to Wombat.

  “He heard Wild Bill say it, and he’s been using it since then,” Wombat whispered back with a grin.

  Lindsey smiled then grew more serious as she looked around in the thick fog. The dead could be anywhere.

  They walked along the wall for a couple hundred feet until they were stopped by a chain-link fence sitting perpendicular to the wall. It was a few feet shorter than the concrete barrier, and it stretched out into an intersecting road for about sixty feet. Large pieces of sheet metal were welded to the posts inside the fence, concealing what was on the other side. They followed the fence until it turned a corner, revealing a large gate.

  “Looks like they ran the walls right down the streets,” Wolf said. “Closed in the whole area. I wonder how big it is.”

  “Hard to tell without going around the whole thing,” Snake said. “This could be the opening. The fenced-off section might act as some sort of a staging area. Wombat, think you could climb that fence and see if anybody’s home?”

  The Australian grasped the fence, but he wasn’t able to get a foothold. He began to pull himself up with his arms, but he was making a lot of noise in the process as his boots banged the fencing into the sheet metal.

  “We need to get you some climbing shoes, dude,” Snake said. “We’ve got to do this quietly. Xena, you’ve got the smallest feet. Maybe you can get a foothold.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” she said, grabbing onto the fence and pulling herself up. She was able to get the toe of her boot into the diamond on the chain-link fence, but not much more. She slipped once or twice, but she was able to regain her grip and pull her way to the top with little noise.

  “I don’t see any openings in the wall,” she called down quietly, “but there is a huge fuel truck parked inside the fenced area.”

  “Hell of a place to park a truck,” Wolf said. “Why wouldn’t they just drive it inside?”

  “It looks like there’s a good-sized hose that comes from the truck then goes over the wall,” Lindsey continued. “If I could just see . . .” A bullet ricocheted off the fence, and a shot echoed throughout the neighborhood.

  “Get down, Xena!” Snake shouted, but Lindsey was already on her way, jumping the last few feet.

  “Son of a bitch,” Wombat said, pulling his pistol out as he looked around.

  They all moved away from the gate and hurried down the wall toward the bikes.

  Another shot was fired, missing Snake’s leg by a couple of feet.

  “Guys, let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” he said as he ran the rest of the distance to the bikes. “I can’t tell if they’re firing warning shots or just can’t see us in the fog, but I ain’t going to stay here to find out.”

  “So much for hospitality,” Wolf said, stomping on his kick start.

  “I think we’ll take our shopping elsewhere,” Snake commented as the bikes started with a roar and disappeared into the fog.

  ~*~

  St. Mary’s Hospital, Lansing

  Dr. Martinez frowned and covered the patient with a sheet.

  “That’s four today,” he said, shaking his head.

  “We did everything possible to keep him alive,” Dr. Sharma pointed out.

  “I know, but these people shouldn’t be dying,” he said. He kept the curtain pulled shut around the deceased man since there was another patient asleep in the room with him. “I never realized how dependent we’ve become on technology.”

  “There are so many things we take for granted,” she said, in agreement.

  “I’ll see about having someone take the body down to the morgue,” Dr. Martinez said after they stepped away from the room. The patients they’d lost that day would all be buried in the cemetery down the street after Snake and the others were back to handle it. Before he could contact someone about removing the
body, the sound of a bell could be heard, letting them know that there was another emergency. Both doctors hurried that way.

  ~*~

  Moose watched the two doctors run down the hall before turning his attention back to Marla. He wanted to start a conversation with her, but he couldn’t come up with a good way to do it.

  She finally spoke first. “Did you help rescue those people this morning?”

  “Sure did,” Moose said. “I’ve been on most of the rescues. I almost died the other day.”

  Marla gasped. “I want to hear all about it!”

  Moose walked over and stood by the desk, telling her about the close call he’d had when they’d trapped a large number of the dead in an old warehouse.

  “You’re so brave!” Marla said when he finished telling his story. “I wasn’t sure we’d be safe here with the zombies outside and all, but now I’m not so worried. I figure with a brave man like you on our side, they’d be crazy to mess with us.”

  Moose looked her up and down. “Speaking of figure,” he said in the most romantic voice he could muster, “if you don’t mind me saying, you’d look even hotter in leather.”

  Marla smiled and leaned closer. “Do you think so?”

  Moose indulged himself in the thought of Marla in leather. Despite his recent conversion to Christianity, Moose still had a weakness for women. Drugs, alcohol, and smoking had been a cinch to quit, but when it came to the opposite sex, Moose struggled with his convictions.

  “I could make you a leather nurse’s outfit,” he suggested.

  Unlike all the other nurses, who wore scrubs, Marla wore retro nurse’s uniforms that were tailor made for her.

  “You can do that?” she asked Moose.

  “It’ll look just like the one you’re wearing but shorter,” he smiled, “and tighter.”

  ~*~

  The front-end loader stopped just short of the SUV that served as a gate. One of the men jumped off his bike and moved the vehicle so that the trucks and bikes could get through. Billy followed with the loader, though he left it just outside the hospital gate in the walled park area.