by Ben Tripp
“Here I am, talking your ear off,” Vaxxine chuckled. “Your head must be pounding. I’ll stop talking, padna.”
“No, keep telling me about it,” Danny said. Aside from the warm, musical sound of her voice, Danny found Vaxxine’s story interesting on its own merits. Survivors from the urban centers were rare. Most people who outlasted the first month of the crisis were from sparsely populated areas, or fled the cities immediately.
Her head wasn’t hurting anymore, either. She felt much better—even hungry.
Vaxxine continued: “I haven’t talked to a living soul in three weeks, and I shot the last one,” she said. “Cheeky badjohn wanted my gear. I’ve been alone most of the time since spring. I’m not a loner, but it’s the only thing that seems to work, survivalwise. You get into a group and the old saying about ‘you don’t have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun your friend’ kicks in real fast. I’m the one to outrun, see.
“Anyway, I’m there in the hotel, right? And by now I’d got the idea that whatever was happening, it was a chain reaction, like a relay race. Runners would crash into nonrunners, and then the nonrunners would start running. But most of all by late afternoon, they weren’t running anymore. They were just falling down and staying that way, exactly like dead people. After a couple of hours of them not moving, I was pretty sure they were dead. It was quieter inside and outside, and the fire seemed to have gone out, although there were fires all over the city as far as I could see.
“I had to know what was happening, but the phones stopped working. My mobile, I mean. Probably all mobiles. I don’t know if they cut the lines or what, but now all I had was the staff phone. So I rolled on over to the elevators and pressed the ‘down’ button but none of the cars came. I kept pressing the button again and again. Then I went back to the closet and finally got somebody on the phone, one of the laundry ladies from the basement. She was scared to death and didn’t know what was happening either. I asked her if she could come up and see what was amiss with the elevators. She said she was too scared. She wanted me to come down. So I explained my situation. I guess that made her feel like she wasn’t the most-screwed person at the hotel, because she said she’d come up.
“Half an hour later, she was good as her word. Rafaela was her name. She was a big lady and I thought she’d stroke out from climbing the stairs, but that’s how she came. She told me the elevators were jammed with dead people. The whole of the ground floor was jammed with dead people. Living people, too, but they were just standing around the edges in shock or holding the dead if they knew somebody. No one paid attention to Rafaela. There was an automobile went straight through the restaurant. That’s what the smoke was from, she told me. The whole place smelled of smoke, but thank God the fire sprinklers hadn’t gone off, except in the restaurant. Blood all over the place. She said there were so many bodies floating in the swimming pool, she couldn’t see the water.
Rafaela said she had to get back to her sister and nephews and nieces, which meant she was going to have to walk across town. The streets were impassable, right? I mean there were cars and junk all over the place. I begged her to help me get down to the ground level, and she didn’t want to. But I said ‘Just take my chair down and I’ll make my own way.’ So off she went with my fancy wheelchair, which was not lightweight. She went down the stairwell and I listened to make sure she didn’t just drop it off after a couple of floors. It sounded like she took it all the way down.
“I was on the top step of the eighth-floor landing with a cardboard box flattened out like a toboggan. And I started down the stairs. It took me half the damn night, bumping down. Here’s the nasty thing about legs like mine: They don’t work, but they still hurt. I had bruises for the next month. I slid every step on the cardboard, hanging on with both arms to the railing to keep myself from sliding too far at once. But the railing is up here, right? So my arms kept going numb and my hands got so tired I’d have to stop all the time.
“My bam-bam was on fire. I don’t have much padding there, so it was like tapping my tailbone with a hammer every twenty seconds for six hours. Oh, my God. Plus I had a catheter bag and diaper on and it wasn’t going very well. Let’s leave it at that. I even took a nap at one point. Another time, I lost my grip and slid down a whole flight and about broke my neck to go with my back.
“But I made it down by dawn. No windows in the stairwell, so I didn’t even know what time it was except by my phone, and the battery died on that before I reached the fourth floor. But I got to the bottom, and there was my chair with a note on it. ‘Good luck,’ it said. And she’d left a bottle of water on the seat. I never saw Rafaela again, of course.
“I dragged my busted ass into the chair and went through the door into the lobby. Now, I hadn’t seen anybody on the stairs, right? The door was closed and I guess nobody died there. So when I rolled out of the stair hall, I see everybody is walking around. I’m like ‘What the fuck?’ because Rafaela told me one out of two people was dead. But I saw only a couple of bodies.
“Then I realized there was something wrong with these people. They looked sick. There were people with godawful injuries, cuts and smashed faces and the like. All yellow and sick-looking. They were all wandering around. Then I saw not everybody was like that. There were regular people, too. A woman saw me and she was like ‘Oh, God, what happened?’ and I said, ‘Ski accident three years ago,’ which was supposed to be funny. But I guess she meant how did I get there. Anyway, I joined up with some people who were behind the main bar where the TV was, because the brain-dead people couldn’t get back there. They couldn’t do anything. You know, you must have seen it at the same time. One guy said, ‘They’re all retarded,’ and the same woman jabbed him in the ribs and kind of tipped her head at me like I was retarded and he’d hurt my feelings. But he was right. They acted like they were mental.
“I don’t know exactly when the killing started. I mean I can’t remember it clearly. Something changed, and all of a sudden instead of just looking at us, some of the sick people started to go after us, not like they wanted to bite, but more like they needed a hug. I don’t know how else to put it. Then somebody got bitten. It was a man, I think. Not sure. But a minute later, there was complete chaos. I mean, pandemonium. Being in the chair saved my narrow behind. People were struggling all over the place and the zombies came over the bar and started attacking and I fit right under the flip-up section of the bar you walk in and out of. I only had to duck. So I scooted out of there and straight to the supply closet next to the bar and hid myself. For ten days.”
“Ten days?” Danny gasped.
“Ten days.”
By now, there was a greenish cast to the night sky along the horizon; morning was coming. The predawn light revealed a bank of heavy clouds on the horizon. They were driving through relatively open road with the hills on either side getting lower and flatter.
“I hid in that closet like a baby,” Vaxxine continued. “I had a key for those kind of areas, but the closets lock on the outside, not the inside. I jammed a stacking banquet chair under the handle and listened to those obeah freaks thump into the door and watched the handle wiggle for ages and ages that first day. The screams and shouting died out after a while, and then it was just the moaning. That awful moaning. If anybody else was alive, they’d gotten out of the hotel. So I took stock of what I had. I lived on fucking salt peanuts and Coca-Cola for ten days. Poured my piss down a floor drain. It was like the longest commuter airline flight in the history of the world.”
3
The cracked parking lot of the hospital sprouted weeds, the landscape plantings were dead or run wild, and there was a scrum of abandoned cars, police vehicles, and ambulances jammed around the emergency room entrance. These had been attacked long ago. The glass of the vehicles was smashed out of the windows and most of their doors stood open, the interiors weather-stained and gnawed by vermin. The ground-floor glazing had been starred with bullets or stones; the safety glass didn’t shatt
er, but it was damaged everywhere and in some places had been torn out of the frames. In one wing of the hospital there had been a fire, a couple of windows blown out and the structure blackened by smoke in a V-shaped plume that ran up the wall. But most of the place was intact, at least from the outside. Danny assumed the interior had been thoroughly ransacked.
Vaxxine didn’t stop talking until it was a tactical necessity. She hadn’t had human contact for more than a couple of minutes on end since the escape from Los Angeles. Danny let the words flow. She was listening for clues, for useful information. And she wasn’t much of a talker herself, so Vaxxine was welcome to hold the floor. Now, with the hospital in front of them, the talk petered out.
The dawn sun finally crawled above the clouds gathering in the distance, and turned the upper stories of the building to molten gold that ran imperceptibly down the facade of the building. Vaxxine drove the truck cab in a wide circuit of the parking lot and access roads that surrounded the hospital. It wasn’t just zeroes they needed to worry about, but humans. Hospitals were a critical resource. Medical and surgical supplies, drugs, syringes. These materials had replaced precious metals as the barter medium of choice. There were plenty of survivors who would kill rather than share. It was near full daylight when Vaxxine pulled up across from the front entrance.
“Some asshole parked in the handicap spot,” she remarked.
“I’ll just run in there and see what I can secure,” Danny said, checking the clip on her sidearm.
Vaxxine shook her head. “You shouldn’t run anywhere. There’s something wrong with your brain, Sheriff.”
“There’s something wrong with your legs,” Danny pointed out.
“You can ride shotgun,” Vaxxine said.
She took a roll of duct tape out of the storage compartment in the driver’s side door, tore off a strip a couple of feet long, and laid it sticky-side down on another length of the tape, turning it into a strap with adhesive ends. Then she bound her legs together just below the knees. The Silent Kid was watching with as much interest as Danny.
“Pass me the leather,” Vaxxine said, indicating a top-of-the-line Schott Perfecto jacket in thick horsehide that hung on the bulkhead behind Danny. Danny passed it over and Vaxxine drew it under her legs and buttocks, the jacket oriented upside-down, so her ankles projected from the collar opening. She zipped it up over her knees. It formed a tough leather sheath over her limbs. She was already wearing a lightweight jacket on her arms and upper body. Next she pulled on work gloves and a knit balaclava to cover her neck and ears.
“Not bad,” Danny said. She generally didn’t wear anything more protective than a windbreaker or overshirt, and she had the bite marks to prove it. The one on her arm still itched.
It was the next stage of the operation Danny most wanted to see, however. The driver’s door was a good forty-five inches off the ground. The wheelchair, a lightweight folding model, was strapped on the driver’s side running board, as Danny had observed in the rearview mirror. She watched and waited.
Vaxxine flung her door open, checked fore and aft to make sure nothing had crept near while she leathered up, and then tossed a golf bag down from behind her seat to the ground. It made a hell of a noise, as if it was full of copper pipes. Then she popped the buckles that held the wheelchair in place and lowered it to the ground one-handed, the other hand firmly gripping the grab handle on the door frame. She shook the chair and it popped open like an awning. She dropped it and it rattled to the pavement, remaining upright.
Vaxxine swung her bound legs out using her free hand, and all in the same motion, like a gymnast, twisted her body and dropped out of the cab. She landed heavily but squarely on the seat of the chair, manually arranged her boots on the foot plate, then grabbed the golf bag and slung it over her shoulder and the back of the chair. Then she wheeled herself swiftly toward the hospital. She’d gone thirty meters before Danny shook off her astonishment and alighted behind her. Danny closed the cab door and pointed a warning finger at the Silent Kid as he pressed his nose to the glass: stay. Then she trotted to catch up to her unusual companion. They approached the hospital in silence, side by side. Thunder boomed out over the grassland.
• • •
There was one zero near the entrance, but it was almost immobile with decay. It lay on its side and raised a feeble arm, hissing, but no longer had the ability to approach them. They ignored it and went inside.
Vaxxine’s wheels bumped over the fragments of glass and splinters of furniture that littered the floor. Potted ficus trees had been thrown around, and there were blood sprays on walls and ceilings, so old they’d turned to black varnish. Rat-eaten surgical dressings, gauze, and other field medical supplies lay where the treatment had been done, with dark slicks of dried blood here and there; a couple of hollowed-out corpses lay against the bullet-pocked walls like heaps of kindling. There were tarnished brass shell casings everywhere. A last-stand battle had been fought here a long time ago.
“Did you hear that?” Vaxxine whispered.
Danny found this intensely irritating. Yes, she had heard. And if people always talked right after there was a noise, they wouldn’t hear anything else.
They listened, and after a short interval heard a second sound. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the hospital, someone or something was rummaging around.
They advanced down a dark central hallway. The hospital was intended to enjoy an uninterrupted supply of artificial light, and many of the corridors were windowless. Danny didn’t use her penlight; better to allow their eyes to adjust to the faint glow that filtered in from the lobby end of the hall than to give themselves away with a flashlight. Except for the litter on the floor, the place looked as if it was only closed for the weekend. Like it could be put back to use the next day. But there was also a tang of mildew in the air, the sour stuffiness of disuse.
The noises were coming from downstairs. Elevators weren’t working, as expected. They found fire stairs. Danny pointed at herself and then the stairs; then she pointed at Vaxxine, aimed two fingers at her eyes, and pointed up and down the hallway. Going down. Keep me covered up here. Vaxxine didn’t object. Instead she withdrew a big hunting slingshot from the golf bag, fitted a fat steel ball bearing into the sling, and gave Danny the thumbs-up. Danny gently pressed the stairwell door open. It was silent. She eased into the pitch blackness on the other side.
Now she needed the flashlight. She tucked the butt end of the light into her watchband, stabilized it with her pinky, and used her thumb—the only other digit on that hand—to cover most of the lens, so that only a narrow crescent of light shone out.
The stairs were littered with acoustic ceiling tiles and medical supplies of various types, probably dropped by people in a big hurry carrying armloads of the stuff. She picked her steps with care to avoid crunching on anything; so far the noise from below continued intermittently. Whoever or whatever it was—probably the latter—hadn’t heard Vaxxine’s truck arrive.
Danny reached the basement level, where the door was jammed open by some kind of monitoring machine on an overturned stand. The air was stale and smelled of organic decay and more mildew. She stepped over the machine and her boot crunched on a drift of gritty blue pills.
The noises stopped.
Danny pressed her thumb over the entire lens of the flashlight and aimed it into her side. The darkness rushed in like a physical mass. All was silent.
After a minute, in which her mind filled the darkness with slinking hunters stealing toward her with scaly, distended jaws, the noises started again. Around a corner, somewhere ahead.
Then she saw a flicker of light. It had to be a human being.
Or a thinker.
She advanced down the corridor, sliding her feet so she wouldn’t crunch anything else, as she was working without her own light; the activity was around a corner at the next intersection.
She doused her flashlight completely and kept the pistol gut-high, then dipped her head around the co
rner. Ducked back, processed what she’d seen.
It wasn’t a thinker. She could hear the person breathing. It was a man in a one-piece leather motorcycle racing suit and no head protection. She saw that fairly often, usually on people who had lost an ear or had been bitten on the neck. They only protected the parts of themselves they could see. The man was of middle size, Asian.
He was utterly intent on what he was doing: filling a couple of ex-military duffel bags with medical supplies harvested from the rooms on either side of the corridor. Based on her brief inspection of the hallway, it looked like this was where the hospital staff stored most of the restricted materials; Danny had passed a nurse’s station that would have overlooked the stair door, and there were key-card locks at various points, all of them unlocked because the power had failed. She took another glance and saw handfuls of sanitary-packed syringes and surgical dressings going into the bags. There were boxes stacked beside the man; she saw antibiotics and blood products, drugs, all sorts of things. The floor was thickly layered with similar stuff, but Danny guessed he hadn’t made the mess—that would be scavenging groups blowing through fast and hard. This man seemed to have a specific inventory he was filling.
He stopped to listen again. Danny held her breath. The man started to turn, and she ducked out of sight, confident he hadn’t seen her. He’d been working by the light of a big box flashlight that shone directly into his face half the time. His night vision would be terrible. Danny waited a few seconds. The man was silent. Then he began frantically shoving things into the bags again.
Danny dipped to one knee around the corner and raised her pistol. She switched on her penlight with her damaged hand held well away from her center mass in case he spun around shooting.
“Don’t move!” she barked.
The man froze. His light began to quaver; he was shaking. But he stayed very still.
“I’m not a zero,” Danny said. “I am alive, and I intend to stay that way and I know you want to stay that way, too. So turn to face me, slowly, and place your light on the floor pointing at the ceiling. Hands behind your head. Good. What do you have? I see a shotgun. Anything else?”
