by Mark Clodi
"Hey man, try it from there on the ones coming over the car on this side." called Jack.
Juan turned towards the zombies and said "Go away! Don't ever come back!"
Most of the zombies reversed course, one, just looked at Juan and hissed angrily in his direction. While it was distracted, Nanci took a step up and clubbed it with a round house swing that connected to the back of the thing's head. Juan took up a more central position along the wall and the zombies on the other side stopped actively coming towards the ER, they resumed their listless wandering and milling about.
The doors to the ER slide open and Ted came out followed by Sanchez and Thompson. Ted said, "Good morning." curtly and he and his men made their way out to the Humvee, killing a few zombies that were milling about as they went.
"Uh, good morning, ah Ted?" said Jack, "What are you doing?"
"We are going to take the fifty caliber machine gun and set it up on the roof, we will get a good field of fire from there, practically unbeatable, plus we'll take the radio, I am not sure I want to turn it on, but if I do it will get better reception up there than down here surround by the hospital's walls."
Jack moved forward to grab a box of ammo from one of the men, "So are you staying then? Need a hand to lug this stuff up to the roof?"
"Staying?" Ted paused, then nodded, "We aren't going anywhere, we decided that last night. We were just too dog tired to move the gun and stuff then. If you want to help us, I would appreciate it, plus I want someone else to learn how to fire the fifty and to take a look at our rifles, just in case we can get more guns sent down here. So if you and a couple other guys want to help us, sure. Choose who you want to learn the guns."
"I can stay here, and watch the ER, take the other guys, alright?" said Juan. Nanci immediately chipped in that she would be staying down with Juan too, in case he got tired.
Agreeing Charlie organized Jack and the other three relief guards into pairs with the military men and they set off, each pair carrying a part of the gun, a box or two of ammo, or some other boxes and crates that Ted pointed out. During the process of unloading Juan just thought 'Stay Away' as hard as he could out at the zombies, it seemed to work and Ted noticed.
"Why're they acting like this? Normally they attack when we get this close, they are just milling about."
Charlie answered, "We don't know, Juan was out here this morning and he said they have been acting weird all night. Part of me is paranoid about it, like something is holding them back, trying to get a force up here before it attacks. So, like, we better move this gun up to the roof quick, huh?"
Nodding agreement, Ted hustled them along faster. Soon Juan and Nanci were left alone in front of the ER, every once in awhile people would come through, bring them coffee or ask if they needed a break. Juan politely refused. Jack and Charlie came back through with Sanchez and Thompson, to get another few boxes of equipment and to warn Juan and Nanci that they were going to fire off a few rounds of the machine gun and probably take a few shots with the soldier's AR-3 rifles as well. As they left Juan and Nanci watched the sky turn from light blue to pink in the pre-dawn light.
The crash of the machine gun shattered the quiet morning and made Nanci jump about six inches, though Juan barely stirred at the noise. The gun stopped for a few minutes then another series of shots rang out. Juan didn't know what they were aiming at, apparently the gun was not facing towards the ER. It would make more sense to put it around on the other side of the building to over look the highway which was far more likely to bring zombies to the hospital than the scrub covered hills that the ER faced.
The rifle fire sounded far less intimidating than the machine gun and went on for a shorter period of time. Just after sun rise Charlie and the three other original day guards were back to grab more ammunition for the guns, they were loaded up and heading back into the building when Juan heard Jack's voice yelling from the roof, five stories above, he was screaming and at first they could not understand what he was saying, then they understood him to be yelling for Juan and Charlie to come up to the roof right away. He yelled harder when they did not move right away. As he was yelling a flash of light brighter than anything any of them had ever seen before back lit Jack's body, it was like someone had set off the largest photo flash ever invented behind the man. A few seconds later they all heard a distant rumbling, like a stampede of cattle, the sound was from the other side of the hospital and washed by the ER leaving behind a weird echoing that bounced off the scrub hills back at them.
Chapter 22
By dawn most of the people involved in the racket out in the parking lot of the Mike's Club a few hours before had calmed down and gone back to bed. Kevin was sleeping, after Doc had looked his shoulder over and pronounced him a lucky son of a bitch. He had cleaned the wound and stitched it up as best he could, then bandaged it and forced some pain killers down Kevin's throat with orders for him to get some sleep. Doc even warranted that Kevin rated one of the few mattresses to sleep on.
'Funny thing', Doc thought, 'when I first showed up the mattresses looked like enough for a small army, turns out that eighteen mattresses aren't nearly enough. Ah well, soon enough we will all be used to sleeping on the floor.'
Doc went by and checked again on Hank, who was doing far better than Doc would have ever thought possible. Broken ribs do not heal up, yet Hank was managing, getting himself to the bathroom, running around in the middle of the night while people were shooting each other, never complaining. Doc edged over to him and touched his forehead, checking for a fever, nothing. As Hank lay in the lazy boy that had become his home, Doc peeled back the bandages on his wounds slowly.
"You know that hurts more when you do it slow doc." Hank said, startling Doc.
"Sorry, I thought you were asleep." Hank gave him a look indicating that he had been, "Sorry. I just got done with Kevin, I thought I should check you out before I went to get a couple more hours of sleep myself." replied Doc quietly.
"What? It is morning out, no sleeping for us now." Hank said, pointing to the doors of the Mike's Club where the dawn light was clearly visible.
Nodding, Doc said, "You are probably right, but I am tired and need to get a little rest, the last few days have been pretty hard." Doc continued working on the band aid around Hank's ribs, not quite removing it, but pulling it up and shining a flashlight down into the crevice created between Hank's skin and the bandage. The bruising was very mild, almost gone in fact. As he worked his way over toward back he had to have Hank roll over. "Sorry Hank, I know this is a pain in the ass, but if there is an infection I want to nip it early, we don't have the means to deal with full scale sepsis." Behind the doctor the doors to the Mike's club flashed brilliantly, lighting the entire building briefly. Both Hank and the Doc looked around, thinking that someone had just taken a picture of them, when they saw no one nearby they looked to the door where people were scrambling around outside. Then a wave of sound hit them, rumbling through the ground, through the building and waking everyone from the smallest child to the oldest adult among them from their slumber, save one. Kevin would always regret the fact that he was blissfully unconscious and asleep when what remained of the government started fighting back in earnest and dropped a nuclear bomb on North East Denver.
Chapter 23
Dave threw another rock at the zombie kid, it was a heavy stone, and it hit the kid on the forehead and bounced off high into the air, coming down on the parapet of the roof before spinning on the edge and then falling off into the alley below. The kid's head looked dented and Dave laughed at the trickle of black blood that started to slowly ooze from the wound.
"Stupid little fuck, didn't dodge that one, did you?" Dave laughed again and reached for another rock from the top of the flat roof they were on. He had moved about three blocks away from the Mike's Club, the new plan was to ambush people trying to get to the club and to that effect he had parked his motorcycle in the middle of the street. On the seat of his bike he put that piece of shit,
plastic fucking gun. He figured if the bike was not enough of a reason for people to stop, the gun might draw attention. It was just after dawn and business was dead. He plunked another stone off of the kid's head, aiming for the eye, he hit it, Dave had to admit that his accuracy throwing things had gone way up since 'passing on'. The rock was not large enough this time to do more than bruise the eye lid, it did not even draw blood. Still the kid slowly raised his hands to his face and held one over his eye while holding the other out towards Dave, as if trying to block any more incoming missiles.
Dave didn't know how old the kid was. Three? Eight? He hadn't been around kids much, who knew they could be this damned fun? Dave reached down and grabbed a handful of pebbles and threw them half-heartedly at the zombie kid, just to see what it would do. The kid flung his hand around ineffectively and let out a kind of moan.
"First thing kid, is I am gonna get you some food, once you are smart we are gonna start rounding up others, probably little ones, like you, I get a whole pack of you and we go after any hold outs we can find. I got a plan, a good plan to get into Mike's, and you are gonna help me do it. Holy..."
Only halfway through his planned speech Dave was interrupted by the flash of a nuclear blast many miles away, it caught the corner of his eye and drew his attention in as it grew. Dave quickly made himself look away and threw himself over the kid, knocking him down as well. He was not sure if he could go blind anymore, but nothing would be worse than being a blind zombie looking for food.
'The funny thing', Dave thought, 'is that I have never seen a nuclear blast before, yet I know what that was a nuclear bomb.' Thinking about it more Dave was curious as to why was the bomb dropped there? The bomb, as near as Dave could tell went off North of downtown Denver. He saw the light silhouetted by the large buildings. What was in that area to bomb? The airport? Going to the airport had not even occurred to Dave, maybe there were a lot of living out there and hence, enough zombies to make dropping a bomb worth it. Still a lot of people would die too and that did not seem like something the government would do. Or maybe it did. Now he had to think, how was this going to change his plans? 'Probably not at all', he thought, 'unless they drop more bombs, make the place a glass plain or something.' Dave sat up, pulling zombie boy with him. Dave looked the kid over, checking his eyes particularly carefully. "Can you still see you little fuck? Answer me!"
The boy nodded slowly, really slowly. "Goddamned retarded zombie, just what I need. We got to get you some food, I sure hope the gun trap works cause I can't stand having such an r-tard follow me around." Pushing the kid away, Dave looked over to the ballooning mushroom cloud.
"Huh, you know you seen pictures in books and the film of the bombs and they just don't do it justice. No wonder all those peace-niks of the fifties wanted to ban these things. Look at how high the smoke goes. Shit." Dave sat back on his well worn denim jeans and looked at the cloud for awhile. "It just goes so high, it is beautiful, just beautiful." he whispered to himself.
Chapter 24
"Let's go!" Juan yelled to Charlie, pulling Nanci along with them. They ran into the ER and Charlie yelled at some of the 'backup' men and women to go cover the entrance, something bad had just happened on the roof.
Running to the end of the hall Charlie hit the elevator button and one of the doors opened immediately, they hopped in and Charlie hit the top floor button and the elevator started to rise. Then, abruptly, the lights went out and the ride stopped.
"Shit!" Charlie screamed. "I hate elevators! Why didn't we think about that? A bomb goes off on the roof and of course the electricity is going to go out."
"I hope Jack it alright." said Nanci, then she went into a litany of prayer in Spanish. Shrugging Juan joined her after she had completed two verses.
Charlie looked at them, "What? What are you saying, I am not getting all the words, speak English."
Juan stopped, "Prayer Charlie, that's all, asking God to look out for Jack. Doesn't the hospital have automatic generators to power up when the grid goes off? Like if they were in surgery or something?"
It was Charlie's turn to shrug, "I guess, they should, I mean they do surgeries here, maybe the elevators are not considered a medical necessity?" As he finished talking one of the lights flickered on, then the elevator alarm started buzzing. The buzzing stopped and the button light went off, then the elevator started moving up. It stopped faster than Juan thought it should and the doors opened, they were on the third floor. Not hesitating Juan jumped out, followed closely by Nanci and Charlie. "Stairs okay?" Juan asked. No one objected and they were soon pounding their way up the remaining floors to the roof access. The roof door opened to the north and as they made it out onto the roof they stopped dead in their tracks.
"Madre de Dios." Nanci gasped and crossed herself as she went to her knees.
Before them was a cloud they have never seen before, yet they all knew what it was from textbooks and old films. Someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on Denver, north of the downtown area, it looked more like they had bombed the airport. Juan put his arm around Nanci's shoulder and they stood staring dumbfounded for seconds which seemed to stretch into hours before they heard a voice behind them.
"Hey, I'm okay, thanks for checking man!"
Looking over his shoulder, Juan saw Jack, he was pale and looked like he had seen a ghost or worse yet kissed one.
The snappy retort Juan had been going to call out died on his lips, replaced with, "Jack, what man? What is it?"
"Oh you mean aside from 'the man' bombing the working class to save themselves? Yeah it is worse. What's missing Juan?"
Looking around Juan couldn't tell, he saw the machine gun sitting up where he thought it might be, facing down slope to the north. The boxes of ammo were beside it and the whole mess had a tarp pulled halfway over it, probably to fend off the afternoon rains. It looked like the guys had set up their radio too, on a couple ammo boxes sat what looked like a satellite disk, pointed slightly south and west. Juan didn't see anything unusual and shrugged his shoulders slightly and shook his head at Jack.
"Maybe I should ask, 'Who is missing?'"
A light went on in Juan's head, "Ah! Where are the guardsmen?"
"Dead." came Jack's flat reply.
"What?! What happened?" asked Juan, looking around for zombies or bodies or something to indicate what had happened, seeing nothing he repeated his question, "What happened?"
Nanci and Charlie turned to look around and face Jack, who sat down on the boxes the satellite dish was on.
"I went with the guys back down, right? After the lesson on how to fire, reload the guns, they even gave us a primer on cleaning them too, though we didn't do that, they left us a manual. Anyway I headed downstairs, carrying this rifle and thinking, 'Why the heck am I going downstairs?' I mean I can't carry an ammo box by myself and we had an odd number of guys, so I am going along humping this gun as a guard? After we stopped for a bathroom break in the ER I told the others I would wait for them on the roof. So I get on the elevator and headed up here and the door is shut. We had propped it open with a piece of wood to make it easier to pull the boxes up here, right? So I was like, 'this is weird' and went to push the door open, no go. And I know that is wrong, because the door has a push handle, it cannot be locked from inside. I push harder and still nothing, so I thought they were fucking around with me, you know mess around with the wanna-be hippie or something, maybe a little military hazing to get their jollies. I hear Ted talking on the radio, he is speaking to somebody, only I can't hear what he is saying, he is talking kinda low. So I yell out, 'Hey, open the damn door!', they didn't, so I yelled louder, then started swearing, nothing. Well, I thought about it, this place has a couple of wings, so maybe there is another roof access door, only we haven't cleared the other side yet, so no way am I going through the stairs on the other side."
Taking a breath, Jack continued, "So I got a little harder on the door. Really pushing it, then hitting it and it started to give a little, I
couldn't see out, but eventually I could work my hand through and felt a piece of wood they had propped under the door handle on the outside. A bit more shoving and I was able to work it free and get onto the roof."
"Ted was the only one I saw, he was standing over there, heading towards the vents." Jack stood up, he headed over to the venting and various pipes that snaked up through the roof. Walking around on the other side of them the group saw three ropes tied off on three different pipes, the ropes were taunt and led over the side of the building.
"Anyway I see Ted over there and I am like, 'Ted? Man what is going on?', all he said was he was sorry, then he pull a loop of rope up off the roof and wraps it around his neck and jumps off the fucking building! Right in front of me! I ran to the edge and tried to pull him up." Jack gestured to the edge of the roof, Juan and Charlie peered over cautiously, Charlie pulled back quickly, Juan just stood there leaned over the edge of the building looking down, he stood that way for probably thirty seconds, looking at the three bodies that dangled about ten feet from the top of the roof, none of them were moving, all of them looked like they had long necks, obscenely long, boneless necks. One of them, Sanchez? His tongue was protruding, dark purple and glistening wet from between his lips, all of the corpse's eyes were open.
"Juan?" Jack called, pulling him by the shoulders, back from the edge. Juan looked blank for a second then turned to Nanci and held her tight for a quick hug.
"Let me finish, here, before we decide what to do. I saw Ted do this and was trying to pull him up when the radio came back on, some guy on the other end, asking for Ted, I grabbed it, said, 'Ted is dead'. The voice swore, then came back on and said there was a bomb on the way, thanks to the relay booster Ted had set up, there was little immediate danger in my area, but I shouldn't look north for about a minute, in fact, I might want to get under cover. I asked where? Where was the bomb going to impact at? Thinking of the Mike's Club store, he just came back and said, the radio station, then, impact in twelve seconds. That's when I came over and started shouting for you."
