Last to exit the room was her mother. Her head wobbled on the scant remnants of her neck. Her left breast had been chewed away, exposing her rib cage. What remained of her intestines hung loosely from the gaping hole in her abdomen and one slimy rope dragged along the floor. Her shredded stomach dripped green fluid down her left hip.
As she shambled into the hallway, what Carolyn guessed to be her spleen slipped out and plopped to the floor with a wet slap. Her mother stepped on it and the organ squished into pulp between her toes. The dragging intestine tangled between her feet and relieved her of her uncoordinated gait.
She teetered forward. Her legs buckled and her body fell, and she never raised her arms to protect her face. It slammed with a sickening crunch against the linoleum. She didn’t twitch after that. Perhaps shards of bone rammed into her brain when she fell, causing severe damage and ending her reanimation. But her brain barely functioned before she died. How did death make it possible for her mother to be mobile now?
Carolyn pushed her hands against her temples. Trying to find reason where none existed made her head hurt. She looked around to see that Ms. Johnston had focused on one of the attendants, Carl. He was so transfixed by the other walking corpses he had no idea the petite ghoul was closing in on him. Carolyn squeaked out a warning just as he turned.
“Holy shit!”
Carl raised his arm to block the dead patient’s gnashing teeth. She clamped onto his wrist and tore off a huge chunk of flesh in one bite. A spurt of blood shot out and she stuck out her tongue to lap it up in mid stream. He shoved her with all his strength and she tumbled to the floor. As she struggled to stand, Carl ran down the hall toward the exit.
Carolyn did the same before Ms. Johnston turned on her. The burn victim and the one-armed nurse were occupied with hospital staff as they tried to protect themselves with various office supplies. Some kind of struggle ensued in the old man’s room but all she could see as she ran past was the fluttering curtain and a wide spray of blood. Ahead, Carl had reached the doors and slammed his hand on the large silver button to open them. The doors swished open. A corpse, that looked like it had been crushed by a train, lay in the main hallway just outside the ICU.
His right arm and leg had been severed at the elbow and knee. The left side of the man’s body looked like it had been dragged down an industrial strength cheese grater. His teeth, cheekbone, and part of his skull gleamed in the hallway light. Flaps of skin and hair dangled from his head. Meager scraps of flesh clung to his skeletal left arm. His bony hand couldn’t find purchase on the smooth tiled hallway and it clicked and clacked with each effort to pull his weight forward. A long snail trail of blood stretched down the hallway behind him.
Too late, Carl saw him. He tried to back pedal through the doors but only managed to lose his footing and smack his head on the floor. The train wreck wrapped a clawed hand around the attendant’s calf and pulled it into chomping range. Though the fall had dazed him, Carl seemed to snap to attention when the corpse bit into his leg.
He shrieked in pain. Carolyn ran to him and grabbed his outstretched hand. She dragged him toward the elevators hoping to shake the corpse loose. She succeeded. The dead man wasn’t strong enough to keep his teeth secured onto Carl’s leg. He moaned as Carl and Carolyn slipped out of his reach and into the closest elevator. She jabbed the first floor button and they descended.
Carolyn didn’t know where she found the strength to remain vertical in this bizarre nightmare but somehow had managed to stay focused. She ripped the lining from her coat and wrapped strips of it around Carl’s leg and wrist. He winced.
“Christ that hurts. Burns like a bitch, too.”
Carolyn continued to bandage his wounds, not responding. She didn’t know what to say. He didn’t seem to mind as he began a nervous ramble.
“You did see all that, didn’t you? I mean, it wasn’t just me hallucinating, was it? The patients. The dead patients, moving around and…and…”
He pulled at his hair.
“They were dead, right? I mean like dead dead. Really dead. Like there was no fucking way they could have been walking. Did you see that old lady? With her guts and her stomach.”
Carolyn kept her eyes down. In her mind’s eye she could still see the visage of her mother’s corpse, oozing and dripping and moving down the hall. Carl began to cry.
“What the hell is happening?”
A legitimate question but Carolyn didn’t know how to answer him. She simply shrugged then turned to watch the lighted buttons display the progress of their descent as Carl cried.
Carolyn gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze as the car came to a stop. The doors slid open and she listened for movement but heard nothing. At this time of day the lobby should be bustling with activity from visitors and hospital personnel. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as she inched her head between the open doors to look around.
The lobby was deserted. The revolving front door spun in quiet circles but no one used its automated convenience. The soft hissing of the rubber flaps on the tile entryway sounded like the dry discarded husks of molted cicada skins tumbling across rough cement. A few bits of paper and trash blew down the driveway outside the hospital, adding to the air of desolation.
She stepped out of the elevator and looked down the hall on her right. The cafeteria and shipping/loading area waited that way but there were no signs of life. She looked back toward the front and saw a woman slumped over at the Information Desk. Hoping she was just taking a little mid-day nap, in the lobby, on display for everyone, Carolyn tiptoed over to her. She got a few feet away when she heard the elevator doors close and Carl screamed.
“No, stop!”
Carolyn ran back to the elevator but the doors closed seconds before she reached them. She watched the pointer of the floor indicator above the elevator glide through the numbers until it reached “4” - the ICU. Pressing the button to call the elevator back did nothing. The car remained on the fourth floor. Muffled screams drifted down to her as the two other elevators descended. She backed away and looked for anything that could be used as a weapon, desperation pushing her heart into overdrive. Nothing useful lay nearby. The elevators stopped on the main floor and their doors opened.
Both were empty. Sighing with relief she took one last look at the floor indicator of Carl’s elevator, still on four, then crept over to the information desk. The woman behind the desk sat hunched over with her head resting on her forearm. Carolyn cleared her throat.
“Excuse me, Miss?”
The woman didn’t move. Carolyn cleared her throat again and leaned over the counter to tap the woman on the shoulder.
“Miss?”
The woman twitched once and Carolyn almost screamed. She looked over her shoulder, afraid that another corpse might be lurking nearby and hear her. Carolyn then moved around the desk to get a better look at the woman. Snarls of long black hair intertwined with a bright blue ribbon that matched her sweater. One black low-heeled shoe lay on its side by her chair. An aluminum bat leaned in the corner, a big red bow tied to its end and “Happy Birthday Kenny” printed in bright red paint along the side.
Here was something she could use as a weapon. Unfortunately she had to maneuver behind the woman, and corner herself, in order to get it.
“The sooner you do this, the sooner you can get out of here, Carrie.”
In three quick steps, Carolyn had the bat in her hands. She hefted it, feeling its light but powerful durability. Without a trace of hysteria this time she smiled, confident she would make it out of here alive.
She turned and the woman bolted upright so hard that the chair rolled and slammed against the wall. Her arms and legs extended straight and stiff, blocking Carolyn’s escape. The right side of her face was gone. The optic nerve hung limp against her white cheekbone, slick with blood that also colored her exposed teeth and jaw. Her neck had been torn open and air whistled through the ragged hole in her trachea. She began to shake and vibrate as if a
high voltage current ran through her body. Her limbs eventually relaxed and her head jerked back and forth until her remaining eye rolled around and fixed on Carolyn.
What was left of her mouth curled up into a savage grin. She jerked herself into a standing position and wobbled toward Carolyn. Carolyn swung the bat without hesitation. It connected with a satisfying crack against the woman’s head. She staggered a bit but Carolyn did not allow her to regain momentum. She swung the bat and knocked the woman to the floor. Again and again the bat sailed through the air as she pounded and pulverized the corpse, reducing the woman’s head to bloody hummus.
It surprised her how gratifying it felt to pummel the zombie into mush. She didn’t feel the least bit ashamed or disgusted by what she’d done. If only she had a camera to preserve the moment. For one fleeting second, Carolyn feared her sanity had just given its notice and moved to Jamaica. But the feeling dissipated, replaced by power and freedom.
She kicked the lone shoe off to the side and slung the bat onto her shoulder. As she stepped over the remains of the information lady she saw the phone. Smacking herself in the forehead for not thinking of it sooner she grabbed the receiver and held it to her ear. The line was dead. Of course.
She headed back to the elevators to see if she could help Carl, or anyone else, in the ICU. Something moved along the hallway across from the elevators and she turned left to see a stocky middle aged man shamble toward her. He wore a beige three-quarter-length raincoat that exposed his bare muscular legs and flat feet. A tuft of dark brown chest hair poked above the coat collar.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
Carolyn bent over with laughter. Amidst all the craziness of today, the last thing on her list of crazy shit to see was a flasher. Wiping tears from her eyes she thought she should admonish him for having nothing better to do than display his privates to an unsuspecting public. Before she spoke, though, she saw something stuck to the man’s foot.
Her first guess was toilet paper but as he approached it became clear it was a toe tag.
“You didn’t just come from the bathroom, did you, buddy?”
Details she originally missed sharpened into focus. Dull violet splotches covered his grey-blue skin. Pale pink liquid seeped out of his ears and nose. Carolyn wasn’t sure how long he’d been dead but she could now smell his decay.
As he wobbled toward her he fumbled with the buttons on his coat. His slimy black tongue darted in and out of his mouth to lick cracked lips. Even in death he was still ready and willing to flash his genitals at the ladies. Carolyn grimaced as his rotting stench made her eyes water. She gagged as his left eye popped and the cloudy vitreous humor trickled down his face.
He pulled open his coat to reveal a more advanced state of rot than Carolyn would have guessed by looking at his face and legs. A “y” incision didn’t mark his chest so an autopsy had not yet been performed. That would explain why he still had his coat. And without an autopsy, his organs remained intact inside his body and were probably liquefying as she stared at him.
His stomach protruded as if he’d swallowed a huge beach ball. The dark red shadow on his lower abdomen indicated where the bodily juices had collected. His chest was a mottled terrain of blue and grey and a purple swollen penis dripped viscous yellow liquid. He grabbed his organ and waved it at Carolyn. With his other hand he beckoned her to touch it. The lewd faces he made would have been comical if he hadn’t been a walking bag of decomposition.
He took a few shuffling steps, yanking his penis left and right, until it suddenly pulled off in his hand. A thick stream of blood and fluid oozed onto his feet. A slow rotation of confusion, fear, then understanding twisted his features as he cradled his ruined member. He held it out to Carolyn, his lower lip trembling as he cried, almost as if he were pleading with her to fix it.
“I got your solution right here, pal.”
She brought the bat up underneath his hands and tapped them hard enough to send the foul shaft of flesh into the air. As it descended, she choked up on the bat then swung it against the putrid organ. If it had been a baseball, she might have earned herself a double. But as it was just a rotting hunk of flesh, it splattered on contact, spraying chunks of fetid penis everywhere.
The flasher became distraught at the destruction of his manhood. He fell to his knees moaning and whining. He crawled along the carpet, plucking up little bits of tissue and sheltered them close to his body. While he whimpered and mumbled to himself, Carolyn walked behind him and shoved him with her foot.
He sprawled to the floor and let out a miserable groan as the few pieces of saved flesh flew from his hand. He rolled over onto his side and Carolyn kicked him in the stomach. She’d been right about his organs liquefying. A great rush of blood, bits of pulpy tissue, and a gush of gelatinous fluids spilled over her foot. She stepped back, clamping a hand over her mouth and nose in disgust. The flasher grinned in triumph at her misfortune.
“What the hell are you smiling at?” she screamed at the corpse before slamming her foot into his face, her disgust forgotten.
She felt his bones crunch. He began to spasm like an electrical wire with a short in it. First he arched his back then curled forward into a ball while muttering “unh unh unh” over and over.
Snarling, Carolyn held the bat over her head. The flasher arched back again and his eye circled toward her. He looked at the bat, then her, and she thought she detected a small nod of his head. A brief moment of clarity from what remained of his humanity helped him understand his predicament and he wanted none of it.
She swung the bat down and crushed his head into jelly.
The pitiful look on his face brought Carolyn to a clear and strong realization. She had helped this man. She had saved him from a nightmare existence. This was her purpose now, like a prophet or a savior. Like God himself. Carolyn would deliver tortured souls from the realm of the undead through massive head trauma.
She smiled down at the flasher, truly dead now thanks to her, and leaned on the bat like a walking cane. Carolyn looked down the hall that led toward the morgue and thought it would be the best place to continue her work, which she dubbed “Operation Deliverance.” There must be dozens of corpses down there, already reanimated and on the move.
A bell dinged behind her as Carl’s elevator returned to the lobby. Carolyn watched the doors slide open. Several zombies knelt over Carl’s ravaged body which was mostly scraps of tissue clinging to a pile of bones in blue scrubs. Lucky for Carl, what remained of his body was not enough to live a life of the undead.
Carolyn only recognized the burn victim from the ICU. The fried corpse stood and turned to look at the open elevator doors. It stumbled into the lobby. A flap of Carl’s skin dangled from its lower teeth and jiggled with each lumbering step. Its gaze fell on Carolyn. Tilting its head to the side it studied her like a dog trying to puzzle out its master’s command. Its eyes widened then it pointed to its throat, indicating her mother’s breathing tube.
“Son of a bitch,” Carolyn growled as she hefted the bat into swinging position. The morgue would have to wait.
Fast Food
By Jonathan Wood
Keith Bennett sat at the kitchen table reading the Monday morning paper which had popped through the letterbox not five minutes earlier. Diane, his wife was busily cooking breakfast and clomping about the kitchen noisily to his annoyance in amongst the crackling of bacon in the frying pan and the toaster spitting out overdone bread. Diane shouted loudly for the kids upstairs, their two twin daughters and the noise of her piercing shout causing Keith to wince.
“Jesus Di, you nearly split my ear drum in half, do you have to shout like that?”
“Sorry babe,” she replied flatly. “But you know what the girls are like, if you don’t bash a drum kit in front of their faces these days they just ignore you. Anyway, instead of just sitting there, why don’t you call them down for breakfast?”
Keith sighed and rose flicking the paper down on the kitchen table.
The front page was reporting another case, the new virus that had first appeared a few weeks ago and splashed across the papers and the television had claimed its second victim in a week. This time it was a man in Scotland who had just returned from holiday in the West Indies and had taken ill on the plane returning home. The paper reported he was in a serious but stable condition in an Edinburgh hospital.
Keith moved towards the kitchen double doors and bellowed up the curling staircase for the girls. This time it was Diane’s turn to wince. Keith slumped back down in his chair at the kitchen table.
“The paper says there is another case of that… whatever it is, some guy in Scotland this time,” he said.
Diane was dishing up fried breakfast and the sweet smell of bacon and tomatoes filled the kitchen. She plopped a plate down in front of Keith. “I haven’t had time to look at the paper or see any news today” she retorted somewhat sarcastically. Keith chose to ignore her tone, not rising to the bait.
“Yeah, it’s some kind of new virus; they haven’t got their heads around it yet. Apparently, the symptoms start with a fever then weight loss, nausea and headaches.” He continued reading from the front page of the paper. “The fifteen cases already confirmed in the last two month have all led to death; they don’t even say here if it’s something you can pass on like flu.”
Diane sat down and began to pour coffee from the pot into her mug, then into Keith’s. “I think the media jazz these things up to sell papers, look at the panic they created over bird and swine flu. The epidemic they predicted never even happened!” she said.
Keith grunted and began eating. At that point their two twin girls of thirteen, Sophie and Vanessa came in, one glued to her iPod, the other one furiously tapping away at her Blackberry. Watching them, Keith often wondered what had happened to the two sweet girls he used to take for walks along the coast years before, the girls who held his hand on the beach and laughed and smiled. Now it was all Twitter, music via earphones and the endless bleeps of text messages going off at all hours of the day. They barely even spoke to him anymore. Keith looked up as they both sat down at the breakfast table.
CODE Z: An Undead Hospital Anthology Page 10
