by Caleb Cleek
While I worked on the floor, Matt cleaned the blood spatter from the walls. Within minutes the room was pristine again.
I went back to the hallway and wheeled Dr. Kemp into the room, hoping that sanitizing the room to the visual senses would bring him out of his catatonic state. Containing the welling panic I felt, I talked softly to him, telling him that Katie needed him and he was the only one who could help her. His eyes blinked and slowly began moving from side to side, taking in the room.
“What happened?” he questioned. “Who would do something like that?”
I gave him the Reader’s Digest version of the story. He took it better than I thought he would. Appearing satisfied, he stood up and moved to Katie. Decades of experience resurfaced and he instinctively assessed her condition, explaining as he went.
“It looks like a glancing shot. It broke the fourth left lateral rib, but the bullet didn’t actually penetrate past the rib,” he said, looking at me over top of his glasses, which were perched halfway down his nose. He extended the index and middle fingers of his right hand and tapped her chest, which reverberated with a dull thud. “Give me the stethoscope on the counter,” he barked at Matt. Placing the earpieces in his ears, Dr. Kemp positioned the circular chest piece over the right side of Katie’s chest and then moved it to the left side. He shook his head back and forth as he announced, “Absent breath sounds on the left side. Notice how her trachea is deviated to the right and the veins in her neck are bulging. She has a pnuemothorax. I need a chest tube kit, now! Look in those cabinets over there,” he said, pointing toward the wall. “It will be in a sealed packet. And make it quick. She doesn’t have long if we don’t relieve the pressure.”
Matt and I scurried around the room, opening drawers and cabinets. “I have it,” I exclaimed triumphantly as I held up a package marked “Chest Tube.” Dr. Kemp had moved to the sink and was scrubbing his hands and forearms. When he saw that we had completed the task he had assigned, he hobbled back to Katie’s side. She continued to moan intermittently. Her chest heaved as she struggled to draw life-sustaining air into her body.
“Open the package,” he said, nodding toward my hands. I easily peeled the plastic seal off the top of the box. It was full of more sealed packets on top with instruments on the bottom. “Set it on the bed next to her,” he ordered, “And don’t touch the instruments. They are sterile.” I gingerly set the box beside Katie.
Dr. Kemp opened a packet marked “gloves” and placed them on his hands. He picked up a pair of curved clamps from the bottom and asked me to open a packet labeled Betadine wipes. He grasped the swab with his clamps and instructed Matt to pull Katie’s arm up toward her head. He swabbed the area below her arm pit. When he was satisfied it was clean, he picked the syringe out of the bottom of the package. He told me to hold the ampule of Xylocaine. Dr. Kemp plunged the needle through the rubber top of the glass container and withdrew a syringe full of the liquid. He punctured Katie’s skin with the needle and pushed it all the way into her side. The muscles on her side quivered as the needle penetrated. He slowly pulled back on the plunger of the syringe as he started pulling the needle out. As he pulled the plunger backwards, the syringe began sucking air. Suddenly air ceased entering the syringe and fluid began rushing in.
“Okay, the needle is out of the chest cavity and is in the parietal plura,” he stated as he stopped pulling the plunger and stopped withdrawing the needle. He moved his thumb over the back of the syringe and pushed the plunger down as he slowly resumed pulling the needle out. “Now I'm injecting the Xylocaine as I pull the needle out. As the needle moves through her side, it is leaving a trail of anesthetic which will deaden the tissue from the inside out.” he informed us. By the time he had pulled the tip of the needle from her skin, he had deposited all twenty CCs of anesthetic from the syringe into her side.
After the area was numbed, he picked up the scalpel and made an inch long incision parallel to her ribs. He picked up another set of curved clamps and pushed the closed tip into the incision. As he pushed the tips in, he opened the handle. The expanding tips tore tissue. He closed the tips, pushed them further into her side and opened them again. Air suddenly gushed outward from the hole he created in her chest cavity.
Katie gasped as her lungs filled with air and she began breathing normally. The panicked look on her face disappeared. “I can breathe,” she whispered, taking great pleasure in an activity she had taken for granted her whole life up until forty five minutes ago.
“What just happened?” I asked, looking from Katie to Dr. Kemp.
As he opened another packet and removed a tube, he explained. “Her broken rib nicked her lung and put a small hole in it. Each time she inhaled, the expanding lung forced both sides of the hole together so the lung was able to fill with air. When she exhaled, the hole opened and part of the air was expelled into her chest cavity rather than out her nose. Over time, air pressure built up inside her chest cavity, which prevented her other lung from inflating properly.”
As he was explaining her problem, he placed the tube through the hole in her side and began sewing it into place. “She wouldn’t have lasted much longer.” he continued. “If she hadn’t gotten that chest tube, the air inside her chest would have kept her good lung from inflating and she would have suffocated.
“The last thing we need to complete the procedure is a Heimlich flutter valve to go on the end of the tube. Look around and see if you can find one,” he said as he moved to a cabinet and searched the interior. Not finding what he was looking for, he shut the door and moved to the next cabinet.
“One of you go look in the next room,” he said as he continued opening drawers and cabinets.
Matt stepped into the hallway and immediately came back into the room and closed the door. “Stop talking,” he whispered, “Several infected just walked around the corner into the hallway. They’re coming this way.”
Chapter 18
“We can’t stay here. Can we move her?” I asked, looking at Katie without much hope. She had a tube hanging out of her left side and nothing had been done about her bullet wound.
“We need to seal the tube before we move her,” Dr. Kemp said. “There doesn’t seem to be a flutter valve in here and we aren’t going to be able get to any of the other rooms. Get me a sterile glove from that drawer over there,” he said, pointing behind me to the drawer marked “gloves”. I pulled the drawer open and picked up a white package from the bottom. “Open it up without touching them,” he admonished.
Inside the sealed package was a paper packet folded in half. I unfolded the paper, exposing a pair of gloves, one glove on either side of the unfolded packet. Dr. Kemp, who was still wearing his gloves, picked up one of the new gloves. He took the scissors from the suture kit and cut the tip off the middle finger of the glove and then cut the base of the finger from the rest of the glove. He took the tip of the severed finger and stretched it over the end of Katie’s tube. The rest of the finger hung limply until she exhaled. A small puff of air straightened the finger out slightly and then it went limp again. When Katie inhaled, the suction from her chest pulled the upper and lower part of the rubber finger together, forming an effective seal which prevented air from being sucked into her chest through the chest tube.
“I learned that trick while visiting a friend who was a missionary doctor in Africa,” he whispered proudly. “It’s crude, but it will work fine. Give me thirty seconds and I will have her bullet wound bandaged up good enough to travel. I would like to get to the pharmacy down the hall and get some antibiotics and some pain meds for her,” he added as he deftly bandaged the wound on her chest.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I stated as I looked toward Matt, who was facing the door with his pistol drawn. The door seemed a bit flimsy. Hopefully its strength wouldn’t be put to the test. The room was as silent as a cemetery on the night of a full moon. Just like that cemetery, no one wanted to be here.
As the infected moved, I could he
ar shuffling feet progressing down the hall. Occasionally, something would bump a toppled cart or some other metallic item and the hallway would reverberate with a clang from the object hitting the wall or another hard surface.
The tension in the room was palpable. Nobody was speaking. Beating hearts were pounding so hard, they were nearly audible. Dr. Kemp had finished bandaging Katie. Her shirt had been discarded on the roadside, so he procured a clean gown from one of the cupboards. She quickly put it on as she sat at the edge of the bed with her feet dangling just short of the ground. She whispered her thanks, grateful to be decent again as Dr. Kemp had cut her bra off prior to performing the procedure. After Katie had pulled the gown over her head, Dr. Kemp cut a hole in the side and pulled the tube through it.
While Matt and I conferred over what our plan was going to be, Dr. Kemp cut the excess fabric from the Katie’s gown and she tucked what was left into her waist band. She winced as she stood and her broken rib shifted slightly.
The shuffling footsteps reached the door to the room we were in and they suddenly stopped. Everything in the hall went silent for a moment and then I heard sniffing. It was like a dog sniffing the feet and pants of a newcomer who had a dog of his own at home. The sniffing dog was trying to figure out where the smell of the intruding dog was coming from and how it should react. Unlike the sniffing dog, the noses outside the door didn’t lose interest after a few seconds. More noses congregated outside the door and the volume increased as the chorus of noses grew in number. Snorts began between sniffs. Snorts turned to growls and the growls turned to howls.
In the span of thirty seconds, the hallway erupted into a fury. Fists began banging on the door and fingernails clawed at its hard surface. Then the entire door shuddered as a solid mass collided with it. The banging from the fists subsided and the door was struck again and then a third time. My imagination pictured the swarm of banging fists and scratching nails moving aside to allow enraged ghouls to throw themselves against the door in a frenzy. The door was holding; however, it was made to protect people inside from prying eyes. It was not designed to withstand repeated bludgeoning from bodies throwing themselves against it. Unless they lost interest, the door would not hold forever.
I looked at Matt. “If they break that door down, we aren’t going to be able to hold them off. I could barely overcome one at a time in the diner. If the sounds coming from the hall are any indication, I would say there are at least a dozen out there. It could be closer to twenty. We need a way out of here that doesn’t include traveling through the hallway.”
The problem was, there was no other way out of the room. There were no other doors and there were no windows. We were trapped. With each impact, the door shuddered. It began to wiggle at the frame with each strike against it. The screws that held the hinges in place were starting to break free. We didn’t have long before they gave way.
“Doc, are x-ray rooms lined with metal?” Matt asked as he moved to the north wall of the room and knocked on it with his fist.
“Yes, they typically have a lead lining about an eighth of an inch thick. Why?” Dr. Kemp asked.
“The room adjacent to this room is the x-ray room. If we could knock a hole through the wall, we could get into it. There is a door on the north edge of the x-ray room that leads to a waiting room that has an outside door,” Matt said as he moved across the room and began undoing the strap on the oxygen bottle that was standing in the corner. “Give me a hand with this thing,” he said, dragging the metal canister across the floor toward the wall shared with the x-ray room.
I helped him move the four foot tall canister next to the wall. Once it was in position, we were standing on opposite sides of the canister. We tilted the valve end of the tank away from the wall. With one hand near the valve and the other three quarters of the way toward the bottom, we lifted the tank and held it horizontally.
“On three,” Matt said. “One, two, three!” Together, we both swung the tank up and back. When gravity overcame our strength, the tank began to arc back down and forward. We changed the direction of the force we were applying to the steel tank and added our strength to force of gravity. The tank continued to increase in velocity until it impacted the wall. The bottle left a crushed, round impression in the drywall. The bottle had bulged the wall inward slightly, but nothing more. We moved down the wall a short distance and tried again. The result was the same. We swung the massive bottle again and again and again. The wall bulged in a little further with each strike, but we couldn’t penetrate the metal layer.
“Let’s try the south wall. There’s an exam room on the other side. The door to that room was closed when we walked by. There’s no outside door, but as long as we keep the hole small, they’ll have to come through one at a time. That should give us a better chance of holding them off.”
We moved the bottle to the south wall and swung like lumberjacks in a tree chopping contest. The bottle hit the wall with a dull thud, again leaving a round crushed impression of the bottom of the bottle in the drywall, but nothing more.
Matt looked dumbfounded. “This wall shouldn’t be shielded with metal. Is there brick behind the sheetrock?” he asked, bewildered. “That should have punched right through.”
“Let’s try it again. Move nine inches down the wall.” I suggested. We replayed the previous maneuver. This time the outcome was different. The bottom of the tank went through the drywall. The rest of the tank followed. We were left with empty hands as we looked through a nine inch wide circular hole in the wall. The steel container landed in the examination room with a clang. “They must have used some strong studs when they built this place,” I said, peering through the hole in the wall.
With the battering ram no longer accessible, Matt quickly began kicking the wall with the bottom of his boot. Chunks of sheetrock crumbled beneath the force of the blows. In less than a minute, he created a hole that was big enough for us to scrunch through. It was small enough that if the door gave way, the infected would have to come through the hole one at a time to get at us. The hole wasn’t very high so they would have to bend over which would further slow them.
While Matt was enlarging the hole in the wall, I located the cabinet that held surgical masks. When he was done with the wall, I handed one to Matt, who had left his gas mask in the van, and gave the other to Dr. Kemp. “You might want to put these on in case they get through the door.”
Katie went through the hole first. As she doubled over to fit through, she yelped in pain, but it didn’t slow her. I followed. Dr. Kemp couldn’t bend low enough. Matt helped him sit down with his back against the wall and I grasped him under the arms and pulled him through and then pulled him up to his feet. Matt followed on his heels.
As Matt cleared the breach in the wall, there was a loud crack and the door gave way. Looking back through the void in the wall, I saw an infected slide across the floor, carried by the momentum he had established prior to colliding with the door. The room was instantly filled with legs, at least forty of them. The hole was too low to allow more than legs to be seen. Looking through the hole, I could also see through the shattered doorway into the hall. More legs were frantically moving back and forth in the hallway.
The hospital was full of infected. At first it didn’t make sense. Then I realized it probably had the greatest concentration of dead bodies, thanks to Homeland Security’s massacre. It was a veritable buffet of human flesh. Fat, thin, old, young, whatever their taste, there was a little of everything for the infected. Right now, it seemed we were at the top of their list of desirable food.
The low height of the hole in the wall, which prevented me from seeing more than legs, also prevented the walkers from seeing us in the exam room. It didn’t prevent the slider from seeing us, though. He came to rest six feet from the hole with his head on the ground, looking directly at us. He howled in delight and scrambled on all fours toward the hole, his feet slipping sideways on the freshly waxed tiles.
Matt tore his gun from
its holster as the infected slid his head through the breach.
“Cover your ears, Katie,” I shouted, right before Matt squeezed the trigger and hurled a half ounce of lead toward the intruder of our refuge. The infected had his head down as he came through the wall. The bullet smashed into the top it. He collapsed to the ground, his arm quivering slightly. If his movement hadn’t alerted the other infected to our location, the explosion from Matt’s gun did. All the legs scampered furiously to the hole.
An upside down face appeared in the hole, blood and gore dripping from her lips. Her long blond hair nearly touched the floor, as the infected woman bent over to inspect the cavern behind the hole. Her inspection was met with a bullet through her open, snarling mouth. It missed her brain, but must have hit her spine because she collapsed on top of the first one. Her open eyes roved back and forth from person to person, searching the room, her teeth continuing to click together. Her mouth opened in a silent howl. When the bullet severed her spine, she lost the ability to contract her diaphragm and thus lost the ability to move the air necessary to make noise. Clacking teeth didn’t justify another bullet.
Another body appeared in the breach and began to enter our stronghold. The body chinked to the left as Matt fired and he hit the woman’s right shoulder. She continued her assault undeterred. She was three quarters of the way through the hole before Matt got off his second shot. That one connected with her head and stopped the woman cold in her tracks.
The accumulating bodies were effectively shrinking the useable size of the hole, which slowed the infected even further as they attempted to breach our sanctuary.
Our plan was working perfectly. Our defensive position was secure. And then the infected in the hallway figured out there was another way into the room. They began pounding on the door and then began hurling their bodies against it. The door shuddered with each collision.
