by Sam Sisavath
“How old.”
“Over sixteen, I guess. Basically, anyone with a gun. They don’t want anyone who resists. They just want the kids.”
Gaby turned nineteen today. And she’s certainly as hell going to resist.
“Is it over?” Will asked. “Did you kill all the adults? I don’t hear anymore shooting.”
“Last time I checked, there were a couple unaccounted for. They’re still looking for them.”
Gaby?
“Why are you doing this?” Mike asked. He had been so quiet for so long that his sudden voice made Jones jump a bit.
“What do you mean?” Jones asked, turning to look back at Mike.
“Why are you betraying your own kind?”
“I…” Jones’s mind seemed to be working overtime, probably trying to come up with an answer that would keep him alive. “To survive,” he said finally. “Isn’t that what we’re all just trying to do here? I’m just trying to survive like everyone else.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m not proud of it, but I don’t have a choice.”
“You had a choice,” Mike said. “You just chose the wrong one.”
Jones opened his mouth to answer, but thought better of it.
Mike looked at Will. “You wanna ask him anything else?”
“How many did you kill on the tenth floor?” Will asked Jones.
Jones shook his head. “Wasn’t my assignment. Me and the other three guys that chased you had the lobby. I didn’t even kill anyone.”
“Not for lack of trying.”
“I’m just following orders,” Jones said defensively.
“Now where have I heard that before?”
Jones didn’t answer. He looked away instead.
“Anything else?” Mike said.
Will shook his head. “I’m done.”
“Good,” Mike said, and blew Jones’s head off with the Mossberg from less than a foot away.
CHAPTER 12
GABY
I just turned nineteen, and I’ve already killed three men.
Happy birthday to me.
Eleven months ago, she was trying to decide who to let take her to the senior prom. After a lot of debate and conversations with friends, her choices had come down to two likely candidates—Trevor and Scott. They were both cute boys, and she knew Scott from tenth grade when they dated for half a year before calling it quits. Trevor was new in town, but he had the bluest eyes, and she had always been a sucker for blue eyes.
She wondered where Trevor was now. Maybe hiding in a basement. Or inside a building with friends. If he was lucky, he would have found some people to travel with. That was the only way to survive these days. You couldn’t do it on your own. She remembered those months when she stayed behind in whatever basement they had found while Josh and Matt went out to search for supplies.
Had she been scared back then? No, not really. Thinking back, she was never really scared. She just deferred to the boys because they were boys, and she was a girl. She didn’t know any better.
She felt like laughing as she thought about the Gaby from a few months ago.
She might have actually laughed, or made a noise, because Jen glanced over. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” she whispered back. “Just thinking of an old joke.”
“Really? Now?”
They were squeezed inside a small, six-by-seven room in the back of the nurses’ lounge. It would have been pitch black if not for a few slivers of sunlight poking through the edges of the closed door. The lounge had a north side-facing window with raised blinds that looked out at the parking lot.
The room had once been a bathroom, judging by the big toilet in the back and a porcelain sink somewhere on her left, poking into her rib cage at the moment. The nurses had pushed a refrigerator over one side of the door and covered up the other half with a big poster boasting Mercy Hospital as one of the Top 50 Best Reviewed Hospitals in America. Mike’s people had discovered the room a while back, but never did anything with it. There wasn’t any point with so many rooms to choose from, and she guessed they never expected to need an emergency hideout.
Will would have put it to use ‘just in case.’
She wasn’t alone in the room. Besides Jen, there was Amy, who was the one who had remembered the room and led them here. It was only a couple of turns from where they had been when the attack began. Along the way they had run across Benny, running with the button-nosed boy Gaby had seen earlier, both of their eyes wide with fear.
Benny sat directly behind her now. Amy was in the back with the boy in her lap. The kid was strangely quiet, though he was clearly terrified, the large whites of his eyes staring back at her in the semidarkness. All four looked stunned and bewildered by what had happened. She didn’t blame them. The attack had been swift and brutal. The four of them were probably thinking of all the friends they had just lost. She knew how that felt, too.
The five of them packed into the small bathroom was tight enough, but they also had to battle the bags of medical supplies for the limited space. Amy and Jen had wanted to leave them behind, but Gaby wouldn’t let them. She and Will had come all the way here for them, and she’d be damned if she was going to abandon them now. She liked to think Will would have done the same thing in her position.
“What now?” Benny whispered, leaning forward until the cold barrel of his AR-15 poked into Gaby’s back, causing her to wince a bit. “Sorry.”
For the longest time, they heard gunfire and screaming. When it was finally over, they heard sniffling and crying, and she knew without actually seeing that the men outside were taking the children. Amy told her there were eleven kids in the hospital, not counting the one with the button nose.
What are they doing with the children?
They weren’t shooting them; she was certain of that. They shot everyone else, though. The adults and some of the teenagers. She remembered the sight of Tom, Benny’s friend, lying around a corner with a bullet hole in his forehead. The men in hazmat suits hadn’t shown any mercy.
She saw and heard them entering the lounge twice in the last hour. They had looked around before moving on. The sight of the gas masks reminded her of Beaumont, but she did her best to push those memories into the past where they belonged and focused instead on the moment, the here and now, on trying to stay alive today.
One of the collaborators had actually walked over and opened the fridge, looked in at the bottles of warm water and Gatorade inside, before slamming it shut and leaving. He may or may not have taken a bottle with him. She had a limited view of the lounge through the small slivers in the uncovered parts of the doorframe.
Sometime between the start of the attack and when she heard the last gunshot, Gaby swore she could hear gunfire from above her, on the rooftop. It seemed to go on for a while, and she immediately thought, Will and Mike are back. They’re firing on Will and Mike.
The fact that the gunfire went on for some time told her it hadn’t been a massacre, so that was a good sign.
Hopefully.
Then it was quiet. Very quiet.
Now, Gaby looked down at the glowing hands of her watch: 12:13 p.m.
“We can’t stay here forever,” she whispered.
Jen nodded. “I know.”
“Why not?” Amy whispered behind them. “Why can’t we just wait them out? They have to leave eventually.”
“Not before they open the doors to the ghouls,” Gaby said. “By nightfall, this entire floor will be filled with them. You think they’re just going to lock everything back up when they go? That’s not how this works.”
Amy didn’t answer, and Benny seemed to be breathing a little harder than before.
“So what now?” Jen asked.
For some reason, the pilot’s eyes were focused on Gaby’s when she asked the question.
Seriously? I’m nineteen years old. Why are you looking at me?
But she knew why. Mike had let them down. Jen, Amy, Benny,
and the kid. He hadn’t prepared them for this. It was only Amy’s quick thinking that had saved their lives. The hazmat suits were everywhere, in every hallway, and moving through all four towers of the hospital, looking for targets. Neither Jen nor Amy had any idea how they had gotten in.
They’re so unprepared. Will would never have let us be such easy prey.
“We have to get out of here,” Gaby said.
“How?” Benny whispered.
“The helicopter,” Gaby said. She looked at Jen. “You have the keys with you, right?”
“Keys?” Jen said.
“To the helicopter.”
Jen looked a bit confused. “It’s a Bell 407 model. It doesn’t have keys.”
“So how do you keep people from stealing it?”
“What, the helicopter?”
“Yeah.”
“Gaby, who would steal a helicopter? It’s not like stealing a car. You actually do need to know more than where the gas pedal is to fly one.”
“So if we get to the rooftop, you could just hop in and fly us out of here?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“How are you for fuel?”
“I’m down to eleven gallons.”
“Could you get more?”
“There’s a private airport about ten miles from here. It’s my primary refueling depot.”
Gaby nodded. “So we just need to get up to the roof.”
“Gee, that’s it?” Benny said.
She gave him an annoyed look, and Benny turned away. The nineteen-year-old girl in her felt bad for her quick-tempered reaction, but the survivor part of her, who had struggled to survive Will and Danny’s crucible on the island over the last three months, was glad he was embarrassed.
“All I know is we can’t stay in here forever,” Gaby said. She looked down at her watch again. “If we’re still here when it gets dark, we’re never leaving. Not as ourselves, anyway. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat a bullet than become one of those things.”
She looked back at their faces. Even the kid with the button nose seemed to grasp the gravity of what she was telling them. Or maybe not. For all she knew, he probably didn’t speak English.
“What’s your plan?” Jen finally asked.
“I think Will’s out there,” Gaby said. “Maybe with Mike and the others. The shooting we heard earlier, I think that was them.”
“We could wait for them,” Benny said. “Mike wouldn’t leave us.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Amy nodded certainly.
“And Will wouldn’t leave me, either,” Gaby said. “But they would be on a timetable just like we are. Will especially would know it’ll be too late if they don’t do something by nightfall. We have to let them know there are still people in here to help.”
“How do we do that?” Jen asked.
Good question…
*
She waited until one in the afternoon before acting. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing, but spending the next six hours stuck in the bathroom, waiting for the inevitable nightfall, didn’t strike her as a very good plan. The old Gaby might not have been so assertive, but she hadn’t been her old self in a while, thank God.
Jen argued briefly, and Benny gave her a horrified look when she told them her plans. He spent the next twenty minutes trying to talk her out of it. She wasn’t sure if he was afraid she would get them caught, or if there was something more. The truth was probably somewhere in-between.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just wait for my signal.”
“What kind of signal?” Jen asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Hey, you got any bright ideas?”
“No…”
“So okay, then. Wait for my signal.”
Using the slivers in the doorframe, she looked into the nurses’ lounge and saw no one. She listened, and heard nothing. The men in hazmat suits were all wearing combat boots, and they weren’t shy about stomping back and forth. She could usually feel the ground vibrating slightly whenever they approached or walked past the lounge.
The bathroom door opened inward, so she had to move back a bit, bumping into Benny in the process. He struggled to give her space, and she swung the door open, revealing the dust-covered poster that had saved their lives. Gaby pushed the lower half of the glossy sheet forward, gently, and was thankful the top half was held in place by thumbtacks. It fluttered a bit as she slipped outside, and she heard the door instantly closing back up behind her.
She pushed the poster back into place, rubbing down the bottom edges as best she could until it stopped moving. She unslung her M4 and moved toward the open door, then leaned against the wall next to it.
She heard voices in the hallway and the loud crunch of footsteps moving around. There hadn’t been any additional gunfire since around noon, which meant the attackers had completely taken over the hospital. She tried not to think about how many people were already dead out there. She had seen four on the way to the lounge, and the look frozen on their faces said it all—they never saw it coming.
Gaby tried to picture the hospital’s layout in her head. They were in the north tower, and the rooftop access was to her right, around a couple of turns, then at the very end. There had to be men on the rooftop, so even if she could make her way up there, she had to expect an additional fight.
What the hell am I doing? Is this what Will would do?
She glanced back at the long window behind her, the parking lot visible below. She looked for a bit, but couldn’t detect any signs of movements. There had been a gun battle out there not all that long ago. Will and Mike, she was sure of it. Definitely Will. Sound traveled, and he would have heard the attack all the way at the Archers a couple of blocks away.
If only Mike had been smart enough to issue radios to his people…
Gaby turned back toward the door for a moment. From her angle, she only had a limited view of the hallway. The sounds of footsteps from earlier were gone, along with the voices. How many of them were still out there? It wouldn’t have taken very many to secure the floor. Mike’s people were shockingly unprepared, and most of them were women and children. As for the men, she only saw about a dozen that could have really put up a fight.
She moved to the window and put a palm on it. Thick glass, like in the patient rooms. Knocking on it produced a dull, thudding sound. No wonder the ghouls couldn’t get inside. It would have taken an entire magazine just to make a dent in it.
She peered out at the parking lot below, then along the streets, trying to catch sight of something she could use. Would Will be out there now? He had to be. If he knew the hospital was under attack, he would try to get back in, find out if she was still alive. She knew him. You didn’t eat and sleep on the same patch of dirt with someone in the woods for two weeks without a shower and not know how he would respond in a crisis.
Will wouldn’t leave me.
So where the hell is he…?
Unless he thought she was dead. Will might head back to the island if he believed that. Will wasn’t cold-blooded, but he was extremely practical. Maybe—
Gaby froze.
There!
She saw it near an alleyway to the left of the parking lot, across the street and between a couple of orange buildings. It looked like a reflection.
Sunlight glinting off metal?
No, not metal. Glass.
Gaby focused on the glinting object.
She was sure of it now. It wasn’t something natural, because the reflection wasn’t constant. It was there one second and gone the next. Then it was there for a good five seconds, then disappeared for two more, before flickering again. Like it was trying to get her attention.
Will?
A single gunshot echoed directly above her, from the rooftop. The reflection vanished as small pieces of the orange building flicked into the air.
I guess I wasn’t the only one who saw that.
&nbs
p; The loud sounds of heavy footsteps in the hallway snapped her back to the lounge.
Gaby hurried to the door and pushed against the wall. She glimpsed two figures in hazmat suits walking awkwardly across the open door. One of them was carrying a crate of canned food, while the other was lugging a familiar green ammo can.
That’s ours, asshole.
They passed by without bothering to look into the lounge.
She heard another man coming down the hallway trailing the first two, already fading as they got farther away. Her mind’s eye flashed back to the man in Beaumont and how he had worn his gas mask. She remembered only his eyes and the bridge of his nose, but no real details about his face because it was hard to see what he really looked like under the gas mask.
That’s it. That’s the way out of here.
Just as the third man reached the lounge, Gaby picked up a ceramic black mug—World’s Best Nurse was written on the side—from a nearby table and tossed it to the floor. The mug cracked, revealing stained black insides.
The man stopped in the hallway and stepped into the lounge, his rifle in front of him. Gaby watched him walk past her and noticed he was about her height. He moved carefully inside, before stopping when he saw the broken pieces of the mug on the floor.
He might have sensed her, but before he could turn, Gaby jammed the barrel of her M4 into the back of his neck. “Put the rifle on the floor.”
Her voice was amazingly steady.
Why aren’t I afraid? I should be afraid, right?
The man did as she ordered, bending slowly at the knees. He might even have been shaking a bit inside the suit. Gaby reached back with one hand and closed the door behind them.
“Benny,” she called. “Get out here.”
She heard the bathroom door opening, then the poster fluttered as Benny hurried out. “This is your plan?”
“This is it.”
“So now what?”
“Put your gun on him.”
Benny aimed his rifle at the man in the hazmat suit while Gaby freed his sidearm from a holster, then unsnapped the gas mask from his belt.
The man looked to be in his mid-thirties, with the kind of face that made her think he might have been an accountant in a past life. She knew the type. Her father was a taxman, and he’d had the same pudgy and pale complexion from working in an office for most of his life.
