by Perrin Briar
She didn’t turn to look back. She got into the small glass elevator and repeatedly jabbed the button for the fifth floor. There was no friendly female voice, no lights. It still didn’t have power. Susan checked her watch. Ten seconds left.
It seemed an eternity. Susan could barely breathe. The zombie could appear any second…
Four seconds left…
Three…
Two…
One…
The elevator lights came on. Susan jabbed the fifth floor button.
“Going up,” a calm female voice said.
The doors began to slide closed.
A mutilated hand reached inside. The elevator doors stopped and began to open.
Susan was frozen with fear. She pressed herself against the wall, wishing it would swallow her.
The door revealed the undead creature, like a conjuror’s trick. A corner of his mouth was turned up into a permanent sneer.
Susan shut her eyes. Amy was there to greet her. Her beaming smile, her beautiful face, curled up into a smile… And the thought she might never see her again, never lay hands on her, nor tuck her in at night…
It was all Susan needed. She opened her eyes.
Steve’s combat knife was already in her hands. She hacked at the zombie’s groping arms. She sliced open his forearms. The undead’s fingers danced on the floor in their death throes. But the zombie still came on, undaunted.
Susan shifted her grip, the blade facing up. She blindly raised it in a reverse stabbing motion, piercing the monster under the chin. Its blood oozed over Susan’s hand. She held the zombie back with her free hand as she impaled it again and again.
“Going up,” the elevator’s voice said.
The elevator doors attempted to close again, but jolted when the sensors picked up the zombie obstruction.
Susan screamed and stabbed harder, the zombie’s lidless eyes glaring at her. Susan pushed the zombie back. He stumbled, leaning dangerously back, as if he was losing his balance.
Susan jammed her finger on the fifth floor button again. So hard, she thought she might have broken her finger.
“Going up,” the elevator voice said.
“Come on,” Susan said. “Come on!”
The doors began to close. The zombie found his balance, and leaned forward. Behind him, the two scrapping zombies from outside were approaching. If the door didn’t close in time, Susan was dead.
The door edged closer to shutting. Just a few inches remained. The lead zombie reached out with his hands…
The elevator doors shut. The zombie, a split second later, banged into the doors. The elevator whirred and vibrated as it rose. Susan clutched the knife close, and cried. Her body was still shaking. She was alive. She let herself smile.
Thud.
Thud, thud.
They came from the roof. What the blazes? The groans of the undead answered Susan’s curiosity. Had some of them managed to pry an elevator door open? Who cares. The point was, they were here.
Susan jumped, scrabbling to grab the hatch that was still open from when she’d dropped down earlier. She slammed it shut. Scrabbling hands felt for the latch, feeling for something, anything, to seize and tear at, but the surface was glass and difficult to grip.
At this rate, the undead would get to the open elevator doors on the fifth floor before she would. They would stumble inside and attack the soldiers, who had their backs turned, drawing away as many of the undead from Susan as they could.
Worse, Richard was lying on the floor, not far from the elevator doors. He’d be helpless. It was a nightmare.
Susan pulled the emergency stop lever. She needed time to think. The undead’s feet shuffled on the elevator roof. Now what was she going to do?
She listened.
There were no scrabbling noises on the door side of the elevator. Undead weren’t waiting to get on the elevator. She could get out at the third or fourth floor and find a way up. She picked up a walking stick that had belonged to one of the dead men. She used it to pry the elevator doors open in the hope of being greeted by an empty floor.
She pressed on the stick with all her weight and strength. She bounced, forcing the doors open an inch at a time. Three inches wide, the gap was wide enough for Susan to know she was out of luck. She put her hand to the concrete wall. She was between floors. Susan ran her hands over it and smacked it with the palm of her hand.
“Damn!” she said.
How was she going to get out of this situation? The creatures on the roof continued to beat on the roof. It sounded like heavy rain.
Then she had an idea.
Susan removed the emergency stop lever. The elevator began to rise again. Susan jabbed at the opposite end of the elevator with her stick, getting the undead’s attention. With any luck, they would be distracted and wouldn’t stumble through the empty elevator doorway. The elevator kept rising.
They would be approaching the fifth floor any moment. Susan’s stomach twisted. She kept tapping at the wall. There was a crunch, a grunt, and blood ran down the gap in the elevator doors. At least one zombie had attempted to make it through the empty elevator doorway, and had been crushed in the attempt.
Ding.
The doors slid open. A waterfall of blood oozed from the roof. Snapped bones and a decapitated head lay on the floor. An undead figure stood before her, its back to her. The rest of the undead were still on the elevator roof.
The single undead stumbled forward, toward Richard, who was curled up on the floor, his eyes wide and terrified. He shuffled back an inch, unable to do more. Susan was meant to bring salvation. Instead, she’d brought death.
Susan gathered her courage, took out Steve’s combat knife, and threw herself forward. Blood speckled her face from the roof, but she didn’t stop. Her knife punctured the zombie’s body. She fell upon him and stabbed at the creature mercilessly over and over until she was bloody up to her elbows.
The zombie reached out and grabbed Richard by the wrist. Susan slammed the knife into the back of the zombie’s head. It gargled a final warning. Its body relaxed.
Richard opened his eyes. It appeared to take a great deal of effort. He was pale, his lips blue. He was breathing silently, his chest barely moving. It was a bad sign.
“No…” Susan said. “No, no, no, no, no!”
Susan pulled Richard into her lap, helping him to sit up so his lungs expanded to their full size. She put the inhaler in his mouth. She waited, but nothing happened.
“Breathe,” Susan said. “Richard. Breathe!”
His lips were white. There was nothing but a small rasp squeezing past his lips. Tears spilled down Susan’s cheeks.
“Please, breathe,” Susan said. “I can’t lose you.”
She formed a fist and beat him on the chest. She didn’t know why she did that. Was it out of anger? Or desperation? Or some extrasensory perception that operated under the radar? She did it again and again. She roared and pounded him one last time.
Richard shot up, into a sitting position, breathing in deep. Susan pressed the button on the inhaler. Richard coughed, spluttering, and tried to remove the pump, but Susan kept it in his mouth.
“Breathe,” she said. “A few more times.”
Richard did, his breaths coming stronger, until air filled his lungs completely.
“You… you saved me,” Richard said. “How?”
“It doesn’t matter how,” Susan said. “You’re alive. That’s the important thing.”
Richard smiled.
“Thank you,” he said. “For saving my life.”
Susan smiled. Richard raised a hand to her cheek.
“Really,” Richard said. “Thank you.”
Susan rocked him gently in her lap.
The gunfire stopped, and the soldiers approached, taking in the scene of a blood-splattered Susan and the undead corpse. Jericho shook his head in unveiled respect.
“You got some cohunes on you, girl,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
“I’ll second that,” Jericho said.
He pressed the button for the first floor and stepped out of the elevator. He stood back as the elevator descended. The soldiers formed up.
The undead came into view, wandering around on the roof as it lowered. There had to be a dozen of them. They saw the soldiers, hissed, and moved toward them, but the elevator took them down before any of them could stumble through the doorway.
At least that part had been easy.
Z-MINUS: 50 minutes
The comatose patients lay in bed, every bit as unresponsive as the undead, heartrate monitors bleeping their life signal in calm measured tones. They had no idea what was happening to the world, to the center.
“What are we going to do with these people?” Taylor said. “They won’t stand a chance against the undead. They’ll get in here and it’ll be a free-for-all buffet.”
“We’ll make our stand here,” Jericho said. “This is where we’ll hold them back.”
Susan shared a look with Steve, recalling his earlier warning that they wouldn’t be able to hold out against all the undead in the center – and that was before they’d fired their guns, getting the attention of even more undead.
“We’ll set charges and blow the stairwells,” Jericho said.
“That might bring the building down on top of us too,” Taylor said.
“Between the zombies and the building falling on us,” Jericho said. “I’ll take the building. Besides, if we don’t make a stand now to defend these patients, when will we?”
“On the fifth floor,” Susan said.
Her comment gained the attention of everyone present.
“Excuse me?” Jericho said.
“We can’t defend from here,” Susan said. “We have one more floor left, one more barricade. We shouldn’t give that up.”
“These people are your patients,” Jericho said. “You swore an oath to protect them, not to sacrifice them to the infected.”
“He’s right,” Richard said. “We can’t just let them die.”
“Do you think I like doing this?” Susan said. “We have to think about the greater good. These people will buy us time. Who here wants to carry their bodies? It makes us weak and unable to fight. They need their machines to keep them alive. Eventually the power is going to go off anyway, and they will still die. And we would have lost any advantage we might have had.”
“You’re saying we should leave them to their fate?” Jericho said. “Let them get slaughtered like cattle? I won’t do it. You’re not God. You can’t make that decision.”
“It was God who infected all those people out there,” Susan said. “And put us in here, with the only way to make the cure upstairs.”
“We can’t just up and leave them like this!” Richard said. “We swore an oath!”
“Oaths don’t mean much during the apocalypse,” Susan said.
She couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. They were cold and dead, not the chipper tone she greeted the soldiers with each morning. She had the cold hard reason of a judge.
“This isn’t an apocalypse!” Phil said. “This is just… a setback, that’s all.”
“The undead walking the streets, the spread of a dangerous virus,” Susan said. “I think it’s a safe assumption to call this the end of days. But there’s still hope. It’s upstairs, and if we can hold out just a little longer…”
“We can’t let those monsters eat these people alive!” Jericho said, betraying a humanity Susan never knew he possessed. He turned to Steve. “Steve, please. We can’t do this.”
Steve opened his mouth to speak, and then turned and looked away.
“Some soldier you are,” Jericho said. “You lost your balls as well as your arm?”
Steve glared at Jericho.
“It takes more balls to do the hard thing,” Steve said. “Susan’s got more balls than the rest of us put together.”
Jericho spat on the floor. The decision had been made, and it hadn’t been in his favor.
“They don’t have to die to those things,” Phil said.
He moved to a cabinet and took out a handful of syringes. Then he went to a cupboard and unlocked it. Inside were rows of various liquids. He went to the end, to a large white jug with an image of a skull and crossbones on it. He set it on a table. He began to fill the syringes.
“Arsenic?” Richard said.
“The king of poisons,” Phil said.
Arsenic, so often the choice of whodunit authors, really was the best poison in the world. It had no taste and worked incredibly fast.
The three scientists each approached a patient. They hesitated. Phil ran a hand through his hair. Susan’s eyes were sunken and desperate. Richard rubbed his sweaty palms over his white coat.
“Are we sure about doing this?” Richard said.
Susan didn’t answer. She felt sick to her stomach. If she did reply she wouldn’t have been able to do it.
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” Steve said.
He peered through the furniture at the staircase. The furniture inched backward an inch, and then two.
“They’re coming,” he said.
It gave the scientists the push they needed. They pressed their lips together and inserted the needles into their patients, emptying the poison into their veins. They moved from one patient to the next. As they moved around to the final few patients, the furniture was freely sliding across the floor. The soldiers pushed against it to keep it in place. Susan administered the final injection and wiped the sweat from her brow.
“Done?” Steve said.
Susan nodded.
“Then it’s time for us to get out of here,” Steve said.
The patients’ heartrate monitors sped up, like a racecar off the start line, until the machines were ringing with a single tone. It was a dagger to the scientists’ hearts. They had worked hard to keep these people alive, so they might one day wake up and see their families and loved ones again. Now, they were to enter a true endless sleep, and it had been at their primary caregivers’ hands.
The room was alive with the monotone death knell. It nipped at the survivors’ heels as they took off up the second set of stairs to the fifth floor. Susan’s icy demeanor faltered and her lips turned down. She’d put them down like unwanted mongrels. It broke her heart, but not enough to make her regret doing it. It was the greater kindness. She was an angel of death, come to bring them solace, to reap their souls, to give them a better farewell than the one they would have received at the hands of the undead.
“Form up around the stairwell,” Steve said. “The final floor. Our last hope.”
“We should barricade the stairs,” Taylor said.
Steve shook his head.
“They’ll hear it,” he said. “For now, we wait.”
“No…” Phil said.
He was looking at something behind them.
“No!” he said, louder.
He got to his feet and ran toward something on the other side of the room. They all turned to see what had so filled Phil with despair.
“No…” Susan said.
“Not now,” Richard said. “Why now?”
Phil was on his knees before Archie. Neither of his arms were working.
Z-MINUS: 28 minutes
Each of Archie’s arms had caught on the petri dish holder, a metal bar that was part of the main chassis. The arms were never meant to come in contact with it, but somehow they’d gotten stuck. They moved back and forth between it and the wall and couldn’t get free.
“When did you last check on him?” Susan said, jumping on a terminal.
“About ten minutes ago,” Phil said.
The arms’ juddering made a high-pitch ringing sound. It was loud, like the alarm bell at school. There were grunts from the fourth
floor below.
“You need to shut it up!” Taylor said. “It’s getting their attention!”
Susan turned Archie off, and the piercing sound stopped. Phil used a key to unlock the Plexiglas cage and reached for a petri dish.
“How long will it take to fix it?” Steve said.
“There is no fixing it,” Phil said. “This petri dish is broken.”
“Can’t you just put it back in the machine?” Steve said.
“It’ll be contaminated,” Phil said. “And we’ll have to start over again.”
They were never going to survive that long. Susan’s mouth felt dry.
“What about the other one?” she said.
The undead were making their way up the stairs to the fifth floor, but no one cared. If Archie had failed, they were doomed anyway.
Phil’s footsteps were heavy as he approached Archie’s other arm. He unlocked the case, reached in, and took out the petri dish. A heavy silence as Phil peered at the dish. His expression betrayed nothing. Had everything they’d been fighting for been for nothing? Had Oaks’ death?
“It’s okay,” Phil said. “It’s good.”
He grinned. His eyes shimmered with tears. Everyone’s shoulders relaxed.
“Then we’re still in the game,” Steve said.
“How long till it’s complete?” Richard said.
“Fifteen minutes,” Phil said.
Phil reset Archie’s arm and put the petri dish back in place. He lowered the plastic case.
“Turn him back on,” Phil said.
Susan did. The arm limbered up, checking its joints. Then it returned to its protocol and continued making the cure.
“How much time do we need?” Steve said.
“Fifteen minutes,” Susan said.
Steve turned to look back at the stairwell, the loud grunting and groans from the undead bouncing off the hard concrete walls. Susan could see his thoughts on his face. They didn’t have fifteen minutes.
Z-MINUS: 12 minutes
