For myself I just couldn’t relax. I’d never liked hospitals—well, who does? The chemical stink of the disinfectant they use. The desolate utilitarianism of their furnishings. The lingering sense of decay and dissolution. I felt like something was crawling around on my shoulders, one of those long, wet-looking millipedes covered in hairs as fine and curved as eyelashes.
I kicked over a pile of bloody linens half-expecting something underneath to jump up and bite my leg. Nothing. Ayaan gave me a look and we pressed on. We were making lousy time, by necessity. The hallways of the deserted dark hospital were full of things to trip over, as I had just proved, and every few dozens yards the corridor was broken by a pair of swinging doors. Each of these could hide a crowd of the dead so the girls had developed a strategy for opening them. Two of the girls would kneel down on either side of the doors, their rifles at the ready, their flashlight beams converging on the doors. Ayaan would stand back a few yards ready for a frontal attack. Then I would push on the doors and step back hurriedly as they swung open. Theoretically I could roll out of the way before the shooting started if we found anything. I was pretty sure this was my punishment for not discharging my weapon back on the docks.
We covered a whole floor of the hospital this way. By the time we reached an elevator lobby sweat had soaked through my shirt even though it was cool in the dark corridors. The muscles in my face kept twitching. Every time we passed a side door that was even slightly ajar I could literally feel my skin trying to crawl off my back. Every time the corridor branched off to the sides I felt like I’d entered an abyss of cyclopean proportions where something horrible and huge might have been lying in wait for years, hoping for just this opportunity to strike.
In the elevator lobby I looked at the signs on the walls, whited out by the fierce bright wash of my flashlight, and tried to figure out what had happened. I knew we were lost, that was perfectly clear. I also knew I couldn’t say as much out loud. This was supposed to be my role in the mission, to act as a native guide. Admitting failure at this point might have inspired the girls to head back outside and leave me here alone. Alone and lost, unable to find my way back.
I really didn’t want that.
Ayaan cleared her throat. I ran my flashlight over her face, making her eyes glow like glass marbles lit from within. She didn’t look scared, which I irrationally took as a sign of contempt for me. How dare she be so calm when I was ready to throw up from sheer terror?.
I played the light over the color-coded signs again and then pointed it at the emergency stairwell. “This way,” I told them, and the girls stormed the fire door like they were assaulting an enemy fortress. Was I just a coward? I wondered. In my career I had purposefully gone into some of the worst places on Earth (at least they had been before the dead came back to life—now every place was alike in its badness), actively looking for war criminals and heavily-armed psychopaths so I could ask them to pretty please turn over their guns for disposal and destruction. I had never felt particularly afraid back then, though I had known when to duck and when to leave with or without what I’d come for. One time in Sudan I’d been in a convoy full of food and sanitary supplies heading to a village in the extreme south of the country. That just happened to be the day the rebels decided to seize that particular road. A hundred men wearing green hospital gowns (they couldn’t afford uniforms—they could afford plenty of guns, though) had stopped us and demanded that we just hand over the contents of our trucks. There was some discussion as to whether they should shoot us as well. Eventually they left us with one truck and all of our lives intact and we sped all the way back to Khartoum. I remember my heart beating a little faster then. It was nothing like this, this horripilating dread, this crawling fear.
Back then, no matter how bad things got, there was still some possibility of safety. There would always be a United Nations, and a Red Cross, and an Amnesty International. There were people somewhere who would work night and day to get you released from captivity or transferred to a clean well-run medical facility or airlifted out of harm’s way. Since the Epidemic all that was gone. My American citizenship got me nothing here, no help, no relief. Even in the middle of New York City I was helpless.
Ayaan and her squad could have sympathized—that was the only kind of life they’d ever known, even before the world died. As we entered the emergency stairwell and started up the stairs I considered how much I had to learn from them, how much I was going to have to change to survive and I tried not to hate them so much for having a head start.
Clang, clang. Clang, clang. Every step on the stairs rattled and banged with noise. The echoes rolled up and down the seemingly limitless vertical shaft of the stairwell, the sound shivering the cold air that we climbed through. It was loud enough to wake the dead, you know, if they hadn’t already been… damn. Even dumb jokes couldn’t help.
I was scared shitless.
It was some kind of help to me, then, when we rushed the doorway to the second floor and I pointed my flashlight right at a sign that pointed us towards the HIV Center. We’d made it. We had nearly reached our destination. Now we just had to grab the drugs and get back out the way we came.
We attacked another door and just like all the others there was nothing beyond it but more darkness and nasty-smelling hospital. More carts on casters and more piles of soiled linen. Nothing moving, nothing voicelessly lusting for our flesh. No sound at all. I took a step into the hallway and saw the reception desk for the HIV Center right ahead of me in the yellow stab of my flashlight. I took another step but I could tell the girls hadn’t followed. I spun around to demand why.
“Amus!” Ayaan hissed. I shut my mouth.
Nothing. Silence. An absolute lack of sound so distinct I could hear my own breath moving in and out of my chest. And underneath that something dull and atonal, and very, very distant. It was getting louder, though. Louder and more insistent.
Clang. Clang. Clang clang clang. Clang. Just like the sound our feet had made on the metal stairs—but without the rhythm of footsteps. The sound a fist makes when it hits a piece of metal but without any organization or purpose behind it. Clang. Clang clang. We heard something snap and clatter, a latch breaking off a door perhaps. An image came to me, why I don’t know, of fists pounding on the inside of a closed metal cabinet door and the door finally giving way. Sure, I thought. Like the metal door on a refrigerator or a meat storage locker. Or the heavy insulated door that might seal off a hospital’s morgue from the warmer air outside.
That was the other thing I hated about hospitals—people died there. Other people gotten take there for storage. Dead people.
We heard silence for a while. None of us moved. Then we heard the noise come back. Slow, painfully slow but loud. Very loud. Clang, clang. Pause. Clang, clang. Clang, clang.
Something was coming up the stairs behind us.
13
“First we find the drugs,” Ayaan said, pointing her rifle at me. “Then we can run.” I tried to grab the muzzle and push it away, certain she wouldn’t shoot me but she took a deft step backward that left me lunging at air. “They are slow. We have the time, still.”
In the light of just a couple of flashlights I couldn’t read her face very well. I could hear the dead men coming up the stairs behind us perfectly, though.
I pushed past the girls and into the clinic lobby, my light stabbing through the swirling dust in the corridor. A ward of double rooms stretched to the right—I had no time for this!—to where a nurse’s station connected two hallways. Move, I told myself, move, and I broke into a dash. I splashed light across every door I saw. Tub room. Patients’ Lounge. Linen Services. Dispensary. Okay. Okay. Yes.
The door had a hefty lock on it, the kind you would need a keycard to enter. With the power out it probably sealed automatically. I ran my hand along the jamb hoping there was some kind of emergency release mechanism and nearly yelped when the door fell open at my touch.
No, I began to howl in my head but I shel
ved the thought—it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe the door automatically opened when the power failed. I stepped inside the closet-sized room and something crunched under my foot. I pointed my flashlight down and saw a couple of dozen pills in bright orange and dull yellow and that powdery pink so beloved of pharmaceutical companies. Looking up again I saw bare cabinets with their doors hanging morosely open.
To be sure I searched every cabinet with fingers made clumsy by stress. I found a bottle of Tylenol in one of them. Tylenol.
“Looters,” I told Ayaan as I raced back around the corner, tossing the bottle at her. She caught it without looking away from my face. “It makes sense—there were patients here, living patients. They couldn’t survive for long without their medicine. When they were evacuated they must have taken everything with them.” She didn’t move. “There are no drugs here,” I shouted at her, trying to grab her arm. She shied away from me again.
The sound of the dead coming up the stairwell had grown deafening, their heavy feet smashing down on the metal risers. They would be here any second.
“Is there another room here where drugs will be kept?” Ayaan asked me, “a main dispensary?” but I was busy playing my flashlight along the walls of the north-south corridor that lead away from the nurse’s station. According to the directory I’d seen downstairs there was another stairwell at the far end of the building and maybe it was clear. Otherwise we were going to have to jump out a window.
“Don’t worry, American,” one of the girls said. She adjusted the selector lever of her AK-47 and smiled sweetly for me. “We fight them for you.”
I pointed my light at her face. Her sixteen year old complexion was marred only at her chin where she had a bad pimple.
It happened like something seen underwater. With the kind of slow, liquid grace of a nightmare where you are falling and you never hit the ground.
As I watched in horror a hand trailing strips of torn skin reached around her mouth and pulled her backwards into the darkness outside my cone of light. I heard her muffled scream as the stairwell door swung shut and a noise like a bed sheet being torn to ribbons. I ran.
Panic surged through me, bubbles of adrenaline fizzing away in my blood as I raced down the hallway. In the dancing light of my flashlight I saw wheeled carts and piles of dirty linen everywhere—I dodged around the former and jumped over the latter and knew for a certainty I was going to break my leg like this but the option, the only option, was to stop and let them catch up with me.
Behind me I heard shots—the rapid buzz of automatic fire. The discipline the girls had shown on the piers had evaporated in the face of a dark hallway full of death. Was it Ayaan I heard shooting, I wondered, or had they already got her? I dashed forward into the dark and pushed open a set of swinging doors to find myself in the other elevator lobby, facing the other emergency stairway.
I looked back. I pushed open the doors and ran my flashlight over the corridor beyond, searched for any signs of pursuit. “Girls?” I called, knowing it would attract the dead but also knowing I couldn’t just leave them behind, not if there was a chance of regrouping with them. “Ayaan?”
In the very far distance I heard someone shouting in Somali. She was yelling too rapidly for me to make out any of the words in my limited vocabulary. I listened, craning my head forward as if I could hear better if I could get closer to the sound, but no gunfire or screams followed. Just silence.
“Ayaan,” I called, knowing I was alone.
I gave her the time it took me to breathe ten long breaths and then I tried to push open the stairwell door. It resisted so I put my shoulder into it and finally it budged, opening maybe two or three inches. It must have been blocked from the other side. I kicked furiously at it which didn’t seem to help at all.
Halfway down the corridor to my right I heard something rolling toward me. I stabbed out with my flashlight and saw a rolling cart spinning slowly until it collided with a wall. Farther up the passage my light speared a pile of bedclothes, thick with dried blood.
No. Not bedclothes. A woman in a blue paper hospital gown. Dead, of course. Her hair was so fine and sparse it looked like silken threads tied to her mottled scalp. In the yellow flare of my flashlight her skin showed up as a pale green. She didn’t have any eyes. I realized in a second what had happened. Coming down the hallway toward me she had stumbled against the rolling cart and fallen to the floor. Even if she couldn’t see me she knew I was there. Maybe she could smell me.
Slowly, achingly she began to rise to her feet, bracing herself against the wall with one unfeeling arm.
I pushed again at the unyielding door to the fire stairs but it just wouldn’t move. I pushed my AK-47 into the gap I’d made and tried to pry open the door. I felt it give a little… and then a little more. The woman was on her feet at this point and walking toward me. She was stooped and she walked with a pronounced stiffness in her leg. I kept my flashlight on her all the time as I heaved and heaved against the stock of the rifle. Finally the door sprang open and I saw what had been blocking it—a heavy metal bookshelf. Judging by the bloodstains on the floor of the landing someone had barricaded themselves in the stairwell. Unsuccessfully.
I didn’t worry about that. I pushed past it and raced down the stairs and into the hallways of the ground floor.
14
A bullet pranged off the passenger-side door and the car rocked on its tires. The Volkswagen’s windshield had a long silver crack running across its width but it hadn’t broken yet. Gary assumed a fetal position in the leg well of the driver’s seat and tried not to make a sound.
The demented girl scouts or whatever they were had spotted him and opened fire before he could say a word. He’d tried to run away but he was pinned between two hazards: the boat on the river with its sniper ready to shoot anything that moved, and these heavily-armed schoolgirls who had taken over half of the West Village. It was inevitable that he would be spotted. He’d barely had time to take cover in the abandoned car before they started spraying the neighborhood with lead. He was pretty sure they didn’t have a fix on him, though, that they were just firing blind. He was pretty sure they would eventually leave, if he could stay perfectly still and not give himself away. Which, considering his current state of health (undead), seemed entirely doable.
If it wasn’t for the damned fly.
His fellow passenger buzzed angrily every time the car moved. It would climb along the dashboard for a while then take to the air with a sudden leap and make a circuit of the enclosed space before settling down again on a headrest. Gary felt truly sorry for implicating it in his peril—clearly the fly had a good thing going here. The backseat of the car was full of rotten groceries. Much of the former food had long since turned to white fuzzy mold but maybe the fly ate that, too. Either way the fly looked plump and contented. Bursting with life, real life, not the sham kind that animated Gary. A kind of golden aura shimmered around it, inside of it, as if it glowed with pure captured sunlight. It was the first living thing (other than the gun-toting girls) that Gary had seen since his reanimation. It was beautiful—exquisite. Priceless in its immunity to death, in its continued breathing existence.
There was a deep-seated, urgent, and entirely unbearable need in Gary’s soul to get this fly, somehow, into his mouth.
A bullet hit one of the VW’s tires and the car sagged to one side with a sharp popping noise that echoed off the brick facades of the surrounding townhouses. Gary, whose hand had been creeping toward the fly, pulled himself into an even tighter ball on the floor of the car and tried not to think about anything at all. It didn’t work.
The fly landed on a seat belt latch and fanned its prismatic wings briefly in the sunlight. Its whole body seemed to glow with the light of its health. It rubbed its hands together like a cartoon character about to sit down to a satisfying hamburger—all it needed was a tiny little bib. How cute would that be? Oh god, Gary wanted so much to eat the fly. His fly, he had decided. It was his.
The fly leapt into the air again with a flourish of wings and Gary’s hand shot out for it. The fly evaded him and he lunged upward, catching it between two cupped palms. In a moment he had shoveled it into his maw and he felt its wings brush frantically against the roof of his mouth. He bit down and felt its juices burst across his dry tongue. Energy surged through him even before he’d swallowed the morsel, an electric jolt of well-being that burned in him like a white flame that nourished him instead of consuming him. If the hamburger patties he’d eaten earlier had calmed his hunger the fly instead sated him fully, suffusing him with a euphoria the insect’s tiny mass could not possibly account for. He felt good, he felt warm and dry and satisfied, he felt so good.
The feeling had barely begun to recede when he realized with a start that he was sitting up, perched on the front seats of the car and clearly visible through the windows. He heard gunshots and knew he’d been discovered. Desperate but feeling safe and potent now Gary pushed open the driver’s side door and rolled out of the car. He got his feet on the asphalt and started loping away from the Volkswagen, certain he could reach safety if he just hurried up a little, if his legs would just move a little faster—
A bayonet blade slid through his back and right into his heart.
Good thing he wasn’t using it.
He tried to turn but found himself transfixed—literally—by the bayonet. He raised his hands in the air, the universal signal of surrender. “Don’t shoot,” he shouted, “I’m not one of them!”
“Kumaad tahay?” One of the girls came around into his field of vision and raised her rifle. She panted with exertion or fear perhaps, her weapon bobbing up and down. He could see the dark O of its muzzle waggling at him, the gap between a bullet and his brain. She yanked on a latch on the side of the weapon and flexed her trigger finger.
Three Zombie Novels Page 5
