by Josh Hilden
The President then stepped forward again and said quietly, “Dr. I am sorry to interrupt you …” He never finished as the picture blanked out and was returned to the local anchors.
“We have temporarily lost contact with our network uplink. We hope to have it reestablished in the near future. To recap …” The voice of the pretty former Meteorologist droned on. Below her, a list of Safe Zones scrawled across the screen.
Carlos reached up and turned the volume down. Then he looked at the assembled employees. “I think we need to do something about Jackie.” He said.
“What do you mean do something?” Mel asked. The hostility was unmistakable to everyone gathered.
“I mean we need to put her down before she gets up and tries to eat us.” Now the flatness was gone. He actually seemed to enjoy the idea of having to take charge and do it.
“What about you, Carlos?” A quiet voice asked.
Everyone in the room turned and looked at Benny. His eyes were fixed coldly on Carlos, and the blood that was soaking through his makeshift bandages.
“What do mean?” Carlos asked his tone radiated threat.
“You were bit.” Ben’s voice was a little more confident now. He pointed at the red soaked towels taped around Carlos’s forearm while they’d been watching the president. Ben got up from the chair and moved a little closer to Carlos. The same courage that Ben Millett showed when all he’d had was a skateboard to protect him was evident now.
“You need to shut your mouth and back the fuck up little man.” Carlos growled.
“Why?” Kyle said, “That thing out there took a chunk right out of you. I think you should leave right now.” Kyle got up and moved closer to his best friend. He was not going to let Benny deal with Carlos alone. His mind flashed back to that day with Benny and the skateboard saved him.
“Oh look at this. Heckle and fucking Jeckle think that they can take me. Listen up faggots six of you could not …” he never finished as Melanie Bailey hit him in the back with the break room fire extinguisher. Carlos stumbled forward and Benny took his shot. He punched Carlos in the jaw, at the same time Kyle kicked him square in the thigh.
Carlos dropped to one leg but they all knew he was still a threat. He’d never dropped the crowbar and now he whipped it out lightning quick and caught Benny in the hip. Benny screamed and fell back into the tables and chairs.
Carlos started to get up.
Maybe things would have gone differently if they’d noticed before the moan but that was not to be. At that moment Jackie opened her eyes and moaned.
Jackie groped from the table and managed to get a hold of Mel’s shirt. Mel screamed and tried to pull away. Even dead Jackie was considerably stronger than the pixie like woman. She pulled Mel to her as she rose from the table and stood on wobbly feet.
“Help me!” Mel screamed. It was already too late. Jackie brought her head down and bit a sizeable chunk of flesh from the side of Mel’s exposed neck. Blood spurted and the pain gave Mel the final amount of panicked strength to break free. She ran from the break room toward the front of the store issuing an increasingly garbled and wet sounding scream.
The break room door closed and latched behind her.
Carlos used the confusion to attempt to escape. Kyle and a weakened Benny tried to stop him. Benny blocked the emergency door and Kyle blocked and locked the door to the sales floor.
Jackie began to moan and shuffle toward Carlos.
Without hesitation Carlos ran toward the back door and struck Benny a glancing blow on the side of his head with the crowbar. Benny dropped like a sack of rocks.
“You bastard!” Kyle screamed and launched himself at Carlos. He bypassed Jackie and slammed Carlos into the wall next to the door. Carlos grunted in surprise and thrust his meaty hand at Kyle, grabbed his head, and slammed his face into the cinder block wall.
Kyle felt his nose and cheek bones smash as he hit the wall. He tried to cry out but his ears, eyes, nose, and throat seemed to be clotted with various fluids. He heard Carlos open the door and leave the store. The door shutting behind him with a slam.
When he heard Jackie moaning Kyle knew that she was almost on him. Kyle looked up and through vision obscured by tears, he saw she was 10 feet away and closing. On the floor next to him he heard Benny moan weakly.
“Ben, get up.” Kyle almost begged, “Come on man you have to get up.”
Ben only moaned a little more.
Kyle grabbed Ben by the legs and started dragging him to the bathroom door. He had to get Ben in there, if he was in there, he would be safe from Jackie and Kyle could go get help. His head throbbed as he moved Ben just a little faster than Jackie who was stumbling toward them. He fought off dizziness but the strain was already getting to him, he had to get Ben in there.
Jackie stumbled on a fallen chair and Kyle thanked god that it bought him a little more time. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and with one last strain he got Benny into the cool dark room.
He looked and saw his Ready Bag just a few feet from the door. Without thinking he dashed back out and grabbed it. Then Jackie turned and started toward him. He had a decision to make. Leave the store and risk the dangers outside in order to seek help, or take refuge in the bathroom and wait with Benny to be rescued? The coward in him won out and he joined the unconscious form of Benny Millett in the restroom. Locking the door behind him.
Then the scratching, pounding, and moaning began. It was then that Kyle finally loosed the scream that he had been holding back.
Chapter Four
1
University of Michigan Medical Center
Ann Arbor, Lower Michigan
October 18, 2012 AD (Day One)
1:20pm EST
Dr. Lisa Sutton hurried through the corridors of the University of Michigan Medical Center. She was moving away from the horror and she was scared. She desperately needed to rest. She had made the mistake of taking a cat nap an hour ago and the nightmares had been horrible. She had seen her sister Sandra torn apart by creatures that’d once been human at the lip of a stygian pool. Considering that people very much like the ones in her dream now inhabited her hospital did not help her as she tried to convince herself that the dream could not be real.
Her features, that had often been said to be beautiful by the men she infrequently dated, were washed out and appeared to be those of a woman several decades beyond 32. She was supposed to have been off her 36 hour on call rotation at six am but she was still here. She’d just returned from the basement containment areas and she did not want to even think about what was happening down there. She heard cries from up ahead and walked a little farther down the hall. Low guttural moans could be heard coming from locked rooms and closed doors all over the hospital.
It’d all started just after four in the morning when the paramedics brought in a car crash victim. They tried like hell to save the poor man but his wounds had been extensive and the Attending ER Doctor called the time of death less than five minutes after he’d arrived. They’d started the cleanup procedures when the man began to move on the table. One of the nurses, Juanita Reynolds, rushed over to check his vitals and been seized and bitten on the arm. Security was called in and the man restrained and gagged.
Lisa had been catching a few minutes of sleep in the Doctors lounge when all of the commotion began. She rushed out just in time to see the Campus Police detain the man. She would not have believed it if she had not seen it herself. The man’s chest was cracked wide open to allow the ER Trauma team access to the heart when they attempted to resuscitate him. As he thrashed on the table she could clearly see that his heart was not beating and his internal organs were spilling forth.
The nine hours that followed were a dark comedy of madness and insanity that culminated with her trip to the basement. Dr. Alder asked her to go down there and find out why nobody was answering the phone in the morgue. Since the crash victim more than ninety people in a similar state had been brought to the emergency ro
om. And as far as the doctors were able to determine none of them showed any signs of life, each of the “Patients” were restrained and gagged. This policy was extended to anyone who had been bitten by the patients after Nurse Reynolds seemed to sicken, die, and rise up again in the span of an hour and twenty minutes. At last count there were more than one hundred people in the waiting room claiming to have been bitten by another human being.
When Lisa reached the heavy metal doors that led into the morgue she was greeted by the sounds of repeated banging from the interior. The reception desk in front of the Morgue door was empty. The teenaged kid that manned it during the day shift was nowhere to be seen. That had been enough for Lisa.
It was the sounds of all of those things behind the heavy steel doors that had done it. Things in there that had no business on God’s green Earth to still be walking around, let alone beating on the metal. That had convinced her that it was time to get out of dodge. She was almost to the door that would take her to Physicians’ entrance when she heard screaming erupt from the waiting room.
“DONALD!” A woman’s voice screamed in horror. This was followed by dozens of screams from the same area. Lisa didn’t even think about it, she just turned and ran toward the waiting room. If she’d taken a second to consider everything she probably would have just kept going and left the hospital. That decision would have saved her from seeing the sight that greeted her. It was the years of Army training and experience as a combat doctor that guided her actions in the following moments and not her natural survival instinct.
She had to help.
The waiting room was chaos. The rich smells of blood, urine, and human excrement assaulted her nose. There seemed at first glance to be six or seven different people attacking the others in the waiting room and attempting to eat them. People were jammed into the single exit as they tried to flee. This failed exodus effectively corked the only ready means of escape from the waiting room. Others were engaged in life and death struggles with the people attacking them.
One haggard old man was using his cane to beat at a woman who Lisa thought was probably his wife. The cane seemed to have no effect on the shambling form of the woman, and when she reached the old man she sunk her teeth right into his arm. The man screamed and pushed her away. The violent action of being pushed away had the added effect of dislodging the old woman’s dentures which remained buried in the man’s arm as she fell to the ground with a thump.
One of the Campus Police shouldered past Lisa without a glance. He then drew his sidearm and opened fire on a large man in a flannel shirt. The man was tearing into the throat of a pretty young blonde woman. The Police Officer yelled, “FREEZE!” at the top of his lungs before firing but nobody took any notice.
Lisa realized what the cop was going to do a split second before he did it but it was not enough time to truly protect her ears.
The reflexes that’d lain dormant for years took over in Lisa’s brain as the Policeman opened fire in the confined space. For the briefest of intervals Lisa thought that she was once again in the Mountains of Afghanistan trying to patch up some poor Marine who’d taken an IED in the guts. Doing this while all around her the rest of his company fought a pitched battle with Taliban troops. The 9mm pistol was not as loud as an assault rifle under normal circumstances but in the tight confines of the hospital it sounded like artillery. Lisa dropped to one knee and put her hands over her ears. She watched as the four rounds had no effect other than punching through the man and into the woman he’d been savaging, thus ending her screams with a final gurgle.
The cop started to shake as the man slowly turned and began walking toward him. All the while letting out more of those moans that Lisa had become so familiar with in the last few hours. The cop emptied the rest of his magazine into the man. All of the shots except for the last were center mass just as he’d been trained. He jerked his arm in quick spasm and the last round flew high and slammed into the man’s forehead. Bone and gooey brain matter splashed the wall behind the man who dropped to the ground and stayed completely still.
The Policeman had no time to analyze or celebrate his victory. A small child, Lisa was never sure if it was a boy or a girl, latched onto his leg and began to bite and pull. The child was joined by two adults who sank their teeth into the Policeman’s soft flesh. He screamed for somebody, anybody, to help him. As he was enveloped by his attackers Lisa heard him call out for his mother and then he called out no more.
The death of the Policeman broke her paralysis and Lisa realized that she was in mortal danger. She heard footsteps from down the hall and saw half a dozen armed men and women running toward her and the hell of the waiting room. She picked herself up and ran to meet them yelling, “The heads, shoot for the fucking heads!” at the top of her lungs.
2
5:10pm EST
Even after listening to the horrible news that the president delivered in his airborne address Lisa stayed at her post. Against her better judgment and the urgings of her brain to just run she helped with the cleanup and containment. After headshots had been used to put down the people that were already dead, the infected but still living people in the waiting room were cuffed to their beds to see if they too were going to change.
The waking nightmare had only gotten worse. The hospital was surrounded by police and a makeshift militia of University staff and students. They’d rounded up any and all weapons that could be found, from hunting weapons and sidearms to baseball bats, various bows and crossbows to a mixture of martial arts weapons. The powers that were still present at the university and a cadre of City of Ann Arbor Police Officers ordered all afflicted individuals put down. A hellish hour of search and destroy in the hospital that culminated with the assault on the basement and morgue resulted in more than two hundred corpses.
Lisa bit the bullet and told the Police Captain, Samuel Sims, who’d taken charge in the University district that she was an Army Reserve Captain. He immediately issued her a 9mm pistol from the swat van. Dr. Alder had suffered a minor heart attack during the uprising in the Waiting Room and was now being monitored. This left Lisa, as the Chief Resident, the senior doctor in the ER and effectively in charge.
“Dr. Sutton,” A voice called from behind her. She turned and saw it was Captain Sims.
“Yes Captain?” She was signing orders that an orderly pressed into the duties of a nurse had presented to her.
“The Governor has declared a state of emergency and Martial Law throughout the entire state.” He looked and sounded tired. Lisa was not keeping up with the local information and what was going on outside the University walls. But she gathered it was really bad out there.
“What does that mean for us Sam?” She asked.
“Hopefully we will get some National Guard units in here before midnight.” It sounded great but something in his voice made her question the veracity of the statement.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“I’ve been hearing things from other police departments. Detroit is in really bad shape. The Mayor and the city council are presumed dead and the city is burning. The Police and Fire Departments have to spend more time fighting the Dead and looters than the fires themselves. It’s only a matter of time before the Motor City is gone.” He sounded defeated.
“And?” it was obvious that there was more bad news so she pushed ahead. She asked the question but she feared that she already knew the answer.
“I’ve been hearing that the bulk of the units are being ordered into Detroit Metro, despite the situation there being untenable. I think we might be on our own.” Now he sounded angry. In a choice between defeated and angry, Lisa would choose an angry Sam over a defeated one right now.
“So we are going to have to do it ourselves.” She said.
“Yeah, I’ve ordered every weapon that can be found rounded up and distributed to anyone willing to fight. We have set up a perimeter around downtown but the traffic on I-94 and 23 has already ground to a halt. There seems t
o be a lot of them lumbering down the highways toward town.” He sighed and sat in a chair then continued. “The chief is having barricades erected around the perimeter. We are hoping that we can keep them at bay until help arrives, but there are more and more of them outside the defenses every time I check in.”
