by mike Evans
The phone didn’t work. No reception. No bars. No wifi. Nothing.
The window. It was my only hope.
I turned around.
Ella limped toward me. Her calf muscle had been someone’s last meal. Dear God, they eat people. Her foot dragged along the ground, but she was gaining on me.
I barreled toward her, thrusting all my weight to get her on the ground. Her head hit the tile with a soft squish. But she didn’t stop gnashing her teeth. She didn’t stop wiggling. I pinned her with the ax.
Her body was weak. Tired. She probably didn’t weigh more than 80 pounds, that stupid, stuck-up model.
I grabbed her foot and twisted. It came off easier than I expected. Her toes still wiggled in her heels.
“You killed my friend!” I didn’t know if she understood me or not. I didn’t care. All that mattered now was getting to that window. Saving my Heather.
“Eat your heart out, Bitch.”
In a strong swing, I brought that pointy heel down through her middle of her forehead. Her eyes connected with mine and then whatever unnatural life kept them open, fizzled out.
One down. How many more to go?
Outside, the streets swarmed with panic ridden people, screaming and shouting at each other. I didn’t have long if I wanted to get to my Heather and make a break for it. The officials were sure to show up soon. The army. Government. Someone was coming. I just had to make it to a safe place.
Nine stories is pretty damn high. I hurled the ax at the glass and it shattered by the second try. There’s was a balcony below. A few of them. If I could just jump…if I could just make this first jump, I could reach Heather safely.
I crouched on the windowsill. Closed my eyes. And prepared myself for impact.
Some minutes tick by faster than others. I hoped that Heather’s were long and peaceful.
THE END
By Kya Aliana
Return to the Sandbox
Floor Ten
Doug Dandridge
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© 2016 Doug Dandridge, All Rights Reserved
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Floor Ten
“Why in the hell did we get more of these crutches in,” yelled Thomas Doc Conway, glaring at the stack of offending equipment stacked against the wall.
“Because I was able to get a good price on them,” said Maggie Fullbright, staring at her partner. She knew she needed his expertise as a doctor in knowing what they needed to carry. But Doc was not a business man by any stretch of the of the imagination. He didn’t understand the notion of inventory. Football season was coming up, and if they didn’t carry the crutches someone else would.
Doc shook his head as he turned his scowl on his partner. “You’re going to ruin us for sure.”
“And when have we not turned a profit?” she asked, her voice rising. For a moment she wished she had never left the Army. There she had no worries, except for keeping herself and the people around her alive. She was a combat medic with two tours in the Sandbox under her belt. Only she couldn’t stand the thought of working in the bloody guts of another young man or woman, struggling to keep them breathing. Business was stressful, but not in the same way that fighting against time to keep people alive against all odds.
Doc kept staring at the crutches, like they were going to walk away on their own. She knew Doc would rather be practicing medicine than selling medical supplies. Several malpractice suits had ruined his dream, but he still wanted to keep his fingers in the medical field. This was one way of doing just that.
Maggie looked around the storage room that was the heart of their operation. Seventy feet long by fifty wide, two of the edges were the outer walls of the building, and two doors that led into the outer office and the bathroom. The last edge was the wall between the room and the outer hallway. Maggie thought it would have made more sense to have extended the room into that hallway, and not wasted the space on a walkway that was of no use. Especially since the entrance to the unrented space across the hall was even with their own. The room had a ceiling ten feet from the floor, with sprinkler heads regularly spaced. Doc installed the system himself, not trusting what the builders had put in. The door to the office was to the left of the bathroom door, and it had the anachronism of a push out window at the top, another affectation that Doc had wanted for some reason. Shelving units filled the room. They were three feet wide by ten long, rising eight feet and piled with the products they sold to hospital, clinics and doctors’ offices.
“And I have to ask. Why do we have all of these oxygen tanks back here?” she asked, looking at a group of the cylinders sitting on their flat bottoms. “I’m always afraid something is going to happen, and were going to have a bunch of bombs going off.”
“Hell,” exclaimed Doc. “We’re not in a warzone. What the Hell is going to happen to puncture a bunch of high pressure cylinders? If I were you, I would be more worried about some of the other things back here catching fire.”
Maggie looked past him to a shelf where some of those things were stored. Boxes of four glass bottles each, filled with ninety percent isopropyl alcohol. Extremely flammable, and she had to wonder why it was still shipped in glass bottles. Other shelves held bottles of various acids. Really about anything that could be of use to a medical establishment, even the experimental kind, was stored here. The only thing missing were controlled substances, mostly pain killers. She still felt some anxiety when she saw the surgical instruments, tools she had once been proficient with, almost as skilled as a surgeon. But she had used them in situations where she didn’t have the clean surroundings of a hospital, and people died quickly if she didn’t make the correct snap judgment. She shuddered at the thought, driving it from her mind.
“Things are going well, Doc,” she said, turning back to her partner. “And as long as people keep engaging in risky behaviors, they will continue to go well.”
Doc stood there for a moment, shaking his head. His brow rose, and he gave one last headshake before a smile graced his face. “You’re right. Sales have been good, and you’re the reason.”
“Well, I can’t take all the credit,” said Maggie, though she definitely thought she deserved the lion’s share. “I…”
The light went off suddenly, leaving the room in partial darkness. The only light coming in was through the thick-glassed windows. Moments later the emergency lights came on, which were not bright enough to take the place of the fluorescent tubes, but adequate.
“What happened?” asked Maggie, a feeling running through her that something was very wrong. She walked over to the small portable TV, hoping that she had replaced the batteries after she watched the game last Saturday. As she was reaching for the TV the building alarm went off, letting them know that the structure was in lockdown. She turned away from the TV to stare at the flashing light over the door.
“It’s not Wednesday,” said Doc, a confused expression his face. “Why the Hell are they running a drill on a Friday?”
“I don’t think it’s a drill, Doc,” said the wide eyed business woman. She pulled her cell out of her purse and hit the speed dial. The no service warning came on, and she swore under her breath. “I need to find out how Felicity is doing,” she said, looking over at her partner. “Her and my mom were both coming down with something this morning.”
“Then why didn’t you stay home?”
“Mom said she could take care of them both,” she replied, noting that her phone had no bars. She looked back at her partner.
“Turn on the TV, and let’s see what’s going on.”
“You know I hate that thing,” said Doc, gesturing toward the small instrument on the shelf.
“Would you
hate being underneath a nuke going off more?” asked the woman, walking over and pulling out the power switch, waiting a moment for the old set to warm up. Sometimes she thought Doc was hopeless. As a veteran herself, she thought she knew the way of the world. And one who knew that when things starting going wrong, there was always the possibility that they were really going wrong. America might not have the same enemies they had in the Cold War, but that didn’t mean there weren’t people still capable of blowing the Hell out of an American city or three. Doc would think she was being paranoid, and maybe she was. But that was the way she was wired, and she wasn’t going to apologize for it.
The TV took a moment to warm up, and instead of the soap opera that was normally on that channel, the screen lit with the image of a popular local newscaster sitting behind her desk. The logo ‘special report’ was at the bottom of the picture.
“What the Hell is she saying?” asked Doc as the woman started spouting crazy stuff about people attacking other people, killing them with their teeth. That was crazy enough, but when she got to the part about the dead coming back to life Doc lost it. “What kind of shit is that? People coming back to life? They must not have had any kind of medical training, and couldn’t tell if someone was just unconscious.”
“Shut up for a second, Doc,” growled Maggie, trying to pay attention to what the anchor was saying. She had to turn the TV up to hear anything over the alarm. Doc had gone over to the thick, almost sound proofed window and looked out to the street, mumbling under his breath.
Images of the zombie apocalypse came to mind, instantly dismissed. Those were fairy tales, something that made great entertainment but couldn’t happen in the real world. That was when something out of a nightmare ran out on the sound stage, a big man with blood streaming down his face, charging toward the anchorwoman. The woman looked up, an expression of terror on her face as she tried to get up from her seat and get away. Too late. The man jumped onto the desk, sliding on his stomach as his hands grabbed for the anchor. She screamed just before being jerked over the desk, and toward the maw of the man, who dug into her throat with his teeth. Blood spurted as the man gnawed at her throat like a mad dog. The cameraman came into the picture, trying to pull him off the anchor. After a few moments the attacker released his victim and turned on the cameraman. The anchorwoman fell over on her back on the desk, eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling. Dead.
The attacker and the cameraman fell out of the picture, the cameraman yelling over the growls of the assailant.
“Doc, you’ve got to see this,” Maggie shouted.
“I think I’m seeing enough over here,” returned Doc, craning his neck to get a good view out of the window
Maggie moved over to see what he was looking at, turning her eye every couple of seconds to see what was happening in the TV. The anchorwoman still lay unmoving on the desk, obviously dead, while the sounds of growling and ripping flesh came from off camera.
She looked out the window that Doc was standing in front of to see bodies lying unmoving on the street below. Some people were moving quickly into the building, humans with a strange gait coming after them much more slowly. She watched in horror as one of the slow moving people knelt down by one of those who were still and started taking bites of flesh out of its arm.
“What in the Hell is going on?” growled Doc again. Several of the still bodies on the street started to get up, looking like they could barely move. What sounded like shots came from the TV, and both turned to see the anchorwoman rising up from the desk. Her clouded eyes looked out over the studio while blood splashed from bullet holes in her chest. That didn’t seem to bother her in the least, and she walked off camera in an instant, shouts and shots following her disappearance.
“This is impossible,” Maggie said, staring at the street below. She saw more of the strangely gaited people appear every second. As she watched, one of those supposedly dead bodies, a woman with her throat torn out, the front of her shirt soaked in blood, opened her eyes and staggered to her feet.
She thought she had seen it all when she had been in the Sandbox. She had seen bodies lying in the street, rotting under the hot sun. Men, women, even little children. Babies. But none of them had ever gotten to their feet and started moving toward the living, murder in their clouded eyes. It was impossible, beyond what medical science said was possible
“Doc. Do you have a gun?”
The older man looked at Maggie like she had lost her mind. “Why in the Hell would I have a gun?”
“To protect yourself,” she replied, wishing that she still had her service weapon, an M4 carbine. Or even a Browning nine millimeter. Of course Doc had never been in the shit. He had always lived in the better parts of town, and always had enough money for security systems, or the armed guards that protected gated communities.
“Against what?”
“Zombies, for a start.”
Doc opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. She was sure he was going to say once again how zombies were impossible. But something was going on beyond Doc’s experience, and the man had to be open minded enough to realize he didn’t know everything.
Maggie started moving around the storeroom, gathering things she thought might be of use. Drip poles, surgical kits, the flat shovel they used to pick up the cat litter that would be spread on chemical spills.
“What’s that for?”
“In case any of those things make it up here.” She picked up a bottle of hydrochloric acid and looked at the label.
“Security won’t let that happen,” said Doc in a disbelieving tone, shaking his head. “And the police will be here to set things right.”
“You see any cops out there, Doc?” Maggie asked, pointing at the window. The alarm was still going full blast, but she couldn’t hear any of the sirens of police cars or ambulances nearby. She thought the Army or the Guard might respond, given time. But how much time would they have?
She looked out the window again, this time seeing several of the strangely gaited people being pushed out of the building by men in security uniforms. The creatures, she couldn’t think of them as people any more, were clawing and biting, and she was sure some of those security guards were taking injuries. Probably not enough to hurt them badly, and they were doing their jobs, keeping the danger from the tenants.
Maggie tried her phone again, frantic. Felicity was only a small child, not yet four. Her mom had been the wife of a cop killed in the line of duty. She had her deceased husbands service weapon, and knew how to use it. But if these things made it into the house, and she shot center mass, they would overwhelm her. And then what would happen to Maggie’s baby.
“They’ll be okay,” Doc implied, putting down the handset of the landline and shaking his head. “The landline is out too.” He glared at the phone as if it had betrayed him on purpose.
Maggie hadn’t thought the landlines would work with their current equipment. No one used the old-fashioned phones powered by the lines anymore. Everyone used wireless handsets connected to answering machines, and when the power was out, they were down. Which was one of the reasons people carried cells phones at work. But they didn’t work either when the cell towers were down.
“Maybe we should go down to the lobby and see what’s happening,” she said, putting her phone back in her purse.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Doc said as he shook his head. “I’m sure they have it under control down there, and we would just be in the way.”
Maggie didn’t know what to do. If the building was in lockdown there would be no way out. The exit to the parking garage would be locked, as would the gates out of the car storage area. And she wasn’t sure what she would do if she was out on the street, looking for buses and taxis that probably weren’t running. She would just be a target.
“Let’s get back to inventory,” said Doc, a strained smile on his face. “It will do us good to be doing something.”
Maggie nodded and picked up a clipboard, looking ov
er the next item. She got back to work, and tried to push the concern for her daughter out of her mind, failing. At least the work kept it in the back of her mind, and not in the forefront, where it could drive her crazy.
There was a muffled knock on the outer door, beyond the storeroom. She thought that Betty, the girl who covered the front office, would get it, before she remembered that the receptionist had called in sick. Something about a flu.
Before Maggie could get to the office the door opened and a young couple staggered in. The girl was young, slender, with honey blond hair, like Maggie had sported before her own had turned grey. Her eyes were a sparkling blue, much like Maggie’s had been before they had assumed the thousand-yard stare. The boy with her, he could hardly be called a man, had dark skin which had an unnatural pallor. There was a bite mark on his neck, and his shirt’s shoulder was soaked in blood.
Maggie felt the flashback coming on, almost too late to say the calming mantra that would stop its onset. As it was she was still dealing with one of the primary visions. The one that woke her up at night. A young black man, a soldier in her company, lying on the ground with his abdomen ripped open, and his ruptured intestines peeking out of the wound. The soldier looked up at her, the person he thought of as Doc, his eyes imploring her to save him. And there was no way she could. She knelt at his side and probed the mess that had been a working gut, trying everything she could think of to save him. The one thing she couldn’t think of, and the only thing that could save him, was a complete surgical ward and a team of real surgeons. Not an Army medic with nothing but her bag. The eyes continued to plead,until they turned into the sightless stare of the dead, and she knelt there crying for the life she couldn’t save.
“We need help,” said the girl, almost falling under the weight of her boyfriend. The words snapped Maggie out of the flashback.
Maggie ran forward to help her support the weight of the man, who she guessed couldn’t be more than seventeen years old. Not much younger than people she had served with. “What happened?”
