by Ivan Turner
Over the course of an hour, Abby watched people pass through the glass wall and come out of it. Some of them were doctors and nurses but most of them were patients. She was amazed at the crowd around her. Early afternoon and so many people were sick or injured. She called Whitaker on her cell phone to make sure everything was all right. It was. He'd been joined by two customers but the place was still very quiet.
About an hour after that, she dozed off. She wasn't yet in a deep sleep, the edges of dreams flirting with her subconscious. She was startled away by Karl, who must have also dozed off. His head drooped to the side and landed on his shoulder.
"Karl," she admonished. He'd dropped his bloody tissues. "Karl?"
When he didn't move, she lifted his head and saw that his nose was clogged with dried blood. He wasn't breathing.
Abby screamed then. She hoped she was calling for help but she couldn't be sure that anything coherent was escaping her lips. The man sitting across from her looked directly at her, saw her holding Karl's head away from her shoulder, and ran to the window. Within seconds, the glass doors slid aside and four people came out, one of them wheeling a gurney.
They took Karl away from her and loaded him onto the gurney. Even as they pushed him inside, they were trying to clear the blood from his nose. Badly shaken, Abby followed, leaving the wheelchair behind.
Inside, everything was chaos. She had barely the brain capacity to take in her surroundings. Off to the left was a bustling desk with three people moving around behind it and several others crowding its exterior. Toward the back was a row of tables, each accented by equipment. They could be made private by pulling a curtain around the tables. But not that private. Off to the left was a short hallway that was lined with doors. One was clearly marked as the bathroom while the others seemed to be examining rooms. At the end, the corridor branched off and she could see no more.
They pulled the gurney into a curtain area, closing the curtain around them, and immediately began whatever life saving techniques they used. Abby didn't know anything about medicine. She heard someone say no pulse and someone else call for paddles. They hooked up an IV in seconds. There was a very young man in a white coat pumping Karl's chest while someone else put a mask with a bag over his head and tried to force air down his throat.
All this time, Abby stood back, silently watching the drama. No one gave her a glance until it was all over and someone said, "Time of death: 14:21".
A woman in pink scrubs, a nurse, came over to Abby and took her by the hands. "Are you his wife?"
Abby shook her head. "I just work at the gym," she said, unable to take her eyes away from Karl's prone form.
"Is there someone we can call, do you know?"
She shook her head again, had never stopped shaking it. "I…I'll call and have them go into his locker and get his stuff. Maybe…" she trailed off.
The nurse, sensing that Abby was in shock, stepped away to attend to something else.
Abby had never seen anyone die before. The only time she'd ever seen a dead body had been at a wake. That seemed like such a controlled environment. Here there was chaos. There was smeared blood on Karl's face and the IV tube still trailed from his arm. There was a drape over his legs but she could see his swollen and bruised foot sticking out from underneath. They hadn't even looked at it.
She went to his side, looked down at his face. How old was Karl? Was he twenty five? And they'd thought she was his wife? He must have looked pretty bad because she surely didn't look that good. Abby had just turned away when Karl's hand moved slowly and found her own.
"Oh, my God!" She was so shocked that she pulled it away instantly. Then she realized he was trying to sit up and she went to him, calling out for help.
"Karl, it's okay. Don't move too fast." Draping his arm around her shoulder, she lifted him into a sitting position and helped support his weight with her own. He came up easily if awkwardly. When he was fully upright, he seemed as if he was about to fall but Abby realized he was swinging his legs over the side of the table. He wanted to stand.
"Your foot…" Abby began but then he was up, standing fully erect with his feet flat on the ground. He didn't utter a sound.
Now Abby pulled away from him slowly as he found his balance. She said his name again, so confused until he looked up at her. There was no life in his eyes. None at all.
A week before, Shawn Rudd had encountered Larry Koplowitz on the street and known right away that he was a zombie. He had known the same way that Abby knew now. The only difference was that Shawn had been sparked into action, destroying the zombie and its victim without a second thought. Abby just froze.
"Oh, my God!" the nurse mimicked as she came through the curtain in answer to Abby's cry. She was standing behind Karl and thought he had just revived. It wouldn't be the first time she'd seen a patient come back moments after having been declared dead. It was rare, ridiculously rare, but it did happen. When she saw him standing on that foot, she ran up to him and grabbed his arm. The actions took his focus away from Abby and he turned on the nurse, opening his mouth wide, suddenly consumed by that insatiable undead hunger for living flesh.
***
ANTHONY Heron had lung cancer.
It seemed kind of fitting seeing as how he'd been a smoker since he was twelve and there was cancer in his family. His father had died of it in his forties and his grandfather had died of it in his sixties. He had numerous aunts, uncles, great aunts, and great uncles who were also either dead of cancer or had been fighting that battle for years. It was just his turn to join the family.
In retrospect, he supposed he had not only been waiting for it his whole life but had been rushing toward it. After all, only an idiot smokes when the family history suggests that smoking is as surefire a way of killing yourself as a bullet in the head. Heron was forty two years old, not quite as old as his father had been when he'd died. But then again, he wasn't dead yet.
The cancer wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for the timing. Just a week before, the day the doctor had called with the biopsy results, Heron had met his first zombies. There had been two of them. Lucy Koplowitz, a successful woman. A wife and mother. Zoe Koplowitz, a girl of eight years. It was the girl who'd bitten Stemmy, his partner. He'd died about twelve hours later and Heron had made sure that he would never get up again. There had been no repercussions for that act, but he still had to live with it. When Stemmy had died, he'd marched into that room and shot him as if he were nothing more than a wounded horse.
The intervening week had passed in a blur. A wake. A doctor's visit. A funeral. Time allotted toward helping Eileen Stemmy sort her husband's affairs and put back together the remaining pieces of her family's lives. Heron had done it all. And he hadn't logged a single day of work. Which meant he hadn't heard a thing about zombies. That suited him just fine.
Heron wasn't working today either. He actually wouldn't be back to work for a couple of weeks. Today he was going to the hospital and having his final consultation before the surgery. They said the cancer wasn't so bad as cancer goes. All of the tests showed that it was confined to the lung. That was good. It was just a small spot in an easy to reach place. The surgery was minimally invasive and while strenuous activity wasn't recommended for up to six months, he could resume his regular activities within a week or two. That didn't sound too bad.
His doctor worked out of Sisters of Charity hospital and that was where the surgery would take place. It wasn't the closest hospital to where he lived but it wasn't terribly far. Captain Naughton had been extremely understanding of the circumstances. In light of his partner's death, Heron was pretty sure his caseload would have been light for a couple of weeks regardless. They'd spoken, Heron and Naughton, the night before about Heron's schedule and whether or not he'd be assigned to another partner. It occurred to Heron to ask about zombies, to ask if any more cases had been discovered but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He had too much on his mind to worry about the undead.
The
news was devoid of zombie stories. There had been a blurb some time just after Stemmy had died but that was it. Whoever had leaked that information out of the department had been quickly silenced. Life without zombies was infinitely preferable to life with them. It didn't stop him, though, from thinking about Zoe Koplowitz whose little blonde curls had contrasted so deeply with her darkening and ghoulish face. He wondered what she looked like now, a week later. Did zombies last a week? What if they weren't fed? Were they feeding her?
The doctors ran a basic physical. They took his blood and gave him back a stress test. They hooked some electrodes up to his chest and monitored his heart rate. Heron was in excellent health. Except for the cancer.
"Been smoking?" his doctor asked.
Heron shook his head. "Going nuts, though."
Was that ever true! You don't smoke for thirty years and then quit cold turkey without side effects. Night sweats and ravenous hunger. At times, he thought he was a zombie himself. And he took it all out on his wife. Alicia, that poor woman, absorbed the brunt of his attacks for two reasons. The first was that he needed to vent in order to heal. The second was that she was adamant that he not take out his discomfort on their five year old daughter.
When it was all over, Heron dressed and went to his doctor's private office to wait. He already knew how the conversation would go.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
You be here at six then and I'll be here at ten.
And then he would laugh because the patient had four hours of prep work before the doctor even had to show up.
He was sitting in a leather chair across from the doctor's huge desk just waiting when the commotion began outside. At first he ignored it. It was hospital business, none of his concern. But the door was open and several telling words floated in. One of those words was zombie, said with a just a hint of the flare of the ridiculous. Heron couldn't ignore that.
So all of a sudden he was at work. He stood from the chair and went out the door. He saw his doctor coming down the corridor for the meeting.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Anthony…"
But Heron cut him off with a wave of his hand. A nurse and an orderly were now talking in hushed tones over by the nurse's station. Despite the fact that their voices had become inaudible, he could tell that they were having a very animated conversation.
He marched right up to them. "Did I hear the word zombie?"
They ceased their conversation at once and looked at each other. Then the nurse's face transformed into the one that she used to instruct patients in the gentlest of ways to mind their own business. Before she could speak, though, he was showing his badge.
She said nothing, but the orderly looked at the badge a long time and said, "They've locked down the ER."
***
ABBY screamed as Karl bit deep into the neck of the nurse who'd come to assist him. His teeth weren't cut out for tearing the living flesh from a human but he was determined. He twisted his jaw and pulled as blood leaked and then spurted from the wound. The poor nurse flailed helplessly, too shocked by the attack to have any real strength even before the wound had become severe. She would have fallen to the floor but he held her up, chewing patiently on the large hunk of flesh in his mouth. Abby's gaze shifted from Karl's monstrous and bloody face to the nurse's. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she passed out. Karl adjusted her body for another bite but slipped on the blood on the floor. The two of them fell like a pair of ragdolls. Karl's foot hit the table and twisted oddly. The nurse's skull hit the ground hard.
It seemed a long time that Abby was alone with the monster. She just stood there watching as Karl battled the slippery blood and tried to regain his feet. He wasn't Karl anymore. That much was clear, but she couldn't stop thinking of him as Karl. This poor meaty boy who liked to come into Push Ups and work out with the weights. What was he now?
Now someone parted the curtain and several people turned to look.
Confused by the number of people around him, and there were many, Karl took one lurching step one way and then another in a completely different direction.
"Kill him," Abby whispered to herself.
At last, the zombie found its balance and took one halting step toward Abby. A young doctor, the same one who had been pumping Karl's chest minutes before, seemed like he was going to ask a question and then stopped himself.
All around the ER there was silence. Murmurs of everyday business drifted out of the closed curtains and even from some of the private exam rooms but everyone who could see Karl and Abby and that poor nurse stopped and fell silent. Even behind the noise proof and bullet proof glass wall patients lost interest in magazines, TV, and even their own ailments. Necks craned and eyes strained to get a better look at what was unfolding inside.
A low moan escaped Karl's lips, the sound of air being forced unnaturally through dead lungs.
"Nobody move," said a doctor. She was an older woman, probably close to sixty. Her coat was immaculately white except for one small brown stain just under the ID badge. The badge itself was clear and read Doctor Veronica Leke.
"But, Jane…" someone started.
"I said nobody move!" Dr. Leke shouted and drew Karl's attention right to her. At the moment she was in no danger. She was standing several feet from his position. There was a thermometer in her hand and a small child on the table in front of her. She was three curtains away. The mother who'd brought the child in whispered a prayer in Spanish and hugged him close.
Abby's breath came in short gasps. The smell of blood was beginning to turn fetid in her nostrils. She desperately wanted to bolt but her legs wouldn't work.
"Cover all of the exits," Dr. Leke said to no one in particular. "No one else comes in." Several staff moved toward various doors. They were mostly orderlies and nurses. There were two security guards in the room but they didn't move to the exits. Their job was yet to come and it would be much more difficult.
Dr. Leke's next order was chilling. "Peter and Marie and Todd and Sven, gowns and gloves. We've got to restrain him and help Jane."
Todd and Sven were the security guards. Todd was black man with thick neck muscles. His chest and arms were hidden by his shirt but Abby could tell that he was ripped. In fact, she was sure she'd seen him in Push Ups a couple of times. Sven was exactly as his name indicated. He was tall and thin with long blond hair tied into a pony tail. Peter and Marie were doctors, both young, Peter that one young doctor who didn't seem able to escape the Kurious Kase of Karl the Zombie, Marie a short stocky woman with jet black hair and a round baby face .
The two doctors knew just what to do and went to do it. Todd and Sven seemed a bit fuzzy on the whole gown and gloves thing and so got help from nurses.
All the while, Karl just stood and stared. It was impossible to tell whether he was confused or just docile. He hadn't been docile moments before but then again he'd now had a meal. He watched Dr. Leke curiously as she began to ferret patients toward the glass entryway. Nurses and orderlies who were not otherwise occupied were moving those patients who could not move themselves. All the while, Dr. Leke, calm as if running a class trip, was saying, Come on, come on. Right this way.
Abby watched all of this with the perspective of an observer. She felt as if the whole thing was on television and she was just sitting on her living room couch with Martin. She found that all of her fear had left her. She was not a part of this. Until…
"You too please, ma'am."
Abby looked over at Dr. Leke.
The older woman nodded. "You need to leave now."
Todd and Sven were suited up and ready to move in. They held billy clubs in their hands and wore masks over their mouths and nose. They'd been given goggles, too. Abby wondered if the zombie could bite through that gown. Abby wondered if the billy clubs would have any effect whatsoever.
