Black Tide Rising - eARC

by John Ringo

  Beth wanted to say that it wasn’t as easy as all that. She’d killed deer in season, but they needed culling or they’d destroy the crops, and she’d killed chickens. Of course, being made into nuggets probably raised a chicken’s intelligence. Killing a person or what had once been a person was something else again.

  But she met Dr. Hayden’s eyes, and nodded.

  Later, in the doctor’s lounge, the people still on shift gathered around the TV.

  The doctor’s lounge was really just a small room, with a loveseat in a corner, a TV on the wall, and a table where people tended to throw whatever sweets they’d brought in from home. It was a dirty little secret that doctors and most medical personnel in the ER lived on sugar, like some form of bee. In what Beth was starting to think of as the good old days, before H7D3, there weren’t many people in the lounge. Even in these days, there weren’t as many people in the lounge as now. For one, the nurses had been failing to come in when scheduled and didn’t answer their phones, so it was anyone’s guess whether they’d zombed or hightailed it out of Denver. Which, Beth thought, was arguably the sane reaction.

  The few nurses that were in just used the doctor’s lounge anymore. And the physician’s assistants who kept coming in did the same, as did the scribes. The weird thing was that nearly every doctor dragged himself or herself in, by grim determination, as though their presence there could stem the tide of the infection. As Dr. Clithero, a beautiful Samoan woman with an inability to suffer stupidity gladly—or indeed at all—had said that night, in desperation at the seventh H7D3 patient, “I feel like I’m trying to empty the sea with a conch shell.”

  But that hadn’t stopped her coming in, and now she was munching on a brownie and drinking coffee, while about ten doctors, half a dozen scribes, and a PA took a break from the mess in the emergency room.

  From behind the break room came the low-grade growl-screams of the infected, housed in all the rooms of ER and in all the hallways. Since all their space for H7D3 was taken up, St. Thomas the Martyr hospital had started a divert to the other hospitals in the city. Which meant there was a lull that allowed doctors to gather and socialize for the first time in days. Weirdly, there weren’t many patients otherwise. Not even frequent flyers or drug seekers. Then again, maybe it wasn’t weird. After all, if you got eaten on the way to the hospital, it was not that easy to get in for that pain in your left foot that had bothered you for three years but was an emergency now that you were bored.

  Since the crisis, the TV was set permanently on news and all the remaining anchors sounded on the verge of hysteria. Though seeing Emerson Cuiper go full zombie on camera before chasing the other CNN anchors around trying to eat their faces had been completely worth it. And it was a sign of how jaded they’d got in the last few months that it warranted no more than snorts from a couple of the doctors and Lucas Fiacre, one of the physician’s assistants, saying in his best camp voice, “Oh! That is nothing to brag about,” when the news anchor tore all his clothes off.

  “The thing is,” Dr. Pillarisetti said when laughter died down. “When does it all come crashing down?” He spoke without drama, in a grinding, flat voice, that made his words seem more scary than if he’d shouted.

  Beth, leaning against the door frame of the room, was so startled she said “What?” aloud, even though normally she tried to stay quiet when doctors and other trained professionals discussed things. It was okay, because hers wasn’t the only “what?” Just about everybody else said it too.

  Dr. Pillarisetti swept the room with a concerned gaze. “Seriously? None of you has thought of that? An advanced technological society needs a certain number of personnel with knowledge and ability to keep it running.”

  And Beth spoke in a gathering of doctors for the second time, somewhat shocked to hear the words coming out of her mouth, “But wouldn’t a small population be better for everyone? It seems like after the Black Plague in Europe—”

  Dr. Pillarisetti’s ancestors came from the Indian subcontinent. He had very dark eyes and an unnerving way of bringing his heavy eyebrows down over them that made it look like he was contemplating where to hide your body after he was done ripping off your head and beating you to death with it. Now he turned the full force of it on Beth and said a word that, if everything weren’t falling apart, would certainly have got him a process open with Human Resources. “Is that what they teach you kids these days? Well, they’re wrong. The Black Plague did not hit an advanced technological society. Remember your first year classes and how many people dropped out of bio or chem or engineering to take a humanities degree? And that was from the ones who got into college to begin with. The pool of people who can handle math and science is limited. Not even an intelligence thing as the type of intelligence they have. Not all smart people can handle science. Given the morbidity—or at least the zombidity—of this virus, leaving maybe one per cent of the population untouched, how do you think technological civilization can survive? The virus is not selecting for intelligence.”

  Beth bit her lip to make sure she didn’t say anything more. The certainty that Dr. Pillarisetti was right sank in, even as the TV flickered, and then an announcer said, in an eerily calm voice, “Folks, we’re getting reports that the lights went out in New York City.” The TV flickered again. “And now our lights have gone off and we’re working with backup generators.” There were screams behind the man, and the sound of breaking glass, and someone yelled, “Turn the farging lights off and shut up! Zombies are attracted to light and sound!” And the man in the screen who couldn’t be a regular announcer because he was wearing sweatpants and a stained T-shirt that read You Can Have My Coffee When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands said “They’re tearing into the station now. Folks, stop listening to me and save yourselves. It’s the end of the world.”

  The TV picture went to snow. Doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants and scribes had just the time to look around at each other with horror, when the lights in the hospital blinked. Then the backup generators hummed, and the lights came back on.

  They looked at each other, each as pale as he or she could get.

  St. Thomas the Martyr was not quite downtown, but was set right off Colfax. If the city was dark, and the uncountable population of zombies out there were attracted to light and sound the hospital had just become a magnet for a horde of zombies that would submerge them all.

  Beth loved the hospital, wanted to be a doctor, and all she could think was, How do I get out of here? And read the same thought in everyone else’s gaze. She heard glass break from down the hall, at the emergency room. Then there were very distinct human screams. Of course, the hospital was modern and the façade was mostly glass. Beth choked on a chuckle at the thought that if they’d known what was coming they’d have built like the middle ages, with narrow windows and small doors. She gave herself a mental shake. Hysteria was one thing she didn’t need right now.

  “We can’t go out the door,” Dr. Barfuss said.

  “The roof,” Lucas Fiacre shouted.

  “Why the roof? What do we do after?” Cody, an older scribe yelled.

  “How the hell do we get off the roof?” one of the other PAs asked.

  “Helicopter-ambulances,” Lucas said. “Bound to be some up there at the rate they’ve been bringing us patients.”

  It made sense. St. Thomas the Martyr serviced all the southern suburbs and all the outlying areas up to Aurora, whatever wasn’t covered by the med school hospital there, so it had six helicopter ambulances, donated by a kind benefactor, which brought in the stroke cases, the heart attack cases, and the alcohol poisoning cases of a Saturday night.

  “And who the hell is going to fly them?” Dr. Barfuss asked, in his annoying, superior manner.

  “If the pilots aren’t with their ’coptors, hell, I can fly one,” Fiacre said, grinning over his shoulder. “Flew helos in ’stan.”

  “And what about the others? We can’t all fit into one!”

  Dr. Sarah Clithero
, who had been looking out the door of the lounge said, “Oh, I can fly another. Learned to fly them when I was young.” As though anticipating the question, she said, “Was bored.”

  “But the ambulance helicopters—”

  “Are designed to be an easy to fly vehicle,” Fiacre said. “How does it look out there, Sarah?”

  “From the sounds, they broke the front glass panes, and anyone who wasn’t a zombie in the waiting room is dead. We’re going to have to fight our way up. Grab whatever you find that can be used as weapons,” Dr. Clithero said.

  It gave Bethany a little shock, and it was stupid. Of course they needed weapons, unless they just wanted to be zombie chow.

  “It might surprise you,” one of the other PAs, Albert Schoen, a tall, blond man, said, “but the emergency room and this lounge weren’t designed to have a lot of impromptu weapons on hand.”

  “Grab what you can,” Dr. Pillarisetti said, pulling a fire extinguisher from the wall. “Just try not to get bitten.”

  “Gait belts,” a nurse said. “Attach something heavy to the end and you have a mace.” She ran out of the room, then back in and started distributing seven rainbow colored belts around. “We had some in the nurse’s lounge.” Some of the men were taking their own belts off and attaching heavy objects to the end of them.

  Beth didn’t have a belt and she didn’t get a gait. In despair she grabbed a standing lamp, by the lamp end, holding the weighted base in a defensive position. As a weapon it sort of sucked, but not as much as the others. It was fine. She wasn’t sure she could look into a human face and smash it, anyway. She was afraid she wouldn’t last long.

  Just then, she heard, at the back of her mind, what her dad had said, when she failed the first round of med school interviews, Of course, you’ll try again. If you’re sure that’s what you want to do you try again. Life is trying and failing and trying again and sometimes succeeding. If you stop trying for something you really feel you should do, you might as well be dead, Beth. And so she’d promised herself not to give up her dream of being a doctor.

  “Come on,” Lucas Fiacre said. He hadn’t got one of the gaits or a belt either. He’d grabbed the curtain rod and tied a knife to the end of it with strips of curtain. He probably wasn’t supposed to have that knife in the hospital, a weapon-free zone, but she was damn glad he did. His grin looked entirely feral. “We have to get higher. We’ll go to the second floor and bar the stairs. Come on.”

  Beth wondered why Lucas seemed more alive than she’d ever seen him. She knew a lot of PAs, Lucas included, were war vets. She wondered if learning to survive under fire changed you, if it made you even like it.

  She wondered, if she survived, would it change her the same way?

  And It Won’t Last for Long

  It all turned surreal very fast. Beth had been going hunting with dad since she was about five, and, being a farm kid, she’d seen animals killed. In the hospital, too, she’d seen her share of bleeding and dying.

  But all that was different. Now she was killing people, or at least hurting them very badly. No. Not people. She remembered what Dr. Hayden had said. Zombies. Vectors, who’d infect people. The back of her head screamed that this was a dangerous slippery slope, but damn it, they knew you couldn’t come back from zombie. Not to kill them just meant they took over the whole world.

  Her mind was torn between do no harm and but it’s self-defense. All she knew was that as the zombies tried to come in, she and the others fought back.

  The first time Bethany hit a zombie and heard the sick crunch of a breaking cranium and got splattered with blood and brains was bad, but she couldn’t stop. She turned her head not to get splatter in her eyes or mouth, but there was so much gore flying, she had to just hope nothing got in. Her mind said vector. Save people from the vector. She argued with herself, slippery slope. But then she looked at the vacant eyes, the gnashing teeth. There was no human there. There was no coming back. They were vectors. Just vectors.

  She swung the lamp. Somehow they cleared a space so they emerged into the hallway. She found herself in the front lines, swinging the lamp at zombies’ heads, as they gnashed teeth and whined and tried to reach them. If you swung the base with sufficient force it stopped them. Vector. She was saving people.

  Then a zombie grabbed for her. Dr. Pillarisetti’s fire extinguisher broke its shoulder and then its face. The hand let go of Beth’s arm, and she swung her lamp at a zombie trying to bite Lucas Fiacre.

  She and Lucas—probably because they had longer-range weapons—moving back to back managed to clear the cluster around the lounge enough to get their group to the hallway that led to the service stairs up to the second floor.

  They were stepping over zombies’ still-twitching corpses and she was glad she was wearing her ankle boots, otherwise she would have been bit thirty times over. Fortunately, the zombies slowed long enough to eat other fallen zombies. As it was, as they reached the second floor, Lucas Fiacre looked over his shoulder and said, “Stop. How about the patients?”

  “What patients?” Dr. Barfuss asked. “Good God man, you can’t mean the zombies.”

  “No, the other patients,” Fiacre said. “Second floor.” He squinted. “Oncology?”

  “Mostly,” Dr. Clithero said. She was splattered in blood and gore, and held a blood-splattered reinforced computer case nonchalantly. “Right now. Usually anyone we need to do a lot of tests on, but right now mostly oncology. I don’t know how many patients we have, or how many are ambulatory.”

  Fiacre looked at the door to the ward, then down at the door to the first floor they had locked in their wake.

  Beth heard the glass on the door break and knew it was a matter of time before the zombies either squeezed through the door, or broke the handle. “I’ll go in,” she said. If they just let people be eaten, what was the point? “I’ll see how many of the patients here are ambulatory and how many we can rescue.” She didn’t say and how many have zombed out. But she thought it. Just because you were a cancer patient, it didn’t mean you couldn’t catch the zombie plague. Until now that had been their biggest problem: people admitted for other things turning and wreaking havoc in their units.

  That much was obvious as they stepped out of the elevator. Whoever had been on duty in the hallway nurse’s station was dead. Even from a distance that was easy to tell because people are rarely alive with half their face missing. A trail of blood led deeper into the ward. As they got deeper in they checked the first room. A man tethered to the bed and to machines that were making a long, continuous beep was also very sincerely dead and partly eaten on the blood-soaked sheets. Then they heard from the end of the hallway the moaning growl of the zombies.

  She and Lucas rushed forward, side by side, while Beth hoped that the people they’d left by the door would keep the zombies from attacking them from behind. The hospital smelled of blood and feces, overlaid on the normal disinfectant smell, and the polished tiles of the hallway were spattered in blood, which made it hard to run without falling on her face. Once she almost fell, but Lucas Fiacre grabbed her shoulder, without ever slowing down, and hauled her upright.

  At the end of the hallway, they were faced with a knot of people, all wearing hospital gowns. It was clear a lot of them were zombies, covered in bite marks and groaning-moaning.

  But the thing was, when formication—the sensation of something crawling all over their skin—hit, as people were zombing out, they ripped all their clothes off. With the hospital gown that was not easy—them being tied behind the back.

  Which posed the problem.

  “Shit,” Lucas said as he came to a skidding halt. “Is it just zombies fighting?”

  “Oh, hell no,” a voice said from the middle of the melee. “About time you guys got here. I’m going to give this hospital a very bad review in my patient satisfaction form!”

  He Left Yesterday Behind Him…

  Zachary Zodiac Smith had been having a bad day long before this. Actually if you rea
lly wanted to be specific, he’d had a bad decade. Maybe a bad life. But he balked at that idea. His life hadn’t been bad. At least not until Mom had decided to off herself, when Dad hadn’t come back from ’Nam. But even then there had been intermittent good times. Hell, yeah, very good times. Like Rosie.

  But he turned his mind away from his first wife, Rosamund. Damn good thing, all things considered, that Rosie and the baby had died. Otherwise now he’d have to worry about her, and about a twenty-year-old son. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a good thing they’d died, but at least they hadn’t zombed out. Thank God. Until now ZZ hadn’t understood a fate worse than death. Now he did. Even if a part of him still longed to know that when he died he left something of him behind. But how many people would be able to do that now?

  He stood with his back to the wall. He’d wrapped his arms in blankets, haphazardly because he hadn’t exactly had a lot of time when the patient on the bed next to him had started screaming there was stuff crawling on him and throwing the bed clothes around. ZZ wasn’t an idiot. Not him. He knew damn well what that shit meant, and he was out of his bed, wrapping his arms in sheet and blanket with a lot of it trailing, and grabbing the nearest defensive weapon. Which wasn’t a very good weapon, being the tray on wheels that they’d put next to the bed.

  Given he’d come in for throwing up all his food and catastrophic weight loss and the stomach cancer and all, he probably wouldn’t have been able to lift a tray like that normally, but fear, like love, makes a man stronger. He was swinging the tray table around, and caught the guy getting up from the other bed, teeth gnashing and hands groping, on the side of the head and sent him flying.