180 Days and Counting... Series Box Set books 1 - 3

by B. R. Paulson

  She held Cady’s gun in her hand.

  Kent moved closer, crossing the driveway without looking at the puddles of the melting snow. Spring was on its way and winter wanted to leave behind as big a mess as possible. He rounded the car Cady had moved to the front of the house, close enough to identify that the silver thing in his hands was a long bread knife with a wooden handle.

  His grunting reached her. He was trying to talk, but the words wouldn’t articulate. Angry, narrowed eyes searched Cady and the garbage bags. He was determined to kill her. She could see that.

  Opening her hands, Cady called to Bailey. “Throw it. I’ll catch it.”

  Bailey didn’t hesitate, tossing the weapon in an underhand throw to her mom. Cady leaned forward, catching the gun by the butt and rearranging her hold in less than a second.

  Kent was almost on her.

  “Kent, stop.” Her words were sharp, authoritative. She held her gun up, confident in her stance. She didn’t want to kill him, didn’t even want to injure him, but he was a danger to her and Bailey. She wasn’t completely comfortable with the gun in her hands, but she was comfortable knowing she could at least work the gun as she needed. She wasn’t a sniper by any means, but she could hit a target – especially from the short distance Kent was creating for her.

  He paused, but his limbs still moved in a jerky dance Cady couldn’t figure out. Had the disease destroyed his motor skills? His chin twisted to the side while he snapped his teeth, moving his tongue as he tried speaking. The flesh in his mouth was a mottled purple which spread out to his tongue. His eyes bulged and blood seeped from his inner ears to trickle down the sides of his neck.

  Kent swiped the blade through the air, his head twitching to the side and then back to face forward.

  “Kent, I will shoot you. Do not come any closer.” Cady slid her right foot back a few inches, lowering her chin.

  Her neighbor didn’t stop, didn’t even act like he’d heard her.

  Cady held her breath, but he was too close to Bailey, too close to Cady. He couldn’t be allowed to come any closer. Cady held her breath and shot the ground at his feet. “Stop!” But he kept coming, his arms jerking helter-skelter.

  Bailey’s gasp at the shot drew his attention and he lurched toward her, swinging the blade in a wide arc.

  Cady didn’t pause. She lifted the sight and centered it on his center mass. Pulling the trigger took less effort than blinking.

  He dropped to the ground, his wrist bending and straightening, bending and straightening as he fought the large blood loss staining the clothes he wore.

  Bailey covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Go inside. Don’t come out until I call you.” Cady didn’t look at her daughter again, she had to get rid of his body. First, she had to try to process the fact that she’d just killed her neighbor, a man who hadn’t hesitated to share his salmon when he’d brought some home from a fishing trip, who’d volunteered to watch Bailey when Zach had been sick a few years back and Cady had to take him to the hospital, her neighbor who was nothing more than a sweet man.

  Cady couldn’t process the death through the silence that rang around them. After another moment, Bailey began to sob, ignoring Cady’s orders.

  Crossing to her, Cady took Bailey’s shoulders in her hands and turned her back inside the garage. “You need to go inside, Bailey.”

  Her daughter nodded softly, sobs shaking her chest.

  Closing the door behind her, Cady leaned on the doorjamb for a moment before turning back to the scene she didn’t want to face. Maybe if she waited long enough, it would be like it had never happened. But she turned and almost immediately regretted it.

  Kent’s foot twitched and his eyelid ticked. Cady didn’t have enough control over herself, she was still scared. She popped off three more bullets into the man’s chest before calming herself down.

  Bailey burst through the closed garage door, screaming for her mother and straight into Cady’s arms.

  Brushing back Bailey’s hair, Cady shushed her. “It’s okay. It’s fine. His nerves made him move. I overreacted.” She panted, unsure why she was so relieved that he was already dead.

  Bailey took a breath, staring at Kent’s body. “Like the fish?” She shivered, her breathing ragged.

  “Like the fish.” Cady hadn’t been able to come up with a comparison, but of course a fish needing to be clubbed after being caught was a prime example. She looked in the direction of Kent but glossed over what she was seeing. “I need to get rid of the body.”

  “Can we burn it?” Bailey shifted from Cady’s arms, standing back from the gruesome scene. “Do we need to call someone?” She was as good at deflecting as her mother.

  “Who would we call?” Cady shook her head, suddenly tired. “We can’t draw attention to us. I’m going to have to drop his body by the dumpsters or maybe off the overpass.” She’d mostly likely not make it to the overpass. She couldn’t take the SUV. Not without ruining the option of ever having to bugout from her home. Not that she would leave her place without a fight.

  The drop spot she was thinking of was only ten minutes away by car. She could load him in the trailer.

  Except she had to touch him to do so.

  Cady pushed Bailey a little further from Kent’s body without trying to be alarming. She cleared her throat, trying to figure out just how she was going to do the task that lay before her.

  “Wasn’t he sick?” Bailey’s eyes widened with the realization, as she put two and two together.

  “Yeah. He was.” Too bad the virus didn’t know the host body was dead. Cady didn’t stand a chance of not getting infected by touching him.

  He was going to have his way. He was going to kill Cady – except it wouldn’t be with the bread knife lying beside his body.

  Chapter 12

  Scott

  Maneuvering around Boise with no idea where they were headed with no sunlight to help had to be worse than a nightmare. Scott glared for what wouldn’t be the last time at flashing streetlights when there was no cross traffic to be seen.

  There was no traffic at all.

  He’d left his parents’ place a good two hours before. Jason didn’t know where they were going and Scott was losing his patience. The GPS on his phone was glitching and working too slow to show them where they were going.

  Finally, a blue street sign caught the light from his headlights. A white H with an arrow to the left gave him a way to go. Finally. Finally! He wanted to scream it to the silent streets.

  The building came out of nowhere with its external lights off and very few internal lights playing. Windows facing east – the direction they came from – didn’t have lights on except for the bottom floor.

  His mom had said things were bad, but Scott hadn’t really registered just what that might mean. A building full of sick people… many of whom could be bad or dead.

  Ignoring the parking lot, Scott pulled up and parked the car in the ambulance drop-off spot. He looked around the dark lot and turned to his nephew. “Look, I don’t want to do this, but I need you to stay here. Do you think you can do that?”

  Jason set his jaw and nodded tightly.

  Scott reached down, beneath his seat and pulled out a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun he kept for emergencies. “This is Bessy. She isn’t legal so don’t flash her around. Hold her on your lap, facing out that way,” Scott pointed out Jason’s door, away from him. “If someone approaches the truck, you be ready.” He fed the spring-loaded tube. “This is semi-automatic. If you’re going to shoot, you won’t miss. When I come back, I’ll come from the front, so it won’t be a surprise.” He stopped and looked Jason full on. “Can you do this?” He was asking a lot of the young man, but extreme times and all that.

  “Yeah, I can do this.” Jason agreed with a slight hesitation. “Be careful.”

  Scott closed the door after locking it and placed his hand over the butt of his Glock he’d tucked into his inner jacket pocket.

  Slid
ing doors protected the emergency department from the elements but they didn’t slide open when Scott approached them. Nothing happened as he stared at the sensor. He pushed along the center seam between both doors and pushed the door open, the metal brushing across the black flooring as it pushed inward.

  The smell hit him first before he’d even made it past the second set of doors. A mixed odor of unwashed bodies and fecal matter wafted on the air, slapping him in the face and making his eyes water. The scent was so strong he could taste the bitterness.

  He lifted his arm and held his jacket sleeve over his nose and mouth. He had to be infected already, so he wouldn’t bother with a mask. He wasn’t dumb. His efforts there were simply to fulfill his mother’s last wishes. None of them were going to survive. Not if Cady was right about the virus’s mortality rate.

  Scott had to push harder on the inner door because someone’s leg blocked it from opening. As he pushed, he hoped the person would move, but it didn’t happen. The interior was too dark to see clearly what was going on inside.

  The strength of the odor washed over him, sending bumps along Scott’s spine as his eyes adapted to the dimness.

  Everywhere he could see were shadows of people lying and slumping where ever they could reach. Some had IV poles beside them, the tubes connecting them to the spot they had fallen. Others held the bags in their hands, but the tubes vanished under the tangle in their laps of bag, shirts, and paperwork.

  Soft sounds of breathing and unsatisfied moans permeated the thickness of the air. He was tempted to leave the doors open to get some fresh air in the large area, but he would probably get yelled at.

  A large half-circle desk with brushed-nickel letters was identified as the receptionist’s desk.

  Scott picked his way through the unmoving bodies. There were so many. He couldn’t count them and he couldn’t differentiate between men, women, children, or he would look too closely and want to save them all.

  There was no saving any of them.

  At the desk, he stared at the empty seats behind the glass. Had he expected women to sit back there with their makeup tightly applied and a name badge pinned to their chests?

  A sign on the wall to the side of the desk area gave directions to the various parts of the hospital. The only department Scott was interested in was the NICU. He ignored the ache in his chest that his sister had been there – alive – not more than twenty-fours before. Her body was somewhere in that building.

  NICU was on the third floor. He wouldn’t chance taking the elevator with the hospital in the condition it was in. An arrow led him toward the stairs.

  Bodies sat everywhere and Scott continued picking his way over the linoleum, pretending the bodies were just ill-placed pieces of furniture. He winced when his heel came down on someone’s hand. They didn’t moan and that scared Scott more than stepping on them had. He didn’t look down, just stepped a little faster toward his goal.

  The door to the stairs, fortunately, opened into the corridor. Scott almost fell through, his anxiety to leave behind the maudlin scene pushing him fast. The stairwell was darker than the main level and Scott felt with his hands, dragging his feet on the floor. He just had to get up three floors.

  The process was slow but thankfully he didn’t run into anything like a body or an obstruction on the stairs. At the third landing, Scott pulled his phone out of his pocket and shined the light to make sure he was on the third floor and that there hadn’t been any weird floor numbering.

  Foot tall numbering reflected the light from his phone. Scott tucked his phone back into his pocket and leaned on the handle. He wasn’t ready to go in there yet.

  This was the NICU. Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The baby hadn’t been born too early. Scott’s sister had been thirty-eight weeks along, but his mom had said something about his niece being moved to NICU because there was no room in the normal place where they kept new babies. Scott had no idea what was what. He’d never had to follow the process of a pregnancy and infant with real attention.

  What was he going to face on the other side of that door? The stairway didn’t have as strong a smell as the lobby had. Scott was going into an area where children were sick. Possibly worse. Could he handle what was in there?

  He took a deep breath. If he could just get the baby, he’d come back out to the stairs and see if he could find an exit from the corridor instead of having to go back out through the lobby. Usually there was an external exit off of stairs, like a fire code or something.

  Scott straightened his shoulders. He could do this. He had to save that baby. His family. The only family he was going to have until he died from the sickness.

  He pulled the door open, prepared to be hit with an atrocious smell similar to downstairs. Instead, the odor was a combination of death, rot, and baby powder, with curdled milk underneath – a whole different level of horror.

  Scott entered the hallway, across from the nurses’ station.

  A woman with an IV hooked into her left wrist, blinked dully at him from a propped up position on a swivel chair. She drew a ragged breath, narrowing her eyes at him as she registered his presence. “Here. To. Hurt?”

  Scott held his hands up and softly shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’m here to save my niece. Newborn. Jensen-" He shook his head. “No, my sister’s maiden name was… was… Jensen. The baby, she’s a girl, her last name is Martin.” He swallowed. “I’m not sure what her first name is. My sister… died. I don’t know where her husband is and my parents are…” He didn’t go on, looking at the woman with desperate pleading in his gaze before he rambled on until forever.

  She jerked her head forward, then back, as if her neck was too weak to support her head. “Needs. To. Eat. Baby. Save her.” The woman gasped. Meager light spilled across the reception area from an LED night light that glowed from the side hallway.

  Whimpers and soft crying carried down the hallway from open doorways.

  Scott looked closer at the woman, shocked to see white headed bumps dotting her face and around her mouth. The baby had to eat, of course, she did. He was there to save her.

  “Can I do anything for you?” Scott searched the area around her for something he could do to help. She had to be uncomfortable in the chair and Scott wanted to do something for her, but he didn’t know what.

  She stared hard at him, licking her lips carefully. Her gaze flicked past him and then to her left and right. “No one. Else. Is coming. Not in tim… time. They… suffering.” Tears sparkled in her bump-rimmed eyes.

  “What can I do to help them?” But Scott had a feeling he knew what she was going to suggest. He didn’t want to go any further. He wanted to push pause in time and just stop.

  But the universe ignored his internal pleas to stop.

  She lifted her hand, but only about an inch with a finger pointed in the direction of a bucket of prefilled syringes. “Se. Conal. Half a syringe… each IV.”

  Scott shot his gaze to her face, horror freezing his vocal chords. “I… All of them?” Seconal was used in euthanasia procedures. Something that wasn’t legal in Idaho. How far in advance had she suspected this was going to be a necessity? Judging by her own rash, she’d been sick a while.

  The nurse blinked, tears streaking down her cheeks. Mascara she’d put on a few days before still streaked her skin. How long had she sat there wishing and praying for help? For some kind of relief for her and the children? “Plea. se.”

  Scott swallowed back his fear. He would surely burn in hell for assisting in the horror, but at the same time, he didn’t want small children to suffer. “Will… will it hurt them?” He couldn’t hurt anyone, let alone innocent babies.

  What she was asking him to do was enough to destroy the most hardened of men – which Scott was not.

  She turned her head to the side, but didn’t do more as she spoke carefully. “They. Will. Sleep. Be good. Please.”

  The children would sleep and then die.

  Could Scott do that? He considere
d all of the options before the children. What he’d seen on the streets and downstairs.

  How could he not help?

  He nodded, slowly. “Can I…” He motioned toward her, as if offering to administer one to her. The chance to help her find relief was a big one, but he didn’t want her to suffer either. Not when she looked like she was barely holding on herself.

  A sensation of peace crossed her face and her breathing hitched. “After… babies. Them. First.” She flicked her fingers from the resting position on the chair.

  Scott nodded. He looked on the charts, searching for Jensen or Martin so he didn’t accidentally Seconal his niece. On the room assignments, Baby Martin was in room #N363. That would be just across the hall from the station.

  He crossed the dark linoleum as if trapped in a sensation of disbelief. How was that his reality?

  Two cribs in the room had small LED lights above them, glowing insistently above the forms below them.

  The clear plastic cribs were more the size of basinets with squishy mattress pads that weren’t more than two feet long by a foot and a half wide. They sat atop wheeled-wooden platforms.

  The first crib’s occupant was motionless, frozen in a silent sob, eyes squeezed tight. Scott’s heart froze. Was that his niece? All newborns looked the same to him. A blue card above his head on the plastic top of the bed declared the baby a boy with the name designation of “Tomas Madires”.

  Not his niece.

  But someone’s son. Had the parents died? Were they there in the hospital, sick, and hoping to find their son taken care of when they got better? Scott pushed the cycle of thoughts from his mind. He’d never be able to do what the nurse needed, if he didn’t ignore the babies.

  Scott dragged in a breath. His niece had to be in the other crib, but was she alive? He went to the other bed, approaching on tiptoe as if scaring her would cause her death.

  Her eyes were closed. A pink card named her “Baby Martin” with weight and length information. Scott inspected her. Tiny movements in her chest assured him she was alive. No tubes or cords connected her to oxygen or IV fluids. She couldn’t have been in there longer than a day or so. Had the staff been affected so horribly and so fast that they hadn’t been able to watch over the babies, or had the youngest and most helpless been left behind so others could save those who could eventually save themselves?