The Eden Project (Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 6)

by Jeff DeGordick

  As she shone the flashlight down the hallway, she could see two shambling figures bumping around each other down near the middle of the corridor. They didn't have the telltale twitches that the scratchers did, and they didn't seem to move intelligently like the new zombies did. But even so, she wished to avoid an encounter if she could, and even Trevor was skeptical that she would find anything of interest in the patient rooms. So she moved on.

  When she got up to the third floor, she checked the relevant locations again, but came up with nothing on the list that Trevor was looking for. She knew it was probably a bust, but at least Trevor was getting the parts he needed from the MRI machine.

  Sarah sauntered over to one of the windows overlooking the front of the hospital, remembering standing there six months ago and seeing the killer looking up at her in the night. As she looked outside now, she saw a similar sight.

  It took her a second to process what she was seeing, and when she did, she stepped back in shock. Then she pressed her face against the glass to get a better look.

  There was a figure standing inside the hospital grounds, looking up at her just as the killer had done. But not just one figure this time. In fact, there were six of them. They all looked up like they saw her, and after another pause, they proceeded to head into the shattered emergency ward doors.

  Fear grew inside of her. They definitely weren't the normal zombies that she knew were already skulking around the hospital; these were the new, intelligent kind. There was no mistaking it.

  Sarah frantically brought the walkie-talkie up to her mouth and pressed the call button. "Trevor? Trevor! We're not alone. They're coming!"

  7

  Search Party

  Sarah stared down at the walkie-talkie in her hand, expecting it to come to life. It remained silent. She ran up to the window again and pressed her face against the glass, looking down to find if she could see anything. But the zombies were already inside. She feared the worst. Should she go down and try to get to Trevor? Or was it too late?

  Just then, the walkie-talkie squawked and released a retch of static, followed by Trevor's garbled voice. "What are you saying, Sarah?"

  She pressed on the call button again. "Some zombies just came in the building through ER!" she reiterated. "Six of them, I think. And they're the new kind, the smart ones!"

  The walkie was quiet again for a long moment, and Sarah snapped her head over her shoulder, thinking she heard something.

  "Where are they?" Trevor asked. "I still need some more time here."

  "I don't know, but they could get to you any minute!"

  Then the walkie fell silent and his voice didn't come on again. She pressed on the button and called his name in a whisper, wondering if there were someone near him, but he never responded.

  "Shit!" she uttered. Sarah turned and ran immediately for the stairwell, but as soon as she opened the door, she heard footsteps coming up the stairs, at least two pairs.

  She stuffed the walkie in her pocket and ran along the corridor the other way, abandoning the stairwell. She still had the M16 hanging around her neck and the pistol on her hip, but she would rather evade and flee if she had the chance. She held out hope that Trevor was as skilled as he had shown her the day before and that he would be able to handle himself and get out in time with the item. She whizzed past the patient rooms lining the hall until she got to the stairwell on the other end of the long corridor. She glanced over her shoulder and saw three zombies chasing her, about halfway through the corridor themselves. They had a measured, hungry look in their eyes; these new zombies could not only outlast her in endurance, but also in intellectual endurance. They would stay on the hunt for as long as they needed to, using whatever means they needed to use to get their meal. It was the same look of the biggest predators in the animal kingdom as they ran down their prey.

  Sarah burst through the door and hurried down the stairs. She twisted the flashlight as she wound her way down, trying to search well ahead of herself to make sure there was nothing waiting to ambush her. The doors to the third and second floors flew by her, and she steeled herself against them as she passed, waiting for any one of them to fly open and a zombie to tackle her. But she made it all the way to the ground floor and pulled open the door as quickly as she could, hearing the zombies above her begin to descend the stairs.

  She found herself in the main, long hallway leading all the way back to the ER and the exit, and the coast looked clear ahead of her, but she didn't want to go just yet in case Trevor needed her. The walkie-talkie was still silent, and she was starting to fear the worst.

  There was a wide-open reception area next to her with dirty chairs lining the stained and musty carpet, and there was a perpendicular hallway just up ahead to her right. She heard the zombies coming down behind her, almost on the ground floor now.

  Using it one last time to see where she was going before she put it away, Sarah swept the flashlight across the area in front of her, then decided to head for the hallway. She turned the corner and found herself stumbling around in the dark. The stairwell door burst open behind her from around the corner, and she patted around on the wall, her eyes not yet adjusted to the darkness. But she found an open doorway in the nick of time and slipped inside. She crouched down behind the frame and turned the flashlight on again, cupping the light with her hand as she held the bright end of it. She swiveled the light around the room, looking for any indication of where she was and found signs indicating that she was in a pediatrics office. There was a reception desk ahead of her with a narrow hallway stretching beyond it to some small patient rooms.

  She turned off the light again and rushed for one of them, but as soon as she got past the desk, she realized that she didn't want to corner herself in a tiny room and elected instead to hide under the desk.

  The hurried footsteps coming out of the stairwell split up and echoed through the hallway outside the office as they split off in various directions. Sarah removed the Sig Sauer from her holster and held it ready in case one of the undead made its way into the office and found her. She didn't want to do it, but she would make a dramatic exit if she had to.

  Two sets of footsteps seemed to continue down the main hallway, and the third set sounded like it clapped across the open door of the pediatrics office where she hid. She would wait for it to make a fair headway further into the hospital, then she would duck back out into the main hallway and see if she could make her way to radiology without getting spotted.

  But then she heard a startling sound from outside of the office. The hungry groan of a normal undead echoed from somewhere nearby, and suddenly the footsteps she was listening to in the hallway stopped. A moment later, they started again, but this time they were running. The sounds of grunts and groans and ripping flesh bounced off the peeling paint of the walls. They made her skin crawl, and her heart sank as she realized exactly what was happening.

  The smart zombie was feeding on the normal zombie, and when it was done, the normal zombie's agitated and stupid grunts died down. And then there was silence. And two sets of measured footsteps.

  Sarah's heart hammered in her chest. Her grip tightened around the gun, wondering if she should make a break for it, stay and fight, or continue to hide. She decided to wait, realizing it was the best option when she was trapped in the darkness without knowing her way around and what was lurking around each corner.

  She listened, waiting to hear the footsteps come back and investigate the office where she was hiding. But they never did. They went the opposite way and faded down some other corridor in the maze of halls and rooms. Then she listened for the walkie-talkie to squawk, but Trevor was still silent.

  It was now or never for her. Sarah aimed her handgun as she crawled out from under the desk and returned to the doorway, peeking out into the hall. She waited and allowed her eyes to train themselves more to the darkness rather than using the flashlight and risking bringing attention to herself.

  It looked like the hallway w
as empty and there was no sign of any immediate activity around her. So she crept back to the main hallway stretching from the stairwell she'd fled down to the entrance by the ER. She turned the corner and made her way down to the other hallway branching toward radiology. She flicked on the flashlight sparingly, just to make sure she was going in the right direction and to recognize the familiar sights that she took in when they originally found the room with the MRI machine, but the downside was that the brief flashes of light blinded her and took her eyes a long time to settle back into the darkness.

  She retraced their steps, hearing quiet footsteps in the distance in various parts of the hospital, but none directly in her path. She turned the flashlight on one final time and pointed it up at the sign she remembered seeing that marked the fMRI room. When she was sure she had it right, she turned the flashlight off and slipped inside.

  "Trevor?" Sarah whispered. "Are you there?" She turned on the flashlight again and pointed it at the fMRI machine. It looked different than it had before. The front casing had been pulled off, revealing the guts of the machine. Pieces of it were strewn about on the table of the machine or on the floor. She looked inside and behind the machine, but didn't find Trevor. She searched behind chairs and a desk on the other side of the room and he wasn't there either.

  Finally, the garbled voice came back over the walkie-talkie. "Sarah, are you there?" Trevor asked.

  Sarah trotted back to the door of the room she was in and quietly closed it, not wanting any of the noise of their conversation to drift into the hallway. Then she hunkered down on the opposite side of the room and held the call button down. "I'm here, Trevor, where are you?"

  "I'm out front, across the street. Did you make it out?"

  "No," she said, "I'm in radiology looking for you."

  Trevor held the call button down on his end, as Sarah could hear the static coming over the line, but he didn't say anything at first. "Okay, you need to get out of there."

  "I'm going to try heading for ER where we came in," Sarah said.

  The walkie squawked again. "No. I see a few of them waiting out here at the entrance for you. You'll have to take a different route... Unless you want to fight your way out," he added.

  "Not particularly," she said. "Shit! I don't know how else to get out of here."

  There was another pause, then Trevor came on again. "It's okay, I took the map from the wall, so if you tell me where you are, I can tell you exactly where to go."

  Elation filled her body at his sweet words and she felt an involuntary smile spread over her face. "Trevor, you're a genius."

  "Just keep your wits about you," he said. "These guys are smarter than anything I've ever seen before, but they're not smarter than you. Remember the training I gave you yesterday."

  Sarah closed her eyes and the feelings came back to her: the feel of the soft earth between her toes; the cool grass tickling the bottom of her feet; the gentle breeze gliding across her skin as she moved silently toward the rabbit.

  She pressed down the call button. "I'm in the room with the machine you took apart. Where do I need to go?" She laid the walkie down on the floor and took her shoes off, wedging them in the back of her jeans. The finished cement floor was cold on her feet, and she could already feel her clammy feet stick to them a little. But she knew it would still be quieter than her shoes slapping against the floor.

  "When you get back into the hallway, take a left and move away from the entrance we came in. The first thing you're going to come up to is a fork. Take it to the left and continue down all the way to the end. There's one last corner to go around, and then there should be a back door there you can leave through."

  Sarah ran through the instructions in her head. They seemed simple enough, and she knew she would be able to make it there. "Okay, I'll let you know when I get there."

  Trevor stayed off the line, knowing she would need complete silence for the next few minutes.

  Sarah stuffed the walkie-talkie in her pocket and headed for the door to the room she was in, silently twisting the handle and pulling it open. She elected to keep her flashlight off and only use the tiniest reflections of light to see her way through once her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She knew that even though she had a hard time seeing, zombies did too, and unless these new kind had advanced vision that she didn't know about, she would be able to make it just fine.

  She went left into the hallway and came toward the fork in the path ahead. The corridor to the right took a sharp ninety-degree turn, while the left path stretched out on a forty-five-degree angle away from her. But before she got there she heard footsteps from the right.

  She carefully ducked into a PET scan room just before the fork and waited. She made sure she was absolutely silent as she moved, holding her rifle tightly against her chest to make sure it didn't jostle around. She kept her footsteps slow and even, but when she had heard the movement from around the corner, she took a page from Trevor's book and put a bit of spring in her step, landing carefully on the balls of her feet and distributing the weight as she came down, just like she'd seen him do. And it worked too, because she didn't make a sound.

  Crouched against the doorframe, she peeked into the hall and watched the open space of wall between the fork intently as she heard two very different sets of footsteps shuffle toward it. One was uneven and stuttering, and the other was in a run. And there was the sound of a collision around the corner as both footsteps slapped against the cement floor in unison.

  Two figures stumbled into view. One of the zombies grabbed the other one by the shoulders and shoved it against the wall. The zombie being manhandled seemed somewhat aloof, not really paying much attention to the one attacking it and chewing on its neck. And when the feast was done, the smart zombie looked around each direction in the hallway and Sarah pulled her head back into the room. Then she heard the footsteps cross in front of where she was hiding and head back for the main hallway.

  Sarah poked her head out again and watch the back of it as it went, the zombie being none the wiser that she was watching it, much like the one hiding from her as she passed the storage yard two days prior. But as she looked at the normal zombie it had attacked, she was shocked.

  Within a matter of a minute, the normal zombie had visibly transformed into the new, smart kind. She remembered back to when she and her small company had infiltrated the police station in Raleigh and Curt got bitten by a scratcher. It had taken a few minutes before he transformed into one of them, and now the transformation process was down to only a single minute, if that.

  The transformed zombie began moving around evenly on its feet, searching up and down each stretch of hallway before moving back around the right side of the fork. This was a clear indication that the thought capacity and intelligence in all the normal zombies after all these years likely weren't damaged beyond repair; they simply seemed to be blocked, but it was something she would have to ask Ron when she returned to the lab.

  Sarah didn't know how many of the normal zombies there were lurking in the hospital that the smart ones had bitten, but if they were truly smart, they would go after them first and spread their advanced infection, creating a much more sizable force to hunt her and Trevor down.

  But she shook off these thoughts and moved back out into the hallway, quietly creeping to the fork and taking the left path. Another hallway came up on the right, but she remembered Trevor told her to continue on to the end. She glanced over her shoulder, but there was nothing behind her. And there was only one solitary corner left ahead of her, only a few yards away. When she reached it she stopped in front of it and sidled herself up to the wall. Then she leaned her head out from around the corner and peered down the last stretch.

  It was only a dozen feet long, the only thing of interest being the door itself. It was a solid steel door with a push bar across it that she would have to press to shove the door open and escape, and she knew they usually made a fair bit a noise. But she took her time, bracing her forearm a
gainst it and taking a firm grip, then she slowly moved the bar against the door. But when it was fully depressed and she expected the door to open up into the afternoon sunlight, it no longer budged. Sarah pulled back a little on the door, then she pushed into it again, a little harder this time.

  The muffled sound of rattling chains on the outside of the building seeped through the crack in the door, and her heart sank.

  They must have chained all the doors up when they closed the hospital, and unless she wanted to create a big ruckus, she would have to find another way out to a door made of glass like those of the entrance in the ER.

  She crouched down and pulled out the walkie-talkie. "Trevor! I'm at the door, but it's chained shut from the outside! Can you get here and open it?"

  "I don't have anything to open it with, Sarah," he said. "But there's another way out not far from you. It's the visitor entrance, and the doors should be glass. If they're still shut and you can't pry them open, you might have to break the glass, but I haven't seen any of them moving around toward the back, so you should be good."

  "Which side of the hospital is it on?" she asked.

  "It's on the opposite side from the emergency room. Once you get outside, see if you can find a way over the fence and meet me around at the front. I'm across the street, hiding behind a blue sedan.

  Footsteps stirred in the distance, and a prickling sense of fear rolling across her skin agitated her. "Okay, I'll do what I have to. Where do I go from here?"

  "Take the hallway back toward the fork, but before you get there there'll be a hallway to your left. Take that hallway and pass a nutrition office. There's going to be a secondary set of elevators to your right and then you can come up to pathology on your left. Keep going toward the end of the hallway, then take a left. Once you get there, you should see the way out. Just make it quick; I don't like the way I heard these things multiplying in there."