And the Blood Ran Black

by Nathan E. Harvey

  “Wait, you really asked him to do that?” Moto scoffed.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way,” his mother shrugged. “You just get a little bit too excited when there’s the opportunity for adrenaline.”

  “Oh, like you’ve ever been out there with me when I’m doing anything that involves adrenaline.”

  “I was with you after your father mentioned in passing that the speed limit sign near our house was silly and that no one could possibly be up to 60 miles an hour after the four-way stop just up the hill from it. You took it as a challenge, God knows why.”

  “A challenge I won.”

  “A challenge you won with your mother riding shotgun. Who knows what kind of adventures you dreamed up to keep yourself occupied in Puerto Rico,” she said. “Marvin, could you please give your brother and me a second to talk? Just a second.”

  John’s mother patted the edge of her bed as Moto shut the door behind him, gesturing for John to come sit next to her.

  “There’s a conversation that we’ve tried to have a few times, but it never plays out like I’d hoped. You’ve been dodging it your whole life, but this just might be our last chance to talk. You know you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, right?” she asked.

  “Sure, mom,” John answered, avoiding eye contact. “What little girl doesn’t dream about finding that special someone that is willing to share his Rohypnol…”

  “Stop right there!” she interrupted. “I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about you.”

  “But I am him,” John whimpered, tearing up. “I can’t look into the mirror without wondering about him. How you can see me as anything other than what he did to you. I will never understand why you even kept me.”

  “John, I wasn’t exactly innocent back then either. What do you think I was doing out there as a teenager? No one is denying that you came from a bad situation, but the situation doesn’t have to define you! Whatever good things there were in that man, you got them. You sure as hell got all the best parts of me. I never would have made it this long without you, John. You were taking care of me when I was supposed to take care of you, and given the chance, I wouldn’t change a single thing about you!”

  John was crying.

  “Your brother relies on you more than you will ever realize. Anything that I am, anything that he becomes, you did that. You are not that man’s son. You’re my son! For God’s sake, you never even carried his name. You were my boy, and then you became one of the Chow boys.

  “A difficult name to take on in middle school for a kid with my looks,” John added.

  “Stop changing the subject. You need to forget where the sperm came from. That doesn’t mean a thing. If you passed your ‘father’ on the street, you wouldn’t look twice. So don’t give him a second thought. Don’t put any more effort or time into that douche.”

  John couldn’t help but laugh. He leaned in and hugged her after maneuvering his arms around the maze of IVs. “Now go get your brother.”

  When Moto returned, he could tell that John had been crying and was thankful to have missed the conversation.

  “I know you don’t want to call a dog Puddin’, but he may not come to y’all without a little effort on your parts. It took me days to gain his trust,” their mother said, “And, whatever it is, I don’t care one bit about the big news you guys think I need to be informed about. Whatever has happened, whatever is coming, I don’t want to know about it. Seeing you two was all I needed on my way out… that and my GSN,” she said. “Thank you for remembering your mom and coming all this way, but I would just be more trouble than I’m worth. No regrets and no bitching about it. We had a good run,” she said as she unmuted her show just in time to hear a sexually suggestive question.

  “Don’t worry, we won’t try to talk you out of it,” Moto sighed, trying to keep his eyes from watering. “You’re a grown woman, and you make your own decisions. My money is still on you to outlive both of us, anyhow. John can’t drive the big rental for shit.”

  “Dammit, Marvin, your language!” she slapped his hand.

  ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

  The next morning, John groggily awoke in the awkwardly shaped chair next to his mother’s bed, thankful he had been able to sleep at all.

  “Code 44, 308. Code 44, 308,” a voice echoed down the hallways.

  “That one is heart attack,” his mom said matter of factly. “You pick up on these things after so much time on the inside.”

  Moto was still fast asleep on the couch beneath the window where the sun was now spraying small, blinding dots of light through the blinds.

  “You boys planning to stick around until breakfast?” their mother asked. “As much as I’d love to keep you around, I don’t know how nice my morning nurse is gonna be if she finds that you stayed the night in here with me.”

  “Is it not anybody we know?” Moto asked with a stretch and a yawn.

  “No, she’s not nearly as good as the girls that y’all were accustomed to.”

  Another voice on the PA echoed down the hall. “Doctor Strong to pathology, Doctor Strong to pathology.”

  “That’s odd,” she said trying to sit up. “They usually call Dr. Strong as a code when they need some muscle for an unruly patient. I can’t imagine why they’d ever call Dr. Strong to the morgue.”

  John took a second to process this before rushing Moto into action while trying to remain subtle enough as to not startle his mother. He sternly communicated to Moto that it was time, and the two started their separate, brief goodbyes with their mother. Knowing that no words could ever be sufficient for a situation such as this somehow made it easier to shorten the farewell. Their mom also understood the apparent gravity of the situation, and focused on the fact that her boys made coming to see her their first priority. Considering her condition, the men and their mother were all aware of the fact that this would be a final goodbye, though the words were never spoken. The necessity of an immediate departure was no indication of any lack of love for their mother, and she knew it and gracefully forced her boys out the door. On his way out, John ignored his mom’s request to leave the door propped open and instead made sure that it shut securely.

  “I think we’re out of time,” John whispered on their way to the elevator. “I mean, they called for assistance with an unruly patient in the morgue. What else could that mean?”

  He pressed the down button, remembering a pathology sign down the hall from the cafeteria on the bottom floor.

  “Do we just go take care of it?” Moto asked. “I mean, do we just start crackin’ skulls? I can’t see that ending any other way than with us being arrested.”

  “We couldn’t realistically go public and do any good before,” John started as the elevator doors slid apart, “but we have to do something now. If nothing else, there are probably worse places we could end up for all of this than to be safely behind bars.”

  Moto psyched himself up as the elevator doors closed in front of him, pressing the button for the ground floor.

  “Ok. Let’s do this.”

  The doors opened and the brothers stepped out, ready for anything. They glanced along the walls for any weapon they could use, be it a fire axe, a piece of a stretcher, whatever was available. A few steps out, though, John realized they weren’t in the basement, but down the hall from the main lobby. After what seemed like several minutes waiting on another car to arrive, the elevator doors finally re-opened, letting off a joyful couple with their young daughter. The dad had flowers under one arm and a crutch under the other as they eased their way past John and Moto. The two hurried onto the elevator, along with two elderly women carrying to-go plates of breakfast. John pressed the Lobby button, and the doors sprang back open without changing levels.

  “Where is the cafeteria?” John sounded a bit harsh in his confusion. He knew for a fact that it had been on the bottom floor.

  “This is the old wing,” one of the ladies responded. “The Heldenfelds tower doesn’t ac
cess the basement.”

  The elevator began buzzing, having been held opened for too long.

  “You have to go up to three and walk the tunnel back to the new Ornelas building. That elevator will take you down to the cafeteria.”

  John pressed three and released the elevator doors, allowing them to close, silencing the squeal of the electronic alarm. The elevator rose to the second floor and stopped at the destination of the two ladies. Unaware of the brothers’ rush, the ladies held the door open momentarily and wished the men good luck in finding some food. Finally to the third floor, the brothers exited and rushed along the extending hallways, following the signs to Ornelas. Their steps grew faster and faster as their frustration grew, and even faster when they heard another request over the loudspeaker for help to make its way to the morgue, and now the kitchen as well. The time for using codes had passed, and the plea was no longer exclusive to only the hospital personnel.

  Finally, they reached the Ornelas elevators and pressed the down button to call on a car. While they were waiting, Moto noticed that a large group of people had gathered around a television showing the news. Taking a few steps over, he could tell by the caption that a local policeman had shot an aggressive young child. He could overhear different people in the group that had gathered arguing about self-defense and police brutality. Turning back around, he was surprised to see that the elevator had still not come. Before he had even taken a step, shrieks and gasps erupted from the growing crowd around him. Moto stepped back over to where he could see the screen and observed a bleeding paramedic fending off a crazed police officer who was now completely covered in blood. A few nearby policemen opened fire on the man just as the news station was able to cut away from the live feed.

  A staff member who had joined John in waiting for the elevator gave up and instead shoved open a nearby door into a stairwell. Moto and John quickly followed on behind him. Before they could enter, though, a bleeding man shoved his way out of the stairwell door and into the lobby. As the brothers began their descent, the sounds of panic that echoed up the stairs were drowned out by the squeal of a fire alarm. The steps became virtually impassible as the brothers rounded the lobby level, and faced dozens of people fleeing from the cafeteria. The nurse that they’d followed into the stairwell gave up and joined the crowds in escaping toward the lobby’s front door.

  The two men resisted the temptation to shove their way down the last flight of stairs, and instead helped those that fell and were in real danger of being trampled. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, the brothers saw that most of the cafeteria had been completely evacuated. Rounding a corner, the elevator came into view. A man in a Florida Gators t-shirt laid motionless on the floor with his torso in the elevator, blocking the doors from closing. Every few seconds, the doors would slide up against his body, pause, and re-open. The buzzing of the elevator’s alarm was continuous. A zombie knelt next to its meal, tugging apart the man’s flesh with its teeth. It appeared that the infected man had worked maintenance, and still wore his uniform neatly tucked into his khaki pants with name badge dangling. As Moto moved to claim a metal fork as his weapon, he saw that the victim was now an unrecognizable corpse with no face. The uniformed zombie bared his teeth at Moto, but it refused to stand and leave its kill. The zombie’s slow, un-coordinated movements made for an easy approach, and Moto was able to quickly close the gap and stab the zombie with his utensil.

  Backing away, Moto realized that the fork did not penetrate deeply enough, and the zombie rose in pursuit of its attacker. From nowhere, John appeared with a broken, wooden handrail and bludgeoned the undead thing until it lay motionless in the hallway. Content that it was finished, the two turned to investigate the morgue. As they approached, another fire alarm was set off. Flashing lights, sprinkler water, and piercing sirens all flooded the hallways simultaneously. Moto worked to arm himself by breaking loose an arm from a stretcher. Down the hall, a zombie appeared. It was obvious that the man had been a doctor, and his intestines dragged across the floor as he staggered toward them. With each uncoordinated step, his eviscerated bowels would swing in a pendulum-like motion and became entangled under his foot. Eventually, the length of intestines reached its full extent and tugged at his core, causing him to stumble like a child with untied shoelaces. Moto, now armed, quickly worked his way down the hall to dispose of the lone zombie.

  “Wait!” John yelled ahead to Moto.

  Glancing into the opened rooms on either side of him, John realized that they had all been overrun and now contained numerous zombies sharing their various kills. Alerted by the uncommon panic in John’s voice, Moto turned to see more of the undead stumbling out into the hallway from the doors behind him. Moto and John fought to work their way toward one another through the growing mob as the remaining food sources were now becoming depleted and all the attention was turning to them. The movements of the undead were slow and awkward, but the brothers had to take care to avoid each potentially infectious bite. Attacking only those that they had to, the brothers regrouped and eventually fell back to safety near the elevators, plotting their next move.

  All planning halted abruptly when the desperate pleas for help arose from a woman somewhere down the hall.

  ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

  “Please! Stop it! Leave us alone!” the woman screamed as John searched frantically for a better weapon.

  “We need a gun!” Moto yelled. “There’s too many of ‘em.”

  “No time,” John said, his eyes lighting up at the sight of the dead maintenance man’s cart.

  John instinctively lifted a handled shelf section of the box that contained small screwdrivers and other smaller tools to reveal some larger, heavier weapons hidden beneath. He tugged at a large wrench and then noticed an imposing crowbar on the bottom of the cart. He tossed the wrench over to Moto and kept the crowbar for himself. The brothers made eye contact and exchanged a nod of mutual understanding. Moto ran in first, undercutting zombies in the chin with the heavy tool, sprinkling broken teeth across the floor. John’s first swing came in sharp side down, and the crook of his weapon penetrated a muscular doctor’s forehead. The doctor’s legs buckled instantly, but John’s crowbar went down with it, securely lodged in the thing’s skull. John bent over and pressed his foot against the large doctor’s head to dislodge his weapon.

  “Use the blunt end!” Moto yelled while cracking a young nurse in the jaw as she approached John’s blind side.

  “The brain, not the jaw!” John answered as he pinned a now toothless but still standing zombie to the wall with his free hand. Jerking his lodged tool free of the doctor’s skull, he swung the crowbar firmly into the toothless man’s throat in one swift motion.

  “We’re good, we’re good,” Moto said as he brought the full weight of his wrench down on the pinned zombie’s head, caving in its skull and spraying blood across John’s arms. Their movements grew more and more connected like a well-choreographed dance as they worked their way down the hallway.

  “Hang on lady, we’re coming!” Moto yelled between gasps for air.

  John reached over his brother’s shoulder, grabbing the throat of a zombie that had suddenly emerged from a dark room, only illuminated by the flashing emergency lights. He stiff-armed the woman as best he could with his left hand and, once clear, side-armed the crowbar into her temple forcefully. The slight woman did a full 360° rotation before meeting the hard tile floor, splashing down into the rapidly accumulating sprinkler water. Moto voiced his thanks as John continued to attack each new threat, now just feet away from the women’s restroom where the trapped lady called out from. John lifted his weapon, ready to swing, before realizing that the last man between himself and the bathroom was no threat. The man sat lifelessly hunched over in a wheelchair against the wall with no obvious bite marks.

  At the restroom door, a heavyset elderly man had worked his arm between the door and its frame. He showed no reaction as the trapped woman repeatedly slammed the door against
his upper arm and was concerned only with pushing forward to gain entry into the room. His humerus had been completely shattered, and the door appeared to be closing almost entirely with each slam, just a fraction of an inch from latching. Only strands of flesh and cloth seemed to hold the man’s arm together. He never saw the brutal attack coming as Moto laid him to rest from behind with a mighty swing.

  “C’mon, c’mon!” Moto yelled to the woman. “There’s too many down here. We’ve gotta go now.”

  To his surprise, a shocked little girl’s face appeared as the door cracked open farther. She was young, and visibly distraught. Above the blonde child stood the source of the earlier screams, an attractive woman who was still protectively holding the child back. Both of the girls’ focus was on the mutilated body of the man that was now slowly slumping over against the doorframe. Moto couldn’t help but appreciate that the woman had the kind of looks that forced a man to take pause, even despite her running mascara and frizzled hair. He felt the impulse to smile and introduce himself, but was interrupted upon hearing that John had already turned his back to the girls and was ferociously hacking his way back down the hall toward the cafeteria.

  “Stay close!” Moto yelled as he waved them along with his gore-covered hand. “You hang onto her!”

  The woman looked up from the mangled corpse and nodded, allowing Moto to catch direct eye contact with her for the first time. He stopped himself from gazing into the woman’s deep, green eyes that were peeking out from behind her wet, brunette hair and forced himself to instead turn and assist John. Moto felt a hint of disappointment that the woman’s face didn’t reciprocate the same love at first sight kind of countenance that his own surely held, though he supposed that would probably be asking too much considering their predicament. He was shocked to find that the man his brother had left sitting in the wheelchair was now upright and almost upon him. He quickly disposed of the now mobile attacker and led the girls on their way.