Wolf Running

by Toni Boughton

  They had also found dead people who were truly dead. These bodies Nowen had also tossed outside. Somehow, by some miracle, they still had power in the hospital, but they had watched the rest of the city fall dark, night after night, until only a few patches of light here and there remained. Everything else was dying, too, it seemed - television, radio, and the internet had stopped giving new information two days ago, just before they disappeared from the airwaves. At least Nowen had learned the name of the city that was collapsing around her. The hospital was in a suburb called Exeter, on the western edge of Ft. Collins, in the state of Colorado.

  The tapping of fingers on hard plastic drew Nowen from her reverie. She recognized the sound, and with an internal sigh she turned her back on the window and joined the other woman at the table. She plucked a handful of stale crackers from a box and watched as Jamie hovered over the sleek, brilliant purple cell phone cradled in her hands.

  “Any luck?” I already know the answer.

  Jamie gently placed the phone on the table, like she was returning a holy relic to its homeland. “No. Still no answer.”

  And why do you still expect there to be? Nowen knew better than to ask that out loud. Instead, she sat quietly and waited for Jamie continue.

  “It’s just, my folks, you know...I always thought that if anyone could survive the end of the world, it would be them. They were - they are - into being prepared for anything. Not like some crazy nutcases, expecting the New World Order. They just believed in being able to support themselves. I mean, they still believe.” Her face blanched as she realized what she had said. With a desperate note in her voice she looked over at Nowen. “I told you about their farm, right?”

  Nowen nodded. “Yes, you did.”

  “So I know it seems futile. I’m not stupid. I just-I can’t make myself give up yet.”

  “I’m sorry. But we need to decide what we’re going to do next.” Nowen said.

  Jamie’s brow furrowed under a fall of limp blonde hair before she dropped her head to her hands. “Oh, what’s the point?” came the muffled words.

  Nowen forced down a mouthful of dry crackers and looked around at their woefully small stash of scavenged supplies. “Well, we’re going to have to do something about more food and water, at least. And we need to decide if we’re going to stay here or-”

  “What’s the point?!” Jamie interrupted, raising her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed and tears tracked down her face. “Seriously, what’s the point? When you sit and think about it, I mean really think about it, about the enormity of it all...” her voice trailed off, and she cupped her hands together in front of her. “The entire world is like Exeter, like Ft. Collins. Dead and dying.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Ohhhh, but I’m pretty positive. You saw the news, same as I did. Things were going to shit all over the place. Between Flux and the Revs...” Nowen started to interject but Jamie raised a hand to stop her. “And how long will our luck hold out. Is Flux still out there? Can we get it? Any day now will we turn on each other?”

  “The authorities-”

  Jamie laughed, a harsh bark. “Ha! What authorities? Have you seen any police? Or military? Or even the damn Boy Scouts?” She slammed her fist down on the table. Cracker crumbs danced from the force of her blow.

  Nowen frowned. “Oh. Are you going to kill yourself?”

  Jamie looked dumbfounded. “What?”

  “Well, if you feel everything is hopeless, then it’s not worth going on. Right?”

  For the first time in the few days Nowen had known the young nurse Jamie showed anger. Intense, burning anger.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Nowen?” The words came out bitter and red-edged.

  “What? What did I do?”

  Jamie wiped her face with the back of hand. “You’re so damn cold, Miss I-like-to-watch-from-the-window-as-people-die-and-it-doesn’t-bother-me, and sometimes you ‘re as scary to me as what’s outside-” her hysterical words stopped as she realized what she had said.

  “I scare you?” Nowen asked, puzzled.

  “Yes. No. Sometimes. Oh, hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.” Jamie sighed and ran her hands through her hair. Hearing her lay her innermost thoughts out seemed to have brought her back to normalcy. “I’m sorry, Nowen. It’s just, you know, everything...” she trailed off. A heavy silence filled the room. Finally, Nowen spoke.

  “How do I scare you?”

  Jamie shook her head. “It’s nothing. It’s just foolishness.”

  “I’d like to know, nonetheless.”

  “I watch you when you’re looking out the window. You’re so intense as you watch those people die. You practically vibrate with energy, as if you want to be down there. And you lick your lips when you’re doing this. A lot. Do you know you do this?” The young woman’s voice grew quieter as she added “I don’t know anything about you. You don’t know anything about you. You killed those Revs so easily, like it was no big deal. I’m a nurse, I’m used to seeing blood and bile and mucus and every gross substance the human body can produce, and all that death still makes me ill. But it doesn’t bother you, does it?” Jamie’s blue eyes were wary but accusatory as she waited for an answer.

  Nowen didn’t know what to say. She settled for a shrug and “Sometimes.”

  Jamie threw her hands up in exasperation. “And that’s another thing! You’re as silent as a stone-” The ringing of a phone interrupted her.

  The only bit of good news in the past week had come through the inter-hospital phone system. A group of survivors (one doctor, two nurses, an elderly couple who volunteered at the hospital, two young men, and one very pregnant woman) had found safety on the second floor. Jamie had made contact with them the day after the fight in the stairwell, but even the welcome relief of hearing other human voices had been tempered by the realization that this new group was worse off than they were and could provide no help.

  The second-floor housed the women’s care unit, and the survivors were split between a medication storage room and the delivery room. Revs were everywhere, supplies were even less available than they were on the fourth floor, and no one wanted to discuss what had become of the nursery.

  Jamie darted out to the nurses’ station desk. “Who can that be?” she shouted over her shoulder. “It’s too early for Dr. Westrick to call!”

  Nowen watched her leave and then turned back to the window. She had listened in on the first few regularly scheduled calls but had found the doctor wearying. His voice was that of an older man and rich in timbre, but underneath ran a constant stream of self-pity. By the fourth or fifth repetition of “I’m a cardiologist, I was supposed to be in Aspen, I shouldn’t even be here!” Nowen decided she’d had enough and skipped the rest of the calls. Jamie always told her the important stuff, anyway.

  The murmur of Jamie’s voice receded into the background as Nowen looked out the window. Am I cold? Is that something bad? She replayed the conversation over in her head. I thought I was being logical. Maybe...Jamie was just venting? Did she need something from me? Nowen sighed and stared at the horizon. Humans are so confusing.

  The view from the window faced east, and she watched as lazy plumes of smoke rose from here and there in the city. Fires had raged through most of the first couple of days of this insanity. A heavy thunderstorm on the second night had quenched the fires and saved the majority of Ft. Collins, although the smoke trails spoke of smoldering embers waiting to spring to life.

  To the west the jagged edge of the Rocky Mountains split the high summer sky. To the southeast Denver still burned. The rain that had saved Ft. Collins had only brushed the edges of the bigger city, and towering pillars of black smoke wrapped around the tall buildings. She and Jamie had watched the dragonfly shapes of helicopters darting in and out of the inky fog for the first couple of days of the outbreak, but the choppers had disappeared around the same time that the airplanes had stopped fleeing the white-peaked airport.

&nb
sp; Nowen raised her hand and blocked Denver from view. Now the dark smoke seemed to rise up from her fingertips. There was a sudden blurring of her vision, and just before she blinked her eyes to clear them it looked as though her fingers were turning as black as the smudges marring the blue sky.

  Jamie was calling her, and she turned from the window to see the other woman standing in the doorway. The nurse looked even more tired than she had before, if that was possible, and again her eyes swam with tears.

  Jamie leaned against the doorframe, wearily brushing tendrils of blonde hair from her face. “That was Dr. Westrick. Adam’s dead.”

  Adam Lee, one of the second-floor survivors. His twin brother Albert had killed himself two days before.

  “How?”

  “Revs. Revs got him. He was making another water run to the bathroom and dropped a bucket. The noise drew the Revs and...” Jamie’s voice faltered. “Do you think he did that on purpose? To join his brother?”

  Nowen shrugged. “That’s not important, quite frankly. Where does that leave the rest of them?”

  Jamie narrowed her eyes at Nowen’s less-than-sympathetic tone. Damn. I must have said the wrong thing again. “Not in good shape. Last night they finally got everyone together in the delivery room, but the water is only gonna last another couple of days. The med room group had some food but in the rush to move those people to the delivery room the food bag was lost. So, that’s another problem.” Jamie was kneading the hem of her scrub top in her hands. “We have to get some of our supplies to them.” She gave Nowen a worried look, as if expecting resistance.

  “We don’t have that much ourselves.” Nowen said, and then caught the horrified look spreading across Jamie’s face. “But of course, we should help them. Do you know how we can get supplies down to the second floor?”

  “There’s always the stairwell-” As if in response, a faint moaning echoed down the hall. The slower Revs were as content to stand still as to move, but the fast ones seemed to be everywhere, flowing like liquid into every empty space. Jamie winced at the sound. “On second thought, no.”

  Nowen looked around the room they were in. “Jamie, do the delivery rooms have windows?”

  The other woman looked puzzled. “Some of them, yes. Why-ohhhh!” Her eyes widened as she caught on.

  Chapter Seven

  Then

  Jamie’s pencil scratched across a manila folder that had once held a patient’s records. She talked as she drew, sketching a rough outline of the hospital. “Ok, so, Exeter General is laid out like a capital L. The front of the hospital faces south, and the back faces north, and the wings run east and west, like so.” She blew a strand of limp hair from her face. “The hospital is four stories tall, with a kind of sub-basement for the morgue and the body pick-up, mechanical systems, etc. Oh, and the emergency generators, and thank God those are still going.”

  Jamie chewed on her lower lip for a moment, then continued drawing. “The floors are stacked in tiers, like one of those Mexican pyramid thingies. Going out the front is a no-go. Those damn Revs just collect there. But, the north side is a little better. I think. There’s just the staff parking lot, some small metal buildings for, I don’t know, electrical systems or whatever, and then there’s this narrow alleyway with a fence. That alley opens onto this street, Corsica, which, if you follow it far enough, turns into Highway 287 North, and then if you follow that long enough, leads into Wyoming.” She raised her head and looked off into the distance. “You know, I think north is the way to go. North, or maybe west. Less people so less Revs, and I wonder if the cold of the mountains wouldn’t just stop those damn things.”

  Nowen had been studying the rough map as Jamie drew. Now she studied Jamie from the corner of her eye. The successful delivery of a large part of their stores to the second floor yesterday, via two open windows, knotted bed sheets, and a mop bucket, had caused a sea change in the young woman’s attitude and outlook. It seemed that just doing something, anything, was enough to draw her out of the despair that had threatened to consume her. There had been some discussion of trying to get the other survivors up to the fourth floor, but the pregnant woman couldn’t make the trip, the elderly couple wouldn’t even think about climbing up a rope made of bed-sheets, and the nurses wouldn’t leave their charges alone. Nowen had a feeling that the doctor would have loved to have climbed up the makeshift ladder but his self-image wouldn’t let him.

  Nowen tapped the counter to get Jamie’s attention. “And where am I going?”

  Jamie turned back to the map. She pointed at a spot just past where Corsica and the alley met. “Here. There’s a gas station, and they have a lot of food - I mean, it’s gonna be junk food, but it’s food. And water, sports drinks, etc.” She turned to Nowen, concern evident on her face. “I wish you weren’t going to do this.”

  Nowen looked away from the turbulent emotions in Jamie’s eyes “We don’t have any choice.”

  Jamie sighed loudly. “I know we don’t have any choice!” Her tone was acerbic. “I can still wish! I can still wish that all of this never happened, and I can still wish that the Navy would come marching in to save us.”

  “We’re pretty far inland for the Navy.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was a joke.” At Nowen’s blank look the young nurse rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Come on, we’re wasting daylight.”

  Half an hour later Nowen was looking out a window of the western-most hospital room. Below them the hospital dropped away, each floor wider and longer than the one before it. The drop to the next tier was about twelve feet, but a ledge ran horizontally along the wall right below the windows, effectively cutting the distance between drops in half. Fifty feet down the staff cars glinted in the sun. Behind the hospital a large grassy swath stretched out hundreds of yards. It was fenced in on all sides by limp chicken wire.

  Jamie joined her. She gestured at the open ground. “I heard the hospital wanted to build on that space, but the old bastard who owns it wouldn’t sell.”

  Nowen looked around, planning her route. This area looked to be free of Revs. There were a handful of bodies lying between the parked cars, but they weren’t moving. Likewise, the narrow alley and the grassland were empty. Looking to the right she could make out the figures of shambling Revs roaming through the street. Nothing else moved.

  The wind shifted and suddenly the smell of the decaying bodies down below filled the room. Jamie gasped and drew back in, her hand clamped over her nose. “Oh my God.” she moaned and ran from the room. Nowen could hear the nurse vomiting from further down the hall. She closed her eyes and lifted her head to the wind. She inhaled deeply, filtering the smells as they came to her, reeking of bodies baking in the sun and rotting in the shade, of dead people behind locked doors and in locked cars dissolving into sacks of fluids and corruption. She could almost read the story of each death in the scents that spoke of gunpowder and disease and blood spilled, and she leaned forward into the wind, drinking it in.

  Jamie’s footsteps snapped Nowen back into herself. Her hands ached. She looked down to see that she had made fists, clenching so tightly that her knuckles were white. She opened her hands and wondered at the half-moon marks from her fingernails. The capricious wind currents shifted again and the smells lightened and faded.

  Jamie rejoined her at the window, face pale and sweaty. She offered Nowen a wan smile. “Sorry.”

  Nowen shrugged her shoulders and looked back out the window. At the back of her mind a continuous note played over and over, three little words that she was able to ignore most of the time. They were trying to take over now, buoyed by her reaction to the scent of death. Who am I? Who am I? Who amIWhoamIwhoamiwhoamiwhoamiwho- She shoved the thoughts away, shutting a mental door on them and the faint feeling that she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer anymore.

  Beside her Jamie was talking and pointing, and Nowen turned her attention to the other woman.

  “-and there’s the store, the one with the
blue roof, see, and you only have to get down the alley and across Corsica and there you are. Wow, sounds almost simple, huh?”

  Nowen marked the location in her mind. It did sound simple, if you didn’t take into consideration the mass of cars in the street and the Revs, both of which presented obstacles.

  “Getting down to the street should be the easiest part of the whole thing.” Jamie continued animatedly. “Out the window, onto the ledge, down to the next tier, and so forth. A couple of minutes and you’re in the parking lot.” She frowned and shook her head. “I feel like a general sending soldiers to their death. I’ll go.”

  Nowen laid a hand on the nurse’s thin shoulder. “We’ve discussed this. I’m taller, I can run faster, and I can lift more weight than you.” Boredom brought on by interminable card games and browsing the baby name book had led to an impromptu track and field meet this morning. “And besides, you have medical training. You can help Dr. Useless if that pregnant woman goes into labor.”

  “Don’t call him that.” The reply was quick and sharp.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No you’re not.” Jamie turned away from the window, the set of her shoulders telling Nowen that she was miffed. “Come on, let’s do this.”

  Twenty minutes later Nowen was standing in the parking lot. Other than a couple of scrapes on her palms the journey down from the fourth floor had been as easy as Jamie had said. Before starting down Nowen had changed back into the jeans and loose shirt from that first day. Now she dusted her hands on the jeans and looked up at Jamie.

  A blue nylon backpack flew in an arc from the open window. Nowen caught it in one hand and looked back up in time to see another backpack, this one pink with glittery stars, come tumbling her way. She snatched it from the air and stuffed it into the first one, then pulled the blue one on, wriggling her shoulders to adjust the fit. A noise from above drew her attention upwards. Jamie was leaning far out the window.