A slight breeze was coming through from the dark room behind the broken door. That tipped the balance. After flipping the bird to the raging little monsters, I opened the door on the left, hoping that would confuse our pursuers if they made it this far, and pushed the wheelchair through.
Again, I felt the breeze. Air was coming in from outside. We walked about ten minutes in total darkness. A couple of times we came to a dead end and had to retrace our steps. Prit was starting to worry me. He was now lethargic and indifferent to everything. At one point we passed a couple of steel fire doors that shook violently. A horde of undead was crowded on the other side, uselessly beating against the doors. Someone had nailed some wedges into the door frame to keep the doors from opening. Not even that aroused the slightest interest in the Ukrainian. He was struck dumb.
We rounded a couple more corners and reached an area with some light. The breeze was stronger, and we could hear the rain. My mood lifted. We had to be close. Damn close.
When I opened one last swinging door, I couldn’t contain myself—I shouted for joy. A huge lobby stretched out before us in the shadows, lit up by lightning we could see through a long glass wall. The room overlooked a huge park and weed-covered gardens, silent in the downpour. The lobby was deserted. A pole with a tattered, scorched Spanish flag stood guard next to an identical pole lying on the floor. I didn’t see a single creature in the rain, human or otherwise. I smiled with relief. We’d made it. We were saved.
The lobby floor was littered with papers, medical files, and flyers in every color. On one end was a closed café, waiting for employees who’d never open it up again for medical staff that no longer existed. At the other end was an empty reception desk crowded with phones. Some of the headsets were off the hook, hanging by their cords, mute and motionless.
In the middle of the lobby stood a newsstand, like an abandoned monolith. Stacked against it were magazines and newspapers still in bundles. Out of curiosity I picked up a copy of each publication. They were dated four months ago. Their front covers announced the creation of Safe Havens and asked the public’s cooperation in addressing “this crisis of epidemic proportion whose origin is still unknown.” Safe Havens. Yeah, right. And unknown origins. What a load of shit!
I’ve always been an avid reader of the press, so out of habit I began to flip through the pages. The international section was down to the bare minimum; the sports and business sections didn’t exist. Some newspapers had no more than thirteen or fourteen pages, all devoted to the pandemic. The articles must’ve been written by a skeleton team of journalists, the ones who dared to keep going to work.
I smiled at the foolish ideas and nonsense I read. The public was blind right up to the last minute. Arrogant, foolish sons of bitches.
I looked up to discover that Prit was not in his chair. Dropping the newspapers, with my soul on tenterhooks, I scanned the lobby and spotted the small figure of the Ukrainian, silhouetted against a wall by lightning. He was absorbed in something on that wall. When I figured out what had caught his attention, I felt my stomach shrink.
In a bright flash of lightning, I got a good look at that wall. It was covered with hundreds of messages and photos that had one thing in common. They were all notices of missing persons. Family or friends had stuck them up there, hoping for news of their loved ones. Photos of smiling people gazed down at me. Heartbreaking notes. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Little Johnny, please call this number right away. Mr. So-and-So disappeared three days ago. Little Susie and her entire school bus vanished a day and a half ago. If anyone has seen our child, please contact us at this number. “Missing” was written in bold letters with a red marker below the picture of an older woman sitting at a table decorated for Christmas. The photograph of an entire family smiling in a garden, in summer, with “disappeared” written over it with a cell phone number. “Javier Piñon, we’re at your parents’ house. Meet us there.” “Luisa Sabajanes, if you see this note stay where you are. I’ll come by every day till I find you. I love you.” “If anyone has seen this man, please contact this number.” And on and on.
It was a sickening sight. I took a couple of steps back, stunned. Of course. A hospital was the logical place to look for a missing person. Thousands of missing people, in fact. You got a feel for the magnitude of this chaos. Fuck. It was chilling. I could feel pain and anguish oozing out of that wall. I was staring at pictures of thousands of people who were dead. Or worse.
I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and looked into Prit’s infinitely sad eyes. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get out of this place right now, or by God, I’ll go crazy. Doctor my wounds someplace else, anywhere, just not here. We gotta go. This place is bad, very bad. Come on. Please.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. The Ukrainian wasn’t the only one on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I wanted out of that macabre place, too.
I went to the door, with Prit leaning on my arm, limping, and a rather cowardly Lucullus tangled around my legs. As we approached the door, an alarm went off in my head. Something wasn’t right. What was wrong with this picture? I couldn’t figure out what until we were standing right in front of the door.
Of course. Those ultramodern glass doors slid open on rails. There must be a sensor nearby. With no electricity, the doors remained obstinately closed.
Yet there we stood, Prit and I, like fools, expecting the doors to open by magic. When it dawned on us that those doors wouldn’t open by themselves, we calmly thought through the problem. Pritchenko said that kind of door had an emergency backup system. There should be a lever located on the door frame that could be activated manually in case of a power outage.
Nervously I felt around the edge of the doors, until my fingers found a recessed compartment on the floor, next to the door. I pulled off the cover and froze. All I found was the symbol for emergency and a diagram explaining how to use the lever. That was it. That and bare wires. Someone had ripped off the lever.
Fearing the worst, I rushed to the other two doors, but those levers were ripped off too. Someone had turned that sector of the hospital into a fortress and wanted to make sure those doors couldn’t be opened, even by accident.
I felt Prit’s eyes boring into me. I had a look of shock on my face. I picked up a heavy red fire extinguisher. I reared back and threw it as hard as I could against the glass. A loud Bam! echoed through the lobby, sending a million more echoes throughout the building, but the glass held fast. Only a slight scratch marked the spot I’d hit with the fire extinguisher.
Seeing red, I threw the container against the glass again and got the same result. Choked up, unable to swallow, I cocked the pistol and, holding it with both hands, shot into the glass. The weapon kicked savagely and almost jumped out of my hand. A tiny hole opened two feet above where I’d aimed. I fired again. And again.
Prit rested his hand on my arm, forcing the barrel down. “It’s useless. That’s security glass, nearly three inches thick. It wouldn’t break if you ran a truck into it.”
I punched the glass, enraged. So close, yet so far. We were just a few inches from getting out of there. We could see the way out…and we were still trapped. Damn it to hell!
Calm down, I told myself, think for a moment. On the way there, we’d felt a breeze, right? That gust of air came in somewhere. I just had to find where.
I dashed across the lobby and stood in the middle of the room, on top of the Galician Health Service shield engraved in the floor. I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms, trying to detect any puff of air. A slight breeze ruffled my hair. I opened my eyes. It was coming from the left, behind the reception desk.
I hooked my arm through Prit’s and dragged him over to that point. The Ukrainian seemed to draw strength out of weakness and despair. He contemptuously refused to use the wheelchair anymore. “If we’re fucked,” he said very seriously, looking into my eyes, “I want to die like a man, standing up, not sitting in a fucking chair.”
D
espite his brave words, I noticed that the glow in the Ukrainian’s eyes had faded. Something had broken inside him when we walked through that room with all the children’s bodies. Seeing that boy’s body lying in the hallway had been the last straw. Under so much emotional pressure for months, he’d snapped. His nerves were shot. That tough soldier who’d survived the slaughter at the Safe Haven, the cold-blooded guy who slowly hacked off a woman’s neck without blinking, was falling apart. I’m sure any psychiatrist would’ve diagnosed PTSD. What good would that diagnosis do now?
There was a narrow corridor behind the front desk. Large metal cabinets were lined up silently against the walls, half-hidden in the shadows. Internet servers, I concluded, when I noticed the huge bundle of wires that ran along the baseboard.
The corridor led to a square room. At the back of the room was a big red door with EMERGENCY EXIT painted on it. Thick chains crisscrossed the two push bars. I rattled the door but couldn’t open it with my bare hands. I’d need an acetylene torch (before all this happened, I wouldn’t have even known what that was). Since I didn’t have one in my backpack, we were screwed.
A staircase disappeared into the shadows to the floor above. The flashlight’s beam reached the next landing, but no farther. I could only speculate where those stairs went, but that’s definitely where the breeze was coming from.
Cautiously, we started up the steps. Prit carried the AK-47 across his chest, strapped to his belt. I held the gun with one hand and the flashlight with the other. Lucullus skittered along, half-strangled by the cord tied to my wrist, glued to my ankles.
We had to climb three more sets of stairs before we reached the next floor. Before us was a cavernous, gloomy room. A row of overturned beds formed a bunker. Someone had tried to mount a defense there, but it mustn’t have worked. The left half of the row was completely pushed to one side.
A strange, watery slurping sound coming from behind one of the overturned beds put us on alert. We approached quietly, Prit on one side and me on the other, trying not to make any noise. I tied Lucullus to the leg of a chair so I had both arms free. Then I swapped the pistol for the speargun. We’d made so much noise on the ground floor, I didn’t want to make any more noise here.
Prit was already alongside the bed, waiting for me, looking disconcerted. He nodded. For so long, he’d seemed to be in another world. Now he was ready.
I took a deep breath and shone the light on the other side of the bed. Crouched on the floor, an orderly or a nurse (I couldn’t tell which, but it was wearing a hospital uniform) was bent over something I couldn’t see. I focused the flashlight on the thing’s head. When he noticed the light, he whipped around, and I saw two things. First, his face was covered with burst veins, his skin was a dead, yellow color, and fresh blood trickled down his chin. Second, a huge black rat lay on the floor, ripped open, its guts spilling out. The monster glared at me with bloodshot eyes. He’d been so engaged in his prey, we’d taken him by surprise.
I squeezed the trigger about eight inches from his forehead. The spear pierced his skull cleanly, splashing putrid blood all over my face. Sick to my stomach, I set the flashlight and the unloaded speargun on a bed and frantically began to wipe myself off with the sheet.
I was so absorbed in what I was doing, I didn’t see the second undead guy rush me from behind. He was a young guy with a horrible haircut that reminded me of an ashtray. He wore lots of gold chains around his neck like a Latin Kings gang member.
A weak cry from Prit, who watched the scene, glassy-eyed, warned me, but it was too late. Ashtray Hair grabbed me by the armpit as I turned around and sank his teeth into my shoulder. His bite couldn’t penetrate the thick neoprene, but I got a close look at those teeth. I needed to keep him from scratching me with his bloody hands.
I held tight to the undead’s waist and tried to push away from him, but the beast was very strong. We spun around the room, colliding into everything in our path. I screamed for help, but Prit was curled up on the floor, moaning, rocking back and forth.
The undead guy and I struggled furiously, linked together. We looked like a couple dancing cheek to cheek, all the while trying to rip each other’s throats out. I was in trouble. If I let go to grab the pistol hanging from my waist, that monster would overpower me and finish me off. If I didn’t, sooner or later he’d succeed in biting me, and that would be the end of me.
I don’t know when we bumped into the flashlight, but it smashed to bits on the floor and plunged us into total darkness. That’s when the situation became really desperate. We were now wrestling in silence. The beast kept trying to bite me through my wetsuit. I tried to wrap one arm around his hands, grab his neck, and immobilize his head with the other hand.
We stumbled against something hard and lost our balance. I teetered around like a drunk, desperately waving my leg around to regain my balance, but inertia was unstoppable. I realized we were falling, still cheek to cheek. A sharp edge drove into my bruised side. I screamed in pain, but that was all I had time for. Our mortal dance had brought us to the edge of the staircase, and we tumbled down those stairs at top speed.
For several minutes, I didn’t know what happened. I don’t even know how much time elapsed. I just know I woke up in a haze. Pain spread over every inch of my body. I had a salty taste in my mouth. Blood. I gingerly touched my lips and found I’d bitten my tongue. I tried to sit up, but a stabbing pain on my bruised side coursed through me like an electric shock. The pain was bad before, but now I was on fire.
Gradually my mind cleared. I remembered Ashtray Hair. Where the hell was that bastard? I groped around in the holster strapped to my leg and pulled out the Bic lighter I’d found in the nurse’s purse. That lighter felt like it was running low on fluid. When I clicked it, a faint blue flame weakly lit the scene. The creature was lying on the landing, his head smashed against the wall. At my feet lay his body in the throes of strange seizures. Between bursts of pain, I managed to sit up so I could take a look.
That son of a bitch had gotten the worst of it in the fall. I surmised his spine was broken, since he couldn’t move his arms or legs. The bastard jerked his head from side to side, his teeth snapping like a trap. He looked at me with hatred in his dead eyes. Fuck you, you dumbshit, I thought. You’re no threat to me now.
I kicked him hard and sent him rolling down the next flight of stairs, hoping his head would split open on a sharp corner. Sore and exhausted, I stood up. My right ankle was swollen to a size that didn’t bode well. Every time I breathed, I felt a knife in my side. My mouth was bleeding, and I had a colossal headache. I was a mess.
I hobbled up the stairs, leaning on the railing to steady myself. The lighter was burning my hand, and the blue flame was fading. My backpack lay on the ground, right where I’d left it to switch the pistol for the speargun. I dug down in it and found the spare flashlight.
I swept the beam across the cavernous room. It looked like a tornado had hit it. Prit was curled up right where I’d left him, unscathed. Suddenly, my heart sank. The chair I’d tied my cat to was upside down. Lucullus had disappeared.
I shook Prit’s trembling body. The Ukrainian shrugged me off, muttering gibberish in Russian. He couldn’t take the stress any longer. I draped one of his arms around my shoulders and helped him stand up. My mind was racing. I couldn’t leave without Lucullus, of course, but finding the cat with Prit in tow would be really difficult. I had to find a safe place to leave him while I looked for my cat. Then I’d come back for him, and we’d get the hell out of that hospital.
I spotted a huge, heavy, carved wooden door at one end of the room. Its intricate engravings and huge brass handles looked like something from a Rococo mansion, not a supermodern hospital that was all angles and straight lines.
Intrigued, I nudged the door carefully with my foot. It was locked, but a heavy old key dangled from the keyhole. After a couple of noisy turns, the lock opened and the door swung open wide.
Soft light filtered through tall, narro
w windows, covering the floor with green, blue, and red dots. At one end was a small nave with a double row of wooden benches on each side and an altar on a raised platform. Above that was a large wooden cross, hanging on thick steel cables. We were in the hospital chapel. It was too ironic.
I let Prit collapse on to one of the pews. I was exhausted, so I rested for a second, then prowled around the chapel, peering into every dark corner, making sure we didn’t have any company. I braced myself and then kicked open a confessional. The disgusting image of an undead priest leaping out terrified me. But I breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing in it or the adjoining sacristy.
Out of a little closet built into the wall, I grabbed a couple of stoles worn to celebrate mass. I draped them over Prit, who’d fallen into a deep, restless sleep. Bundled up in those warm robes, the Ukrainian made a strange picture. I shook him by the shoulders. I needed twenty seconds of his attention. He stretched, a lost, glazed look in his eyes. A tremor shook his left hand uncontrollably.
“Prit, I need you to listen for a minute. I have to leave you alone for a while. Lucullus has disappeared, and I have to find him. Understand?”
The Ukrainian nodded without saying a word. He was almost catatonic. I tucked the stoles around him and wiped his forehead. I unclipped the canteen, which had gotten dented up in my fall, gave him a sip, and set it beside him.
I had to sit there for a good twenty minutes till my legs stopped shaking. The twenty minutes turned into almost an hour. Every time I thought about going back out the door, an uncontrollable panic screwed my feet to the floor with the force of a hydraulic drill. I knew I had to control that fear. I was a goner if I let panic get the best of me. And Prit along with me.
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End az-1 Page 27
