Lucia stood a few steps behind me, watching me with a puzzled expression. She just had to take one look at him to wonder how on earth I got there, dragging along an invalid—a short guy with a big mustache, one arm in a blood-soaked sling and a thousand small cuts on his face, who seemed to be on a different planet.
I felt her questioning gaze on my back. I got really mad. How the hell could I explain everything Prit had been through? How did I explain the horrors he’d braved to reach that lousy abandoned room?
Lucia didn’t ask any questions. She just spoke in a soft voice as she slipped an arm under Prit and helped him sit up. I was surprised how tenderly she treated him. She looked like a little girl nursing a baby duck with a broken wing.
We headed slowly back down to the metal door in the basement. Clearly Prit was in no condition to leave. Oh sure, I could go it alone (that is, Lucullus and I could). We’d probably make it, but I ruled out that option.
I couldn’t leave Prit behind. Not that girl either. And just thinking about going back out there alone made my stomach churn. No, for better or worse I’d stay with them. If I could endure all those ordeals, I could deal with whatever lay ahead.
When we reached the metal door with no lock, Lucia knocked a few times (two quick, three spaced apart, and finally a loud kick) and waited. After a few seconds, someone turned the lock from inside, and the door opened. Light streamed out through the open door, blinding us for a second.
Light.
Electricity. Somehow they had electricity.
I took a couple of steps toward the door. I smelled something really delicious cooking. I glanced back at the gloomy, damp tunnel and hesitated. I’d had bad experiences with other survivors. I didn’t know who or what I’d find on the other side of that door. Under the circumstances, I decided it was worth finding out. Bottom line, I had no choice. Not hesitating any longer, I stepped through the doorway. The heavy metal door closed behind us with a thud, leaving the hallway dark again.
Whatever came next, we were part of it.
ENTRY 84
Mid-July, 3:40 p.m.
I’ve spent four magical months recovering my sanity and putting some distance between me and the cornered animal I was becoming. Those months helped me remember I’m a human being, not just prey fighting to survive.
I’ve recovered physically, too, thanks to the rest, good food, and attentive care of my new friends. I’m back to the shape I was in before all hell broke loose. But not everything has healed. Part of me has grown hard and bitter, like a war veteran. My values and my idea of what’s important have changed. That shouldn’t be a surprise. The whole fucking world has changed.
Now we’re a group of four, not counting Lucullus. Prit and I have joined forces with Lucia and Sister Cecilia. I couldn’t believe my eyes. A fucking nun in the middle of this madness. As I write this, they’re working away at the stove, their backs to me. It’s great to have a hot meal every day.
Our refuge is fantastic. Behind the metal door and up a short flight of stairs is a subbasement that’s completely closed off from the rest of the hospital. This was the hospital’s huge kitchen, which turned out thousands of meals for staff and patients daily.
There are only three ways to gain access to the place: the freight elevator that carried supplies to the top floor, the stairs that connect to the rest of the hospital, and the emergency staircase we used to get in. The elevator was disabled by a piece of metal that held the doors open. The main staircase is cut off from the next floor by thick doors that are chained shut. The only possible way into the basement is down the emergency stairs. A single entrance and exit, protected by a fire door. Completely safe and impossible to get through.
But that’s not the best part. To our relief, the hospital’s emergency generators are still running, supplying power to this sector. The giant freezers in the kitchen, filled with enough food to feed an army, are still operating. Since there’re only four of us (and a cat who eats enough for two), I calculate we have enough frozen food for two years.
The hospital has its own water supply. Years ago, when they were digging the building’s foundations, they discovered a huge aquifer. So water’s not a problem.
All we have to worry about is the generators failing or running out of fuel. We don’t know exactly where they’re located or where the control panel is. We ration energy as much as we can, but we know that the generators’ reserves of diesel fuel aren’t infinite. Sooner or later we’ll have to face that situation.
Sister Cecilia Iglesias is an exceptional human being. She’s a small woman in her fifties, bubbly and plump with an intelligent twinkle in her eyes, from a remote village in Avila, like Spain’s patron saint, Saint Teresa. For the last fifteen years, she’d worked in a hospital run by her order a hundred or so miles from Nairobi, Kenya. She’d come to Vigo to give lectures at several religious schools but got trapped by the turmoil of the pandemic at the airport. At first she was housed in a crowded hotel in town, waiting for things to blow over. When it was clear that the situation was out of control, this energetic woman refused to be a passive refugee.
She learned that Meixoeiro Hospital was still caring for hundreds of people, but had an acute shortage of medical personnel. Most had fled or were dead. She didn’t hesitate to show up at its door, offering her services as a nurse. She spent the final weeks of civilization in a whirlwind of exhausting work that kept her from learning news of the outside world. While I was comfortably holed up in my house, Sister Cecilia was tending to a constant, heart-wrenching stream of wounded refugees.
Meixoeiro Hospital was the only medical center that was operational until almost the end. That’s why so many ambulances and cars kept making their way to its door to drop off dozens and dozens of injured people.
Sister Cecilia told me that a couple of army doctors sorted through the wounded at the entrance of to the ER. Those who had bites or scratches or had had some contact with the infected creatures were escorted by a platoon of soldiers to another “specialized medical center” nearby.
I didn’t have the heart to tell that pious woman that that “specialized” center never existed. The overwhelmed military must have applied their own brand of “final solution” to the injured for whom there was no hope. In some field nearby, there’re probably hundreds of dead with a bullet in their head, slowly rotting in a mass grave. That’s how terrible the situation had gotten.
Not counting those unfortunate people, there were still hundreds of sick and wounded that the overloaded hospital staff struggled to administer to. Traffic accidents, people injured in rioting and looting, stroke victims, patients with appendicitis…the whole spectrum of illnesses and accidents poured in. Meixoeiro Hospital reached crisis mode as the situation outside unraveled.
One day, the order came to evacuate everyone to the Vigo Safe Haven. Authorities could no longer secure the perimeter. Out of all the ambulances that responded to emergency calls, only half returned. The rest were mysteriously swallowed up.
A BRILAT armored unit appeared one morning to organize the evacuation convoy. Hundreds of sick and wounded were crammed on to the open beds of army trucks and into ambulances, taxis, private cars—anything with four wheels—along with tons of drugs and most of the medical staff. They had to leave behind about a hundred patients who were too sick to be moved. A small group of volunteers, Sister Cecilia among them, chose to stay to care for those poor doomed people so they didn’t have to suffer a slow, painful death alone. Maybe it would’ve been better if they had.
The group included three doctors and five nurses, counting Sister Cecilia. A small conglomeration of soldiers and policemen were stationed there as protection. Their mission was to hunker down in the hospital and wait for a larger rescue team that would come “at a later date.” Obviously, the rescue team never came.
While the medical team struggled to keep their critically ill patients alive, the soldiers systematically fortified the entrances. That accounts for the locked d
oors we encountered. The basement we’re in was christened “Numantia” by a sergeant with a macabre sense of humor, a place to reenact the Spaniards’ famous resistance to a Roman siege in the second century. If the defenses fell, everyone was to take refuge in this sector. The generators were set on automatic. They cut the power to the entire building except the kitchens. Once they’d done that, all they could do was wait.
That was when Lucia showed up. She’s a baby, just seventeen years old (“almost eighteen,” she never tires of saying), but she has a sexy, grown-up body. She lived with her parents in Bayona, a small tourist town about twelve miles from Vigo. When the order came to evacuate their town to a number of Safe Havens, the authorities attempted to carry it out in an orderly fashion. Somewhere they found a fleet of buses to move the people. While thousands of people waited at an inn on a small peninsula, buses tirelessly made the short trip over and over between Bayona and the Safe Havens.
In all the confusion, Lucia got on one bus and her parents got on another. Trusting she would easily find them at the Safe Haven, she made the trip without protest, overwhelmed by the situation like everyone else. However, the bus Lucia’s parents were on never reached its destination. Along the way, it mysteriously disappeared. Everyone feared the worst. Back then, attacks on the Safe Haven were getting worse as the undead swarmed everywhere.
Lucia nearly went crazy with despair. Alone, not knowing her parents’ fate, she was enveloped by the quagmire at the Safe Haven, crammed into a frozen-food warehouse along with three hundred other people. She decided to find her family. She reasoned that if they weren’t at the Safe Haven, the only other place they could be was Meixoeiro Hospital. So as rations dwindled and they recruited volunteers for reconnaissance groups, she was one of the first to sign up.
They issued her a camouflage jacket several sizes too big and heavy combat boots, but no weapons. There weren’t enough to go around, ammunition was getting scarce, and her frail appearance didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the officer in charge. So she served as a porter. When the team reached its objective, one group secured the perimeter while another group raided the place. The porters had to drag out many pounds of nonperishable food and any other useful items they came across.
Lucia spent three grueling weeks cheating death on every outing. She saw half a dozen members of her team die. She was nearly caught once by an undead crouched down in a warehouse. But she still went out, day after day, waiting for her chance.
Finally, she got that chance. When she calculated that that day’s objective was relatively close to Meixoeiro Hospital, she slipped away from the group and started walking down the road toward the hospital. That was the most frightening forty-eight hours of her life. At night she hid anywhere that was high and inaccessible. At first light she started out again, dodging the undead, forced to spend long stretches of time in hiding, waiting for her predators to move on.
When she finally reached the hospital, the soldiers were dumbfounded. For weeks they hadn’t seen a single soul in the area, apart from the throngs of undead that wandered their way. The sight of that young girl, dressed like a soldier, walking up in search of her parents was disconcerting.
That brave girl was devastated to learn the hospital had no record of her parents. She realized she was completely alone. She didn’t know what to do next.
But the worst was yet to come. The presence of a pretty young girl among a group of isolated, brutalized young men created sexual tension. More and more fights broke out among those soldiers, whose nerves were on edge. One night, one of the soldiers got drunk off his ass and tried to rape her. Fortunately, one of the doctors stopped the guy just in time with a well-aimed blow to the head, but the situation was out of control.
The lieutenant in charge ordered Lucia and Sister Cecilia to remain in Numantia. They weren’t to leave for any reason. Outraged protests from the sister and Lucia did no good. The lieutenant was old school. He didn’t want women fraternizing with the men under his command. End of story. For a couple of weeks, they worked as cooks and helped out the doctors on the upper floors. Meanwhile patients died one by one of their grave illnesses, since the doctors lacked specialized drugs and couldn’t perform any kind of surgery. All the defensive team could do was wait.
But not for long. A couple of nights later, they lost radio contact with the Safe Haven. Hundreds of undead began to gather around the hospital. Instead of trying to fly under the radar, the lieutenant, an empty-headed, power-hungry idiot, ordered the soldiers to fire at will. The clackety-clack of automatic weapons drew an even larger crowd of those creatures like a magnet.
In the end, the undead managed to get in. Neither Sister Cecilia nor Lucia could explain how. They were entrenched in the basement as the drama unfolded above their heads. All they knew was that one of the soldiers, a very young, scared boy with a strong Andalusian accent, stuck his head in to Numantia and warned them to lock the door from inside.
For a couple of hours they heard shooting outside, explosions around the hospital complex, and then a bomb. The shooting soon ringed the interior corridors of the hospital. Then it stopped altogether. For two hours, the nun and the girl waited for someone to come tell them the fighting was over. No one ever showed up.
Steeling herself, Lucia took a risk and left Numantia to find out what had happened to the soldiers. She saw what Pritchenko and I found months later. Empty corridors, evidence of fighting everywhere, and not a single living being.
Since then, the two women have lived in that basement, protected from the outside. They had light, water, and food, and were safe from the undead. What they didn’t have was a clear idea of what the devil to do next. They knew the odds were not in their favor on the outside. On their own, they wouldn’t get very far. They concluded that their best option was to wait for the rescue party.
But all that showed up were two tired, injured, hungry, disoriented survivors. And a cat. Our arrival and the news from outside brought a mixture of horror and hope—horror at discovering there was nothing left of the civilization they knew; hope that, because of us, there was finally a solution to this complex situation.
Prit is a whole lot better. The minute we walked through the door, Sister Cecilia took him under her wing like a mother hen shelters her chick. Not only did she mend his shattered left hand with remarkable skill (although there was nothing she could do about his missing fingers), she also drew the Ukrainian out of the debilitating depression he’d sunk into. She diagnosed both of us as being shell shocked. It’s curable. Normally, a couple of weeks in a safe, quiet, stress-free environment alleviates it, but sometimes the sufferer never recovers.
Fortunately, Prit wasn’t one of those cases. His zest for life is too strong for a little thing like a nervous breakdown to get the best of him. I’ve seen his outlook slowly grow more positive. I’m sure the long talks he’s had with Sister Cecilia well into the night have contributed to his recovery. The nun and the Ukrainian have forged a close friendship based on trust.
Like many Slavs, Prit’s a devout Christian. Although Sister Cecilia’s Catholic and he’s Orthodox, her presence has comforted him deeply. During those long talks, he must have tried to make sense of this hell. Why did he lose his wife and child? Why did God unleash this catastrophe? I don’t know if he found any answers, but his search has been a balm for his wounded soul. Something inside his heart is broken forever, that’s for sure. Now at least he’s learning to live with the pain.
For my part, I prefer not to ponder it. Every minute of the day, I wonder what happened to my family. Damn, I never thought I could miss anyone in such an intense, hopeless way. It’s highly likely they’re mutants, I know, but I refuse to accept it.
I’ve had the same nightmare for weeks. I’m walking down a dark corridor. I can hear the sea splashing against one wall, but it doesn’t smell like the sea. It smells like something rotting. The corridor is littered with trash and shell casings. The walls are stained with something that looks lik
e shit, but I know it’s dried blood. Suddenly, my sister and my parents come out of a door. They’ve been turned into those things. They walk toward me with blind eyes, after my blood. I’m armed in my dream, but I can’t raise my gun, and then…then I wake up, deeply upset, with an urge to throw up.
Undoubtedly, those who have changed into those creatures are in hell, but we survivors are living pretty close to that hell.
ENTRY 85
Mid-September, 9:45 a.m.
Yesterday afternoon, Prit and I were standing in the elevator shaft, discussing the fastest way to reach the SUV. We agreed we should drive it around to our exit in case we needed it in an emergency. Moving it from time to time it would also keep it in running condition. Winter was coming, and I was afraid the cold weather would damage the starter.
In the middle of our conversation, the Ukrainian straightened up suddenly, sniffing the air nervously like a retriever, with an intensely focused look on his face.
“Smell that?” he asked.
“Smell what?” I said. After nine months surrounded by trash and slowly rotting corpses, my sense of smell wasn’t as keen as it used to be.
“Fire,” Prit said as he closed his eyes and sniffed the air eagerly. His eyes flew open, boring into me.
“Fire? A fire? Here in the hospital?”
“Not in the hospital. A fire out there! In the forest! I’m sure of this.” Prit’s voice caught in his throat.
I trusted my pilot friend. After years of fighting wildfires, he could detect the faintest hint of a fire, fires the average person wouldn’t notice. I didn’t smell anything, but if the Ukrainian said he smelled smoke, that was the end of the discussion. The question was how it would affect us.
“It’s blowing in on the wind. Come here,” the Ukrainian continued.
“We should go take a look.”
“Yes.”
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