Z

by Michael Thomas Ford

  “You can’t think about it,” Josh told him, although he knew this was impossible. How could they not think about it, especially now that they knew how the zombies had been made? But they had to try. Josh reminded himself that nobody would want to live that way, and that if he and his friends wanted to get out of there, they had to do what they had to do.

  “Here’s our starting point,” Scrawl said as they reached the end of the corridor. “Josh, you and Charlie go right. Firecracker and I will go left. We’ll meet at the stairs. Remember, we’ve got eleven to go.”

  They split up. Josh and Charlie walked side by side as they began their search. The fourth floor seemed to be nothing but patient rooms. Every door they passed opened into a room very much like the first one, with two beds and one small window covered by thick bars.

  “Where would a z even hide in one of these?” Charlie asked when they were halfway down the hall and hadn’t found anything.

  “Could be a small one,” Josh reminded her. “A kid.”

  Charlie looked at him. “Even Clatter wouldn’t do that,” she said. “Would he?”

  “I don’t know,” Josh answered. “Until a few hours ago I wouldn’t have believed any of this.”

  They reached the end of the first hallway without finding anything, and the second hallway seemed to be a mirror image of the first. By the time they’d checked the fourth room on that side, Josh was getting anxious. Where were all the meatbags? He looked at his watch. Ten minutes had passed. They had five left.

  “This is like one of those nightmares where you’re trying to get out of a place and keep coming back to the same door,” Charlie remarked as they approached the next room.

  The next second Josh was on the floor and a horribly disfigured face was hovering over his. He recognized it as the woman whose cell he’d looked into in the lab. She gnashed her teeth, flecking him with spit. He noticed that most of her tongue had been chewed off, leaving her with a bloody stump that twitched from side to side as she tried to talk.

  Charlie grabbed the woman by the collar and pulled her back. With a ripping sound the woman’s dress tore, and Charlie slipped sideways. Josh could smell the woman’s breath as she bent closer and closer. It was worse than the smell in the sewers, reeking of blood and decay.

  Josh heard footsteps, and suddenly the woman was pulled away from him, her bloody fingertips clawing at him as she was lifted up. He heard Firecracker yell, “Stay down!” and then felt heat on his skin as a stream of fire erupted over him. A gurgling scream filled the air, followed by the horrible stench of burning meat.

  Josh rolled over and onto his knees. As he stood, he saw something on the floor and picked it up. It was a name tag, the kind that people wore at meetings or parties when they wanted to identify one another. HELLO, it said. MY NAME IS. Below this someone had printed, in perfectly even letters, ALICE.

  “What is that?” Charlie asked as she peered over Josh’s shoulder.

  “He wants us to know their names,” Josh replied. “He’s reminding us that they’re human.” For reasons he couldn’t understand, he folded the tag in half and tucked into the pocket of his jeans. “First Howard, and now Alice,” he said. “I wonder who’s next.”

  “Did you guys find anything?” Charlie asked Scrawl.

  “Just our friend Howard,” Scrawl answered. “Is she your only one?”

  Josh nodded. “Ten more,” he said.

  “And three floors,” added Charlie. “Why do I think most of those ten won’t be on floors three or two?”

  “He’s saving them for us,” Josh agreed. “But we still have to check every floor. He’s making sure we don’t have much time when we get to the end.”

  Charlie looked around, scanning the hallway for cameras. “Are you having fun?” she yelled. “Are you getting all this, you sick bastards?”

  Josh took her arm. “Come on,” he said gently. “Time’s up for this floor.”

  They took the stairs to the third floor in single file, with Josh leading. As they descended, the condition of the walls deteriorated. Huge chunks of plaster were missing, exposing the wood beneath. Broken pipes protruded like bones from the splintered ceiling, and only a few bulbs still emitted any light. What little they did was thin and watery. Josh turned on the light on his flamethrower, but nothing happened. He clicked it half a dozen times to make sure. The others did the same, with no better results.

  “Great,” Josh said.

  As planned, they switched partners, and Firecracker gave Charlie his watch. Josh, now with Firecracker, took the left-hand hallway. Unlike the fourth floor, the third was a mixture of rooms. The first one they came to was an examining room. The floor was cluttered with old instruments, and a tattered eye chart hung on one wall. A discarded hospital gown, stained and torn, lay across the examination table. Other than that, the room was empty.

  Another exam room sat next to the first. As Josh swung the door open, a figure turned toward him. It was a man holding something in his hand. The light in the room was burned out, and it was impossible to see exactly what it was, but Josh thought he saw something wet hanging from the end.

  He lifted his flamethrower as the zombie shambled toward the door. He waited until he could read the name on the man’s tag—RICHARD—and then aimed at his chest. Just before he hit the trigger, Josh realized what the man was carrying was a hand. Veins and tendons dripped from the wrist where it had been broken from the arm, and on one of the fingers was a ring.

  He has both of his hands, Josh thought as he stared at the zombie. That means that one belongs to someone else.

  The man dropped the hand, and Josh stared at it. Something about the ring was familiar to him, although he couldn’t place it. It looked like the body of a snake coiled around the finger, its head biting its tail to form a circle.

  “Get down!”

  Firecracker’s voice startled Josh. He looked up just in time to see the zombie reaching for him. Instinctively falling to his knees, he covered his head with his hands as Firecracker’s flamethrower roared into action. The zombie wheeled back, shrieking.

  “Close the door,” Firecracker said. “Roast him.”

  Josh started to do that, then saw the hand again. Trying not to think about it, he reached out and grabbed it, flinging it outside the room. Firecracker cried out in disgust. “What are you doing?”

  Josh slammed the door and pressed his back against it as the zombie tried to get out by ramming his body again and again into the door. Josh could feel the heat from the flames passing through the metal, and every time the zombie hit the door, he jolted Josh forward. But slowly the hits became less and less forceful, until finally they stopped completely.

  After checking to make sure the zombie was really dead, Josh turned back to the hand. He’d been staring at it while holding the zombie back but had come no closer to figuring out why the ring triggered something in his brain. He knelt and reached for the hand.

  “Don’t touch it,” Firecracker warned. “It’s got blood all over it. You get that in you and you might as well be that guy,” he added, gesturing at the closed door. Smoke was seeping out from underneath it and filling the hallway. It burned Josh’s eyes.

  “I don’t have any cuts on me,” Josh said as he reached out and pulled the ring from the finger. It came off easily, and he wiped it on his jeans. “I’ve seen this ring before,” he said. “I just can’t remember where.”

  A muffled scream came from somewhere else in the building, interrupting his thoughts. “Charlie?” Firecracker asked.

  Josh shook his head. “No.” He put the ring in his pocket, and he and Firecracker ran down the hall. Josh completely forgot about checking the rooms until they started to turn the corner into the next corridor. He stopped. “We should go back,” he said to Firecracker.

  The scream came again, this time louder and more frenzied. Josh looked down the hall just as someone rounded the corner, running straight for them. Whoever it was moved much more quickly than zombi
es usually did, with a rolling gait that carried the body forward in weird zigzagging steps.

  For a moment Josh was afraid it was Charlie, but in the dim light it was impossible to tell. Then two more figures came around the corner. He saw flames flickering at the ends of two torches and knew the figures were Charlie and Scrawl. Which meant that the screaming figure was a z.

  The zombie kept coming. Then, when it saw Josh and Firecracker standing with flamethrowers pointed at it, it stopped. It started to turn, but Charlie and Scrawl were closing in from the other side. The zombie raised its arms as if to cover its face with its hands, and that’s when Josh saw that its right arm ended in a stump.

  “On three!” he heard Scrawl shout. “One! Two! Three!”

  All four of them fired their weapons at the zombie. It was consumed in a fireball that immediately blackened the walls and ceiling. Flames whipped around the zombie like a tornado. The creature stood perfectly still for a few seconds, then collapsed into a pile like burning leaves. Josh and Firecracker stood on one side of it, looking through the fire at Charlie and Scrawl.

  When the flames died down, Charlie ran to Josh. “She knew,” she said. “She knew we were going to kill her. I’ve never seen one run away before.” She choked back tears. “Josh, it was horrible.”

  Josh reached into his pocket and removed the ring. “Have you seen this before?” he asked Charlie.

  She took the ring and looked at it. Then her hand began to shake.

  “Freya,” she whispered. “It’s Freya’s.”

  23

  “There are eight left,” Josh said as they pounded down the stairs to the second floor. He clenched his fist, feeling Freya’s ring press against his palm. Rage burned in his chest. He looked at his watch. “Forty-five minutes left,” he called out. They had wasted time, and it was his fault. After they torched Freya, he had fallen apart, cursing Clatter and screaming in pain and anger over what his friend had been turned into. The others, not knowing what to do, had let him yell it out.

  Now he was filled with new strength. Eight z’s stood between him and Clatter, and he was determined to find them. He strode down the hallway, abandoning the two-to-a-side plan and kicking in every door he saw. The second floor held more examination rooms, as well as what seemed to be offices for the doctors. They found the next zombie in one of those, standing by the wall and staring dumbly up at a framed diploma, like he was trying to read it. Josh noted the name on the z’s tag—PAUL—before giving Scrawl the okay to torch him.

  They found two more zombies on the floor, a woman named Gwen sitting in a kind of living room staring at an old broken television set, and a man named Virgil hiding in a closet. They each went down with barely a fight.

  “I’ve got to say, these meatbags have been pretty tame,” Firecracker remarked as they regrouped at the head of the last flight of stairs. “I’ve played holo-z’s meaner than these ones.”

  “He’s saving the worst for last,” said Scrawl. “I guarantee it. Probably the ones who’ve been turned the longest. They’re totally gone. Nothing inside but pure instinct to kill.”

  “Whatever they are, they’re still people,” Charlie said, shooting Firecracker a dirty look. “Remember that.”

  “Okay,” Josh said. He checked the fuel level on his flamethrower. “We’re low on firepower and we’ve got five more zombies standing between us and walking out of here. I don’t know what we’re going to find down there, but whatever it is, I’m not going down without a fight.”

  “I’m with you,” Scrawl said.

  “Me too,” Charlie agreed.

  Firecracker nodded. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  “What’s our time?” Scrawl asked Josh.

  “Twenty-five minutes,” Josh answered. “None to waste.”

  They went down the stairs. The first floor was different from the others. There were no examination rooms, no offices. In fact, it looked like a hotel lobby—one that had been bombed over and over again. The walls were covered with water-stained wallpaper that hung in ribbons where it had fallen away. The dusty old furniture had nearly disintegrated into piles of sawdust and scraps of velvet. A huge chandelier that had once hung in the asylum’s grand foyer lay on the marble floor, its shattered crystals sparkling like diamonds in the moonlight that managed to find its way through the boarded-up windows.

  “This is the only floor the families ever saw,” Scrawl said as he surveyed the ruins. “The administrators wanted them to think this was more like a country club than a mental hospital.”

  “So where do we go?” Charlie asked.

  “That way is blocked,” said Josh, looking down the hallway running south. The ceiling there had caved in, and the corridor was impassable. “It looks like we don’t have a choice.”

  “He’s herding us,” Scrawl said. “Whatever is down this way, Clatter set it up.”

  Josh nodded in agreement. “Then let’s get the show over with,” he said.

  The hallway seemed to go on forever. They moved quickly, taking turns stepping into any rooms they came to and doing a quick sweep. Josh didn’t expect to find any z’s there, and they didn’t. He’s trying to get us to run our time out, he thought.

  Finally they came to the intersection of the north and west corridors. Like the south corridor, the west was also blocked by debris. The only option remaining was to go through a small door set in the inside wall.

  “The garden,” Scrawl said. “He wants us in the garden.”

  Josh tried the handle of the door. It turned easily, and the door swung out. Moonlight flooded the hallway, and Josh blinked a couple of times. After the darkness of the upper floors, even the weak light of the quarter moon took some getting used to.

  The walls of Feverfew rose up all around the garden. The dark panes of the windows stared blankly out at the overgrown plants and the crumbling fountain at the garden’s center, where headless figures stood reaching their cold hands up to the sky. The air was rich with the smells of dirt and rot.

  “They could be anywhere in there,” Charlie said, looking at the jungle of trees and flowers. “There’s no way we can find them in time.”

  “Then they need to find us,” said Josh.

  The others looked at him, confused. “How?” Firecracker asked.

  “We torch the whole place,” Josh said. “The one thing they’re afraid of is fire. We’ll smoke them out. There’s only one way in and out of here, right?”

  “As far as I know,” said Scrawl. “But Clatter could have made another one.”

  “We’ll have to risk it,” Josh said. “We’re almost out of time.”

  “But how will we get out?” asked Charlie.

  “One of us will guard the door,” Josh said. “Make sure nobody locks it. The other three will set fires.” He looked at Charlie. “You stay here.”

  “Why me?” Charlie argued. “Why not him?” She nodded at Firecracker. “He’s the one with no experience.”

  Firecracker snorted. “What kind of experience do you need to set something on fire?” he countered.

  “You’re guarding the door because you have more experience,” Josh said to Charlie. “If anyone—or anything—tries to come through that door or close it, you stop them.”

  “All right then,” Charlie said. “Go start your fires.”

  The three boys headed for the trees. “We’ll start in the back and move this way,” Josh said. “Firecracker, you take the left. Scrawl, you take the right. I’ll go up the middle. We run through, start blasting, and run back here. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Scrawl and Firecracker said.

  “And don’t forget, there are z’s in there somewhere. Don’t engage them, even if you see them. You’ll just get stuck in the crossfire. Avoid them and get back here.”

  Scrawl looked at him. “You think this will work?”

  “I don’t know,” Josh answered truthfully.

  He counted down from three. At one, the three of them took off into the garden. Josh
saw Firecracker and Scrawl disappear into the darkness; then he was plunging headlong through the overgrown grass. It was still wet from the rain, and he hoped it would light.

  He drove that thought from his mind as he pushed past some wizened bushes. Then he was running through a patch of rosebushes. Their thorns snagged in his clothes and scraped his hands, but he ignored the pain. He could see the far wall of the garden twenty yards ahead of him. As it grew closer, he lifted his thrower.

  A flash erupted from his right. Scrawl had reached the wall. He always was the fastest of us, Josh thought as he came to a stop and aimed the flamethrower at a clump of dead weeds. As he fired, a third blast came from the left. Firecracker had made it too.

  The fire took hold, snaking up the stalks of grass and hungrily consuming it. It seemed to hesitate for a moment, then jumped to a nearby tree. The dead wood popped and exploded as the flames wrapped around the desiccated limbs. Josh watched long enough to make sure the fire wasn’t going out, then turned and started running back to the door.

  When he reached the fountain at the center of the garden, he bore left to go around it. As he did, a zombie leaped out of the muck that filled the basin and flung itself at Josh. It was covered in slime, and its hands grasped at Josh’s arm but slipped away. The zombie fell, its fingers catching hold of Josh’s leg. Josh stumbled, tried to wrench loose from the zombie’s grip, and went down hard on his back. The air was knocked out of him.

  The zombie awkwardly got to its feet and came at him. Josh scrambled for his flamethrower, but he had fallen on top of it and couldn’t get it. He had nothing to defend himself with. This is it, he thought. I lost.

  A figure charged out of the darkness to his left, bellowing madly. The zombie, confused, stopped its forward rush. Then Josh saw Firecracker aim his flamethrower at the thing’s head and fire. The zombie crackled as the flame made contact with the water soaking its skin and clothes. Steam exploded off its head, enveloping it in a black shroud of smoke and steam.