As they approached the room, Jessica could hear light chatter coming from inside. Sarah had told her that they were headed to the nurses’ break room and lounge. It was behind a door that required a key card to open it and had a sign on the door that read “Staff Only”.
Jessica walked into the room, and saw four people were sitting inside: two women and two men. The room featured a countertop with a microwave, a small sink, a refrigerator, a sofa and love seat, and a large table in the middle of the room where the four survivors were eating. Three of them had plates in front of them with only scraps left on them, and the other—one of the women, a nurse who’d treated Jessica some since she arrived at the hospital—was still working on her dinner. Inside, Jessica was elated. They’d fed her well since she’d been bedridden in the hospital, but it felt like years since she last sat down at a table and had a real meal with other people.
The group stopped talking and stared at Jessica. Sarah stepped into the room, smiling.
“Guys, this is Jessica Davies,” Sarah said. She looked over to Jessica. “You’ve already met Kristen.” She was the other nurse who had tended to Jessica.
“This here is Brandon; he’s an anesthesiologist.”
“Good to see you up and walking,” Brandon said.
Sarah pointed to the other woman. “This is Rachel. She is an administrator here.”
Rachel raised her glass of water toward Jessica.
“And finally, this is Trevor. Lawrence found Trevor out there just like he found you and Mrs. Kessler.”
Trevor smiled and nodded at Jessica. “Hi,” he said timidly.
Sarah walked over to a counter on the other side of the room. “You can grab a plate right here. We’ve got salad, some chicken, a few different veggies, and some fruit. Grab what you want.”
“Thank you,” Jessica mumbled, and she limped over to the counter and fixed herself a plate.
As she sat down at the table, she looked over and saw Lawrence walk into the room. He was wearing a red plaid shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. He noticed Jessica and raised his eyebrows.
“Well, very nice to see you, Jessica.”
Jessica nodded and smiled.
“She walked in here herself without any help,” Sarah said.
Lawrence put his hands on his waist and nodded. “Excellent. Glad to see that you’re doing better.”
Jessica turned from him and grabbed a fork with the hand on her left arm, her good arm. She was right-handed, so eating would take a little bit more effort than normal, but she was so hungry that she didn’t care.
“Did you find anyone else?” Kristen asked Lawrence.
Jessica turned to see him shaking his head.
“I know you’re tired of hearing this and I know that you’re still hurting from what happened, but you’ve got to take one of us with you when you go out there,” Brandon told Lawrence. “It’s too dangerous for you to be going alone. Hell, you almost got yourself killed when you found Jessica, here.”
Lawrence sighed. “I know.”
“I’ll go,” Rachel said. “I wanna see what it’s like out there.”
“No you don’t,” Jessica mumbled before Lawrence could answer. She looked around the room and everyone was just staring at her. She cleared her throat and took a sip of the water in front of her. “You’ve got a good thing here. Enjoy it. You don’t want to go out there.”
Rachel looked frustrated and was about to speak, but Trevor butted in.
“She’s right,” he said. “You don’t want to go out there.”
“They are right, Rachel,” Lawrence added.
Rachel put down her fork and stood up. “Okay, then. Guess I’ll just go back to my fucking desk and wait for the phone to ring, how about that?”
She stormed out of the room before anyone could stop her.
Jessica looked up at Lawrence. “Sorry.”
Lawrence smiled and patted her on her good shoulder. “It’s fine. She’s just getting a little bit of cabin fever and she doesn’t understand. Go on and finish your dinner. You’ve got to be starving.”
She was, and she went back to scarfing down the food in front of her.
Chapter 4
David
David Ellis sat at the edge of the bed, staring down at the floor. Before Lawrence and the girl stopped by the room, a nurse came in and suggested that he lie back down and rest. He ignored her, and instead chose to sit up. He’d been lying down in that bed since the moment he arrived the previous day, and he was becoming antsy.
He felt the urge in his bladder to use the restroom, and walked to the toilet.
The bathroom inside the hospital room was simple. It had only a toilet and a sink, which had a very small vanity in front of it as well as a mirror plastered to the wall above it The luxury of having indoor plumbing was one he hadn’t been sure he’d ever know again, and he was pleased to be experiencing it here after two days of hell out on the road.
When he was done, he flushed the toilet, and then looked at himself in the mirror. He had on a gown, which he was already tired of. He didn’t care for the tickle of the open air hitting his bare backside. His curly hair looked like he’d just woken up from a week-long nap, and the stubble on his face looked like it had increased ten-fold overnight.
On a table near his bed, there was a fresh set of clothes for him. On top, there was a note that read: “Hope these fit. Had to guess on the size. Not too many options. - L”. David stared at the clothes after he was done reading the note, and slipped out of the gown. The pants fit just about right, while the shirt was a little tight, but he was okay with it. His toned biceps strained the short sleeves of the shirt, and it felt great to wear a fresh pair of underwear.
While he wasn’t hungry, David was going to go stir crazy if he stayed in the room any longer. He figured that, with everyone presumably at dinner, it’d be a good time to go have a look around.
So, that’s exactly what he planned to do as he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.
He looked both ways after he stepped out of the room, and saw that it was clear in both directions. He quietly pulled the door shut behind him, so as to not catch the attention of anyone who might be lurking around. David could hear the chatter down the hallway, presumably coming from where the group was eating dinner, so he headed the opposite direction. They’d kept David in his room since he arrived here the day before, and he was curious to learn more about where the stranger had brought him.
Either side of the hallway was lined with doors, each one numbered with a small metal plate, just like the room he was staying in. Most of them were open and didn’t appear to have anyone occupying them. Two of the open rooms he passed did have belongings in them, proving to David that other people were in fact living in at least some of these hospital beds.
When he reached the end of the hall, he looked to to one side and noticed a pair of double doors just a few steps around the corner. To the other, there was a set of elevators at the dead end of the hall, also just a few yards from where he was standing. He stepped toward the elevators and read the signs taped to the metal doors that read “Do Not Use”.
He started to turn around, and he heard someone walking down the hall from the direction he’d come, mumbling as they moved swiftly. David stepped back and stood with his back against the elevator, with the frame of the door hopefully hiding just enough of him to where he wouldn’t be noticed.
A woman appeared from around the corner, heading toward the double doors. She had a clipboard in her hand and was shaking her head as she walked, still grumping indistinctly to herself. David watched her as she pushed hard through the double doors, hearing them crash into the walls as they swung in.
At the end of another short hallway, the woman headed around a corner, disappearing from David’s vision.
He stepped away from the elevators and followed.
The hallway was only dimly lit. A sign on the double doors read “Employees Only” written on notebook paper with a black
marker and then taped on with Scotch tape. He ignored it, curious to know where the frustrated woman was headed.
At the end of the room, he turned the same direction the woman had, and walked down the lengthy corridor.
On either side of him, there were closed doors. It looked very similar to the area he was staying in, only this part of the hospital was dark and cold. He opened a couple of the doors and noticed that they were simply abandoned hospital exam rooms. The two rooms looked identical, both containing the uncomfortable, table-like bed you’d sit on if you were a patient, the doctor’s small rolling stool, a sink, and a small cabinet.
At the end of the hall, he could only go left, which put him in another hallway. This time, though, he could see a glowing light at the end.
David crept down the hall, and as he made it near the end, he heard the woman scratching notes onto the clipboard while still mumbling to herself. He stood with his back against a door that was slightly ajar, and listened.
“They send me here to deal with this shit, but they don’t trust me to go outside,” the woman said, then sighed. “Such bullshit.”
She continued to mumble to herself, and David stepped out of the doorway and peeked around the corner.
The woman was standing there, as he’d imagined her, looking through a window and jotting down notes on the clipboard.
David narrowed his eyes when he heard something else. A faint sound was coming from near the woman, though he couldn’t make out what exactly it was.
The woman sighed again and then reached up and hung the clipboard on the wall in front of her.
David backed up around the corner, ducking into an open room just as the woman stepped away from the window and headed toward him.
From inside the room, he watched her walk away through the crack in the door.
David counted to twenty, then poked his head out of the room.
He looked out and saw that no one was coming or going, so he stepped out into the hallway. The noise he heard earlier became more distinct. Along with a low hiss, there was a repeated clatter.
His bare feet moved gently over the floor as he headed around the corner toward the lit room the woman had been standing in front of.
And as he approached the window and looked inside the room, his eyes went wide.
“Holy shit.”
All he could do was stare at it. The room appeared to have once been a gift shop, its contents pulled out so that the room was empty except for a bed, a small table, and some sort of machine. The thing was strapped into the bed, chomping its jaws and trying to break loose as it spit and hissed into the air. There were cords coming off of its body, hooked up to various machines. David looked at the clipboard, which had various numbers scribbled next to acronyms and initials that he couldn’t translate.
He stood there watching the Empty squirm and try to break free for what seemed like an hour.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
David jumped when the man’s deep voice came from his left, and his dark shadow loomed in the bits of light. As a reflex, he reached to his pants for a knife that wasn’t there. If it had been, the man in the shadow would have been dead.
Lawrence approached David, smiling and looking into the room.
“Her name is Joanne. She was a patient here when everything happened.”
David sighed and narrowed his eyes at the man. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry.”
David shook his head, then glared at it. “Why is it here?”
Lawrence looked over at David. “See, we got lucky. This woman was actually a very bad person. She was a criminal, a drug dealer. She had OD’d, and they had her strapped in so that, when she came to, she wouldn’t be able to escape and the police could arrest her. There was so much going on up here after everyone fell, that she was basically forgotten about. So, she remained unscathed. Once the rest of the area had been cleared out, Kristen—one of the nurses who is still here now—left her in her room and shut the door. When I got here, they wanted me to go in and kill her, but I figured we oughta keep her alive. Study her. So, we cleared out this gift shop and put her in here so we could look in on her through this large window.”
“Shit,” David said. “Have you found out anything?”
Lawrence raised his eyebrows and put his hands in his pockets, bouncing up and down on his toes. “Unfortunately, I’m not a doctor. While I have studied to become one, there are only so many things I know to do. The only thing we know for certain is that it’s not viral. We ran some tests, but couldn’t find any kind of strain. Other than that, we honestly don’t know much.”
David rubbed the stubble on his chin, and the creature made eye contact with him. He wondered if it actually knew that he was standing there, or what he even was. He’d assumed that whatever had caused everyone to change was viral, and was perplexed to find otherwise.
In regards to Lawrence, David was starting to see some value in him. The man was learning things about these new beings, and David decided it best to lay low and play along, at least for the time being. As hungry as he was to be in control and to obtain power in the new world, he knew that he first needed to survive, and blending in and understanding these monsters would go a long way toward reaching that goal.
“You can’t tell the others that you were here. Not everyone knows Joanne is here.”
David nodded.
“Can I walk you back to your room?” Lawrence asked.
“Sure,” David said, and the two men stepped away from the glass as the thing’s snarls faded behind them.
Chapter 5
Will
“Thank you for inviting us in here, Donny.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Will looked over at Gabriel, who was standing at the other end of the room, and then back to the shop owner. “And sorry my guy went all cowboy on you.”
Donny, the store owner, spit his dip into a plastic bottle, then said, “It’s okay. The way things been goin’, made folks a wee bit crazy. I understand. Hard to trust others.”
Donny had taken the group into a cellar located under the shop. There was a back room with a door in the floor that led down to it. Will was now sitting next to him with his back against a wall.
“He’s got a wife and kid in D.C. he’s had trouble getting in contact with. He’s pretty high strung, as you might imagine. You got any kids? A wife?”
Donny removed his cap and wiped his brow. He had his elbows over his knees, and his gut protruded further over his waistband because of how he was sitting. He put his cap back on, and then looked over toward Dylan. The boy had finished eating his portion of the canned soup that Donny had shared with the group, and was now sitting with Holly playing a game of Connect Four that Donny had had for sale in the shop above them.
“Cathy, my wife, she died four years ago. The cancer got her. And my daughter, she was fourteen. She got caught up in all this shit a few days back.” He began to cry now. “I left her in the double-wide we were livin’ in. She attacked me, but I couldn’t bring myself to put ‘er down. She’s still locked up in there now, I ‘magine.”
Will shook his head and put his hand over his eyes. “I’m so sorry, man.”
“Yeah.” It’s the only response that Donny could muster up. He changed the subject. “So, y’all headed to Knoxville?”
Will nodded. “Hoping to find my mom and dad there.”
“Then what?”
Will gave him a confused look.
“Where you gonna go after that?” Donny asked.
Will sighed and looked over to Gabriel again. “I imagine we’ll head toward the East Coast. See if maybe we can’t get Gabriel and Dylan back to their families.”
Donny shook his head. “That’s an awful long way to go.”
Will shrugged. “Not quite sure where else we’d go. Hoping maybe they’ve set up some kind of refuge out there. Or, at least, maybe that they have one planned. What about you? You just gonna stay here?”<
br />
“Don’t really see any reason to leave. I’ve got protection, shelter, food to last me a while. It’s pretty safe here.”
“As long as you lock the door,” Will said with a smile, and both men laughed.
The others in the room were talking amongst each other, while eating canned food that Donny had given them. He had a large supply of it down in this cellar, along with lots of bottled water and plenty of weapons that he collected through the pawn shop. Will wondered if Donny was one of those survivalist types that was always Doomsday prepping, but he didn’t bother asking. He was just thankful that the man had invited him and the group inside.
Gabriel stood up with his empty can and made his way over to where Will and Donny were sitting. He had a sour look on his face, but he reached his hand out to Donny, who took it and shook.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said, “for bringing us in. And, I’m sorry.”
Donny smiled, letting go of Gabriel’s hand. “It’s alright. I pointed my gun first. Besides, your boy here filled me in on some of the shit ya got goin’ on. Sorry to hear ‘bout all that.”
Gabriel acknowledged the shop owner’s sentiment with a nod, then turned back around and walked over to where Holly and Dylan were sitting.
Will yawned and stretched his arms up over his head.
“You look exhausted,” Donny said.
“Just a little.”
“Get ya some rest.”
“Thank you for all this.”
“Don’t mention it. Now, seriously, get ya some sleep, friend.”
Will curled up on the floor where he sat. Compared to being stuffed in the car with five other people, the hard floor of the cellar with the single, thin blanket under him felt like a suite at the Hilton. And within minutes, he was fast asleep.
Gabriel
When Gabriel awoke the next morning, he noticed that Dylan was no longer beside him. The boy had fallen asleep right next to him, but now he was gone.
Empty Bodies Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 19
