9.0 - Sanctum (12 page)

Awkward is the best word to describe it.  Murphy and I walked to the far end of the hall.  Lots of smiles.  Everybody looking at everybody else’s private parts while pretending not to.  No hugs.

“I’m happy to see you guys made it,” said Murphy.  Mostly he was looking at Jazz.

Grace nodded at me.  “We were out scrounging when the naked ones showed up.  We didn’t get caught in the fight.”

I couldn’t help but look her up and down again.

Grace rolled her eyes and turned to Murphy.  “We figured the best way to help was to take a page from Zed’s playbook and fit in with these naked ones and kill them while they were busy trying to kill everybody else.”

Murphy scanned the hall.  “All of these?”

Jazz shook her head.  “The Aggies did most of this.”

“We didn’t realize the infected were in these buildings with the scientists until it was too late,” said Grace.

“It was too late everywhere.”  Jazz frowned but looked more hurt than angry.

“We checked the outposts,” said Grace.  “They had them set up all around the perimeter of the veterinary science complex.”

“Fritz showed us,” I said.

“Fritz made it?” Jazz asked, perking up.  “Where is he?”

I pointed vaguely northwest.  “We put him and some other people from the infirmary on the helicopter to Fort Hood.”

“Wait.”  Grace stepped toward me, very interested.  “Fort Hood.  The Army is there? Is it a safe zone?”

“It was a first.”  Murphy shook his head.  “The regular Army had it that way.  But you know.  The virus hit them like everybody else.  Then that bunch of yahoos who chased your guys out of the Capitol—the Survivor Army—took over Fort Hood and made it their base.”

Grace’s shoulders slumped.  “I don’t understand.”

“Long story,” I cut in.  “Bottom line, most of the Survivor Army assholes are dead.”

“How?” she asked.

Murphy looked at me.

Grace said, “What aren’t you telling us?”

“These naked Whites got ‘em,” I told her.  Not the whole truth, but not a lie.  “Me and Murphy came across a helicopter pilot while we were scavenging.”

“Wait.”  Grace raised her hands.  “What were you doing in Killeen? We dropped you naked in the middle of the night like seventy miles from there.”

“Like I said.  Long story.”  I looked up and down the halls, thinking more Whites should be coming to find the source of our talking. 

Grace saw me looking and pointed toward the end of the hall where Jazz had nearly skewered me with a couple of arrows.  “If you killed the ones down there, then I think this floor is clear.”

“Anyways,” said Murphy.  “We got this dude with a helicopter.  Loaded it up with ammo and guns and came here because, you know, we said we’d meet you here.”  He looked again at the dead on the floor and the happiness he’d been gushing since seeing the girls turned back to the morose mood he’d been in since the helicopter dropped us on the drill field.  “But it looks like we’re too late to do any good.”

I elbowed Murphy.  “Don’t be such a pessimist.  We saved Fritz and those people from the infirmary.  We’re rescuing Grace and Jazz now.”

Jazz laughed harshly.  “We’re doing fine, Sir Galahad.”

“Sorry,” I told her.  “That’s not what I meant.”

We organized ourselves with Murphy watching the stairs at one corner of the building and Jazz watching the stairs at the opposite corner.  The only other way to get to the fourth floor was to use the elevators, and they didn’t function.  The roofs of the veterinary sciences buildings had been covered with a hodgepodge of solar panels just as the pharmacy building had been, but non-essentials like the elevators had been disconnected from the limited supply of electricity.

Of course, thinking back to my experience in Brackenridge Hospital back in August, the Whites bravely climbed the elevator shafts.  Conclusion: the veterinary sciences building was indefensible.

Grace and I walked a third of the way down a hall that I hadn’t yet seen.  The inside wall of the corridor was lined with glass-faced oaken cabinets, eight feet tall and six feet wide, that looked antique and weighty as well.  I guessed the cabinets had been moved to this much newer building when their original home on campus had been repurposed.  The myriad of taxidermied animals and formaldehyde-preserved specimens that had been in the cabinets were on the floor among the dead.  Most of the stuffed animals had been ripped open, probably by Whites disappointed at what they found inside.

One cabinet was out of place against the opposite side of the passageway.  When we got to it, Grace said, “Help me slide this out of the way.  The stockroom door is behind it.”

“Good idea,” I told her.  “The Whites didn’t know there was a door, so they didn’t move the cabinet and try to break in.”

“Brilliant, Sherlock.”

“Sherlock?” I would have complained about the sarcastic nickname but I was sure I already sounded whiney.

“I heard Murphy say it,” replied Grace.

I sighed, and we both got on one side of the cabinet and pushed.  The cumbersome thing must have weighed four hundred pounds.

The cabinet’s feet screeched on the floor, and Jazz leaned out of her stairwell to hush us with a gesture.

In a voice just loud enough to reach the stairwell door, Grace asked, “Infected?”

Jazz shook her head.  “Just be quiet.”

Grace looked at me, and we put our shoulders back into moving the cabinet.  It screeched again, but exposed the door hidden behind.

Grace stepped away to catch her breath.  She looked me up and down.  “I thought I was going to have to trade you in for Murphy.”

I tried not to pant and reveal what an effort it had been to move the massive oak display case.  “I’m stronger than I look.”

Grace stepped up to the door and knocked gently.  “It’s me.”

The doorknob clicked, and the door swung open.

The room wasn’t as small as I expected, maybe fifteen by fifteen feet with metal shelves around the walls and a row of shelves down the center, filled with jars and bottles of who knew what—specimens, chemicals, and whatnot.  The shelves didn’t leave a lot of space for the men and women squatting on the floor and standing inside.  Some of them had weapons in their hands—a few rifles, a pistol. 

One of them, an older man who looked to be a skeleton with a bowed back and bald head, stepped out of the stockroom as he looked at Grace through thick glasses.  “Well?”

“The building is clear,” said Grace, “though more infected can come in downstairs and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

“That’s disheartening,” said the old man.  He looked at me.  “Who’s this? Another white-skinned survivor like you?”

“He’s from Austin,” said Grace.  “We met him and Murphy, also a white-skinned survivor, before we left to come here.”

“They’re the ones you came with?” he asked.  “The ones who you lost along the way?” He smiled, showing old yellow teeth as he looked at me.

I extended a hand to shake.  “Zed Zane.”

“Pleased to meet you.”  He took my hand.  “Dr. Oaks, but I suppose you can call me Melvin if you want.  Mel, if you’re the casual type.”

“Dr. Oaks.”  I smiled though the casual encounter was making me nervous.  Slipping into old-world habits had never done anybody any good.  I looked over my shoulder for Whites who weren’t there, and I cringed when the people from inside came out into the hall, relatively quiet but making entirely too much noise.

“Don’t go too far,” said Grace.  “In case we have to get you back inside.”

“They’re tired,” said Dr. Oaks.  “And they’re frightened.”

“They need to get used to that,” I told him.

“That they do,” said Dr. Oaks.  “Things are changing for the worse again.”

“Yes, they are,” Grace agreed.

Dr. Oaks started walking up the hall, stretching his legs in slow steps.  “I need to get the circulation going.”  He reached over and patted my belly.  “I’m not a lean young man anymore.  Not for about fifty years, I guess.”  He laughed at his joke, and that turned into a series of coughs.  When he got past that, he pointed at the bodies strewn on the floor in front of us.  “It’s going to smell pretty bad in here by this time tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Grace agreed.

Dr. Oaks stopped and looked Grace in the eye.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t thank you.”

Grace shook her head uncomfortably.

“My dear.  Just say, ‘you’re welcome.’”

“You’re welcome.”  She smiled thinly. 

“What is the state of things?”

Grace looked down the hall.  “There were no more survivors in the veterinary science building.”  She pointed up and down the corridor.  “You’re it.”

Dr. Oaks frowned and set his jaw purposefully.  “We lost more than thirty of our colleagues.  That’ll be hard to recover from.”  He heaved a sigh into his rattling old lungs, and he frowned.  “It will get worse.”

“Because of the others?” Grace asked.  “Nearly none of the volunteers survived the attack.”

“It may not matter,” he said, in a quiet voice.  “They won’t have much to protect soon anyway.”

“Don’t give up now, Dr. Oaks.”  She patted her chest.  “There are four of us like this.  The infected don’t know what we are, and that gives us a big advantage.”

“It’s not the infected that worries me now,” said Dr. Oaks.

“It’s the infection,” I said, giving away the answer Dr. Oaks was circling around to.

Dr. Oaks nodded. 

I looked at Grace.  “Fritz told me these guys were never exposed to the virus.  That’s why they were able to save so many doctors and professors in one place.  It wasn’t a fortuitous number of immune cases, it was good quarantine procedures.”

“Now,” said Dr. Oaks, “quarantine is broken.  We’ve all been exposed.”

Grace slumped against the wall.

Dr. Oaks pointed down the hall at the other academics.  “We may all be goners, we’re just not dead yet.”  He smiled as though there had been some dark humor there to qualify it as a joke.  Maybe he was correct.

“Still,” I said, “we need a plan.  Grace is right, staying here won’t end well.  The Whites will come.  They will get up to this floor.  They will find you in your stockroom.  You can take my word for it or not.  I can’t offer you anything to prove that I know what I’m talking about except to say that I’m alive, so far.”

Dr. Oaks smiled at that.  “Best resume I’ve heard all day.” 

I chuckled.  I liked his wry wit.  “If any of you are going to make it, we need to get you someplace safer.”

Grace straightened up again.  “It throws me off when you turn optimistic, Zed.”

“There’s a chance some of you are immune,” I told Dr. Oaks as if I might know more about the disease than him.  “If not, some of you may survive the infection with your brain functions intact.”

“Some.  That’s a gross overestimation.”  Dr. Oaks laughed.  “However, I agree with your intent.”

“I’ve got a suggestion, then.”  I looked at Grace and Dr. Oaks, the apparent man in charge of the academics, for tacit permission to proceed.  Neither objected.  “It’s going to be dark in a couple of hours.  There are four of us.”  I patted myself on the chest for clarity.  I meant the Slow Burns.  “Two of us can stay here to watch things.  Two of us can go out and find a better place to hide.  Something defensible.  Something easily hidden.  Camouflage works better as a defense than nearly anything else with the naked horde.  Hopefully, we’ll find a place where it’s easy to get food and water.  We need somewhere larger than your storeroom because we’ll be there for three or four days.”

“Waiting for the disease to run its course,” said Dr. Oaks.  He looked at me.  “That’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it?”

“I am,” I told him.

“Before you take the survivors to your sanctum, right?” he guessed.

“Sanctum?” The oddity of the phrase caught me off guard and I laughed.  “I wouldn’t get all formal.  Safe places don’t tend to last.”

Getting down to more serious questions, Dr. Oaks asked, “What will we do with the ones who the virus doesn’t kill? The ones who don’t recover?”

“You mean the ones who turn into monsters?” Grace asked.             

“There’s only one solution.”  I didn’t want to say it, but it needed to be said.  “It sucks, but it’s the only way.  They went through something like this at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin.”  I looked at both of them, as though they might not know the place.  “They restrained the infected ones before they infected—”

“They infected?” Dr. Oaks interrupted.

“It was a fucked up situation,” I told him.  “They had their reasons for doing it that way.  They infected everyone in groups.  They restrained them.  The ones who recovered, they let loose.  The ones who turned symptomatic, they killed.”

“They didn’t wait,” Dr. Oaks asked, “to see if any got better, like you two?”

I shook my head.  “I don’t agree completely with their methods, but I wasn’t there when they started the whole thing.  I didn’t have a say in it.  Not sure it would have made a difference anyway.  Everybody was desperate then and willing to try anything to avoid what looked like the inevitable.”

Dr. Oaks frowned and looked at his wrists as he mused, “Restraints.”

“It may be best,” said Grace.  “It could work.”

“But we need to find a place,” I told them.  “We need to do it quickly.  If your people were exposed, then they’ll start showing symptoms any time.”

“And what if they weren’t all exposed?” Grace asked.  “What if they don’t get exposed until we think they’re immune, and they turn later?”

“We make sure,” said Dr. Oaks.”

I replied, “At Brackenridge they used—”

“All it takes is a big wet kiss,” said Dr. Oaks.  “That’s enough.”

Grace sighed and stepped up to Dr. Oaks and pursed her lips.  “If this is what you’ve decided.”

He pecked her on the lips and laughed.  “I’m sorry.  I haven’t been kissed by a pretty young woman in a long time.”

Grace stepped back and blushed.

“We need to wait until one of us turns feverish,” said Dr. Oaks.  “That person needs to do the kissing.  Like most viruses, it’s not likely to be contagious after the fever subsides.”  Dr. Oaks looked up and down the hall.  “I hope it’s one of the young ladies who gets it first.”

“Okay, then.”  I decided to move things along.  “Me and Grace will head out to scout for a place to hole up.  Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated since you know the campus better than either of us.  Murphy and Jazz will stay here to guard you guys, but you’ll have to get back inside the storeroom, just in case.”

“We can’t,” said Dr. Oaks.

Grace and Dr. Oaks shared a glance.

I was being left out of something.  “What?”

“We need to save what we can of our research.”  Dr. Oaks pointed at Grace.  “She gets motherly when I bring it up.”

I rubbed my eyes as I fought with competing requirements.  “You stay on this floor, you won’t be safe.  If you go into the adjoining buildings, you probably get killed and draw in enough Whites to kill everyone else.”

“No, no,” said Dr. Oaks.  “Most of us work in this building on the top two floors.”

“Get what you can on this floor,” I told him.  “We’ll get the most important stuff off of the third floor when we get back.  Either way, you can’t take anything with you now.  I’d say secure it as best you can,” I glanced at Grace, “some of us will come back after things cool down here and gather everything up.”

Dr. Oaks nodded.  “Food and water.  If we can do something about that.  We don’t have any stored here.  The volunteers protecting us kept us supplied with food.”

Skip a meal!
I didn’t say that.  These people had a lot to learn about life in the world nowadays.  “We’ll see if we can find something.”

Grace put a hand on Dr. Oaks arm.  “We’ll find some food.”

“And something we’re not thinking about,” said Dr. Oaks, “if we go somewhere else on campus—” 

“When,” I interrupted, “not if.  You can’t stay here.  Everyone will die, probably by this time tomorrow.  It’s that simple.  I’m not exaggerating.  This place is risk-factor central.  Believe me on this point.”

“I do,” said Dr. Oaks, “but how will we cross the campus? The infected will see us, won’t they?” He looked at Grace.  “They’ll come after us, won’t they? We’re not like you two.”