War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (18 page)

“And who is doing all the shooting?” Riggs asked, eyeing the gun in Deck’s hand. “Are you killing them?”

“Just the ones that piss me off,” Deck growled, annoyed at the stupid questions. “Unless you want to end up like them, we can’t just stand around. Let’s get this door barricaded, they’re on their way up. They say they want a cure and I don’t think they’re going to leave without one.”

In the hour before the hospital broke down into bedlam, Nurse Lacy Freeman had downed half a bottle of valium to keep, what she thought of as the real monsters from taking over her mind. The face that shone out from the valium haze, the one Dr. Wilson had looked upon and thought capable of murder, was an innocent babe compared to what lurked beneath.

As much as she had wanted to let them free, she had held the real monsters back in order to do her duty. She had followed after Wilson and Sinha as they had gone around the ward doing their spinal taps. In their suits, they had been oblivious to her. Her mission, given to her by Von Braun had been to slow the Diazepam drips on all the patient’s IVs and loosen their restraints.

She also told them about “the plan.”

It was a simple plan, because it had to be. The patients could not understand higher reasoning beyond:
let’s kill the ones who had done this to us and drink their blood
. Most of them ignored the IV bag that Lacy pinned to their shoulders in order to keep their minds functioning in some fashion. Others resented the bag or looked upon it as part of the problem. These people tore the catheters from their arms and hurled the bags away from them. In minutes, their minds descended into a state of hell that was beyond all control.

They no longer understood “the plan”, they only understood the need to feed and the desire to rid the hated dirt from their throats. It felt like their intestines were backing up and they were choking on shit. Instinctively, they knew their bodies were toxic and instinctively they craved clean flesh and pure blood. They were drawn to it.

Three such evil monsters came after Paolo Garcia.

Along with forty other people he had been quarantined on the third floor where he’d spent the day playing cards in the hospital kitchen with his friends. The first gunshots in the stairwell had found him up two hundred dollars—he had a veritable pile of green in front of him. While a few people ran to see what was going on, Paolo quickly dealt another hand. He was hot and didn’t want anything to disturb his run of good luck. It didn’t hurt that the man right next to him, Hernando Dias, was a fish who wouldn’t stop accidentally flashing his cards to Paolo.

“It’s probably nothing,” Paolo said of the gunshots. “Let’s play.”

Four others stayed in the game and by luck, ill luck as it turned out, Paulo dealt himself two aces. Two people folded in front of Hernando who raised, “Veinte dólares.”

“This is America, moron,” Paolo seethed. “Speak English. Say twenty. Tw-enty.” Paolo wasn’t just legal, he was an actual citizen, a rarity among the lower paid members of the staff. It had taken him eight years of endless paperwork, dull hearings, and hoops to jump through but he had persevered and now he possessed legal papers and a fairly overbearing attitude toward the
illegals
.

“Tenty,” Hernando said.

“It’s
twenty
but since you were close enough, I will see your…” Paolo was interrupted as more gunshots went off when Deck put two into Lucy Freeman. One of the other players got up and ran to the door that separated the kitchen from the cafeteria. While he stood there staring through the crack, Paolo re-raised, “Twenty more.”

Hernando sucked his teeth as he thought over his options. Outside the cafeteria people were running and there was a scream. “Hurry up!” Paolo said. Hernando shrugged and dropped another twenty dollar bill into the pile. Quickly, Paolo dealt the flop, turning over three cards. Another ace sat staring up at him.

“Bet,” Paolo said, impatiently, running a hand through his black hair. “Let’s go.”

They were the last two left in the kitchen. There was a lot of shouting, out in the halls as well as in the cafeteria, but no more gunshots.

“
Shek
,” Hernando said.

“The word is
check
,” Paolo snapped. “Ch-ch-check. Say…”

He stopped in midsentence. A woman in a hospital gown banged into the kitchen—black goo was running from her eyes. Hernando took one look at her and jumped up. He was running even before his feet were under him, causing him to stumble. The woman chased after.

Paolo watched in shock as the two disappeared heading for the back where the freezers ran in a line of shining metal. “I had aces,” Paolo yelled, scooping up his money as fast as he could and stuffing the bills into his pocket. He had no clue what was happening but, with the screams and all the running, he felt he should be armed. The prep line was the closest source of weaponry; he grabbed two gleaming, sharp knives, each a foot in length.

He was challenged almost immediately. Three strangers, all in hospital gowns came barging in from the cafeteria. All three had the same black-dripping eyes and the same murderous rage on their faces, but otherwise appeared to be normal people. “Stay back!” Paolo yelled, holding up the knives.

Acting as though the knives didn’t exist, they charged.

Despite the fact that he was armed and they weren’t, Paolo ran. He made a break for the dining hall, slamming open the swinging doors with his shoulder and charging through; only to be brought up short by what he saw: there was a full-on battle raging right before his eyes. People were fighting back and forth across the entire room:
Black-eyes
versus the
Cafeteria workers
.

His people were losing badly and already bodies littered the floor, lying at ugly, twisted angles with pools of blood around them. Blood seemed to be everywhere: red puddles on the tile, handprints on chairs, spatters across tables, and footprints tracking from body to body.

Paolo stared a second too long. Behind him the doors banged open and he spun. The first one of the black-eyed things was on him in a blink. It had been a man: white, bald, middle-aged. Paolo didn’t hesitate and slammed his foot-long knife into the man’s chest. The blade was brand new and sharp as a razor. It parted the man’s sheer hospital gown with ease, slid through his flesh like it was warm butter and went deep into his right lung.

The man didn’t seem to notice the knife that had skewered him. He kept coming, grabbing Paolo by the arm and lunging at him with his mouth gaping wide. Paolo saw there was more of that black stuff in the man’s mouth. His tongue was coated with it and more of it dangled from his teeth.

Paolo screamed. He never thought that he’d scream in a life and death situation, but out it came nonetheless. He screamed and twisted and stabbed blindly with the other knife, desperate to get away, however the man with the black eyes and the diseased mouth was far stronger than he looked and had him in an iron grip. The two, as close as lovers locked in an embrace of death, fell over, hitting a table on the way down.

They struck the floor hard, but Paolo didn’t feel it. The pain of having teeth rip into his flesh was horrific and galvanizing. It overwhelmed everything else. The diseased man’s teeth sunk into the side of his neck and tore out a huge hunk of meat and skin. Paolo’s screams rattled the windows. He screamed again and again until the man chewed his way into Paolo’s larynx. Then blood poured into his lungs and, for a time, Paolo was dead.

The first two gunshots were so unexpected that it was a few seconds before the lobby guards reacted.

“Was that a gun?” Jack Cable asked.

They were seated behind the desk, twenty feet from the front doors. Earl Johnston had his head cocked with an ear to the ceiling. “I think so.”

They just sat there in somewhat stunned disbelief until Deckard came over the two-way: “Shots fired, south stairwell! Proceed with caution.”

As Jack and Earl were unarmed, being cautious was their only choice. The hospital was so small and so out of the way that the original security plan consisted of allowing only the supervising agents, Deck and Ray, to carry weapons. With the prisoners being a part of the trial, Deck had hired on three more guards, all with the proper firearm permits. Rory had been one of these.

The other two armed guards, along with all the other off-duty guards had made themselves scarce hours before, not wanting to be caught up in the quarantine if they didn’t have to be. They were at a pool hall in Poughkeepsie thirty miles away—close enough to be called into work when the quarantine ended, if they were sober enough that is.

Jack stood and looked around the desk as if he would find a gun that he had previously overlooked. “Shots fired…this is crazy. What the fuck are we supposed to do against someone with a gun?” he demanded.

“We have our tasers,” Earl said, touching the bulky weapon at his side. He’d never fired one in anger before, yet he was relatively confident. Someone with fifty-thousand volts running through them wasn’t going to do much except piss himself, even someone with a gun.

Earl led the way to the stair exit and drew his weapon. Jack came right behind him, grimacing in fear. “This is fucked,” Jack whined. “First the quarantine and now this. I need some fucking combat pay if this keeps up. You know what I mean? Fourteen dollars an hour isn’t going to cut it.”

Behind them someone hissed, “What’s happening?” A few of the more curious and daring Admin workers had crept down the hall and were now peeking around the corner. Earl waved them away. “Get back to the break room! We have the situation under control.”

There
were almost forty people
quarantined on the first floor where the Administration offices and the large entrance lobby were located. They had, for the most part, sat gaggled in the break room where they gossiped or complained, watched TV or read books. For reasons that were beyond them, Jack and Earl hadn’t joined them. They had stayed at their post although it wasn’t really necessary since all the exits were locked and the two gate guards were in charge of turning people away.

Now, Jack and Earl were crouched at the south stair door; their eyes went wide when three more gunshots went off, one after the other. Jack wiped his hands on his polyester pants. “If no one comes out, do we go in?” he asked, nodding at the stairwell door.

“I’ll call the boss,” Earl said, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Deck, this is Earl, over. Come in, Deck.”

It took two tries before Deck came on. In the background Earl could hear bangs and crashes, metal on metal. It sounded like his boss was in a scrap yard. “You two ok?” Deck asked. His voice was uneven and his breath was drawing heavy.

“Yeah, we’re doing fine. What’s going on? Who was doing all that shooting?”

“Hold on!” Deck shouted. Under the sound of his heavy breathing, they could hear what sounded like growling. There was another crash and then swearing. “Get that end…No, turn it on its side. Damn it, hold that one back. Don’t let him get too close to you.”

Jack and Earl shared a look. “Deck!” Earl shouted into the two-way. “Come in, Deck.” For three minutes all they got was more of the same: crashes and curses and the strange growling.

Finally, Deckard came back on. “You two have any activity down there?”

“What sort of activity?” Earl asked.

Deck blew out. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Listen, what I need you two to do is to evacuate the first floor. Take everyone, and…and I don’t know, take them to a police station or something. Just get them out of here and try to maintain the quarantine. Keep them away from other people. Just in case.”

“Ask him just in case of what?” Jack suggested.

Deck was quiet for a moment. When he came back on he sounded equal parts mad and embarrassed. “Just in case they
turn
. You’ll know what I mean if it happens. Now get moving.”

Earl tossed his keys to Jake—they were brand new and flashed in the light. “Unlock the front doors, I’ll get the others.”

They were hurrying to the center of the building when the middle stairwell door opened and three people came out. “Get on back upstairs,” Earl ordered. “Go on, you’re under quarantine.”

“What’s with their eyes?” Jack asked. He was suddenly very nervous. The people weren’t right; they were dirty and they walked strangely, as if they weren’t sure how to coordinate all their moving parts. “They have stuff coming out of their…” He stopped in mid-sentence. The three people started to charge the two security guards.

Unlike Jack, Earl wasn’t afraid. The three people were clearly patients and not only were they unarmed, they weren’t overly large or striking in any way. Earl stepped forward and waited until the first of the dreadful looking people was practically on him before he fired his taser.

The twin spikes struck one of the cancer patients that he and Jack had checked in earlier the day before. Earl even remembered the man’s name: Mr. Mumford. He’d been a jolly little man despite that he was practically at death’s door. Now he resembled some sort of ghoul, discolored, leaking black fluid and smelling nasty.

The taser burned two holes in his gown as it lit him up. Mr. Mumford stopped in place and stared vacantly ahead as if the electricity had done nothing more than short a system in his brain.

“What the fuck?” Earl breathed, stepping back.

Another of the patients charged around the manikin-like figure of Mr. Mumford. This one was bigger. It was a woman who hadn’t gone through chemo and who had managed to retain her appetite until the last few days. She weighed over two hundred pounds and, when Jack’s taser struck her she didn’t stop coming at him. But she did slow down… horribly so. It was as if someone was running a film of her at quarter speed. It wasn’t human.