Wolf Running (6 page)

Chapter Six

Then

“Drucilla.”

“No.”

“Dulcibella.”

“No.”

“Dymphna”

Nowen gazed over her shoulder from her viewpoint at the fourth floor staffroom window. “Now you’re just making stuff up.”

Jamie smiled, riffling the pages of the battered paperback she held. A sleeping baby was pictured on the cover. “Swear to God, it’s in here.”

“No. It doesn’t sound familiar.”

The other woman tossed the book on the pale orange table that held the crumbs of their lunch. “Ok, that’s all of the ‘D’s. We’ll start on the ‘E’s later. After several more exciting rounds of Old Maid and Go Fish.” She sighed and dropped her head to the table, resting it on her folded arms, before she raised it again. “You know, you look Native American. Or Hispanic. Maybe we should concentrate on those.” Jamie reached for the baby name book and then withdrew her hand. “Nope. Can’t do it right now. No more weird names.”

Nowen looked out the window again. The view hadn’t changed since she had stood here a couple of hours ago, woken by a dream of being chased through a forest, and watched as the sun rose on a dying world.

From this window she and Jamie had gotten a crash course in how fast the affliction could spread. They had watched over the past five days as groups of fleeing people had passed down the street below, only to be ambushed by the Revs. Most of the Revs were slow, but when they came together in great masses they easily overwhelmed the refugees that became trapped in the endless traffic jam that blocked the street from one side to the other. The people that evaded the shambling Revs ran the risk of attack from the scattered fast-moving ones. These darted between the cars like cheetahs on the African plains, dragging down and devouring their prey. And about a third of those that were attacked rose up in hours to continue the cycle.

On that first day of this new reality Jamie had turned away after an hour of the slaughter, leaving the staff room entirely and going elsewhere on the floor. Nowen, on the other hand, had found herself drawn back to the windows again and again. There was a fascination to be found in the hopelessness below. Survivors made the surely-terrifying trek to the hospital only to be met by hordes of the undead. At Jamie’s insistence they had scrawled a warning on a bed sheet and hung it from a window, but still people kept coming, and the outcome was always the same. And now the dead in the streets outnumbered the living.

As Nowen watched a single Rev standing in front of a broken-windowed storefront, she thought again of Jamie’s words of nearly a week ago, when she had asked the young woman if rescue would come. “Time will tell.” Jamie had said.

Time had let them know they were very much on their own. They had spent the hours waiting for a rescue that hadn’t arrived yet in securing the floor. Nowen and Jamie had worked their way methodically from room to room, checking every possible nook and cranny for other survivors or more of the risen dead. They had found none of the first and four of the second. These had been killed by Nowen and thrown out a window to land in the parking lot below. Jamie had theorized that the floor was so empty because the majority of patients had been Revs, and had chased the staff and other unaffected people into the emergency stairwells, where they had met a frenzied mob fleeing up the stairs. The result had been a deadly collision. A quick look into the western-most stairwell and the bodies piled up there had lent credence to her theory.

They had also found dead people who were truly dead. These bodies Nowen had also tossed outside. Somehow, by some miracle, they still had power in the hospital, but they had watched the rest of the city fall dark, night after night, until only a few patches of light here and there remained. Everything else was dying, too, it seemed - television, radio, and the internet had stopped giving new information two days ago, just before they disappeared from the airwaves. At least Nowen had learned the name of the city that was collapsing around her. The hospital was in a suburb called Exeter, on the western edge of Ft. Collins, in the state of Colorado.

The tapping of fingers on hard plastic drew Nowen from her reverie. She recognized the sound, and with an internal sigh she turned her back on the window and joined the other woman at the table. She plucked a handful of stale crackers from a box and watched as Jamie hovered over the sleek, brilliant purple cell phone cradled in her hands.

“Any luck?”
I already know the answer.

Jamie gently placed the phone on the table, like she was returning a holy relic to its homeland. “No. Still no answer.”

And why do you still expect there to be?
Nowen knew better than to ask that out loud. Instead, she sat quietly and waited for Jamie continue.

“It’s just, my folks, you know...I always thought that if anyone could survive the end of the world, it would be them. They were - they
are
- into being prepared for anything. Not like some crazy nutcases, expecting the New World Order. They just believed in being able to support themselves. I mean, they still believe.” Her face blanched as she realized what she had said. With a desperate note in her voice she looked over at Nowen. “I told you about their farm, right?”

Nowen nodded. “Yes, you did.”

“So I know it seems futile. I’m not stupid. I just-I can’t make myself give up yet.”

“I’m sorry. But we need to decide what we’re going to do next.” Nowen said.

Jamie’s brow furrowed under a fall of limp blonde hair before she dropped her head to her hands. “Oh, what’s the point?” came the muffled words.

Nowen forced down a mouthful of dry crackers and looked around at their woefully small stash of scavenged supplies. “Well, we’re going to have to do something about more food and water, at least. And we need to decide if we’re going to stay here or-”

“What’s the point?!” Jamie interrupted, raising her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed and tears tracked down her face. “Seriously, what’s the point? When you sit and think about it, I mean
really
think about it, about the enormity of it all...” her voice trailed off, and she cupped her hands together in front of her. “The entire world is like Exeter, like Ft. Collins. Dead and dying.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Ohhhh, but I’m pretty positive. You saw the news, same as I did. Things were going to shit all over the place. Between Flux and the Revs...” Nowen started to interject but Jamie raised a hand to stop her. “And how long will our luck hold out. Is Flux still out there? Can we get it? Any day now will we turn on each other?”

“The authorities-”

Jamie laughed, a harsh bark. “Ha! What authorities? Have you seen any police? Or military? Or even the damn Boy Scouts?” She slammed her fist down on the table. Cracker crumbs danced from the force of her blow.

Nowen frowned. “Oh. Are you going to kill yourself?”

Jamie looked dumbfounded. “What?”

“Well, if you feel everything is hopeless, then it’s not worth going on. Right?”

For the first time in the few days Nowen had known the young nurse Jamie showed anger. Intense, burning anger.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Nowen?” The words came out bitter and red-edged.

“What? What did I do?”

Jamie wiped her face with the back of hand. “You’re so damn
cold,
Miss I-like-to-watch-from-the-window-as-people-die-and-it-doesn’t-bother-me, and sometimes you ‘re as scary to me as what’s outside-” her hysterical words stopped as she realized what she had said.

“I scare you?” Nowen asked, puzzled.

“Yes. No. Sometimes. Oh, hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.” Jamie sighed and ran her hands through her hair. Hearing her lay her innermost thoughts out seemed to have brought her back to normalcy. “I’m sorry, Nowen. It’s just, you know, everything...” she trailed off. A heavy silence filled the room. Finally, Nowen spoke.

“How do I scare you?”

Jamie shook her head. “It’s nothing. It’s just foolishness.”

“I’d like to know, nonetheless.”

“I watch you when you’re looking out the window. You’re so
intense
as you watch those people die. You practically vibrate with energy, as if you want to be down there. And you lick your lips when you’re doing this. A lot. Do you know you do this?” The young woman’s voice grew quieter as she added “I don’t know anything about you.
You
don’t know anything about you. You killed those Revs so easily, like it was no big deal. I’m a nurse, I’m used to seeing blood and bile and mucus and every gross substance the human body can produce, and all that death still makes me ill. But it doesn’t bother you, does it?” Jamie’s blue eyes were wary but accusatory as she waited for an answer.

Nowen didn’t know what to say. She settled for a shrug and “Sometimes.”

Jamie threw her hands up in exasperation. “And that’s another thing! You’re as silent as a stone-” The ringing of a phone interrupted her.

The only bit of good news in the past week had come through the inter-hospital phone system. A group of survivors (one doctor, two nurses, an elderly couple who volunteered at the hospital, two young men, and one very pregnant woman) had found safety on the second floor. Jamie had made contact with them the day after the fight in the stairwell, but even the welcome relief of hearing other human voices had been tempered by the realization that this new group was worse off than they were and could provide no help.

The second-floor housed the women’s care unit, and the survivors were split between a medication storage room and the delivery room. Revs were everywhere, supplies were even less available than they were on the fourth floor, and no one wanted to discuss what had become of the nursery.

Jamie darted out to the nurses’ station desk. “Who can that be?” she shouted over her shoulder. “It’s too early for Dr. Westrick to call!”

Nowen watched her leave and then turned back to the window. She had listened in on the first few regularly scheduled calls but had found the doctor wearying. His voice was that of an older man and rich in timbre, but underneath ran a constant stream of self-pity. By the fourth or fifth repetition of “I’m a cardiologist, I was supposed to be in Aspen, I shouldn’t even be here!” Nowen decided she’d had enough and skipped the rest of the calls. Jamie always told her the important stuff, anyway.

The murmur of Jamie’s voice receded into the background as Nowen looked out the window.
Am I cold? Is that something bad?
She replayed the conversation over in her head.
I thought I was being logical. Maybe...Jamie was just venting? Did she need something from me?
Nowen sighed and stared at the horizon.
Humans are so confusing.

The view from the window faced east, and she watched as lazy plumes of smoke rose from here and there in the city. Fires had raged through most of the first couple of days of this insanity. A heavy thunderstorm on the second night had quenched the fires and saved the majority of Ft. Collins, although the smoke trails spoke of smoldering embers waiting to spring to life.

To the west the jagged edge of the Rocky Mountains split the high summer sky. To the southeast Denver still burned. The rain that had saved Ft. Collins had only brushed the edges of the bigger city, and towering pillars of black smoke wrapped around the tall buildings. She and Jamie had watched the dragonfly shapes of helicopters darting in and out of the inky fog for the first couple of days of the outbreak, but the choppers had disappeared around the same time that the airplanes had stopped fleeing the white-peaked airport.

Nowen raised her hand and blocked Denver from view. Now the dark smoke seemed to rise up from her fingertips. There was a sudden blurring of her vision, and just before she blinked her eyes to clear them it looked as though her fingers were turning as black as the smudges marring the blue sky.

Jamie was calling her, and she turned from the window to see the other woman standing in the doorway. The nurse looked even more tired than she had before, if that was possible, and again her eyes swam with tears.

Jamie leaned against the doorframe, wearily brushing tendrils of blonde hair from her face. “That
was
Dr. Westrick. Adam’s dead.”

Adam Lee, one of the second-floor survivors. His twin brother Albert had killed himself two days before.

“How?”

“Revs. Revs got him. He was making another water run to the bathroom and dropped a bucket. The noise drew the Revs and...” Jamie’s voice faltered. “Do you think he did that on purpose? To join his brother?”

Nowen shrugged. “That’s not important, quite frankly. Where does that leave the rest of them?”

Jamie narrowed her eyes at Nowen’s less-than-sympathetic tone.
Damn. I must have said the wrong thing again.
“Not in good shape. Last night they finally got everyone together in the delivery room, but the water is only gonna last another couple of days. The med room group had some food but in the rush to move those people to the delivery room the food bag was lost. So, that’s another problem.” Jamie was kneading the hem of her scrub top in her hands. “We have to get some of our supplies to them.” She gave Nowen a worried look, as if expecting resistance.

“We don’t have that much ourselves.” Nowen said, and then caught the horrified look spreading across Jamie’s face. “But of course, we should help them. Do you know how we can get supplies down to the second floor?”

“There’s always the stairwell-” As if in response, a faint moaning echoed down the hall. The slower Revs were as content to stand still as to move, but the fast ones seemed to be everywhere, flowing like liquid into every empty space. Jamie winced at the sound. “On second thought, no.”

Nowen looked around the room they were in. “Jamie, do the delivery rooms have windows?”

The other woman looked puzzled. “Some of them, yes. Why-ohhhh!” Her eyes widened as she caught on.

Chapter Seven

Then

Jamie’s pencil scratched across a manila folder that had once held a patient’s records. She talked as she drew, sketching a rough outline of the hospital. “Ok, so, Exeter General is laid out like a capital L. The front of the hospital faces south, and the back faces north, and the wings run east and west, like so.” She blew a strand of limp hair from her face. “The hospital is four stories tall, with a kind of sub-basement for the morgue and the body pick-up, mechanical systems, etc. Oh, and the emergency generators, and thank God those are still going.”