Read Crusade (Eden Book 2) Online
Authors: Tony Monchinski
Crusade (Eden Book 2) (28 page)
“Hi.”
“—she’s one of our nurses here at the medical center. She’ll be in to check on you frequently, given that you’re only one of three patients we have here.”
“Medical center? Are we in a hospital?”
“Well,” the doctor said. “We’re a little smaller than our name implies, but we’re expanding every day and pretty soon we’ll live up to our name.”
“The doctor is just being humble,” Julie said. “This place is everything we could have hoped it would be.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Doctor, you remind me of someone, from television…”
“
Little House on the Prairie
,” Julie said. “Doctor Malden looks like the doctor on the show.”
“My girls used to watch that.” Malden smiled. “I caught it with them once or twice, and from what I remember, the doctor was a noble character. So thank you. Well, why don’t you and I—” he addressed Julie, “—go next door and run that sonogram I promised you?”
“Sonogram?” Gwen asked, brightening, “You’re going to find out—”
Julie nodded her head and her smile was all excitement.
“I’m going to run down the hall for a couple of minutes,” Stacey said. “Can I turn the TV on for you?”
“Television? You’ve got lights and television here?”
“Solar and wind power,” Mickey said. “They’re on the grid.”
“Yes,” Stacey said, “but all we have are a bunch of TV re-runs on DVD from the 70s and 80s. Our television station isn’t up and running, yet. I’ll bring you some DVDs to choose from.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Gwen,” Mickey said, “Dr. Singh—he’s another of the doctors here—he was going to show me and Bear around today. Will you be okay by yourself for awhile?”
“I’ll be fine. Hey, Bear. What, no hello?”
“Hello,” said the big man from across the room.
“Hello, Bear. If you boys get a chance, stop by later on. Fill me in on what I missed.”
“We will,” Mickey promised.
Where Dr. Malden was older and avuncular, Dr. Singh was young and good-looking, like a doctor from a soap opera. There was another man in the room with him who wore an automatic pistol in a chest rig.
“Hey, how are you guys feeling?” he asked as Mickey knocked on the doctor’s office door, Bear in tow.
“Pretty good,” Mickey said. “Happy to be here.”
“That is good.” The doctor stood and shook both men’s hands. “This is Sonny. He works in defense here at Clavius.”
“Among other things.” Sonny was about Mickey’s height and ruggedly built.
“It’s an amazing coincidence that you guys ran into Tris and her crew outside. Though from what I hear,” Dr. Singh looked at Bear, “you might have been able to fend them all off by yourselves.”
Bear didn’t respond to the intended compliment.
“You giving them the tour, Kip? Mind if I tag along?”
“I don’t mind. Well, like I promised last night, you gentlemen want the tour first or your examinations?”
“Let’s start with the tour,” Mickey said.
“Follow me, gentleman.”
Singh led them through the two floors of the medical center, showing them the various rooms and equipment.
“We don’t have everything we’d like here, not yet. But we’ve got a fairly sophisticated facility available to us. You have heart palpitations, we have a Holter monitor. Echocardiogram, heart stress-test. Need your vision corrected? We have a LASIK surgical laser. MRI, ECMO machine, all sorts of acronyms. Adenoids act up, we can remove them.”
“You know how to use all this stuff yourself?” Mickey asked.
“Most of it. Malden and I specialized in internal medicine.”
“There are other doctors here in Clavius,” Sonny said. “Malden and Singh happened to be on duty when you came through.”
“We’ve got three patients here, currently,” Singh said. “Two of them are your friends. Let us introduce you to Michael. May we come in? I want you both to meet Michael.”
A man sat up in a hospital bed reading a book. Most of his head and face and hands were bandaged.
“Hi guys,” he said, then looked at Singh and Sonny. “Did you explain to them why I’m here? I don’t want to freak them out…”
“Michael has the plague,” Sonny announced like it was no big deal.
“Whoa—” Mickey forgot about his own condition and backed up a step.
“See?” Michael aimed the question at Singh.
“Michael is not contagious,” the doctor explained. “The plague is something we’re studying here. Not everyone who gets it can pass it along, and not everyone is vulnerable to it.”
“Interesting,” Mickey said “Sorry I…”
“Nah, its fine. I get it. I’m just lucky I’ve got the doctors and nurses here who are helping me out.”
Mickey noticed that the bandaged hands resting atop the book on Michael’s lap—the title of the book was
The Pugilist at Rest
—were missing fingers and he thought of the thin man at the fire that night.
“How is your family, Michael?” asked Singh.
“Everybody’s great. Max’s birthday is tomorrow.”
“Well, we’ll have you out of here by the morning.”
Out in the hallway Mickey said, “Hey, uh, doc? Sonny? The plague? How can you keep him here?”
“Well, that’s the thing about the plague,” Singh said. “In some people it’s clearly contagious and remains so throughout the duration. That is, until the person expires. But we’ve seen others infected who haven’t been contagious, who live for remarkably long periods.”
“How long?”
“Well, take Michael back there. He had the plague when he arrived in Clavius City. We briefly quarantined him and determined he wasn’t contagious. And he’s been here, what Sonny? Six-seven months?”
“Yeah. Just to be clear with you guys, not everyone is happy with that.”
“What do you mean?” Mickey said.
“Look, me, the doctor here, we work with people like Michael on a daily basis. We’re in close personal contact with them. If they were contagious we would have been infected by now, right? But we’re not.”
“What about what you said to us inside there?” Mickey said. “How some people may be immune to getting it in the first place?”
“Too many of us work here for that to be the case,” the doctor shook his head. “Michael isn’t contagious.”
“We do have a vocal minority who don’t want anyone with the plague here,” added Sonny. “
Anyone
.”
“Well, is that a major issue?”
Sonny was about to address Mickey’s question when Singh put his hand on the other man’s arm. “You know, I’d like to show them something now.”
“Sounds good,” Sonny said.
Mickey and Bear followed Singh and Sonny down the hall towards the elevator.
“We try not to keep any secrets here,” Singh explained as he pressed the button for the elevator. “So, I want to be open with both of you. Before the outbreak, I was very active in college, and even in med school, as an animal rights activist.”
“PETA?” Mickey asked.
“A similar organization. I was out there on the picket lines, protesting the cosmetics industry, KFC, the things they do to animals. And I want to be clear with you both, I still believe in what we were fighting against, and
for
. So, what I’m going to show you downstairs—”
The elevator door opened with a
bing
.
“I’m not trying to sound unfriendly, doctor,” Bear spoke up for the first time in a while, “but we’re not getting on that elevator until you cut to the chase.”
“What Kip is getting at,” explained Sonny, “is that this is a joint military-medical facility, if that terms means anything. That’s part of the reason I’m here.”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” said Singh. “We’re experimenting here, on the zombies. Downstairs, I mean. That’s what I want to show you. But I wanted to warn you first, because some of what you might see, it can be disturbing.”
Sonny added, “And you’ve probably never encountered zombies in anything but a hostile environment, right? Their presence can be…startling.”
“They’re not running loose down there, are they?” asked Mickey.
“No, of course not,” assured Sonny. “They’re secured.”
Bear looked at Mickey and although he did not look happy he stepped on the elevator.
The doors opened two floors down. Singh and Sonny led Mickey and Bear down a short hall and introduced them to a female guard seated at a desk flipping through a magazine. They next entered a suit of large rooms. The first contained several desks and computer consoles and there were five or six men and women working at various stations.
Sonny introduced them to Mickey and Bear—“and this is Greg, and Hayden there is our I.T. tech—” but Bear had stepped forward to a large glass window that looked out onto the next room where three zombies were secured vertically to gurneys.
“…and those three,” finished Sonny, joining Bear at the window, “are Bill, Al, and Hilary. We’re trying to learn everything we can about them.”
“You named them?” asked Bear. “Like pets.”
“No, not like pets,” Singh said, as he and Mickey joined Bear and Sonny at the glass. The three zombies, which had been looking elsewhere, all looked up at the glass, causing Sonny to remark “Interesting.”
Singh finishing his thought, “We never want to forget as we experiment on them that they were human. They were us. And we could too easily become them. One bite, yes?”
“As strange as this is gonna sound,” Sonny said. “We don’t want to forget their…
humanity
I guess you’d say. So, no, we don’t name them to belittle them.”
“You don’t feed them, do you?”
“Of course not,” said Dr. Singh. “They’re zombies. They don’t need to eat. All they would eat is human flesh, and we’re not going to indulge that here.”
“They eat other animals too, right?” asked Bear.
“Yes, but as plentiful as everything might appear here, we can’t afford to sacrifice a deer or a cow for them. We have living human beings who need that protein.”
“Uh-huh,” Mickey said. “Bill, Al, and Hilary, huh? Someone with a Red State sense of humor around here.”
“We’re equal opportunity offenders,” Sonny said. “The last couple we worked on we called Ron and Nancy.”
“So, what have you learned from them?” Bear asked.
“For one thing,” Sonny said, “they track us with their sense of smell.”
“Smell, huh? They can smell humans?”
“No, they can smell
blood
,” Singh said. “If you have an open wound, they will find you. From miles away. It’s uncanny really. We don’t know how they do it.”
“I don’t get it,” Mickey said. “In so many ways, once a person turns into a zombie, they seem so…
dumb
? But…”
“But their olfactory sense is somehow heightened,” the doctor said. “Yes, we don’t
get it
from a scientific standpoint either, but we’re working on that.”
“Another thing about them?” Sonny said. “They won’t go near plague victims. Or the autistic.”
“They won’t go near the autistic?” Bear asked.
“I know,
strange
,” Singh said, “and again, we don’t know why.”
“What’s that about they’re not being attracted to plague victims?” Mickey asked.
“Once someone is infected,” Singh explained, “even before the plague is showing, zombies will not attack that person. A plague victim, like Michael upstairs, could freely move among a crowd of them. It’s quite remarkable actually.”
“Interesting,” Mickey said.
“Is this one-way glass?” Bear asked.