War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (19 page)

“That’s sick,” Jack said. Her movements were so robotic that it was hypnotic. “That’s just so sick.” He stepped to the right just as she came within arm’s reach, dodging her easily.

Then the third one was on them; it went for Earl lunging at him with both hands extended. Earl tried to throw the crazed man off him but was surprised to find he wasn’t strong enough. The two went down in a heap and struggled in an unearthly quiet.

“Earl!” Jack cried, rushing up and kicking the patient in the side. Jack wasn’t a small man and the kick should have broken ribs, only the patient didn’t even seem to notice. With his taser spent, Jack had no other weapon and so he kicked the patient again and again and again until the man finally looked up from what he had been doing to Earl.

There was so much blood. It ran down the patient’s chin as though he had been lapping it up out of a bucket like a dog. Earl was dead, his throat had been torn out in seconds.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Jack said, backing away, his eyes like lamps staring at the body of his friend. The woman he’d tasered came at him, still very slowly. Jack hauled off and punched her in the mouth. The blow rocked her head back and cut his knuckles, but was otherwise without effect. She grabbed at his coat, fouling the navy blue uniform with her diseased hands.

When the man who’d killed Earl got up, his mouth dripping red juices veined with black, Jack ran. He sped for the front door, fingering the keys as he ran. Behind him the south stair opened up, causing the crazed creatures to turn away and giving him the seconds needed to find the right key. Then he was outside and sprinting madly for the employee lot where he’d parked his Mustang.

As he climbed in, the first rain dotted his windshield. It went unnoticed as he gunned the car toward the gates, leaving steaming rubber in his wake. The gate guards stepped in front of the speeding Mustang; Jack frantically tried to wave them away but they wouldn’t move and he was forced to slam on the brakes.

“Get out of the way, damn it! All hell has broken out in the hospital. The disease…” Jack paused as his mind brought up the image of the crazed man’s mouth, there had been flesh in his teeth. “Earl is dead and Deck is trapped on the top floor. The quarantine has failed and now they’re running amok.”

“What kind of disease is it?” one of the guards asked.

“It’s turning them into cannibals,” Jack answered, speaking so quickly his words ran over themselves. “Earl had his throat ripped out. We tried tasing them but they just walked right through it.”

“Where are you going?” the second gate-guard asked, first eyeing the Mustang and then the hospital.

“I don’t know. Somewhere away,” Jack said. “Whatever they have, it’s contagious…they leak black stuff out of their eyes and it’s making them crazy! I don’t want that to happen to me. You guys should get out of here, too.”

“I’m staying,” one said.

The other barely gave it any thought. “And fight them with what? We don’t have guns for fuck’s sake. I’m not staying. They don’t pay me enough to get some disease.” He climbed into the Mustang and wouldn’t look the other gate guard in the eye.

“But our posts,” the first said.

“This isn’t the fucking army!” Jack cried before taking a look back at the hospital. He could see a number of the patients walking around. Remembering the inhuman way they moved gave him the shivers. “Stay if you want. Be a hero for fourteen dollars an hour.”

The guard changed his mind a second later. He opened the gates and then climbed in next to Jack. The three of them couldn’t think of anything better to do but to drive the half-hour to Poughkeepsie to find their friends and tell them what had happened. Jack decided against mentioning that he’d been touched by one of
them
. He had a pretty good guess what would happen if he did. Instead, between shots of tequila, he told the other guards that he had run back to the desk to get his keys and when he turned around he saw Earl being swarmed.

“There was nothing I could do,” Jack said, finishing in a whisper. By the third re-telling, the number of infected patients attacking Earl had jumped to ten. Jack wore a grimace as he spoke—his head had begun to ache. He prayed to God it was just the stress getting to him.

More alcohol helped, and when both the gate-guards began to complain of headaches also, Jack kept the denial going by ordering each of them a bottle.

On the fourth floor of the Walton facility twenty three people were fighting a losing battle keeping the barricades in place. There was simply not enough furniture in the labs. Thuy had been particularly proud of the sleek, modern look that deemphasized clutter, however now there just wasn’t enough heavy material to block-up the stairwells properly. They would throw a table down the stairs and a minute later the infected people would pull it further down the stairwell. Had there been just a single door to defend this might have gone on for many hours, resulting in a draw, instead there were three stairwells they had to barricade.

The scientists were so hard-pressed keeping their pathetic defenses from being breached that the telephone went ignored and three calls from the CDC went to voice mail.

On the third floor there were only six people left alive after the massacre. They were huddled in a side room of the radiology department where PET scans were performed. They were deathly afraid to make any noise. If they spoke, which was very rarely, it was in whispers. They cried in silence and mourned in silence and shook in fear in silence. The little group had no plan but to sit there as quietly as possible and not die.

Eventually, they decided to risk calling the police. “Help,” Dr. Hester breathed into the phone after dialing 9-1-1.

“What is the nature of your emergency?” a bored voice asked.

Even the tinny, little voice coming from the phone seemed too loud and the others silently begged Dr. Hester to hang up. He said one more word, “Zombies,” before hanging up. To him it was a very legitimate word. He could think of no better way to describe what the patients had turned into—they fit every criterion he could think of: they were unstoppable, mindless, cannibals who looked like they had been spawned in hell.

Unfortunately the word “Zombie” was not legitimate in the eyes of the police. The dispatcher turned to the girl sitting next to her and said, “Get this, Courtney. Some guy just called and when I ask him the nature of his emergency, he says zombies!”

“He didn’t!” Courtney Shaw practically yelled.

“He did. It was all in a whisper, too, like zombies have super-hearing.”

“I bet it was a kid pranking you. I’d flag the number or they’ll keep calling. Remember the dude who kept calling to say an alien was probing him? Lieutenant Pemberton bitched up a storm when I finally sent a trooper to check it out.”

Back at the hospital, on the second floor, Von Braun wiped at his eyes and tried again to make sense of the writing on the little IV bag. Everything was so small and blurry and the lettering only confused his swirling mind and made him, if it was possible, even angrier. Without warning, he punched a hole in the wall next to him and then tore down part of the plastic curtain around the nurse’s station.

“It doesn’t matter,” Herman hissed. “We know where the cure is. We just have to get it.”

“Yes it does matter, you stupid fuck,” Von Braun said, grabbing the sides of his head and crushing his hands inward, trying to smother the fire of hate that was beginning to interfere with his ability to think on a second grade level. “If I can’t think straight, how will I know what is the cure and what is a bottle of piss?”

“I don’t care if you find it or not,” Herman said. “I like being like this.” He’d been in prison for tax evasion though that was only because the prosecutor couldn’t get enough evidence to make the pedophile charges stick. He’d been certain that Herman was guilty, and he’d been right. Herman, a short, fat, hairy little perv, liked to feel powerful and the only time he ever had was when he was around little children.

Except he was feeling exceptionally powerful just at that moment. He felt he could do anything he wanted without any fear of the consequences, and just then he really wanted to hurt someone. He wandered away from Von Braun. He knew where people were. They were trapped upstairs.

Von Braun didn’t notice him leave. His Diazepam drip had run out a few minutes before and his mind was regressing quickly. “It starts with a 'D' I know that,” he said. He also knew the IV bags were small. It narrowed his choices to one. After a five-minute struggle as his hands and brain fought against each other, he finally got the new bag in place. The calming effects of the drug were immediate.

“Yes,” he whispered, enjoying the peace in his mind. He still wanted to kill and he still knew that “they” had done something to him, something that called for revenge, and he still felt dirty on the inside, but at least he could think. “The cops will be coming. I need a gun.”

He had a vague memory of a nurse with a gun; he went in search of it.

One floor down the “authorities” finally arrived. Vince Oldham and his two EIS officers parked the CDC van directly in front of the building. “Full gear?” Damon asked. He’d been an
Epidemic Intelligence Services
officer for only three months and the training videos were fresh enough in his mind that he still asked about going full on, every time out.

“I think so,” Vince said. He liked to gear-up. Without the bio-suit, people only saw him as nothing more than an over-bearing, officious bureaucrat. The suit, whether it was needed or not, lent him an air of urgency and it did quite a number on the psyche of people. The biggest corporate bully was always a bit more circumspect when Vince came in suited up.

Too bad the CDC suits were canary yellow. He had pleaded with his superiors for them to be changed out to black—for recruiting purposes—he had argued, but had been shot down.

The three of them began gearing up: full bio-suit, rubber boots and gloves, goggles, and the P-100 filtered mask. Before he put the mask in place, Vince tried to call Dr. Lee one last time. It was a courtesy he extended to her simply because he’d looked her up after the initial call and thought she was smoking hot. Normally, he would march right in, hoping to catch the offending company desperately trying to clean up whatever mess they’d made.

“Went to voice mail again,” he said

“What about trying the state troopers one more time?” Peggy asked. He’d called an hour earlier to check on the run-away situation only to sit on hold for fifteen minutes. Eventually some tired sounding dispatcher had come back on to tell him that they hadn’t found anyone matching John Burke's description.

“I’ll call the state police after our initial run through,” Vince told her, noting that the rain was really starting to come down. Who knew what it would be like after another lengthy stint on hold? “Burke’s probably holed up somewhere, safe as a bug in a rug.”

Vince wasn’t close in his assessment. John was four floors up, trying to cut a length of carpet in two using only a scalpel. He and Chuck Singleton were rolling up the flooring and using it to stuff the cracks that kept opening up in their barricade—they had run out of furniture and were getting desperate. The zombies were tireless in their attack.

“Let’s do this,” Vince said. He opened the van door, stepped out and shouldered his pack. They went to the front entrance and noted that the door was unlocked. “First violation,” he remarked.

“Second violation,” Peggy said as they stepped in. No one had put tape over the elevator or the stairwell entrance. The three of them were so absorbed with picking at the breaches in the hazmat code that none of them saw the body of Earl Johnston lying behind the waiting room chairs.

“What’s that banging?” Damon asked. A great deal of thumping and crashes were coming from somewhere down the north hall. As there was no one around to escort them, they decided to follow the noise. They passed through a right-angled field of cubicles and found a small group of people hammering on a door with their fists.

Peggy and Damon turned with a rustle of plastic to share a look that each interpreted as:
What the fuck?

Vince raised his hands and said: “Excuse me! What’s going on here?”

The group turned as a unit. There were nine of them and Vince saw right away that seven of the nine were in bad shape. They were leaking what looked like old blood from every orifice; their eyes being especially affected.

“Is that hemorrhagic fever?” Damon asked, taking an involuntary step back.

“I really doubt it,” Vince answered. “If it is then it’s awfully advanced, and these people seem too energetic to be in such a late stage.” The
victims,
as the three CDC agents saw them were staring, turning their heads this way and that as if they, too, were trying to make sense of what they were seeing.

“Thank God we wore the suits,” Peggy said. “We…we should call in some back up. This is bigger than just Fusarium.”

Vince had to agree. “We will, but first we have to see what we’re dealing with. We have to get a handle on the scope of the situation.” He stepped forward, hands out in a calming gesture. “Hi. We’re from the CDC. We’re here to get you people some help, but first, can any of you tell me where I can find Dr. Lee?”

One of them, the man that used to be Mr. Mumford, shambled forward. Vince saw the fresh, red blood that ran all down his chin and assumed it was part of the disease. “Hi,” Vince said, this time nervously. Mumford reacted to the sound of his voice and stood on his toes trying to see into the tiny plastic window. They locked eyes. “Yes, I’m trying to find Dr. Lee. She’s the head of…”