Aftermath (33 page)

They might have them barricaded as well, but he wouldn’t know that until he got down there. If it was impossible for him to pry the doors open, he would just have to find the hospital’s diesel generator and start pulling parts until it stopped working. He figured the best bet for finding the generator was either on the ground floor, or the basement level, if the hospital had one. In either case, it looked like he needed to go down.

Lee shut the flashlight off and replaced it in his pocket. He eased the door open an inch and peeked out through the crack. The curving hallway was clear. He stepped out and closed the door behind him, like he had every reason to be inside the janitor’s closet, and began making his way down the hallway. He searched the walls for placards indicating the direction of an emergency stairwell that might take him down to the bottom floor.

The hallway he walked in was on the outer wall of the hospital, which is where you usually find emergency stairwells, so it didn’t take him long to see the little black placard on the wall with a rudimentary picture of stairs, a flame, and an arrow pointing to a door.

Lee looked behind him to see if he was being followed, but the hall was deserted as far as he could see. The sounds of Milo’s men trying to get into the parking garage stairwell had grown muted and faraway.

He pushed through the door and into a dimly lit space. To his left, the stairs led down into darkness. The smell in the stairwell was dank, like an unfinished basement, but he didn’t detect anything foul. He flicked on his light and began moving down the levels, taking the stairs two at a time. His earlier guesstimation about which floor he was on turned out to be fairly accurate, as he only had to travel down four flights before reaching the ground level.

As with all emergency stairwells, the ground floor had an exit door that opened to the outside world. Lee pushed on the door but found that it would not budge. He played his light around the edges and discovered the sloppy chunks of soldering that bound the steel door to its metal frame. Someone had been in a rush to weld the damn thing shut.

“
It can never be easy,” Lee mumbled to himself.

Behind him, he found another door, this one leading into the hospital. It was unsecured. He opened it slightly and looked through to what appeared to be the main entrance to the hospital. The smell of the lobby eked through the open door, heavy and rich with decomposing flesh. Lee gagged but forced himself to stay in the door and keep surveying the room.

The place had clearly been a madhouse in the last hours before Smithfield fell apart. Muted daylight bathed the room, coming in through the bank of windows and sliding doors at the front. The room was wider than it was long, with white linoleum floors and heavy looking white pillars topped with green accents. Trash was scattered everywhere and shoved into corners to make narrow paths for gurneys to get through. The trash was a mix of food wrappers, bottles, and the sterile packaging of innumerable medical supplies. Directly across from Lee, a corner of the lobby was crowded with gurneys draped with white sheets. On several of them, the white sheets bulged into swollen, discolored mounds. Here and there a hand or foot poked out from underneath.

Lee watched, and the moment stretched. Nothing moved in the lobby, so he stepped out slowly, keeping his eyes trained on the front as he navigated around one of the large white pillars that blocked his view of the outside. When he could finally see around it, he froze. Fear mounted a comeback and seized the breath in his chest.

Outside the thin wall of sliding glass doors, just past the cement barricades and loops of concertina wire, the parking lot and the street beyond had been swallowed by the approach of hundreds upon hundreds of infected.

***

Doc stared at the dead man for a very long time.

His mouth was open in a scream that Doc couldn’t hear, staring back at him with eyes that Doc couldn’t see. The feeling that the dead man gave him was as raw and empty as the holes in his face that glistened darkly in the blood-red light. It was a ponderous, horrid feeling, but it was something that Doc had never felt before, and for that reason only, he could not take his eyes off the dead man. The feeling that wormed around in his gut, the feeling that he had never felt before was true, and pure. It was unadulterated hatred.

Eventually, Doc moved.

He leaned forward and got his legs underneath him. Then he staggered three steps so that he was looking over the dead man. Who was it? Some stranger. Some person. Another random event. Another act of violence. Another dead body.

He mustered what frothy spit he could in his dry mouth and let it fall from his pursed lips as he hung over the dead man. The white globule landed with a wet smack in the center of the dead man’s forehead. The glob seemed to wiggle, as all the tiny bubbles it was made of popped and dribbled down the man’s forehead and into the gaping wound of his left eye socket.

Doc knelt. For once in his life, his skin-and-bones build was a blessing. He was able to pull his hands around to his side, despite the duct tape that bound them. He went through the man’s pockets, found half of a granola bar wrapped in a napkin and a pocket knife.

Doc sat back, satisfied with his find, and opened the pocket knife, feeling his way through cutting at his bindings. His face was a mask of concentration as he focused and visualized his own hands behind his back, twisting and contorting his wrists to get the knife edge to the tape and begin to slowly saw back and forth. The process was long and particularly difficult with a missing finger, but after about five minutes of breathless focus, he freed himself.

He brought his hands to his front. Ripped the remaining bits of tape off his wrists, not wincing when they took his hair with them. He balled the tape up and tossed it to the side. He worked his shoulder and neck, trying to get some life back into the stiff joints. Then he inspected the pocket knife. It was about a three inch blade. Solid wood handle with brass fittings. He took the knife, blade up and made three quick stabbing motions with it.

He looked at the knife and nodded.

He leaned over to the dead man and took a breath, as though preparing himself. He put the tip of the blade against the dead man’s stomach, then seemed to reconsider and moved the point to the neck. Cringing slightly, he pushed the blade into the neck. He pulled the knife out and regarded the blade curiously. The silvery steel was marred only by a small smear of blood, near the base of the blade. He was familiar with the weird sensations that went along with putting a blade through flesh. Being a pre-med, he’d done some work on cadavers. But he’d never simply stabbed someone in the neck.

This was a new sensation.

Doc settled himself into position in front of the dead man and stabbed him in the neck again, three times in quick succession. When he was done, he took a moment of self evaluation, then finished with a firm nod and wiped the blade off on his pants and closed the knife. He folded his legs underneath him and picked up the granola bar. He regarded it unsurely, but unwrapped it, sniffed it, and did not find it offending. He ate the granola bar slowly, still watching the dead man lie there.

When he had finished the granola bar, he picked up the knife and opened it again, then he moved to the door and tested the handle. Captain Harden had left it unlocked. He opened it without regard for what was on the other side and stepped through. The hallway to his left was beginning to fill with people, but they paid him no mind. Their eyes and their fear was focused out the windows and down to the cement and barbed-wire barricades that encircled the hospital. Even Doc paused for a moment to stare down at the view. It was amazing and terrifying all at once.

Pushed tight against the barricades and stretching to either side, beyond Doc’s line of sight, a horde of infected scrambled spastically at the defenses. They climbed and clambered and tangled themselves in the wire, trying to get over. Trying to get to the hospital. In several places they had already choked the barbed wire defenses with so many bodies that they had managed to create more human bridges across, just like at the outer barricade. Like storm waters through a crack in the dyke, the encroaching horde was beginning to trickle through. There was so many of them, it was breathtaking in an almost awe-inspiring way. A bacteria, something smaller than the width of a hair, had brought humanity to its knees and had turned them all into a surging mass of lunatics.

Incredible.

He kept walking, down the hall, towards the nurses’ station.

Several of Milo’s men and a few of the survivors from the Smithfield group were crowded around the door to the stairwell. As he approached, he could hear a shouted conversation between two familiar voices the he eventually realized were Milo and Shumate.

Milo had a finger in Shumate’s face. “Tell me how to get the fuck outta this hospital!”

“
There’s only one way in,” Shumate looked scared, his voice a panicked whine. “We did that on purpose so we didn’t have to guard all the other entrances and exits.”

“
Well, what the fuck did you do to those exits?”

“
They’re all on the ground floor!”

“
And there’s no other way to get in the parking garage?”

Shumate’s face clouded with thought. “We might be able to jump across from the roof, but by the time we do, the parking garage is going to be full of them.” He pointed out the windows. “They’re breaking through already!”

Milo had had enough. He drew out his Bowie knife and grabbed Shumate by the collar, slipping the blade easily under his chin and growling so low that Doc almost couldn’t hear it. “This is your fucking fault. This was one of your fucking people that did this, because you’re weak, and you have no fucking control.”

Shumate’s terrified eyes were squeezed shut. “I didn’t know! I swear to God! It had to’ve been LaRouche! He’s had it out for me and you since this all started!”

At that point, Doc had lost interest in the conversation. He strode forward, heading for the big man with the goatee standing close behind Milo with his arms crossed. Big G. Didn’t Milo say that Big G was the last person with Nicole? Yes. Doc believed those were his words.

He pushed through the crowd, and for some reason, no one stopped him. Maybe because they didn’t recognize him, maybe because they just didn’t expect it coming from Doc because he had always been such a puppet for Milo that they simply couldn’t wrap their brains around him doing something Milo wouldn’t approve of. Whatever the reason, they moved out of his way when he nudged them aside and strode up, just to the right-hand side of Big G.

Big G must have felt the burning stare, or perhaps noticed the movement out of the corner of his eye, but he managed to turn his head just as Doc reached him and he uttered a weak syllable of surprise before Doc plunged the pocket knife into his throat.

It was odd how everyone stood around and did nothing.

Like they couldn’t believe this was actually happening. Big G. The mighty giant, slain by Doc, the weakling. Surely Big G was just going to toss Doc off of him and beat him to a pulp. They all just watched and waited in those brief few seconds as though it were some sort of stage play put on for their amusement.

But it was not a play.

Doc felt the crunch of all the little bones and cartilage in Big G’s throat as the blade slipped into his larynx. The man’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened and emitted a strange, raspy shout that turned into a gurgle as blood welled up in his throat. Doc held the back of Big G’s neck as he kept the blade pressed firmly inside of him. Big G’s hands scrambled about, first going to his throat, then trying to shove Doc off of him but they were panicked and ineffective. Doc stared into his eyes, his skinny arms corded tight by manic strength, a grimace of pure hatred on his face.

“
Where’s my Nicole?” Doc whispered.

Big G sank to his knees and there was a collective gasp from the men that crowded around. It was in that moment that Milo seemed to realized something else was happening behind his back and turned to find Doc, the skinny, cowardly pre-med student grinning down at a man twice his size that kneeled on the ground with blood pouring from his mouth.

Even Milo was too shocked to move for a moment.

“
Where’s my Nicole?” Doc’s voice grew to a bellow. “She was mine! She was mine!”

The shout seemed to jar Milo into movement. He released Shumate and sprang for Doc’s slender frame, plunging the Bowie knife into the man’s back, all the way up to the hilt, nearly running him through.

The only reaction that Doc gave was to pull the knife from Big G’s neck and begin repeatedly stabbing him in the same spot, screaming as he did. It was not pain that wrenched that sound from him but a purity of rage that weakened the knees of everyone still standing there. It made even a psychopath like Milo feel a cold, dead slab of fear land in his gut, the same fear that grips the heart of a man whose first bullet does not down the charging bear as he had expected.

It was panic that made Milo pull his Bowie knife out and stab again and again into Doc’s back, but it was as though Doc had completely disconnected from his body. The entirety of his mind was focused on Big G, who was nearly dead even at that point in time, and he just kept sticking that pocket knife into his neck until the heavy body fell backwards, taking Doc down with it.

Milo took a step back, his eyes wide, his teeth bared.