Dead, but Not for Long (25 page)

“Anyone in there we might be surprising? Maid? Assistants?” Snake asked.

“No,” Doune said. “I don’t allow anybody in the
building when I am not here to supervise. Secrets can be stolen, mistakes can be made.”

The lab had an apartment upstairs where he stayed
almost as often as he did at his home, a huge place a few miles outside of
town. He wondered briefly if his wife had survived. Their house was not in a
populated area and it did have a fence around it, so she might have made it.
Then again, the woman seemed to spend most of her time shopping, so the odds
were good that she had been in the city when disaster had struck. If she were
alive and at home, they had a basement full of food and a pool full of water
outside. She could get by for a while, though he would probably have to check
on her eventually. Odds were likely that she was dead and that thought didn’t
bother him as much as it should have. He’d never loved her. He had simply
needed a wife to bring along to functions and to run the household while he
worked. She had wanted a man that could support her shopping habits, so they
had both gotten their wishes. Still, he knew that others would expect him to
worry about her.

“I was hoping that I might see my wife’s car here,”
he said with a forced sigh. “This place is more secure than our home and she
knows it. I haven’t been able to reach her by phone.”

There was something insincere in the doctor’s voice.
Snake was surprised to hear that the man was married. He pegged the doctor as
someone who was not only hard to get along with, but also someone who didn’t
have the time to nurture a marriage, at least a successful one. He rubbed his
beard in thought. “If your place isn’t far, maybe we could take a side trip and
see if she’s there.” He was sure Dr. Doune would find an excuse to decline his
offer, but he had to ask, anyway.

The offer caught Nick off-guard. The last thing he
wanted to do was to risk his life and his equipment to go rescue his wife. If
she had somehow managed to stay alive, he certainly didn’t need to have her
running around the hospital making demands of him. All these thoughts rushed
through his mind in a matter of seconds. He pretended to be considering it
before finally shaking his head.

“It’s five miles outside of town,” he said. “She
just might be safer there than we’ll be in the city. We maintain a sufficient
supply of food and water at the house, too.”

“Suit yourself,” Snake shrugged, not surprised by the doctor’s answer.

Once they were through the gate, it closed again,
and Nick looked back to make sure that none of the infected had followed.

“There is a service bay over there,” he pointed to a
driveway that led back behind the building. Once they rounded the corner, he said,
“If we back the truck up to that door, we can easily load the equipment.”

Snake backed into the service bay and his men jumped off the truck.

“Careful with his stuff,” Snake advised his men. “Dr.
Doom here just may end up being the only thing between us and some severe jungle rot.”

Doune used the key pad to unlock an entry door
outside the loading bay. Once he went inside and raised the roll-up door to the
loading dock, he went to an inner door that required him to key in a different
set of numbers. He was glad to see that everything in the lab seemed to be
untouched, though he wasn’t surprised since the gate outside had obviously not
been breached. He showed the men the large, fairly sturdy pieces of equipment
that they could take first. While they set to work on their task, he wrapped
padding around a few of the fragile pieces and began to box up the smaller
equipment along with his personal computer and the hard drives from some of the
others. It would have been easier to do research at the lab, but the building
probably wasn’t as safe as the hospital and there was also the issue of
collecting subjects to study. That was something he didn’t want to do himself.

It was a shame that the microscopes had been
destroyed at the hospital, but even if they hadn’t been broken, they were old
and inadequate for the research he was doing. Had he been working at one of the
larger hospitals he would have probably had access to a state-of-the-art lab.
Unfortunately, he had done his time at the larger hospitals and it hadn’t
worked out well. There was too much scrutiny and too much red tape. St. Mary’s
was a small hospital and Doune helped to bring in money. Well-known in the
world of brain surgery, he had no problems getting donations for the hospital
as long as he wasn’t the one asking for it, since his bedside manner left
something to be desired. He was often asked to come to the fundraisers but he wasn’t
allowed to say much, which suited him just fine. He felt it ridiculous that he
should have to waste his valuable time begging for money, but that was the way
the game was played. He donated his hour or two to the tedious fundraisers and
brought in money to the hospital, enabling him to continue his research without
much interference. Had it not worked that way, he never would have bothered with such a small hospital.

Snake started loading boxes, making sure that his
men were being careful. The linens proved useful for buffering and the
equipment was tightly packed together. If they had to plow through more of the
dead on the way back and the ride got bumpy, the equipment would need to
survive. Snake was sure that if Dr. Doune had to choose between the bikers and
the equipment, Snake’s men didn’t have a chance. Still, he couldn’t think of
anyone more up to the task than the doctor.

Snake looked into the sky. It looked surreal. The
smoke from the fires had painted it a reddish brown and seemed to mingle with
the tiny droplets of rain that fell to the ground and gathered into serpentine
streams of rust. Snake thought about the passage in the Book of Revelations
where it was foretold that, in the end days, the waters would turn to blood. He
wondered if biblical prophecy was being fulfilled before his eyes; if this was
the beginning of the end.

Nick had noticed the color of the sky, too, but not
in a philosophical way. His first thoughts were to analyze the color and try to
determine what, exactly, they were breathing. The fires could become a problem
if they were to spread. Not only did they have to worry about the flames and
smoke reaching the hospital, but there were chemical plants in the area. The
air could quickly turn deadly if the plants were to catch fire. He closed his
eyes and sniffed the air. Plastic, he thought, and human flesh. There were
other scents that he couldn’t quite discern, but he didn’t want to take any
chances. He grabbed an almost-full box of N95 respirator masks that he kept on
hand. They wouldn’t help much, but they were better than nothing. As he looked
at the sky again, he began to wonder if the hospital might turn out to be a
death trap. It was something to discuss with the others but for the moment, it
would have to do.

“I haven’t seen anybody change yet,” Nick told Snake
as they were loading the last few items. “What can you tell me about it? From
what I’ve heard, those who are infected get sick first and eventually appear to
die. If this is the case, we should have time to secure them to a bed or a
gurney when they begin to reach a danger point. I don’t want to take any
chances.”

“I couldn’t tell you exactly how long it takes,” Snake
remembered, “but I saw a couple guys at the shelter turn. It started with
flu-like symptoms and it progressed pretty fast. When we took them to the ER,
nobody could figure out what was wrong with them. Nothing showed up on the
blood tests, but remember, we brought these guys from the shelter and they
weren’t insured, so the tests weren’t exactly exhaustive, just the bare
minimum. We took them back to the shelter and they seemed to sleep a lot. A
lady who checked on them noticed that one wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t find a
pulse, so we did CPR. Mouse gave him mouth-to-mouth and I did the chest
compressions but nothing worked. Then the other one stopped breathing and the
ambulance still hadn’t arrived, so we called again. Half an hour later, when
the paramedics finally got there, both of the guys had already woken up and had
gone insane; like rabies. They just attacked everyone they could. The people
that were killed by these goons seemed to reanimate shortly after they died.”
Snake stroked his beard as if he were deep in thought.

“Doc, I saw someone torn in half, literally, and a few minutes later, he started trying to attack
people. I was a medic. Believe me, I know live from dead. These people were
dead. It seems to be transferred by body fluids, mainly saliva . . . oh crap.”

Snake hit his head on his fists. “Mouse gave that
guy mouth to mouth. Do you think he could be infected?”

Nick considered the question. “It might require an
entrance into the bloodstream, so a cut in the other person’s mouth could
possibly allow introduction of a contagion. Perhaps someone should keep an eye
on your friend until we learn more about this.”

Snake grunted in agreement, almost sorry he had said
anything to the doctor. He didn’t want to see any of his guys restrained
needlessly.

“Well, Doc, if you’ve got everything, I think we
need to get going,” Snake said, knowing that they’d been making a lot of noise,
which had probably attracted all the dead within hearing distance.

Doune walked through the lab one last time then
turned off the generator. The gates and alarms were on a separate system and
would not be affected. He pulled the metal bay door down with a loud clang
before locking up and arming the alarms.

“Looks like we’ve got company,” one of the bikers
said, noticing several of the undead gathered beyond the wall.

Snake looked at the crowd behind the gate.

“No sense in letting them in,” he said. “We’ll just
pick them off and open the gate. It may be a bumpy ride, though.”

Snake caught movement out of the corner of his eye.
One of his men had jumped off of the truck and was running toward the wall.

Snake yelled up to the others. “What the hell is he doing?”

“He said he’s going to distract them so you can get
through clear,” said a voice from the top of the truck.

The man ran to the wall, leaping as he came within a
few feet of it, and barely caught the top with his fingers. After pulling
himself up, he started waving and shouting at the creatures. Snake watched as
the undead slowly started to leave the gate and work their way toward the man.

“That wasn’t worth the risk but I guess it’s
working,” Snake admitted as they approached the abandoned gate. “Would you
believe we call him Monkey?” Snake smiled, trying to get a reaction from the Doctor.

“Why am I not surprised?” Doune asked, dryly. He
shook his head as he watched the man, wondering if he acted so impulsively all
the time. Perhaps he was just so sure of himself that he didn’t believe that it
was that much of a risk. If his actions enabled them to get the truck out and
close the gate without letting any of the infected in, Doune would be grateful.
It was good to know they might be able to use the lab if they had to leave the
hospital, though it wouldn’t accommodate many. If things got to that point,
Doune would have to decide who would be allowed to come with him. They would
have to be useful to him, of course.

Snake drew his attention to Monkey. Earning his
nick name, Monkey jumped from the wall onto a tree in the neighboring property.
The creatures were slowly enticed away from Doune’s gate toward the adjoining lot,
which housed a run-down commercial building surrounded by a scattering of
trees. The trees were thicker at the rear of the lot and it was hard to tell how far back it went.

Monkey taunted the zombies from his perch in the
tree, bouncing on a limb while shouting and waving his arms. The dead followed
a cyclone fence that stretched across the front of the property, clawing at the
air as Monkey continued his taunt.

As soon as it was clear, Snake opened Doune's gate
and drove out, pushing the button to close it again before any of the dead wandered back.

Satisfied with the results, Monkey began to climb
back across a thick limb of the tree. He was halfway to the block wall that
divided the two properties when the branch snapped.

Monkey hit the ground hard and it showed on his face. He went to stand, but crumpled to the ground when he tried to put
pressure on his right leg.

As some of the men jumped down off the truck to see if they could help, Snake quickly scanned the area, trying to figure out a way
to get to his friend. The only gate was about three feet wide and padlocked from the inside. There was a
small retaining wall supporting the cyclone fence, so driving through it to
perform a rescue was out of the question.

“Is there another way to get onto the property?” Snake asked Doune.

“The delivery trucks usually go around the back,”
Doune said. “There’s a wider gate and the owner doesn’t always lock it since
it’s hidden from sight by the trees.”

Some of the zombies that had been intent on getting at Monkey through the wire fence now turned
toward the bikers at the truck with a renewed interest.

“Guess we'll have to go find that gate.” Snake sighed. “Hang
tight there, Buddy,” he called to Monkey. “We're coming around back.”

Monkey tried to crack a smile through his painful grimace but his expression changed
as his head turned toward the trees at the back of the property.

Snake had only driven a few feet when he saw the
look on Monkey’s face and it gave him a sick feeling. His heart sunk into his
chest as the dead swarmed out of the trees and began to surround the injured biker.

~*^*~

The truck slammed to a halt, making Doune cringe.

Snake jumped out and some of the men on top of the
truck quickly climbed down to join him. They opened up with a volley of shots
that dropped some of the dead on both sides of the fence. The shooters still on
top of the truck concentrated on the swarm surrounding Monkey, but for every
one that was shot, two more staggered from the forest to take its place.