Dead, but Not for Long (35 page)

“We couldn’t find any paint to put an “S” on the
roof, like you said we should do, but I guess it doesn’t matter now anyway,” Shanelle
said with a sigh. “Besides, there was already a red cross up there, so maybe
they knew we needed medical help. One of the guys was up there earlier, waving
a sheet around, and he thinks that they might have seen him.”

Something about the statement nagged at the back
of Keith’s mind as they continued to talk. When he heard jets, he went to look out a window.

Shanelle screamed and it sounded to Keith like she had dropped her phone.

“Shanelle?” Clouds of smoke began to fill the sky.

“I-I’m here,” she said after picking the phone up
again. “Keith, they’re bombing buildings right around us!”

Keith closed his eyes for a moment, feeling helpless.

“Hang on, baby, don’t panic. They’re just supposed
to take out the buildings that are overrun,” Keith said. “You should be all right.”

The nagging feeling grew stronger and he
hesitated, wondering what it was that he was missing. The answer hit Keith
suddenly and he felt his blood run cold.

“Shanelle, get under a table or something,” he said,
trying to remain calm. “Hurry.”

Depending on the angle, the sign on the roof might
well have looked like a red cross and who wouldn’t think that it meant that aid
was needed? But Keith knew otherwise. He remembered standing on the roof
earlier and seeing the red Xs on the buildings that were totally infested.

“I’m under the table,” she said after a short
pause. “Keith, you don’t think that . . .”

She was cut off.

“Shanelle!” Keith yelled into the phone.

Moments later, he heard the next group of bombs hit.

~*^*~

It took another two hours for Snake and his crew to
finish getting everything they needed. They even managed to fill the empty tank
in the back of the truck with diesel fuel and cover it for the ride home. The
whole time, bombs were falling on the city. It was almost dusk by the time they
returned but the sky was already dark with dust and debris. Several of the men
were coughing as they got off their bikes.

Snake was pleased to see that the wall appeared to
be finished. He got out and approached a man in a surgical mask who was
dragging a body to a growing pile of dead undead.

“We’ve been trying to keep the parking lot clear
for you, Boss,” the biker said, after pulling down his mask. “Hasn’t been easy.”

Snake yawned and stretched his arms. “We brought something back that might help.”

“What’s that?”

“A gate. We’ll just need to be able to keep the area clear long enough to install it.”

“The wall of cars helped. We just had to move a few of them so you could get back in.
We can move them back when it’s time to start on the gate.”

Moose walked over and Snake talked to him about the gate.

"You know, Boss, the grout in these pilasters isn't going to be totally cured for a month.
Better not hang these gates yet."

Snake slowly turned and glared at Moose.

"But, we should be able to hang them in a day," Moose said, backing up, "if we're careful."

“How about tomorrow morning?” Snake asked.

Moose thought about it and said, “I guess that’ll be okay.”

“I’ll talk to Gunner about starting first thing in the morning,” Snake said, stifling a yawn.

Helga looked disappointed when she got off her bike and looked around. Her eyes lit up when she saw a lone ghoul heading their
way. She made quick work of it with her crowbar then looked around to see if there were any more.

“I think I’ll go check in with Dr. Doune and see
how Autumn is doing,” Lindsey said after helping to unload the truck.

“Alright, Sweetheart,” Snake said, giving her a
wink. “You have fun with Dr. Doom and I’m going to grab some grub then get some
sleep. Wake me up if anything interesting happens.”

Lindsey shot him a look and mouthed the word, “coward.”

“You’ll need to clean those arrows and the quiver,”
Wombat told Lindsey, leading the way to a corner of the room where the others
were disinfecting their weapons with bleach. “You wouldn’t want to scratch
yourself with an arrow that’s got infected blood on it.”

“No, that would pretty much ruin my whole day,”
Lindsey agreed. She’d wiped the blood and gore from the arrows onto the clothes
of the dead but she realized that probably wasn’t enough.

“We weren’t even sure if the bleach would kill the
virus,” the biker added, “but Dr. Doune did some testing once he got his
microscope and he thinks that it works.”

When they were finished with the arrows, Wombat took
the quiver over to a mop bucket full of bleach and water. From the water, he
pulled something out that looked like a miniature mop, made from a wire coat
hanger and a rag. He swabbed out the inside of Lindsey’s quiver as well as his
own sheath and set them out to dry on some newspaper.

“Now we have to get checked before going into quarantine,” he said.

They walked over to one of the guards and Wombat
pulled up his leather pant legs as far as he could to let the guard look for bites. When Lindsey
did the same with her jeans, the guard took an extra long time to look over her
legs, causing Wombat to slap him on the head.

“Hey! I’m just doing my job,” the man said, rubbing his head.

“Yeah, well, you’re doing it too well, Mate,”
Wombat said, taking off his leather jacket and long-sleeved shirt. He turned
around so that his arms and torso could be checked.

“Um, wait a minute,” Lindsey said.

“Don’t worry,” Wombat grinned at her. “They just
need to see your arms and make sure there aren’t any rips in your shirt.”

When they were deemed free from bites, Lindsey
asked, “Can I skip quarantine if I stay in the lab?”

“Sure, as long as Dr. Doune is there to keep an
eye on you,” Wombat said, taking off the bandana he always wore when they were
around the infected. His hair was almost shoulder length and would be easy to
grab if he didn’t keep it tucked safely away.

“Great,” Lindsey said, having no desire to spend a
couple of hours in the ER. They’d been fairly relaxed about the rules though
there was some talk of changing that since the infected infant had been brought in.

“Good job today, by the way,” Wombat said to her. “You’re
pretty good with that crossbow. You’d be a good addition to the team if you
decide to stick around.”

She gave him a smile but said, “You know, I haven’t
even decided yet, but if I do, I’d love to keep helping with the supply runs if
Snake will let me. It was the most excitement I’ve had in a long time.”

Wombat laughed and squeezed her shoulder briefly
before heading to the ER to find a place to sleep for a couple of hours.

Theresa heard that the group was back and had
meals brought to them, along with coffee and homemade pie. Once Snake was done
eating, he made his way to a small room adjacent to the ER waiting room. It had
once been a Physicians’ lounge, complete with a coffee maker, a small fridge,
and a couch that looked extremely comfortable to Snake. He fell face first into
it and started to drift off.

~*~

“Can’t you find something for Eric to do?” Dr.
Sharma asked Jack, exasperated. They stood outside of the closed door of the patient
room where Cheri and her children were staying. “Cheri doesn’t want him around
and he just won’t listen to me. He’s come here to her room a dozen times today
alone.”

“I’ll talk to him again,” Jack said.

Moments later, Eric peeked around the corner then ducked away quickly when he saw them both looking his way.

“There he is again. That’s the third time in the last twenty minutes or so. There must be something we can do to keep him
busy,” Dr. Sharma said. “He has tried to sneak in, dressed as a CNA.
He has tried telling me that he is there to see her on official security business.
It is almost comical, except that he is hindering the poor woman’s recovery.”

Jack sighed. “Snake said he had to stop the other
bikers from throwing him out a window. I’m not sure if he was serious, but I
don’t want to take that chance so I can’t have him in the Crow’s Nest or doing
guard duty. I had him helping to do repairs and maintenance but he broke more
things than he fixed. Let me ask around a bit more and see if anybody needs his help.”

Dr. Sharma thanked him and opened the door to
check on her patient. Jon and Marie were taking turns reading a book to their
mother, who was at least making an attempt to act interested. Cheri had made
some serious progress and Dr. Sharma wasn’t about to let Eric ruin it.

~*~

Lindsey walked into the lab and noticed that
Harold was gone, but there was a jar on one of the counters. When she stepped
closer, she could see that it was a brain – Dr. Winston’s, no doubt. She turned
to leave, almost bumping into Doune and Autumn who were returning from dinner. Before
Lindsey could say a word, there were sounds of yet another confrontation coming from the ER.

~*~

Snake had just entered a deep sleep when he was shaken awake by Mouse.

“Boss!” the small biker whispered so loudly that
he may as well have shouted. “Helga’s been bitten and she won’t go into quarantine.”

Snake sat up and looked at his nervous friend. Rubbing his eyes,
he mumbled through his fingers, “This had better be a nightmare.”

Snake entered the ER to a scene of chaos. Dr. Martinez was trying to reason with Helga, who was not cooperating.

“It was not one of those dead things!” Helga yelled.

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Martinez said. “Why
would some random person come up and bite you?”

“We were fighting over the last bottle of whiskey,”
Helga said. “It happens to me all the time.”

“Right,” the doctor said.

Helga erupted into a vulgar string of Ukrainian
and Dr. Martinez was glad he didn’t understand what she had said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “Even if it
seemed like a normal person to you, the man may have been bitten himself and he
could have passed the virus on to you. We don’t know enough about this disease
to take any risks.”

Helga towered over the doctor, her lip curling up
into a sneer. “You want me locked up? You better be able to put me there.”

Grabbing the metal tray from one of the bed sides,
Snake slowly crept behind Helga. While she was preoccupied slandering the
doctor in her native tongue, Snake carefully lifted the tray above her and
slammed it into her head. The tray bent around her head like a sombrero and
fell to the floor. To Snake’s horror, Helga didn’t follow it to the ground.
Instead, she slowly turned around and stared at him with narrowing eyes. He
hadn’t seen that look since he had entered her mother in the local dog show.

“Not nice,” Helga said, taking a step toward
Snake. “You should know better. You want to hit me, you better hit me hard
enough to knock me out.”

She pulled her arm back for a punch but stopped
when she felt a sharp pain in her shoulder.

Snake closed his eyes and braced himself for Helga’s
wrath, but the punch never came.

Standing behind her, Dr. Doune released the
plunger on the syringe and then pulled it out, stepping away from the woman.

Helga growled at the doctor and took two steps
before her eyes closed and she began to sway. Dr. Martinez tried to catch her
but she landed on him, pinning him to the ground.

Snake opened his eyes in time to see Helga falling
on the wide-eyed doctor. The sight reminded him of a Hindu goddess as she
appeared to have four arms.

“Somebody get her off of me!” the doctor squeaked, unable to breathe.

Snake went to pull her off but hesitated when he
saw her finger twitch. “Are . . . are you sure she’s out?” he asked Doune.

Dr. Doune looked down and nodded. “She’s out. I
gave her my own special
cocktail
and it’ll keep her out for a while.”
His concoction was highly illegal but he doubted that anybody was going to arrest him for it.

A couple of the bikers struggled to lift Helga off
of the doctor then half-dragged her to a gurney.

“You’ll need to strap her down,” Doune said. “I
would recommend using the four point restraints. I doubt that she’ll be in a
good mood when she wakes.”

The other doctor lay on the floor for a moment,
gasping for breath before he finally managed to get to his feet.

“You know,” Snake said to Martinez, “the only
respectful thing you can do after that is to marry her.”

“Marry her?” the young doctor said, paling. He
glanced over at the woman and shuddered. She wasn’t bad looking except for the
unibrow, but she looked like she could bench press about a thousand pounds. “I’m,
uh, married or not into women or something, just in case she asks.”

Doune walked over to where the other bikers were
finishing up with the restraints. He looked the bite mark over, taking
measurements and reading them to Autumn, who jotted down notes. The skin
appeared to be broken in a couple places but just barely. Doune had seen plenty
of bites in his days as an ER intern. Most of them had happened during a bar
fight or domestic dispute, but they had always been done in anger and had been
meant to cause pain, not tear flesh. Helga’s bite appeared to be that sort of a bite.

Snake went to talk to one of the guards then
started back to his room. He smiled and nodded toward Helga as he passed by. “Those
will never hold her,” he said. “Remember King Kong? He ain’t got nothing on her.”

Doune hoped that the biker was exaggerating, but
he wasn’t going to bet on it. His eyes shifted to Helga, who made the gurney look small.

“I have injections ready for her if necessary, but
frankly the bite appears to be healing rather than getting worse. She probably
isn’t infected, though she may be an even bigger threat if that’s the case, at
least to you. She’s been talking in her sleep and has had a few choice words for you.”