Dead, but Not for Long (4 page)

“He can’t be,” Keith said, shaking his head. “He’s missing his heart.”

“Then how can he be moving?”

Nobody had an answer for him.

~*~

Eric was glad to leave the room. Besides, it would give him a chance to change his pants. Oh
great, it’s Friday, he thought. The ER was always packed on Fridays. He led the
woman, still blind from the blast of pepper spray, slowly down the hall. He
glanced around for a wheelchair but didn’t see one, so he decided she could just walk.

“I’m sure you understand why I had to spray you like that,” he said, not wanting to be sued. “Sometimes
a person needs a little burst of adrenaline to escape a potentially harmful
situation.” Eric stopped and turned toward her.

“You know, Cheri and I used to fight, too, sometimes. I mean, I never bit her, but sometimes we
said and did things we didn’t mean. Well, I’m sure it’s too late for you and
your husband, with him being mutilated and all, but if you ever find someone else . . .”

The woman mumbled some profanity through her fingers, which were still covering her tender eyes.

“Fine,” Eric replied, as he continued to lead her down the hall. Spying the vending machine,
he hesitated, remembering that there was only one Cocoa Nutter Bar left. If he
waited until he got back upstairs, someone else might get it. He turned to the old woman.

“Wait here, I’ve got to check something.” Reaching into his wallet, he saw that he had only a twenty.

“Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back,” he said as he went on a quest for change,
ignoring the woman’s protests.

Several minutes later, Eric returned with his change and claimed another soda and the last
remaining Cocoa Nutter Bar. He smiled as he tucked his prize in his pocket.

The woman, still rubbing her eyes, was mumbling words that Eric’s mom usually didn’t allow him
to hear. Occasionally the word “lawyer” would pop up among the profanity.

No wonder your husband bit you, Eric thought as they took the elevator down to the first
floor. They started down the south hall toward the ER, but as they passed the
cafeteria, Eric asked the woman to wait again. He walked in to check the white
board for the day’s lunch specials then decided to buy a breakfast sandwich
though he’d already eaten. He stuffed it into his pocket so the old woman wouldn’t see it.

“Had to make sure everything was okay in there,” he informed the woman as he led her to the ER.
They walked up to the front desk and he got the attention of one of the busy nurses.

“This lady needs a doctor, fast,” he commanded in his most forceful voice.

“Chest pains? Bleeding to death?” the nurse asked sarcastically.

“She’s got some eye problems,” he replied, oblivious to the pints of blood that had already
soaked through the bandage as they had traveled down the hall.

“Well then,” the nurse replied without looking up, “she can wait with all of the other patients
who don’t have chest pain and aren’t bleeding to death.”

The nurse pointed to the chaotic mass of people around them.

“But, my arm is bleeding,” the woman mumbled in inaudible tones. She lifted her bandaged arm to show
the nurse, but the emergency doors opened and another group of people rushed
through, supporting a man who was covered in blood.

“Help!” one of them yelled, close to panic. They all began to talk at once, drowning out the
quiet voice of the old woman.

Eric led the woman, still mumbling, to a vacant seat. “You’d better sit here,” he suggested.
“It could be a long wait.”

She whispered something and Eric bent down to listen.

“I-I’m not feeling too well,” she said, her demeanor changing.

“Lady, we’re in a hospital. Nobody feels good here. That’s why they call it a hospital.”

She slumped over onto her side.

Good girl, he thought to himself. While you’re resting, I can go change.

~*~

“This is insane,” Jack said, looking at the man who was still struggling to crawl on the
floor, cuffs and all. “How can he be moving around? His heart has been eaten
and this was after it was ripped from his chest.”

Keith shook his head. “I thought the guy might be on something at first. It might explain the
attack but it sure doesn’t explain this.” He nodded toward the man on the floor.

“What do we do now?”

“Let’s get the other one back into the room then I’ll need to make some phone calls,” Jack said.

They stepped out into the hall and the patient immediately lunged at Keith, managing to
head-butt him. Even with his arms bound and mouth taped, he kept trying to
attack as the two men pushed him back inside the room. Once the door was shut,
Keith put a “do not enter” sign on it and hoped that it would be enough. With
the patient slamming his body against the door, he was afraid that someone might investigate.

A call came through on the radio for Jack and he answered it, promising to come to the
fifth floor where one of the visitors was threatening a doctor. No sooner had
he put the radio down than there was another call, this time someone
complaining about two men fighting outside. “They’re not on hospital property,
so I can’t do anything,” Jack said. “Call the police.”

“I’m going to go get another shirt and I’ll be back,” Keith said, looking down at the
vomit-soaked top of his scrubs. “I’ll try to keep my eye on the room until you
find out what we’re supposed to do.”

Jack thanked Keith and was moving toward the elevator when another call came in. This time
it was the ER saying that they needed security right away.

“Eric should be there. In fact, he should have gotten there a long time ago,” Jack said.

He was not pleased to hear that Eric had already been there and had left the old woman behind.

“I’ll find him and send him back down,” Jack said, getting into the elevator.

The reply was less than enthusiastic.

“I know,” Jack sighed. “But I’ve got an emergency on the fifth floor, so it’ll have to be
Wapowski. I’ll be down to check on things once I’m done upstairs.”

~*~

Keith changed quickly and grabbed an apple from his backpack to eat on the way back to the third
floor. He finished his rounds, keeping an eye on room 329 as much as possible.
When he saw two men in suits round the corner and approach the room, he got
there first. One of them flashed a badge at him.

“Can I help you?” Keith asked.

“FBI,” said the one with the badge. “We heard you had a biting incident.”

“That’s a bit of an understatement, but yes, we did. You guys got here pretty fast.”

Not much time had passed since Jack had left to make the calls. Keith had figured the local
cops might show up within an hour or so but he hadn’t expected the Feds. As if
on cue, Jack rounded the corner and headed over to where the other three men were talking.

“There were two people that were bitten on this floor. The biter and one of the victims are
both inside this room and we sent the other one down to the ER. What’s going
on?” Keith asked with a frown.

“And the ones inside the room have both been restrained?” asked the taller of the two agents.

“Yes,” Keith said, telling them the whole story with Jack jumping in with some additional information.

The tall agent tried to enter the room but the patient inside was banging his body against the
door, making it difficult. They finally managed to force the door open, pushing
the taped-up man back with it.

Keith pointed to the man on the floor with the gaping hole in his chest where his heart used to
be. He’d managed to roll onto his side but he hadn’t been able to get back onto his feet.

“That’s the biting victim. The guy that did it is the one behind the door, wrapped in tape.”

“We’ve been instructed to take one of them to CDC,” the taller agent said, glancing at a
piece of paper in his hand before looking behind the door. Jack thought he caught a glimpse of a photo.

“CDC?” Keith repeated. He asked for the second time, “What’s going on?”

Once again, the agents didn’t reply. Instead they busied themselves putting on gloves as they
discussed something in quiet tones.

Keith thought he heard one of them say, “This one.”

The other agent looked at the paper and nodded.

Keith edged a little closer to Jack and whispered to him, “Get the feeling they know
something we don’t?”

Jack feigned his best surprised look. “What? The government hiding something? You notice when
they saw the guy rolling around with no heart, the ‘holy shit’ factor was about zero?”

“Yeah, I know these guys are notoriously unemotional, but seriously.”

The two agents whispered together for a moment longer then announced that they’d be taking the
man wrapped in tape. While they worked at getting the tape off his arms and
cuffing him, Keith whispered to Jack again.

“Guess they thought that dragging the guy without a heart through the halls might raise a few eyebrows.”

When the two agents started to leave the room with the patient, Keith said, “Hey, what
exactly is going on here? And what are we supposed to do with this other guy?”

One of them shrugged.

“Not our problem,” the other agent said over his shoulder.

“Hey, wait!” Keith said, determined to find out what they were up against, but the men
ignored him once again as they headed for the elevator.

“Great,” Keith said, frustrated.

Jack picked up his radio and tried calling Eric.

“Eric, you there?” There was no answer. “I’d better head down to the ER and check on the
village idiot. I reported this to admin, by the way, but had to leave a message. No response yet.”

“Maybe I’ll see if I can reach them,” Keith said, knowing that Jack had his hands full.

Jack left for the elevators while Keith closed the door to room 329, locking the partially
eaten man inside. He called for housekeeping to clean up the blood in the hall
then tried to call administration but he got the answering machine, just as Jack had.

~*~

In the emergency room, one of the nurses shook her head, wondering how Eric managed to keep his
job. She looked up to make sure he hadn’t returned before muttering, “He must
be sleeping with someone; someone desperate.”

Her eyes widened as she noticed that the old woman now lay crumpled on the floor. With a new
sense of urgency, she grabbed the other nurse and approached the patient, a
trail of blood droplets leading to the old woman.

“Eye problems my ass,” she said incredulously. “We’ve got another bite victim.”

“Another one? This is getting creepy,” the second nurse said, reaching down to try to find a
pulse. “How many is that today?”

The first nurse shook her head. “Several. Besides the ones that we let go home, I know we sent
two upstairs and others are still waiting down here to be admitted to the ICU.”

Well, we won’t be admitting this one. She’s dead.”

~*^*~

Eric returned from the security room with a mostly eaten bag of chips, after a ‘well
deserved’ nap. He had changed into a clean pair of pants, which he kept
adjusting as he wasn’t accustomed to going without underwear. It had been some
time since he had taken the old woman to the emergency room and he was hoping
that Jack wouldn’t discover that she had been left alone. As he approached the
lobby, he was met with a greater scene of chaos than there had been earlier. The
nurses were desperately trying to regain control as the crowd had turned wild.
The nurse that he had spoken to earlier grabbed him, hands shaking as her eyes
darted between Eric and the chaotic scene.

“We called for security a while ago and Jack said that you should be down here. The
woman you left here just started going crazy and attacking people. I don’t know
how many she’s bitten, but I’d swear she was dead a few minutes ago because we
couldn’t get a BP on her. A couple big guys have her pinned down over there.
She even bit them in the struggle. I don’t know what’s going on!”

A woman’s shriek rang above the noise. The crowd scattered in all directions
exposing a horrifying scene. Two men were tearing a casted patient limb from
limb and fighting over the pieces. Both of the men appeared to be bathed in
blood and the one that Eric could see the best had a huge hole where his throat used to be.

One of the nurses grabbed the phone with a shaking hand, trying to explain to the
dispatcher what was happening.

“Hurry!” she screamed. “They’re killing people here!”

The other nurse ran to try to help the patient, but one of the men turned on her,
grabbing her around the waist as he brought his mouth down to her neck, taking
a large chunk before starting to chew.

~*~

As Jack got closer to the lobby, he started passing some very agitated people, all
running away from the ER. When he arrived, he could see why. The room was
filled with screaming people being chased by slow moving, partially-eaten
maniacs. Eric was backed onto a desk in a corner by three of them. He was
swinging wildly at them with a severed limb, casted at the foot. The plaster
appeared to be breaking off in chunks and some of it was hanging from strips of
gauze. Jack, who was the only guard on shift certified to carry a firearm, pulled his gun
and warned the attackers that he would shoot. The three crazed men didn’t even
acknowledge the warning but kept trying to reach Eric.

Jack did not want to use his gun unless he had to and he certainly did not want to
shoot an unarmed man in the back. When one of them lunged at Eric and almost
grabbed him, Jack realized he had no other choice. These were no longer humans
and they were going to kill Eric if he didn’t do something immediately. He
yelled one more warning then he had no choice but to fire. A round landed
directly in the back of one of the crazed attackers.

The lunatic reacted with a jerk and seemed to fold over backwards. To Jack’s
surprise, the man continued trying to grab Eric. His broken back made him
appear to be engaging in some diabolical game of limbo. Ignoring Jack’s
commands to stop, he continued reaching for Eric with malevolent intent.