Dead, but Not for Long (5 page)

~*~

Keith put the phone down, frustrated. He’d tried several different numbers and nobody
was answering. He changed a bandage on one of his patients and then decided to
go to the administrative offices himself since he couldn’t get through to anyone.

Instead of answers, what Keith found on the first floor was chaos. The minute the
elevator doors opened, he could hear loud voices coming from the south hall
where the cafeteria and ER were located. Granted, it was Friday, but it was too
early in the day for the weekend madness to begin.

The hospital was L-shaped, with a large open area at the intersection of the wings
on each of the five floors. The elevators were in this area, along with either
a nurses’ station or, in the case of the first floor, an information desk. For
the first time since he’d worked at St. Mary’s, Keith found the information desk unmanned.

He hesitated for a moment, glancing toward the south wing. His instinct was to go
see if help was needed, but he turned the other way, reminding himself that his
job was to take care of his patients, not to handle security matters. Turning
toward the west wing, which housed the administrative offices, he planned to
report the incident in room 329 and get back to his patients as quickly as
possible. As he made his way down the corridor, he ran into a secretary who had
her purse and was running for the lobby.

“Hey, wait a second,” Keith said, stopping her. “We have a problem upstairs and
nobody is answering their phones. I’m supposed to report it.”

“Upstairs, too?” the woman asked, glancing around nervously. “Was someone attacked?”

“Attacked and eaten,” Keith said, turning his head back toward the lobby when he thought
he heard someone scream.

“Something bad is happening,” the woman said, glancing over her shoulder. “We’ve had
people coming in with horrible bites. Community Hospital just called and
reported they’ve had the same thing. Everybody is going home to check on their
families and I’m doing the same.”

“We’ve got patients here to think about,” Keith said.

“Too bad,” she said, fear in her eyes. “I’ve got kids at home. They come first.
Besides, I doubt that anybody needs a secretary right now.”

Her eyes suddenly grew large as she gaped at something over Keith’s shoulder.

Keith turned to find himself looking at a mutilated man in bloodstained coveralls.
Keith thought that it might be Al from maintenance, but it was hard to tell
with half of the man’s face missing.

“Damn,” Keith said, ducking when Al tried to grab him. He saw a second form shuffling
down the hall, a low moan echoing off the walls as it grew closer. Looking
around as he evaded Al’s attempts to grasp him, Keith grabbed a crutch that was
leaning against the wall, wishing he had a better weapon.

“Back off, buddy,” he warned, brandishing the crutch. “I’m not kidding.”

When the warning went unheeded, he swung the crutch hard. Al grabbed for him again,
opening his mouth to expose bloodstained teeth.

They struggled for a moment until Keith was able to shove his attacker back against
the wall, hard enough that it should have stunned him, but there was no
reaction. Instead, the former maintenance man lurched forward again. All the
while the second man was getting closer.

“Here,” a female voice said, shoving a .357 Magnum into Keith’s hand.

He blinked in surprise but there was no time for questions. He tossed the bent crutch aside.

“Last warning. Stop right now or I’m shooting,” Keith said, hoping the threat would
be enough. The vivid memories from the incident in room 329 made him realize
that one of them was probably going to die. He decided that it would be the
other guy. When the ghoul went to grab him, Keith put a hole through Al’s eye,
or where he assumed the eye used to be. After the body dropped to the floor
with a thud, Keith turned to find Marla, who was also an RN, standing behind
him. The secretary was long gone.

“Your gun?” he asked, trying to stay calm as he watched the second man lumbering toward him.

“Sure is,” Marla smiled. She was sipping a soda from the cafeteria. “Stan, I mean Mr.
Paulson, just gave it to me before he left. He said he wanted me to be able to protect myself.”

Keith shook his head. Stan Paulson was the hospital administrator. Now he understood
how Marla kept her job, since it certainly wasn’t due to her nursing skills. He
turned his attention back to the man that was still coming down the hallway.
This one was walking slower, probably because his foot was twisted almost
backward. Most of his throat was ripped out and Keith knew that, like the
visitor who had been attacked upstairs, this man couldn’t possibly still be
alive. That made it a little easier to pull the trigger. The force of the
bullet caused the body to jerk backwards as a hole appeared on the man’s shirt,
directly over the heart. When the walking corpse regained his balance and kept
coming forward, Keith muttered, “Impossible.” After what he’d already seen, he
wasn’t sure why this surprised him. He aimed higher this time and succeeded
with a shot to the forehead that dropped the man to the ground.

Glancing around to make sure there were no others, he took a deep breath to calm himself.

“So is everything all right in the cafeteria?” he asked Marla who didn’t seem
overly concerned over the bizarre happenings.

“No, there was some kind of a food fight so I left,” she said, wiping at a spot of
red on her scrubs. “Look at this. I even got ketchup on me.”

It looked like blood to Keith, but he really didn’t have time to argue about it.

“I think we need to get back upstairs,” he said when a scream of terror came from
the direction of the ER. “We need to check the patients and lock the floor down.”

~*~

“The head, Jack, shoot them in the head!” Eric screamed.

Jack shot one of the attackers in the back of the head, dropping him immediately. He
dropped the others with a single shot each, allowing Eric to escape.

Eric ran past Jack, who was still shooting.

“Jack, they’re everywhere. C’mon, let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Eric,” Jack said as he turned and ran, “you picked a good time to start shining. How
did you know how to drop them?”

Eric panted heavily. “When I borrowed that leg, I beat the pulp out of one and it
didn’t even flinch until I split its head open.”

They hurried through the double doors leading to the hallway and then down to the lobby where they rested a moment.

“I keep thinking I’ll wake up and realize this was all a dream,” Eric said,
sounding like he was about to cry.

Jack took a couple of deep breaths. “If this ain’t real, Eric, it’s a nightmare.”

A shot rang out and Jack turned to look at Eric. "Looks like I’m not the only one with a gun."

They ran to the administrative hall and there was Keith, sporting
a .357 Magnum over a lifeless corpse. Another body lay face down on the floor, not far away.

“I guess I don’t have to tell you to shoot them in the head,” Jack said, stating the obvious.

“The chest shot barely slowed it down,” Keith said, looking at the two bodies on the
floor. “I thought I must have missed the heart so I went for the head.”

“Well, I laid a round into the spine of one of those things and it didn’t seem to
care,” Jack replied.

Eric jumped in. “I beat the hell out of one and it didn’t do Jack, no offense Boss,
until I gave it an upper thrust punch to the head. I knew my Kung Fu would come in handy one day.”

Jack shook his head. “Remind me, Kung Fu Possum, how old were you when you had your last lesson?”

“Eight, or maybe nine,” Eric replied, “but we got some training in the guard, too.”

“He hit the guy with a deceased patient’s plaster dipped drumstick,” Jack stated
frankly. “I do give him an A for creativity.”

Eric beamed proudly.

Keith shook his head, picturing the scene almost exactly as it had happened.

“Well, since we probably don’t want to try to find more of the ‘drumsticks’ maybe we’d
better think of some other way to keep ourselves and our patients alive until
the cops show up. How bad is it in the rest of the hospital?”

“It’s pandemonium in the ER,” Jack replied, dialing 911 on his radio/phone.

“Marla said there is something going on in the cafeteria, too. Sounds like the whole
first floor is in bad shape.”

“I told you that it was just a food fight,” Marla said, rolling her eyes.

“Problem is, we’re the food,” Keith told her. He added, “One of the secretaries said
that Community Hospital is reporting similar attacks.”

“So it isn’t isolated?” Jack shook his head after a moment. “I’m getting a
recording. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Keith, what’s your medical take
on it? It looks like those that are bitten change a few minutes after they die,
or appear to die. Could it be some bad-ass strain of rabies?”

Keith thought about Jack’s question for a moment then replied. “Probably not rabies,
but the comment the agent made about the CDC has me worried. If CDC is
involved, seems like it’s got to be some sort of a communicable disease,"
he said. "And whatever it is, it happens fast. The person dies, or appears
to die, then reanimates quickly, though I don’t know how it’s possible. I just
hope to God it’s not airborne as well, though I’d think we’d be showing some symptoms
if that were the case.”

Jack nodded. Maybe we could seal off the areas in the hospital that aren’t swarming
with these freaks and give ourselves a little safety zone until help comes, if it does.”

“What about survivors?” Keith asked. He was torn between wanting to get back to the
patients upstairs and wanting to help those that were in trouble downstairs.

“Keith, did you hear what I said?” Jack asked. “I don’t think you understand just how
bad it is in there. By the time I reached Eric, I didn’t see a single other
person that wasn’t either changed or in the process of being eaten. We were lucky to get out of there.”

“But the screams,” Keith said. “Someone must still be alive.”

“There are probably thirty of those maniacs in there. We have two guns and a limited
supply of ammo. If we go in, we’re dead, and that won’t help anybody upstairs.
There have got to be a lot of patients who haven’t been infected yet.”

Keith blew out a long breath and nodded. If it had been Eric talking, Keith would
have had doubts. Jack was different. He had always struck Keith as the type of
person that would risk his life for anybody, so if he said a rescue attempt was
pointless, Keith was sure that it was the truth.

“All right,” he said, glancing toward the doors, “so how do we want to do this?”

“We need to get up to the second floor and . . .” Jack stopped in mid-sentence and
directed his attention to Eric, who was walking towards the lobby.

"Eric, what are you doing?"

“I’m getting dizzy,” Eric said with exaggerated panting. “I need to get a candy bar.”

“You can’t be serious!” Jack yelled with amazement. “We barely got out of there
alive and you’re going back for a candy bar? Are you nuts?”

“I’m hungry. Look, I’m shaking.” He lifted his hand to show anyone who cared.

“There’s a vending machine on every floor. You can get something upstairs.”

“They’re out of the candy I like,” Eric explained.

Jack looked at Keith. “Are you hearing this?”

Keith watched in amazement as Eric left. Screams could be heard coming from the south wing.

“Eric, get back here!” Jack yelled, walking toward him. “Eric!”

Either Eric couldn’t hear him over the din from the south hall or he was ignoring Jack, but he kept walking.

Jack told Keith, “I’m going to go get him. I’ll be right back.”

“Wait, Jack, do you think that’s a good idea?” Keith asked. “You barely got out of
there alive and if Wapowski isn’t smart enough to realize it’s stupid to go
back, do you want to risk your life to go after him? You said yourself that it would be suicide.”

“I can’t just let him walk in there,” Jack said. “They’ll kill him for sure.”

“And if you go after him, they’ll kill you,” Keith pointed out. “As you just told me
a few minutes ago, we’ve got three floors of patients that need our help. If
there’s a problem upstairs, I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle it on my own.
Wapowski made his choice.”

Jack sighed and said, “You’re right. Let’s get upstairs,” he said. “We need to shut
down the elevators and secure the stairs. There shouldn’t be anybody else
needing to get to the upper floors because it’s not likely they’d make it that
far. Once we get up there, we can do a floor by floor check and see what we’re up against.”

“How do we disable the elevator?" Keith asked.

“There’s a manual override that requires keys,” Jack said. “So are we ready to make a run for the elevators?”

“My break isn’t over yet,” Marla said.

“Yes, it is,” Keith said, checking the gun.

~*~

Eric crossed the lobby without a problem. He could hear a lot of noise though most
of it seemed to be coming from the cafeteria, which had a door off the lobby
and another down the south hall, close to the emergency room. Glancing down the
corridor, he checked to see if the route was clear. Confident that nothing
lurked in the shadows, he crept down the hallway. He passed the cafeteria,
quietly moving toward the vending machine just outside the emergency room. As
he approached it, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned his
head to see a figure at the end of the corridor stooping over something on the
ground. He could see a creature in a nurse’s uniform feasting on a fleshy mass
on the floor. The arms and legs protruding from the gelatinous pile were the
only indications that it used to be human, while the IV still attached to the
arm indicated that it had been a patient. The feasting nurse seemed too
preoccupied with her meal to notice the security guard, who was in plain sight.

Normally Eric’s cowardice would propel him as far away from confrontation as
possible, but his stomach was overriding all other functions and he continued
on. Slowly, he reached into his pocket and grabbed his wallet. He pulled out a
dollar, carefully watching the crazed nurse down the hall. Inserting the bill,
he pressed the appropriate buttons. The metal spring unwound and dropped the
candy, with a muffled thud, into the tray. Eric looked back but the hallway’s
other occupant didn’t seem to hear. He started to leave, but stopped when he
saw the soda machine. Grabbing another dollar, he quietly inserted it into the
slot and pushed the button. The soda dropped with a resounding clang, which
immediately turned the empty eyes of the dead woman toward Eric. She moaned as
she rose to her feet and started to stagger toward him. Eric quickly grabbed
the can and ran into the emergency room, blocking himself from his escape
route. The room was now quiet, except for several feeding ghouls, which
immediately looked up at him. He turned to see the dead nurse gaining on him.
His only option was to shoot for the exit of the ER.