Authors: Mark Campbell
At the circular desk
, a nurse laid face-
down
on the desk
with he
r arms dangling over the front of the desk. Next to her arms, a
white blood-sme
ared telephone receiver swayed side-to-side. Silver lettering on the front of the desk read
:
WILLIAM B. DUKE CARDIAC INTENSIVE CARE WING
Richard heard
the
stairwell
horde
approaching behind him. He ran into the waiting room and quickly
slammed the
stairwell door shut behind him.
He threw a panicked glance around the waiting room for movement, but f
ortuna
tely none of the tarp-covered corpses moved. All he could hear was a man moaning somewhere near the corner of the smoke-filled lobby.
Infected
pounded
against
the stairwell door
.
Richard reached down and grabbed a nightstick off of a dead police officer and slid it in-between the door lever and the doorframe.
The door lever rattled, but would not turn
He backed away from the door, uneasy.
This is great. How do you plan on getting out of here exactly?
(I’m working on it.)
Well work a little harder, Richie.
(Just shut up and let me think, Andy!)
Richard frow
ned, turned, and scanned the room. His gaze fell on the double-
doors at the
opposite
end of the room
.
This is a bad idea, Richie. You’re fucking up.
“If you know a better idea, I’d love to hear it. Besides, you’re not really real,” he muttered to himself, but he was beginning to doubt himself when he could hear Andy’s voice so clearly. He
carefully made his way through the sea of sprawled out corpses that littered the
room. Many of the corpses had rolled out from underneath the red tarps and lay stiff on the floor. Many of the corpses were police officers. He tried not to look down at them as he walked.
Stop, idiot.
Richard stopped walking.
“What is it now?!” he growled.
Don’t you think it would be a good idea to take a weapon?
Richard glanced down at of the dead police officers. As usual, his brother’s voice was right, real or imagined. He reached down and pulled the officer’s pistol out of the holster and loaded his pockets with the extra ammo clips off of the officer’s duty belt. He stood and walked towards the double-doors, pointing the gun in front of him.
A
nother
fighter
jet passed overhead
and shook the room violently. Suspended c
eiling tiles
shook loose
and
fine granules of
dust
fluttered down above Richard
.
He coughed and struggled
to catch
his
breath amidst the
plumes of dust. After the jet passed and the room stopped shaking, the emergency lights
dimmed and the fire
alarms silenced.
The immediate silence was unsettling.
Richard
stood motionless in the pitch-black room, skin prickled with gooseflesh.
“Bring the Buick in for the night,”
a man muttered from the corner of the room.
“Bring it in b
efore the frost collects… Nancy
.”
The man groaned in fevered anguish and started crying.
Richard tried to drown the
lunatic’s
voice out
. He gripped the pistol with both hands and blindly shuffled in the dark towards the direction he remembered seeing the double-doors. His feet nudged against corpse after corpse as he blindly navigated his way across the room.
“The door should be close,” Richard whispered
to himself in the dark.
“Nancy? Is that you? Did you move the Buick? You need to bring it in before the frost collects! Do you hear me? Nancy?”
Richard’s path was blocked by something large. He
crouched down and blindly searched the cold floor tiles with his fingertips.
His fingers brushed
across a bloated cold ankle, a sticky wet puddle, spent shell casings, and a handful of cold wet band
ages. Gooseflesh ran up his arm but he forced
himself to keep searching. His fingers ran across ashy dry lips
, plastic,
and the
n brushed over a cold oily nose–
Richard re
coiled immediately
.
He knew what was blocking his path; a stack of corpses. He tried to maneuver around the pile of corpses and
tripped. He landed
against
an obese corpse
spread-out on top of the pile. His
elbow struck the corpse’s abdomen and caused the corpse to expunge a pungent
burst of rotten air out
his gapping mout
h.
The smell almost made him
vomit.
He
managed to maneuver around the pile and his hands brushed against the double doors. A faint orange glow shimmered out from underneath the door. He heard something rustle on the other side of the doors and the sound of rattling chains.
“Fuck,”
Richard
said, barely above a whisper.
“Nancy?”
“Shut
UP!
” Richard screamed.
“Nancy? Is that you? Did you move the Buick?”
“Shut the fuck up! Nancy is not here!”
“Did she move the Buick? Frost is coming.”
The man started crying and broke off into a spasm of coughing.
Slowly, Richard pushed one of the swinging doors open and choked on the thick smoke and the stench of burning flesh. He doubled-over and coughed violently.
A pile of corpses burnt in the center of the room and inundated the room with thick black smoke. The flickering flames lit the room in an orange glow and
revealed
multiple
overturned hospital beds
against the wall
and bullet-riddled
medical
monitoring equipment. The
few
beds that was still upright had patients
on
them with their arms handcuffed above their head
s against
the bed’s metal headboard. Each
patient
had been executed by a
single gun
shot to
the head
. Their heads hung limp with
their chin against their chest.
Corpses inside white hazmat suits lay strewn all throughout the room amongst countless spent brass shells. One of the white-suits way sprawled on his belly at Richard’s feet near the double doors.
Richard
rolled the corp
se over with his foot and read
‘CDC’ on the white-suit’s che
st in bold blue
lettering.
The protective suit had large
tare
s near the neck and its plastic
faceshield
was shattered
. The face visible through the shattered faceshield
was badly disfigured from
multiple gunshots
. He rolled the white-suit back
onto
its
belly.
Richard pulled a dirtied handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his nose with it using one hand while gripping the 9mm pistol with his other hand. Slowly, he ventured into the room. Each step he took sent brass bullet casings skittering across the floor.
As he walked deeper into the room, closer towards the human bonfire burning in the center, he discovered the source of the rattling noise in the far corner of the room and froze.
The infected patients in the corner of the room hadn’t been shot and thrashed violently in their beds, handcuffed to the headboards.
Richard stared at one patient
in particular, a greying
old woman
,
as
she viciously snarled and snapped her toothless mouth at him
from one of the beds in the far corner. H
er eyes were cold a
nd listless and her curly
hair bobbed as she
trashed against her restraints. She didn’t seem to mind as the metal handcuffs tore into her wrists.
Get us out of here.
Richard flinched at the sound of Andy’s voice and then quickly scanned the room, struggling to peer through the thick smoke. The flickering bonfire revealed a second set of doors at the opposite end of the room. He trudged towards the doors.
The handcuffed cavalcade of infected clamored, snarled, a
nd bit the air like rabid animals
as Richard
crept
past their beds
.
The doors he was walking towards creaked open and a nurse shambled into the room.
She was wearing a paper germicide mask
speckled with droplets of blood
. She fixated her g
aze
on Richard
and darted towards him, closing the distance quickly
.
Richard raised his pistol in a panic
and fired three shots at her at point-blank range.
Two shots sunk into her chest a
nd simply made her flinch, but the third struck home.
It
tore through the paper mask covering her nose and mouth, sunk between her lips, shattered her front teeth, ripped into the back of her throat, and erupte
d out the base of her skull in
a burst of blood and bo
ne.
The nurse collapsed backwards in
a lifeless heap
, arms flung over her head
.
Richard took deep frantic breaths
and coughed as the smoke filled his lungs. He hurried towards the door, lowering his pistol.
A CDC white-suit darted through the flames in the center of the room. The flames rolled off of his flame-resistant environmental suit. The white-suit sprinted behind Richard and
wrapped his arms around him
, snarling
.
Richard
gave a frightened cry
and
bashed
his pistol against the whit
e-suit’s mirrored faceshield.
The
white-suit’s
faceshield shattered and exposed
a
pale lace
rated face. He gave
a feral scream and
hurled
Richard across the room
towards the shackled infected in the beds.
Richard slammed
hard
against the wall between two
beds and the pistol slid underneath the bed next to him.
The i
nfected
patients on the beds
thrashed livi
dly and leaned
towards Richard
,
as
close as their cuffed arms would allow anyway,
as they tried to bite him.
Richard sat
with his back
pressed tightly against the wall
, well out of their reach, terrified.
The white-suit
sprinted towards him. The glow from the flickering flames made the reflective blue ‘CDC’ lettering on his chest glimmer.
Richard
grabbed the bed to the left and quickly rolled it
out in front of him, sending the man
cuffed to
the headboard into hysterics.
The
CDC
white-
suit crashed into bed and toppled with it
against the wall
. Both the white
-
suit and the handcuffed patient began scuffling with each other.