Fracked (11 page)

“Please help us!” she called out to the soldiers. “We’re not sick!”

The soldiers immediately looked up towards the sound of her voice and fired.

Rebecca screamed as John pulled her back.

The barrage of bullets struck the iron staircase and ricocheted off of the walls.

“Run!” John shouted above the ringing in his ears. He took Rebecca by the hand and led her back into the hallway.

The soldiers quickly ascended the steps and chased after them.

John and Rebecca ran back inside the pitch-black radiology waiting area and took cover behind the receptionist’s desk.

Two soldiers kicked open the door and entered the waiting room with their rifles ready.

They slowly started to walk towards the receptionist’s desk.

The double-doors on the other side of the room rattled…

Both soldiers stopped and looked towards the noise. One of the masked men pointed towards the double-doors; the other nodded.

They quietly advanced towards the double-doors with their weapons ready.

One of the men tried opening the door, but lowered his hand.

“It’s locked,” the masked soldier said. “They’re inside.”

They pointed their rifles at the door’s hydraulic lock and fired a three-round burst.

The hydraulic lock ruptured and the doors flung open.

The soldier closest to the door was immediately swarmed. He screamed out in agony and let out a wild burst of gunfire as he was brought to the floor.

“Shit!” the other solider said as he fired into the massive horde while backing towards the hallway door.

A few people wearing hospital robes and nursing scrubs collapsed, but other ghouls quickly took their place as more and more swarmed into the waiting room.

The soldier stopped firing, turned, and sprinted out into the hallway. He pushed in the locking device on the door’s handle and slammed the door shut.

The room was bathed in darkness once again.

Infected blindly pounded against the door but their efforts slowly subsided as they stood like statues in the dark.

John and Rebecca stayed hidden behind the receptionist’s desk, practically holding their breath.

“What happened?” a muffled voice asked from the hall.

“T-The room is festering, sir,” a voice breathlessly replied. “Williams is down.”

“What about the two civilians?”

“Dead,” the voice replied. “They have to be. The room is full of those things.”

There was a moment of hesitation.

“Is that door locked?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. We’ll come back and clear the radiology department after we finish clearing the rest of this floor. Let’s move.”

John and Rebecca listened as the soldiers retreated down the hall.

The only sound in the room were the quiet snarls and garbled breaths of the infected standing throughout the room, twitching, waiting, and listening.

Several minutes passed.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, John peaked out from behind the desk. He could make out a faint line of light coming from underneath the hallway door, but he also saw multitudes of feet...

Rebecca was hugging her knees against her chest, looking down.             

John leaned close, nudged her, and pointed towards the hallway door. He slowly, quietly, got up on his haunches and got ready.

Rebecca nervously nodded and followed his lead…

He reached up and grabbed a stapler off of the top of the desk and hurled it towards the far corner of the room.

The crowd inside the room let out a piercing scream as they blindly darted towards the noise, crashing against each other in the mass confusion.

John and Rebecca ran towards the door, pushing a few of the clamoring infected out of the way before they had a chance to react.

John pushed down on the door’s lever, unlocking the mechanism.

The corpses in the room spun towards him, snarling.

He swung the door open and ran out into the hallway, holding Rebecca’s arm as she struggled to keep up with him.

The couple ran down the hall towards the stairwell once again, sprinting as fast as they could manage. They ran inside the stairwell and slammed the wooden door shut.

The swarm of ghouls rushed out of the room and gave chase, quickly gaining momentum and closing the distance.

A burst of gunfire came from the distance and echoed along the hallway.

The ghouls stopped mid-stride, turned towards the noise, and dashed towards the noise.

A pale man wearing a bloodied hospital gown started to follow the others towards the gunfire, but stopped… He slowly turned his attention back towards the stairwell door and continued his pursuit after John and Rebecca.

He started bashing against the flimsy wooden door with his open palms, splintering the door bit-by-bit…

At the bottom of the staircase, John and Rebecca snuck through the open doorway into the hospital’s lobby and hid behind a stack of ammunition crates.

Rebecca looked around the room with surprise; it certainly had changed since she saw it last.

The entire lobby was illuminated by bright halogen flood lamps. Crates of military equipment and ammunition were stacked aside large drums of disinfectant. Corpses of slain patients and hospital staff were stacked in front of the admission’s desk like cordwood, covered by a flimsy plastic sheet. A plastic tunnel with a zippered flap had been erected around the hospital’s main entrance and temporary chemical decontamination showers were lined next to it. A large plaque hung on the wall above the admission’s desk, above the stack of bodies, and read: ‘Triburton Medical Center, Serving the Community, Serving You!’

In the middle of the room, the plastic waiting room chairs were pushed aside and a table had been sat up with the hospital’s blue prints and a short-range radio sitting on top of it.

Outside there were police sirens and the rumble of diesel engines.

A group of masked soldiers and white-suits stood huddled around the table, staring down at the blue-prints and marking off areas with a red permanent marker.

Suddenly the pale man from upstairs emerged from the stairwell. Screaming, he sprinted towards the men at the table, knocking over and shattering two halogen floodlights in the process.

“Contact! Contact!” one of the startled soldiers shouted.

The soldiers knocked aside the table and fired on the pale man while the white-suits ducked down and retreated.

The pale man’s body jerked with each shot and his tattered hospital gown fell off of his body. He stumbled forward a few more paces before falling flat on the floor, naked and still.

Cautiously, the soldiers kept their weapons pointed at the stairwell door, waiting.

On the floor, the black substance started to leak from the pale man’s corpse and formed tiny, oily beads. The beads rolled their way across the tiles towards the stack of corpses in front of the admission’s desk, went underneath the plastic tarp, and started entering the corpses…

The corpses started violently convulsing.

Realizing what was happening; the soldiers started firing wildly into the massive stack of bodies, but it did little to impede the corpse’s rapid evolution.

Meanwhile the weaponless white-suits cowered by the sealed exit tunnel.

The reanimated corpses tore their way out of the plastic tarp, sprinted across the lobby, and took down the screaming soldiers one-by-one.

Panicking, the white-suits unzipped the plastic flaps and ran outside through the tunnel. One of the white-suits stopped and quickly zipped the flap back up before taking off after the others.

The reanimated corpses effortlessly tore through the zipped plastic flap and pursued the white-suits outside into the parking lot, attracted by the sounds of the sirens and the commotion.

In a few seconds, the lobby was vacant aside from John and Rebecca.

Outside, gunfire erupted and screams drowned out the sirens.

Inside the abandoned lobby, John wasted no time.

He ran and picked up one of the M-16s that the soldiers left behind. He turned towards Rebecca and couldn’t help but feel a little proud as soon as he saw what she was doing.

She had an M-16 slung over her shoulder and was busy stuffing extra magazines into her pockets, making sure to only take ones that still had ammunition left.

Rebecca was a country girl through and through. When things got tough, she was type who’d rise to the occasion and he honestly couldn’t be prouder to be with her.

“What?” she asked as she looked at him.

“It’s nothing,” he said as he wiped the grin off of his face. “Are you ready to head out there?”

Rebecca frowned and shook her head as she stood up and tossed him two magazines that were half-full.

John caught them and stuffed them under his belt.

“Honestly, no,” she answered. “But I know we can’t stay in here…”

Despite her country-raised fortitude, it was obvious to him that she was scared; her eyes alone gave her away.

Hell, who was he kidding? He was terrified himself.

“I agree,” he said. “Eventually they’ll come back inside or the rest of them upstairs will make their way down here. Either way, I’m thinking that we shouldn’t hang our hat here too long.”

Rebecca nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

John listened as the gunfire outside intensified, frowning.

“We need to get out of town before they shut down the whole area,” he said.

“Austin?” she asked with a thin smile.

John chuckled and shook his head.

“You know what? Austin sounds pretty damn good to me right now, darling,” John said as he readied his weapon. “Let’s go find us a vehicle.”

They walked through the plastic tunnel, exited the lobby, and stepped outside underneath the hospital’s awning.

It was dark outside and humid.

Multiple fires were burning out of control.

People were running in all directions, panicked and screaming. The flimsy Tres Rios police barricade had been overrun and the infection ran rampant throughout the hysteric crowd. Tres Rios’ main street, the street that ran in front of the hospital, was completely clogged with traffic and the storefronts were shattered.

Riot police were shooting canisters of teargas into the besieging masses while soldiers were busy indiscriminately firing live rounds; neither tactic seemed to have much effect.

One by one, the riot police officers fell; their bulky body armor did little to stop the black substance from entering every facial orifice.

As their numbers rapidly diminished, the soldiers started to retreat to their vehicles and let the infection run its course amongst the unlucky civilians who had gathered around earlier to gawk at the spectacle.

A black helicopter haplessly circled overhead while the sniper on board fired into the crowd.

As John and Rebecca stared awestruck at the carnage, a man sprinted towards them with gore smeared around his mouth. The man was wearing a plaid shirt, denim coveralls, and a trucker’s cap.

John quickly aimed the rifle at the man’s head and fired.

The man’s cap flew off as his forehead shattered. He fell backwards and convulsed on the pavement.

A group of nearby infected turned towards the sound of the gunshot and started running towards John.

“Let’s go!” John shouted as he ran towards the parking lot.

Rebecca followed and popped off a few quick shots, striking one of the women that was pursuing them in the abdomen and hitting an elderly man in the shoulder.

Both the elderly man and the woman fell as soon as they were struck, but quickly got back on their feet and kept running.

John led Rebecca through a massive crowd that was huddled near the front of the parking lot. The crowd was cowering from the carnage on the street.

The crowd screamed and started to panic as soon as they spotted the infected horde advancing towards them.

“Move!” John shouted as he pushed his way through the group.

A lanky, bald man wearing a stained t-shirt and thick glasses grabbed John’s gun out of desperation.

John tore away and slammed the butt of the rifle against the man’s face.

The man let go and fell to the ground with a bloody nose and broken glasses.

Two other men wearing orange safety vests grabbed Rebecca and tried to pry the gun away from her.

She drove her knee into one man’s crotch and the butt of the rifle into the other man’s throat.

Both men let go and stumbled backwards; one wheezing and one grasping his crotch.

Rebecca looked over her shoulder and watched as both men were struck down.

“Don’t look back, just keep running!” John shouted, struggling to catch his breath.

John and Rebecca broke free from the crowd and entered the parking lot.

The entire parking lot was full of vehicles. Vehicles were parked wherever there was space; there was no order, no sensibility. Panicked people were backing up and revving forward, slamming into whatever cars were parked in front of them and behind them, but their efforts to break away from the gridlock was in vain. Most honked their horns, but all that did was call the attention of the infected.

The sniper perched on the edge of the helicopter stepped back inside and slid the door shut as the helicopter banked away from the scene and disappeared into the horizon.

As the couple weaved in-between the narrow spaces between the vehicles, they watched as people were helplessly pulled out of their vehicles kicking and screaming by the ravenous infected.

John and Rebecca took cover behind an empty van, breathing frantically.

“Are you okay?!” John asked as he looked over at her, drenched in sweat.

Rebecca nodded and continued to hyperventilate.

John peaked around the front of the van.

On the street, a Tres Rios police cruiser weaved through the crowd with its lights flashing. It was being chased by a growing throng of recently infected men, women, and children. The cruiser had a man wearing a firefighter’s uniform sprawled across the hood and a woman wearing a tattered shirt clinging onto the roof; both of them were repeatedly striking the windshield, trying to break it and get inside.

The police officer driving looked terrified as he swerved through the crowd, striking down both infected and non-infected. He lost control of the vehicle as it skidded across the gore-slathered pavement.

The police cruiser jumped the curb and slammed into a telephone pole, knocking both the man and the woman off of the car.

The transformer on the pole gave a thunderous boom as it erupted in a shower of sparks.

Downtown Tres Rios went dark; every streetlight and every storefront went out in an instant.

A skinny police officer wearing tactical gear got out of the wrecked cruiser and took off on foot.

Moving like a flock, the group of infected ran after him in the dark.

John and Rebecca stayed quiet and remained hidden as they listened to the men and women who were chasing them dash across the parking lot to join the others in their pursuit of the terrified officer.

The parking lot was left abandoned.

In the distance, the police cruiser was left kissing the telephone pole with its frontend damaged and blue lights flashing.

Its doors were open.

“Now’s our chance,” John whispered as he looked at the cruiser.

Despite a little steam coming out from underneath the car’s dented hood, it appeared drivable and was the closest viable option.

John and Rebecca sprinted across the parking lot towards the cruiser, weaving in-between the parked cars.

At the edge of the parking lot, they threw their weapons on the floorboard and got inside of the wrecked cruiser; John behind the wheel and Rebecca in the passenger seat.

John threw the transmission in reverse and mashed down on the accelerator.

The engine made a loud grinding noise as the cruiser backed away from the curb and stopped in the middle of the street.

The noise captured the attention of some sprinters nearby. They turned towards the car and started running towards it.

John switched the transmission into drive and sped down Main Street, blue lights flashing in the dark.

Rebecca stared out of the passenger window as the blue light reflected off of countless pale faces that were all making their way towards the car from seemingly every direction. She buckled her seatbelt, hands shaking.

Infected carelessly threw themselves against the car and splattered like insects as they crumpled onto the pavement. They were flung over the hood and went tumbling across the top of the car, knocking the LED light bar off of the roof and cracking the windshield.

Within seconds the entire windshield was smeared with gore.

John turned on the wipers.

It didn’t do much, but it offered a limited blood-streaked view of the road ahead.

Despite the rattling engine and the steam that shot up from underneath the hood, the cruiser managed to pull away from the encircling crowd and approached the edge of downtown.

John kept glancing up in the rearview mirror at the crowd as it fell further behind.

“John!” Rebecca shouted as she gripped the dash.

He glanced back out the cracked windshield and saw an armored personnel carrier flatten a barbwire fence as it pulled into the middle of the road. The vehicle was all black with no identifying emblems or numbers. It had a high caliber machine gun mounted on the roof.

It stopped in the middle of the road as the solider manning the gun turret pointed the weapon at the police cruiser.

A line of halogen flood lamps lit up behind the armored vehicle and revealed a barricade that had been erected across the road. The barricade was constructed out of concrete highway dividers and multiple spools of barbed tape, or ‘razor wire’.

John slammed on the brakes.

The police car skidded to a stop in the middle of the road about a block away from the armored vehicle.

The mob of infected townspeople quickly closed in.

The gunner started laying a line of fire up the middle of the road towards the cruiser, creating a shower of sparks and riddling the asphalt with large holes.

John mashed down on the accelerator and took a hard left, narrowly escaping the barrage of gunfire.

The gunfire tore through the infected townspeople, eviscerating those who were gathered in the center of the street. The townspeople lost all interest in the police cruiser and started running towards the armored vehicle.

John spun out in the street and slammed through the sprinting crowd, smearing the pavement with their blood. He turned right onto state highway 72, the very same road he took to go home every day.

The road was empty and dark. The police cruiser only had one working headlight and it was pointing askew towards the side of the road.

John leaned over the steering wheel and squinted, struggling to make sure the path ahead was clear.

Rebecca turned her head and looked out the back window towards the darkened downtown area.

At least nobody was following them.

Relieved, she turned her attention back towards the road ahead.

“Well… what do we do now?” she asked. “They have the road towards the interstate blocked off…”

John thought for a moment and shook his head.

“We can take 72 past our house into Tilden and then ride 16 all the way up towards San Antonio,” John said. “It’ll be all country roads until we get into San Antonio so it should be clear. Once we get there, we can hop on I-37 and head up towards Austin.”

Rebecca looked over at him.

“What about Lucy?” she asked.

John nodded.

“Don’t worry. We’ll stop and get her,” he said. “While we’re there we may as well grab a few supplies for the road. The less stops we have to make between here and Austin, the better we’ll be.”

Rebecca reached over, turned on the radio, and scanned through the stations.

None of the stations coming through from Corpus and San Antonio were saying anything about what was happening. The stations all played music, commercials, and even had the normal annoying DJ banter.

No news, no warnings, and no official messages; it was as if nothing was wrong.

“I don’t get it,” she said as she sat back and stared down at the radio.

John frowned.

“Well, at least we made it out of there,” his said.

His voice was drowned out as a line of black helicopters flew low overhead.

The helicopters flew in formation towards downtown. They each fired their payload and quickly veered off into different directions.

Tres Rios erupted as soon as the bombs struck the heart of downtown. Napalm engulfed every building, corpse, and vehicle in the vicinity.