It was Conan.
His white canvas sneakers, one of which was stained with a dark red fluid, stood awkwardly cockeyed to one another, as if the two were acquainted but had never formally been introduced. He didn’t pause when his gaze fixed on A-team; his massive bulk simply fell heavily on the hapless lack-wit with a speed not befitting his shambling gait.
A-team screamed once, before the creature brutally severed his jugular vein with his teeth and tore into the tissue around his neck, pulling skin from flesh as blood poured onto the floor. His jaw moved slowly as he chewed the first bite, blood trickling down the side of his jaw, eyes staring forward and unblinking, hands pressing down on the still-twitching shoulders of A-team.
“Fuck. That.”
Conan looked up, dull glazed eyes searching slowly for the source of the distraction.
Had I said that?
Shit. That was genius. I ducked my head and cowered behind the nurse’s station, hoping that I had hidden myself quickly enough. Fearful and confused, I listened intently for the sounds of a shuffling approach.
Then a moan and the sound of sniffling, like the thing had a cold. Then nothing. Could these things smell? Like a dog? For several long seconds I waited, holding my breath. I knew that if I moved, if I even twitched, I’d meet the same fate. My neck itched suddenly, anticipating dull incisors pressing into my arteries.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I heard the horrific sound of Conan returning to his meal. Like a large dog gnawing blissfully on a bone, the gruesome sounds of flesh being sloppily pushed into an open mouth reached my ears clearly. The blood pooled across the floor, and I stared at its spreading stain as it intruded into my space, making its way toward me under the desk. There was so much blood.
My head split in two, fire from inside cracking my skull like a hammer blow to the forehead. Pain ripped through my consciousness.
Maria’s face was suddenly before me, her mouth and eyes bearing the vacuous look of that thing on the other side of the desk, as she leaned toward me in a crude semblance of a lover’s embrace. My hand was on something: a flashlight dropped under the desk. How did I miss that?
I was on my feet, and in the distant clouded vision of my mind’s eye, I saw that I had been discovered. Maria’s ID badge, still fashioned to her lapel, flashed in front of my eyes. Her eyes, unblinking, stared at me with no light of recognition as she came for me. The flashlight came up. The face I no longer recognized disappeared in an explosion of color. It was suddenly dark, and I was alone.
Again.
Chapter 3
The words on her badge were stenciled into my awareness as I struggled against the darkness. Starling Mountain. For the second time in the last two hours, I woke up. This time, I was sprawled in a pool of blackened, sticky blood, with the name of Maria’s employer barely and inexplicably beating out a crushing headache for dominance of my skull.
I hadn’t been out long. Light still streamed across the floor, casting shadows against the far wall and highlighting my unique predicament.
Conan lay atop my legs, his massive, crumpled torso trapping my feet, his head laying inert against the cool tile of the floor. A large flashlight was on the floor next to my hand, slick with blood and other matter.
I gently probed my head, feeling through my overgrown hair for contusions or bumps that would explain my nap, but I discovered nothing. I looked back down at Conan, slowly and laboriously removed a foot from beneath his massive chest, and rolled his weight off of my legs.
As the body flopped to the floor, the head pivoted to the side, allowing a glimpse of the trauma that had felled this tree of a man. He bore a massive head wound on the left side of the head.
This was too much. I must have blacked out when he attacked me, either from fear or exhaustion, or both, but still managed to hit him hard enough to drop him. But why did I remember seeing Maria’s face? A voice that lived in a foggy corner of my mind was whispering to me, but I suppressed it.
Even if the voice was right, and I was imagining everything, even if this wasn’t real, even if, as I lay here, feeling the pain, staring at the blood, I was in my cot, back in my room, doped up on meds, I lost nothing by surviving the hallucination. I lost everything if it was real, and I did nothing. I shook my head.
Escape first, existentialism later.
Rising slowly and shakily to my feet, I stuck the flashlight into the pocket of my standard-issue scrubs, and moved to the doors leading to the exit hallway. I was dizzier than a drunken sailor at the end of three days’ leave, and the room spun until I managed to grab hold of a desk for several minutes. This was really bizarre.
No head wound, but I was blacking out and getting dizzy? Either I was really crashing hard from being doped up, or I was as crazy as they said I was.
Looking down at the crumpled bodies before me, I decided to reserve judgment for a later date.
The passage to the front exit stretched in front of me; corridors to more rooms extended to either side. I stared towards the exit, to the Plexiglas antechamber, and tried to make out the movement I could see in the distance. I looked to either side hallway, but discarded them as an escape option, the corridor to my left dead-ending in a wall past several rooms, the corridor to my right culminating in a stairwell, unpromisingly lacking the magic red Exit sign that I was searching for.
Nope, no doors to the outside that way, my friend, and it was the greener pastures of the good outdoors I was headed to right now. As I moved toward the security room, a fire extinguisher hanging from the wall caught my attention, and I ripped it from its mounting bracket. Oh, yeah. Now you’re a bad ass.
In my movies, I always seemed to find a grenade launcher, a man sized pistol, or a shoulder mounted tank at the last (and most opportune and convenient) moment. Like during a romantic dinner, or while on the john. No such luck today. I guess if I want some help, I need to write it in to the script. The little voice in the back of my mind tried to add to that thought, and I heard amused chuckling sound from the recesses of my brain.
As I approached the plastic chamber, I could see through the open exterior doors that there were definitely people moving around outside, some of them in the white uniform of the facility, some in street clothes. They were all moving very, very slowly. Either very unconcerned, or very sick. I wasn’t liking my odds on it being the former.
While I still couldn’t bring myself to buy into the story on the news, the pictures made for a compelling case of some seriously f’d up individuals on the outside. But there still had to be a better explanation for this than reanimated corpses. Rabies, maybe? People act weird all the time-it doesn’t take some sort of zombifying plague to cause that, right? More likely a whole shit load of people just got their tax bills or their alimony was due or something.
Tax bills. Definitely. I could stick with that for comfort’s sake. For now, at least.
I half-heartedly checked the door to the guards booth to my right which, naturally, was locked. Not only locked, but keypad controlled. I needed a code. I glanced back toward the rec room; I could ask Conan, but I doubted he’d be much help. I checked the door to the antechamber on a whim, but no go on that front either. How much did I want to go outside anyway, given that it looked from here like at least twenty of those things were wandering in the yard? I walked back to the crossroads between the hallways, contemplating my next step.
Why had Starling Mountain come to mind? I know Maria worked there, but what the hell did that matter? She had worked there for years before it happened, and I never gave it much thought. Despite the many discussions we had about her work, I really didn’t have a good idea what she did there. So why wake up with it in my head after beating a zombie to death.
I just used the word: zombie.
Jesus, I was crazy. No other excuse. I chuckled to myself. At least I least I was where I belonged.
The place was so damn quiet, especially since I had lost my theme-song soundtrack, that at first, I thought I was hearing things. From the hallway to the right, I thought I heard the faint sound of voices. Half-believing I made them up in my desire to normalize this oh-so-fucked up situation, but for lack of a better option, I moved cautiously down the hall to investigate. I stepped carefully to avoid the squelching sound my blood-soaked sneakers were making on the well-polished tile floors.
Definitely voices; real, live voices too. Not moaning or shrieking or an imbecile humming television theme songs. Sounded like two people having a conversation. I moved to the outside of the room and looked through the observation glass in the door. Sure enough, two men, seated in chairs facing a television, were tuned to the cable news. An anchor was interviewing a disheveled older gentleman in a uniform of some sort. The volume was up high enough to carry into the hallway.
The door was closed and latched, but unlocked, and moved easily enough when I depressed the latch that I could push it open with a toe and step in without calling attention to myself. Against the wall to the right, a chair lay overturned, and a remote control lay broken on the ground, having apparently fractured when it hit the floor.
Suddenly, a thought that should have come much earlier: Where had Conan come from? And why had he stayed when everyone else had fled?
I instinctively stepped backward, and my foot caught the leg of the overturned chair, slamming the back of the chair against the wall. The two men jerked, as if a noose around their necks had been pulled abruptly back, the spell of the television broken; their heads turned toward me, almost in unison.
He hadn’t stayed, I realized too late. He had been left. Along with these two.
I backpedaled too fast and tripped, sprawling on my back in the hallway. I scrambled to my feet, as the creature on the left rose from his chair and shambled to the doorway, and his companion simply crawled over the back of his chair, sending he and the chair to the ground in the process. They each bore hand-cuffs that at some point been attached to the wooden chairs, but which now hung loose from their graying wrists. I caught the name on the breast pocket of the guy on the left: it was Mr. Hickman.
I sprinted, or did my best to sprint, down the hall, passing the rec room on the right, where Conan’s body still lay inert, but A-team’s had struggled slowly into a seated position, legs twitching. Vacant eyes tracked my stumbling, clumsy progress past the open door, and the sound of his struggling to get up reached my ears, even as I fled.
I shook my head and sped up, now convinced that this whole thing was some sort of mind-fuck, but not willing to slow down and find out.
The stairwell, my only option, was at the end of the hallway. I stumbled to a hasty walk as I reached it in order to navigate the narrow flight. The walls on either side of the narrow passageway were peeling, the bone-white top layer of paint revealing a light green underlayment the color of brackish ocean water. A chain link divider separated the stairwells from one another, and as I reached the bottom, two floors down, I met an iron door.
I had struggled to reach the end of the hall, muscles unused to activity and shoes slick with blood, so I had failed to outdistance those things by much, despite their slow movement. Low-pitched groaning and a putrid smell announced their proximity, as they reached the door to the stairwell and shuffled through. As I reached for the handle to the door I realized I had dropped my fire extinguisher in my haste to leave the party upstairs.
Not as much of a badass as you thought, eh McKnight?
The handle moved easily but the hinges squeaked something terrible. The pursuit from above quickened, if that was possible, and through the chain link barrier, I saw the shuffling feet descending the flight directly above me. I flew into the open doorway, nearly splitting my head on the low-hanging door frame, and slammed the heavy iron door shut behind me. I felt for some sort of locking mechanism, and found a rusty latch that I threw into place just as the first body slammed against the thick metal.
I was breathing harder than I thought possible. They let us exercise, but we got very little in the way of cardio training. The anti-psychotics constricted the lungs, and made any kind of excessive cardiovascular exercise painful. Those of us who were sane enough to do so got to do light weight training; enough at least to keep fit, if not maintain the muscle mass some of us started with. Exercise releases endorphins, endorphins make us happy, and when we’re happy, we don’t crap in the rec room. Good theory, and based on actual research done by the guy down the hall from me who would engage in the latter activity if not allowed the former.
I couldn’t wait to write my memoirs.
Once upon a time, I had been a muscular fellow. No Schwarzenegger or Stallone, but certainly larger than your average Gold’s Gym toolbox. I still had a decent amount of size to me, but nowhere near the imposing figure I cut in my last film.
Either way, breathing was a happy place for me right now as my lack of aerobic exercise caught up to me.
As the pounding on the door kept up, I pulled the still wet flashlight from my pocket and for the first time, thought to check to see if it worked. A glorious beam of light shot from the lens, and temporarily blinded me as I adjusted to my surroundings.
I was in a narrow, low-hanging chamber, and large, corroded pipes led from my little room down a narrow passageway to a terminus unknown. The walls here were brick, probably the original stuff from the 1890’s. I moved slowly down the passageway, looking over my shoulder to check that the latch was holding strong against my pursuers. Water dripped slowly from the low ceiling, and as I moved further into the dark hallway, the dank, centuries old walls illuminated by the fluorescent glow of my flashlight, it took more and more effort to quell the sense of growing claustrophobia. Shadows created by the severe contrast between light and dark masqueraded as solid entities before me.