“Think you’re special, don’t you?” he growled through a vicious grin. “Think you can break our rules? Think you’re safe here just because Aria let you have your way this once?”
Nancy struggled and tried to scream, but Jake’s huge paw was clamped around her face. She felt a bruise already beginning to form on her jaw. Hot tears sprung to her eyes.
Jake leaned close so that Nancy almost gagged on the stench coming from his mouth. “I’m the
law
around here, sweetheart,” he whispered, “and you thought you were above the law, didn’t you? But I’m not about to let you get away with that kind of bullshit. Not on my watch.”
With his free hand he began to undo his pants. Nancy’s eyes burned as she struggled. She punched at his chest and tried to swing her legs to kick him, but the knee on her stomach prevented her from getting any momentum. She thought her heart might be beating hard enough to break her ribs, and she couldn’t force her racing mind to
think
. Her saving grace was when, having difficulty with his pants, Jake shifted for a second to get a better grip on them. The moment he moved, Nancy twisted, pulled back, and slammed both her fists directly into his groin.
He doubled over in pain, stumbling over himself, but managed to scream, “You
whore
!”
Sarah began to wail.
Nancy tried to run to the baby in her incubator bed, thinking that she’d grab her and make a run for it, but Jake recovered quickly, snagged her arm, and hurled her back onto the bed. She opened her mouth to scream, but his fist came crashing down on her face. Stars swam in front of her eyes and a horrible pain zapped through her skull. She could feel Jake ripping at her shirt and pants, but she couldn’t do anything to stop him.
It felt like an hour was passing with every second of real time, but then quite suddenly something warm and wet splattered across Nancy’s face. It took her several shocked seconds to realize that it was blood. Jake was looking down at her with a strange grimace on his twisted face. His mouth was hanging slack, his eyes wide and glassy. Blood poured from his lips and down his chest. The end of Nancy’s katana was jutting through his throat.
He slumped and pitched forward. Nancy cringed and wiggled out of the way as he landed on the bed with a soft thump. Ken was standing at the end of the bed, breathing heavily, his face full of rage. He was gripping the sword so hard that his knuckles were turning blue. “The bastard!” he spat. “The fucking
bastard
!”
It took a long time for Nancy to sit up. When she finally did it was because she realized the baby had stopped crying. She jumped to her feet and almost immediately fell backward, still dizzy from the blow to the head.
“It’s okay, I’ve got her,” came Greg’s voice. He walked forward with Sarah in his arms. She was reaching up and playing with the collar of his shirt.
Nancy turned instead to Ken. When she put her arms on his shoulders she found that his whole body was shaking. Without saying anything she pulled the katana from his twitching hands and lay it on the bed. After a moment he managed to tear his eyes away from Jake’s body to look at her.
“Thank you,” Nancy whispered. Ken just nodded and leaned his forehead on hers. She could only imagine the thoughts that must be rushing through his mind. He’d dedicated his life to trying to save people, and here he’d just taken a life. A worthless, cruel, evil life, perhaps, but still a life.
A while later, when the baby started to fidget again, Greg spoke up. “I think we should go tonight,” he suggested. He gestured toward the bloody mess of a man on the bed as though to say, “Yeah... We’re not going to be able to hide that for long.”
Nancy nodded. “Just let me clean up first,” she requested.
The hit to the head had her moving as though through a dream - a terrible, disturbing dream - but the reflection in the bathroom mirror brought the whole situation back down to Earth. Her face was spattered with Jake’s blood. Beneath it all she was starting to show a black eye and some nasty bruises. She began to wash her face with bottled water and before she knew it she was leaning over the sink, weeping. Weeping for her face, weeping for her inability to defend herself against that monster, and weeping for the fact that even in a disaster of apocalyptic proportions people could still turn against each other in such a horrifying way. She didn’t realize how long she’d been crying until Ken appeared beside her. He took her by the shoulders and lifted her into a standing position. He wet a fresh facecloth with the bottled water, rung it out a little, and began dabbing at Nancy’s face and neck. As he cleared away the blood and tears he smiled at the face that appeared beneath. When he was finally done he dropped the cloth in the sink, set the water aside, and took Nancy’s hands in his.
“Better?” he asked.
Nancy nodded. “Better,” she said. Then she reached up on the tips of her toes and kissed him; not with gratitude, nor with passion, but with something somehow
more
. She’d often daydreamed about kissing Ken, but she had never imagined that it might happen like this. By the time she pulled away, something had changed between them. He held her close for several long moments before finally speaking.
“We should go.”
“Yes. Yes, we should.”
Chapter Nine
Though their path had been laid out for them by Jake’s demise, they had no idea how they were going to get out of the hospital. Laden down with bags of what they’d managed to scavenge the evening before, the trio and their baby crept through the building, completely aware of how suspicious they looked. It was the middle of the night and they were carrying their own body weight in supplies; what excuse could they possibly give if someone spotted them?
Aria’s thugs were at every exit they checked. A bit of quick deliberation had them heading for the basement exit, which Ken was pretty sure let out into the parking lot. Perhaps, they thought, they could knock out the guard there without anyone finding him until they were long gone. It wasn’t a good plan, but they didn’t have a lot of choice. Surely it wouldn’t be long before someone noticed that Jake was missing.
The guard was leaning against the wall - an average-looking middle-aged guy - when they found him. They hid their bags around the corner and tried to seem like they were walking by casually. He leaped about a mile when he heard them approaching. He had his gun cocked so fast that Nancy’s heart skipped a beat, but he managed to restrain himself before taking one of them out in his jumpiness.
“What the hell are you three doing down here?” he demanded. Half a second later his eyes narrowed at Nancy. “What the hell happened to your face, girl?”
Nancy forced a smile on her face and pretended like she hadn’t heard the second question. “Sarah was fussing, so I took her for a walk,” she lied, gesturing to the baby in her arms. “But I’m so nervous about being alone, I asked the guys to come with me.”
It was a ridiculously thin story, and even as Nancy was spewing it she realized that the man was noticing the fact that the baby was fast asleep. His eyes began to narrow. Greg sprang into action immediately; he widened his eyes and plastered a look of horror on his face as he stared at the door behind the guard. He raised a finger and let out a panicked little squeal that even had Nancy convinced. The guard, reacting as Greg had no doubt expected he would, whirled around in a panic, expecting to see zombies behind him. The second he turned Ken was on top of him. There was a short struggle and when Ken stepped back again the guard had a syringe jammed into his neck. He barely managed to raise his hand to touch the empty container before slumping to the ground.
“What did you give him?” Nancy asked. She nudged the man’s body with her foot and he didn’t even twitch.
“Don’t ask,” Ken said with a cringe. “Just a little something I’ve been carrying around for an emergency. He’ll live, that’s all that matters. But he’ll be damn sick when he wakes up.”
The men picked the guard up by the arms and legs and carried him as carefully as they could behind the basement door.
The basement itself was pitch black. They immediately began searching for a light switch, but when Ken found one it turned out that the circuit must have blown. Unamused, but dedicated, they pressed on. Nancy gripped the baby close, and the men each kept one hand on the woman’s shoulders at all times. Their closeness made it difficult to navigate down the stairs, especially with all the bags they were carrying, but eventually they found their way to solid ground again. A thin line of light was peeking at them from about thirty feet to their left. Excited, they made their way toward it, narrowly avoiding tripping over a pile of paint cans and maintenance supplies. Nancy chuckled nervously to herself as they finally made it to the door that would lead them out into the side parking lot.
“Shit!” Ken hissed. He pushed several times but kept coming up against some resistance. He fumbled around in the dark for a second before groaning, “It’s chained.”
Nancy’s heart fell, but she also felt rather stupid. “We should have known it would be blocked off,” she muttered.
Greg was stubbornly examining the door. “I think we can remove the handle from this side,” he suggested, “if we can find a screwdriver or something.”
The men began to search around in the dark. Eventually Greg found an electrician’s knife by slicing open the ball of his thumb with it. He hissed and sucked on the wound while fiddling with the door at the same time. It was very slow going, as the knife didn’t fit well into the screw heads, but bit by bit he managed to remove them from the door. After what felt like an eternity, the handle popped off in his hands, bringing the chain with it. “Yes!” he celebrated quietly.
Someone groaned. Nancy frowned. “What’s wrong, Ken?” she asked.
Ken’s hand snaked out and gripped her arm tight. “I didn’t say anything,” he told her.
The three turned into the darkness of the basement. Something was coming toward them. Nancy bit her lip hard to keep from screaming. Ken grabbed the katana and held it at arm’s length, swinging it back and forth. Something made contact, and he tried to pull the sword back, but couldn’t. Greg shoved open the basement door and a parking light shone on them. Ken cried out in alarm.
The guard they’d dispatched was holding the end of the katana in one hand, ignorant of the blood dripping down his arm. With the other hand he was reaching out, grasping toward Ken. Drool was running down the sides of his mouth and his eyes were blood red. Panicked, Ken stabbed the sword forward, catching the man in the chest. He stumbled backward, then reached out with both arms and began shuffling toward them with the sword sticking out of him. Ken let out a second yelp as the man’s fingers swung and grasped for his face.
“Greg!” Nancy cried, thrusting the baby into his arms. “Hold Sarah!” Startled and shaken, Greg grasped the baby - who twisted, cried out, and then fell back into a soft snore - to his chest. Nancy grabbed the electrician’s knife from where Greg had dropped it and turned back to the guard. “Ken! Hold him still!” she commanded.
“Easy for you to say!” Ken retorted. He grabbed the katana hilt with both hands and struggled to steady it as the guard slowly slid his body closer and closer while reaching for Ken’s head.
Nancy jumped to the side, raised the knife up high, and brought it down hard on the man’s head. It seemed to crack his skull, but didn’t stop him. He turned, as though examining an annoying fly that was buzzing around his face, and twisted his body against the blade of the katana in an attempt to move toward her instead. With a lurch in her stomach, Nancy drew the knife back again and shoved it through his nose and upward. This time the blade reached something important. With a spurt of blood and a terrible moan, his eyes went blank and he fell to the ground, almost taking Ken and the sword with him.
They all stood, staring and breathing heavily for a few moments before Greg exclaimed, “I thought you only knocked him out!”
“I...I did!” Ken insisted. He was sweating visibly. “I’m sure of it! He must have had an allergy or something...” Despite himself, his eyes were looking a little glassy, and Nancy could see why. Even if it had been an accident, he’d just taken his second human life in the same night. That couldn’t feel particularly great. Nancy gave him a squeeze on the shoulder, unsure what else to say or do to make him feel better. Ken gave her a shaky nod before handing her the katana and heading for the door.
The immediate area of the parking lot seemed deserted. Counter-intuitively, that concerned Nancy. Obviously she didn’t want to be wandering around a lot littered with the moaning, rotting undead, but the complete absence of them was almost unnerving. The fences that Aria’s group had erected had spatters of old blood here and there that proved they’d been approached more than once, but from where they stood now Nancy couldn’t see any sign of movement at all, not even on the roads outside the wall. Had they all wandered off? Surely someone in the hospital would have noticed if the coasts had suddenly become clear. Nancy found herself straining her ears for signs of the shambling monsters, but all she could hear was the wind rustling though the nearby trees.
The men found a vehicle that they deemed suitable; a family-style SUV. It was unlocked and there was almost a full tank of gas. They set about looking under the dashboard for the proper wires.
“Do you think it’s the red wire or the yellow one?” Greg asked.
“You’re asking me?” Ken rebutted with a raised eyebrow. “Do I look like the kind of person who hot-wires cars?”
Greg raised an eyebrow of his own. “Do
I
?”
“
Boys
,” Nancy hissed. “Don’t make me crack your heads together.”
“Sorry,” they mumbled in unison. They hurriedly turned back to the fistful of wires.
Nancy opened the back seat and sat down with Sarah, snuggling the sleeping baby close. She looked around the parking lot. So quiet. It was genuinely disturbing. The first few days of the disaster there had been so much noise; screaming and explosions, car crashes and sirens. As recently as a few nights ago they were still hearing the occasional vehicle screech by, or a blat of gunfire. Now everything was silence, and it was unnerving her. Surely the danger hadn’t simply vanished, so where exactly
was
it?
“Ow!” Greg cried out. “Dude, are you
trying
to electrocute me?”
“Well if you’d keep your big mitts out of the damn way...”
Nancy closed her eyes and counted to thirty.
When she opened her eyes again she thought she saw something to her left and turned. There was no movement, but something seemed off. While the boys bickered over the car, Nancy slowly moved her eyes across the darkness before her. The parking lot was more than half empty. There were some skid marks in a few areas to show where people had peeled away from the hospital as fast as they could. Two cars were smashed together near the entrance; Aria’s group had used them as a base for their fence. Another car had the windows smashed out of it and what looked like blood smeared over the door. Three of the seven flood lights in the lot were on, giving just enough light to be creepy. Up in the hotel there were slivers of light showing through shut curtains, but the two nearby buildings were completely dark. None of the streetlights were on. Presumably the main power for the entire city had been cut off weeks ago. Nancy wondered if there were people in those other buildings, hiding in the dark and hoping that the danger would pass before they starved to death.
About fifty feet away there was a large stone wall dividing the hotel from the park on the other side. There were splatters of blood here as well, some in the shapes of hand prints that seemed to climb the stone. It was while staring at those prints that Nancy figured out what was bothering her. There was a figure on that wall, standing with its arms crossed, staring at them. Nancy stared back, a little shaken, unsure whether the figure was a statue or a person. It was standing perfectly still and had the shape of a large man. Nancy squinted at it until a gust of wind blew the figure’s long shirt in gentle ripples around his body. With a chill Nancy concluded that there was a very good chance that this was a live person watching them. But why? Was he one of Aria’s look-outs? It didn’t seem likely, as he appeared to have no weapon and wasn’t moving to take them down. A survivor would surely be approaching them, if not banging on the doors of the hospital. A zombie would be stumbling toward them as well, groaning its desire for flesh. This person was simply standing... And staring...
A warm hand touched her chin and Nancy jumped out of her skin. Sarah gurgled up at her. Nancy bit her lip and forced a smile for the child.
“Is this it?” Ken was asking. His question was followed by a spark and a curse, punctuated by a snark of laughter from Greg.
As the boys began to poke at each other again, Nancy’s ears perked up at a different noise. She looked up again. The figure was still there; it had not moved in the slightest. She strained to hear the noise again, but between the men tormenting each other and the baby making ‘Play with me!’ noises, she began to think she’d imagined it.
But then there it was again, far off, hard to distinguish. And again, a tiny bit louder. Nancy squinted toward the road and thought she saw something like a strange shadow, off in the distance. It was like an inky black mass, growing slowly but steadily larger and moving closer by the second. The sound began to become clearer, and in a moment of sudden realization Nancy’s heart almost stopped dead in her chest.
“Guys,” she hissed. Her voice cracked and they didn’t hear her, so she coughed it out again, louder: “Guys!”
Ken and Greg looked up to see pure terror on Nancy’s face. They turned their gazes to the direction of hers and the horror came crashing down on them as well.
It was a hoard of zombies, two or three hundred at least. They were moving toward the hospital, laying siege, their moans like battle cries in the night air. And they were moving faster than they’d moved before.
“Hurry!” Nancy screamed. Greg was frozen in shock, but Ken immediately dropped back down to the bundle of wires and started shoving together every combination he could think of. He seared the skin off the tips of his fingers with the sparks.
The baby began to wail, but Nancy couldn’t hear it. The army marching toward them was huge, terrifying, and much faster and more determined than their previous experiences. It was almost as if they’d
organized
. They were swarming like a hive of bees whose honey had been stolen. As they moved closer Nancy could begin to make out the individual bodies. Some were missing limbs, some were covered head to toe in blood, and yet others had entire sheets of skin missing to reveal muscle and bone underneath. Most had their arms outstretched, anticipating the meal before them, and all were emitting the otherworldly wail of death and hunger. Tears began to fall from Nancy’s eyes just listening to it.