Psych Ward Zombies

Copyright © 2014 by James Novus

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover illustration and design Copyright © 2014 by James Novus

First Edition, 2014

www.ZombieBookSeries.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or undead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The half-rotted creature stumbled spasmodically toward him from the opposite end of the hospital corridor. As it lurched down the litter-strewn hallway, each step was punctuated by the grinding and clicking of its heel bones on the tile. The skin and soft tissues on its bare feet had been worn away by days of ceaseless shuffling through the corridors. While its halting movements suggested hesitancy, the cold gray eyes
reflected a single-minded determination. It was as if the creature were incapable of any thought other than pursuing its human prey.

Dave reflexively reached for his 9mm pistol, but he was out of bullets. Moments earlier he had been ambushed by the zombie, and the surprise attack had caused Dave to panic. He had turned and fled down this corridor, firing his pistol wildly behind him. A few of his bullets managed to hit the attacker, causing minor flesh wounds. However, most of his rounds had missed their target, and the encounter had finished off Dave’s remaining bullet supply. The empty gun was now useful only as a club, and a poor one at that
.

Dave abandoned his hope of simply shooting the zombie in the head
and tossed his empty pistol aside. It was time for Plan B.

He kept his eyes fixed on the monster and slipped his hand down to his waist. Dave drew his white doctor coat back like a Western gunslinger brushing back a long duster. His hand continued to his belt and felt the handle of a machete hanging at his hip
.

“Why is a doctor carrying a machete in a hospital?
” he wondered, momentarily distracted by the thought.

His puzzlement was quickly replaced by a feeling of confident self-awareness. He was taller than the zombie, and certainly stronger too. His muscular arms and chest strained at the fabric of his doctor coat. Plumes of golden hair tumbled down to his broad shoulders, framing his tan cheeks and square jaw. He looked, and felt, like a super hero. The panic was gone, and Dave was emboldened by a sense of being invincible
.

Although he pulled the machete from under his leather belt, the blade called out with a metallic “schwing” - the noise typically heard in the movies when a sword is withdrawn from a scabbard. Dave raised the machete and took a couple of practice swings to
assess the range of the weapon. The blade whistled as it sliced through the air. Despite this impressive display, the undead creature seemed to pay no heed. Its dead face remained twisted into a grimace of pain, anger, and hunger. It was fixated on eating Dave, and it did not care whether its victim held a machete, a ball point pen, or even a bazooka.

Dave assumed a fighting stance. His knees were bent and he kept his vital organs turned slightly away from the advancing creature. He raised the machete above his head, ready to strike. As the zombie stumbled into range, Dave swung the blade down with all his strength. He had aimed to hit the zombie in the neck, imagining the zombie’s would head soar through the air like some sort of putrefied frisbee. His swing, however, impacted the creature halfway between the shoulder and base of the neck. The machete went cleanly through the clavicle and subsequently split a couple of ribs. The blade embedded itself in the zombie’s torso and stuck fast. The handle protruded like some perverse variation of Excalibur jutting from the magical stone
.

Dave lacked the divine birthright of King Arthur and therefore was unable to pull his blade from the monster’s chest. All attempts to yank the blade free simply brought the rotten beast closer. In desperation, Dave brought his right leg up and planted his foot on the zombie’s abdomen in an attempt to get leverage. With one mighty tug he would have the weapon free and would launch a more well-aimed attack. However, as he brought his foot up, this allowed the zombie to grab his leg and push him off balance. Dave fell backward onto the floor with a heavy thud. The zombie lurched upon him and sunk its face into the soft tissue of his neck
.

The zombie tore open Dave’s throat, sending a spatter of blood and chunks of meat onto the floor around them. Darkness enveloped the corridor, shrinking Dave’s field of vision down into a tiny red dot that paused momentarily before being swallowed by the blackness
.

The words “GAME OVER – PRESS X TO RESTART” flashed on the screen of Dave’s television
.

Dave hurled his game controller onto the floor as he simultaneously hurled obscenities at the television screen. He had been playing the zombie-themed video game all morning and had already spent three hours on this level without beating it. The game was called “I.C.U. Dead”, a first person shooter where the undead take over the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital and unleash gory destruction on the doctors and nurses. Being a physician, Dave found the premise rather compelling. He enjoyed shooting the rampaging zombies, but he also found a strange sense of pleasure in inflicting collateral damage on the patients and staff members. This was a healthy way of blowing off a little steam from work - or at least that is what he told himself
.

His eyes burned from staring at the screen
over the past several hours, and his slumped posture on the couch had resulted in an aching back. He had not dressed for the day yet, still lounging in his underwear and a T-shirt.

Like the machete-wielding character he played in the
video game, Dave was a doctor. However, all similarities ended there. He did not wear a white lab coat at work, and he certainly did not carry a machete. And, of course, Dave did not battle zombies.

The most notable difference, however, was that
Dave was actually a middle-aged dwarf. Not the heroic kind of dwarf found in fantasy books, bustling around gold mines with tankards of ale and bushy beards. No, he was just a normal everyday dwarf, like the ones being exploited for a cheap laugh on television. He had been born with achondroplasia, a genetic disorder that causes short stature. At 4' 9” and 135 pounds, his size was not impressive, although he was technically on the tall end of dwarfism. Despite the social stigma of his size, he had done well in school and in his medical career. His romantic life, on the other hand, had never quite blossomed.

He was smart enough to see the silver lining in his isolation. The lack of a wife or steady girlfriend allowed him the freedom to play video games as much as he wanted, to spend his money on his own hobbies, and to live like a slob.
No one was there to harp on him about the pizza boxes on the floor. He left the toilet seat up all the time. He could walk around his home in a pair of tighty whities (or less), and no one would say a word. He was living like a king. – a pants-less, slovenly Dwarf King with no beard and no gold.

Dave squinted at his watch. It was almost
noon, and he was already in danger of being late for work. He had just enough time to get cleaned up, grab some lunch, and drive to work by one o’clock. He usually worked a regular schedule, from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, like most other doctors. However, once a week he was required to cover the night shift at the hospital. This entailed going to work at one o’clock in the afternoon and staying at the hospital all night. He would go home at 8:00 AM the following day and then have the rest of that day off. His job on the night shift was to cover the hospital for psychiatric emergencies as the “doctor on call”.

He dreaded these shifts. Because his mind liked to compartmentalize things, he preferred to get his work done during the regular workday and then go home in the afternoon. Such a routine left a sharp demarcation between “work time” and “me time”. He also liked predictability. The idea of hanging around the hospital all night waiting for something bad to happen was almost intolerable. His overnight shifts at the hospital felt like being sprawled beneath the Sword of Damocles. However, in this case the object representing the sword was his pager, which at any moment could summon him to deal with some unpleasant crisis
.

There was always drama on the night shift, and it was always the bad kind of drama. The nurses never called him at three in the morning to tell him good things, like they were having cake and ice cream on G Ward, or that the receptionist’s dog just had puppies. No, it was usually a call to tell him that a patient had assaulted another patient, that someone had inserted a foreign object in their ear (or some other bodily orifice), or that someone with explosive diarrhea needed to be evaluated. Good times
.

Dave took a quick shower, unsuccessfully attempting to wash away the dread. He toweled off and returned to his bedroom to select some clothes for the day. He knew he had a decent chance of encountering some sort of bodily fluids during his shift, so he chose a shirt and pants that were older and already had a few small stains. He elected not to wear a necktie, in case he
was required to intervene in a scuffle between patients. He recalled hearing a story of a psychiatrist being strangled when a violent patient had grabbed the shrink by the necktie. He had no idea if the story was true, but he also had no desire to be the subject of similar stories himself.

Although he was not particularly hungry, Dave knew he should go ahead and eat something. The cafeteria at the psychiatric hospital offered few options for palatable meals, and gave a whole new meaning to the term “institutional food”. He always avoided the food at the hospital if possible. He fixed a couple
cheese sandwiches and gulped them down before walking out the door to the garage. He took along a duffel bag containing toiletry items and a change of clothes.

Once in the garage, he was surrounded by projects related to his favorite hobby. Each October he enjoyed creating a “haunted house” in his garage, inviting brave trick-or-treaters and their parents to walk through the display on Halloween. The garage would be sectioned off into separate scenes, each with its own scary theme. One room might have a vampire in a coffin, another might have a mummy, and other rooms might be based on more recent horror movies. He would also create an impressive array of tombstones, cemetery fences, hanging skeletons, and creepy lighting effects in the yard. He had been doing this for several years, and the kids from all the surrounding neighborhoods now made a special point t
o visit his house on Halloween.

Recently he had considered abandoning his psychiatry career and opening a professional haunted attraction. However, the income and job security of psychiatry made it a tough thing to toss aside, so the dream of running a haunted house remained on the back burner for now. The psychiatry job did not provide any outlets for creativity, so his seasonal hobby served to fulfill those needs
.

Dave
walked under a couple of fake bats hanging from the ceiling and made his way over to his vehicle. His 30-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser was old and painfully slow, but he felt like the truck made up for it with style. He kept it running well and it was fairly reliable. He tossed his duffel bag in the passenger seat and climbed inside. The pedals had been specially-modified to allow him to reach them. Other modifications included fold-down running boards and a grab handle to allow him easier access to the driver’s seat. He could have bought a smaller car, but he liked big trucks. Dave knew the old joke about how people drive big trucks to over-compensate for small size in other areas. He figured if the shoe fit, he would wear it.

A half hour later, he had arrived at the hospital and was loitering in his vehicle in the parking lot. He was still dreading the shift that lay ahead, so he sat and listened to the radio for as long as he could. He tried to relax, resting for a while with his eyes closed. As he listened to his music, he felt the midday sun on his face. The warmth soothed him, and he was able to temporarily push the angst from his mind.

His moment of peace was shattered by the sharp sound of someone knocking on the window beside his head. Dave tried unsuccessfully to suppress his annoyed scowl, swiveling his head toward the window to confront his antagonist.

A tall man in a white doctor’s coat stood beside the driver door, hunching his back a bit to position his vulture-like face squarely in the frame of the window. “You’re going to be late,” the man said matter-of-factly, in the tone of a parent scolding a child
.

The man was his boss,
Doctor Devlin. Devlin was the Medical Director of the hospital. While Dave’s first inclination was to roll down the window and jam a car key through the man’s neck, he managed a more passive response.

“Yeah, uh, okay
… Thanks, Dr. Devlin. I’ll be there shortly.”

Devlin always gave Dave the creeps. Maybe it was Devlin’s bushy black eyebrows that hovered over dark, deep-set eyes. The eyebrows looked like storm clouds swirling over two dark entrances to Hell. Dave always felt like Devlin’s eyes had the ability to pierce his soul, like some sort of evil black laser beams
.

The eyes continued to stare at Dave with a mixture of expectation and disdain, although Devlin did not speak. It was an awkward moment that felt like an eternity. Dave broke the silence, as well breaking eye contact, glancing down into his passenger seat while mumbling something about finding his name badge. He pretended to search a little bit before pulling the name badge from the center console where he always kept it. “Got it,” he said with a measure of fake enthusiasm. He held the badge aloft, as if admiring his find. However, as Dave turned back to the window, Devlin had disappeared from view
.

“What the hell?
”

Dave checked his side mirrors and rear view mirror, scanning for Devlin. A
lanky man in a stark white coat should be pretty easy to spot in a parking lot, but Dave could not find him anywhere. The thought occurred to Dave that Devlin might be crouching or hiding behind a nearby car, staring at him like some sort of creepy stalker. “He’s just about weird enough to do something like that,” Dave whispered to himself. He dismissed the idea a moment later with the realization that Devlin had no sense of humor and no reason to hide from him.

Dave grabbed his duffel bag and name badge and
hopped from the Land Cruiser. He felt a cold chill go down his spine, which led him to take another look around the vehicle – just in case. Finding no one, he walked warily toward the entrance of the hospital.

Dave was in no hurry, as his shift did not start for another 10 minutes. He still had time to stop by his office and drop off his things before he was supposed to be working. As he approached the entrance, he produced his name badge and held it ready in his hand. He arrived at a large set of locked doors. Beside the doors stood a small pole with a black box attached. The box was a proximity sensor and used radio frequencies to detect ID badges. Dave held his badge in front of the box and a small red light turned green. Simultaneously, he heard the click of the lock solenoid in the door mechanism, signaling that the doors were now unlocked
.

It was all very high-tech. The hospital building was practically new, having been built just two years earlier to replace an older facility. The old hospital had been the stereotypical mental hospital one sees in the movies - a sprawling brick building with towers, ivy-covered facades, and a network of dank tunnels underneath the building. Inside, most the windows of the old building had bars on them, and the floors were all made of cold, sterile terrazzo. Both hospitals were located on a 600-acre wooded estate located a forty-five minute drive from the nearest suburban area
.

When the state had decided to build the old hospital in the early 1900’s, no one wanted a mental hospital to be near their town. It was the typical “not in my backyard” kind of thing. A hundred years ago, it seems people feared that escaped mental patients would swarm into nearby towns, raping and pillaging the poor citizens like a horde of deranged Vikings. The resulting location was so remote that there was no reliable cell phone service. An amplified booster antenna for cell signals had been placed atop the new hospital, providing marginal but adequate cell service
.

Dave had started this job a year or two before they decommissioned the old building. He enjoyed the old hospital, feeling a sense of novelty to be working in
an old-time mental institution. The first day of working there, he had stood on the front steps and gazed upward at the imposing structure looming over him. He recalled feeling it was preparing to suddenly reach out to grab him, using its six tall pillars as bony fingers. He figured the building was probably haunted. It certainly looked haunted.

He was also aware of the old building’s history. He knew back in the old days the staff would do lobotomies, involuntary electric shock treatments, and ice baths for the unruly patients. Things had changed with mental health treatment over time, so he did not feel guilty or remorse about working in such a place. To Dave, it felt like working in a museum.

The old building had been left standing after the new hospital was built, although the plan was to tear it down in the coming months. The new hospital building, dubbed Eldemere Psychiatric Hospital, had been erected directly across the parking lot from the old building. The new hospital was a totally modern facility, with large courtyards, immense windows made of unbreakable glass, skylights, colorful murals, and a state-of-the-art heating and air system. There was faux-wood linoleum throughout, which gave the corridors a cheerful, cozy feel.

The planners of the new building realized that working in a psychiatric hospital requires passing through innumerable locked doors, so they sought to make this as convenient as possible. While the old building had utilized conventional and cumbersome keyed locks, the new building was built with the proximity readers on most of the doors. This allowed any staff member to simply wave his or her name badge in front of the sensor, and each door would unlock automatically
.

Dave pushed the huge door open and entered the hospital. He was immediately greeted with the familiar odor of a medical institution. It turns out even hospitals that do not perform medical procedures or surgeries still have that “hospital smell”. He strode down the corridor past a number of common areas such as the cafeteria, group discussion rooms, an auditorium, and a reception area. From the region of these common areas, the corridor split into branches like an immense tree, with diverging hallways leading to the individual wards
.

The hospital had 5 wards, each labeled A through E. Each ward had a specific purpose. A, B, and C Wards were used for the general adult patient population and D Ward housed the elderly patients. E Ward was designed for children, with its own small cafeteria and common rooms. The juvenile patients did not generally interact with the adult patients in the hospital.

The wards all had a similar layout. From the entrance of the ward, there was a wide corridor that intersected with a couple small hallways that led to the clinicians’ offices. The wide entrance corridor continued onward to a central area consisting of a nursing station and several day rooms. The day rooms were where the patients would spend their leisure time when not engaged in treatment activities. The rooms contained tables, chairs, and sometimes a television, creating a place for social interaction. The nursing station consisted of a sort of kiosk, with a tall semi-circular countertop surrounding a low desk. Behind the desk was a small chart room where the medical records for each patient were kept. Beyond the central area of nursing station and day rooms, another long corridor extended for about 50 yards. This hallway was lined with the doors of the patients’ private rooms.

Dave spent most of his time on B Ward and was primarily responsible for the ten patients who lived there. However, on these night shifts he had to cover the entire hospital after all the other physicians had gone home at four o’clock. He swiped his name badge at the door of B Ward and walked into his home away from home.

His office was not far from the entrance to the ward, down a small hallway where the patients were not allowed. Outside his office was a plastic wall plaque that read, “David Hexer, MD”. He was able to unlock the door to the office with a small metal key, since all the private offices in the building still relied on physical door keys. No matter what sort of chaos was going on outside on the ward, Dave was the only one who had access to his office. He took great comfort just knowing that he could lock the rest of the world outside.