Justin did as he was told with shaking hands.
"Good,” Ramirez continued. “Now place the bit of the drill directly in the middle of her forehead at a ninety-degree angle. Good. Now that red button by your thumb is the cauterizer. Press it and give it a few seconds to heat. Once it does, it will melt through the skin of the forehead and give you a steadier purchase." Justin followed the steps and the acrid smoke wafted up. It smelled like cigarettes, barbeque, and sweat. He started to gag.
"Slow, steady breaths," Ramirez reassured him. "Now. When you're ready, Justin, slowly pull the trigger and steadily increase the speed and pressure on the drill. The cauterizer will reduce the amount of blood and spread of biohazard material.
Justin stared intently at the glowing metal. In his hand he held one of the most effective weapons against the apocalypse. It was his duty as a living, breathing member of society to destroy the dead before they could spread their scourge. As he mustered up his courage, the seconds ticked on. Ramirez glanced at the countdown on his watch. With barely a minute and half on the timer, the kid looked up, his face pale and sweaty, "I can't."
Ramirez held out his hand to take back the drill. "I understand, kid. This is not an easy thing to do. I'll take care of it. You don't have to watch if you don't want to."
Before Justin could respond, there was a loud ruckus coming from outside the apartment. "Hey!" shouted Drifts shouted. He grunted in pain and a moment later his winded voice said, "Leo!"
There was the sound of running feet, and a moment later, the daughter appeared in the doorway holding a long carving knife. She released a cat-like howl and charged.
Ramirez threw the hot-drill at her. It glanced off her shoulder but the enraged woman hardly noticed. Ramirez snatched up his medical bag and swung it at her like a flail. The open bag's contents spewed out as it connected with her arm, knocking her off balance. She stumbled into the bed, her knife slicing into her dead mother's calf.
Putting himself between her and Justin, Ramirez grabbed his student by the arm and shoved him for the door. "Go!" he shouted and fled through the door behind him.
She screamed as she ran after them. Ahead of them, Drifts's silhouette appeared in the apartment doorway. He was holding his flashlight like a baton as he rushed forward. Justin's foot caught a hidden iron cord and he fell onto the three-foot wall of stuff. Moving too fast to stop, Ramirez tripped and landed right on top of him.
Tangled in a web of clothes, broken appliances, and molded food left on dishes, they thrashed to free themselves as the daughter pounced like a spider.
Ramirez's floundering legs caught her as he twisted around. She fell towards him, her bloody knife glinting in the dark. He reached out defensively and caught the wrist of her knife hand. She tried to claw at him with her free hand. He drove his elbow into her, but his arm was tangled in laundry diminishing the power in his strike, but still enough to stun her.
"Fuck! We’ve got a runner now!" shouted Drifts.
Ramirez heard another pair of feet running from the bedroom and the cold reality occurred to him: he hadn’t neutralized the mother.
He saw the old woman's fleshy carcass running into view with a speed her body had not known in years. The zombie’s yellow teeth were working to chomp through the intubation tube, and the blackened circle on her forehead from the hot-drill resembled a charred third eye. She was almost on top of them.
Drifts lunged over all of them, catching the zombie in a diving tackle. The two of them hurtled out of Ramirez's range of vision, crashing down on the floor beyond. The impact of them striking the floor woke the daughter from her temporary stunned state. She turned to the sounds of his partner's struggle with the zombie and threw herself at Drifts's back, tearing free of Ramirez's already precarious grip.
Ramirez sprung after her desperately. Ramirez crashed down on the daughter’s back as he grabbed her knife arm with both of his hands, stopping her short of sinking it into Drifts's back. She released an angry scream as she writhed beneath him. He slammed her knife hand to the ground again and again. Her battered knuckles opened. Ramirez awkwardly grasped the knife’s handle and threw it. It clattered as it disappeared in the cluttered darkness.
Justin, no longer pinned by their combined weight clambered to his feet.
"Someone, help me with this bitch!" shouted Drifts.
Drifts's arms were shaking as he wrestled her. Her bloody teeth had bitten through the tube and were inches from his exposed neck. His grip was slipping on her naked flesh, and her savagery overwhelmed him. He was getting tired, but the dead did not tire.
The daughter disarmed, Ramirez reached Drifts at the same time as Justin did. The two of them pried the dead woman’s clawing fingers off of Drifts and helped him to his feet. He stumbled several steps and toppled backwards over the wall of junk with a muffled, “Fuck!”
The naked zombie, still on the floor lurched for Justin's leg. "Whoa!" the student screamed as he jumped back kicking. His boot caught her in the teeth, snapping them and knocking her head backwards. He brought his foot down and tripped on more debris causing him to stagger back a few feet. As he regained his footing he saw a metal handle gleam on a shorter knocked over heap. He snatched it up and a light flooded the room as he discovered Drift's flashlight. Justin raised the flashlight over his head like a hammer.
Ramirez backed towards Drifts, keeping his eyes fixed on the dead woman as he hauled his partner back to his feet.
"No!" screeched the daughter. She stood up between the EMS crew and her mother eyeing them warily as she held her arms out to ward them off. Behind her the zombie rose.
Ramirez shouted for her to move, and he and Drifts rushed her in unison, but the zombie reached her first. Dead fingers latched on her neck and hair yanking her backwards.
"Momma?" The daughter half-turned as the dead thing sunk its teeth into her shoulder. "Ay!"
It tore off a chunk of flesh as they reached her. They broke the mother's hands as they freed her daughter. She collapsed bleeding and sobbing into Drifts, who pulled her backwards. It lurched towards them. Ramirez brought his flashlight up, but Justin was already there swinging Drifts’s flashlight. He brought it crashing down on the zombie’s head. The metal tube glanced off its head and struck its collarbone, snapping it with a loud crack."
The student raised his flashlight for another blow, but the dead thing crashed into him. They collapsed to the floor with the obese zombie on top. Justin cried out as he tried to push her off of him. Despite his adrenalized strength, she was too heavy and continued pulling herself towards him hungrily.
“Hang on!”
Ramirez ran up and grabbed a handful of gray hair yanking back. The zombie’s neck arched and it teeth chomped at the air in hungry expectation. Ramirez’s other hand pulled a field knife open with a click.
He jammed the tip of the blade into the space below the base of her skull. He twisted the handle until there was an audible crunch. The zombie convulsed once and went still.
Justin lay below it panting. “Okay she’s dead-dead now,” Ramirez said. “Push her to your right on the count of three. Ready? One-two-three.”
Together they rolled the zombie off of him and let it thump to the trash-covered floor. Ramirez reached out and helped haul Justin up. The older medic lifted the dead woman’s head then pulled his knife free the mother’s skull. He rummaged around the piles and pulled a stained shirt and wiped the blood off his blade.
Ramirez placed a hand on Justin’s shoulder, and the student flinched. "Come on. Let's get out of here." Justin nodded. Drifts, still holding the sobbing daughter, nodded to him from a few feet away. Together the three of them exited the room.
Outside, Drifts looked at Justin. “Well if that didn’t grow some hair on your balls, I don’t know what will.”
Justin looked at the EMT with open shock. Then a moment later he snorted.
Ramirez took him through the finer points of field wound care as they bandaged the daughter’s bite out in the hall. While they tended to her, Drifts went back inside to gather up some of their equipment and wash off his flashlight in the bathroom sink. He came back out a few minutes later with the monitor, oxygen tank, and a considerably lighter medical bag.
"I have the narcs, anti-venom, and the hot-drill. Fuck the rest!"
"I thought that you were going to clean your flashlight?" said Ramirez as he noted the dented flashlight in the biohazard bag.
Drifts shook his head. "Not here. The bathroom is worse than the rest of the place."
They silently carried the daughter down the stairs and placed her onto the stretcher. Sirens screamed as they loaded her into the back of the ambulance and two police cruisers arrived. The hooker and the drug dealer had conveniently found other places to be.
"Better late than never," muttered Drifts.
The first officer stepped out of his patrol car, his eyes bulging as he noted their bloody appearance. "What the hell happened to you?"
“We had a code on apartment 4B that reanimated, and then her daughter attacked us,” Ramirez said matter-of-factly. "We put it down, but not before she was bitten."
The officers took a step backwards, their hands drifting towards their sidearms. "She attacked you before she was bit? Was she the only one?"
"Yep," said Ramirez.
"Do you need us to arrest her? Is she safe? Do we need to put her down?”
"You don't have to kill her. She wasn't bitten anywhere vital. I think she can be saved. We're taking her to the hospital now. We'll press charges there."
Drifts hit the lights and sirens and drove. Ramirez washed and cleaned his patient's wounds. He started an IV and gave her a sedative and zombie anti-venom.
Justin sat silently at the head of the stretcher and watched Ramirez work. He did not try to help and only broke his silence once when Ramirez administered the zombie anti-venom. "Will that help?"
"It might,” said Ramirez. “Coupled with surgical removal of all infected tissue, it has a forty percent chance of success. The problem is, it's highly caustic to the kidneys, and she might have to be on dialysis for the rest of her life. Still, that’s a better outcome than putting a bullet in her head."
Justin grunted and said no more.
They arrived at the hospital and a hazmat team met them in the ambulance bay, where they and their patient were stripped, washed, and examined under armed guard. Ramirez asked for privacy during his exam. Seeing that he wasn’t going to budge on the matter, the hospital staff relented.
“What that all about?” Justin asked.
Drifts shrugged. “Leo has modesty issues unlike me.” He stepped forward in naked glory, “All right folks, I’ve been a dirty boy. Let’s clean me up! He jumped with a shriek. “Hey! This water’s fucking freezing!”
Later, the hospital staff took the sedated daughter to a special ward. The three of them were given paper scrubs to wear as they waited for results.
Drifts said solemnly. “I’m sorry how things went back there. That bitch caught me off guard and kicked me in the nuts, and then she head-butted me. I came as quick as I could, but she had already grabbed that knife from God-knows-where and was almost on you guys. Scared the shit out of me!”
Ramirez waved off the apology. “Could have happened to any of us. You did stop the zombie.”
Drifts shrugged. Ramirez sat down by Justin. “Are you okay?”
Justin shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“That was the first zombie you’ve ever seen, wasn’t it?” asked Drifts. Justin nodded.
“They’re a pretty brutal sight,” Drifts acknowledged.
“That wasn’t the worst part. I keep thinking about how she lived before she died. How she was treated by her own daughter.” He shook his head. “Daughters aren’t supposed to treat their mothers like that.”
“I know,” said Ramirez.
“Then we try to save her, and her daughter tries to kill us. Her mother becomes one of those things and tries to eat her. We should have let her. It’s what she deserved, but we saved her. We gave her medicine took her to the hospital. For what? So that she can spend the rest of her life in jail.”
“Have to agree with the kid on that one, Leo,” said Drifts. “Who wants to live that way? All those meds you have to take. Going to dialysis every week. Then everyone looking at you like you have the plague, because well you fucking pretty much do.” Drifts looked at his partner. “If a zombie took a big chomp out of my ass, do me a favor. Put a bullet in my head, and put me out of my fucking misery. In the end I think it might be kinder.”
Ramirez shrugged. “It very well might be. But your solution is pretty permanent. I would like to give the bitten a choice in the matter. Who knows maybe they’ll live a life of purpose.”
Drifts gave his partner a look that said, ‘I doubt it.’, but he otherwise held his tongue.
Justin said, “I don’t know. This situation was pretty messed up. I can’t really find the good in this moment.”
“I can’t really say I can see it either.” Ramirez admitted.
Justin looked at him. “What’s the point? Why even bother?”