Supervisor Bertrand turned and strolled out of the room, giving Jonah’s a brief nod before his exit.
I was in shock as I thought about the implications of what we were just told. Are they really going to intentionally inject us with the virus? I tried to remember back to all the crap he’d said. Did he mean the outbreak in Malaysia was intentionally unleashed to test vaccines by competing pharmaceutical companies? My mind was swirling. You mean there’s some global conspiracy to use IHS on a worldwide scale to commit mass murder in the guise of saving the world? He also mentioned that our colleague had used ‘the same story about a reality TV show’. Had he captured one of the other teams and, if so, why did he say colleague in the singular?
A few minutes later, Jonah went to the nursing station and came over to Jamie’s bed where he proceeded to hook up an IV to the overhanging metal hook and jam the thick needle into her vein on the top of her hand. She cried out a bit as the needle pierced her skin. He then did the same for me and when he was finished brought over two vials and an injection gun. He loaded the gun and injected the vaccine into my carotid artery, then did the same for Jamie.
“Sorry to say, you don’t get the luxury of sedation tonight. We need to keep your vitals as normal as possible to simulate real world circumstances. I’ll bring over the television in a while. The hospital has a huge selection of Taiwan dramas and I’ll even let you choose which ones we watch until I’m off shift at four.”
He strolled back to the nursing station to a phone, picked up the receiver and made a short call. Soon two other men in green scrubs came in to the room pushing an empty gurney.
“Take number four to isolation, he’s showing signs of fever,” Jonah ordered.
The two orderlies went to one of the patients, took the clip board from the foot of the bed, consulted quietly, made a couple of notes and then attached it to the wheeled gurney. Then they put on rubber gloves and surgical masks, unstrapped the patient and set him on the gurney. Even I could see that the fever was taking hold. The patient was grinding his teeth and his bed sheets from under where he was lifted were soaked in sweat. They carted this newly infected man away and Jonah followed; their voices and steps fading down an outer corridor.
“Pssst.”
“Oy!”
“Pssst.”
Jamie looked at me and then towards the open windows on the far side of the room. There was Quaid’s shaved noggin and hands poking over the lip of the window seal.
“You all right?” he mouthed.
We nodded silently.
“I’ll get you out of there. But first I need to get Norris. He’s below you in a private room under lock and key. Once he’s free, we’ll come and get you. Be ready.” He whispered while miming his plan with his hands.
Both of us nodded again and he ducked out of sight just as Jonah re-entered the room, eating a large ripened plantain.
We had four hours left. If Quaid could help us escape, we’d still have a chance to make it to the signal beacon before the helicopter was summoned by Lydia and Derrik, who’d presumably make it to the evacuation point on time.
My spirits were elevated and I could tell Jamie shared the same feeling. But we still needed to play the role of frightened captives. Jonah dragged the television over on a cart and started a teen serial drama called ‘Comet Garden’ that I’d seen a hundred times already. He retrieved the same chair Supervisor Bertrand had used and sat between us. I think he was lonely because he began to laugh and tell us gossipy stories about the most handsome of the star’s love life.
We waited and pretended to watch with interest but all I could see was the second hand of the wall clock overhead taking money from our pockets one second at a time.
It was over an hour before something substantial finally happened. Jonah had just started episode two and I was losing hope we’d get out on time when someone began to shout in the hallway. Jonah jumped to his feet, listened intently at the screams in French and said, “Sounds like one of the infected got lose. I’ll go help them wrassle it back to its bed and be back with some cream sodas. Watch this one without me,” he patted us on our arms like we were good friends and left the room.
As the doors swung closed, Quaid jumped over the window seal and into the room. His bio-suit was covered, head to toe, in fresh blood and he had a large black bag slung over his shoulder. He looked like a deranged Santa without the beard and hat. Once at our beds, he tore out the IV drips and began undoing the straps holding Jamie down.
The commotion in the hallway grew louder and we could see people running frantically past the fishbowl windows embedded in the doors. Then there was muffled gunfire and a couple of loud booms underneath us.
“Get up and dress fast. I freed a group of those zombies and cracked open all the doors. Turned it into a real cock-up down there! If those nancy’s don’t get things under control, the monsters will be up here in no time. I don’t know how but those things are bloody quick!”
“Is that your blood? Where’s Norris?” I asked as I pulled on my bio-suit over my hospital gown, ever mindful of my modesty.
“Nah, lass, this isn’t my blood. I poured this on me from pints I found in an icebox marked ‘clean’ to make myself more attractive to the zombies. Then I broke into their room and got them to follow me into the hallway to act as a diversion. They’ve been holding forty or so in a surgical theater downstairs. Man, they’re like zombies on crack, faster than a bloke lookin for a bint at last call! A couple of them almost got their choppers into my neck. One of them jumped onto my back and tried to bite through here and here,” he pointed to his shoulder and neck, “This bio-suit saved my life.
“What about Norris,” Jamie asked.
He shrugged, “I think they have him somewhere on this floor. Get your weapons and let’s find him, they’re over there under the counter. Hurry up, girls. We can escape out on the ledge below the windows. But first, let’s find my mate.”
While we got our act together, Quaid crept up to the doors and peer outside. Just then Jonah pushed through the swinging doors smacking Quaid in the head. He staggered back a bit and then fired a bean bag from the shotgun into Jonah’s breadbasket. He doubled over onto the floor, gasping for air as we jumped over him and into the hall. There were people in hospital garb and white medical coats running up and down the corridor in terror. No one paid the slightest attention to Jamie and me. However, everyone stopped to stare at Quaid; with all that blood, they probably assumed he was Berjalan penyakit because they turned and fled in a panic.
We could hear screams and echoes of weird groaning in the hallway as we ran down the corridor looking through the fishbowl windows into each room for Norris. Finally, near the end of the hallway by the stairwell we came to a locked door that was marked, ‘Do not open.’ Quaid took a few steps back and kicked the rather flimsy plywood door inward, splitting it in two. We rushed into the room and there was Norris lying strapped to a hospital bed hooked up to half a dozen machines, multi-colored tubes poking out of his arms, wires and nodes attached to his bald head. He was conscious and staring wildly at us. He winced each time there was another scream from outside his room. “Oh thank God you’re here,” he said when he realized it was us, and not zombies intent on eating him as he lay helpless.
Jamie and I freed his legs and then his arms while Quaid unceremoniously ripped the tubes out of his arms and tore the wires from his head. Norris yelled a bit as the thick needles were jerked from his flesh, but he also smiled a little as he appreciated the bluntness and matter of fact way Quaid took care of business. He sat up, wearing only a hospital gown, and rubbed his arms where the tubes once protruded.
“These mother cussers were planning on infecting me with IHS intentionally! They already supposedly gave me a vaccine before sticking all these things into my arms. Said I was going to be one of the final clinical trials before beginning full production. What is going on here? Am I in some sort of alternate universe? Who are these people?”
Jamie spoke up, “We got the vaccine too. On the bright side, being turned and becoming one of the eaters is now out of the equation for us. That is except for our courageous hero here,” she said, pushing against Quaid affectionately, trying to sound less terrified than she actually was; the thought of one of those infected tearing into the soft parts of her flesh flashed through her mind.
I began to explain what Supervisor Bertrand had told us, but Quaid shushed me, ran over beside the crushed door and shut off the room’s interior lights.
There was someone ascending the stairwell just outside the room.
The footsteps were loud and irregular, pausing, then taking two or three steps, then pausing again.
We sat in silence.
Quaid, with his finger pursed to his lips, leaned over the splinters of door, peering into the hallway.
Whoever it was had stopped and was standing at the top of the stairwell.
We could hear sniffing noises and then someone screamed a few yards up the corridor. There was a rush of movement as, we could only assume, one of those Berjalan penyakit born from the new mutant strain of virus sprinted past our doorway towards the screams of terror. The screams turned to gurgling sounds of someone drowning in their own fluids. I crept up to the door and saw an infected straddling Jonah and tearing at his throat with his hands.
Quaid wasted no time; he grabbed Jamie’s and my hand and ran into the stairwell heading up to the third floor. Norris was right behind us. Quaid pushed at the door but it was locked and there was one of those hired paramilitary thugs with a gun on the other side shaking their head in denial of entry.
We ran to the fourth floor door, which was, thankfully, unlocked. The door opened into a large room that was probably once a cafeteria. It had been converted into a research/command center for Vitura Research personnel. The remaining Vitura staff and a couple of mercenaries dressed as WHO paratroopers were scrambling to pack gear, stuffing important papers into boxes and wiping hard drives from dozens of laptops lining the walls. A few scientist-looking fellows in white coats were doggedly continuing their research in a corner of the room that had been converted into a laboratory. They were so focused on their work that they didn’t even notice us as we ran into a unisex bathroom beside their setup, slamming and locking the door.
There were showers, lockers and a couple of toilets and sinks inside the rectangular restroom.
Norris turned to Quaid, pulling a face, he said, “Dude, you have to get the blood off of you before we do anything. So gross. Get in that shower and spray down before I barf all over the floor.”
Quaid was a bit vain and didn’t need to be told twice. He stepped into a shower stall and turned the pressure on high. The blood was already crusting , but it came off the slick rubber of the bio-suit easily, swirling and disappearing into the drain in the center of the floor.
I remained as far away from the shower as possible to avoid any splash back and Jamie riffled through the lockers looking for some functional clothes for Norris. She found a lab coat and some casual shoes that were a couple sizes too small. He pulled the coat on over his hospital gown and jammed his bare feet into the loafers, grimacing as his toes cramped up against the tips.
We were only inside the bathroom for about five minutes, but when we opened the door to go, all of the Vitura Research personnel had vanished and the room echoed eerily with our footsteps.
“If they went downstairs, they were most likely dead or being eaten,” Quaid said. “But I have a hunch they probably have an escape route pre-planned for this type of contingency. As for us, we need to find our way out of this building. I have a plan to get us to Kota Tinggi before our time runs out. Follow close.”
“Right, just like I trusted you to mess with our SUV’s throttle,” Norris replied as we walked back to the stairwell. “Did he tell you what happened to us? We left Kuala Lumpur and headed north east just as our route said. Then this goof ball here decided to tinker with our engine. Sure he got us enough horsepower to hit sixty kilometers an hour, but at what cost? We gained a couple of hours of daylight, but our engine blew about thirty kilometers north of Mersing. Luckily, there was a shack nearby with a couple of rusted pre-war bicycles with adequate tire pressure to carry our weight. Anyway, we biked a couple of kilometers looking for another car or truck we could boost that would get us to the signal beacon. But then we came across a couple of ‘paratroopers’ scooping up corpses of Berjalan penyakit into a large mass grave on the side of the road. I approached them to ask for help. I don’t think they spoke English, maybe French or something, but those a-holes drew their guns and took me captive while Quaid high-tailed it into the forest, retreating like a frightened bee-och.”
“Bloody hell, Mate! What did you want me to do? They had machine guns! Should I have tried to shoot them with my useless bean bags?” He held up the shotgun and made a cocking motion, “I’m here now, aren’t I? Saving your roly-poly arse!” They were griping a bit at each other, but you could tell they were both happy to be reunited for the time being.
“So how are we getting out of here?” Jamie asked.
Quaid had spent some time studying the hospital compound before attempting our rescue. As a London police officer, he had received training in hostage rescue which included building evacuation. Not that we knew this at the time, of course. “We go back down to the second floor to your room. There’s a ledge lining the building just below the windows. We can shimmy around to the west side and jump across to one-storey utility building. Then it’s just a matter of swinging down some cables and we’re safe on the ground to find our way to the shoreline and docks about a half a click to the east. There’s a sweet speed boat I found,” he pulled some keys attached to one of those puffy floating key chains and dangled them in the air, “I ‘commandeered’ the cutter from the local tourist hut. It’s all gassed up and ready to race us down the coast to this resort I know outside Kota Tinggi. Then it’s just a simple matter of finding some wheels to get us to the beacon before time runs out. I was only expecting to rescue my partner. But since we aren’t currently competing against each other for the ‘big prize’, I supposed you can catch a ride with us. I think with what we’ve just seen, it’s best to stay together if we want to make it back to Singapore alive and virus free.”