The barrier from the cafeteria broken, and nothing but stale air separating us from the lunatics with a hankering for human flesh, we moved toward the double doors leading from the waiting room and away from the intruders.
Must lead to the parking garage or parking lot, I thought, not wanting to betray my ignorance of the building by asking. Although I couldn’t see that it mattered, all things considered, I wasn’t excited about revealing my identity to this doctor. While she seemed decent enough, I didn’t want her to think of herself as a caretaker for four, instead of three. And I sure as hell didn’t want her to be afraid of getting bludgeoned in the head while she slept.
The voice that had until now remained quiet, spoke up. Should she be? Afraid of being bludgeoned, I mean?
I had no answer for it. It didn’t ask for one; it simply chuckled softly and retreated for the time being.
We spilled through the double doors in front of us, as at least ten of those things slowly came into view behind us. They caught sight of our group, and immediately turned the corner in pursuit. As we ran down the hall toward the dubious safety of a vehicle, I couldn’t stop trying to fill in the gaps from what I had seen on television.
What the hell had happened?
Chapter 5
According to the news reports I had seen, it started somewhere on the eastern seaboard, and spread.
Fast.
Apparently, the first morning of the infection had been a morning like any other, albeit with strange reports filtering in from the initial infected cities and some small surrounding towns. But by the mid-afternoon of that same day, as I would soon bear witness, the shit got real.
No one had a bead on where it actually started, but the consensus was that it was mid-Atlantic East Coast. Probably D.C., New York, Baltimore or Philly: areas that saw the first cases. But because it apparently spread through the blood stream quick, and the things were hardwired for aggressiveness, it went through the densely populated areas like wildfire. And when every person killed was another person added to the ranks of the killers, society was facing a pretty real threat in a very short time.
The vast bulk of the military was in Iraq, but what was left stateside of the Guard was called out.
They had apparently attempted ad-hoc evacuations of the cities, with barricades keeping the infected in and trying to weed the healthy out. Most of the news footage that I saw was from outside the barricades looking in. I even caught a helicopter shot of a huge throng of the bastards pressing against a barrier set up on an interstate, catching healthy humans between the collective mass of creatures, while the Guard opened fire. They cut from that shot pretty quickly after that. Still had standards of decency to uphold, I guess. What really struck me from that video was the numbers. It looked like a hundred to one ratio-and it wasn’t in favor of the living.
The news channels also seemed to be making a lot out of the response times; apparently, those areas with local emergency plans were faring a hell of a lot better than those that were waiting for FEMA and what was left of the Army. The Guard was able to work pretty quickly in conjunction with the local guys, who had drilled emergency plans since the terrorist attacks in ‘01, and the Katrina debacle in ‘05.
Boy, if that mess didn’t teach you that you have to watch your own back, nothing will, huh?
A small town in Jersey was highlighted; they had evacuated their whole township in under two hours, and were locked tight in a local stadium, complete with a contingent of Guard and the whole damn police force. Compare that with one of the stories about a shelter opened by FEMA in DC to keep some inner city neighborhoods safe and secure; someone had left a back door wide open when loading water into storage, and the doors were all dead bolted from the inside. Those things wandered right in, following the water boys, and the guy with the key went missing. The next part was predictable, and the only survivor could barely get out the story before collapsing in front of the interviewers. Of course, the small towns only had 5,000 people to handle, and DC had a few more bodies to contain. But still.
The rural areas might be faring better, but they weren’t on the news. The populated areas were hit hardest and fastest; the denser the population, the faster it spread, and the more resulting converts there were to infect others.
I remembered seeing a program on the internet when I was younger. It was put up by a math student at a university in Boston, and it purported to simulate a zombie invasion, and the rapidity with which an infection like that would spread. A joke at the time, probably inspired by an obsession with that director who made all those zombie movies, it illustrated how fast a disease like this would spread. It was just a simple maze with hundreds of little dots milling around aimlessly. The gray dots were zombies and the green ones were humans. You start out with five or six gray ones, and hundreds of greens. When the zombie dots touched the human dots, they turned to gray, and the infection rate accelerated out of control. In a matter of minutes, the box was totally gray.
It was interesting at the time but now, as the theory was put into play, it seemed too real. If that was any indication of how fast this plague could move, we were looking at a shit load of gray dots. Humanity’s fate, summed up online, and in a matter of minutes. Will the wonders of the internet age never cease?
I snapped back to the present as we hung a left at the water fountain and toward the back exit, which through the window on the door looked to open into a garage of some sort. Given the number of those things I had glimpsed from Wisteria, seemed to be very little to recommend this course of action, this headlong plunge into the known unknown. But I wasn’t about to hang around here. We weren’t. We couldn’t. So better the devil you don’t know, right? Whatever.
We reached an external door with a red and white striped handle: the kind that are keyed to an alarm, so that anyone within a half mile knows when the door is opened.
“The only way to disarm this alarm is from the guard booth on the other side of the building,” said Kate, “and I don’t think any of us want to make that trip.” She indicated back the way we came.
“So this door is going to scream bloody murder when we touch that bar,” I filled in, not really a question. She nodded. We shared a look that conveyed our mutual uncertainty. We had no idea whether the ones outside would be attracted by such a noise, or if they needed to see their prey to be drawn to us.
“On the other side of this doorway is a parking garage, but we have no way of knowing what’s out there.” The sounds of pursuit filtered to our position from further down the hall. Slow, but persistent. “But we don’t have a choice, and our options are limited. We’re looking for plate number XLJ 920, Jersey tags.” She looked out the window in the door, which afforded a very narrow view of the exterior. No-Name grunted, and Erica stared down the hall the way we had come. Fred, sensing the tension, bounced quickly on the balls of his feet, looking excitedly first to me, then to Kate. Two of our followers rounded the corner and, seeing us clustered at the end of the hall, shuffled forward hungrily.
They looked like Conan did: gray, pallid skin; shuffling feet; vapid, empty expression. But it was eyes that got to you. Not in a weird, Discovery channel kind of way, but I mean really got to you. They were bloodshot and wide open, staring forward - always trained on you, never blinking, never looking away. And there was nothing there but pain. No shred of humanity, no flash of cognizant comprehension. These fuckers were just hungry.
“OK, time to go now,” I said, pushing forward and slamming the door open. A high-pitched squeal cut through the air; a red light above the door flickered to life and flashed insistently over our heads like a damn Walmart special. Free meat! it screamed.
“Move!” I shouted, as Erica stopped in the door frame to cover her ears, crouching in an upright fetal position. Kate, Fred and No-Name bolted across the intervening space and into the garage, Kate turning and stooping to examine license plates as she ran.
Erica wouldn’t move from the door frame and I struggled to pull her after me. The pack behind us had grown to ten or twelve, and the first creature was barely five feet from her cringing figure, its bare feet squeaking loudly against the tile floor.
I looked over my shoulder to the garage, seeing Fred looking at plates, apparently imitating Kate. No-Name was following Fred, walking unconcernedly behind.
Back to Erica. Three feet. I pulled as hard as I could, and she shouted in pain as I jerked her off her feet, and physically dragged her through the exit. I threw her to the ground as the first creature’s arm plunged through the opening. I slammed home the door, but too late. The fleshy resistance obstructed a complete lock and I struggled to push it shut.
The arm moved, fingers searching in vain for purchase on my arms. Gray, flaky skin came off on the door and the frame as the arm moved up and down along the gap. Brown fluid smeared against the white paint and a horribly rotten burst of air blasted into my face as the creature pressed its face inches from my own and I pushed harder, my weakening legs straining for leverage. Suddenly, the door shifted inches inward, and the obstruction vanished. Three neatly severed fingers fell to the ground as the alarm stopped wailing. I turned toward Erica, pulling her weeping frame from the ground into the garage.
“I’ve got it, Joe! Let’s go!” Kate’s head disappeared from behind a small Korean sedan. No-Name and Fred followed closely after. Dragging Erica behind me, I staggered to the car, weary legs, unused to such activity, bearing me stolidly forward.
Kate flew into the driver’s seat, plunging the key into the ignition. I pushed Erica into the backseat, and Fred piled in after me. No-Name crowded into the front seat, seeming now to sense the urgency of the situation. Erica laid her head against the glass of the passenger side window, staring unseeing ahead. The ignition turned. The engine came to life. Gears ground loudly as Kate threw the car into reverse and her head whipped around.
“Where to?” she asked anxiously, looking at me.
“Don’t you have a plan?” I replied, still trying to catch my breath.
“I didn’t expect to get this far,” she yelled, fear and adrenalin making her voice shrill and her words tumble over one another in rapid succession.
Suddenly, from the front of the car, a shadowy form shambled into view. The look in my eyes, or perhaps a reflection, betrayed the sudden appearance of a business suit-clad creature, rounding the corner between the hood of the car to our left and the concrete barrier, and Kate turned back to the windshield. His tie hung from a bloody neck, face slack-jawed but for the now-familiar glare of hungry malevolence. Shuffling forward, he clambered against the passenger side of the car. Kate, glancing once in his directly, slammed her foot on the accelerator. The car powered backward, the small engine humming in surprise. The creature fell forward, suddenly bereft of his support, sprawling forward into our now vacant space.
“Son of a bitch!” Kate screamed, more startled than angry, throwing the car into first and accelerating forward, into the hunched-over figure.
I braced myself against the back of both front seats, arms flying from my sides and elbows locking in anticipation of impact. Not against the target, but against the wall behind him.
The front fender caught him in the jaw, just as the head turned ignorantly upwards to meet the coming challenge. The head was separated from the body instantly, landing prominently on the hood of the car and rolling off to the side. I caught a fleeting image of the blank stare and then secondary impact. Kate slammed the brakes as soon as the decapitation had been achieved, but given the fifteen feet or so of lead space she had used to accelerate, it looked like we needed at least three feet of braking space. We had two.
We all jerked forward as the airbags in the front seat deployed, and the car came to a stop, the front end crumpling back slightly into the engine compartment. The airbags abruptly deflated. I peeled my fingers from their grips on the front seats, and looked to both sides groggily. Fred and Erica had both hit the seats in front of them, but they looked fine. Kate shook her head and looked back at us. I tentatively reached up to touch my forehead, feeling the warm sensation of blood heating my fingers as I did. They came away sticky and red from a small laceration above my right eye. A single tear of blood dripped off my eyebrow as Kate turned around.
“Shit. Look at your head. Sorry about that, I… ”
Whatever she was going to say was interrupted by the shattering of glass on the passenger side of the back seat. I turned to the sight of Erica’s head being pulled violently back over the shards of remaining glass, and a mouth firmly attaching itself to her jugular, clamping down firmly as she screamed, blood spraying against the roof of the car in spurts. Two more creatures followed her attacker, stymied in their own approach only by the narrow passage afforded between our car and the adjoining vehicle, which pathway was currently blocked by the dining intruder.
I grabbed the hair of the creature and tried to dislodge its toothy grip. Erica continued to struggle, her scream now garbled by the intrusion of teeth into her larynx; hair matted with crusted blood fell across her face, as the intruder’s head ground slowly against her neck. In frustration, I balled my fist, striking the back of the creature’s head as hard as I could and forcing it from its meal. I grabbed the hair on the top of Erica’s forehead, pulling her head back into the car as forcefully as possible.
“Drive!” I screamed, as her head snapped forward, tears streaming from her eyes, and her lifeblood pooling in the hollow of her neck and trickling down her torso, relocating to a stain of widening moisture on the chest of her scrubs. Her attacker’s hand was still clamped on the back of her neck as the ignition stuttered, catching on the third try, and the car rocketed backwards.
Erica screamed again as her neck became the prize in a tug of war between the creature and the car, the latter prevailing only as the creature’s arm was sheared off at the shoulder, our car slamming its side into the adjoining SUV and scraping the thing off on the corner of the monstrous vehicle. I pressed my hand against her neck, which was a fountain of blood, as Kate navigated the rows of parked cars and sped toward the exit.