Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (14 page)

“Bitten?”  Cender was confused, he didn’t know.  “Riley, what are you doing?”

“Were you bitten?” Riley shouted.

This took Cender aback as she was usually a calm person.  “No, no.  What-?”

Riley wouldn’t let him finish.  “Get in the rig, Cender.”

“Why…?”

Riley was getting impatient.  “Get in the rig, Josh!”

Dr. Joshua Cender climbed up into the back of the ambulance with her, his face bunched up in confusion.  Riley closed the other door and headed for the driver’s seat.  To her pleasant surprise, the keys had been left in the ignition.  Riley sat down and started up the engine.  She was beginning to pull out of the bay when Cender got into the seat next to her.

“What the hell, Riley?”  Cender was upset as he buckled in.  Riley didn’t bother.  “Where are we going?  We’re not paramedics; we don’t go get people from the field.”

“Shut up, I’m saving your life.”  Riley pulled out into the street.  Cars were jammed everywhere, but the constant string of ambulances and police cars coming through the area had left a clear lane.

“What do you mean by that?”  Cender calmed a little.  But only a little.  It was likely that he was trying to calm Riley down.

“Do you remember when I told you my parents were nuts?”  Riley carefully scanned the streets, inching the rig along slowly, so as not to risk hitting any pedestrians.

“Yeah, you said they were crazy,” Cender nodded,  “a harmless crazy, but crazy nonetheless.”

“Yeah, well, I was wrong.  They were right.  Terribly right.”  Riley’s voice cracked slightly.  It even surprised her when it did that.

“What were they right about?”

“That the end of the world was coming.”

Cender blinked in silence a few times.  “Umm…  This craziness they have…  It’s not from a gene is it?”

“No
, Cender, I’m not crazy.”  Riley turned down the corners of her mouth and turned the rig down a side street.  It was a street that headed away from the park and didn’t have as clear a path as the others.  “Where’s the siren on this thing?”

Cender turned it on but didn’t take his eyes off her.  “It’s not the end of the world, Riley.”

“Maybe not the world, but our way of life is certainly going to change.”  She got the ambulance to jump the curb to get past the abandoned vehicles.

“Why?  How is it changing?”

“Look around, Cender.  Look around us right now.”

Cender did.  He saw the abandoned cars, the panicked and lost people, the fear, and even one of the attackers.

“We’re not close to the park right now,” Riley pointed out.

“You were working a long time,” Cender rebutted.  “People have had time to run, hell, even walk, this far.”

“Then why are the
attacks
still occurring?” Riley asked.  “They’re only increasing in numbers, getting worse.  Why did the attack happen to begin with?  If it was a terrorist thing, why is it spilling out this far?”

Cender shrugged.  “What started you thinking about all this?”

Riley sighed.  “A patient.”

“What?  A patient mentioned it to you?”

“No, he flat-lined.”

“So did several others today.”

“He flat-lined, and then he became conscious again.”

“You misdiagnosed is all.”

Riley shook her head.  “What were you doing most of the day?  What kind of patients did you work on?”

“I was doing a lot of suturing.  A lot of people came in with various lacerations
, so I stitched them up and sent them out to get them out of our way.”

“So you didn’t see any of the patients in the trauma rooms?  You didn’t see anyone who died?”

“No,” Cender admitted.  He seemed almost disappointed by that fact.  Almost.

“I had a man come in.  He had been shot several times in the chest, and had a fever of 110.”

“110?”

“I checked three times.  I tried my best to save him, but his injuries were too severe.  He
flat-lined and I couldn’t bring him back.  I pronounced, and Mason started to wheel him out.  The man started to thrash and convulse.  Mason brought him back over.  He tried to bite people, like those crazies we’ve been getting lately.  In fact, he managed to bite Mason.”

“Maybe he was on the same drug.  Perhaps one of the side effects is a temporary loss of vitals.”

“I thought that too.  I checked for a pulse, breath sounds, and a heart beat.  I found none.  No signs of life.”

“None?”

“Has anyone been able to check for those things on the other patients?”

“Not that I know of.”  Cender was clearly trying to consider other possibilities by the look on his face.

“Do you really think a drug could cause all that, for that long?”  Riley pushed him to open his mind.  “You saw the giant this morning, the congealed blood.  We should have noticed it then, but he wasn’t bleeding as much as he should have been with those wounds.  Most of the blood on the floor got there from his guts being dragged around on it.”

“So what are you saying?  That he had no heart beat?”  Cender laughed.

“Yes.”  Riley didn’t find it very funny.

Cender’s laughter died in the face of her seriousness.  “What are you thinking?  What are you trying to get at?”

“You won’t believe me if I tell you.”  Riley wanted him to think of it on his own, but she wasn’t sure he could.

“If I won’t believe you, then let me at least hear your thoughts to give me something to think over.”

“Zombies,” Riley finally spoke her thought out loud.  Doing so made even her doubt it, but there was so much evidence.

“Zombies?”  A grin tugged at the corners of Cender’s mouth.  He was trying hard not to smile, not to laugh.

“If I’m going to be honest with you, yes.  I think it’s some sort of infection that makes people very similar to zombies.”

The grin made it through onto Cender’s face.

“Think of the facts,” Riley frowned.  “Increase in human bite wounds.  A violent insanity.  Desensitisation to wounds of all kinds.  Congealed blood and vitals with no signs of life.  And it’s spreading.  Today was just the boiling point, when the number of infected became so high that they’ve spilled out into the public light.”

Cender sat in silence.  He faced the passenger window, so Riley couldn’t see if he was still grinning or not.

“And your parents said this would happen?” Cender spoke with an emotion that Riley didn’t recognise.

“Not this exactly, but they always said something along these lines would happen.”  Riley turned another corner.  As they headed away from the centre of the city, there were more people still driving in their cars.  More moving lanes.

“So what are we doing right now?”  Cender’s use of the word ‘we,’ didn’t escape Riley’s attention.  Maybe he was starting to believe on some level.  “Why did you abandon the hospital?  Abandon our friends?”

“No offence, Cender, but I would have abandoned you too if you hadn’t shown up when you did,” Riley admitted.  Some inner part of her got mad about that.  She couldn’t tell though if the anger was for bringing him, or for almost leaving him behind.

“Why?”  Cender turned to face her.  His face was completely unreadable, a rare occurrence.

“It’s just the way I was brought up.  Save myself first, others second.”

“And you became a doctor with that motto?”

“I was hoping to bury that side of me.  I guess I haven’t succeeded yet.”

“So where are we going?”  Cender looked back out the window.

“My house.”  Riley was relieved he had looked away.  She felt as if his eyes were boring holes through her.  “I have useful supplies there.  I also want to call my brother.  He works north of here as a pilot, flying wilderness tours.  He has a plane that can get us to my parents’ place.  If he hasn’t left already.”

“Why your parents?”

“I told you, they saw this coming.  They’re prepared.”  Riley finally got on a street that led straight out of the city.  “But that’s secondary.  My house should be safe for
a while.  The infection shouldn’t be as bad in the suburbs.”

“Pull over.”

“What?”

“I said pull over.”

Riley didn’t like where this was going, but she drove the rig onto the curb and stopped.  Cender opened his door.

“Where are you going?”  Riley thought she might know but asked anyway.

“Back to the hospital.”

“Why?  I’m not crazy.”

“I didn’t say you were.  Part of me believes you, despite how insane it all sounds.  The difference between you and me, though, is that I can’t just abandon everyone.  If you’re right, they need to be warned.  You said you’re going to your place, right?”

“Yeah.”

Cender opened the glove box and dug around inside.  He found a map and a pen and handed them to Riley.  “Mark it on here.  I’ll convince the others and try to meet you there.  Then we’ll go north together.”

Riley quickly marked her home on the map and handed it back.  “I won’t wait for you.  At least not for long.”

“Just give me a day, two at most.”  Cender gave her a smile that wasn’t as warm as it usually was.  It was deeper though.

“One at most.”

“Fine.”  Cender put the folded map into a pocket and hopped out onto the street.  He was about to shut the door.

“Cender?”

“Yes?”  Cender held off on closing the door.

“Be careful
, okay?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll radio another ambulance to try and pick you up.”

“Thanks.”  Cender slammed the door closed.  As he
started up the street, Riley called in his location over the scratchy radio.  She watched him walk away in the rear-view mirror for a moment, wondering if it were the last time she would see him.  He was the closest thing to a friend that she had ever really had.  Then she pulled away from the curb and headed towards suburbia.

Danny

Danny Cole was shot in the back by BioCat87 with a shotgun.  He died instantly.

“Oh, come on!” Danny shouted.  “Where the hell did they come from?  Guys, one got in the base, they have a shotgun.”

“I got it,” the voice of TheLastLemon came through the
earpiece on Danny’s head.

Danny grumbled, but grinned sadistically to himself as he watched Lemon take out BioCat87 on his kill cam.  She used a shotgun as well
, which made the vengeance even sweeter.  Lemon was good at this.  For a girl, anyway.

His game avatar, which he named Hfant, re-spawned on the screen.  He directed Hfant over toward his team’s base where he planned to pick up the weapons off his own character’s dead body.  They weren’t great weapons, but they were better than the defaults everybody spawned with.  A set of numbers popped up in the corner of the screen just as he retrieved them.

“Ah crap, guys, this has to be last game,” Danny sighed into his microphone.

“What?  But I just got on!” JimmyHaHa20k complained.

“Yeah, well, the timer just popped up.”  Danny compared the new and ugly green numbers to the time left on the clock for the game.  He had enough time to finish this one, but not to start and finish another.

“I can’t believe your mom put a timer on you,” Lemon laughed.

“She’s not my mom,” Danny grumbled.

“Your babysitter then.”  Lemon knew Danny’s living arrangements, but liked to poke fun at him anyway.  That’s what happened when you were the youngest member on the team, no matter how skilled and polite you were compared to the rest of your age group.

“Will you be able to get on later?” BaybeFayce asked.

“Maybe.”  Danny finally got his character over to where it needed to be in the central area of the game map.  “Luca is going to some birthday party tonight, so I might be able to get his time slot.”

“Cool.  Now would you mind going and stealing their flag for me?” Pyromaniac1234, the last member of the team, asked from his perch.  He was a great sniper and put a lot of pressure on the other team.  Danny was actually fourth string sniper on the team.  The only player he was better than was Lemon, but that was because she liked the up-close and personal weapons like the shotgun.

“Sure thing.  Should I go up the river side or through the caves?”  Danny moved his character up a hill in the middle of the map from where he’d be able to see both routes.

“Actually, go straight up the middle,” Pyro instructed him,  “it’s clear right now.”

“You better cover me.  Jimmy, where are you right now?”

“Behind the rock behind their base,” Jimmy told him.  A little icon hovered over his head to indicate he was indeed over there.  “I’m waiting for you though.”

“Good.”  Danny continued to play his game with his online friends.  He played a lot and by now, he and his team worked like a well-oiled machine.  If he didn’t have to share the system with the other kids in the house, he would spend all day online.  His teacher once told him he needed to make friends with the other kids in his class.  What she didn’t understand though, was that he had enough friends here.  And they remained his friends no matter how many times he had to move.