Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (43 page)

“I have no idea.”  Jessica leaned forward again and shoved the containers out of her way.  One clattered to the floor accidentally.  On instinct, she wanted to pick it up, but then realized there was no point.  She rested her head on the table.  Sleeping seemed like a fantastic idea.

“We need a directory or something.”  Abby got up and started looking at stuff around the room.  She appeared tireless.

Jessica enjoyed sitting where she was.  Not being on her feet felt wonderful.  She felt herself drifting off, the world going out of focus, when a loud clatter came from out in the hall.  Jessica snapped upright in a flash, completely alert.  The clatter was right outside the only door in, or out, of the doctor’s lounge.  Abby stood rigid over by some lockers, like a rabbit who had spotted a fox.

The
doorknob began turning slowly.  Jessica rose from her seat in an instant and hurried over to Abby.  Abby opened an unused locker and began squeezing herself inside.

“There’s another one over there,” she hurriedly whispered to Jessica, pointing down the row of lockers.

Jessica moved fast, tugging at each locker until she found the one that was open.  She could fit into it, but not in any way that would be considered comfortable.  Bending her knees as much as the space would allow, she still had to crane her neck sideways to fit.  Her shoulders were bunched up and a coat hanger was digging into one of them.  She grabbed the back of the locking mechanism and pulled the door closed just as the doctors’ lounge door crashed open.

There were slats at the top of the locker, but because of the shelf, Jessica couldn’t see out of them.  There were also slats down near her feet where she could just barely see some light coming through.  In the small, metal container, her breath sounded like a wind turbine to her own ears.  She tried to breath
e as little as possible, taking slow and shallow breaths through her nose.

Something smashed into a locker down the row.  Jessica hoped Abby was okay but didn’t dare to move.  Another crash, closer this time.  A shadow appeared in front of the lower slats.  Heavy breathing sounded from the other side of the thin metal.  Something slammed the front of Jessica’s locker.  She bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from screaming.  She squeezed her eyes shut as tears began running down the side of her face.  A strange, barely human squealing rose in volume on the other side of the door.  Then, just like that, it ran away.  The squealing made its movements easy to track as it fled out of the doctors’ lounge.

Jessica continued to stay quiet, fearing it would come back.  She shook slightly, causing a slight vibration in the metal surrounding her.  A small squeak of hinges sounded from down the row.  It was probably Abby leaving her own locker.

“Jessica?” Abby hissed.

Jessica sighed with relief and pushed on her locker’s door.  It didn’t budge.  She pushed again, but still it wouldn’t open.  The door must have gotten jammed when the thing hit it.  She was stuck.  Trapped in a tiny metal box, smaller than a coffin.

She freaked out and began thrashing against her tiny enclosure, banging against the sides, the back, and mostly the door.

“Jessica!  Calm down!” Abby hissed urgently from outside the door.  “You’ll make too much noise and bring it back!”

Jessica immediately stopped moving, but her hammering heart was far from calm as she looked at Abby’s shadow through the slots.  “I’m stuck,” she whimpered.

“I’ll get you out.  Just hold on.”  Abby’s shadow disappeared.

Jessica had no idea what she was doing out there.  Abby could leave her for all she knew.  Left to die in this somewhat smelly metal container.  She wondered how long it would take.  Probably days, since she had just eaten.  Even if Abby came back, what if she couldn’t get her out?  Would Abby stay around anyway, finding her scraps of food to slide through the slots until someone with better tools came?

Abby’s shadow appeared again.  “Which side are you on?” she asked.

That was a silly question.  Jessica filled the whole damn space.

“The side with the hinges or the side with the lock?” Abby clarified her question, although it was still silly.

“The side with the hinges.”  Jessica decided to base her answer on what side her back was pressed against.

“Good.  Try to keep yourself away from the door as best you can.”  Like there was room for that.

Jessica tucked her arms away from the door and crumpled as best she could against the rear of the locker.  Abby grunted and with a clang, something was shoved between the door and the side of the locker.  Jessica looked and saw it was her shovel.  Her gore-covered shovel she had left near the fridge.  Her freshly eaten food tried to rise back up at the sight of the shovel’s blade, but she managed to fight it back down.

Abby began prying with the shovel, using it as a lever.  She wiggled it up and down trying to loosen the whole door, coming millimetres away from slicing into Jessica a few times.  Eventually, it popped open.  Jessica gasped as if she had been underwater for a long time.  She spilled out of the locker and rubbed the shoulder that the coat hanger had been jabbed into.

“You okay?” Abby asked her.

Jessica nodded.  “You?”

“I just about pissed myself when it crashed into the locker next to mine.”  Abby handed Jessica the shovel and went to grab her field hockey stick.

“How do you think I felt when it
did
crash into mine?”  Jessica followed her.

“Let’s get out of here.”  Abby went to the door.

Jessica grabbed her arm before she could open it.  “What if it’s still out there?”

Abby stood with her hand on the door, unsure of what to do.  Eventually
, she decided that going out was better then staying in and left the doctors’ lounge.  Jessica followed with her shovel held high.

* * *

The hallway outside the lounge was empty.

“So which way do you think the CT scanner is?” Abby whispered to Jessica.

Jessica shrugged, “Further up?”

Abby led them over to the stairs and they climbed to the third floor.  This one seemed to be the surgical floor.

“If she needed surgery, she’d be here.”  Jessica remembered when Cillian had his tonsils taken out.  Mostly she remembered the waiting room.  She had waited there during the surgery, and a while after.  She got to walk with him to the recovery ward but she wasn’t allowed to stay there with him.  He had apparently tried to eat as much free ice cream as he could before they discharged him.

“It’s unlikely she would have needed any, but we should look around here anyway.  Just in case.”  Abby stepped out of the stairwell and into the hallway.

The first thing Jessica noticed when she followed her was the smell.  It was an awful combination of sterilisation chemicals and rot.  Although the place didn’t look as bad as the ER did, it was looking pretty bad.  She guessed that some patients from the ER had been moved up here for surgery and that’s when things went wrong.

The women wandered around the surgery floor, not really knowing where they were going.  Although Jessica had been here before, she had been pretty much confined to one area.  They ended up next to a door labelled as the surgical observation deck.

“Maybe we should take a look?” Jessica suggested.  “It’ll allow us to see into at least one room without having to go into it.”

Abby shrugged and opened the door.  They climbed a short flight of narrow
stairs, which led into a long, wide hall.  Both sides were lined with heavily meshed glass, which had benches in front of them.  A few chairs were also stacked in corners.

Jessica walked up to the first window on the right and looked through.  The surgery room was bright white, with an ominous black leather, cross-shaped operating table in the centre.  IV stands and monitoring systems had been knocked all over the place, and some blue cloth pieces lay scattered all over the floor.  There were a few drops of blood on the pristine white floor, but not a lot.  Jessica turned to Abby, who was looking through the window behind her.

“Anything over there?” Jessica asked.

“One of those crazy people is restrained on a table,” Abby told her.  “It looks like he’s trying to chew his hand off.”

Jessica decided against looking for herself.  She moved down the hall to the next surgical room.  This one was not pristine; it was a gore fest.  A body in hospital scrubs lay face down on the floor in the middle of the mess.  Jessica moved on again.  She came to the last surgical room on her side of the hall.  Other than the lack of doctors and nurses, everything looked normal.  A patient lay on the table, sound asleep.  Jessica could tell he wasn’t dead by the monitors stationed near his head.  It was a man, possibly in his 30s.  He wore only a hospital gown and had those blue cloths draped around his leg.  He looked perfectly fine, other than the large set of stitches running up his shin.  Apparently, the surgeons finished with him and then left.

“Hey
, Abby.”  Jessica waved her over.

“What?”  Abby looked through the window.  “Who’s he?”

“I don’t know, but he doesn’t look like the others.”

“He could just be sedated,” Abby pointed out.

“True.  But no one else that’s been nuts has been sedated, right?  What if sedation doesn’t work on them?”

“You can’t know that.”

“I know that sedation would be the first thing I’d want to try if I worked here.”

“What do you want to do?” Abby asked her.

Jessica wasn’t sure, so she said so.  Abby sat on the bench, and Jessica let her think.  She looked around and spotted a box with a speaker sticking out of the glass off to one side.  She walked up to it and noticed a button on the box.  She pressed the button and spoke into it.

“Hello?” her voice sounded on the other side of the glass.  “Hello
, Sir?  Can you hear me?”

The patient had no response.

“He’s probably too heavily sedated,” Abby said.

“We should go down there,” Jessica finally decided.  “Maybe we can wake him up.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.  He could be like those crazy people.”

“I don’t think sedation works on them.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.  Gut instinct, I guess,” Jessica shrugged a shoulder.

“He may not want to be woken up,” Abby said.  “To wake up to this?  It might be better to leave him until things calm down.”

“Things may never calm down.”  Jessica hadn’t been planning on voicing that thought aloud, but there it was.  The end of the world may have come, and this hospital would never be running again.

Abby didn’t reply to her statement.  She did, however, stand up and walk right up to the glass.  She stood there, looking quite solemn, for some time.

“Are we going?” Jessica eventually asked.

“Yeah, I’m just trying to work out how the hospital is likely laid out between here and there,” Abby nodded her head toward the end of the hall.  “I noticed there’s another set of stairs over there.  I don’t know if they lead into a hall like the other ones do or not.  If they do, it’s probably just a short walk to get to that OR but if it’s not…”

“It probably is.”  Jessica headed for the stairs.  After the locker, everything hurt about as much as her feet, but she didn’t want to stay in one place for too long.  Something else might show up, and the observation deck offered nowhere to hide.

It was Jessica’s turn to lead this time.  She went down the stairs with Abby following closely behind her.  So close in fact, she was practically pushing Jessica over, but she didn’t mind.  The doorknob at the bottom turned easily, but when she pushed on the solid wooden surface, it stopped opening part way.

“Something’s on the other side,” Jessica whispered to Abby.

She then tried pushing harder on the door, and the blockage shifted slightly.  She kept pushing until the door was open enough for her to squeeze through.  It was a good thing she hadn’t rammed the door, because the blockade was a large wire rack holding a lot of supplies.  If she had knocked it over, it would have made an exceptionally loud crash.  Abby squeezed out behind her.  Jessica led them down the hall toward the OR’s entrance.  She held on to Abby’s hand to draw strength, and because she kept thinking the other woman would be suddenly replaced by a horrible monster.

When Abby had called the room they were heading to an OR, Jessica had no idea how she knew it was called that.  Now though, she noticed it was written on most of the signs at each hallway junction.  The first time Jessica had looked at the signs, after they got on the floor, she thought of all the letters and numbers as gibberish.  Now she realized that you just needed to know what you were looking for and they were simple.

They got to a swing door labelled OR 3 on the glass.  It was possible the room they were looking for was the third OR, so Jessica pushed her way through the doors.  That led into a room lined with sinks, with boxes of gloves, gowns, paper booties, and hair covers piled around.  Jessica and Abby bypassed all of this and walked up to the next set of swing doors.  Jessica peered through the glass, hoping they hadn’t gotten turned around and ended up at the OR with the hand chewer in it.  They had gotten the right one though; the man continued to lie there, sleeping peacefully.  Jessica pushed through the doors, shovel first and quickly checked out all the areas of the room she couldn’t see from the viewing area.  There was no one else in the room.  She looked up at the viewing area where she had stood moments before, then walked over to the patient.