Zombies! Episode 2 - Abby's Bad Day (2 page)

At half past noon, she went through the door
and saw that all was normal. Whitaker was at the front desk reading
a
Fitness
magazine. She didn't know why he bothered.
Everyone knew he cared as much about fitness as he did about the
Spanish Civil War. If he had his druthers, she was sure he'd be
reading a
Sports Illustrated
or a
Maxim
.

The place was pretty empty at lunch time,
which wasn't always the case. One treadmill was going, a woman she
didn't recognize giving it a go. She wasn't really dressed for a
workout and Abby guessed that she was one of those free trial kind
of women. She was a bit older than Abby and a bit more overweight.
She had the look of a wife and mother whose husband has suddenly
developed a wandering eye. Going to the gym was an effort at
getting it to wander back where it belonged. Besides her there was
no one except Karl. Karl was a beefy guy whose muscle was well
hidden beneath his round frame. He came to
Push Ups
twice a
week at lunch time and always worked out with the weights. He was
currently doing half curls with thirty pound dumbbells.

Abby took over at the front desk and Whitaker
disappeared into the back storeroom to inventory some cleaning
supplies. He left his magazine, which Abby perused absently. She
hated the gym when it was empty. There was nothing to do.

There was a bang and when she looked at the
clock it was 12:51. She'd been daydreaming. Looking around for the
source of the bang she saw Karl sitting on a bench, holding his
foot. He'd dropped one of the weights. She came around the counter
and went to him right away. The woman from the treadmill was gone.
Abby hadn't even seen her leave.

"Karl?"

His head was down and he was gripping his
ankle because he was afraid to grip his foot.

Whitaker came out of the back and looked at
them. "What happened?"

"Got dizzy," Karl said. "I almost passed
out."

"Your nose is bleeding, man," Whitaker said.
Abby, now sitting next to Karl with an arm over his shoulders,
couldn't see his face. When he looked up, she could see that there
were red rings around his nostrils. It looked weird for a
nosebleed. It didn't drip, just sort of coagulated around the
rims.

"Do you think you broke your foot?" Whitaker
asked. "I'm gonna call an ambulance."

"Wait, don't do that," Abby told him. "Just
go in back and get me the wheelchair. It'll be quicker if I just
push him over to the hospital."

The hospital was only two blocks away and she
was right. An ambulance would be there quickly enough but then they
would have to examine him, load him up, and bring him back. She
could walk him over in less than five minutes.

But Whitaker didn't seem to like the idea. "I
kind of need you here, though, Abby."

She looked around as if to accentuate the
fact that they were alone in the gym. "I'll only be an hour. Call
it my lunch hour."

"Um, you just took your lunch hour."

She got up and went to the back, smiling at
him as she went. "Then we'll call it your lunch hour. I even bought
you a sandwich."

She came back out with the wheelchair and
gingerly helped Karl into it. Whitaker stared in silence as she got
a feel for the chair and Karl's weight and then pushed him out the
door, pausing only to grab her hand bag.

***

THE
ER at
Sisters of Charity
was newly renovated. It didn't look like a place for sick people at
all. The floor was standard industrial tile and the chairs were
molded plastic but the plastic was form fitted so that even the
most finicky of emergency room patrons would be comfortable while
nursing their vomiting children or bleeding fingers. At the back of
the room was a wall of bullet proof glass with four windows and
matching speakers. Two of the four stations were currently open,
each with an administrative assistant sitting behind it.

They checked Karl in and gave him some
tissues, the kind with lotion in them, to staunch the nose bleed.
He used the tissues to pinch his nose but the queer behavior of the
bleed required him to change tissues often and the pinching didn't
seem to help. They put some ice on his foot and the two of them sat
in the waiting room watching a flat screen TV that put the twenty
year old set Abby had in her living room to shame.

Over the course of an hour, Abby watched
people pass through the glass wall and come out of it. Some of them
were doctors and nurses but most of them were patients. She was
amazed at the crowd around her. Early afternoon and so many people
were sick or injured. She called Whitaker on her cell phone to make
sure everything was all right. It was. He'd been joined by two
customers but the place was still very quiet.

About an hour after that, she dozed off. She
wasn't yet in a deep sleep, the edges of dreams flirting with her
subconscious. She was startled away by Karl, who must have also
dozed off. His head drooped to the side and landed on his
shoulder.

"Karl," she admonished. He'd dropped his
bloody tissues. "Karl?"

When he didn't move, she lifted his head and
saw that his nose was clogged with dried blood. He wasn't
breathing.

Abby screamed then. She hoped she was calling
for help but she couldn't be sure that anything coherent was
escaping her lips. The man sitting across from her looked directly
at her, saw her holding Karl's head away from her shoulder, and ran
to the window. Within seconds, the glass doors slid aside and four
people came out, one of them wheeling a gurney.

They took Karl away from her and loaded him
onto the gurney. Even as they pushed him inside, they were trying
to clear the blood from his nose. Badly shaken, Abby followed,
leaving the wheelchair behind.

Inside, everything was chaos. She had barely
the brain capacity to take in her surroundings. Off to the left was
a bustling desk with three people moving around behind it and
several others crowding its exterior. Toward the back was a row of
tables, each accented by equipment. They could be made private by
pulling a curtain around the tables. But not that private. Off to
the left was a short hallway that was lined with doors. One was
clearly marked as the bathroom while the others seemed to be
examining rooms. At the end, the corridor branched off and she
could see no more.

They pulled the gurney into a curtain area,
closing the curtain around them, and immediately began whatever
life saving techniques they used. Abby didn't know anything about
medicine. She heard someone say
no pulse
and someone else
call for paddles. They hooked up an IV in seconds. There was a very
young man in a white coat pumping Karl's chest while someone else
put a mask with a bag over his head and tried to force air down his
throat.

All this time, Abby stood back, silently
watching the drama. No one gave her a glance until it was all over
and someone said, "Time of death: 14:21".

A woman in pink scrubs, a nurse, came over to
Abby and took her by the hands. "Are you his wife?"

Abby shook her head. "I just work at the
gym," she said, unable to take her eyes away from Karl's prone
form.

"Is there someone we can call, do you
know?"

She shook her head again, had never stopped
shaking it. "I…I'll call and have them go into his locker and get
his stuff. Maybe…" she trailed off.

The nurse, sensing that Abby was in shock,
stepped away to attend to something else.

Abby had never seen anyone die before. The
only time she'd ever seen a dead body had been at a wake. That
seemed like such a controlled environment. Here there was chaos.
There was smeared blood on Karl's face and the IV tube still
trailed from his arm. There was a drape over his legs but she could
see his swollen and bruised foot sticking out from underneath. They
hadn't even looked at it.

She went to his side, looked down at his
face. How old was Karl? Was he twenty five? And they'd thought she
was his wife? He must have looked pretty bad because she surely
didn't look that good. Abby had just turned away when Karl's hand
moved slowly and found her own.

"Oh, my God!" She was so shocked that she
pulled it away instantly. Then she realized he was trying to sit up
and she went to him, calling out for help.

"Karl, it's okay. Don't move too fast."
Draping his arm around her shoulder, she lifted him into a sitting
position and helped support his weight with her own. He came up
easily if awkwardly. When he was fully upright, he seemed as if he
was about to fall but Abby realized he was swinging his legs over
the side of the table. He wanted to stand.

"Your foot…" Abby began but then he was up,
standing fully erect with his feet flat on the ground. He didn't
utter a sound.

Now Abby pulled away from him slowly as he
found his balance. She said his name again, so confused until he
looked up at her. There was no life in his eyes. None at all.

A week before, Shawn Rudd had encountered
Larry Koplowitz on the street and known right away that he was a
zombie. He had known the same way that Abby knew now. The only
difference was that Shawn had been sparked into action, destroying
the zombie and its victim without a second thought. Abby just
froze.

"Oh, my God!" the nurse mimicked as she came
through the curtain in answer to Abby's cry. She was standing
behind Karl and thought he had just revived. It wouldn't be the
first time she'd seen a patient come back moments after having been
declared dead. It was rare, ridiculously rare, but it did happen.
When she saw him standing on that foot, she ran up to him and
grabbed his arm. The actions took his focus away from Abby and he
turned on the nurse, opening his mouth wide, suddenly consumed by
that insatiable undead hunger for living flesh.

***

ANTHONY
Heron had lung cancer.

It seemed kind of fitting seeing as how he'd
been a smoker since he was twelve and there was cancer in his
family. His father had died of it in his forties and his
grandfather had died of it in his sixties. He had numerous aunts,
uncles, great aunts, and great uncles who were also either dead of
cancer or had been fighting that battle for years. It was just his
turn to join the family.

In retrospect, he supposed he had not only
been waiting for it his whole life but had been rushing toward it.
After all, only an idiot smokes when the family history suggests
that smoking is as surefire a way of killing yourself as a bullet
in the head. Heron was forty two years old, not quite as old as his
father had been when he'd died. But then again, he wasn't dead
yet.

The cancer wouldn't have been so bad if it
wasn't for the timing. Just a week before, the day the doctor had
called with the biopsy results, Heron had met his first zombies.
There had been two of them. Lucy Koplowitz, a successful woman. A
wife and mother. Zoe Koplowitz, a girl of eight years. It was the
girl who'd bitten Stemmy, his partner. He'd died about twelve hours
later and Heron had made sure that he would never get up again.
There had been no repercussions for that act, but he still had to
live with it. When Stemmy had died, he'd marched into that room and
shot him as if he were nothing more than a wounded horse.

The intervening week had passed in a blur. A
wake. A doctor's visit. A funeral. Time allotted toward helping
Eileen Stemmy sort her husband's affairs and put back together the
remaining pieces of her family's lives. Heron had done it all. And
he hadn't logged a single day of work. Which meant he hadn't heard
a thing about zombies. That suited him just fine.

Heron wasn't working today either. He
actually wouldn't be back to work for a couple of weeks. Today he
was going to the hospital and having his final consultation before
the surgery. They said the cancer wasn't so bad as cancer goes. All
of the tests showed that it was confined to the lung. That was
good. It was just a small spot in an easy to reach place. The
surgery was minimally invasive and while strenuous activity wasn't
recommended for up to six months, he could resume his regular
activities within a week or two. That didn't sound too bad.

His doctor worked out of
Sisters of
Charity
hospital and that was where the surgery would take
place. It wasn't the closest hospital to where he lived but it
wasn't terribly far. Captain Naughton had been extremely
understanding of the circumstances. In light of his partner's
death, Heron was pretty sure his caseload would have been light for
a couple of weeks regardless. They'd spoken, Heron and Naughton,
the night before about Heron's schedule and whether or not he'd be
assigned to another partner. It occurred to Heron to ask about
zombies, to ask if any more cases had been discovered but he
couldn't bring himself to do it. He had too much on his mind to
worry about the undead.

The news was devoid of zombie stories. There
had been a blurb some time just after Stemmy had died but that was
it. Whoever had leaked that information out of the department had
been quickly silenced. Life without zombies was infinitely
preferable to life with them. It didn't stop him, though, from
thinking about Zoe Koplowitz whose little blonde curls had
contrasted so deeply with her darkening and ghoulish face. He
wondered what she looked like now, a week later. Did zombies last a
week? What if they weren't fed? Were they feeding her?