Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (4 page)

When my feet hit the street that ran between the hospital and the garage, the infected on the upper floors of the garage were still in a tizzy over their lost meal, though many had fallen silent, perhaps feasting on their dead brethren instead. At street level, there were infected loitering and resting in shadows, and others gathered around the doors into the hospital, drawn by the promise of warm flesh upstairs.

But something was profoundly different. The world felt a little more dead than it had just hours before.

Was it
me, or was I sensing something real?

I looked out across the street. All of the hospital windows were dark. The giant full color sign in front of the basketball arena had no advertisement for upcoming concerts. It was black. Its lights were out. The traffic signal at the corner flashed red in an unflinching rhythm.

Looking back into the garage, I saw that the overhead lights were out. The lights in the stairwells were out.

I pulled my cell phone from my pocket. No cellular network. No data.

No, wait! There was a bar…then it was gone. I slowly waved the phone through the air, trying to catch a signal, but it would only come for a second or two at a time. It was out there, but it was weak. I concluded the only thing that made sense.

The power grid had failed.

Mankind had just taken another giant step backward.

Soon the batteries that powered the flashing stoplights would fail, and the rapidly weakening batteries on the cell towers would follow. If the virus itself wasn’t the beginning of the end of civilization, the failure of the power grid surely was.

I pocketed my cell phone. It was no good now as a communication device, but it was still a pocket-sized computer, though I’d need to find a solar charger for it.

Looking back toward the hospital, I had a clear view of the glass stairwell that I’d shot to hell earlier. Nearly every pane on its glass walls was shattered. Bloody bodies of the infected lay on the stairs, hung out over the edges, or were piled on the ground below. At least a hundred Whites greedily fed on those bodies.

Still, there was barely any movement to be seen on the stairs themselves.

Perhaps an opportunity lay in that carnage.

With blood still glistening on the scarred blade of my machete, I hefted it in my right hand, drew my Glock with my left, and walked across the street toward the feeding infected.

They were noisy. They were sloppy. They tore at clothes with their hands, and with their teeth, they lacerated flesh that seethed with the same virus that had scorched their brains. All around, crimson painted the grass and pooled in the dirt. In the blood, bits of bone, eyeglasses, and shoes were strewn.

But the infected paid no attention to me.

At the moment, I was one of them, a white beast from a child’s nightmare, strong and deadly, not worth a second thought when the ground was covered in a bounty of bleeding human meat.

At the bottom of the stairwell, I stepped through a shattered glass wall into the epicenter of the slaughter. The big fifty-caliber bullets had smashed the tempered glass into thousands of razor sharp bits of crystalline shrapnel. Every white body was broken, shredded, and bled out, dripping down the concrete steps. Agonized mouths stretched across broken faces. Bones splintered through skin. And the smell of death, blood, and everything ripped from stomachs and intestines was heavy in the air.

Up I walked, careful with each placement of my foot, lest I slipped. Live infected were among the bodies on the first few floors, feeding on the scraps of their brothers and sisters. By the third floor, their numbers thinned. By the fifth, there were only one or two per
flight, faces buried in the work of gorging themselves on newly dead remains.

That made my task easy as I went to work with my machete, hacking at the backs of necks and severing heads. I wanted no breathing White nearby when I got to the top.

I passed the sixth floor and killed three. I passed the seventh and killed two more. Between the eighth and ninth, there were four. One struggled and attacked. As a result, I wore more of his blood than I did of the others.

When I finally reached the top of the stairs, I had to climb over a makeshift barricade of hospital beds, chairs, and cabinets. The barrier had no hope of stopping any infected from climbing over, but it did serve the purpose of slowing them down, and more importantly, it kept them from massing and pushing their combined weight on the door.

Once over the barricade, there was enough room for me to stand in front of the steel fire door. Above the doorknob, about eight inches wide and two feet tall was a long rectangular window.

Through the reinforcing wire mesh in the glass, I saw two soldiers standing across the hall with dispassionate faces and nervous eyes, aiming their weapons at me.

I shouted, “Hey!”

The soldiers shared a glance, but didn’t respond.

“Hey, listen. I know you’re kind of freaked out about seeing me out here, but I need to talk to someone. Can I count on you not to shoot me?”

One soldier looked nervously at the other. He said something that I couldn’t make out through the heavy door.

I shouted again, “Look, I’m not going to stay out here all day. It’s only a matter of time before the infected hear me up here and come. So go talk to whoever you need to talk to and let me in. I’m not a danger. I won’t stay long. I need to talk to Steph.”

“Go away!” the previously silent soldier ordered.

I huffed. “Look, man, don’t be a dick. Go get your boss or whatever you need to do, but hurry up about it.”

“If you don’t leave, we’ll shoot.”

I guess I should have been happy that they didn’t start the conversation with bullets, but I wasn’t. I was impatient. “Look, let me be clear about a couple of things. First, there aren’t any infected out here. All the ones in this stairwell are dead. At least until you get down to the third floor or so. Second, I’m going to come in there and see Steph. I don’t mean anybody any harm, but I gotta tell you guys, I’m already tired of fucking around about it. I went to a lot of trouble to get here and if I’d wanted to hurt you, I would have just blown the door open with a grenade, come in, and shot your dumbasses.”

I pulled a pin from one of my three grenades, slipped the pin into my pocket, and then held it up to the glass for the soldiers to see. “You see what I have here, right? I know you’re thinking that you really want to shoot me through the door now, but if you do, this grenade goes off. The door gets blown open, and the infected come running. Do you know what happens after that? You do, don’t you? All of you die. But that’s not what I want and I know that’s not what you want. I just want to come in and talk to Steph. I don’t mean anyone in there any harm. I sure don’t want anybody to harm me. Just open the
fuckin’ door. I’ll come in, and then I’ll leave.”

I peeked through the glass. The soldiers were talking again. As I watched, one ran off down the hall.

The other soldier said, “You’re infected, right?”

I nodded, “I’m a slow burn. I am infected. Aside from that, I’m just as normal as you.”

The soldier said, “You could infect us all if we let you in. Do you want that on your conscience?”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing already anyway? Infecting yourselves, trying to find the immune ones?”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve been talking to Steph on the phone about it. She’s a nurse. Cute, with red hair, about five-foot-five.”

The soldier asked, “The network is still up?”

I shook my head, “No. I think the power grid failed. I think there are batteries in the towers, but I guess they’re dying. I couldn’t get a signal when I checked.”

The soldier nodded. “The emergency generator here kicked on a few hours ago.”

With no more questions on his mind, the soldier stood and watched me.

Not concerned with small talk, I thought about racing my motorcycle several years ago out on FM 2222, blazing over the hills and around the sharp turns, trying to shake the carnivorous banshees that lived in my soul but no matter how fast I flew down the road, I couldn’t slip them. When I hit a guardrail and my body crashed through the upper branches of some trees on a downward slope, I ended up a summertime resident of the hospital.

The main building, the oldest, was laid out in something of a T-shape with the top bar of the T being too long for a properly formed letter. The upper floors each had a central hall down each branch of the T with patient rooms on both sides. An expansive nurses’ station stood at the intersection of the three branches on each floor. At least that was the layout of the upper floors. The lower two or three were maze-like with additions through the years. On the fourth floor, a breezeway connected at an angle from the shortest leg of the T to a roughly circular and relatively new children’s hospital.

Knowing the layout as well as I knew the house I grew up in, I started to plan how I was going to find Steph if I had to force my way in. Of course, I should rather have been considering what an all-around stupid idea that was, but that thought never really bubbled to the surface.

The other soldier came hurrying back into view with a guy in a soiled white lab coat. The three of them conferred quietly for a few minutes and then the guy in the lab coat came over to the glass.

I asked, “Are you the doctor in charge?”

“I might be.”

“Christ! I’m not a Chinese spy. Are you in charge?”

The guy in the lab coat peered through window, trying to see as much as he could see. After he was satisfied with whatever he was looking for he said, “Yes, I am in charge. I’m Dr. Paul Evans.”

“Zed Zane. Will you please open the door and let me in?”

Dr. Evans looked blankly at me, but said nothing.

Quietly, but sternly, I said, “Look, the infected downstairs are going to…”

Dr. Evans held up a hand to silence me and said, “I know, I know.”

More whispered conversations among the three and a few too many suspicious glances at my white face through the glass left me uneasy.

But they came to a decision. Dr. Evans raised a hand to the door and the lock clicked. He pushed the door open. I had one fist gripped around my fragmentation grenade and the other held my Glock with my finger on the trigger. I walked through.

The soldiers held their weapons pointed at the floor, but enhanced my distrust by surrounding me, one behind and one beside me. Dr. Evans stood in front.

“You’re in.” Dr. Evans’ tone was condescending and angry when he pointed to my hand grenade. “Do you intend to kill us with that?”

“No,” I answered. “I just don’t trust any of you.”

“Then why come here?” he asked.

“Like I told the guys. I’m here for Steph.”

“Steph?”

The soldier to my left, the one I’d been talking to, said, “Nurse Leonard.”

So that was Steph’s last name.
It had never occurred to me to ask.

Dr. Evans asked, “Are you a relative?”

Without an ounce of respect for authority left anywhere in me, I spouted, “Really? After all that’s happened, you’re going to stonewall me with a protocol that nobody gives a shit about anymore?”

That pissed him off. Dr. Evans’ face flashed anger, but returned quickly to an icy cold nothing expression, except for his lips, which remained
pinched closed.

I stood half a head shorter than him, but having separated so many souls from so many different sized bodies over the past week, I was no longer intimidated by physical stature.

Dr. Evans forced his voice to sound calm. “I was curious, Mr. Zane, that’s all. No, no, I’m not curious. I
need
to know. For better or worse, I’m in charge here. I’m trying to keep as many of these people alive as I can. They’re my responsibility. So, unless you want to detonate that hand grenade right here and kill us all, then you’ll have to answer my questions, because you’re not taking one step further until I get some answers.”

I cocked my head at the soldier behind me. “Why is he back there?”

Dr. Evans looked at the soldier behind me and motioned to his right. “Corporal.”

The guy behind me walked around me to stand a few paces behind the doctor.

“Let me ask you something, Dr. Evans. How long have you been in charge here
—
since the beginning?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Who set up all the triage tents outside? Who decided on the protocols that put all of the infected in that gym and then left them there to die? Was that you, Evans?”

“Is that what this is, then?” Dr. Evans motioned at the two soldiers. “You men go up the hall to a safe distance.” He looked down his long, narrow nose and said, “I did that. I was in charge here when those decisions were made. If you’re here to kill me over some grudge about that, then shoot me. Don’t detonate that grenade in here and compromise the safety of the others.”

I shook my head emphatically, “No, that’s not why I’m here. I’m not here to kill you, though now that you mention it, it sounds like an appealing idea. I was in that gym, Evans. I almost died there. I’m a person, you fucker. I’m not a piece of medical waste. But that’s how you saw me, right?”