His eyes move around the room, gauging our reactions. No one has freaked out yet, probably because he hasn’t broken the worst of the news. “But, once they die, their bodies don’t stop the way they should. They’re not…dying. Most of you know the hospital is surrounded. We shut down the visitor elevators by the stairwell after they got onto the patient floors. The police were coming to take care of it.”
Bart gulps air, which puts a little color in his cheeks. “But they’re not coming. They can’t.”
A buzz ripples through the crowd. There’s a shout, followed by another, until voices bay like dogs. Bart has to mean they aren’t coming in a timely fashion, not that they’re not coming, period. I rock back on my heels from a surge of wooziness. If I look anything like Grace, then I might be about to faint, and I feel a lot like Grace looks.
“Please! Let me finish!” Bart yells. The room quiets. “We have to stay put for now. I know you have families—I have a family—but we’re at ground zero here.” He points to the hall. “Now that you’ve seen them, you know what I’m saying is true. It’s like nothing seen before. I can’t explain it except to say that the virus works with a parasite to act on the nervous system. The infected continue to attack after they’re medically dead, and the only way to kill them is to destroy the brain. If you get bitten, you will become one.”
More shouts—a few the Z word—are quieted by Kearney, who leaps to a chair, hand on his gun.
“It’s spreading too fast to contain,” Bart says. “They predict many, many casualties in the next few days. They’ve decided the best course of action is to quarantine—close off—the city in order to protect the surrounding areas. As of tonight or tomorrow, they plan to quarantine New York City by blowing up the bridges and tunnels.”
He’s said the last part in a rush, maybe hoping we’d miss it. There’s an awestruck hush, a moment where we stand in astonishment, contemplating how completely fucked we must be for New York City to be taken out like that.
Then someone wails. Shouts drown out Bart’s next words. A young nurse with a long brown braid grips a patient’s hand, eyes bulging. Maybe she knew what was happening, but it’s plain she didn’t know what was coming. Grace is frozen, phone clasped in her hand. With the addition of this news, there could be two reasons why our phones don’t work: the outside world is the same as the hospital or they’ve shut off service entirely. Cutting off cell service is nothing if you plan to blow up bridges.
“Shut the fuck up!” Kearney yells.
They do. A man in his thirties, with short brown hair and a round face, turns for the hall. Clark blocks his path. I don’t want anyone near that stairwell door, especially not a guy who looks as jumpy as this one.
“Where’re you going?” Clark asks. His hand sits loosely on his holster, and his light blue eyes are sympathetic but wary.
The man slouches, defeated before he began. “I have to get home. I have kids. I wasn’t even supposed to be here. I need to get home. I can’t—”
Bart moves forward to rest a hand on the man’s shoulder. “What’s your name?”
“Craig. My name’s Craig. I have to—”
“We can’t leave, but we
can
warn our families.” Bart holds Craig’s gaze but speaks loud enough for everyone to hear. “Everyone can use my phone. It works on a different system from your cell phones, so you have a better chance of getting through. Craig is going to go first, all right? Let’s make a line.”
Bart steers him to the silver laptop and hands him his phone. Once Craig dials, Bart approaches those of us who are on our feet. “I need your help. The hall has to be cleaned before someone gets infected. Can anyone here help with that? I promise you’ll get a turn with the phone.”
Grace and I raise our hands, as do a middle-aged couple, both of whom wear Giants jerseys. An old man wearing a fedora does as well, but he barely looks able to hold on to his cane. Grace brings her arm down and rubs at her other elbow.
“Let me see,” I say.
She shows me an elbow that’s turned lavender and swelled enough to lose its shape. “It’s fine.”
“Yeah, that looks totally normal. Too bad we’re nowhere near a medical professional who could look at it.”
“I think everyone’s a little busy right now.”
I cross my arms. “Fine, but you can’t help. Go get in line.”
“I should—”
“Call Logan and your parents. And your brother. That’s the only thing you should do, okay?”
She gives me the glimmer of a grateful smile and leaves to take a spot by Bart’s phone. The last thing on Earth I want to do is walk into the hall. I can still smell it, even if I can’t see it. I pull a pair of latex gloves from the box a nurse offers. The first dead body I ever touched was my mother’s, and now, not much later, I pull limp arms and dead weight along the smooth tile. I lift them onto gurneys and deposit them behind thick steel doors at the far end of the hall. The corridor beyond leads to the morgue, but we can go no farther—the morgue has zombies. Shadows move in the light that pours from a window set into a door down the way.
The chill of the zombies’ skin makes it through the latex. It gives just a bit under my fingers, like partially cooked steak, and makes my skin crawl. I grab the arms of a heavyset woman and pull with no success until Jorge takes one arm. We drag her the whole way and unceremoniously dump her beside another body. By the time we’re done, my mouth is pasty and my head throbs. We shove the gurneys through and Jorge locks the doors, then we head back to stand in the liquid of the bodies we moved.
The stairwell door rattles. A face with chewed-off lips peers through the oblong window. The tattered cheek of another presses to the glass, teeth gnashing and one eye protruding from its socket. It’s unbelievable. All of it. The virus and the bombs and the dead not dying.
I know this disbelief I feel, the disbelief on the others’ faces, is a survival mechanism. You draw a line in the sand and say you won’t cross it, you won’t believe or do a particular thing. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the unbelievable, or you’ve done what you’ve sworn you’d never do, you redraw the line a little farther back. You let the waves wash the first away like it never existed. But disbelief is insubstantial. The things at the door are real as can be, made of flesh and bone and teeth. All I have to do is believe in zombies.
I’d be an idiot not to when they’re banging at the door.
“We should probably start on this.” Jorge points to the floor and the murals of splatter on the walls. His shoe makes a sucking sound as he walks to the edge of the mess. “Be right back.”
He returns with a janitorial cart, an extra mop, spray bottles of industrial disinfectant and giant rolls of paper towels. It takes a while, and approximately ten changes of the water in the mop bucket, but between us and the Giants jerseys couple, the floor is now spotless and the cream walls gleam but for a possible pinkish hue. We’ve filled two garbage bags with things I don’t want to think about ever again.
Jorge tosses a mop in the bucket. “I’ve cleaned up a lot of crazy shit in this place, but that…” He puffs his cheeks, head moving side to side. “Thanks for helping out.”
“What else would I do?”
“Call your family?”
I look to the line in the cafeteria. A nurse rocks from foot to foot. An older Asian man in a hospital gown stares straight ahead, hand to his chest. I can just make out the top of a raw pink incision on his sternum. No one shoves anyone else out of the way. Order has been established. Or maybe fear reigns.
I shrug in answer. The only people to call are Grace and her family, and she’s on it.
Jorge says quietly, “Me neither.”
He removes his latex gloves and squeezes my shoulder. I don’t like people in my bubble, am never sure how to react, but I smile to cover my unease. After we’ve cleaned our shoes, we push heavy tables into the hall to form a barrier from the door to the wall. Even if they manage to get the knob turned and the door swings into the stairwell, they won’t get past.
I surgeon-scrub my arms in the bathroom until my skin is rosy. My reflection in the mirror is round eyes and stunned expression. I stare at the new version of me but can’t get her face to register any other emotion, so I leave.
Grace sits with our stuff, right hand cupping her elbow. I sink down beside her. “Did you get them?”
“Voicemail,” is all she says.
“How about Josh?” Josh is her older brother by seven years, who lives in Atlanta. She shakes her head, and I sigh. “They might get the messages.”
Fat tears hang on her eyelashes before they make the move to her cheeks. She doesn’t bother to brush them away. I wish Grace wasn’t apart from her family, but I can’t help but be glad I’m not alone. It figures that doing the right thing by my mother would be what puts us at ground zero in the middle of an already hopeless situation. Good old Mom, still ruining lives even after death.
A nurse crouches beside us. She tugs at the short brown hair that falls to just below her ears, framing an attractive heart-shaped face with small nose and gold-flecked brown eyes. Close up, the lines around her eyes suggest she could be in her early fifties, but she has a youthful appearance.
“You girls okay?” she asks in a voice tinged with a soft Spanish accent. We nod. “Did you use the phone?”
“Yes,” I say. “Thanks.”
“I’m Maria.”
We introduce ourselves and I point to Grace. “Can you look at her arm? She hurt it upstairs.”
Grace shakes her head. “I’m sure she has better things to do than—”
“Let me take a look,” Maria says. Grace holds out her arm while Maria gently prods and asks questions. “You might have sprained it. We don’t have a doctor down here, or an MRI machine to see if you tore a ligament, so we’ll put it in a sling and ice it.”
Maria leaves and returns bearing a bag of ice, ibuprofen and a piece of bedsheet. “We did the best we could. It’s not fashionable, but it’ll work.” She ties the fabric around Grace’s neck and then nestles the ice inside in a competent but tender manner. “Keep that on there about fifteen minutes. Be sure to come see me if it feels worse, but I’ll check on you later.”
“Thank you,” Grace says. She uses her good hand to move her phone to her leg where she can keep an eye on it. “Just in case my husband calls back.”
“Did you get through on Bart’s phone?” Maria asks.
Grace shakes her head. “I left messages.”
Maria’s eyes skip between us. “I told my girls we were safe here. Don’t worry too much. We’ll be okay.”
She attempts a smile, but it’s gone before she stands. I can’t help but think she’s trying to convince herself.
Chapter 4
I wake to soft moaning and sit up, head swiveling until I confirm nothing is coming to eat me. It should probably become a habit. At least for the next thirty days, which is how long the zombies are expected to live, according to the last phone call Bart received. The news that an end is in sight calmed some people down, including me and Grace. Others, like Craig, grew more frantic when it became apparent we’re on lockdown for a month, or for as long as the exits are blocked.
They dimmed the lights so we could rest, and most people still sleep. My phone says three in the morning, and I turn it off after I’ve checked the time in order to conserve the battery—I forgot my charging cable in my haste to leave my mother’s room. I would like to resume unconsciousness for a few more hours, but I know from a lifetime of experience this is all the sleep I’m getting.
I make my way to the hall bathroom. The toilets still work, thankfully, and I use the travel toothbrush I keep in my bag. Back in the cafeteria, Maria and the young nurse with the braid stand beside a gurney. The moans I heard must have come from the security guard, who lies under the sheet, face flushed and chest hitching slightly. Maria sticks a syringe into a bottle, then a different bottle and another, taking up a bit of each. She deftly turns the guard’s head and places her fingers at the base of his skull.
“Right here,” Maria says. The needle slides into his hairline, the contents injected with a push of her thumb. She picks up his hand and uses her stethoscope to listen to his chest, then gently sets his hand down and nods at the young nurse. “Keep watching but don’t worry.”
Maria sees me watching and pads close. “You’re wondering what that was about.”
I’m fairly certain I’ve just watched them euthanize a human, and it doesn’t upset me as much as it would have yesterday. I’ve seen the alternative. “He was bitten?”
Maria nods. “A small bite on his arm. We didn’t want to scare everyone. We’ll move his body to the freezer in the kitchen.”
Whatever was in the morgue is now in the hall where we left the bodies. The doors are locked and have no windows, but if you knock you get an answer, although it’s more of a body slam. I make a mental note not to eat anything frozen. “Won’t that…infect the food?”
“No, we’ll wrap him up first. He won’t touch the food.”
I imagine them laying him on a counter next to one of those industrial-sized rolls of Saran Wrap and spinning him around. It’s completely inappropriate and hysterically funny at the same time—in the
hysteria
sense of the word. I bite my lip so I don’t laugh aloud.
“That injection is how we took care of them once they finally told us there was nothing else to do,” Maria says. “It destroys the brain stem so the virus can’t take hold. They waited too long. If they’d told us sooner, maybe…” Her shoulders raise and drop almost imperceptibly. “You should rest.”
“I can’t sleep. I can help, if you want.” It’ll be better than sitting and thinking. I’m not much of a joiner, but I like to pitch in.
“You can check on the patients, give them water, and get one of us if they need something. It would be a big help. Thank you.”
I remember she’d said something about her girls. “You have daughters? Did they leave the city?”
“Two, about your age. They should be gone already. They had somewhere safe to go. I hope they listened.”
She clasps her hands so tight her fingers whiten. It must be nice to have a mother who worries about your own welfare more than hers. Who calls to keep you safe rather than to ask for money.