The Zombie Virus (Book 1) (5 page)

One second, Anwar was just lying there and in
the next he was sitting up. LTC Hanson was still facing the camera
and didn’t see him, although she must have seen the look on my face
over her monitor. She whirled around just in time to see Dr. Anwar
Rafik, usually an affable small framed man, reach out with the
quickness of a striking cobra and grab Sung’s arm. I watched in
horrified amazement as he opened his mouth wide and bit through the
tough suit material and into flesh. Sung screamed and tried to
fight off the snarling man who was clamped on like a dog worrying a
chew toy.

Anwar was making a growling noise as he
worked his teeth in deeper while his bloodshot eyes reflected the
madness of what I was witnessing. Sung was trying to pull away,
using the fist of his other hand to pound Anwar about the head.

They fell backwards into an instrument cart
and onto the floor with Anwar on top. He was no longer biting
Sung’s arm, for a large portion of flesh and material had torn away
in his mouth. Blood was everywhere. Before I could yell a word of
warning LTC Hanson was there pulling Anwar off of Sung.

Dr. Rafik, with his own bloody froth mingling
with the blood of Sung and running down his chin, was on his feet
and with a strength out of proportion to his size, picked up LTC
Hanson by the neck and slammed her back into the hospital bed. Her
umbilical cord snapped free from her suit and the sound of escaping
air filled the speaker, whipping the cord around spasmodically. An
insane snarl escaped Anwar’s bloody mouth and he was on her in an
instant, his clawed hands flailing wildly at her body as he tried
to get to her flesh through the spacesuit.

LTC Hanson was beating him about the waist
with her clenched fists. Anwar bent down and bit her shoulder
through the material as easily as biting through tissue paper.
Blood erupted and she screamed, frantically trying to beat him off
of her.

From behind Anwar, I saw a blur of green and
a metallic sound as something slammed into the back of Anwar’s
skull. Sung rammed the blunt end of an oxygen cylinder over and
over into Anwar’s head until his body slumped to the floor.

Blood was splattered everywhere. The room was
severely contaminated. Procedure called for getting everyone out to
the airlock for decontamination and smoking the room with gaseous
formaldehyde, however, that wasn’t going to be possible.

“Sung, how bad is she?” I asked.

“She’s bleeding bad,” he replied, grabbing a
towel and pressing it to her wound. I could see blood dripping from
the tear in the arm of his own suit.

“Steve,” Jennifer called weakly. “We have to
assume this room’s hot.”

“I know,” I replied in a surprisingly calm
voice, “but first you two need to be stabilized. I’m on my way over
now.” I hooked up to the external backpack and exited through my
lab’s airlock, still in shock from what I had just witnessed.

Both Sung and Jennifer appeared even worse
when I arrived in the isolation lab a few minutes later. Less than
ten minutes had passed since the attack. The thing that had been
Dr. Anwar Rafik was still lying in a heap on the floor by the bed
where he had fallen, his head a pulpy mess. Jennifer was lying in
the bed where Anwar had been just ten minutes prior.

“He fucking bit through my clavicle. How the
fuck could he do that!?” LTC Hanson cried weakly when she saw
me.

“He got her brachial artery,” Sung informed
me quietly. “She’s losing blood fast.”

Sung still had the towel folded and pressed
hard to her shoulder and it was already soaked and dripping with
bright red blood.

“I’m sorry I killed Dr. Rafik. I didn’t know
what else to do to stop him,” Sung stated while he tended to LTC
Hanson.

“I know. I saw what happened. You did the
right thing.” Then again I wondered if it was the right thing. A
man we all knew had lost his life after having some sort of manic
episode. Could something else have been done to restrain him? I
replayed the event in my mind and could see no other course of
action that could have stopped Anwar before he had killed Hanson or
Sung.

“How’s your arm?” I asked, looking over at
the other two infected patients in the room. They were still
comatose.

“Very painful, Dr. McQuinn,” he replied in
his light Korean accent.

I spotted some surgical tape laying near the
spilled cart and grabbed a pressure bandage off the counter then
proceeded to bandage up his arm through his suit as best as
possible. I poured a half bottle of hydrogen peroxide over the
bandage and used the other half on the towel covering LTC Hanson’s
shoulder. She was looking very pale, with dark circles forming
under her eyes. I took a roll of duct tape and made a temporary
patch over the hole torn in Sung’s sleeve, thankful when his suit
repressurized.

“We need to get some saline into her,” Sung
said, then motioned to the two infected girls still laid out on
their beds. “Can you secure those two?”

I nodded in reply.

“I’m bleeding out,” LTC Hanson weakly told
Sung. “You need to clamp off the artery. There’s not much
time.”

I pulled Dr. Rafik’s body off to the side,
his mangled head leaving a bloody smear across the floor. I covered
him with a sheet then went over to the two girls. The beds had
leather wrist and ankle cuffs built into each to keep infected
patients immobilized in situations where they could harm themselves
or others. This was one of those situations. It took me only a few
minutes to get both secured to their beds. When I turned around
Sung had cut away a portion of Jennifer’s suit and set up a saline
drip into her arm.

“I will need your help, Dr. McQuinn.” He
grabbed my gloved hand and placed it over the soaked towel. “Keep
pressure on while I get the instruments that I need.”

He rummaged around in a drawer and came back
with an arterial clamp, scalpel and several dispensing bottles of
saline wash.

Sweat was dripping down his face on the
inside of his shield. Our positive pressure suits were supplied
with a steady flow of cooled, filtered air from our umbilicals or
from the portable packs when we were moving from room to room. The
air circulating in the spacesuits could usually keep us cool in the
warmest of regions. For some reason, Sung, through either fear or
exertion was overwhelming the cooling capabilities of the suit.

“Are you okay, Sung?” I asked.

“It’s hot,” he replied cautiously. “I may
have some shock setting in.”

He looked at LTC Hanson, who was lying with
her eyes closed, breathing shallowly, a thin film of sweat covering
her face under her helmet.

“Lieutenant Colonel Hanson?” he asked softly,
“Can you hear me?” She didn’t reply or open her eyes.

“That is okay,” Sung said to me. “This will
be painful, and easier with her unconscious.”

He grabbed the surgical scissors that he had
used to remove the spacesuit sleeve for the saline drip and started
cutting away the other sleeve.

“When I tell you, remove the cloth. It will
start bleeding heavy again when any clotting on the wound’s surface
is torn away. I will cut the material from around the wound and I
need you to keep rinsing the wound with saline as I work.” He
gestured to the different areas as he instructed me. “I will
probably have to cut some of the tissue back to expose enough of
the artery for me to get the clamp on.” Sung continued cutting.
“Remove it now, Dr. McQuinn.”

I pulled off the towel and fresh blood
squirted up from the wound and ran down the inside of LTC Hanson’s
suit. Sung removed a large portion of the spacesuit around her
shoulder.

“If it is too withdrawn I will have to insert
a figure eight suture around it and hope that stops the
bleeding.”

“How do you know how to do this, Sung?” I
asked while squirting saline into the ugly bite mark, rinsing blood
off of the shattered clavicle that looked starkly white among the
pulpous pink flesh.

“I’m an Army Combat Field Medic, two tours in
Afghanistan,” he answered bluntly. “Damn he bit deep,” he muttered
to himself as he tried to locate the torn artery. Blood was pooling
in the wound from the pulsing artery and mixing with the saline and
then overflowing onto the bed, soaking the sheets bright red.

“Okay, I see it. Damn, it’s getting hot. The
sweat is getting in my eyes.”

A sound behind us caused us both to look up
and back. One of the girls was awake and looking at us, a scowling
expression on her face. Blood speckled spittle flew from her mouth
and she growled and hissed at us, her bloodshot eyes nearly lost in
her brown face. She yanked violently at the restraints, but they
held.

We looked back at each other and then to
Jennifer and the job at hand, trying to ignore the animal sounds
coming from the other side of the room.

Sung cut back tissue until he had enough of
the artery protruding to slip the clamp over it and pressed the
handles together until they locked.

“Got it!” he exclaimed. The blood stopped
pulsing from the torn end of the artery immediately. All through
the procedure LTC Hanson did not so much as flinch in her sleep.
Sung taped the clamp to her shoulder so it wouldn’t pull loose,
then took the rinse bottle from me and thoroughly cleaned out the
bite. He stuffed it with clean gauze and bandaged it.

“That will have to do,” he said. He walked
over to a stool and sat down. “I’ve got to get out of this suit,
I’m suffocating in it.” He released the seals on his wrists and
pulled his gloves off, removed his umbilical from his helmet, and
then took off his helmet, revealing his boyish round face and
closely-cropped raven black hair.

“Wait!” I warned. “We need to get you out of
here and through decon first.”

He laughed dryly. “Dr. McQuinn, I am already
contaminated.” He pulled his arm out of his suit and held it up,
pulling back the pressure dressing. The bite looked inflamed –
angry.

“You don’t know that,” I argued. “He may have
been past the infectious stage.”

“Doctor, I am already running a fever. I am
definitely infected.” He continued to strip out of his suit.

The diseased black girl was gnashing her
teeth, making clacking noises as she bit at the air. We both tried
to ignore her.

Sung walked over to Jennifer with the
spacesuit around his waist and removed one of her gloves. He placed
the temperature monitor cuff over her finger. In seconds the
reading was showing 101.2 Fahrenheit.

“LTC Hanson is infected too. In time we will
both be like that.” He gestured toward the girl who was viscously
straining at her bindings while never taking her eyes from us, like
some rabid starving animal.

“We don’t know that yet, Sung. It could be a
temporary condition or only a symptom in a subset of infected
people.” I threw up my red-suited arms in exasperation. Any other
time the display would have probably looked comical. “Hell, we
don’t even know if this disease is contagious, especially through a
bite. You could just be experiencing shock!”

Sung smiled at me with a patronizing
expression. “Maybe, Doctor. Maybe.”

I was at a loss for any more words or
actions. The situation was overwhelming. What was happening to us?
How could a disease spread in a worldwide pandemic nearly
simultaneously? What was it doing to these people? How could I stop
it?

Sung was wobbling on his feet. “I need to lie
down, Dr. McQuinn. Can you set up the last bed for me then help me
in it?”

I backed toward the far corner of the room
where the last of the four patient beds sat, being careful to not
get within reach of the creature that had once been an ordinary
young woman. She made grunting and growling noises, snapping her
teeth at me when I went by her. Despite the cool air being pumped
into my suit, I too was sweating. I hoped it was just from
fear.

I got sheets and a pillow on the bed then
helped Sung hobble over and he slumped onto it in exhaustion. He
seemed to be fading fast. It was looking like the secondary
infection had an almost non-existent incubation period before the
prodromal stage set in, much quicker than the primary infection. We
were only in our first hour since they had been bitten.

“You’ll need to secure me and the Lieutenant
Colonel,” Sung told me in a strained, weak voice. “You don’t want
to take any chances. Those things are strong.”

I didn’t know what words of comfort to offer
him. He relaxed back into the mattress and closed his eyes with a
look of resignation. I strapped his wrists and ankles down securely
and then went over to LTC Hanson and repeated the procedure for
her. I removed her spacesuit helmet and hooked her up with
supplemental oxygen. I didn’t know what else to do, I was out of my
league on medical issues. Holly would have known what to do,
except, of course she wasn’t here.

When I went back to check on Sung he was no
longer responding to me. His eyes were open and unfocused, and
capillaries had ruptured, turning the whites red. His respiratory
rate increased and he became combative, pulling sharply on the
bindings. I pulled the sheet up over him and watched his sweat soak
through it.

I felt very alone.

I walked over to the conscious girl. She had
been quietly watching me with her baleful eyes for the past fifteen
minutes or so but started with a deep throated snarl, almost a
wail, as I moved closer. Her pink tinged drool spilled down her
cheeks in rivulets, staining her pillow a rosy pink color. Her
bloodshot eyes never left me. The girl in the other bed was still
comatose.

There was a feral look in her eyes. “Can you
understand me?” I asked her. She strained her neck to bite at me.
She yanked violently at her straps and I was fearful that they
would break, but thankfully they held. Her black face looked even
darker as it perfused with blood from her straining. She continued
gnashing her teeth at me, her bloody spittle coating the front of
my suit in a fine mist.