Night Zero (Book 1): Night Zero

by Horner, Rob

  “This first part’s going to sting, Tonya,” Patel said, his normally quiet voice now even softer. It conveyed a need to do whatever he was about to do, a conviction in that need, a confidence in his ability to get it done, and genuine regret that he would cause discomfort, even if the desired outcome was a reduction in pain. “The skin is too full to put in any lidocaine. But as soon as we get the pressure off, I’ll get you good and numb.”

  Tonya nodded, keeping her teeth clenched as she answered. “Just do it, doc. I trust you.”

  Dr. Patel nodded, reaching a gloved hand for the bottle of betadine and a gauze pad. “This will be a little cold.” He swabbed gently over the rising mounds of angry flesh, then transferred the gauze to his left hand. Taking up the scalpel in his right hand, he placed the sharp blade on the center of the pus pocket nearest the side of Tonya’s head. He placed the gauze as a spray barrier near the scalpel, to prevent any discharge from splashing onto his face or his clothes.

  Tonya screamed as the scalpel bit, which seemed extreme to Tina. The hand gripping hers tightened almost to the point of pain, then went slack.

  “Sweet Shiva,” Patel whispered. He pushed back from the bed, scooting the wheeled stool away.

  A smell rose from the opened wound, something sweet and sickly, worse than the mushroom-feet smell of MRSA, worse even than the rotting vegetation smell of gangrene. It was like nothing Tina had ever encountered, an assault on the nostrils, all the above mixed with the scent of old blood. She rose from her place on the opposite side of the bed and saw a river of black sludge pouring out of the cut Dr. Patel made in the abscess. It already coated Tonya’s left ear and was building into a sizable puddle beside her head.

  “All of that?” she asked.

  “It’s not possible,” he said, recovering himself enough to scoot a little closer. “Look, the swelling isn’t going down.”

  Tina saw. The tissue wasn’t sinking down as abscesses normally did. If anything, it was still engorged, despite the steady flow of malodorous slime.

  And Tonya…

  Tonya wasn’t breathing.

  This is the last one, Cliff thought with a smile, trundling the stretcher alongside Marcus for the third time in an hour. At least I’ll never forget the way to the morgue.

  “What happens if the morgue fills up?” he asked.

  “As far as I know, it hasn’t happened before,” Marcus answered. “Three bodies are unheard of, really. If we can tell that people aren’t getting better, they’re usually transferred to a hospital with more resources.”

  “So, most of your dead patients come in by ambulance?”

  “More or less.”

  “GSWs?”

  “Not so much. Those are considered a trauma and tend to bypass us. It’s more the cardiac arrest that everyone knows is dead but has to come somewhere to be pronounced. Sometimes we get them in, and EMS is still working on them.”

  “Ever get any back?”

  Marcus smiled. “A few, and we remember them all.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s pure statistics, really. Only about 8% of cardiac resuscitations are successful, and that number falls to only 1% if advanced CPR isn’t started immediately. So, when we get one back, and keep him…those are the ones we don’t forget.”

  “Better than focusing on the others, I guess.”

  “Yeah, much better,” Marcus answered, leading the stretcher into the final turn. In what he hoped was for the last time that day, he swiped his badge to open the morgue door.

  Danny smiled as the lights began to dim. He was dying, but it was all right. It was all right because it was going to be all right.

  Can I get an Amen?

  He was becoming. He had shared.

  And he would continue sharing.

  It was there already, like a dark light inside his head.

  As the light outside dimmed, the light inside grew. His mind folded inside out.

  His vision turned inward and he sought the darkness, so brilliantly dark that it hurt.

  His thoughts moved toward it, straining to reach it.

  Then he was through, and his vision began to turn outward again.

  His heart didn’t beat, but it didn’t need to.

  He felt no pain, because pain is nothing but a warning to the brain to attempt to mitigate further damage to the body.

  The body was dead, but the brain lived on, sustained by an infection that knew only one drive.

  It was time to share more.

  When pain doesn’t exist, there is no reason to avoid motion. Steadily, he began working his right arm up and down, each movement shifting the swathe a little. Soon, he’d be able to get his arm free of the restricting band. Then he could work the sling over his head and free himself.

  Not yet.

  Right arm up and right arm down.

  Have to get out of the swathe first.

  Randy Sprugg opened his eyes to darkness, feeling something covering him that deepened the darkness. He lashed out.

  The filmy sheet fell off his face, but he still couldn’t see.

  His arms swung out, the backs of his hands finding hard walls close to his sides.

  He was trapped, but he had no fear.

  Randy worked his hands over his body, feeling a ceiling inches above his chest, then higher still, until his arms were above his head. Another wall stopped their progress but pushing against it yielded a sense of motion.

  A long clang reverberated through the rectangular space as the bottom of his tray struck the inside of the door.

  His hands slid down a few inches, finding purchase in the walls beside his head. His arms flexed. His body moved back, the tray sliding the other direction. The clang came again, as the head of the tray struck the inside of the compartment. Then he pushed again, harder, driving the foot of the sliding platform down, striking the door with such force that it sprang open.

  Sudden light flooded into the space, illuminating only his legs.

  Lips stretching in a ghastly smile, Randy flexed his arms again, noting that his bed now slid easily out through the opening.

  Other sounds greeted him as he emerged, other clangs coming from doors like his, marching off in a short row to the right.

  Swinging his legs over the side of the tray, Randy rose to his feet.

  With no curiosity or animosity, just doing it because it was something to do, he reached out to the door of the next compartment, feeling the edges, fumbling for a way to get to what was inside.

  His hands found the handle, and he pulled. The door came open.

  Another grab and pull had the tray sliding out where another man fought to be free of his shroud.

  Thinking he could share, Randy yanked the sheet away.

  It was another who’d already become.

  He’d have to find someone else to share with.

  There were two more drawers to open.

  They’d only just left the morgue when the sounds began.

  “What was that?” Cliff asked at the first hollow boom.

  Marcus looked at him across the stretcher. “Hell if I know. Maybe it came from the power room.”

  Another boom sounded.

  “If it’s the power room, we should check it out,” Cliff said. “Might be a fire in there.”

  Leaving the stretcher at the crossing corridor, they moved back.

  A third boom sounded, followed by a softer clang.

  “That came from the morgue,” Marcus said.

  “You sure?” Cliff asked. “I’d really rather it came from the power room.”

  Marcus smiled. “We can check it first if it makes you feel better.”

  “What’ll make me feel better is if we find something in there,” the cop muttered.

  The door to the power room was normal-sized and featured a small plaque on the wall that read “Authorized Personnel Only.” It wasn’t kept locked for safety purposes. If there was a problem in there, you didn’t want to have to wait to find a key.


  Marcus opened the door, reached in, and flipped the light switch.

  Rows of circuit breaker panels lined the wall, each with a detailed listing of which departments each panel controlled, as well as which circuits each breaker enabled. The air was warmer inside and carried a faint hint of ozone. Nothing flickered, sparked, or smoked.

  “Power room’s clear,” Marcus said. Then he added, “Just the restless dead left to check,” because he couldn’t resist. The cop’s disquiet was endearing, though Marcus was certain he’d mentioned a girlfriend. A guy could always hope.

  “Could one of the doors have come open?” Cliff asked.

  “I guess. It’s possible we didn’t close the last one completely. Mr. Sprugg was a pretty-tall guy. Let’s go find out.”

  Cliff didn’t move.

  Marcus laughed. “Fine. We’ll just agree that you get to handle the living bad guys, and I’ll go deal with the dead ones.”

  The cop laughed nervously. “No, I’m coming. Don’t want anything to happen that might mess up evidence, you know.”

  Marcus reached his ID card for the scanner on the wall.

  Chapter 20

  At 4am Central Time, Carolyn Wallace wandered aimlessly around the small hospital in Mississippi. There were sounds of violence everywhere. People screaming, gunshots, the unique thwack/splat that can only mean an axe or hatchet finding a new home in the back or chest of another human. Sirens pierced the night with their rising and falling cadence. Except the ambulances. Those didn’t rise and fall. They just warbled like an opera singer putting some vibrato on the last note, really holding it.

  Bitsy was dead.

  Her little Elizabeth, whom they’d thought would want to be called Liz. But from the moment she held the little bit in her arms, she’d been a Bitsy. When she met new kids for the first time, she introduced herself as Bitsy, then would add my real name’s Elizabeth.

  That mattered to Carolyn. It wasn’t “Hi, I’m Elizabeth but you can call me ‘Bitsy.’” No, it was, “I’m Bitsy, but my real name’s Elizabeth.”

  The doctors and nurses said she hadn’t suffered. She just stayed asleep. She saved her mom’s life in the airport, then fell asleep. And while she was asleep, her heart stopped pumping.

  Did Carolyn think she or her husband would want an autopsy to determine Cause of Death?

  Carolyn laughed. What husband? He’d been as incommunicado as a CIA operative in deep cover in the Muslim Brotherhood, except he wasn’t one of those. He was a high school English teacher, and the sneakiest thing he ever did was to give pop quizzes on Mondays to see if his students read what they were supposed to have read.

  Maybe he’d been caught up in the same thing she had.

  A lot of people had been talking about that in the airport, though she’d been too preoccupied with her daughter to really join the discussion. The trend wasn’t to blame food poisoning, but rather the explosion they’d seen through the airplane windows. That’s what shook the terminal before they got on the plane, and maybe whatever was in the black smoke is what got people sick.

  They’d all breathed it, but only about half of the passengers and crew got sick, like her Bitsy.

  What if Austin started having stomach cramps or diarrhea while he drove up the Interstate? What if he swerved off the road and ran into a ditch? Could he be there now, hurt, maybe dying, with no one there to comfort or try to help him?

  It was easier to worry about Austin, rather than try to cope with the loss of Bitsy. That was just too big, a yawning maw of despair waiting for her to make the mistake of looking at it over the guardrail. It had a desperate gravity, and if she so much as glanced at it, she’d be drawn in, sucked down, and might never have the strength to come up.

  But Austin…

  Maybe she could rent a car, start driving and try to find him. He’d have taken the straightest route between Atlanta and Greenville. She wasn’t sure how far it was from where they’d landed back to Atlanta, but they’d only flown for about an hour. She ran through a quick math exercise in her head. They had relatives in Chicago, which was a little less than ten hours from Alpharetta by car, but only took an hour and a half by plane. If that’s how fast planes flew, she might be no more than six or seven hours away from Atlanta by car.

  Concentrating on the search for a rental car would also keep her mind off…

  No, she wouldn’t think about it.

  She also pushed aside thoughts of the young airport worker, Kim, who was only trying to help a crazy lady and got herself cold-cocked by a bucket full of bloody water. They’d flown her out by helicopter only a few minutes after they arrived. The doctors saw something on her CAT scan that bothered them, though Carolyn was unable to find out what it was. Privacy policies and all that.

  The doctor had also insisted that Carolyn get an X-ray of her face, which confirmed that her nose was broken—duh—but it was lined up well enough that it would heal with very minimal angulation. And if you want the number of a good plastic surgeon, the nurse will be glad to provide you with several in the area who are taking new patients.

  The crazy lady might have wanted a referral, if she hadn’t already gone beyond needing it.

  That was another thing best not thought of. The blaring siren going off inside the hospital, some kind of special signal best translated as We got a genuine Oh Shit moment going on in the ED right now and if you aren’t elbow deep in someone’s ass, you best hoof it over and help! The small hospital had a small staff, just one doctor, four nurses, and one assistant, but every one of them went racing past the room where Bitsy lay dying when that siren went off. Dazed, a little dizzy from the pain pill they’d given her, Carolyn wandered out to see what was going on.

  They had a room at the corner where two halls met which they could clear out and lock, and it’s where they put the crazy lady when she arrived. Carolyn didn’t know if they’d taken the cuffs off or if she’d slipped them off somehow—there was fresh blood streaked all over the room—but she was free and fighting with a nurse who went in to give her a shot. The others ganged up in the doorway, slipping on gloves and making ready to rush in and help, but before they could the woman broke free, and she had the syringe. She didn’t attack anyone with it. Instead, she stabbed herself in the eyes, first one, then the other, pop, pop. She never made a sound beyond a grunt as the needle drove home. The staff hung back in horror, oblivious to Carolyn’s presence behind them, watching the tableau with something approaching satisfaction. The bitch broke her nose and would have killed Bitsy if given the chance.

  Carolyn didn’t know what was in the syringe, though she hoped it was an anti-psychotic drug that would put her down fast and painlessly. The crazy lady never depressed the plunger while popping her eyes like overripe grapes. But as soon as that was done, she issued a scream of pure rage and frustration, like whatever she’d hoped would happen hadn’t. The nurses were rushing in then, fighting past their shock and desperate to keep the lady from harming herself further.

  They were too slow.

  The lady felt for the pulsing artery in her neck, placed the sharp syringe tip against it—Carolyn was sure she could see little bits of eye jelly adhering to it—and pushed it in. Then she deliberately depressed the plunger, pushing all that…whatever it was…straight into the vessel. She collapsed with the needle still stuck in her carotid, hanging there like a dart that didn’t quite have the force to push into a dartboard, dangling and wobbling.

  The first nurse to get to her did what came naturally, though it was probably the dumbest thing he could have done, under the circumstances.

  He pulled the syringe out.

  Carolyn had seen her share of horror movies. They were something of a hobby for Austin. She didn’t particularly care for the blood and gore, but she loved cuddling up next to him, feeling as though he could protect her through even the most nightmarish of scenarios. She didn’t read much horror. No Stephen King for her, thank you. But she’d read about an arterial spray and had seen depict
ions of it on the crime dramas she loved. Well, to be honest, she loved the actors who performed on the crime dramas. No one as hot as Shemar Moore should go unwatched.

  Whatever was in that syringe may have fried the crazy lady’s brain, but it didn’t stop her heart, at least not immediately. That sucker pumped out enough pressure to send a spray shooting out of the pinhole made by the syringe like a geyser at a national park. The first nurse in the room caught a face full of it before he could get a hand over the hole. The second person nudged him just enough that the hand slipped away, making the blood squirt out in multiple directions. Their scrubs were painted with crisscrossing stripes of bright red before someone got the hole covered properly with a gloved thumb.

  She watched as a crash cart was rolled in, as one of the doctors typed things into a computer to try to find out what happened when that medicine went into an artery instead of a muscle—she saw his Google search—and then, finally, as they admitted defeat and called her time of death.

  “Were you family?” one of the nurses asked when he saw her standing there.

  Carolyn hadn’t answered. If Bitsy’s bloody puke caused that, what about the people she’d scratched or bitten back at the airport?

  “You should go be with your daughter,” a second man said. He was Bitsy’s nurse. Numbly, she let him lead her back to Bitsy’s room.

  The rest was a whirlwind. Bags of fluid pumping into her daughter’s arms, fighting to replace whatever she’d lost with her diarrhea and vomiting. It hadn’t seemed that much, not really, but her blood pressure kept dropping no matter what they did.

  That was a couple of hours ago, when the heart monitor thing began issuing its steady, droning whine, when the fluid pumps were turned off and the defibrillator was taken out of the room. People made comforting sounds which were supposed to be words that she didn’t understand. It couldn’t be over. There had to be a mistake. They’d left her in the room with her child on the bed, modesty restored by a sheet pulled up to her chin.