A couple of seconds later, her zombie followers slammed into the door, and she could see their feet shuffling around on the dock. They weren’t smart enough to lower their bodies down to crawl under the opening but just shuffled around outside the door. But she knew in time, one of them would stumble, end up falling, and would end up crawling under the door.
After taking about twenty seconds to recover, Kara got to her feet and put all of her weight against the door and pushed down. The motor didn’t resist her this time, and the door fell down hard, clattering downward and crushing a zombie’s foot, trapping it in place.
Kara felt nothing for the creature but disgust. It was everything she hated - undead, yet somehow still walking around, mindless and insatiably hungry.
It, along with its comrades, began to pound their hands against the door, wanting inside with her. She couldn’t explain why they wanted to gather around her and didn’t care. She just wanted them as far away from her as she could get them.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted as she slammed her fists against the door. It rippled out nearly six inches, knocking the zombies backward.
Kara dropped her head and whispered, “Please go away. Just leave me alone.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth, emitting a low moan which went on for several seconds before she realized what she was doing and stopped.
“Please, no more,” she said in a low voice.
The zombies began to pound on the door again, wanting in. Wanting to be with her.
Kara knew it was a losing proposition and turned away from the door. Directly ahead, she saw a hallway leading into shadows. Anything was better than staying with these things any longer. She trudged into the corridor, disappearing into the darkness.
Chapter 16
Helpless
“I’ve got to find a way to go out there and find her,” I said after returning from my cocoon of grief.
“Haven’t we been over this before?” Alex asked, obviously exasperated at my question. “The answer is still the same. You will die if you do that.”
Frankly, I didn’t blame her for being frustrated and annoyed. I had been singing one-note since coming out of my room. It was ‘Find Kara’ all day long and on all channels. Even the reruns.
We were standing at a bank of windows at the back of the lab overlooking the plaza where Kara had walked away into the swarm of zombies below. Zombies shuffled back and forth across it in that aimless way that they do. There was no sign of Kara among them, though.
She had disappeared from the plaza, and I hoped she would return, but no one had seen her. Both Alex and Richard had taken turns scanning the deaders for any sign of her throughout the day. A part of me assumed that was a sign that they hadn’t completely given up on her. Another part said they were doing it to be able to tell me to let her go. That wasn’t something I wanted to hear, and they must have sensed that.
I knew my mind was flitting from scenario to scenario in an almost panicked fashion looking for any way to rescue Kara from wherever she was. It played with impossible schemes where I tried to slip among the dead in the dark of night, hoping the darkness would cover my movements. But I knew better. With the multitudes of the dead out there, my chances of discovery were very high.
And what if I did find her? She left for a reason. Still, I had my powers of persuasion, and I’d lie, cheat, and say anything to get her back.
A new thought danced into my mind. Another long shot, but I had to ask.
“Doctor M, what do you really think of the Cincinnati team’s progress?
“Why do you ask?” He replied as he stood by the lab table tinkering with one of his little experiments.
“Well, if I can get Kara back, maybe I could take her down there.”
He looked at me as if I had grown an extra head. “We have been over this too many times, Joel. The chances of you surviving any trip out there is astronomical. Getting to Cincinnati would be beyond that.”
“Well, your vaccine did something you didn’t expect,” I said. “Maybe if you combined your research with what they are working on, you could come up with something.”
This piqued his curiosity, and he set down a vial he had been holding in his hand and stepped closer to me. I could see the wheels and cogs whirling behind his eyes.
“Yes, that outcome wasn’t something I would have ever expected, but since it was unexpected, I would not count on it again, and there is no other way to test it, unless someone wants to get themselves infected.” He paused and tilted his head, lost in thought. I knew somewhere inside that mind, he was working out some twisted new experiment.
This pause went on for a long time, and everyone in the room seemed to lean in toward him as they awaited his response. It was as if he had a stock tip, and we were all traders.
He blinked several times quickly and said, “I can tell you one thing; with those odds, I would not waste another one of my doses on it.”
“You wasted no time taking one of those doses yourself,” Richard said.
“Well...well, you cannot have a test run with only one subject,” he said, obviously flustered by Richard’s comment. “I thought I would take the risk on myself.”
“Oh yeah,” Richard said. “You’re my brave and heroic idol.”
Lori said, “Richard.” She stretched out his name, and the pitch of her voice rose throughout the process of saying it.
Richard let out a long breath of air and waved a hand in Lori’s direction, then turned away from Doctor M.
Not to be deterred, Doctor M cleared his throat and said, “Tell me again, Joel, what did you see in Kara when she recovered from her...her state and into her new state.”
“So help me God, Doctor M, if you want to turn this into one of your mad science experiments, I’m going to toss you out this window,” I said.
“But there is so much to be learned,” Doctor M said. “My vaccine was never intended to act in this manner. We must explore this, and you were the only witness in the room.”
“You are getting closer and closer to that line,” I said.
“What line?” He asked.
“The one that gets you closer to being thrown out the window.”
“Well, maybe if we can learn something from your experience with Kara, we can learn something to help her.”
“I know you’re fishing and you know you are,” I said.
“Give it a rest, Doc,” Richard said.
“But we must never give up on learning about this virus --”
He stopped when I turned around and took a step his way, my fists clenched into tight balls and my face filled with rage.
Alex grabbed my arm and said, “Time to take it down a notch. And Doc, it’s time to button it.”
Lori moved up beside Doctor M and said in a quiet voice to the Doctor, “There’s a time and a place, and this is not it.”
Doctor M raised his hands into the air and said, “Go ahead, stand in the way of science, but I tell you that the only way we will survive this is to remain objective.” With that, he turned and stalked out of the room. It was as dramatic an exit as he could pull off in the face of my histrionics.
I turned back toward the windows and looked over the complex, searching for any way to get out there safely to look for Kara. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be a way. Zombies walked, shuffled, and stumbled their way around nearly every nook and cranny.
There had to be some path to finding her. There just had to be something. Anything.
“Do we have any rope or cables or anything like that?” I asked.
“What are you thinking about?” Alex asked, and her voice was thick with skepticism.
I whirled around and said, “Maybe we can devise a way to string a cable or rope between buildings and work our way across them. I mean, if you can’t go through them, then go over them.”
Richard said while he lifted his hand in the air and accentuated each of his points by raising a fin
ger with each point he made, “First, that is insane. Second, we don’t have anything like that. Third, you’re not James Bonding your way out of this. The sooner you accept that, the better.”
“What about the tunnels?” Lori asked.
Alex sighed loudly. “Don’t go giving him any ideas.”
“What tunnels?” I asked, grabbing any thread of an idea they threw my way.
“There are tunnels connecting all the buildings,” Lori said.
Before I could jump on the idea with both feet, Richard threw cold water on it. “And those tunnels are filled with zombies. They are the perfect death trap. The last time I used them to get meds from the ER, I barely made it back alive.”
“You can’t take the tunnels, anyway. We haven’t cleared out the first two floors and secured this building,” Alex said. “That is job one before we do anything else. We don’t get those dead fuckers out of here, and we’re all dead soon. Our supplies up here are dwindling fast.”
“I have no idea where Kara is, and I have to do something to find her,” I said as I looked to each one of them like a drowning man pleading for anything to save him.
“There’s got to be something,” I said.
Alex looked down at the floor for a moment, and I could tell that she was working up the courage to say something. When she looked up, there was only pity in her eyes. “Joel, you’ve got to accept that she walked away from here. On her own. No one forced her to leave.”
“Whatever has happened to her has got to have screwed with her mind in a major way,” Richard said.
“You guys are acting like there is no hope for her,” I said, feeling heat rush to my face.
“Joel, I think maybe it’s time you shifted your focus on protecting Naveen,” Lori said. “She’s taken this hard. It’s like she lost her mom again. She needs you. You’re all she has left.”
My temper was close to boiling over at this point, and I knew that if I stayed in the room, things would get very ugly. “You don’t need to tell me what I’m responsible for. I’d do anything to protect Naveen, and I think one of the best ways of doing that is getting Kara back here and fixing her.”
It was my turn to put on the old dramatic exit routine as I sped out of the room and slammed the door behind me. Yes, it was a temper tantrum of epic proportions, but honestly, at that point, I was a broken man. All the king’s men and all the king’s horses weren’t going to be able to put me back together again.
What I did know was that I was going to get to Kara, one way or another.
Chapter 17
Hopeless
The only light in the room filtered in through the opaque glass blocks at the tops of the walls. It was dim and diffuse which suited Kara just fine. She didn’t care about the dark. In fact, in her current mood, it suited her well.
The events of the past day swirled in her head, and she couldn’t shut the images off. They played over and over again like some endless horror movie.
The final scene of the movie had her back on the third floor of the hospital, battling for her life.
She saw the swarm coming after her as she and Richard ran from the door in the research building. A dark figure had opened the stairwell door, and for a few moments, that figure was all that mattered. But any concern about the identity of this dark figure was erased as the zombies that had been stacking up in the stairwell poured through the doorway.
Panic drove her to separate from Richard as they split up. As it turned out, Richard had picked the right way where she had blundered into a dead end. Backed into a corner, she was forced her to fight her way out.
At first, she used her rifle to whittle down the herd as it came for her, but it seemed as if for everyone she shot, two took its place. She burned through her first magazine quickly. She tried to space out the shots with her second and last one, but a surge of them, drawn in by her shooting, forced her to let loose.
That took down several zombies, but there were still a dozen or more after her as she stumbled over the bodies of their undead companions. It was like navigating over a slick mountainside only this mountain bled reddish-black blood and stank to the high heavens.
She ended up in a maze of offices, wandering around in the dark, fearing to use her flashlight because that would give away her position. After tripping three times, she finally flicked it on. When she did, she discovered a small group of zombies clumped together in a corner. At first, they didn’t react to her, but once the light fell on them, it was as if someone had turned on their power switch.
That’s when she knew she had stumbled upon a nest. She hadn’t seen one of these in quite a while. There were these occasions that the zombies shut down and drifted into a lower state of consciousness. (That is if they ever were truly conscious.) Whether this state was to conserve energy or for some other purpose, no one really knew.
All she knew was that she was trapped in a closed-in space with about fifteen zombies, and she was the sole source of their attention.
Between her hand-to-hand weapon, a length of metal pipe, and her pistol, she was able to fight her way through the first wave of them. Barely staving off panic, she took out four with headshots. When she tried a different direction to run, she found it blocked. The zombies backed her into an office with no escape route, and that’s when she lost her composure. Terror overtook her, and she blew through an entire magazine in seconds, but she quelled the fear, knowing that it would get her killed.
Trying to conserve bullets, she switched back to her metal pipe. The first few swings worked, but the space was so small and confined, she found it nearly impossible to get enough momentum behind her swings. She took out a couple deaders, cracking their skulls, but a few of her hits just glanced off shoulders and arms, barely affecting the undead creatures bearing down on her. She reared back with the pipe, trying to get some force behind her next swing, but the pipe hit the wall and flew from her hands. It was lost in the darkness.
It was the gun or nothing.
Five zombies closed on her as she used an office desk as a barrier. Two came from her right, and three swerved around to the left side. She blew the brains out of the two from the right, but she whirled around late to take on the ones coming from the left. One of them stumbled and practically rammed into her, pinning her against the wall. She heard its teeth clacking away, trying to get a bite of her midsection. Despite it being on top of her, she swung the gun down onto its head and pulled the trigger, shooting blood and brain matter onto her legs.
That’s when one of the other two slammed into her, pinning her against the wall with no way to escape. The undead thing brought its face down toward her arm, its mouth open wide. As soon as its mouth landed on her forearm, it bit down hard, its teeth cutting through her tender flesh.
She threw back her head and wailed, knowing what that one bite meant. Besides the searing pain, it meant that she was infected and that her hours were numbered. It told her that she was going to lose everything she held dear.
Something inside her wilted, ready to give up. It was surrender. It was resignation, but that’s when she heard Joel shouting her name.
He couldn’t come into these offices looking for her. It was a death trap.
Like she had done with the other one, she placed the barrel of the gun against the side of the thing’s head and blew its brains out.
“Joel, don’t come in here,” she screamed as loud as she could, not knowing whether he could hear her at all.
The last zombie tried to climb over the two Kara had just taken down, but she shot it in the face. She had to get out of this office to warn Joel not to come any further into this maze of death.
A couple of minutes later, she ran out of the office just as Joel appeared around a corner, a looking wild-eyed and close to panic. When he saw her, relief washed over his face. She felt no relief at all.
It was all too late. Had he been there just a couple minutes earlier, she might not have been bitten. She might not have been turned into th
is monster.
The dark memory replayed over and over in her head. Her pistol barrel jammed against the head of the zombie. The lightning-like muzzle flash as she pulled the trigger. The zombie’s mouth closing on her forearm. Pinpricks of pain rocketed to searing knife-like explosions of agony as the zombie bit down. Its teeth pierced through the skin, and the blood started to flow.
If Joel had just gotten there a couple of minutes faster, she thought.
Her thoughts collapsed in on themselves as she relived the moment she came back to life. (If that’s what you called this?) In that moment, she came back awake, the first thing she saw was Joel. He had a gun pointed at her head.
The horror movie faded to black, leaving her back in this dark, dingy room. Alone and tortured by her own thoughts. Alone as this terrible half-dead, half alive thing. She wasn’t human anymore, and even though she wasn’t one of the undead, it brought her no comfort.
Do I still even have a soul?
Then she considered what good a soul would do her. Certainly, God had turned his back on her. Then she asked herself if she wanted to know a God that allowed something like this to happen to her and her unborn child.
It was all too much. She was unable to sleep because the undead don’t do that. Instead, she did what she could to shut down her conscious thoughts and retreated into a place of dark nothingness. That was the only way she could escape this nightmare.
Chapter 18
Desperate Measures
It was time to do something stupid, and I was just the guy for the job.
I waited until everyone else bunked down, and I made my move. Since the others were using the safety in numbers approach and had grouped in rooms around the lab, I decided to go in the other direction.
Darkness cloaked the hallway, so I moved slowly along toward the north stairwell. It wouldn’t do me any good to trip over something in the dark and alert the others.
Books of the Dead (Book 8): The Living Dead Girl Page 9