Colder than Hell

by Anthony Neil Smith

  It filled Matt with some relief. Apparently, no one besides those few unfortunates—Quaker, Arnie, the guitar player, Otto, Luke the truck driver, George—and the paramedics Mr. Dark had touched had died in all of this. But whenever he asked about them, and he tried with several different staff members, nobody knew what he was talking about.

  They had taken his ax, told him they would return it when they discharged him. He didn’t notice until they took it away that it had no blood on it.

  Someone was cleaning up.

  He sat in the waiting room, bundled up, staring at his hands while listening to the news report on the wall-mounted TV.

  “…Hundreds of stranded motorists, all of them disoriented and in a state of shock after their cars were stuck in the blizzard on I-29. Authorities say there was a viral outbreak of some kind, but it was localized to the single stretch of highway, which has been quarantined as a precaution. Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta are on their way to the scene. We have Ryley Baskins standing by live with more details…”

  Somebody was removing all the evidence of what had happened, even George’s escape.

  The government?

  The military?

  Pavlov & Kirk Systems?

  Or maybe the answer was D, all of the above.

  Matt turned as another screaming ambulance pulled up to the doors. He stood and walked over, watched as they wheeled in Rhonda, still staring off into space, still mumbling.

  “Back off, man!” The ambulance driver shouldered Matt out of the way. “Coming through.”

  “Wait, I know her. Let me talk to her.”

  They kept on going right past him. “She’s not talking to anyone right now. We’ve got to get her warmed up!”

  Matt watched as they rolled her through the doors to the emergency bay, a doctor already explaining that warmth wouldn’t do it. One of the nurses stepped over to Matt and tried to hand him a clipboard.

  “You said you know her? Could you fill out this information for us?”

  Matt shook his head. “Sorry, not that well. I met her out on the road. But if you find a couple of kids looking for their mom, or a husband who can’t find his wife, they’ll know.”

  She nodded. “I think I know who you mean. A boy and a girl?”

  Good. Matt wanted to smile, but he sighed instead. “Thanks. That’s good to hear.”

  “Are you waiting for someone?” she asked. Matt shook his head. “Because, you know, you’re free to leave. I’ll have someone take you to get the ax.”

  “Yeah, okay. Actually, could…could I talk to a doctor? Someone who’s helping with that woman who just came through?”

  Matt walked a few blocks to an all-night superstore and bought a coat, some socks and underwear, and a new duffel bag. After he explained about the ax, store security told him they would keep it up front for him. And, of course, they had a guard follow him throughout the entire store.

  Then he was at the cashier’s line, ready to go, wishing he could stay and find Jimmy, talk to Rhonda again, but now that he had a lead on Pavlov & Kirk, it was time to hit the road for Minneapolis.

  The doctors at the hospital would be getting blood samples from the patients and passing them along to the CDC investigators when they arrived. And perhaps some of it would remain dormant in the people from the highway.

  The virus would be identified, isolated, studied.

  But he couldn’t rely on that happening. Not with somebody covering their tracks. Not with Mr. Dark around.

  It was his responsibility.

  He had lost the vial. He had lost the crates. He needed to get a sample and protect it this time. Because that deadly, radioactive viral shit could lead to a vaccine that protected everyone from Mr. Dark’s touch, maybe even from the effects of that ancient altar on that bloody mesa in New Mexico or whatever subliminal message was embedded in that cursed movie that turned people into psychopaths…or whatever horrors Matt had yet to discover that could spread evil to the masses.

  So he bought his new wardrobe—so nice to tie on a pair of good work boots again—and some cold medicine, slipped into his jacket, and retrieved his ax. It was just after midnight. It had been a long day. He could crash in a truck stop tonight and find a ride in the morning.

  He stepped outside into the wind, still blowing snow around. So much of it that even on a cloudy night like this the snow glowed enough for Matt to see very clearly. But when he turned back the way he had just come, from the hospital, everything changed. A red glow in the sky. Billowing smoke. The sirens were still echoes, but they were growing louder by the second.

  The hospital was on fire.

  Mr. Dark.

  And then there was a dull thud, an explosion, and a fireball that bloomed high above the tree line.

  He should’ve stayed. Damn it, he knew he should’ve stayed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Matt was back at the hospital before the fire trucks. It was a terrible scene.

  The patients that could walk were out in the snow, shivering in their thin hospital gowns. Some shared blankets and sheets as they watched the place burn, crying, shouting for help. Others—family members and EMTs and maintenance staff—were pushing some of the sicker patients out the doors in wheelchairs, on hospital beds, and in some cases just carrying them out in their arms or over their shoulders.

  It was a nightmare. And there wasn’t a doctor or nurse in sight.

  Matt raced from cluster to cluster, seeing everything from smoke-greased faces to minor burns to severe cases, the helpers covering nasty scorched skin with snow packs. He called out for Jimmy, Rhonda, hoping they had made it down. All around the grounds, hundreds of people, and he couldn’t find them. He asked one of the EMTs, “Where the hell are the doctors?”

  “You’ve got me. I haven’t seen one since the smoke alarms. None of them even helped. Just went about their business. Nurses, too.”

  “They’re still in there?”

  “I sure as shit don’t see any out here!”

  The ground beneath them had gone from snow-covered to mud in no time at all, the intensity of the fire blistering their skin. The patients kept moving back until they were scattered among the cars in the parking lot, some of the drivers trying to pack as many patients as possible into their vehicles. Others broke windows to help the patients most in need find a place to rest.

  How many more were trapped inside the hospital? What was going on in there?

  Matt looked for a way inside, someplace the fire hadn’t consumed yet. All the entrances he’d checked so far were either spitting flames or belching smoke, with still more people streaming out. From high above, people shouted from windows, high-pitched screams as the flames got to them. Matt’s anxiety ramped up. People were dying, and he couldn’t get to them. Why had he left? He should’ve stuck around drinking more bad coffee and watching know-nothing news reports until they let him in to see Jimmy and Rhonda.

  He finally found a place to enter the hospital, one that wasn’t on fire. And that’s where he found the doctors and nurses, outside loading an ambulance with medical waste bags, the back of the van nearly filled as Matt stepped up and said, “Hey, are you guys okay? We need help out front. A lot of hurt people—”

  A couple of them turned to him, including the nurse who had wanted him to fill out the form for Rhonda, and the doctor he had spoken to about taking blood samples.

  Both of them were horribly disfigured.

  What Matt took, for just a moment, to be nasty third-degree burns turned out to be something much worse. Their cracked, blackened lips sneered at him. More of them stepped out from the shadows, each and every one consumed by blistered, festering skin, sizzling out of existence, muscle and bone beneath them.

  Who would’ve thought, especially with that Hippocratic oath, that the healers would make such easy pickings for Mr. Dark?

  He took a step back. Counted. Fourteen of them. And there had to be more inside gathering more “waste,”
which Matt was guessing to be any and all evidence of the virus.

  Same as the EMTs who took those crates.

  Mr. Dark didn’t want Matt to have it. Maybe he needed to learn more about this bioweapon…and its potential as a cure for the madness he spread…so he could stop it.

  Three doctors and two nurses armed with scalpels and other medieval-looking surgical knives ran for him before he had time to get his ax out of the duffel bag.

  Shit.

  He flung the bag off his shoulder just as the first doctor stabbed at him. Ripped into the bag—goddamn thing cost him thirty bucks—but missed Matt.

  The next slice came from a nurse, catching his sleeve and cutting open the back of his arm. It stung, but he’d live. Matt gritted his teeth and swung the bag hard, the ax knocking them both on their heads right before he ducked and rolled to avoid the doctor in the silk tie with the bone saw.

  He was disoriented, on his way to his feet, when an intern in scrubs jumped on his back, held him in a choke hold. “Come get him! Rip him apart!”

  The other docs and nurses gathered around. Matt fought to stay awake, the guy squeezing off the arteries in his neck. Nighty-night. That was all she wrote.

  Until he caught a fleeting glimpse of Dr. Bone Saw picking up the duffel bag and ripping Matt’s ax from it. Woke Matt right the fuck up. The doc held it in two hands, took a couple of practice swings like it was a baseball bat, then raised the ax over his head.

  Matt bent his knees and leapt, found the head of the ax on its downward arc, and kicked it to the side. His foot exploded with pain. Had to have broken a couple of bones doing that. The doctor went off balance onto the asphalt, and Matt felt the intern squeeze tighter and tighter.

  But then a dull thud reverberated through Matt. He thought it was another explosion at first, before the intern dropped him. Matt turned to see his attacker fall, and behind him stood Jimmy with what was left of his bass guitar.

  “Hey, Matt. I’m feeling better now.”

  Matt pointed at the intern. “Keep hitting him!”

  He ran to Dr. Bone Saw, who was up on all fours, and kicked him in the gut.

  The doctor rolled over, hissed at Matt, and aimed the ax handle for Matt’s swelling foot. Pow! The pain was like an electrical current.

  Matt stumbled and tried to catch himself.

  The doctor kicked him, and they ended up with tangled legs. Matt twisted at the waist as the doctor swung again, and Matt caught the handle in his hands. It stung, but he held on, wrenching the ax sideways.

  “Jimmy! I need a hand!”

  Jimmy looked up. He was splattered with blood and goo from the intern—had bashed his face until it was totally flat—and was about to be tackled by the other demonic ER staffers.

  He took a swipe with the bass and kept them at bay while more snuck up from behind. It was too late. They were on him before he could realize what was happening.

  Matt pulled on the handle, harder now, telling Jimmy to run until he could get free. Matt and the doctor were almost face-to-face now, legs untangled as they wrestled. Matt pushed onto his back as Dr. Bone Saw tried choking him with the handle, pushing down, down.

  Matt’s arms were about to give out. He threw his head forward with all he had, felt a bomb behind his eyes, and thought he saw fireworks. The pain rolled in like killer waves, but the doctor went slack, and Matt rolled over, kicked him off. He jumped up, ax already swinging, and brought it down through the doc’s neck.

  “Jimmy!”

  The answer was gurgled screaming. The demons had converged from all sides, a mass stabbing, like Jimmy was Julius Caesar instead of an unlucky kid in a shitty bar band. Each thrust angrier, more forceful, until Matt couldn’t see Jimmy behind the frenzy.

  He lunged for the nurses, chopping through shoulder blades, elbows, Achilles tendons, cut the hands off doctors and residents, took a few more punctures from scalpels, but the adrenaline kept him on full speed, hacking and punishing until they were either dead, delimbed, or running away. They left Jimmy on the ground, lacquered in blood, a shivering mess of a man.

  Matt fell to his knees, lifted the kid’s head. Hadn’t he just lost someone the same way? Hadn’t he cradled George only hours earlier? “Come on, Jimmy, just fight for your life, all right? I’ll get some bandages.”

  Jimmy’s teeth chattered, and his breath was ragged. He shook his head and tried to speak, but the wounds on his throat showed Matt that his voice would only grow more faint. He had seconds left to live.

  He told Matt, “Rhonda…still alive. Help.”

  That was all.

  Matt looked up toward the ER entrance. It was starting to fill with smoke. He saw a few more interns carrying medical waste bags, walking out the doors. Easy pickings.

  Up and at ’em.

  Most of the ER was empty, except for a few patients who were either too far gone to get out alone or had been hacked to shreds by the staff. Matt had taken out the other possessed docs and nurses he found, only a handful, before going back to the beds. The smoke made him cough, but it wasn’t enough to be dangerous yet. Mr. Dark must’ve told them to take all of the viable samples and then leave the ER for last. Burn all traces of their activities. As if the people at P&K or the government hadn’t done a swell enough job already.

  Matt limped from bed to bed, his foot still throbbing badly. In a few cases, he had to take a closer look beneath the gore in order to figure out if any of the patients was Rhonda. He found her husband that way, his throat cut so deep that his head was held on by only a thick slab of flesh. Someone had stuffed his mouth full of cotton balls.

  He finally found her, almost comatose. They must have injected her with some heavy drugs, because Matt couldn’t make her wake up beyond a few blinks and murmurs. He had to get her out of here, and anyone else left breathing, if he could. He scooped Rhonda from the bed and went looking for a wheelchair.

  Another couple of patients were there, awake but confused, and Matt told them he’d be back to help. The smoke was thicker now. He noticed that someone had piled some oxygen tanks in strategic spots around the ER, waiting for the right moment to light them up, Matt guessed.

  He found a wheelchair and set down Rhonda carefully.

  If he could make it back outside, put her in the half-filled ambulance, save the remaining patients, and then get out of here with the evidence, what a win. He could surely find someone to help him, right? Someone at P&K, even, once they knew what he had…

  But how do you tell some scientists that they’d found a way to defeat an evil clown, and suggest that maybe they could, you know, just hand over a whole lot of the stuff?

  The time for figuring out the details was later. Right now, he just needed to survive. He rolled Rhonda toward the ER doors, keeping an eye out.

  From behind, the shouts of the patients he had to leave, and some other bashing noises, breaking glass, crashing machines. The fire alarms were so loud that they hurt Matt’s ears. On and on, making him dizzy.

  Almost there. The doors slid open, and he was about to push Rhonda outside when the taillights on the ambulance flared and the tires squealed, burning rubber as it sped away.

  Son of a bitch!

  Everything. All the samples, gone. The patients, scattered. Notes? Files? Either in the back of that ambulance or burned to ash already.

  All he had now was Rhonda.

  Yes! Rhonda! The virus was still alive in her blood, wasn’t it?

  He pushed her chair back inside, not willing to risk taking his eyes off her, not even for a minute.

  Back into the belly of the ER, he pulled out every drawer he passed—five, ten, and then on twelve he found them. Sterile syringes. They weren’t that large, but he could do this, right? You didn’t have to be trained to suck up some blood.

  He grabbed five of them and tried to shut out the noise and smoke as he leaned over Rhonda and stuck the thin needle into her forearm, pulling the stopper back until it was full of her blood.

  The
n again. She didn’t stir.

  Then he switched arms for the third. This time, she flinched. Her eyes opened, and she said, “Matt?”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, just trust me.”

  She pulled her arm back. “What are you doing?”

  “I need some of your blood. Just a little. I’m almost done.” He pulled the stopper on the third syringe, but she flinched again and pulled back. It was barely half full. It was all he was getting. He capped it like he had the other two and then tossed the three vials in his pocket. Hoped they held the answers.

  Rhonda looked around, her eyes growing wider, her hands lifting to cover her ears. “What’s happening? Where are my kids? What’s going on?”

  She tried to stand, but Matt pushed her gently back into the chair. “I’m going to get you out of here. Trust me, okay? I think your kids are fine. We’ll find them.”

  “What about Stan? Have you seen him? Where’s my husband?”

  Not the time or the place. “I’m sure he’s out there waiting for you. But we’ve got to hurry.”

  That’s when a handful of demons in scrubs burst through the opposite door, all of them carrying butane torches.

  Rhonda said, “Look! There’s some help! Please, help us!”

  Sometimes Matt forgot that he was usually the only person in the room who saw the bastards for what they really were. “Listen, you’re not going to understand this, but…”

  He sprang from behind the chair and grabbed his ax, ran right for the demons just as one took the spark to his torch, lit it up, and threw it toward the pile of oxygen tanks.

  Matt tried to reverse direction, but he slipped on the floor. He turned and shouted at Rhonda, “Get down! Get down!”

  Boom.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The blizzard had passed by morning, but the wind was still kicking up the snow, building dunes, hills, mountains of the stuff. The plows had pushed it to the sides of the road, another wall, leaving long, dangerous stretches of iced-over interstate in all directions. The news on the truck stop TV was still nonstop about the explosions at the hospital, almost certainly linked to arson, they were now saying, by some members of the hospital’s medical staff. It was a huge shock for the entire community. Some of the pillars of Fargo had died in that fire, the same ones who had set it. Anna Lynn had seen a lot of shocking things during her years on this earth, like Vietnam, Oklahoma City, hurricanes and floods, 9/11, and Obamacare, and she had spoken with many a trucker about all of these things in her thirty-six years as a waitress at this Flying J on the intersection of I-29 and I-94. But today, with the tragedy this close to home, everyone had been very quiet. Speechless, even.