Life Among The Dead

by Daniel Cotton

  “It has to help. Thank you.” Oz sprints back to the bathroom.

  Bill watches him go before collapsing into his chair again. His body has gone numb. The pain he has been suffering through has abated to a dull ache; even his insides are feeling better.

  “Wait.” He calls weakly to the man he had just met. He wants to tell him to get his friend to labor and delivery. His thought is, they can join what’s his name and his girl when they go to that place. He crawls out through the small window, falling into the hall with a thud. It doesn’t hurt.

  Bill’s body rolls onto the zombie with a broken neck. The corpses head lolls up against Bill’s shoulder. The dying, disorientated man watches the moving head of the zombie. It isn’t trying to bite me. It could very easily take a bite, Bill thinks. Its mouth is resting against the living man’s flesh.

  A puzzled Bill looks into the vacant eyes of the deceased. It doesn’t view me as food anymore.

  “That can’t be good.”

  36

  Heather opens her eyes and the hand that gently strokes her hair pauses. She loves when he does that. She finds it relaxing, and comforting.

  “Hey, why did you stop?” She asks the familiar face in a tired whisper. Her husband sits in the candlelight. He looks beat. His skin shines with grime and dried sweat, he smells awful. It’s even worse than when he comes home from the factory.

  “So I can do this.” He leans in and kisses her, his lips taste salty.

  “You made it.” She smiles.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “You got to miss all the gross parts, and the pain.” She is trying to sit up; the bed is immobile due to the lack of electricity. Her husband places pillows behind her for support.

  “I wouldn’t say that.” He says with a slight laugh.

  “I heard about what’s going on outside. The nurses say we are safe here.”

  “This ward is safe since security is usually high. They like to prevent baby stealing and all. The hospital is full of them though. I want to get us out of here. I want to go to New Castle. The three of us…” Dan looks around. “Where is he?”

  “I knew you wanted a boy.” His wife points at him and laughs. “He is in the nursery. They took him so I could rest.”

  “My boy,” Dan smiles widely, but the smile is fleeting. “Born into a world gone completely mad.”

  “We’ll be fine, as long as we’re together.” She caresses the top of his head, an action that relaxes him as well. “So, you want to go to the ranch?”

  “Yeah. It’s secure, secluded, and it’ll have power from the dam. The dam will run…”

  “Indefinitely.” She finishes. “You’ve told me about the dam. Can everyone go?”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “The nurses, the other parents, and their kids. I’m not the only one, you know?”

  “I’m sure there’s plenty of room at Bruce’s place.” He says after a brief pause. “I’ve already sent a group that way.”

  “You’re a hero.” She touches his face.

  “I don’t know about that. I couldn’t save everybody.” His mood falters as he thinks of that family of four he watched get torn apart as they left west 8th. He thinks of all the people who must be hiding out, waiting for someone to help them.

  “You’re my hero.” Heather assures him.

  “That’s all that matters.” He says.

  37

  Oz enters the bathroom. Toby is sitting very still in his chair.

  “Ok, Toby. I have an assortment for you to choose from here.” He says loudly in hopes of rousing the boy.

  Toby lifts his head slowly. He looks so weak, Oz thinks. He’s clinging to life as hard as he can. He’s a fighter. The janitor drops the plastic containers to the floor and starts opening them, pressing down while turning the white caps. Pills are spilled into his palm as he moves towards the sickly looking youth. Oz ignites his lighter.

  Toby lunges at Oz. The restraining belt keeps him at bay and out of reach. His arms flail trying to grab the man in front of him. A low moan escapes his lips. Oz can see the boy’s eyes in the flickering light; there is no life in them anymore. They stare at the man who had cared enough to carry him up all those flights of stairs, as if he is nothing more than a pile of meat. The boy is hungry, and Oz is feeling like today’s special.

  “I’m sorry, Toby.” The man says solemnly. The pills fall to the floor, scattering in every direction as Oz rises to his feet. Toby desperately tries to get at him; the boy’s own chair holds him back by the waist. The wasting disease of which he was afflicted had finally taken him. Oz doesn’t want to leave him this way. He walks deeper into the shadows of the restroom.

  Most of the lavatories in the hospital have a small maintenance closet for storing supplies. The janitor locates the steel door without the aid of light. He inserts a key into the lock and opens the door. He uses his lighter to search the contents for something useful.

  Cans of cleansers, plungers, and small wrenches. Rolls of toilet tissue, each individually wrapped in white paper. He finds a stiff pair of leather work gloves and slips them on. His fingers flex inside the rough, water damaged hide, breaking them in.

  Toby is craning his neck to see where his old friend had gone. He tracks the man’s movement as he comes back into view. Oz is passing a row of sinks affixed to the tiled wall. The boy still performs his futile attempts of grabbing the man who now holds onto the sides of a porcelain sink. He watches as his meal tears the fixture from the wall.

  Water pours from the pipes in the wall as Oz carries the heavy white object to the boy’s chair. The floor floods over; water carries the useless pills away in its current. The janitor places one foot on the seat of the wheel chair, between the boy’s knees. Toby grabs his ankle. He lowers his head trying to bring his mouth to the food, his attempts at bringing the food to his mouth proved impossible, the man is too strong.

  Oz kicks out sending the chair into the wall. He swings the hefty sink crushing the boy’s head between it and the hard tiles. The wall is cracked where Toby’s head makes contact. The grip the boy has on his ankle remains tight. Oz swings again and again until the boy falls limp and the porcelain falls to pieces.

  Oz is alone again. He hasn’t felt like this since his wife had run off taking his son with her. She had left him for a surgeon. I wouldn’t feel this empty if it weren’t for these fucking zombies, Oz considers. If not for them, I would have never met the boy. He drops the pieces of sink to the growing puddle on the floor.

  “These fucking zombies.” He says removing the roll of duct tape from his belt. “I’m going to kill all you fucks.”

  Starting at the cuff of the glove on his left hand he sticks the end of the roll, wrapping a thick layer of gray tape around his forearm all the way to his elbow. He tears the adhesive strip in two with his teeth. He repeats the procedure on the other arm. He flexes against his makeshift armor.

  “1,001 uses. There’s no biting through this.” He gives his handiwork a considering nod. The large angry man kicks open the door and storms out on a mission.

  38

  Bill is staggering down the corridor looking for the man who needed the medicine. His mind is clouded and he is losing focus. He no longer remembers why he is in such a hurry.

  “What was I doing?” He asks himself. The corridor dead ends, there are doors along the walls. Each one is labeled, telling him exactly what’s on the other side. He just can’t read them, between the darkness of the halls and his vision being blurred. He starts trying the knobs until he locates a door that is unlocked.

  “C’mon! No whammy. No whammy. No whammy.” He opens the door and a zombie stands before him swaying back and forth. “Whammy.” He states disappointedly.

  The dead man in a white lab coat just walks past him since Bill isn’t on their diet anymore.

  “Excuse me.” He addresses the dead doctor. “I’m looking for a janitor.”

  The corpse rudely continues t
o walk down the hall. Bill limps to catch up and throws his arm around the zombie for support. They walk the hall together like buddies.

  A slamming sound echoes along the walls of the passageway. The deceased man doubles his pace towards the noise. Bill loses his hold and falls to the floor. He watches as his new friend shambles away, not bothering to get up.

  “This is a nice enough place to die.”

  39

  The mortician looks down at the girl he had assaulted. She stares up at him as well. Though the suicidal man was feeling guilty for his actions, he was compelled to push her away when she came at him. He had hopped onto the medication cart and jump onto the rack of patient effects; seeing the ceiling above them was paneled he pushed one up and climbed into the tight space. He prayed it would hold his weight.

  The tiles do hold his lightweight physique, if he evenly distributes it through his hands and knees. The white squares bow slightly under him and even more severely when he shifts even a little bit. He is stuck, straddling the missing tile looking down at the girl who seems bent on revenge. He can’t blame her. She deserves some retribution for what I have done. That doesn’t mean he has to make it easy for her.

  The man is puzzled. He knew she was dead. No pulse. No breath. Her body had cooled. There is no way she could have been resuscitated after all that time. He recalls the others, all of the people in the ward. Maybe they are all dead. He saw a man get his throat torn out by one of the new admissions. He is now up and walking.

  “Zombies?” He poses himself the question. He can’t believe it. Its fiction, but it explains everything. The behavior. Dawn’s resurrection. He doesn’t have the answers. All he knows is that he wants out of here. Mortie scans the space he is in. It is pitch black and he has no idea which way to crawl.

  The man looks down into the med room. Dawn remains there, staring up at him. He tries to ignore her gaze so he can get his bearings.

  “If the door is to my left.” He pictures the ward. He can see the Nurse’s station, a large desk that wraps around the center of the milieu. He is in that center, behind the desk. He had followed Dawn there when the place went crazy.

  “The recreation room is there.” He points straight ahead. The room contains exercise equipment and a ping pong table. The orderly had shown him that on his tour.

  “Beyond the desk should be the TV room.” His arm waves left causing the tiles to bow beneath him. Mortie replaces his hand and redistributes his weight, deciding that pointing is unnecessary.

  “The front door should be that way.” His head gestures to the right. The man slowly turns his body trying to be as light as possible. When facing in his desired direction Mortie starts to crawl taking deliberate strides, he wants to keep his hands as close to the supporting frame that the tiles rest upon as possible. It should be the strongest spot of the structure.

  His arm bleeds from the wound Dawn had delivered. It flows down his forearm and hurts like hell. He knows he deserves it, and probably more. He has decided to turn himself in to the authorities as soon as he is out of here. It will be his first stop after he elopes.

  That’s what Dawn called it, eloping. It is a term specific to psychiatric wards. She told him it’s an old joke where orderlies and nurses would say patients escaped together to get married. Mortie wonders if that ever really happened.

  A force stops his forward movement. His head has struck a wall. Mortie crawls along it feeling the barrier with his right side. His mind pictures the ward. He thinks he must be above the milieu near the rec room. The barrier doesn’t wrap around the nurse’s station, it extends across the unit. There is no way for him to get to the front door.

  The mortician is starting to panic, alone in the dark with alleged zombies under me. He can hear them moan through the fragile squares that threaten to break away beneath him.

  “Calm down.” He tells himself. “On the tour the guy showed you the television room. There is a door there that leads out to the smoke deck. A smoke would be great right about now.” He had left the pack in the room with Dawn.

  Mortie turns and faces towards the way he had come. He slowly crawls past the hole he had entered and bravely transverses the psychiatric ward above the heads of the berserkers. It is dark and smells of dust. As soon as he thinks of the smell he wishes he hadn’t because his nose is starting to tickle.

  A sudden sneeze offsets his weight distribution and the tile beneath his left hand falls through. His shoulder catches on the thin retaining rods. The crowd is directly below him, they have been following his progress.

  Mortie is fighting to get up, but he absently places both knees on the same tile and it falls away as well. He is lying on his chest as his legs dangle. The crazies are reaching for him though he is well out of range. He flails his exposed limbs franticly and the thin aluminum supports start to shake.

  He knows he needs to calm down, or he will fall right on top of the lunatics below. Mortie stops his wild movements and takes a deep breath. The mortician carefully lifts his right leg and sets his knee on the unstable bracket. He waits, wanting to make sure it is safe to lift the second leg. As he brings his left one up the bracket gives way, bending sharply. Mortie is falling.

  The insane mob is showered with debris from the ceiling along with the screaming man. The eager folks break Mortie’s fall, he crashes down on their heads taking them to the hard floor along with him. The mortician is on a pile of bodies that fight to get up. Those still standing have him surrounded.

  Hands are grabbing at him, pulling him in every direction. They all seem to want to bite him. They have him by the hospital pajama shirt he was made to change into when he had first arrived. Mortie slips out of the thin, green fabric and crawls for freedom. His skinny body squeezes between the legs of one of the psychotics.

  Mortie is on his feet running towards the television room. The ward is dark except for emergency lights along the ceiling. The door is illuminated in a circle of yellow light. He doesn’t have to look to know they are after him already.

  His hand is on the knob, but it won’t turn. He tries and tries despite the fact he knows it to be locked. To his right is the patient pay phone. You don’t see those too often anymore, he had thought during the tour. The orderly told him that cellular phone use is forbidden in the hospital because they interfere with the heart monitors upstairs.

  The last sane person on the psychiatric ward steps up onto the pay phone’s metal shelf. Soon he is standing on top of the large rectangular relic, reaching for the ceiling again. His fingertips just barely touch the white squares. He has just enough height to push one up and away, revealing the black space above.

  Mortie must jump to reach the edge where the ceiling meets the wall. He hangs by his fingers as the violent horde approaches. Their bodies push away a wooden chair that allows phone users to sit down when they call their loved ones, or their attorneys.

  He can feel hands brushing his loose pants as he scrambles to get up the wall. They had taken away his shoes upon admittance; he was forced to wear a pair of cheap slippers with virtually no tread. The slippers slide down the heavily painted wall as he tries to gain enough purchase to elevate himself.

  His pants are in the grasp of one of his pursuers. He can feel the thin fabric being pulled down. Losing his pants doesn’t concern him; it actually gives Mortie the incentive to try harder. The frail man finds the strength to pull himself up so his chin crests the edge. Never before in his life has he ever done a pull up.

  Mortie is out of their reach and out of his pants. He shimmies to his left while wearing nothing but those cheap slippers and a pair of tighty whiteies. The nearly naked man is able to swing his right leg up onto the ledge and heft his body up into the void.

  He rolls along the tiles and brackets feeling relieved to be out of danger. After a short rest on his back, Mortie moves to get on his hands and knees. It hits him too late that he should be careful of how he moves on the tiles.

  His body cracks one of the squares
in half and he is once again falling. The television room is as dark as a cave. His back strikes the ground and all the wind leaves him. He can’t move. The pain is too great. He can only wait and see if there is anything vital damaged. The lunatics serenade him during his convalescence. He can hear them moan through the door.

  40

  The door opens and a flashlight beam precedes the two figures that enter the room. Dan rises to meet them. The figure in the lead is pushing a translucent cart. It is a basinet. Heather watches as her husband’s face lights up with a wide smile.

  “You’re a daddy.” She whispers to him.

  “Happy birthday, Vincent.” He says sweetly as he leans over the cradle. They have had the name picked out for the past year with an alternate if they had a girl.

  The tiny bundle moves, his eyes are closed and the lids are glossy from the ointment that the nurses put on after birth. They open slightly and look at the man who hovers overhead. Dan reaches for him. He has been looking forward to holding this boy for so long.

  “Don’t touch him!” The nurse wielding the flashlight says. She aims the beam right at Dan who is blinded when he looks in her direction. He knows by her voice that she is the one he had met at the door, the one with the shotgun.

  “He needs to eat.” She continues. “And, you need to clean yourself up.”

  “Oh. Right.” Dan replies.

  “Bathroom is over there.” She points out a door with her flashlight. Dan takes a few steps as the other nurse scoops up his son and carries him over to Heather. As the child nears his mother a small song can be heard that Dan recognizes as the Irish lullaby.

  “What’s the music for?” Dan asks.

  “It prevents accidentally giving a child to the wrong parent.” The nurse in charge tells him and hands Dan her flashlight. “Wash your hands. And, at least cover your filthy clothes, there are robes in there.”