Jaimee witnessed this ill-treatment, as she saw it, from halfway down the carpeted stair. At the first hint of trouble she had come slinking down on cat’s feet. Why wouldn’t they let her see her own mother? she wondered. Was it because she gone up and died or because she was on her way to being dead?
There was only one way to find out. With all the attention on Maddy, Jaimee was able to pad-foot her way down the stairs and along the corridor without being spotted. She entered Gabriele Rothchild’s room with her heart beating rapid fire in her chest, thinking she was going to be in a room with an almost dead person at best and a haint at the worst.
The room sure seemed a good place for a haint to grow attached to. The lights were dimmed and the shades pulled so that there was more shadow than light. The air-conditioning had been cranked up to a level that would keep a snowball round; quickly Jaimee’s skin bunched into goose flesh and she began to shiver.
Just in front of her, a wall of plastic hung from the ceiling. It had been put in place to guard against any accidental release of Com-cells during the admin phase—it didn’t look like it was coming down anytime soon.
There was a door in the plastic that opened by way of a zipper and Jaimee stepped through only to be confronted by a second plastic wall. Beyond this was Gabriele Rothchild. She was just a half-formed shape beneath a sheet and the little girl would’ve guessed she really had up and died had it not been for the fancy computer looking machinery around her bed that was still beeping and booping the way doctor stuff was supposed to.
Her daddy would’ve said: That signifies.
Gabriele was so still that Jaimee figured she was asleep, so she took extra care to keep quiet as she opened the second plastic door. She was greeted with the smell of bleach, which wrinkled her pert nose.
“P U,” she said, under her breath. She couldn’t understand the smell or the plastic walls or the full-body biohazard suits that had been hanging up between the plastic walls. None of it fit in with her paradigm of cancer and she simply chalked them up to things “rich” people did and thus was beyond her ken.
She went to the bed and gaped.
Maddy’s mom didn’t look like she was dying of cancer. Yes, her hair was short and patchy, just like Amy Lynn’s had been. And she was skinny because it was the cancer what ate her up from the inside out. But that was where the similarities ended.
Something else was going on with Gabrielle Rothchild. She was leaking black slime from her eyes, and there was more building up in her nose and ears. It was even beginning to fill up the pores of her skin. Jaimee touched her cheek and then jerked her hand back.
Gabrielle's flesh had felt like the belly of a swamp frog—cold and clammy; it wasn’t at all what any sane creature would call natural.
2
Deckard dropped down into the chair next to Dr. Lee’s and sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “Anna’s not talking.”
Thuy had been comparing the blood panels for John Burke, trying to find any changes from the initial blood draw done that morning to the last one drawn two hours previously. As far as she could tell there wasn’t any difference.
Platelets, hemoglobin, lipids, red blood cells, white blood cells, all within normal parameters and all basically unchanged. She had tested the blood six ways from Sunday, only to draw a blank every time.
In anger she balled up the sheets and threw them at the glass wall. Deck watched her, his face expressionless as always. “She called her lawyer and is talking about suing R &K for kidnapping.”
“That’s moronic,” Thuy snapped.
“Before the quarantine we were basically holding her against her will. It was mostly through intimidation rather than any overt physical or verbal threat, but I’ve heard of cases stick over less.”
“Not with our lawyers it won’t,” Thuy assured him. “Especially with the possibility of multiple murder charges hanging over her head.”
“Someone die?”
“Not yet, but if John Burke isn’t caught soon he’s likely to turn up in one of the little towns around here and rip someone’s head off. Everyone else is pushing the maximum therapeutic limits of the sedatives we have them on. I’m afraid what Burke is like off of them completely.”
“He’s not exactly a heavyweight,” Deck remarked.
“And neither was Sally Phelps, but it still took three of us to bring her down.”
Deckard didn’t bother to point out that the “three” of them included two rather small women and a middle-aged doctor. He wasn’t all that worried about bringing down Burke if he happened to come back. He glanced at her bandaged arm. “You were scratched by her. Are you infected? Do you have a case of the crazies?”
She wasn’t infected by anything as far as she could tell, however that didn’t stop her from peeking beneath her bandage from time to time. The scratches were red but not inflamed—they looked like normal scratches. “I’m not and neither is Irene Watts who was bitten on the shoulder. If the fungus is contagious, there’s clearly an incubation time before the spores mature.”
He pulled back from her slightly. “It’s a fungus doing this? I thought you called them toxins.”
“It’s all one in the same,” Thuy said, turning from Deck to look at her computer. She really wasn’t in the mood to give a high school refresher class in basic biology, but since he was trapped there because of her, she hit the highlights: “Mycotoxins come from mold of which there are over four-hundred thousand varieties. Mold comes from fungus of which there are over a hundred thousand types. What it is leaking out of their eyes, we just don’t know yet. Maybe spores, maybe gametes, maybe some sort of byproduct."
“Gross,” Deck said, mildly. Although he wasn’t a fan of germs or viruses, or any of that sort of thing, he had a special dislike for fungi. It made him, a rock-hard, grown man feel a little squishy inside.
"Yes, I suppose it's gross. Now, if you'll excuse me, Mr. Deckard, I have quite a bit of..." A gunshot went off in the building. It was distant yet still distinct--there was no mistaking it for anything else.
At the sound, Thuy blinked and, somewhere in the fraction of a second in which she had her eyes closed, Deckard had pulled his gun. “What that a gun?” she asked.
Deckard didn't answer. He was already charging out of her office. Ray stood about fifty feet down the hallway, his weapon drawn. Deck jutted his chin toward the stairwell and the two started toward it at a sprint. As they ran, Deck pulled out his two-way. “Shots fired, south stairwell! Proceed with caution.”
“No!” Thuy yelled from behind them. “Don't proceed anywhere. You can’t break quarantine.”
Deck paused at the door. “With all due respect, Doctor Lee, but fuck that.”
3
Wilson tried not to let the near overwhelming fear that shook his insides, and made it a struggle to breathe without panting, show as he put on his blue bio-suit hood back on properly.
“I’m sure we can handle this," he said to Lacy, smiling toothily, hoping the new sweat wasn't showing across his brow. "It’s just a routine check of the ward. Why don’t you go relax with the others?”
In another time that might have been considered a joke. The others were far from relaxed. Sometime in the last ninety minutes or so, the rest of the medical staff had become infected and their symptoms were progressing rapidly into the paranoia stage. They were being egged on by Lacy Freeman who, if her hate-filled eyes were any indication, was clearly on the brink of murder.
“What were you doing out there for so long?” Lacy demanded. “Were you upstairs with them? With the scientists? Is that what you were doing? Planning more experiments on us?”
He and Dr. Sinha had only just realized their danger a minute before. For the last hour, the two of them had been collecting cerebral spinal fluid from each of the patients, a very tedious chore in a full body biosuit.
Not realizing that the medical crew had been infected and had already gone passed paranoia and were now into dangerous, the two went back to
the nurse’s station to find the others clearly in the middle of something that he and Sinha weren’t supposed to hear.
“If…if that’s true, then of course they have to die,” the security guard, Rory Vickers, was saying. “Just like the rest of them upstairs.”
“Who has to die?” Dr. Sinha asked as she pulled off her hood.
Eighteen sets of eyes bored in at her with such intensity that she stepped back into Wilson. “Do you see…?” she started to say, but he stopped her words by squeezing her shoulders, hard. The signs of the contagion in the other medical personnel were obvious: migraines, the aggressive paranoia in their eyes, the squint that the patients had developed in order to see through their fading eyesight.
Lacy was the worst of the lot. Her eyes were already black and her mental state, alarming. She hadn’t attacked anyone yet simply because she was self-medicating to a dangerous degree. As they stood there, she opened a bottle of Valium and tipped six pills into her mouth. She chewed them slowly, almost daring Wilson to say something about the criminal breach of narcotic regulations.
He only smiled and said, “We’re going to go check on the patients." No one smiled back. They were agitated and on the verge of violence. "Come on, Dr. Sinha, let's get our...our gear back on. Everyone else should stay here."
Unfortunately, Lacy followed them demanding to know what they’d been doing “out there” for so long. Wilson explained about collecting the cerebral spinal fluid, however Lacy clearly didn’t believe the truth when it was offered to her.
“Sex,” Dr. Sinha spat out suddenly through a strained smile. Her hands shook as she zipped up her bio-suit. “We were having sex in the men’s room. Please don’t tell my husband. He’s very jealous.”
“He's jealous because you’re a skank,” Lacy hissed. “You’re a little skank. A little bitch. A little fuck bitch.” She started advancing on Dr. Sinha who was a tiny Indian woman and seemed as defenseless as a child.
Wilson yanked the hood over his head and stepped between them. For a few frightful seconds, he was blind as he straightened it on his head. “Yes, you’re right, Lacy. We were…oh, there you are…we were wrong to have sex. And because we were wrong we should atone. We…we’re going to check on the patients and…and empty their urine bags. How does that sound?”
With desperate hands, Sinha dragged the hood over her head and zipped up. She and Wilson were now fully gowned and had backed to the edge of the plastic curtain. "You should not follow us," Sinha said. "The ward is contaminated. You don't want to end up like the patients."
As they were already infected, it wasn't much of a threat. Lacy kept advancing and right behind her were the others. The smaller women among them were practically growling while the two largest men see-sawed between bestial hate and stark confusion.
“What are you really going to do out there?” Lacy demanded. “More experiments? Is that it? We already know you and the other scientists have a cure and are just laughing at us.”
“Nope just changing urine bags,” Wilson said. He put an arm behind him and gave Sinha a push out into the hall. He followed her, letting the curtain swing into Lacy. The plastic confused her and she seemed to have trouble reorienting on the suited pair as they backed down the hall.
The other eleven parted around her and continued to advance. “Do not come closer,” Sinha begged. “We are simply changing urine bags. See?”
She started to duck into one of the patient’s rooms but Wilson stopped her. “We can’t let ourselves get trapped,” he hissed, pulling her back. To the others he spoke loudly, saying: “We can handle this. The rest of you please go back to the nurse’s station where you’ll be safe.”
“You mean where you’ll leave us to die?” Lacy asked from the back of the group. “That’s what he’s going to…they’re running!”
That "they" were running was a surprise to Wilson who’d been standing his ground. He guessed that Dr. Sinha was making a run for it, and before anyone else could react he turned and ran after her, his plastic suit making a ridiculous swishing noise as he sprinted at his full speed.
Behind him the wild bunch chased after. The sound of their shoes thundered down the hall, coming closer and closer. He barely reached the stairway before them and had just enough time to throw his weight against the door. Dr. Sinha was right beside him. Through the square of clear plastic he could see her white teeth gritted as she strained against the weight of bodies piling up on the other side.
The two were slowly forced back. They struggled against the door until it made sense to run again. Without warning they released the door. It flew open and the nurses fell into the stairwell piling over each other. Wilson was about to leap over them to try to go down stairs but a gunshot rang out and something blinked off the railing right next to his hand.
He went numb from shock and took two steps back—they were shooting at him! How was that even possible? How had the day gone so wrong? How was he going to explain getting shot to his wife? He froze in place, his mind whirling as he saw something more impossible than being shot at: the patients were coming out of their rooms.
It was impossible because they had been sedated and restrained. And yet the black-eyed demons were shuffling down the hall, their hospital gowns open, their genitals flapping about, completely ignored. Most growled, some ground their teeth and others raked at their eyes with hooked fingers. All of them exuded hate. It seeped from their pores, pooling in the air around them.
There was no way Wilson could have known that the infected patients were looking to kill and maim and drink the blood of those who were still clean, however, somehow, in some crazy way, he did. On some elemental level he understood that the patients were no longer precisely human.
Just then a hand came down on Wilson's shoulder and gripped the plastic. Dr. Sinha was pulling on him. “Let’s go!” She was close to panic.
Awkwardly, he turned, losing sight of everything but the inside of his hood. He had to hold one hand on the rail and one on the hood to keep the clear plastic part centered on his face in order to see anything. Behind him, the nurses who had fallen through the door were clambering to their feet, and Lacy, who had hold of Rory Vicker’s pistol was aiming again, slowly, as if she were lining up a fieldpiece. Wilson was three steps up when the gun went off a second time.
Although the bullet missed, Wilson felt a zing of adrenaline shoot up his spine, while Dr. Sinha let out a shriek. Before Lacy could shoot again, they rushed up the stairs and stumbled into the third floor hall, tripping over each other in their fear.
Dr. Sinha was terrified and running blind. The hood of her biosuit kept pulling around so that all she saw was yellow plastic. She'd yank the hood back into place time and again, but eventually it slipped in front of her face and she tripped before she could get it seated properly again.
Wilson, who had been running sideways to see if they were going to be followed, stumbled right over her, catching her in the chest with his knee. He went flying as though he'd been tackled, while she lay flat on the ground, stunned.
The gunshots in the stairwell and the sound of running feet in the corridor had attracted attention. A number of people, including Dr. Hester, stepped out into the hallway. He was startled to see two people in bio-suits on the floor at his feet.
“What is it?” he asked. "What's going..." Just then four more gunshots went off, echoing up and down the south stairwell like thunder trapped in a mine. Everyone stared down the hall, waiting to see what was going to happen. Seconds later the stairwell door opened and five or six of the medical team charged out into the hall. They were gibbering and snarling like lunatics.
“Get back in your offices!” Wilson screamed through his plastic hood. “Barricade yourself in!” Not for a second did he realize he had just damned the thirty-two people quarantined on the third floor to a horrible death and an appalling afterlife.
He looked down at Dr. Sinha. "Get up!"
"Can't...breathe..." she gasped.
&nbs
p; Wilson bent down and hauled her to her feet. They had to run. They had to get away or risk becoming infected, as well. That was what he told himself, at least. He didn't want to think about the hunger on their faces or how their mouths seemed to stretch wider and wider.
"Come on!" he screamed at Sinha. She couldn't stand; she was still fighting to breathe and so he pulled her up and half-carried her to the central stairs. She was crimped inward at the waist and her slick, plastic biosuit made it difficult for him to keep hold of her.
Desperation drove him.
Next to the elevator in the center of the building there was another stairwell. He made it ahead of the infected medical personnel, took two steps down and then stopped--there were people somewhere on the stairs below them, heading up. They were infected, emitting barely human growls that echoed up at the two doctors.
“Holy...shit,” the fifty-six year old Wilson cursed between gasps. He had just run the equivalent of a seventy-yard sprint in full bio-gear, half of which had been spent carrying another person. The air in his hood was as hot and ill-used tasting as exhaust from a car and he couldn’t seem to be able to catch his breath. The best he could manage was a strident wheeze.
Dr. Sinha was worse off. When he had crashed into her, his knee had cracked two of her ribs; she could only take futile little sips of air that never satisfied. She felt like she was suffocating and it took all her willpower not to rip off the hood of her suit.
With Wilson's help she trudged upward, making it only three steps before the door right below them opened.
“Come...on!” he urged Sinha, struggling to hold her upright. She made a great effort, sucking up the pain and ignoring the dizziness that was making her head swim. Four steps later the first of the infected people caught her by the ankle.
Before Wilson knew what was happening, Sinha slipped out of his grasp and was pulled down into the greedy arms of the people below. With one hand on the rail and the other holding his mask in place he turned ponderously in time to see Dr. Sinha's murder.
The Apocalypse Crusade (Book 1): War of the Undead Day One Page 15