The Apocalypse Crusade (Book 1): War of the Undead Day One

by Peter Meredith

  He was challenged almost immediately. Three strangers, all in hospital gowns came barging in from the cafeteria. All three had the same black-dripping eyes and the same murderous rage on their faces, but otherwise appeared to be normal people. “Stay back!” Paolo yelled, holding up the knives.

  Acting as though the knives didn’t exist, they charged.

  Despite the fact that he was armed and they weren’t, Paolo ran. He made a break for the dining hall, slamming open the swinging doors with his shoulder and charging through; only to be brought up short by what he saw: there was a full-on battle raging right before his eyes. People were fighting back and forth across the entire room: Black-eyes versus the Cafeteria workers.

  His people were losing badly and already bodies littered the floor, lying at ugly, twisted angles with pools of blood around them. Blood seemed to be everywhere: red puddles on the tile, handprints on chairs, spatters across tables, and footprints tracking from body to body.

  Paolo stared a second too long. Behind him the doors banged open and he spun. The first one of the black-eyed things was on him in a blink. It had been a man: white, bald, middle-aged. Paolo didn’t hesitate and slammed his foot-long knife into the man’s chest. The blade was brand new and sharp as a razor. It parted the man’s sheer hospital gown with ease, slid through his flesh like it was warm butter and went deep into his right lung.

  The man didn’t seem to notice the knife that had skewered him. He kept coming, grabbing Paolo by the arm and lunging at him with his mouth gaping wide. Paolo saw there was more of that black stuff in the man’s mouth. His tongue was coated with it and more of it dangled from his teeth.

  Paolo screamed. He never thought that he’d scream in a life and death situation, but out it came nonetheless. He screamed and twisted and stabbed blindly with the other knife, desperate to get away, however the man with the black eyes and the diseased mouth was far stronger than he looked and had him in an iron grip. The two, as close as lovers locked in an embrace of death, fell over, hitting a table on the way down.

  They struck the floor hard, but Paolo didn’t feel it. The pain of having teeth rip into his flesh was horrific and galvanizing. It overwhelmed everything else. The diseased man’s teeth sunk into the side of his neck and tore out a huge hunk of meat and skin. Paolo’s screams rattled the windows. He screamed again and again until the man chewed his way into Paolo’s larynx. Then blood poured into his lungs and, for a time, Paolo was dead.

  2

  The first two gunshots were so unexpected that it was a few seconds before the lobby guards reacted.

  “Was that a gun?” Jack Cable asked.

  They were seated behind the desk, twenty feet from the front doors. Earl Johnston had his head cocked with an ear to the ceiling. “I think so.”

  They just sat there in somewhat stunned disbelief until Deckard came over the two-way: “Shots fired, south stairwell! Proceed with caution.”

  As Jack and Earl were unarmed, being cautious was their only choice. The hospital was so small and so out of the way that the original security plan consisted of allowing only the supervising agents, Deck and Ray, to carry weapons. With the prisoners being a part of the trial, Deck had hired on three more guards, all with the proper firearm permits. Rory had been one of these.

  The other two armed guards, along with all the other off-duty guards had made themselves scarce hours before, not wanting to be caught up in the quarantine if they didn’t have to be. They were at a pool hall in Poughkeepsie thirty miles away—close enough to be called into work when the quarantine ended, if they were sober enough that is.

  Jack stood and looked around the desk as if he would find a gun that he had previously overlooked. “Shots fired…this is crazy. What the fuck are we supposed to do against someone with a gun?” he demanded.

  “We have our tasers,” Earl said, touching the bulky weapon at his side. He’d never fired one in anger before, yet he was relatively confident. Someone with fifty-thousand volts running through them wasn’t going to do much except piss himself, even someone with a gun.

  Earl led the way to the stair exit and drew his weapon. Jack came right behind him, grimacing in fear. “This is fucked,” Jack whined. “First the quarantine and now this. I need some fucking combat pay if this keeps up. You know what I mean? Fourteen dollars an hour isn’t going to cut it.”

  Behind them someone hissed, “What’s happening?” A few of the more curious and daring Admin workers had crept down the hall and were now peeking around the corner. Earl waved them away. “Get back to the break room! We have the situation under control.”

  There

  were almost forty people quarantined on the first floor where the Administration offices and the large entrance lobby were located. They had, for the most part, sat gaggled in the break room where they gossiped or complained, watched TV or read books. For reasons that were beyond them, Jack and Earl hadn’t joined them. They had stayed at their post although it wasn’t really necessary since all the exits were locked and the two gate guards were in charge of turning people away.

  Now, Jack and Earl were crouched at the south stair door; their eyes went wide when three more gunshots went off, one after the other. Jack wiped his hands on his polyester pants. “If no one comes out, do we go in?” he asked, nodding at the stairwell door.

  “I’ll call the boss,” Earl said, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Deck, this is Earl, over. Come in, Deck.”

  It took two tries before Deck came on. In the background Earl could hear bangs and crashes, metal on metal. It sounded like his boss was in a scrap yard. “You two ok?” Deck asked. His voice was uneven and his breath was drawing heavy.

  “Yeah, we’re doing fine. What’s going on? Who was doing all that shooting?”

  “Hold on!” Deck shouted. Under the sound of his heavy breathing, they could hear what sounded like growling. There was another crash and then swearing. “Get that end…No, turn it on its side. Damn it, hold that one back. Don’t let him get too close to you.”

  Jack and Earl shared a look. “Deck!” Earl shouted into the two-way. “Come in, Deck.” For three minutes all they got was more of the same: crashes and curses and the strange growling.

  Finally, Deckard came back on. “You two have any activity down there?”

  “What sort of activity?” Earl asked.

  Deck blew out. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Listen, what I need you two to do is to evacuate the first floor. Take everyone, and…and I don’t know, take them to a police station or something. Just get them out of here and try to maintain the quarantine. Keep them away from other people. Just in case.”

  “Ask him just in case of what?” Jack suggested.

  Deck was quiet for a moment. When he came back on he sounded equal parts mad and embarrassed. “Just in case they turn. You’ll know what I mean if it happens. Now get moving.”

  Earl tossed his keys to Jake—they were brand new and flashed in the light. “Unlock the front doors, I’ll get the others.”

  They were hurrying to the center of the building when the middle stairwell door opened and three people came out. “Get on back upstairs,” Earl ordered. “Go on, you’re under quarantine.”

  “What’s with their eyes?” Jack asked. He was suddenly very nervous. The people weren’t right; they were dirty and they walked strangely, as if they weren’t sure how to coordinate all their moving parts. “They have stuff coming out of their…” He stopped in mid-sentence. The three people started to charge the two security guards.

  Unlike Jack, Earl wasn’t afraid. The three people were clearly patients and not only were they unarmed, they weren’t overly large or striking in any way. Earl stepped forward and waited until the first of the dreadful looking people was practically on him before he fired his taser.

  The twin spikes struck one of the cancer patients that he and Jack had checked in earlier the day before. Earl even remembered the man’s name: Mr. Mumford. He’d been a jolly l
ittle man despite that he was practically at death’s door. Now he resembled some sort of ghoul, discolored, leaking black fluid and smelling nasty.

  The taser burned two holes in his gown as it lit him up. Mr. Mumford stopped in place and stared vacantly ahead as if the electricity had done nothing more than short a system in his brain.

  “What the fuck?” Earl breathed, stepping back.

  Another of the patients charged around the manikin-like figure of Mr. Mumford. This one was bigger. It was a woman who hadn’t gone through chemo and who had managed to retain her appetite until the last few days. She weighed over two hundred pounds and, when Jack’s taser struck her she didn’t stop coming at him. But she did slow down… horribly so. It was as if someone was running a film of her at quarter speed. It wasn’t human.

  “That’s sick,” Jack said. Her movements were so robotic that it was hypnotic. “That’s just so sick.” He stepped to the right just as she came within arm’s reach, dodging her easily.

  Then the third one was on them; it went for Earl lunging at him with both hands extended. Earl tried to throw the crazed man off him but was surprised to find he wasn’t strong enough. The two went down in a heap and struggled in an unearthly quiet.

  “Earl!” Jack cried, rushing up and kicking the patient in the side. Jack wasn’t a small man and the kick should have broken ribs, only the patient didn’t even seem to notice. With his taser spent, Jack had no other weapon and so he kicked the patient again and again and again until the man finally looked up from what he had been doing to Earl.

  There was so much blood. It ran down the patient’s chin as though he had been lapping it up out of a bucket like a dog. Earl was dead, his throat had been torn out in seconds.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Jack said, backing away, his eyes like lamps staring at the body of his friend. The woman he’d tasered came at him, still very slowly. Jack hauled off and punched her in the mouth. The blow rocked her head back and cut his knuckles, but was otherwise without effect. She grabbed at his coat, fouling the navy blue uniform with her diseased hands.

  When the man who’d killed Earl got up, his mouth dripping red juices veined with black, Jack ran. He sped for the front door, fingering the keys as he ran. Behind him the south stair opened up, causing the crazed creatures to turn away and giving him the seconds needed to find the right key. Then he was outside and sprinting madly for the employee lot where he’d parked his Mustang.

  As he climbed in, the first rain dotted his windshield. It went unnoticed as he gunned the car toward the gates, leaving steaming rubber in his wake. The gate guards stepped in front of the speeding Mustang; Jack frantically tried to wave them away but they wouldn’t move and he was forced to slam on the brakes.

  “Get out of the way, damn it! All hell has broken out in the hospital. The disease…” Jack paused as his mind brought up the image of the crazed man’s mouth, there had been flesh in his teeth. “Earl is dead and Deck is trapped on the top floor. The quarantine has failed and now they’re running amok.”

  “What kind of disease is it?” one of the guards asked.

  “It’s turning them into cannibals,” Jack answered, speaking so quickly his words ran over themselves. “Earl had his throat ripped out. We tried tasing them but they just walked right through it.”

  “Where are you going?” the second gate-guard asked, first eyeing the Mustang and then the hospital.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere away,” Jack said. “Whatever they have, it’s contagious…they leak black stuff out of their eyes and it’s making them crazy! I don’t want that to happen to me. You guys should get out of here, too.”

  “I’m staying,” one said.

  The other barely gave it any thought. “And fight them with what? We don’t have guns for fuck’s sake. I’m not staying. They don’t pay me enough to get some disease.” He climbed into the Mustang and wouldn’t look the other gate guard in the eye.

  “But our posts,” the first said.

  “This isn’t the fucking army!” Jack cried before taking a look back at the hospital. He could see a number of the patients walking around. Remembering the inhuman way they moved gave him the shivers. “Stay if you want. Be a hero for fourteen dollars an hour.”

  The guard changed his mind a second later. He opened the gates and then climbed in next to Jack. The three of them couldn’t think of anything better to do but to drive the half-hour to Poughkeepsie to find their friends and tell them what had happened. Jack decided against mentioning that he’d been touched by one of them. He had a pretty good guess what would happen if he did. Instead, between shots of tequila, he told the other guards that he had run back to the desk to get his keys and when he turned around he saw Earl being swarmed.

  “There was nothing I could do,” Jack said, finishing in a whisper. By the third re-telling, the number of infected patients attacking Earl had jumped to ten. Jack wore a grimace as he spoke—his head had begun to ache. He prayed to God it was just the stress getting to him.

  More alcohol helped, and when both the gate-guards began to complain of headaches also, Jack kept the denial going by ordering each of them a bottle.

  3

  On the fourth floor of the Walton facility twenty three people were fighting a losing battle keeping the barricades in place. There was simply not enough furniture in the labs. Thuy had been particularly proud of the sleek, modern look that deemphasized clutter, however now there just wasn’t enough heavy material to block-up the stairwells properly. They would throw a table down the stairs and a minute later the infected people would pull it further down the stairwell. Had there been just a single door to defend this might have gone on for many hours, resulting in a draw, instead there were three stairwells they had to barricade.

  The scientists were so hard-pressed keeping their pathetic defenses from being breached that the telephone went ignored and three calls from the CDC went to voice mail.

  On the third floor there were only six people left alive after the massacre. They were huddled in a side room of the radiology department where PET scans were performed. They were deathly afraid to make any noise. If they spoke, which was very rarely, it was in whispers. They cried in silence and mourned in silence and shook in fear in silence. The little group had no plan but to sit there as quietly as possible and not die.

  Eventually, they decided to risk calling the police. “Help,” Dr. Hester breathed into the phone after dialing 9-1-1.

  “What is the nature of your emergency?” a bored voice asked.

  Even the tinny, little voice coming from the phone seemed too loud and the others silently begged Dr. Hester to hang up. He said one more word, “Zombies,” before hanging up. To him it was a very legitimate word. He could think of no better way to describe what the patients had turned into—they fit every criterion he could think of: they were unstoppable, mindless, cannibals who looked like they had been spawned in hell.

  Unfortunately the word “Zombie” was not legitimate in the eyes of the police. The dispatcher turned to the girl sitting next to her and said, “Get this, Courtney. Some guy just called and when I ask him the nature of his emergency, he says zombies!”

  “He didn’t!” Courtney Shaw practically yelled.

  “He did. It was all in a whisper, too, like zombies have super-hearing.”

  “I bet it was a kid pranking you. I’d flag the number or they’ll keep calling. Remember the dude who kept calling to say an alien was probing him? Lieutenant Pemberton bitched up a storm when I finally sent a trooper to check it out.”

  Back at the hospital, on the second floor, Von Braun wiped at his eyes and tried again to make sense of the writing on the little IV bag. Everything was so small and blurry and the lettering only confused his swirling mind and made him, if it was possible, even angrier. Without warning, he punched a hole in the wall next to him and then tore down part of the plastic curtain around the nurse’s station.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Herman hissed. “We
know where the cure is. We just have to get it.”

  “Yes it does matter, you stupid fuck,” Von Braun said, grabbing the sides of his head and crushing his hands inward, trying to smother the fire of hate that was beginning to interfere with his ability to think on a second grade level. “If I can’t think straight, how will I know what is the cure and what is a bottle of piss?”

  “I don’t care if you find it or not,” Herman said. “I like being like this.” He’d been in prison for tax evasion though that was only because the prosecutor couldn’t get enough evidence to make the pedophile charges stick. He’d been certain that Herman was guilty, and he’d been right. Herman, a short, fat, hairy little perv, liked to feel powerful and the only time he ever had was when he was around little children.

  Except he was feeling exceptionally powerful just at that moment. He felt he could do anything he wanted without any fear of the consequences, and just then he really wanted to hurt someone. He wandered away from Von Braun. He knew where people were. They were trapped upstairs.

  Von Braun didn’t notice him leave. His Diazepam drip had run out a few minutes before and his mind was regressing quickly. “It starts with a 'D' I know that,” he said. He also knew the IV bags were small. It narrowed his choices to one. After a five-minute struggle as his hands and brain fought against each other, he finally got the new bag in place. The calming effects of the drug were immediate.

  “Yes,” he whispered, enjoying the peace in his mind. He still wanted to kill and he still knew that “they” had done something to him, something that called for revenge, and he still felt dirty on the inside, but at least he could think. “The cops will be coming. I need a gun.”

  He had a vague memory of a nurse with a gun; he went in search of it.