by GJ Zukow
I don’t know if they heard me telling them, through the bullhorn, that the poison would take a couple of hours to work or that I would return later to finish what I started. I saw three survivors waving furiously at me from an upper window as I left. I was positive that they were broken hearted at my departure, I sure would have been.
I had a couple of hours to kill then, the first thing I did was go back to the shelter and check up on my charges. They were all fine. Laelaps was especially glad to see me and once I let her out she refused to come back inside the enclosed room when it was time for me to leave again. I had to bribe her with eight cans of Spam in her food bowl before she would allow me to sneak out while she ate, giving me the chance to lock her inside. She knew though, she gave me an odd look and barked rather quietly at me as I closed the door. I don’t know what I would do without that dog, sometimes I think she was sent by one of the Gods to look after me.
Then it was back to the junkyard to do some restocking. By the time I finished all of that, enough time had passed so that many of the necrotic, parasitic colonies would have dropped. Any of the undead at the hospital that gotten showered directly will have died, flailing and twitching. Any of the undead that received lesser applications of the cold, zombie killing liquid would still die a final death, it would just take them longer. Depending on how many of the horrid monsters were left, I thought I might have to make another run back to the junkyard to refill the huge plastic tank mounted on the back of the gore splattered truck again.
When I returned to the medical center I wished I had a bulldozer to push past the crescent shaped piles of still shaking corpses. The truck really wasn’t meant for off-roading, the sloshing tank affects the center of gravity too much and adds too much weight. I had to ram my way through some of the piles, having to back up and try again a few times before finally pushing over and through them. I only saw the three other survivors on one side of the main building itself. Every time I worked my way past them they waved and shouted encouragement to me. After another couple circles around the complex, I felt it would be safe enough for me to drive between the buildings and draw out any of the undead that were hanging around the building I had seen the survivors in.
Abandoned cars and an overturned ambulance blocked one of the streets ahead. The parking areas between the buildings they once served were now a tight maze of mangled metal. The vehicular chaos was worst around the ER and the main entrance to the hospital. Around those areas the cars were literally piled up next to each other. Often the packed cars showed evidences of rather sudden stops. Vehicles of all sorts that had crashed violently into the back or side of the unfortunate car in front of it were scattered all over. I couldn’t get very close to the buildings, the wreckage of the parking lot kept me from getting too close in most places. I did draw out a lot more of the walking abominations but a lot of them are still inside the buildings or stopped by a dead end in the twisting paths through the rusting autos. If I wanted to get closer, I would have to go on foot.
The third and topmost floor of the hospital is where the three others are trapped. I was able to cautiously drive the truck over the high curbs and onto the overgrown and gone wild lawn to get underneath the trio.
There’s no Doctor among the three survivors. They don’t even have access to medical supplies. The wing of the hospital they’re trapped in was the administrative wing, nothing but offices, cubicles and conference rooms. On the uppermost floor the three were able to block off the stairwells with desks, tables, chairs and heavy file cabinets. They didn’t merely block the doors with the furniture, they blocked the entire stairwell itself, stacking and piling the heavy, useless furniture into an immovable wall that starts at the first floor.
The once busy wing of course had its own elevator for the benefit of all those that used to work here, day in and day out. It was only because of the elevator and its shaft piercing through all three floors that they didn’t starve to death. On the first floor the elevator came out to a more restricted side of the cafeteria. One that was luckily partitioned off from the general public’s side. On the employee side they had easy access to the kitchen and the all important food stores. Before the electricity went out, they freely used the convenience. After the electricity failed they had to jam the elevator doors open on the first floor. Now the only way back and forth between the cafeteria and safest upper office floor means a dangerous climb through the shaft after gaining access by the elevator’s false ceiling.
My conversation with them was interrupted when I had to use my rifle to pick off the zeds when they got too close. Honestly, I didn’t need to splatter those undead skulls open while I was talking through the bullhorn (the undead kept their distance from the ammonia smell of the truck), but I did want to show those trapped above me that I knew how to shoot and shoot accurately, just in case they got any stupid ideas.
Elle, Keith and Aaron have been trapped in that building since the apocalypse started. By the looks of the clothes they wore (no more than glorified rags and ill fitting articles of clothing that didn’t match with anything else they were wearing), I believed them.
Elle, the groups only woman, seemed to be the dominate one, doing most of the speaking. Keith and Aaron, both of them in their mid twenties, seemed to take Elle’s (who appeared to be in her mid thirties) directions. While the two guys were certainly happy to see me and try and talk to me, they deferred to Elle whenever she spoke.
Elle told me there was a short wave radio here, on the hospital grounds. She knew because she used to work here as a clerk before the world died. She pointed to the array of antennas and satellite dishes reaching high above the roofline on a wing past the main building. The antenna and radio room are on the wing furthest from them. Between the wing that they’re currently stuck in and the one I need to get to is the huge five story building that was the general hospital itself.
When I told them that I needed to get to some medical supplies for my dying friend they told me that the hospital was packed with the hungering dead. I would have to figure out a way to clear it before trying to go in there for any reason. The radio was located in a later addition to the hospital, used mainly to keep in contact with other hospitals and the helicopters that transported patients to and from the facility via the helo pad. The undead are packed in that wing as badly as they are in the general services building Elle told me.
As twilight started falling, once again all too soon, I reassured them I would be back in the morning after I found a sufficiently long enough ladder to reach them. By then the vast majority of the undead that had trapped them here will be dead. Then I plan on taking them back to the shelter so they can rest, eat, whatever they need to do after having been trapped for almost two years. Then Laelaps and I can get a generator for the radio and loot the hospital for some drugs that may yet save Nancy’s life.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Finding an extension ladder that was tall enough wasn’t hard. The first roofing company I broke into had three of them in its dusty storeroom. Convincing the stranded trio that the rickety, fragile looking ladder was safe was a bit harder.
While Elle and Keith climbed into the small cab of the truck, with me driving, Aaron climbed on the back. After Aaron tied down the few possessions the emaciated trio cared enough about to take with them, I was bombarded with questions.
In between answers to their questions I asked questions of my own. They seem to be regular people, traumatized to be sure but who hasn’t been. I don’t get any sense of ill intent from the haggard group, they seemed more intent on getting something else to eat besides the canned soup and instant mashed potatoes that they had been surviving off for the past couple of months than causing any trouble.
Elle had technically been living in the office wing of the hospital since before the apocalypse. When everything started to go bad with the animal madness and the Rat-flu, the hospitals around the globe saw a dramatic spike in patients. The amount of paperwork required for all of
those new customers soon became a round the clock job for her. Her responsibilities grew dramatically once the Scarlet starting showing on the populace. She was allowed, encouraged actually, to use one of the conference rooms to sleep in. There was paperwork that needed to be filled out every day, by law, and it became her job to ensure that it got done. The worst case scenario, that she had heard at the time, was that the Scarlet would end up making people sick for a week or so and then they would recover. That’s what she was led to believe.
She put a lot of energy into the work, believing that a promotion would soon follow. When she woke to the sound of almost complete silence one morning, she was shocked. She knew people were dying from this parasite, that everyone but a lucky few had it. Never in her wildest nightmares did she think the mortality rate would be over ninety percent.
She blinked at me when I told her about the Reds. They all, at first, thought I was telling them a story to scare them, like I was full of crap. None of them had ever seen a Red, they don’t know just how lucky they really are.
There were a few scattered corpses lying amongst the three floors of cubicles and offices. All those dedicated employees that bravely came in and tried to keep the hospital running, even though they were deathly ill, died at their posts. Elle searched all three floors of the administration building and found not one single soul alive. At first she didn’t know what to do and simply stood there, blankly staring at nothing until her stomach rumbled.
She was sitting in the weird silence of the world, stuffing day old donuts into her mouth, when she noted it wasn’t truly silent. If she listened intently she could her far off gunshots.
Keith wandered into the cafeteria after awhile, completely unaware of what was plainly happening all around him. He was so wrapped up in his own misery, having just watched his parents, sister and wife all die like raving lunatics, that he didn’t even note the complete absence of any other living human, including Elle, when he stumbled dazedly into the cafeteria.
Elle had barely stood up, wanting to get Keith’s attention, desperately wanting to know what was going on outside, when both of them turned to the sound of somebody yelling and running down the corpse packed aisles and corridors. Aaron and two other people were running through the corridors shouting for help, that the dead were coming back to life. As soon as they saw the walking cadaver that had obviously risen while in the middle of a full autopsy, Elle led them all into the corporate side of the cafeteria, which was separate from the side used by the general public. Locking the door behind them, they flinched with every beat upon the door that the necrotic abomination made. In a matter of minutes there were more of the unbelievable things joining the impossibility that was slamming itself upon the sturdy door.
For more than three months they survived on the third floor of the hospital, making their way down to the large store rooms and freezers that provided the meals for patients and doctors alike.
From what I understand they ended up clearing out the three floors of the office building by tackling and holding down one of the newly risen dead, then using letter openers to sever the brain stem where the spine enters the skull.
Their best hope for rescue came when they decided to clean out the third floor of the main, adjoining, hospital that lay between them and the radio room. They did it, armed with makeshift spears that stabbed violently through black eyes and blackened mouths. It wasn’t without cost though. One of the five, whose name none of the three recall, got bitten pretty badly. He had been a former mental patient, having been on a thirty day hold after a particularly bad day. The group didn’t shun him, he took up residence on the second floor on his own when the rest of them preferred to be further away from the living dead, sleeping in the larger offices of the third floor. After he was bitten he got sick. The poor guy freaked out when he saw small scarlet spots appearing on his skin. Everybody jumped to the conclusion that he was going to turn bright red as the Scarlet bred within him and turn him into a bloodthirsty lunatic. They were argumentative at first when I informed them about our immunity to the parasite. Once immune, always immune I told them. Even after a zed sinks his teeth into you, directly injecting the single celled monsters and its eggs directly into your bloodstream, a healthy immune system will beat it off after a week or so. The trio got kinda quiet then, seeming embarrassed and slightly confused, when the story continued I’m sure they had changed it for my ears. Apparently, the deranged, sick and hallucinating man jumped to his death through one of the third floor windows, landing badly on the grassy knoll almost thirty feet below. He was sure the fall would kill him outright, he was wrong. As he lay there, screaming and crying from the pain of numerous broken bones, the undead quickly found him. That’s what they said but that’s not what I believe happened. I believe they thought they were protecting themselves and threw the poor guy to his death.
They used the radio to keep in contact with numerous groups at first. After time passed, the number of contacts from widely flung groups dropped. There was a good group of survivors that had been holing up in the Florida Keys, having blown the interstate highway that connected them to the mainland. By the time they lost contact with the small group of refugees that had occupied Key West, the small colony was growing and secure. None of them wanted to go anywhere but there if they ever got out of the hospital alive. The whole of the grounds were packed with the horrible things, making any thought of escape impossible. They said that there were other people they kept in touch with, depending on the weather conditions, but the sanctuary of Key West was the closest. When I heard about Key West and its group of survivors holding out there (safe, sheltered and with plenty of fish in the sea for food), I decided I was going there. When they told me for a fact that there was a Doctor there I told them to scavenge the area for whatever supplies we would need for the trip down there. I told them I was leaving for the Keys with Nancy and the baby in three days, regardless if they wanted to come along or not.
It wasn’t long after they cleared the third floor of the general hospital until they lost control of it again. It happened at the same time Judy disappeared and all of them think the two incidents are related somehow. Judy never mentioned one word about leaving or wanting to further explore the facility, neither had any of them found any clue as to what had happened to her. They had to block the door to the general services floor of the hospital, permanently, when they found there was way too many of the hungry dead to deal with using the primitive weapons they had fashioned.
When I told them I was going back to the hospital to try and hook a portable generator up to the radio they thought I was out of my mind. Aaron volunteered to go with me after he changed out of the filthy, threadbare clothes he was wearing and got something in his growling belly. The others would stay behind with Laelaps, taking care of Nancy (who was in a fever state) and Candi (who always needed attention).
My tactics for clearing the densely packed halls of the hospital worked well. I brought Aaron along to serve as a mule, carrying with him as much ammo as I could get his skinny shoulders to bear and to watch my back. Aaron took every opportunity to flatter and compliment me as he could, obviously wanting to hook up with me. I’m ignoring all of that, I have no plans to get involved in a relationship right now, I've got enough on my plate as it is. I sprayed a perimeter around myself and Aaron, keeping a safe zone around us that the zeds wouldn’t cross. As we were using the hand-held steel canisters instead of the truck mounted tank, the zone only extended ten feet from us. Then it was simply a matter of putting lead into the unfeeling faces of the undead. Shoot, reload, repeat. Spray a new line of protection and move a few feet forward over the nasty corpses then shoot, reload and repeat again. After a while, by about the time I was halfway through, I made a small game of it, seeing how many heads I could blow apart with one bullet. Four. Four heads is my best so far. I have actually hit five or more zeds, they were piled up so thickly in there but I only count head wounds that drops one of the ghouls.
I
took every chance to raid the place for meds, going through every cabinet and drawer I saw. I came away with next to nothing. After two years and the countless staggering and stumblings of uncoordinated animated flesh bashing heedlessly around, everything was ruined and falling apart. I don’t think it was in such good shape before the dead rose, there were the riots and the disruption of the supply chain, there may have been very little for me to loot anyways, even if it weren’t for the mindless dead. All I could do was hope I had better luck with the radio.