by Gibb, Lew
Mike seemed to be thinking about it, then shook his head and grabbed his end of the stretcher. “I’ll put it on later. Let’s just get this done. I’m starving.”
“How about now?” Jerry held his end still. “It’ll take literally five seconds.”
“I’m good,” Mike responded, smiling. “If I have to, I’ll use you as a shield.”
“You can try.” Jerry had worked with Mike for three years, and he knew that once Mike had his mind made up, he wouldn’t change it. Jerry would try to convince him to wear his jacket again once it was just the two of them. “If you can catch me.”
Mike smiled and pointed at Jerry. “Remember…”
“Cardio,” they both said at once, and laughed.
“Man, I love that movie,” Mike said as they started toward the hospital entrance. He patted Brian’s shoulder. “I can also hide behind Brian here.”
“You better not.” Brian laughed. “You guys are supposed to be taking care of me. I expect you to throw your bodies in front of any zombies we come across.”
“Absolutely,” Mike laughed. “I’ll keep you safe, Brian. At least till the nurse signs for you.”
Jerry worried that he still hadn’t seen anything that he could point to and say it was an actual zombie. He even considered the possibility he was becoming schizophrenic. At thirty-five, he was on the late end of the onset age range, but it was possible. Still, he felt normal, and there were others—like Bob and a couple firefighters they had convinced to help fortify the station—that were worried, too. Even Alicia.
As they entered the ER and stopped at the elevator located just inside the doors, Jerry decided he wouldn’t take no for an answer when he tried again to get Mike to wear the jacket.
When the elevator doors opened, Jerry’s nose was assaulted. “Man, it smells like rotten hamburger in an outhouse.” They pushed the stretcher out of the elevator and down the seventh-floor hallway.
“Damn,” Mike said. “My throat is literally burning right now.”
Jerry tried to breathe through his mouth while they rolled their stretcher to Brian’s room at the end of the hall. He was going to have that smell following him the rest of the day.
Once they had Brian settled in his bed, Jerry reached out and shook his hand. “This is a great hospital, Brian, they’ll take good care of you.”
Brian released Jerry’s hand, and his shoulders started to shake. “Hope you make it through the apocalypse in one piece.” He laughed and reached past Jerry to give Mike a fist bump.
Mike laughed and pointed at Jerry. “Me too, man.”
Jerry shook his head and looked at the door. “Where the hell are all the nurses? When they want you to free up a bed, they’re all over you to hurry up. But when we need them to sign for the patient, you can’t find one anywhere.”
“I hear you.” Mike hustled to the front of the stretcher and guided it out the door. “Here we go,” he said, looking to his left.
When Jerry cleared the doorway, he saw two people dressed in hospital scrubs walking toward them from the other end of the hall. The leader was a youngish woman who looked like the type of nurse with whom Mike could be counted on to flirt shamelessly. Young and cute with sassy short hair—just like Alicia’s, Jerry realized. Something wasn’t quite right about her, though. Jerry slowed his pace and focused on the darkness surrounding her mouth. She reminded him of a six year old who’d been eating chocolate. He could tell by the angle of Mike’s head that he wasn’t looking at her face.
Jerry froze. “Look out, Mike!” he yelled.
“What?” Mike turned toward Jerry.
“Zombies!” Jerry screamed and pointed over Mike’s shoulder.
By the time Mike looked back, the two scrub-clad zombies were on him. SpongeBob SquarePants characters covered the first one’s scrubs. The front of her shirt was slathered in glistening crimson stains. Mike turned to run, and his eyes bulged as he was grabbed by the collar. His momentum stopped cold. His arms came up, reaching toward Jerry, but he was yanked backward, and the attacker sunk her teeth into his shoulder.
Mike screamed louder than Jerry had ever heard anyone scream. As his partner twisted and turned, trying to break the grip the woman had on his flesh, Jerry moved—too slowly. It felt like he was churning through molasses as he stepped toward his partner and yanked his radio from its spot on his right hip, raised his arm, and focused on the woman’s head. Mike’s scream went on for so long, Jerry wondered how it could possibly continue. He took another step closer while the second zombie—Jerry now had no doubt, these really were actual zombies—a smaller guy with cats printed on his scrubs, grabbed Mike’s other arm.
“Hey!” Jerry blurted as the guy started pulling Mike’s arm toward his mouth.
The guy hesitated and glanced at Jerry long enough for Jerry to notice the first zombie was trying to bite Mike through his clothes. Like Jerry and most of their coworkers, Mike wore a t-shirt beneath his stiff dress uniform shirt. If they were lucky, human teeth wouldn’t be able to bite through both shirts.
Jerry shifted his aim. The second zombie had discarded the idea of attacking Jerry and was back to pulling Mike’s arm toward his blood-rimmed mouth. Jerry swung the radio with all the strength he could muster. Two pounds of electronics and plastic slammed into the little guy’s head just before he could sink his teeth into Mike’s arm.
Things started to speed up. Jerry pounded the zombie’s head again. The man staggered back and tumbled to the ground. Jerry stepped sideways and slammed his radio into Mike’s current attacker’s head until her mouth released its grip on Mike’s shoulder. She still held his collar. Mike had twisted so he was now facing the woman. He had his own radio in his hand and swung it at the side of her head. The blow didn’t seem to faze her at all. She was still trying to bring her mouth closer when Mike hit her twice more. With the second one, Jerry heard a sickening crunch, and the woman collapsed to the floor.
Jerry let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding when he saw that the shoulder of Mike’s uniform shirt was intact. He was about to ask his partner if he was all right when Mike let loose with another piercing shriek that made Jerry’s ears ache. The zombie in the cat scrubs had gotten hold of Mike’s leg—his mouth was latched onto Mike’s calf. Mike shook his leg and punched the man’s head. A distant voice in Jerry’s head—the one that usually catalogued patient symptoms and suggested possible diagnoses while the rest of his mind was occupied with treating the patient—noted that Mike had lost his radio somewhere.
Mike was screaming obscenities and flailing at the small man at his feet when Jerry saw three more zombies—two in torn and bloodstained scrubs and one in a hospital gown—come around the corner at the far end of the hall. Something about how they moved struck Jerry as strange. Their arms seemed to move independently from their legs, giving them an asymmetrical, unbalanced gait.
Jerry’s skin felt like it’d been doused with a bucket of ice water. He grabbed the cot and took three steps, driving it with his legs before shoving it as hard as he could toward the zombies. The cot covered the five feet to the new attackers in a second, somehow kept going straight, and slammed into the lead zombie. The oxygen tank at the foot of the cot hit the man in the pelvis and doubled him over. His top half landed on the cot, and the bed spun. It crashed into the two trailing zombies, then careened into the wall and fell over.
While the three zombies struggled to crawl out from beneath the stretcher, Jerry turned back to his partner.
Mike was still screaming, shaking like he was having a seizure, and trying to kick the zombie with his free leg. The zombie took the blows from Mike’s tactical boots like he didn’t even notice them, and his mouth remained latched onto Mike’s calf.
Jerry used his radio again and bludgeoned the man’s head three times before the zombie fell back and stared sightlessly at the ceiling. A cartoon kitten on the shoulder of his shirt batted a ball of string toward his gaping mouth.
The pile of zomb
ies Jerry had hit with the cot were getting it together. Two of the three were back on their feet with their eyes fixed on Jerry and Mike, but the stretcher was still giving them trouble.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Mike yelled.
“Come on!” Jerry, grabbed Mike’s arm and dragged him toward the stairway at the end of the hall. Not one of the zombies had said a word or even so much as grunted throughout the whole thing.
Jerry had his hand on the door handle and was about to open it when a face appeared in the window less than a foot from Jerry’s own. The man had the same blank stare and Van Dyke blood-beard as the other zombies. He opened his mouth wide and lunged at the window.
Teeth clacked against the glass as Jerry jerked away.
“Jerry!” Mike yelled.
Jerry turned to see the three zombies had cleared the stretcher and were almost on them. He raised his radio to defend himself.
“What the hell is going on out there?” Brian yelled from his room.
The two lead zombies’ heads snapped toward the sound. They changed direction and entered the room. There was an agonized scream from inside a few seconds later.
A windowless door next to the stairway caught Jerry’s eye. Without thinking, he pushed the handle, shouldered it open, and dragged Mike through before slamming the door and leaning all his weight against it. He scanned the room in a second. They were in a supply closet the size of a large stall in a public bathroom. Storage racks filled with jugs of floor cleaner, boxes of trash bags, and other cleaning supplies lined the side walls, and a large tub sink sat at the far end with a plastic mop bucket beside it.
Mike leaned against the door next to Jerry. “Holy shit!” He slid down the door until he was sitting on his heels with his back against it. “Fucking zombies!”
A sudden pounding on the door made Jerry jump. He pressed his body harder against the door. His legs already felt tired. The simple lever would yield as soon as one of them accidentally pushed down on it or realized what it was. The thought of smart zombies made him feel as if his blood pressure had dropped fifty points and he started to hyperventilate. They seemed to move better than the standard, slow-moving and brain-dead zombies usually depicted in popular culture. God help them if they were smart like the ones in World War Z.
Mike turned and started pounding on his side of the door. “Fuck you, assholes!” he shrieked. “I’ll fucking kill all you motherfuckers!”
Jerry could do nothing but watch his friend scream and pound on the door until he ran out of steam and slumped against it. There was a ragged hole in Mike’s blue uniform pants at knee level and blood forming a small puddle the linoleum around his foot. The smell of Mike’s blood mixed with the cleaning supplies reminded Jerry of the ambulance after a bad trauma call.
“I guess I should have worn that jacket after all,” Mike said, banging his head against the door in a slow staccato backbeat to the zombies pounding from outside.
“I’m so sorry, Mike,” Jerry said, still pressing his shoulder hard against the door and looking down at his friend. “I should have made you wear it.”
Mike laughed, a short bark between thumps. “How many times,” thump, “have you,” thump, “forced me,” thump, “to do anything?” Thump.
“Can’t think of one right now.” Jerry reached down and put a hand on his friend’s head. The thumping stopped. Jerry’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Give me a minute.”
“Take your time.” Mike tilted his head up and gave Jerry a weak smile. “How long did that doctor in Brazil say it’ll take the virus to turn me into a zombie?”
“Don’t say that.” The tears on Mike’s face mirrored Jerry’s own.
“You were right before.” Mike lifted his pant leg. There was an almost perfectly circular hole on the outside of his left calf with a triangular chunk missing on one side. Mike prodded the wound and winced but didn’t do anything to stop the bloody river running into his boot. “I was just trying to get close to Alicia. Pretty stupid, since now I’m going to look like an even bigger idiot in her eyes.”
Jerry’s eyes darted around, searching for something to barricade the door. “I’m pretty she actually likes you, in spite of how big of a dumbass you are.” He tried a smile at his weak joke.
“Thanks, Jerry.” Mike reached up and clapped a hand on Jerry’s forearm. “You always did know how to cheer me up.”
“That’s what friends are for. Hold the door, okay?” Jerry pushed off the door, darted to the end of the room, snatched a mop out of the bucket, and hurried back to return his weight to the door.
“I should’ve asked her out instead of being such a fuckin’ loser.”
“You can ask her when we get out of here and get back to the station.”
“We both know that’s not happening.”
Jerry’s tears came faster. He gritted his teeth and jammed the mop’s tangled lump of grimy-grey string against the door handle, then wedged the end of the handle in the corner where a vertical shelf support met the wall. “It doesn’t look like it’ll stand up to a prolonged attack, but it should hold till we can do something better.” He realized Brian’s screams had stopped—or they were too weak to hear. His friend’s words, the voice in his head saying At least you won’t be around when he turns, and the continuous pounding were all making it difficult to think.
“These shelves run the length of the wall.” Mike pointed at the unit on their right, his voice soft. “We could put one end under the handle and the other end against the opposite wall. You get the shelf down. I’ll keep the mop from coming loose.”
Jerry nodded and cleared the waist-level shelf with a sweep of his arm. Gallon jugs and cardboard boxes hit the floor with dull thuds, barely audible over the zombies’ pounding. He wrenched the shelf free and shoved one end under the door handle. The far end clattered to the floor about six inches from the wall. Jerry bent over a trash can and found a piece of one-by-four with staples protruding from all sides that looked like it had been part of some packaging.
“This should do the trick,” Jerry said. “We can brace it with some of the jugs and maybe the mop bucket.” He dropped the piece in place.
“No way am I going to still be here when I turn,” Mike said, pushing the shelf aside and putting his hand on the door handle. “I love you, man.”
“No!” Jerry yelled.
Mike jerked the door open. “Dinnertime, motherfuckers!” he yelled as he threw himself at the waiting zombies, his arms out like he was giving them a big hug. He wrapped the two at the front in a double headlock and drove them away, legs churning against their combined weight but somehow making headway. He started screaming as they crossed the hall.
Jerry screamed Mike’s name as he lunged for the closing door. Something thumped against the other side as he threw his weight against it, and the door surged inward six inches. Jerry growled and pushed harder. Through the closing gap he saw his friend go down under the weight of three zombies. The last he saw of Mike were the zombies in hospital scrubs mauling both his friend’s arms.
Meanwhile, the zombie on the other side of the door pounded away. Jerry pounded back with both fists, screaming every obscenity he knew and sobbing as the sounds of Mike’s death echoed through the closet. When he realized the pounding had stopped—and what that meant—he collapsed to the floor, tears falling off his face and mingling with Mike’s blood. He managed to wedge the shelf back into place, then sat and stared at his hands in his lap.
“I love you, too, Mike,” Jerry said, his voice ragged from screaming. He wrapped his arms around himself and curled into a ball on the floor.
Chapter Seventeen
The night was nearly over. Rachel pushed a load of dishes into the mansion’s industrial dishwasher, pulled a cleaning rag from the pocket of her apron, and began to wipe the counter. The wreckage of the five-course meal littered the stainless-steel countertops. Stacks of dirty dishes and plastic containers ready to be filled with leftovers occupied an entire table. All they had to d
o was finish cleaning the kitchen and wait for the people in the dining room to eat their desserts. Then she and Lisa could wash the last load of dishes and head home. She couldn’t wait to take a long hot bath and go to bed—after she fed and walked the dogs, of course. This was one of the things she liked least about Jerry’s job. With him away for forty-eight hours, she became a single parent, and it seemed like every minute she wasn’t working she was doing something with the house or for the dogs.
“Hey, check this out,” Lisa said, pulling Rachel out of her daydream. Lisa was leaning against one of the prep tables and looking up at the wall-mounted TV in the corner. She uncrossed her arms and pointed at the TV. A bright red Breaking News tagline scrolled across the screen below video footage of what looked like a large traffic jam on one of the highways. Cars were jammed together at random angles, and people were milling around between them. Some people seemed to still be stuck in their cars.
“What the hell?” Rachel said, taking a few steps toward the screen. “Is that the highway to Denver?”
“Yeah,” Lisa said, not taking her eyes off the TV.
“When did this start?”
“They said it started earlier, like five or six o’clock, right when we were plating the first course. Apparently, there’ve been like fifty crashes all up and down the highway since we’ve been here.” Lisa turned to face Rachel. “Now the highway is completely stopped.”
“I heard a couple of the people talking about some traffic jam, but it didn’t seem like that big of a thing. How did you find out about it?” Rachel kept her eyes glued to the TV.
“I got a text from Jenelle. I’m supposed to meet her to go out later. I only just looked at it, since you make us keep our phones turned off during dinner.”
“I know. It’s such a hardship to be without your phone for five whole hours.”
“Hey, I need to know what’s going on with my friends.”