by RR Haywood
Patients and medical staff clustered together at the base of the stairs, blood soaked and covered in gore. Their skin looks drawn and tight, a sickly pale colour with sunken cheeks and almost hollow eye sockets. Hands clawed and tight, all moisture drawn from their skin and flesh. The clothes hang from their frames, hair limp and filthy. Flies and insects buzzing in and around the festering sores.
Almost gagging from the stench we fan out into a line and watch as they slowly turn and start the ungainly shuffle towards us.
‘Rifles?’ I ask.
‘Okay,’ Dave replies. We holster the pistols and pull the assault rifles round, taking aim and holding for a second. Everyone waiting for everyone else to fire first. After a few seconds we all look at each other and start laughing, triggers get squeezed and the noise of the weapons deafens us in the enclosed space.
It takes just seconds to slaughter them down. Rounds ripping into heads and blowing skulls apart. Brains and hair matted cranial bits flying off everywhere. We use single shots, picking them off until the area is clear. Magazines are changed and we re-draw the pistols.
‘Dave you go right and check the café and shop with Clarence, we’ll take the pharmacy. Lani, you hold at the bottom of the stairs.’
We split up again as Lani strides to the base of the stairs and aims her assault rifle up, then sweeping round to aim at the main entrance doors a few metres away.
‘Cookey, get some food from that café,’ Nick calls out. We head towards the pharmacy. A small waiting with the same bolted to the floor chairs. Low tables with old faded magazines on them. Signs and display notices pinned to walls telling visitors to wash their hands and use the gel dispenser on the walls.
I check the metal shuttering to find it’s fixed in place, seemingly locked from the inside. We head down the side to find a single door marked up with AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.
‘Oh fuck it, we’re not authorised,’ Blowers mutters.
‘Mr Howie, can you authorise us to enter the pharmacy?’
‘I can and you are,’ I reply.
‘Ah that’s good then,’ Blowers adds and pushes the door handle down, ‘locked,’ he says.
‘We’re fucked then,’ Nick eyes the door.
‘Blowers, you stand next to me, we’ll kick it together. Aim for the middle, ready?’ He nods back and we each launch a foot at the door, striking it mid-section and bouncing off with jarred knees.
‘Shit that bloody hurt,’ Blowers winces as we rub our knees and Nick chuckles.
‘Howie to Clarence.’
‘Clarence to Mr Howie, receiving you, go ahead.’
‘We’ve got an obstacle here, can you pop down to the pharmacy please?’
‘Big door is it?’
‘Yep.’
‘On my way.’
‘Defeated by a door,’ I moan.
‘I bet he gets it first kick,’ Blowers says.
‘Probably just punch it in,’ Nick adds.
‘Boss, lads, is that it?’ Clarence walks up and stares at the door then grins at us still rubbing our knees.
‘Yeah, it’s fucking solid,’ Blowers stands upright, ‘and it called you a wanker.’
‘Did it now?’ He steps up to the door and first pushes the top, then the bottom.
‘What are you doing?’ Nick asks inquisitively.
‘Checking to see if there are locks at the top or bottom, or just in the middle. Being a pharmacy they would have used a decent door with a decent lock. See, it doesn’t budge when I push the top or bottom which means it has three locks in place.’
‘How would they do that from the outside?’ Blowers asks.
‘Not bolts, locks. Activated from the main keyhole.’
‘Oh I see,’ Nick says.
‘Yeah, so on a door like this a kick to the middle will just hurt your knees,’ he glances round with a wry smile as the others walk round to join us.
‘Café and shop clear,’ Dave reports.
‘So how do we get in then?’ Blowers asks.
‘You either get an enforcer, you know…those big metal things the police use, or…’ He steps back and first extends a foot to the door gently. Checking range and adjusting the distance a little. He focuses hard and takes a deep breath, exploding out with a low roar and slamming his gigantic foot into the door, splintering the frame and sending the thing flying in several feet to smash into the shelving units behind.
‘Fuck me,’ Cookey says with shake of his head, ‘I want to be Clarence when I grow up.’
‘That’ll never happen,’ Lani shouts from round the corner.
‘Ha! Nice one Lani,’ Blowers laughs.
‘It’s clear,’ Dave peers his head inside.
‘That should cheer Doc Roberts up a bit,’ I say.
‘Have they got Viagra?’ Cookey asks to a torrent of abuse from Nick and Blowers, I can hear Lani laughing too.
‘Do you need it then?’ Blowers asks.
‘No I was going to slip it in your water bottle for the next time we have a big scrap, it’d be funny as fuck watching you trying to fight with a boner,’ he laughs.
‘You want to watch me with a boner?’ Blowers asks in a serious tone.
‘Fuck yeah,’ Cookey laughs again missing the point, ‘no! Not like that…don’t be disgusting,’ he adds quickly.
‘Come on, where next?’ I lead back round to the stairs. One corridor runs off at the back of the room with a large collection of signs indicating every possible type of medical department. More signs are attached to the wall next to the stairs, indicating yet more departments.
‘Alright to come through?’ Pete shouts from the door we came through a minute ago.
‘Yeah it’s all clear mate,’ I yell back.
‘Bloody hell I can see that,’ he says striding over with his shotgun held in one hand.
‘Pharmacy is there mate,’ I nod towards the shuttered counter.
‘Yeah we got the door open, it had the old top middle and bottom locks but we er, well we bypassed them with our advanced door opening technique,’ Cookey says.
‘Big bloke kicked it open did he?’ Pete smiles and winks, ‘we’ve started loading from A and E and I’ll get the pharmacy done next, you checking the rest?’
‘I don’t know…do we need to? What else should we take?’ I ask around.
‘The doc just said to take everything, but I guess medicines, bandages and equipment are the priority,’ Pete answers.
‘Surgical stuff then I guess,’ I say, ‘where’s the surgery section? Operating rooms or whatever they’re called.’
‘Upstairs, but equipment covers pretty much everything that’s not medicine and bandages,’ Clarence says.
‘We should have brought one of the medical people with us,’ Lani suggests.
‘Yeah, we’ll do that next time. Right, let’s go for the surgery place and get what we can. We’ll have to leave a guard down here though as that corridor isn’t clear. Blowers, you and Cookey hold here.’
‘Got it,’ Blowers nods as they both move away to take position facing the double doors
‘Shall we?’ I start up the stairs, holding my pistol double handed as Dave joins me at the front. We reach the top and start down another long corridor with more doors leading off left and right. Splitting into teams we work our way down, taking shots at the undead stood drooling in some of the rooms.
‘Shit, look at this,’ Nick calls out from inside a room. We push inside to see a row of beds. All of them surrounded by monitors and banks of equipment. Dead bodies lie in the beds. Normal dead bodies not turned or infected.
‘Life support machines,’ I say softly, ‘they must have died when the power went out.’
‘Why didn’t the zombies get them?’ Lani asks, ‘maybe they were already dead…like no signs of life or something.’
‘Just luck I think, fucking poor luck…missed by the zombies and dying when the machines went off,’ I reply. The room is a stark difference to everywhere else. Clean and free fro
m any blood or debris. The smell of death hangs in the warm air, but not the rancid stench of the undead. Just normal death smell, still nasty but not as nasty.
‘We should take some of this equipment,’ Nick says softly.
‘Yeah I guess,’ I say and move to the first bed. The wires lead to small sticky pads stuck to the corpses chest and arms. More lines lead into veins via cannulas held in place by sticky tape. Oxygen masks cover the mouths. The corpse looks mottled with sunken yellowing skin. Lifeless and sobering. After so much gore the sight of an unharmed dead body is weird, looking round I can see the others must feel the same too as they’re all staring quietly at the bodies.
‘Poor buggers,’ Nick says.
‘Why? They died without pain,’ Lani replies, ‘no suffering, just slipped away quietly.’
‘So I reckon we just pull those sticky pads off and the cannulas…can’t see anything else,’ I look round the bed. Reaching out I grip the first sticky pad and pull it away, it breaks free with a small section of flesh from the decaying skin. ‘Well that ain't working,’ I stare down at the patch shaped hole in the corpses chest.
‘Er, hang on…I saw this on television,’ Lani says and leans over the body. She pushes one finger onto the patch and yanks the wire free from it, leaving the patch in situ.
‘Oh so we just find more patches?’ I ask.
‘Got them, they’re on shelves under the machines,’ Dave holds a box up. We work quickly, pulling the wires out and then rolling the machines out of the room into the corridor. Once done we keep going, clearing rooms and marking bits of equipment we think would be useful, moving them out into corridor.
Breathless and sweating like crazy we keep going, radioing down to Pete and updated him of the things we find. The drivers and guards work harder than we do, carrying and wheeling equipment down the long corridors and having to negotiate the manky bodies. With little choice we have to keep stopping to take water on. We run out within a couple of hours and end up raiding the café and shop. The vans crews foolishly didn’t bring extra water with them and get a stern warning from Dave to prepare better next time.
Eventually we’re done. Well the vans are filled anyway but the hospital is still filled with equipment. Clarence finds the body of a paramedic in the corridor and checks through the pockets, coming up trumps with a set of keys for the ambulance. Pete allocates one of the drivers and our convoy heads off. Poor Tom taking a break from his position on the GPMG and sitting in the cooler back of the Saxon with a red face and drinking warm bottles of coke.
Our convoy moves off. A whole morning with no disasters, nothing too uneventful either. A first successful mission completed.
SIXTEEN
DAY THREE
Sat at the kitchen table, clutching a lukewarm mug of coffee the tears pour down his tanned cheeks. His eyes swivel round the room that now feels so empty and hollow. He found his way back more by luck than judgement. His subconscious taking over and guiding his hands to steer the wheel and navigate back to the only safe place he now knows.
Self-loathing isn’t strong enough to describe the feeling inside his soul. But one other emotion blots that out, an emotion so powerful that it drives all other thought and reason away.
Pity.
Now he’s alone and even more frightened than before. His mind filling with images of Lucy stuck in the house surrounded by the monsters and just a flimsy English ply board bedroom door holding them back. How long can she survive? Hours at the most before their combined weight forces the door open. Even if they move slowly she’ll have the choice of jumping out of a first floor window into a group of them or trying to fend off the monsters coming through the house.
The anxiety increases by the second. He bends over the table clutching his gurgling stomach. The nerves and fear turning his insides to jelly.
What now? Stay here and try to survive I guess. There’s plenty of food now, and the water is still running. Use the candles and keep a low profile. No, keep a non-existence profile. One candle at night and only in the back bedroom when the curtains are drawn. Yeah, do that. But the thought of being alone in the dark house terrifies him even more. Lucy’s words replay in his head over and over. I will hunt you down. She was scared and panicking, knowing she was trapped as he fled in her car. But those words, those final words, they spin round and round, twisting his mind.
Clutching his griping stomach he heads up the stairs and sits on the toilet. His insides have liquefied and pour out his arse, filling the room with the fetid smell of shit. He gags at his own stench, reviling in his demise and crying loud sobs at the sorry state he’s in.
Cleaned up he heads back downstairs, moving slowly from room to room, spying out the windows and constantly checking the perimeter. He keeps looking over to the outbuilding, at the corpse still in situ with the pitchfork driven through its head. Imagination in overdrive he imagines the corpse has shifted position the next time he checks it. Surely it has, it’s further out now. Someone is out there playing mind games with him. He looks away and rubs his sore eyes, checks again but the corpse is still in the same place.
The seconds tick by slowly. With no sound other than his own breathing and the footsteps his boots make as he creeps from room to room he flinches at every noise coming from outside.
Birds singing, foxes running through the yard and barking for their cubs, the house creaking as it heats up from the scorching summer sun.
Afternoon turns to evening turns to dusk turns to night and still he moves from room to room, checking the view, checking the perimeter. The constant pattern soothes his troubled mind; the repeated action serves to ease the knot in his stomach. Then, as darkness hits fully the tension ramps up as he loses sight of the corpse in the farmyard and is no longer able to see the perimeter. A cloudless night and a bright moon but the area is heavily wooded, casting deeper shadows everywhere.
He drinks water and forgets to eat. Collecting the candle and matches he feels his way through the hallway to the bottom of the stairs. Pausing behind the door and straining his ears for any sounds.
The stairs creak loudly as he climbs up, wincing and inwardly cursing the loose wooden boards and Lucy for not having the house fixed up properly. The thought of her catches in his throat and he whimpers softly, gripping the worn handrail and forcing himself to climb to the top. I will hunt you down Paco Maguire. He should leave but he doesn't know anywhere else and it’s dark now, too late to be outside. I will hunt you down.
In the bathroom he pee’s sitting down, afraid the sound of his urinating standing up will be too loud and could be heard from outside. Groping his way into the bedroom he goes to the far corner and sits down, resting his back against the wall. He slides a match out and softly strikes it along the course strip. The light flares and even that soft noise sends a feeling of panic shooting up inside him. He lights the candle and blows the match out, sitting back and trying to work out if the paltry flickering light can be seen through the curtains.
Thinking of outside his mind goes to Lucy again. Images of her fighting for her life, screaming in panic as the door slowly drives inwards and the clawed hands reach through the gap to rake her skin. Being slowly pushed back, inch by inch, knowing she’s doomed. The terror she must have felt and the horror of knowing she’s going to die at the hands of those things. The feeling of the teeth as they bite into her flesh, the blood pouring into her system. Turning her. Paco draws his knees up to his chest, his own body heat making him sweat in the sultry evening air.
Lucy, torn and bloodied, stumbling towards the cottage, her red bloodshot eyes fixed ahead as she makes her way through the lanes, I will hunt you down. She will come for me; she said she will hunt me down. I left her to die alone and afraid. She will come here to seek revenge.
His mind races with ever increasing grotesque pictures of Lucy with clawed hands and sharpened teeth, her skin pale and drawn.
As time goes by he tries to think of the distance, knowing she must be close. He imagin
es her coming into the yard with her eyes fixed on the front door. She must be halfway across the yard by now. She will be at the door any second. His mind races, waiting for the imagined bang of the front door. When it doesn’t happen he convinces himself that she’s chosen to walk round the house and probe for weakness. The twisted blood encrusted fingers feeling at windows and fingering the back door handle. She’ll find a way in, remember a hidden key or just somehow open the door. His mind fills with the thoughts of the Lucy creeping through the house, course ragged breaths and soft footsteps. He knows that at some point the door will creak open and she will be there, dripping blood and staring at him with baleful eyes.
Gibbering with low moans he gently rocks back and forth, his heavily muscled arms bulging as he grips his thighs.
He prays to God, to Allah, to Jehovah and to Buddha. He panics thinking there will be a vengeful left out god slighted by his wrong prayers so he prays to every god ever known or thought off. He prays for the baby Jesus to show mercy, for Mary and Joseph to keep him safe. He prays for the prophet Mohammed to give him strength and see him through this ordeal.
He doesn’t sleep. Sleep would mean death. Lucy is outside the door now, waiting and listening for the sound of his sleeping form. He won’t give in to it. He won’t give her what she wants. He fights fatigue and thirst. The sweat continues to seep from his brow and soak into already sodden clothes.
The candle burns down to a low nub, barely flickering as it fights for fuel. He curses himself for not bringing another candle up. But it’s too late now. It can’t be that long until dawn. The candle burns bright, flickers and fades out, plunging him into blackness and the absolute worse state of terror he has ever known.
Paco squeezes his eyes closed then as the first tugs of sleep threaten to pull him under he opens them wide and stares into the darkness. Colours and lights flash as he searches for anything other than darkness. He stares at the window and finds the tiniest flicker of moonlight coming through a bare patch in the material. He seizes on it and stares until his eyes sting and water. Still he doesn’t blink but makes himself feel that pain, knowing it will keep him awake.