Healers

by Munson, Brad

  The University Hospital was one of the last health facilities to fall, which probably meant looting was at a minimum. They knew this for a fact: Demilio and the staff at the Fac – all there was of recovering Omaha at the time – heard the hospital’s faltering radio transmissions as they collapsed, months ago. There was nothing they could have done at the time, but it was agonizing. Castillo had listened to the recordings recently; she could still hear them echoing in her mind.

  Let it go, she ordered herself. This was a good target for recovery: a teaching hospital as well as an urgent care facility, so it should have had plenty of supplies and superior technology. Even better, Boyd and his little digital gremlins had somehow managed to acquire floor plans of all four stories of the main building, so they knew exactly what they were after and where they were going to get it.

  “You all know the details,” she said. They had just finished their tenth, completely repetitive briefing, “but I’ll go over the top goals one more time. One: acquisition of medications and medical supplies. You’ve already memorized the list of both. Two: acquisition of specific tech – Piper, McCartney, that’s your assignment, you know where to go and what we’re after. Three: elimination of the infected from as much of the facility as we can manage, and sealing off unrecoverable spaces for clearance during permanent annexation in the next two months. Are we clear on those goals?”

  “Yes! Ma’am!”

  “Daisy-cutter deployed,” Forrest said in her ear. Castillo’s eyes flickered up and she saw a parachute floating out of the cold, cloudless Kansas sky almost directly above her, and the fat, nearly cartoon-parody silhouette of the BLU-82 under it, drifting to earth.

  “Right on target,” she muttered. She was glad for the dead calm air that had been hanging over Omaha all night and day.

  Forrest was still in her ear: “Three … two … one ...”

  They all heard it explode: a huge, deep, and somehow flatulent sound, half a mile away. The ghost of the shock wave pushed air into her face, then faded.

  Castillo shrugged inside her pack. “Okay,” she said to her team. “Let’s do this thing.”

  Kline, shaved bald and lantern jaw clenched, headed to the cab. He was their designated driver. The rest of them piled into the back of the huge flatbed truck that was waiting for them with its engine idling. The reinforced metal sidings rattled as they pounded and lurched on board; Kiley and O’Toole slammed the last two parts into their fittings at the back of the truck, sealing them inside and sealing the infected out.

  As the flatbed trundled down the wide, deserted avenue towards the hospital, Castillo found herself thinking about how combat had changed at a fundamental level since Morningstar had come to America. In the old days, the primary goal had often been kill the enemy, and if that meant blowing up a few buildings – or even a few cities – to accomplish your goal, so be it. Today, however, the reverse was true. This was the Age of Salvage, and protecting those buildings, those cities, those assets, was paramount. It could mean the difference between life and death for the remains of humanity in the decades to come, until they could get civilization fully back on its feet.

  It also meant that many of the twentieth century’s most recent weapons of war were next to useless. Most of the bombs, most of the heavy artillery, destroyed exactly those structures and supplies they were trying to acquire in 2007. Even much of the anti-personnel ordnance, like tear gas, tasers, and sonic weapons, were next to useless against the infected. The new version of the U.S. Army and its allies had been forced to develop – or at least were beginning to develop – an entirely different approach and arsenal.

  The daisy-cutter bomb was part of that. Originally developed for use in Viet Nam, it was a huge explosive device, one of the largest ever made … but it had never really worked out well. Troops in small-scale guerrilla wars, like the ones the U.S. fought in Indochina and the Middle East, tended not to clump together enough for weapons like the BLU-82 to be effective, and using them against civilians was...well, frowned upon, Castillo thought wryly. Ultimately the daisy-cutters had fallen out of use, except to occasionally create instant helicopter LZs or as big, scary flash-bangs in Iraq. But now, the few daisy-cutters that remained, with the capability of shredding anything organic in a 2,500-foot radius, but leaving all buildings intact, had a whole new application.

  Like clearing out the infected in front of a hospital we desperately need to take back, she thought as the flatbed pulled into the ominously empty parking lot in front of the hospital. She could see the exact spot where the bomb had detonated a few feet above the ground, and the nearly perfect circle of destruction that spread out from that spot. The noise it had produced would attract more shamblers, she knew, but it would take them a while to make their way here. In the meantime, they had a clear shot at the hospital, if they moved quickly

  ... but not through the front doors.

  The flatbed cruised past the long front side of the facility, a series of two-story-tall arches that led to an uninterrupted set of glass doors. Castillo and her team peered through the gaps between the archways’ pillars to get a look at their target, and they liked what they saw: a solid wall of thick glass, with no breaches or broken entrances. Just as they had projected: The people inside, even in those last days, had succeeded in locking and barricading the entrance, and the lobby areas they could see as they rolled past looked dark and quiet … and most important, empty.

  The seven salvagers swayed in unison as the flatbed took a hard right and bounced into a much smaller delivery lot to the south side of the building. This was their point of entry: the loading dock that would lead directly into the heart of the hospital.

  Castillo saw the first new shambler in the near distance as the flatbed turned, stopped, and backed up to the loading platform. She and O’Keefe did the honors this time, pulling up the six-by-six-foot panels of heavy slats at the back of the truck, then hopping down to the tarmac. They pulled the two panels down with them and shoved the slats solidly into specially made brackets at the back of the truck, one left and one right. Castillo guided Kline back, pushing the truck as close to the dock as it could get, wedging the specially padded panels tightly into place, creating barriers between the back of the truck and the exterior wall of the hospital loading dock itself – a corridor that would make their exit that much safer when the time came.

  Kline opened the window between the flatbed and the cab, then climbed out and locked the truck securely behind them. He joined the rest of the team as they hopped up onto the loading platform and passed equipment from the flatbed to the platform, nearly five feet above the asphalt.

  The rolling door into the hospital was locked shut with a sturdy latch, but they had expected that. Piper had the cutting torch out and in service already. It took less than thirty seconds to cut through the mechanism; then he and Kiley rolled up the wide blue ribbing and they were inside.

  The first of the shamblers were thumping on the still-warm hood of the flatbed by the time they all moved inside and closed the rolling door behind them.

  The interior of the loading area was pitch black: no windows, no skylights, and of course no electricity. Here, too, they had planned ahead.

  Each two-man team in Castillo’s crew had a light tree with them: a tall, specially made metal pole with a heavy base, a metal plate with a fully charged truck battery bolted to it, mounted on a set of heavy-duty wheels. The trees had ridden with them, strapped to the sides of the flatbed. Now they were wheeled in like gaunt, ugly versions of the rolling luggage they’d all had back when there were still planes and airport. McCartney and Kline thunked their tree down and Kline drove a heel into the switch plate at its base.

  The room exploded with harsh white light.

  “Whoa,” Lassiter said. They all flinched a little, even though they’d been expecting it. It was bright, brutally bright, and the salvagers hurried to put their specially issued
wraparound sunglasses in place to manage their momentary blindness.

  The hospital’s delivery space was big, but the light tree’s illumination filled every corner. No shadows, no dark corners – light that would show them any threat, a light so harsh it bleached the color out of everything it touched. It was actually bitterly amusing to Castillo. It made the whole world look like a black-and-white movie from the Fifties. Like a zombie movie, she told herself, and not for the first time. We’re all trapped in Night of the Living–

  “Movement!” O’Keefe barked. Sure enough – from behind a sack of swollen plastic containers, a shambler in a set of torn and bloody overalls staggered into sight, obviously shaken from his hibernation by all the noise and movement.

  Kiley stepped forward and raised his bladed pike, a long, padded pole with a scythe securely bolted to one end. One lunge, one practiced swipe, and the shambler’s head sheared off and fell away. It was swift, silent, and fatally efficient.

  Just like we practiced, Castillo thought. She couldn’t ask for more.

  The rest were already cataloging the shipments that were in the big, half-empty room. Much of it had already been broken open and emptied, and Castillo wasn’t surprised. It would have been wonderful to find pallets of medications or supplies still shrink-wrapped and waiting, but nobody was expecting miracles today.

  “Linen!” Lassiter said happily and gestured at a wooden loading platform stacked ten deep with bundles of hospital-grade sheets and towels. “Untouched!”

  Castillo allowed herself a small smile. “Excellent,” she said. “Mark it down, get it to the back gate, and move on.”

  Lassiter had already begun before Castillo finished the order. The others had found bits and pieces – cartons rather than pallets – and were packing things together for quick transport. She was pleased to see how quickly and efficiently they all moved. Getting the job done. Ready to move on.

  The door to the administrative offices and the front lobby was exactly where they expected it to be, right where Boyd’s plans had shown it. Castillo commanded Kline to kill the light tree as they clustered at the door to the lobby, and they all lifted their sunglasses, perched them on their foreheads or let them fall on beaded loops to perch on shoulders or chests.

  “Slow and careful,” she said. “We have all day if we need it.”

  “May need it,” Lassiter muttered. “Don’t want it.”

  “Amen to that,” she said. “O’Toole; open it.”

  It only took a single concentrated kick from the soldier to slam the door open. They entered the lobby one at a time, low and fast, guns up.

  Now the game was really on.

  The light trees weren’t necessary in the large open lobby of the hospital; it was illuminated by the long row of windows they’d seen as they were driving in. What they had glimpsed during the drive-by turned out to be true: The space was deserted, free of infected and corpses alike, as if it had been carefully cleaned before it had been locked off.

  They all took a careful tour of the space, looking behind couches and chairs, peering under reception desks and filing cabinets. The light was dim but more than adequate, and a welcome relief from the cruel sharpness of the trees. They all kept telling each other the same thing in loud, clear voices: “Clear … Clear … Clear.”

  The lobby was entirely deserted. There was some wreckage, some overturned furniture, the occasional black splatter of long-dried blood, but no bodies and no walking corpses.

  “Hope the rest of the building is the same,” Lassiter said. Castillo made a mental note: She was going to have to talk to the young salvager about her chattiness.

  “Admin next?” Kiley asked, his hands repeatedly gripping and relaxing on his rifle.

  Castillo noticed. “Take it easy,” she said, looking pointedly at his clenched fists. He looked down and seemed mildly surprised at his own hands. He relaxed them, quite intentionally. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  The door to the administrative office section was closed. O’Toole gripped the knob, turned it, then looked back at his team. “Unlocked,” he said. “Latched but—”

  The door burst open, outward, and a clot of infected, five at once, surged through the frame together, a wet tangle of thrusting arms and hissing, hungry mouths. O’Toole, taken completely by surprise, lurched back as they came through, tripped on a rucked-up carpet and fell on his side, grunting and shouting as he fell.

  “Kevin!”

  It was too late. The phalanx of shamblers fell on him, covered him before he could move. There was the muffled thud-thud-thud of his M4 firing blindly from inside the roiling mass of infected; chunks of black-blooded shambler flesh flew free of the struggling, twitching bodies, but O’Toole was gone, buried … and after a moment, the pile fell apart, disentangled. The shamblers on the top crawled and rolled away, already losing interest. They staggered to their feet, swayed unsteadily … and focused on the five remaining salvagers.

  Kevin O’Toole’s body was an unrecognizable mass of chewed and twisted flesh, half the size of a man.

  “Fuck,” Lassiter whispered, and opened fire.

  They knew they were supposed to keep gunplay to a minimum. No property damage, they had been told over and over. But that was before their comrade had been drowned in a sudden tidal wave of the undead.

  Heads exploded. Chests collapsed into wet knots, skulls following close behind. One zombie, a formal businessman in the remains of an expensive suit, was shredded by a hail of bullets from two angles at once. No piece bigger than a baseball remained to hit the sodden carpet.

  The recovery team didn’t bother clearing the rest of the admin offices. Castillo had no reason to think there was anything there worth the risk. But she gave herself the job of edging past the eliminated infected, back to the wall of the corridor, to pull the door marked ADMINISTRATION tightly shut again, sealing whatever was left inside. “I’ll make a note in the report,” she said, carefully controlling her voice. “Offices still compromised. Somebody else can deal with it during annexation. Not us.”

  “No shit,” Lassiter said as they backed out of the corridor. This time Castillo didn’t blame her for talking.

  *****

  There were two wide, thick sliding doors – carved wood with many small panes of glass – that separated the lobby from the Emergency Department at the back of the first floor. They all remembered the floor plans: The ER had its own entrance, and the scouts who had reported back, weeks earlier, had said those external doors had been blocked and sealed shut as well. Now they could see that the internal entrance, the doors to the front of the hospital, had been locked as well. There was a huge chain with links as thick as fingers looped and locked through the handles of the door. “I can take care of that,” Piper said, and unpacked his cutting torch for a second time while the other four salvagers and their leader gathered around, peering through the tiny panes at the distorted scene on the other side.

  “Movement,” Kylie said almost distantly. Castillo could tell: He was thinking about O’Toole. They all were.

  “Stay sharp,” she said. “I know it’s hard, but—”

  “Can’t give you an exact count,” he said, pretending to ignore her words. “At least half a dozen. All moving. Something’s riled them up.”

  “Us,” Lassiter said. “All this noise.”

  Castillo nodded. “So … we ready?”

  Piper backed away as the chain snaked off the door handles and fell into a pile with a long metallic rattle. He had the cutting torch packed away in seconds. “Ready,” he said.

  The team had drilled together on room-clearing tactics, and even though they were short one man, they knew what to do. Kline and McCartney hefted their bladed staffs; Kiley and Lassiter took hold of the door handles and pulled, swift and steady, as the others shouldered their rifles and waited.

  The shamblers seemed almost surpris
ed when the wall in front of them suddenly disappeared. They stumbled forward, a step slower than they could have, and Kline and McCartney lunged forward, their scythe-like blades sizzling through the air, severing necks and hacking into brains with each stroke, then again on the backstroke. The shooters took careful aim at other shamblers one step behind the first wave, doing their best to pick them off with single rounds to the head, favoring targets that were dangerously close to or even approaching the hand-to-hand fighters.

  They advanced together into the ER, stepping over the motionless bodies of the second-dead infected they had already taken down. Even now, months after the last human death, the smell was almost overwhelming. Castillo could hear even the most hardened members of the team gasp and gag at the stench of rotting flesh. She found herself hissing in tiny sips of air through clenched teeth as she fought back breakfast.

  A few shamblers, no more than a dozen, had heard them and clustered by the door, but another twenty or thirty, wandering around the spacious waiting room, were only now emerging from hibernation. McCartney and Kline, breathing heavily but otherwise unaffected, stowed their bladed picks and switched to sidearms as they all moved deeper into the room, picking off the approaching infected and mindful of their sight lines as they advanced. “West to east!” Castillo called – more a reminder than a command. “Clear it from west to east.”

  It was clear to her that there were basically two kinds of shamblers in the hospital: staff and patients. Virtually every one of the infected they confronted was wearing either the remains of scrubs or nursing uniforms or the backless gowns of patients. Further evidence, she thought, that the hospital had sealed itself away earlier in the outbreak. No visitors, she thought bitterly, and put a round through the nose of a creature that had once been a middle-aged woman with a weight problem, still dressed in the bloody remnants of a nursing uniform complete with peaked cap. She fell heavily to the floor, her body still ripe enough to burst along the arms and legs and leak black ichor.