by Tristan Vick
“It is a little hard to believe that the military got caught with their pants down on this one,” grumbled the general in an apologetic tone. “But shit happens.”
“With all due respect, general,” Jennifer said, “This situation is far grimmer than anyone seems to realize. It happened way too fast to be an isolated incident.”
“What are you getting at, miss…?”
Putting her hands on her hips defiantly, Jennifer continued on. “Jennifer. Jennifer Hurley. And what I’m getting at is there had to be multiple, maybe even simultaneous, outbreaks happening here at the same time as in the city. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“It’s very likely,” Greer answered.
Everyone gasped, and then there was a moment of silence. But what else could he say? She was right. There was no way this had just happened naturally. Someone had to have orchestrated this. It could be the Chinese engineering biological weapons, or terrorists, but this new disease, this Resurrection Virus, didn’t just happen on its own. Someone was playing God, and before they knew it, Mother Nature had transpired to make fools of them all. But beyond his gut feeling, Greer hadn’t a shred of evidence who was behind it. That’s what Dr. Hemingway was supposed to be figuring out, but now she was AWOL too.
Interrupting the idle chit chat came the moans of the undead. Without warning, from the center of the partly open large hangar bay doors, came a throng of animated corpses.
General Thompson Greer turned and looked at the oncoming onslaught and then snapped his attention back to Hurley and gave her a disparaging look. “I’ll answer any questions you might have, but first, I suggest we stop trying to play who's king of the hill and start hauling ass.” The general tweaked his chin in the direction of the approaching horde.
“Well, shit,” Noble said with a grunt, getting his gun ready. Without saying a word, Barnes sprang into action, running over to a nearby Humvee and started it up. Meanwhile, General Greer loaded the rest of his gear into the Komatsu.
“What kind of idiot rounds up all the monsters and just leaves them in the hangar and then forgets to lock the door?” Zanato asked in an annoyed tone as the swarm of monsters inched closer, like an undead army marching to battle.
“Doesn’t matter anymore,” Noble said, firing and dropping a couple of dead-heads that were too close for comfort. “All that matters now is getting the hell out of here, ASAP!”
“My god,” Jennifer said as Barnes helped her up. “There must be hundreds of them.”
36
Awakened
St. Martin’s was Newcastle City’s oldest standing hospital. The building was made of brick architecture circa the mid-1800s. It was one of the first major hospitals in the U.S., alongside Bellevue in downtown Manhattan and the Bayley Seton on Staten Island. The Red Cross had owned it for more than six decades, but when the new city hospital was constructed closer to downtown, and with the Red Cross opening their own establishment on the other side of the city, St. Martin’s became derelict. Now it was just a historical landmark that had seen better days.
Around that time, Dr. Jamal Treslan stepped up and donated two million dollars to pay for renovations and keep the hospital open. Of course, being the main financial donor meant he had a spot on the board, and his timing couldn’t have been better, as the Chief of Medicine soon resigned after management changed. This gave Treslan the opportunity he was looking for and, without any hesitation, he quickly slid into the position of Dean of Medicine for St. Martin’s Hospital. The rest was history.
Treslan led the way as a small army of troopers marched behind him down the corridors of the hospital. Timid eyes peered out of rooms at Rachael Ramirez as she followed close behind the doctor. He led her straight into an ER and marched up to a tightly shut vinyl curtain. Reaching up, he tugged the drapes back, and the curtain rings rattled as they opened. Lying on a metal operating table was a little girl with pitch-black eyes. She snarled and growled at them, jerking violently against her restraints.
Rachael looked at Treslan with a curious look. “What’s this?”
“This is my daughter.” Walking up to a shelf with medical supplies, he opened a drawer and pulled out a couple of syringes and a blood drawing kit. As he prepared, he motioned toward a swivel stool next to the bed. “Take a seat.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Your blood has very unusual properties. I think if I give my daughter a blood transfusion using your blood, it may cure her.”
“It might kill her,” Rachael added with a concerned look.
“As you can see, she has been infected. She has no heartbeat, no pulse. For all intents and purposes, she is already dead. She cannot get any more dead than undead, but if I can cure her, if I can bring life back to her former…” Treslan’s voice trailed off as he attempted to mask his emotional scars with the bandage of silence.
Rachael held out her arm. “If you believe it’s the right thing, then I won’t stop you.”
Treslan stared at her for a moment and then a sad smile broke across his face. “You have children, don’t you?”
“I have…” Rachael caught herself. “I had a son. But the infection took him.”
“I am sorry for your loss.”
Placing her hand on his forearm, she asked, “If this works, will you help me find my son?”
“You have my word.”
An understanding between them, Treslan prepared the apheresis separator to collect her blood platelets. He knew it would be necessary to take out all signs of the infection from his daughter for any potential cure to be viable. In principle, it was the same concept behind why you would have to do the same with a cancer patient after they had received a bone marrow transplant. The idea was to get rid of the infection so that the new, clean blood would not risk being contaminated by the cancer cells when the patient began producing new blood. But in order to purge the system, you had to take out all the blood, including all the blood platelets. In order to produce new blood on their own one needed to have blood platelets. The procedure, however, was quite harmless. It was just like giving blood but ultimately would take a lot longer.
Treslan hooked his black-eyed daughter up to a plasmapheresis machine. Once he collected and filtered Dahlia’s infected blood, he mixed it with Rachael’s virus-resistant blood, and with tubes running to the little girl’s arms and legs, he ran it through the filter and then back into his daughter.
Violent spasms overtook her immediately. She groaned so loud that the sound crawled through the hospital walls. Jerking back and forth, the entire table shook as the restrains struggled to hold the convulsing girl down. The leather straps rubbed raw against her skin, so that Rachael thought the poor girl’s flesh would tear off from her bony little limbs.
Then it all stopped. The creature, the girl, passed out.
Watching intently, Treslan and Rachael waited for something to happen. Soon the girl raised her head and looked at them with human eyes. Looking at them, the child’s attention locked onto her father. “Daddy? Daddy, what’s happening?”
Standing with their mouths open as she spoke, neither of them could believe it was really happening. It was fringe, borderline crackpot, medicine—but Rachael’s blood had worked. Treslan’s eyes began to pour tears as he ran over to embrace her.
“Dahlia!” he cried out. His large powerful hands worked furiously to undo the painful leather straps that bound her. “My Dahlia!”
Once Dahlia was free she wrapped her arms around her father’s neck and cried into his chest. “Daddy! I was so scared.”
“Hush now,” Treslan said. “Everything is all right now. Daddy is here.”
Looking up at Rachael, Dahlia asked, “Who’s that lady?”
“She is the nice lady who made you all better,” he replied.
Treslan held his precious Dahlia in his arms and squeezed her with all the warmth he could muster.
“Where is mamma?” Dalia asked.
“You don’t remember?” Treslan as
ked in a worried voice. He didn’t want to reveal the fact that Dahlia was the way she was because her mom had gotten sick and…. Treslan choked up just thinking about it.
After a long day of work at the hospital, he had come home as usual. Entering the house, he set his briefcase down by the coat rack, as was his habit, hung his jacket up, and his keys in the bowl on the shelf near the entrance. As he turned the corner and entered the living room he saw his wife mauling their daughter.
Treslan recalled the gut-wrenching panic that overcame him. Desperate to rescue his daughter from the clutches of his demented wife, he picked up the glass vase by the entrance to the living room and smashed it against the back of his wife’s head. She fell to the ground, but immediately started pushing herself back up. Her scalp peeled back off her skull.
Somehow oblivious to the pain, she stood up and growled at Treslan like a wild animal. Then she lunged at him.
Treslan dodged her attack and slammed her into the wall. Being a petite woman, she bounced off, fell back down, and hit the floor again. Seeing the crying child in front of her, she started to crawl on her hands and knees toward her own daughter, jaws snapping like a bloodthirsty shark. Treslan smashed her over the head with the vase again, and again, and he kept on bashing her skull in until it was the consistency of strawberry jam. Panting for breath, Treslan dropped the vase. He couldn’t believe what he had done.
Dahlia was screaming wildly, probably more from the pain than anything. Standing there half dazed and confused, his dead wife’s blood spackled on his face and her lifeless corpse at his feet, Treslan didn’t know what to do. Then Dahlia let out a torrent of sobs, and in an instant he rushed over her, picked her up in his arms, and carried her into the bathroom, where he bandaged her up. Treslan glanced at himself in the mirror and saw that he was crying too. They both were.
If Dahlia didn’t recollect that horrible day, then perhaps it was for the better. There was no reason to traumatize her all over again with the brutal, appalling truth of it.
“Mamma is busy at work now,” he lied. But the lie was comforting. The truth would only devastate and destroy the poor girl, who, in all likelihood, probably thought the past week had all been a bad dream.
“Can I see mommy soon?”
“Yes, very soon. Don’t you worry about a thing, Dahlia. Daddy is here. I will take good care of you.”
“Come,” one of the guards said in a quiet voice, reaching out his hand to guide Rachael toward the exit. “Let the doctor have a moment with his daughter alone.”
“Of course,” Rachael said, putting her hand on Treslan's shoulder to let him know that she knew exactly how he felt.
He acknowledged her touch, and then she turned and left. Left him there to be with his daughter.
Once she stepped out into the hallway, the guard addressed her in his regular tone of voice. “We have a room prepared for you. But, as you can imagine, space is limited. I’m afraid you’ll have to share, if that’s not too much of a burden?”
“No, not at all.”
“Your roommate should be no problem, but if you should find her less than amiable, just let us know and we can try to fix you up with some new accommodations.”
“I am fairly easy to get along with,” Rachael said with a smile. “At least I like to think so. Out of curiosity, who is my roommate?”
“A woman we picked up the day before yesterday.”
As they approached the end of the wing, which had large windows on the left-hand side that overlooked the grounds, they came to a door, second from the end. The fluorescent light at the end of the hall buzzed and flickered, fighting to stay alive. The large man pushed open the door for her and waved his hand, motioning for her to go on in. On the bed in the room sat a young woman writing in a purple diary.
Alyssa looked up just in time to see Rachael standing in the doorway staring back at her with equal astonishment.
“No way!” they said in unison.
The guard raised an eyebrow. “You two know each other?”
“Yes,” Rachael informed him, running up to hug Alyssa.
Alyssa leapt up and practically pounced on Rachael. The two embraced each other in a long, warm embrace. Tears of elation filled their eyes as they embraced one another and, getting swept up in the moment, they couldn’t help but start laughing at this strange, yet welcome, twist of events.
“Well,” said the guard, “curfew is at nine. Be in your rooms by then, doors locked just to be safe.”
“Thanks,” Rachael replied without looking back. The guard nodded regally, then turned and made his way back down the hall.
“I can’t believe it,” Alyssa said, stepping back to see how Rachael had fared. “It’s really you! I never expected to see you again.”
“I know,” Rachael replied. “Tell me about it.”
Alyssa had on a gray short-sleeve shirt with a black Felix the Cat print on it and navy blue denim jeans. Staring at Rachael with a contemplative look, Alyssa licked her upper lip and squinted. Rachael’s outfit looked like a sultry prom dress gone feral. A transparent fabric barely masked the fifty-cent sized areolas of her pink nipples. Her bare midriff trailed down to a frilly tutu.
“And what in the world are you wearing?”
Rachael looked down at herself and laughed at the thought of wearing such a hideous outfit. “It’s a long story.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Just then an electric clunk was heard, as if a breaker was suddenly switched off, and the lights went out in the hall. Shutting the door, Rachael turned back to face Alyssa. Her disposition somber, she replied, “Not really.”
Sensing a hint of hesitation in her voice, Alyssa said, “I sense a but in there, somewhere.”
“But,” Rachael added, “I think I have to, just to maintain an ounce of my sanity.”
Alyssa plopped down on the bed, smoothed the wrinkles out with her hand and patted the space next to her, inviting Rachael to sit down beside her.
Rachael cozied up next to Alyssa, and they leaned against the wall and kicked their legs over the edge of the bed, like a couple of girls at a slumber party. Rachael took a deep breath and began her tale of terror and suspense.
37
Fallen Angels
Eyes peered out of cracked doors and whispers seeped out into the hallway as Jamal Treslan lovingly carried his sleeping daughter back to his room. As he took her past the other rooms, he could make out their flabbergasted murmurs about the miracle woman who had cured Treslan’s precious daughter. Some even called her an angel.
Reaching his room, lit by soft candlelight, he gently laid Dahlia onto his bed, pulled a flower-embroidered blanket over her, and tucked her in. Brushing her bedraggled hair out of her face, Treslan smiled, and then went over to his desk and lit a small kerosene desk lamp. The lamp illuminated the room with a doped glow that soothed the eyes and comforted the mind.
Taking out a notepad from the desk drawer, Treslan began jotting down theories about Rachael Ramirez’s blood, her rare immunity to the virus, and several ideas on how to implement it in producing a cure. It was the first time since the outbreak that he felt like a real doctor again and not just a mad scientist—or a father barely hanging onto his sanity. As he wrote, his head bobbed with drowsiness, and he subsequently nodded off.
The clock struck midnight and chimed. Arousing from his slumber, Treslan lifted his head from his desk, which revealed a small puddle of saliva that had drizzled out of the corner of his mouth. Groggy, he sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes and the drool from his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Treslan turned to look at his sleeping baby girl, but upon finding nothing but an empty bed, he jumped up in a dreadful panic. His precious Dahlia was gone.
Noticing the door had been left open just a crack, he figured she must have wondered out to fetch a glass of water or find the bathroom. But why hadn’t she woken him up? She always used to wake him up for that sort of thing. A deep-seated anxiety overcame him, and h
is heart raced in his chest. Jumping up, he grabbed a flashlight and went out into the hall to search for his missing daughter.
Alyssa gently shook Rachael awake, in bed, beside her. She whispered, “You have to wake up.”
“What is it?” Rachael asked, still half asleep.
“We have to get out of this place. It’s not safe for us here.”
Rachael sat up in bed and yawned. “What are you talking about?”
“Treslan is out of his mind. He is farming people’s blood against their will. This place is a prison. People come in but nobody ever leaves. I have a feeling that something very sinister is going on here.”
“Treslan?” Rachael said in disbelief. “Treslan saved my life.”
“Did he take your blood?”
“Well, yeah. But it wasn’t anything deceitful. I offered it to him.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To help find a cure for his daughter.”
“His daughter is a monster!”
“No, not anymore.”
“What do you mean, not anymore?”
“Believe it or not, it actually worked. My blood cured her. The little girl, she’s well again.”
Alyssa chewed on the information. “I understand you’re immune to the virus and all, but that just doesn’t make any medical sense. Are you certain it healed her?”
“Yes, she actually recognized her father. She even spoke to him. You should have seen how overjoyed he was.”
Alyssa hopped out of bed, still in her day clothes, and went over to a dresser. She opened it, pulled out her purple diary, and tucked it into her back pocket. She then drew out a sleek, skin-tight one-piece ponte knit dress and handed it to Rachael. It was white with thick black stripes down the sides.
“Here, put this on,” she said. “I know it’s not ideal, but it’s the only other piece they gave me. You’re slightly larger than I am, so it might be a little snug on you, but it stretches.”