~*~
Autumn sat at her desk, bored out of her mind. Dr. Doune had been busy organizing the new files that he’d downloaded onto his laptop, and she knew that he was hoping to finish before his battery ran out. He’d made it clear that he didn’t have time to talk, and there was nothing for her to do in the lab. After a trip to the kitchen to get more cookies, she finally decided to climb the several flights of stairs to check her trap again. She’d been up twice already, but hadn’t caught anything yet. She made it to the fifth floor without stopping, but she finally had to pause for a short break.
She looked up when she thought she heard a muffled scream. She paused to listen, but the noise was not repeated. Autumn decided that maybe she should alert one of the guards, but when she stepped into the crow’s nest, she was surprised to find it empty. She let out a sigh when she remembered that most of the bikers were out on a big shopping run. That meant she’d have to go downstairs and see if she could find someone to help. She turned to leave, and found herself face-to-face with the dead thing that had once been Chuck. She let out a surprised yell as he lurched forward and reached out, grasping for her.
As Autumn stared at the ashen, blood-covered face, she stepped backward, coming up against the window. The paleness of the face was accented by lifeless, sunken eyes and a gaping mouth that suddenly became a snarl. As Autumn turned to run, the creature stepped forward and grabbed her at the same time, his grip surprisingly strong. The girl screamed in octaves she had no idea she possessed, but the scream had no effect at all on Chuck, not in his new undead form. He opened his mouth wide, eyes on Autumn’s neck.
~*~
Ernie, the janitor, had been napping in the room next to the crow’s nest. The first scream woke him, and he stood as quickly as his arthritis-riddled legs would allow. He arrived in the room just as Autumn shrieked for the second time. Rushing forward, he slammed his body into the ghoul just as Autumn’s arm went up to protect her neck. The creature loosened its death-grip on the girl long enough for her to scramble for safety. As it regained its footing, it directed its malice toward Ernie, lunging forward with a growl. The old janitor slammed his boot into the dead man’s knee with all the strength he could muster.
“Take that!” he said, growling right back.
As Chuck stumbled against the wall, Ernie took advantage of the opportunity and left the room to go find Autumn, closing the door behind him.
Out in the hallway, the girl sat on the floor, cradling her arm in her hand.
When Ernie saw blood begin to seep through the girl’s fingers, he felt as though he’d been punched.
~*^*~
~23~
St. Mary’s Hospital, Lansing
Dumbo entered the stairwell just behind Moose.
“There’s been an outbreak,” Dumbo told his friend. “Bull’s dead, and one of the nurses got bitten.”
“Which one?” Moose asked, eyes wide.
“I don’t know.”
The big biker didn’t even wait for the rest of the explanation, but began to take the stairs two at a time.
When Dumbo stepped out of the stairwell on the fifth floor, the first thing he saw was a gurney by the elevator door with a body on it.
“What the heck?” he asked.
Two more bikers burst through the stairwell doors right behind him. A loud shriek caught their attention, and they started down the hall as Dumbo went to look for the room number that Hawk had given him.
The door was wide open, and a trail of blood led down the hallway.
A groan to the left caught Dumbo’s attention, and he headed that way, the sound leading him to one of the patient rooms where he found Bull. The big biker looked as though he’d been hollowed out. The front of his body was almost solid red, and his intestines dragged from the hole in his midsection. He had already killed one of the patients in the room and was chewing on an arm he’d torn off. Dumbo wasn’t sure if the other patient was alive, at first, but when he stepped closer, he saw the glassy stare of death in the man’s eyes.
“Ah, Bull, why?” Dumbo asked quietly. As with the other bikers, the man had been like a brother to him.
Bull lowered the arm slowly, finally dropping it to the ground as his eyes became fixed on the other biker. A growl issued from his lips and became a long moan as the bloodied biker stepped forward, arms outstretched. Dumbo leveled his pistol on Bull’s forehead, sighing deeply before pulling the trigger. A hole punctured the big man’s head as his brains sprayed out behind him, and Bull crumpled to the floor.
~*~
Ernie tried to tell himself that he was wrong, that there was another explanation for the blood on the girl’s arm, but as she lifted her eyes to meet his, he recognized the hollow stare of a person who has just been sentenced to death. He scooped the child up and hurried down the hall with her, stopping to grab a towel out of one of the rooms. He wrapped it around her arm as two bikers rushed by.
“Zombie in the crow’s nest!” Ernie yelled to them.
“Thanks, Ernie!” one of the bikers yelled back.
Ernie headed for the stairs with Autumn. Once inside the stairwell, he said, “I’ll take you to Dr. Doune if that’s all right. Maybe he can figure out a way to fix you up, and nobody else needs to know what happened just yet.”
~*~
Another child would have been hysterical, but to Autumn, this was just another chapter to a tragic novel. She had yet to rise from the blow of her diagnosis with cancer when both parents had been killed in a car wreck. Although nobody had actually told her, Autumn had known that the doctors hadn’t held much hope that she would live a long life. When chemo and radiation had failed, she had resigned herself to passing on to something better, hoping that maybe her parents would be waiting for her. Then, as a last resort, she had been offered an experimental treatment at a clinic in Mexico. The pain and nausea hadn’t been as severe with the new treatment as it had been with the chemo, though she had lost her hair. She had been ready for either a cure or death. When the treatments had ended, the cancer appeared to have gone into remission. It had been far too soon to consider her cancer-free, but she had been in the process of regaining her strength via physical therapy.
Now it all seemed to have been in vain. She was given some solace that Ernie was taking her to Dr. Doune, who could be convinced to let her die peacefully.
~*~
When the battery in Doune’s laptop had finally died, the doctor had gone down to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. He looked up when he saw Ernie approach.
“Dr. Doune, you need to come to the lab. It’s important.”
“What is it, Ernie?” he asked.
“It’s about the wee lass,” Ernie said.
“What has she done this time?” Doune asked, realizing that it must be bad. Ernie had come from Scotland as a child, and it was usually not very obvious in his speech unless he was upset.
“Just come with me,” the janitor said, keeping his voice down so others in the room couldn’t hear.
Doune turned to follow, and he noticed that Ernie seemed to be having a harder time than usual with his legs as he struggled to climb the flight of stairs.
“Ernie, if your legs are bothering you, you don’t need to . . .”
“I’m fine. I just had to walk down from the fifth floor,” he said. He stopped just before they reached the lab door, and he turned toward Doune. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Autumn’s been bitten.”
“No. Not Autumn.”
“Yes.”
For the first time in his life, Nick Doune’s blood ran cold.
“No. There must be a mistake,” he said, shaking his head. He lifted a hand to point at the lab. “She’s been right here . . .”
No, she hadn’t been there, he realized suddenly, dropping his hand to his side. She had left twice to take breaks and had seemed excited both times.
He looked away from Ernie, blinking. After a moment, he went into the room and grabbed a pair of rubber gloves befo
re kneeling down beside the chair where Autumn sat.
“Show me,” Doune said, already trying to distance himself emotionally from the girl as he always did with his patients. People accused him of having no compassion, and maybe it was true, but it was how he managed to do his job without getting distressed every time he lost a patient.
Autumn’s expression was stoic. She lifted the blood-soaked towel to expose the fresh wound. She sucked in a breath at the movement of the towel, and Doune knew that the girl was in pain. A trickle of blood started to ooze down her arm and drip onto the floor.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” Doune said as he began to clean the wound.
~*~
Dr. Sharma was jotting down some notes on a chart when she heard a scream. She hurried to the nurses’ station where Moose was trying to comfort a hysterical Marla. Two bikers rounded the corner from the other hallway and walked over to let the others know that they’d taken care of Chuck.
“What happened?” Dr. Sharma asked, eyes darting from Marla to the blood on the floor.
Dumbo explained everything he knew, with the others adding bits of information.
“The two patients who were attacked will be infected,” Dr. Sharma said.
“I took care of them,” Dumbo assured her.
She thanked him then asked, “Where did Hawk take Debbie?”
“I’ll find out,” Dumbo said, getting on the radio.
“And where is Dr. Martinez?” Dr. Sharma asked.
The other bikers looked at each other and shook their heads.
“We need to tell him what happened,” she said. “Does Jack know?”
“He’s on his way up.”
“I’m going to go find Dr. Martinez,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do for Debbie when I get back.”
“We’ll check the rest of the rooms up here,” Dumbo said. “We need to see if any of the other patients have been bitten.”
As the four bikers left to check the floor, Dr. Sharma went to search for Dr. Martinez. She finally found him in an empty room, staring out the window. Her instincts told her that something was wrong, but there was no sign of blood on the doctor’s scrubs or anything else to cause alarm. Still, there was something odd about the way he was standing that made her wary. As she walked around the bed, she wondered if he might be suffering from shock. It was very possible he’d seen the dead patients and had not handled it well. She took a couple more steps, approaching him cautiously.
“Dr. Martinez, are you all right?” she asked, still keeping her distance.
He turned toward her slowly, revealing the obliterated right side of his face. There was nothing but muscle and exposed bone. While the back of his scrubs had been unstained, the front of his body was soaked in blood.
Horrified, Dr. Sharma stepped back, but her legs hit the bed, causing her to stumble. The reanimated Dr. Martinez was fast, and he was on her before she could get away. She let out a scream as she struggled to keep the deadly teeth away from her neck. Even in death, Martinez was strong, and Dr. Sharma had no doubt that he was going to overpower her quickly. Her arms strained with the tension of trying to hold him back while he worked just as hard to try to sink his teeth into her flesh. Freeing herself partly from his grasp, she was able to take another step back, but she quickly found herself against the wall with nowhere to go. Her dead colleague moved in closer, grabbing her in a sickening hug. With her arms restrained, there was no way she could fight back.
Tears of fear and regret began to run down Ankita Sharma’s cheek as she watched Martinez’s blood-stained mouth open. She closed her eyes, not wanting the horrific sight to accompany her as she left this life to move on to the next one. Rather than feeling the searing pain of a bite, Dr. Sharma was pulled to the ground as Martinez’s body fell.
Moose leaned over and pulled the knife from the deceased doctor’s head then pulled the body roughly away, helping Dr. Sharma to her feet.
“Th-thank you,” she said, looking down at the crumpled body on the floor. “I thought I was dead.”
“I heard the scream and got here real fast,” Moose said, blushing. “I thought you were Marla.”
Dr. Sharma wasn’t sure how to respond to that at first. “Well, thank you for saving me, even though I’m not Marla.”
~*~
In a slow, methodical voice, Autumn told Doune what had happened. When she got to the part about wanting to infect a pigeon, he shook his head.
“You can’t do things like that, Autumn,” he said. “Do you realize how dangerous . . . ?” He stopped mid-sentence, knowing that it didn’t matter anymore. There was no point in lecturing the girl when she was going to die. He swallowed hard and walked away to compose himself before returning to her side.
“Let’s finish getting that cleaned,” he said, his voice unsteady.
“Are you crying?” Autumn asked, looking closely at his eyes.
“No. Of course not,” Doune said, blinking rapidly. “I don’t cry.”
“Must be allergies or something,” she said, still studying him.
“Probably.”
The wound was deep, but at least the flesh wasn’t completely torn away, which was a minor miracle. Doune was reminded of the time that the female biker, Helga, had come in with a bite. She had gotten it from a healthy human, though they had watched her carefully to be sure. For a moment, Doune wondered if this could be a similar bite, though he saw no reason why anybody would bite the girl. Helga, he understood.
“Are you sure it was one of the infected?” he asked.
“He looked like the others,” Autumn said.
“It was the man that they rescued from the building,” Ernie added.
“He didn’t appear to have any bites, but he was covered with open scrapes and scratches,” Doune said. “He could have become contaminated just by touching an infected surface. I’ll have to do some tests to see how long the parasite can live outside a host.”
He felt a wave of guilt, knowing he’d been the one to give approval to having the man moved upstairs.
“I should have insisted he stay in quarantine,” he snapped, furious with himself.
“Want to hear the rest?” Autumn asked.
“Yes,” Doune said, pulling out what he needed to suture the wound. He hesitated then got out Steri-Strips instead. There was no reason to subject Autumn to the discomfort of stitches if her hours were numbered. He listened as she related the rest of the story, with Ernie adding a few parts.
“Don’t let me become like him,” she begged when she was done. “Put me to sleep, or something.”
Doune made a quick decision not to sugarcoat it for Autumn. They all knew what was going to happen. Pretending otherwise would seem condescending, which the girl would not appreciate.
“Ernie, I am not going to make her spend her final days in the quarantine room. I’ll keep her here in this room, but I’ll lock the door. She will not be a danger to anybody except me, and that’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
He would destroy her brain quickly when the time came. He would do it before she had a chance to rise again.
“My lips are sealed,” Ernie said. “How about if I bring meals to the two of you, so you don’t have to leave to go eat? Nobody else will need to know.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Doune said.
Ernie looked at Autumn once more and left, sadness apparent on his face. “I’ll go get a mop to clean that up,” he said, nodding toward the blood on the floor.
“Thank you, Ernie,” Doune said. He turned his attention back to the girl. “I won’t let you change, Autumn.”
Autumn, trying to hold back her tears, quickly wiped one that escaped and ran down her cheek.
“You can dissect my brain if you want,” she said, her voice trembling, “but wait ‘til I’m dead.”
Doune said, “I promise that you will not be treated as Harold was. That was different.”
One of the doctors had become infected, and when he reanimate
d, Doune had taken him to his lab to learn what he could. Dr. Winston had been disliked by most everybody that knew him, and it had given Doune great pleasure to dissect the man’s brain. He would not subject Autumn to similar treatment.
“Autumn, I need to run some tests on your blood. It’s something I have to do when someone is infected.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s fine.”
Doune tied a long strip of rubber around her arm and had her clench her fist while he searched for a good vein. He noticed how quiet Autumn was, and he wasn’t surprised. She had just received a death sentence. She was handling it well under the circumstances, but she’d been facing death for quite a while. She certainly wasn’t a stranger to the idea.
~*^*~
~24~
St. Mary’s Hospital, Lansing
Autumn didn’t flinch when the needle entered her skin. She had been poked and prodded so much during her fight with cancer that she thought of herself as a human pincushion. Besides, she trusted Dr. Doune. With the exception of Lindsey, he was probably the only adult she did trust. He seemed to empathize with her view of the world, or at least understand it. Since her parents had died, no other adult had been able to relate to her the way he had. Lindsey liked her and watched out for her, but she treated Autumn like a kid. Her foster parents were even worse. They gushed about how much they loved her but when she shaved the cat or painted the dog, they lost patience with her. Dr. Doune, she thought, would have appreciated her creativity. At least she would die under the care of someone who understood her. She was glad she’d lived long enough to meet Dr. Doune. Maybe she wasn’t meant to die alone. Maybe the bikers were right, and there was a God.
She watched as Dr. Doune filled a test tube then put a small sample of her blood on a slide to look at it under the microscope.
Dead, But Not For Long (Book 2): Pestilence and Promise Page 19