by Luke Duffy
The way the doctors and nurses treated him, and looked at him, as he crossed paths with them in the halls and corridors of the hospital, was proof enough to him what type of person they all thought he was, and he bitterly accepted it and believed it himself.
He had never been married and had very few friends. After he left home at the age of sixteen, he had pretty much cut himself off from what family he had and set about trudging through an existence that he neither asked for nor wanted. Life to him was a burden, and it seemed to take forever.
Leaning against the wall by the fire exit, Terry was having a smoke break when the commotion in the hospital started. He ran his nicotine-stained fingers through his greasy brown hair. His physical being showed the signs of a dishevelled, heavy drinking and chain smoking man who had long since given up on himself. The oversized porter uniform that hung from his skinny, narrow shoulders and reeked of stale smoke, the lines on his dry, haggard face, all showed an age far past his actual thirty eight years.
More from curiosity than concern, he flicked away the strained cigarette butt and pushed through the fire exit. He followed the noise and commotion to its source. Screams, shouts and the sounds of crashing and banging had become the norm within the hospital.
The brightly lit corridors were packed with hysterical people; doctors, nurses and patients alike. He found himself pushing his scrawny frame through the bedlam. Screams seemed to fill the corridors and Terry soon realised that he was the only one heading in the direction of the commotion. People bumped into him, spinning him like a coin, yet he still headed in the direction from which they came.
He spotted a doctor rushing toward him.
“Doc, what’s going on?” He tried to grab him by the arm, but the man didn’t seem to have any intention of stopping and pulled away. Terry saw that he was terrified, and watched as he fled towards the exit, his lab coat flowing behind him as he burst through the door and into the sunlight.
Not actually thinking why he was going against the rest of the crowd, or why his fight or flight instincts weren’t doing their normal flight behaviour in accordance to Terry’s nature, he found himself at the epicentre of the carnage.
A ward had been kept to one side for the infected and the dying, with the doctors hoping to be able to deal with the corpses before reanimation, but someone had dropped the ball. The doors had been battered down and corpses had rushed into the rest of the hospital, tearing through patients and staff alike.
He stood in an open area that had corridors leading to it, which further along, was the ‘Doomed Ward’ as they had begun to call it. The infected filled the corridor from one wall to the other and stalked their way along it toward Terry. He could see commotion further within the crowd as one or two faster moving corpses pushed and shoved, trying to reach the front of the column to get to the living first.
On realization of his situation, Terry turned to follow the panicking nurses and doctors only to find blood-covered infected patients and hospital staff blocking his route back to safety as they poured up through a stairwell from a lower floor. He was cut off. Everything seemed to slow down for a split second and he found himself taking in what he was seeing and still not believing it was happening, or that it was possible.
The eyes of the infected where not that of wild people but of people in some kind of shock, and if not for the blood and flesh hanging from their mouths and wounds, or splatter on their clothes, they wouldn’t have looked so threatening.
Terry came back to his senses as one of the bloodied figures lunged at him. Side-stepping the fat half-naked, gore-covered female patient, he rushed for a set of double doors and burst through, hoping to be able to make it to the exit only to find more carnage and atrocities going on over the floors of the corridor. He ran past scenes of brutality that he would never have thought possible. Blood smeared the walls and floors, the screams of the infirm that had been left to their fate clawed at his ears.
He reached a T-junction, glimpsed behind and saw that a large group was closing in on him. He turned to look if the corridors to the left and right were clear, when a sign to the right caught his eye.
Instantly, a sinking gut-feeling hit him hard and he realized he had a choice to make. The sign said ‘Maternity Ward’, and he knew that just past the next doors and to the right, a room housed the incubators full of newborn babies, defenseless against the barbaric atrocities that he had seen throughout the hospital.
His body was aching to just turn and run for the exit that was only fifty meters in the opposite direction and clear of any threat, but he knew he had to act, and there was no one else to take the brunt of what needed to be done.
Tears formed in the corners of his eyes as he contemplated his fate and the fate of the babies.
Terry mumbled in a nervous low shaking voice, “I can’t leave `em, God, I can’t leave them.”
He turned to the bloodthirsty mob and screamed, “Fuck you, I'm not leaving them. You've got to fight me first.”
With tears streaming down his face, he did not run but marched with purpose through the double doors; the ward was deserted of hospital staff. They had fled in blind panic and left the young babies to die. Terry felt disgust rise inside of him. They had spent years looking down on him and judging him as an arsehole, and now it was them who proved themselves to be the moral cowards.
He rushed along the corridor to where he knew the incubators would be. He turned and forced his way through a glass door to the right leading into a room full of peacefully sleeping infants, totally oblivious to their own agonising fate.
He stopped for a moment, and the sounds of the little babies gurgling, whimpering and snoring almost dropped him to his knees. In contrast to what he had just witnessed, the room was like an oasis of tranquillity in a sea of madness.
Pushing over a large set of metal shelves in front of the door, he knew it wouldn’t keep them out for long but he needed to stall them. He searched desperately with his eyes, pleading for an option of escape for him and the babies. Even if there was a route out, there must have been more than twenty full incubators in the room. There was no way he could save them all.
The now sweating and distraught porter started to push the incubator trolleys to the other side of the room as the first hands of the pale-blooded, vile-looking figures started to bang on the glass of the large viewing window and the door, pressing their faces against the panes and gnashing their teeth, which clanked on the glass, making the hairs on Terry’s neck stand on end.
Terry stood his ground in the vain hope that the soldiers stationed at the hospital perimeter would come to his rescue. He could hear gunshots in the distance but they sounded like they were outside the main building. From the sound of things, the chaos had spread throughout the entire hospital complex.
Within a few minutes the glass door and the windows that spanned the length of the room were covered with the horrific faces of the infected. The thumping of fists on glass, of grinding teeth, was unbearable to him and the babies who began to cry hysterically. Terry looked around; the babies somehow knew that there was danger.
“You fucking bastards,” Terry yelled with tears flowing down his cheeks. With all the children pushed into the corner he stood in front of them like a frantic goalkeeper ready to take on whatever came his way.
He turned to try and comfort the little soft-skinned babies, speaking in a quiet soothing voice. “Okay, Terry will look after you, sssssshhhhhh. Terry won’t let them take you.”
At that moment, the once unreliable porter heard the cracking of the glass and the scraping of metal on tiles as the shelving slid across the floor. The door was forced open due to the sheer weight of the mass behind it.
He turned toward the crowd as they pushed their way inside, staggering into the room and heading for Terry and the babies. Wiping his face dry on the back of his hand, Terry whispered, “Come on then you bastards,” so as not to alarm the children or let them hear him swear. He almost laughed. So he wasn�
�t a complete arsehole after all.
The first bloodied body staggered towards him and he hit it with full force in the mouth, knocking it to the floor. He grabbed a metal tray that sat on a table by the wall and pelted at the head of the next to reach him, knocking it to the floor and swinging for the next.
A yellowed wrinkled hand grabbed his arm and he pulled away just as the gaping black maw of what had once been a young woman bit into his hand, severing the skin on his fingers and almost stripping them to the bone. He screamed, feeling the teeth clamp over the fingers and shear the skin from them as he pulled away. The pain was sharp at first, and then became a burning sensation as hot blood gushed from the wound and trickled down to his fingertips.
A couple more creatures tumbled forward over the first that fell. He swung and thrashed with a ferocity that a wild tiger would be wary of, but the things just didn’t care and kept on the same steady pace and momentum. He spat and gasped as his tar laden lungs fought for air, while his limbs used up every bit of oxygen he had until they began to burn with the build up of lactic acid. Kicking and punching, he tried to keep them at bay and away from the defenseless babies that wailed behind him.
His head spun and his mouth was dry; every part of his wiry frame burned and felt heavy with exhaustion, but he kept on going. Not even able to open his mouth, he knew his body was failing as the things kept biting and pulling at him. One of them alone didn’t seem much, but every time he knocked one down, another took its place, sinking its teeth into his flesh.
The burning, crushing pain of their blunt teeth clamping down and breaking his skin was immense and unbearable. He felt broken and ready to lose his fight, and so he turned and scooped up two of the nearest babies, forcing his way into the corner between the wall and the edge of a fixed wall unit. The gap was just big enough for him to wedge his shoulder into and he pushed with all his remaining strength to make sure that he couldn’t be pulled free.
He felt his left shoulder dislocate. Even the pop and the agonising pain, like a mini lightning bolt that shot through him, wasn’t enough to deter him and force him to lose his grip on the baby in that arm. He was losing blood from the numerous bite wounds and he was weak and lightheaded, but he pushed harder, burying himself deeper in to the gap.
Face down and crying with panic and despair, and guilt for being unable to save the defenseless newborn children that wailed higher and harder as the first of the abominations set on them, devouring their soft fleshy torsos and limbs, he stared down at the two he had rescued. They stared back at him in silence, their faces just inches from his own. Then he felt the hands tugging at his legs.
More teeth clamped down into his flesh. He screamed into the faces of the babies as chunks of skin and muscle were ripped from his lower limbs. He felt the fingers digging into his soft tissue and snapping the tendons and ligaments, tearing away at him. His body juddered and convulsed as he was torn apart. He screamed uncontrollably and his eyes and ears threatened to burst. The pain made him nauseous and he had to angle his head so as not to vomit over the babies in his arms.
He was close to passing out, and by now, as he lost more and more blood, the pain became a distant sensation like the echo of thunder hundreds of miles away. The sounds of the infected and screaming babies now seemed to be in another room as his senses began to fade. He couldn’t even scream anymore, and the pain he seemed to accept, just as he had accepted his fate.
All the determination he had left was to hold onto the two little, once bundles of joy.
Terry’s vision started to fail and he couldn’t lift his head. All his limbs were numb and feeling too heavy to even move slightly as the fluids he needed to live flowed out of his exhausted, bloodied body. He slumped as the last of his life left him and his small frame, and all of what weight it had fell onto the two babies who were now alone and only had the body of their hero to protect them.
That seemed to be enough to save them, as the infected lost interest once there was nothing left to hold their attention or for them to eat. They thinned out from the room in an unemotional search for more victims to tear apart and devour.
The babies had fallen silent in Terry’s dead arms. One had suffocated and died but had still escaped the terrible slaughter that the other babies had to endure. The other lay silent, falling in and out of sleep and staring up into Terry’s lifeless face.
Broken limbs and small bodies lay all over the floor in a tangled bloody mess, gnarled to the bone and unrecognisable as human forms. Gore, blood and shreds of internal organs mixed together in the mess, and had been trodden and dragged about the room underfoot leaving a grisly version of a modern art painting behind.
Terry’s body still lay wedged into the corner between the unit and the wall like a cork in a bottle. He had suffered numerous bites and gouges to his upper body, but for the most part that area was still intact. His legs and pelvic area that had still been exposed were nothing but bloodied bone, his left leg completely gone below the knee, carried away from the scene and gnawed upon away from the hungry group.
His intestines and other internal organs had been dragged through the cavern created after his genitals and backside had been ripped away, with hands reaching in past his pelvic bone as far as possible, to tear out the still warm and blood-filled organs from within.
A few hours later, Terry’s torn and bloodied shoulders twitched, his head moved slightly in a slow, awkward circular motion like he was coming to after being clobbered unconscious, then his eyes flicked open.
With a vacant gaze he looked at the babies in his arms for a few moments as if trying to work out what he was going to do with them or even what they were. The conscious baby boy, tightly wrapped in his blankets, stared at Terry in silence as if he knew that he was his saviour.
A deep, unreasoning, uncompromising instinct registered in Terry. Realizing what he had in his hands, Terry dropped the dead baby, his face showing no expression but his mouth gaping open, baring his nicotine-stained, yellowed and broken teeth.
He lowered his head and paused. The baby continued to look into his dead eyes. Terry let out a grunt, and then he sank his teeth in.
11
She ran and ran through the corridors; the echoes of her pounding feet reverberating from the narrow walls of the hospital. Her heart was pounding, about to explode from her chest, tears streamed down her face, but still she ran.
Pausing at a junction, she leaned in close to a wall and risked a quick look to the walkway left and right. There was no one in sight, but she could hear the occasional crashing and banging further in the distance to her left. That was where she had to go.
Her stomach churned, the fear gripping her throat and forcing her to hesitate. She leaned with her back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling and sobbing with the knowledge that she was going to die soon, and a terrible death it would be at the hands of the hideous creatures that had spread throughout the hospital.
But she had to do it. She couldn’t bring herself to run away as the others had done.
For five years, Helen had been a maternity nurse in the hospital. She had wanted to be a nurse since a very young age, and as she had matured her maternal instincts had grown with her. So, when she left school, that's what she set out to be and she had loved her job. She had loved the babies; each and every one of them. She cared for them as though they were her own, and when babies died, or were born sick, she felt the pain too. It never got any easier for Helen, but she felt that it was her calling in life.
Now, everyone in the hospital was either dead, walking dead, or had fled to safety. As she had heard the commotion and gunfire erupt, she had forced her way against the fleeing tide of people from the far end of the hospital and headed directly for the maternity ward. Along the way, she had stopped people, doctors and nurses included, and asked what was being done to help the helpless newly born. No one could give her an answer; they were set on saving themselves. Blind panic made them forget about their duties and obliga
tions, but instead focus on saving themselves.
Helen found herself as the only one still heading into the bowels of the hospital.
Of only a slender build and delicate features, she was what most would call beautiful, but now, in her time of need, these traits would do nothing to help her. She needed to gather from her inner strength, as she had always done in life when faced with something too physically challenging for her slight frame. Her determination in everything she applied herself to was what helped her to not just overcome, but excel, in almost everything she did in life. Including kicking the shit out of an ex-boyfriend who had tried to grab her by the throat one time.
Helen slowly turned the corner, tightly gripping a fire axe in both hands. She advanced along the corridor. Her knuckles had turned white as she clung onto the handle, and she was ready to swing it down onto the head of anyone she saw as a threat, alive or dead.
She stopped at a set of double swinging doors and, standing on her toes, peered through the small square windows set two thirds of the way up. The corridor ahead was empty, but she could see that the infected had been there. Doors and windows were smashed, tables lay overturned and medical equipment and paperwork lay scattered throughout the wing. Amongst the damage and detritus, Helen could see blood stains and smears along the walls and the floors.
Further along and to the left, past the nurse’s station, were the doors that led to the maternity ward. She took in a deep breath, glanced back along the corridor in the direction she had come, then quietly pushed her way through.
The sickly tang of blood was thick in the air, forcing Helen to breathe through her mouth instead. Careful not to create any noise, she picked her way through the mess and broken glass of the ward, choosing each step with deliberation.
She turned the corner and pushed open the door to the maternity unit. The smell of blood was stronger there and her heart began to skip beats. She moved faster along the short corridor, no longer bothering to tread carefully. The windows to the postnatal ward were gone, having been smashed in, and what shards of glass remained were bloodied. Even from a distance as she approached, she could see that the incubator room had been attacked.