South of the river, the city was mostly suburban sprawl. North of it, that didn’t really change. Lots of small houses, sitting on previously tidy lawns, everything now overgrown and somewhat the worse for wear after being untended for almost a year, including a rather harsh winter where no one had bothered shoveling snow. Zombies were everywhere—going through car wrecks, tearing apart store fronts to get inside, and incidentally freeing those that had been unfortunate to die in there. Months out and about in the wilderness had made me forget just how nerve wracking it could be to sneak through heavily infested territories, but the rigorous training Nate had put me through proved to be rather helpful now. Afraid I still might be, but walking—with the odd sprint and lots of sneaking—didn’t wear me down anymore, and the odd neck I had to snap or head that needed getting bashed in weren’t that much of an issue. It was thankfully still early enough in the season that the temperatures made carrying full gear, including long-sleeved jackets zipped up to the neck, not too bad.
After passing the umpteenth gas station and third electronics store without getting anywhere near the buildings, I finally rounded on Nate, after making sure that our position at the side of a white-painted house was mostly secure.
“Why exactly aren’t we looting on our looting run?”
The expression on his face was too calm, not even a smile appearing for the exasperation ringing in my hushed voice.
“Because we’re not even close to our destination.”
“So we do have an actual destination?” He inclined his head. “When were you intending to share that with me?”
“When it becomes important.”
“And that’s now?” I wanted to know.
“No,” he said. Before I could protest, he stepped out of cover and ran across the yard to the next house, continuing further downtown. So much for that.
Part of me wanted to put up a fuss, but I already knew that it wasn’t worth it. When he got like that—all leader, expecting to be followed—there was no sense in demanding explanations. This was still giving me the creeps, but if I’d learned one thing over the past months, it was to shut up and do what I was expected to. So I followed, trying to remain alert even with my ire making me want to focus solely on killing Nate with my glares.
Three hours later, I saw a tall, red brick building—or what looked like that through the uneven canopy of the trees lining the streets—ahead of us, and two streets over I realized that it was a hospital. Hospital complex, more like it, as it seemed to span several city blocks. As we got closer, I noticed the burned-out ruin of a helicopter lying in the house it had crashed into, making me guess that all help had been too late for these patients. Or maybe the chopper crew had tried to flee from the hospital once they’d realized that the shit had hit the fan.
Just outside the hospital, the road was littered with human remains and trashed ambulances, showing a scattered trajectory where the zombies must have exited the emergency room. A few overturned police cars and barricades made me guess that the city had tried to build a safe zone around the hospital, not expecting that the true danger would come from inside rather than the streets. To the left I saw what remained of the beginning of a group of tents, bearing the FEMA logo. That made me wonder if the aid workers could possibly have known what was coming for them, or if they’d been as surprised by the uprising of the zombies as the rest of the world. Considering that I didn’t see a single hazmat suit or even face mask anywhere, I doubted it. Not that either would have helped them much.
It was obvious that the hospital was our destination, so I ignored whatever else there was outside in favor of getting to the trashed glass doors of the entrance. A few of the remains still had weapons on or near them, but after months out in the open, I doubted that they were still working—and until we ran out of other options, I preferred to continue to just use my own gear.
There were surprisingly few zombies around the entrance area, but the destruction inside didn’t bode well for finding whatever had led us here. Hospital beds and wheelchairs had been rent asunder, the metal bent beyond what any human should be capable of. Stains covered any available surface, and while outside the heaps of remains still loosely resembled bones in rags, in here, nothing was as whole as that. Add to that months for rodents and other small critters making a new home of what remained of the building, and it was hard to even find places to step through the trash, let alone remain vigilant.
We made it through the worst of it until we reached a stairwell. Taking point, Nate led up to the first floor, and after briefly checking the area around the stairs, two more. Up here, chaos still reigned, but there seemed to have been fewer patients—or not that many zombies had made it inside. The oddly rhythmic bumping sound coming from further down the corridor made me guess that we were indeed not alone in here, but otherwise it was eerily quiet on this floor. The presence of the locked-in shambler seemed to have kept animals away, at least judging from the lack of excrement and fur tufts around.
Checking rooms left and right as we went down the floor in the opposite direction of the zombie, we soon encountered what used to be the nurses’ station. I went straight to the freezer and cabinet in the back, checking for all kinds of medicine that might still be useful. Someone seemed to have ransacked the stash before they’d abandoned the hospital, but there were still boxes of light painkillers and antibiotics there—solid gold, and much more valuable than anything else we’d likely find around here. I got busy redistributing the packs inside my bag to keep the ammo on top for easy reach, until it occurred to me to question why Nate wasn’t doing the same.
“If that’s not what we came here for, why did we?”
He critically surveyed the room one last time before turning back to the door, making me grab another handful of hormonal contraceptives before I had to dash after him.
“It’s more what I’m not finding than what I’m actually looking for,” he replied, cryptically as ever. I was itching to bite his head off for still not telling me, but instead fell in line checking the next few rooms.
“You know, I could help you look if I just knew what I was looking for,” I offered, not bothering with pushing my voice into a sweeter register.
“Don’t worry. I got this,” he replied, turning away just a tad too slow for me not to catch the grin on his face. Oh, he knew just how annoyed I was, and it seemed as if he was having a great time adding to that.
We found two more rooms with zombies inside, but rather than letting me kill them, Nate pushed me right out into the corridor and closed the door, locking them with what I realized was a key that he must have filched while I’d been stocking up on meds.
“Care to explain what’s up with that?” I asked, keeping my voice low but still causing the zombies to increase their effort to tear down the door.
“You’ll see soon enough,” he replied—and continued on, ignoring my glare. I was starting to see a pattern there, and it wasn’t one that I cared for.
About half an hour after we’d stepped out of the stairwell, we’d cleared the entire floor, leaving three doors locked and all the others open. Then we did the same on the next floor, and once more on the final, top level, too. I gave up on asking Nate what was going on and instead stocked up on other useful things that we came across—sterilized, pre-packaged hypodermic needles, scalpels, two tasers that must have belonged to hospital security, and bottled water from the smashed soda vending machine in the lobby of the top floor. All in all, there were now fourteen doors locked, with a total number of twenty zombies behind them. Three we had to kill because they’d been too quick, and the fact that Nate seemed annoyed about that was not lost on me. On the top floor we also found several maintenance rooms full of equipment, and while Nate was busy sifting through that, I used the bathroom in one of the cleared rooms. Just because there was no one around to rant at me for public indecency didn’t have to mean that I had to crap on the side of the road every time—not if I could help it, at least.
“Floor two is cleared, but one and the entrance are hopeless,” he reported.
Nate accepted that with a curt nod. “Any sign of the others yet?”
“Nope,” Burns replied. “But it’s still early.”
“Early for what?” I asked, inserting myself into their little status report session. Three times shrewd looks was all I got for a reply. “You do realize just how utterly ridiculous you’re acting?” I went on—still getting the same result.
Gnashing my teeth, I stepped back out into the corridor, and started checking the rooms again—this time less for what the former patients had maybe turned into, but what other stuff they’d left behind. Clothes, electronics, books—all useless now, but it was worth going over them, if only for the painful twist of nostalgia it caused deep in my chest. By the time I returned to Nate, Burns and Bates were gone again, doing whatever else they’d come here for. With still no further news supplied, I went into the cafeteria next, starting to sift through cartons of dried noodles and cans, trying hard not to breathe in what lingered of the stench of rotten food. Someone had been looting here before, making me wonder if they’d tried to make a stand up here when they’d had to abandon the lower floors.
That guess got confirmed when I opened the door to the chapel, finding what looked like the torn-apart remains of more than thirty bodies, and two very much alive zombies. I was frustrated enough that I didn’t even consider locking them in, but instead went to town on them with the butt of my shotgun. The fact that once they lay still at my feet I felt somewhat more relaxed was both disconcerting and strangely satisfying.
Then there was nothing left to do for me, so I picked up a novel I found on one of the nightstands, planted my ass on a wonderfully fluffy hospital bed mattress, and waited. It was already late afternoon when I heard the telltale sounds of boots on linoleum outside that made me guess that the others had arrived.
Before I could bother anyone, Martinez signaled me over, handing me two empty backpacks after telling me to dump my own. Grabbing enough magazines and loose ammo to get out of a hairy situation and storing it in my pants and jacket pockets, I accepted the backpacks from him, hating how elated I felt that finally I got something useful to do.
“What do we do?”
“Check for medical supplies,” he told me, already turning toward the staircase.
As I’d suspected, he didn’t mean on the floors that we’d already cleared, but rather the operating rooms in the ER downstairs. Pia and Bailey joined us at the ground floor, helping dispose of anything that came for us on our way to what used to be the sterile environments of the hospital.
One look at what Martinez started stowing away, and I felt like I could finally make an educated guess of what we were up to.
“This is not a supply run,” I observed, handing him an empty pack as he held out the first full one to me.
“Well,” he started, giving me a sheepish grin. “I do expect that once we leave, we take what we need with us.”
“But that’s not why we came into this city,” I insisted. He hesitated, but then shook his head.
“Not the main reason,” he admitted.
“Exactly why are we building a reinforced base here?” The hospital wasn’t exactly the most easily defendable compound I could imagine, but it made for a decent hideout for a couple of days. The many different exits would help with not getting overrun, and the fact that—even with no electricity—there were still amenities here that could be restored with the help of a generator, it was worth staking out. But so would any larger store, and we wouldn’t have to go a good four to five miles into the city for that.
Martinez looked ready to spill his guts, but then shook his head, making my anger return. “Seriously? He told you not to tell me?” Except for Nate, Pia was the only one who had the kind of authority in our group to get someone to shut up about anything, and I couldn’t think of a single reason why she’d keep anything from me. Then again, I’d thought the same was true for Nate.
“He probably has a very good reason why he’s keeping you in the dark,” Martinez pointed out.
Snorting, I handed him another pack to fill, briefly checking what he was reaching for next.
“You know, the fact that you’re packing coagulating agents and surgical equipment rather than stuff we can barter for is giving me a very good idea already,” I pointed out. Martinez looked up at me for a second, but then just continued in silence. “This is not for the cannibals, right?” I tried one last time.
“Let’s continue outside,” he told me rather than answering my question. “We’ll probably find more in one of the crashed ambulances.”
We’d barely gone through one completely trashed vehicle when an eerie howling and shouting coming from deeper in the city made us fall back inside the building, and withdraw to the upper floors after making sure that we hadn’t missed any of our assembled gear. By the time we made it back to the sixth floor, the sun was setting, and more and more voices were joining in outside. Stepping up to one of the windows, I looked out, trying to see anything in the lengthening shadows.
“It seems like they’ve turned nocturnal,” Nate observed from behind me, coming close enough that he could look over my shoulder.
I still couldn’t see anything, but that was probably a good thing.
“What makes you think that?”
“Douglas,” he said, confirming my guess. At my raised brows, he explained. “The mob that was chasing us? They weren’t out and about in the streets. They were hiding inside the buildings, large rooms in particular. We got stupid and ran right into the city hall where a good few hundred had been squatting. Their howls woke the others, and within minutes we had the whole horde chasing us. If we’d just stayed outside, we wouldn’t have been the wiser.”
That made no sense—but at the same time, it did.
“So the few squatters we found in the houses. The nests that they’d built there—“
“Just outliers,” Nate said. “Temporary shelters if they get caught outside of their real lairs.”
“The hospital?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Small rooms, many corridors—my guess was that they would avoid that. They like easy access where they can’t get lost. Gymnasiums, supermarkets, structures like that. Where hundreds of them can move in and out quickly and they find enough shelter not to freeze. Most small towns we hit before either lacked the buildings, or the overall population numbers for enough of them to congregate. Remember that town where you pulled your hero stunt?” I’d forgotten the name, but not that it had been Madeline’s idiotic attempt to get rid of her zombified children that had almost cost me my life, and had come with other painful consequences.
“Why?”
“The mob that you ran into? I think they were squatting in the streets of that quarter of the town. Already they’d been congregating together, forming a larger mass. Winter must have driven the smart ones inside, and the others followed. We still don’t know how many remained behind that didn’t migrate south, but my guess is that they’re hunting together now, scouring the city at night.”
I really didn’t like that idea, for so many reasons.
“Why have they switched to a nocturnal rhythm? They seem to be able to tolerate the sun just as we do.”
The way his lips pressed into a thin line didn’t bode well. “That’s one of the things we hope to find out.”
“What else?” He shrugged, clearly intending that to be the only answer he was giving me, but I about had enough of that treatment. “Want me to make an educated guess?”
“Be my
guest,” he replied, his eyes studying my face intently.
“We’re going to dissect some of them. See what keeps them alive. Or at least, how much you need to cut away before they stay dead. That’s why the hospital—you have all the gear you need for that here, and you can even keep a few spare ones locked away for later use. Very convenient.”
Nate considered me for a few moments, before he turned back toward the door.
“See? You don’t even need me to tell you shit that you can figure out all by yourself.”
That answer was less a surprise than it probably should have been. Gnashing my teeth, I pushed away from the window, following him outside into the corridor.
“Seriously? Are you insane? Do you really want some of us to get infected and die?”
The glare I got was rather unfriendly, but not for the accusation in my words.
“Don’t be stupid. You—or Martinez, or Santos, or Cho—aren’t getting anywhere near them. Only those of us who don’t mind the odd bite will do the cutting. I’m not stupid enough to risk anyone I don’t need to risk.”
“You’re putting all of us at risk by going into a city that’s full of nocturnal zombie mobs!” I pointed out heatedly. Clark looked up from where he was cleaning his shotgun, but only for a second. Nate continued marching down the corridor as if I wasn’t yapping at him like an annoying dog. That this was likely an accurate guess of how he saw me right now just grated more. “Are you even listening to me?”
Stopping in his tracks, Nate whipped around, glaring in my face from up close as he leaned toward me.
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