The wounded people in the waiting area didn’t know where to go, some ran in different directions and some became zombie food. The crowd of walking infected surged towards them like starving animals. They ripped and tore with fingers and nails at anyone with breath in their body. The hospital waiting room turned into a slaughterhouse. Blood, internal organs and body parts piled and slithered across the floor. An emergency alarm blasted from the ceiling and flashed a red warning light across the waiting room. I stood rooted to the spot in shock and fear, watching helplessly as an old man sat shrieking in his chair, unable to move. Blood spurted over his shirt collar when a female zombie with long, dark hair draped over her face, sunk her teeth into his ear. Smith grabbed me by the arm and tugged me away from the scene of carnage. The woman had disappeared from behind the desk and the security door to the backroom was closed.
“Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Smith yelled above the cries of human agony.
We bundled through a set of double doors to the left of the enquiry desk and moved down a long, enclosed corridor. The alarm shrieked constantly throughout the hospital. Smith turned left when the corridor opened into a lobby with a high, glass towered ceiling and several corridors leading in all directions. Orderlies and hospital staff shouted at each another while they scurried back and forth across the lobby floor. Patients hobbled and wheeled themselves out of the wards not knowing which direction to go, their faces white with fear.
Smith led the way and dived through an open fire exit to our left. The midday sun glinted in my eyes and I recoiled at what looked a zombie. A thin, pale man, dressed in blue pajamas stood by the door with a lit cigarette in his hand.
“I thought one wouldn’t hurt, given the circumstances,” the man gestured at the cigarette and smiled weakly. “I know they kill you in the end.”
We were outside the hospital but in a recess between two separate brick buildings restricting our view.
“Which way to the parking lot?” Smith snapped.
“Keep to the building on your left and turn left at the end,” the smoking man pointed the way.
Smith nodded in appreciation. “You’re right; those things will kill you in the end.” Smith snatched the cigarette from the man’s hand and took a huge puff.
“Hey,” the man protested but Smith didn’t hear him.
We trotted around the building to the left and slowed down when we reached the corner. Smith peeked around.
“Ah, crap.” He looked to the ground. I noticed an element of desperation creeping into his manner. “Take a look.”
I peered around the corner and saw the parking lot crowded with zombies, pushing and shoving their way towards the entrance doors. Smith’s car was parked roughly twenty yards to the right of the jostling, infected horde. Smith leant with his back to the brick wall and smoked the cigarette in deep, gasping breaths.
“They’re going to be on us soon, the place is being overrun. Why did I volunteer for this job in Shitsville?” He kicked the wall with the back of his heel.
“I heard on the news this epidemic is happening everywhere,” I said.
Smith squinted into the sunlight. I knew he was forming a plan in his mind. He threw the cigarette butt on the floor and stamped it out.
“Let’s find out what the fuck is going on,” he growled.
I followed as we retraced our steps back into the chaos of the hospital.
Chapter Five
The smoking man had lit another cigarette by the time we went back into the building through the fire door. He smiled as we ran by. I thought of swiping his latest cigarette but it probably would be his last.
The people in the lobby had thinned to a few slow moving patients and a couple of staunch doctors and nurses who looked like they weren’t going to leave under any circumstance. Brave, but they were facing certain death when the sea of zombies eventually washed through the lobby. The siren still wailed monotonously overhead.
A young doctor with a thick, mop of curly black hair and glasses ran from a ward and skidded to his knees as he tried to change direction in mid flight. He was hyperventilating and looked like he had just shit his pants.
“Another one came back to life in that ward,” he pointed to where he had come from. “They’ll soon be all over us,” he stammered.
Smith grabbed him by the lapels of his white coat and pulled his face close.
“Got to get out of here,” the doctor whined.
I noticed his name tag read Jr. Dr. Rosenberg. His face was white and his eyes bulged behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He struggled to retain his breathing and pulled out an inhaler from his pocket, shoved it in his mouth and sucked in long squirts.
“Pull yourself together, doc,” Smith shook the young doctor. “What is it with these people, what is this virus? It sure as shit just isn’t the common flu bug.”
Rosenberg put the inhaler back in his pocket and whimpered. Smith raised his eyebrows like he expected an answer. I was interested to hear if the good junior doctor could give us an insight into what the hell was happening.
“We think that swine flu has somehow combined with bird flu,” he stammered.
Smith looked at me like he was listening to a fairy story. “So?”
“Contracting the flu virus is enough to kill the host but it is mutating all the time and reanimating the host once they’re clinically dead.”
“Which means?”
“These people reanimate into total instinctive creatures. I mean they are dead but alive and driven by a small part of the brain that tells them to feed. It’s hard to explain. The most obvious choice of food is other humans.” Rosenberg garbled the words without pausing for breath.
“How can you cure this virus?” Smith asked.
“That’s the problem. You can’t.” Rosenberg wailed and wildly shook his head. “We had a fax an hour ago from the surgeon general in Washington DC. It said no cure available.”
“Shit!” Smith let go of Rosenberg’s collar.
An elderly woman walking with crutches screamed and pointed towards Rosenberg’s ward. A man in his early twenties, dressed in a surgical gown shambled across the floor towards her. His skin had the common green tinge and the pupils of his eyes formed a familiar milky film. He reached out with a heavily bandaged forearm and emitted a low monotone groan.
“That’s him, that’s the patient I was telling you about,” Rosenberg wailed.
Smith drew his Desert Eagle, aimed and fired at the shuffling zombie. The gunshot was like cannon fire echoing around the lobby and drowned out the siren noise for a moment. The bullet hit the intended target in the middle of his forehead and lifted off the top of his skull. Dark blood and brain matter splattered the floor behind as the zombie dropped to its knees and sank face first onto the polished tiled floor. The elderly woman screamed and shuffled away down the corridor. Rosenberg doubled over and threw up over his shoes. Smith blew the smoke and cordite from the barrel of his gun.
“Okay, time to go,” Smith nodded.
“Can I come with you guys?” Rosenberg asked. His voice was weak and his hands trembled.
Smith sighed in resigned frustration. “All right but just don’t throw up in my car, okay?”
Rosenberg spat bile on the floor and nodded.
“We have to get to the parking lot so which way can we go?” I asked Rosenberg. “We can’t go through the front of the hospital; there are too many zombies that way.”
“My car is in the staff parking lot around the back,” he pointed to the corridor straight ahead of us. “We can get to it that way. By the way, my name is Denny Rosenberg.” He held out a hand but neither Smith nor I shook it. We were too busy thinking of escape to worry about introductions.
“I aint leaving my car here,” Smith growled. “It’s a collector’s item.”
I felt exasperated. Rosenberg was showing us a way out and all Smith cared about was his God damn car. Material objects like cars, money, expensive clothes and jewelry w
ere becoming unnecessary items in the new world of the undead. Food, weapons and basic survival were going to be the key elements of a continued existence.
Rosenberg led the way to the staff parking lot. We moved quickly through the corridor, Smith still had his gun drawn, I had my golf club ready to swing and Rosenberg grabbed an emergency medical bag.
The sunlight temporarily blinded us when we stumbled through the back doors of the hospital. The staff parking lot was reasonably empty. A few cars vacated at break neck speed and some fleeing hospital workers were in the process of stuffing their vehicles with extra medical supplies. The living dead hadn’t breached the staff parking lot yet.
I watched the frightened faces of medical staff fleeing the scene of disaster. It hit me then, the world had changed. This wasn’t some epidemic that was going to be over in a few hours or even days. This situation was here to stay and probably about to get a shit load worse.
“You got to be shitting me?” Smith sighed as Rosenberg unlocked his car.
The vehicle was a beaten up, green Honda Civic with a rusty fender and a blue driver’s door. Rosenberg smiled as he held open the door.
“What the hell is this piece of crap?” Smith looked more horrified at the state of the car than he had when faced with the crowd of zombies in reception.
“Come on, Smith. It’s our way out of here,” I tried to explain.
“Okay, I have a plan,” Smith rumbled.
Oh, Christ. I feared Smith’s plan was going to involve us retrieving his car, and I was right. Rosenberg drove out of the staff parking lot and around the back of the hospital. He looped around the ring route, avoiding a few solitary, aimlessly wandering zombies. He cut through an alley that brought us to the front lot of the hospital. The number of zombies pushing through the front doors had thinned slightly as most of them were inside marauding their way through the building.
Smith wanted me to travel with him in the Pontiac while Rosenberg would follow behind in his crappy Honda. We were going to have one last search for Pete and Marlon at my suggested destination of Buddy’s Bar. I seriously doubted whether they would be sat in one of their favorite drinking establishments, necking beers while shooting pool and chewing the fat on what a shit ol’ day it had been. I didn’t know why I even suggested Buddy’s. It seemed something to say at the time. I feared the worst for my friends, especially as Pete said Marlon was bitten some hours ago and the bloody state of their apartment.
I’d never thought about death in such a brutal way. I’d hoped I’d die in my sleep when I was in my eighties. Maybe my time was up and I’d die today and become one of the walking dead. Bound to walk the Earth and fall to bits while seeking out living flesh to eat.
Rosenberg braked sharply at the edge of the parking lot and U-turned so he was ready to take off at a moment’s notice. Smith and I jumped out of the car and moved quickly but kept ourselves low, ducking behind a line of stationary vehicles. We hadn’t been spotted and weighed up the situation as we surveyed the scene through the car windows. A number of zombies pushed and jostled around the hospital entrance. Some seemed to have lost interest and ambled around the parking lot.
Smith’s Pontiac stood roughly twenty yards ahead and to the right. One or two zombies were fairly close but we could get inside the car and drive away before they’d have time to react.
“Okay, let’s move, quick and clean,” Smith whispered.
We crept forward using the line of parked cars as cover. Smith had his Desert Eagle in one hand and car keys in the other. I tightly held my golf club at the ready. We were about ten feet from Smith’s car and cruising when an evil, little monkey face popped up at the back window inside the car next to me. I recoiled and fell back into the sedan behind me. The creature inside the car used to be a boy of about seven or eight years old. It banged on the window, hungrily baring its small teeth and hissing like a cat. Crusted brown blood surrounded his mouth and neck. Long, matted black hair dangled around his face and the eyes had that emotionless, manifested white covered film. I noticed an old woman slumped in the passenger seat with her head tilted back and a huge gash running horizontally across her throat. The child had obviously reanimated on route to the hospital.
I was glad the zombie child couldn’t escape the restraints of its vehicle but the theft alarm on the sedan I fell against behind wailed like a homing beacon, breaking the silence and blowing our cover.
“Ah, shit!” I screeched.
The lights flashed and the horn blared across the parking lot, giving away our exact position. The kid in the car banged harder and louder and zombies stopped and turned from all directions to study the source of the new noise.
“What the fuck did you do?” Smith muttered and flashed me a look as evil as any zombie.
I stood up and shrugged, pointing to the zombie kid trying to smash his way out of grandma’s Oldsmobile. The zombies started approaching from all directions. The way back to Rosenberg’s car was blocked by twenty or so walking corpses.
Smith gestured towards his car with his chin. We moved quickly towards the Pontiac. Smith fired off a couple of shots at the closing zombies. The sound of the gun shots alerted more dead hordes to our position. We were like a couple of juicy sirloin steaks in the middle of a pack of wild dogs.
We edged our way towards the Pontiac but the zombies kept coming in waves and swelling in numbers. They jostled and bumped into each other trying to get at us. We stayed between the parked cars and the zombies had problems navigating a path towards us. They reached out with grabbing, longing hands, almost pleading to let them feed on us. A tiny stream made their way between the cars but the majority of the infected tried to walk right through the stationary vehicles. The noise was like a herd of cattle lowing and mooing at feeding time.
I clumped a ginger haired female zombie with my golf club when she came around the car nearest to me. She went down after two or three swings. We were surrounded and had to get inside the car soon or we’d be overpowered. The zombies were quickly closing in. Smith fired off a couple more shots and two bodies fell, their existence terminated.
The stream of zombies between the cars was increasing but somehow they’d wedged themselves into a bottleneck and couldn’t move.
“Come on, Smith. Let’s get in the car now,” I yelled above the moans.
Smith pressed the “unlock” button on the key fob. We opened the doors and slid into the Pontiac’s front seats as broken, dirty finger nails reached for us and grabbed our clothes. We locked the doors and Smith fired up the engine. Putrid hands banged and slapped at the windows from all sides. The whole car juddered and tilted as the undead massed around us from all sides.
Smith revved the engine and edged the Pontiac slowly forward. Zombies clung to the car and stood in front of us, preventing a fast getaway.
“Get out the way, you rotten pieces of shit,” Smith yelled.
The back windshield shattered, showering the rear seats and the back of our necks with chunks of broken glass. Grasping hands reached in through the broken window, trying to seize hold of anything they could. A middle aged, female zombie, who looked like a former hippy, tried to climb through the broken window. Fortunately for us, she wasn’t quite slim enough to fit the whole way through the gap. Her torso and shoulders squeezed inside the car but her excessive belly stopped her crawling all the way inside. She reached out with a seizing hand at the back of Smith’s hair. He tilted the Desert Eagle backwards and fired a shot into the woman’s head. The skull evaporated into a mist of crimson. Blood and brain particles splattered the Pontiac interior and showered us with clammy clumps of flesh and bone.
“Ah, Jesus, that’s fucking disgusting,” I whimpered.
“Quit bellyaching,” Smith growled. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
The car inched forward but the throng of zombies surrounding us weren’t going to give up easily. They clung to the car, determined not to let us escape. The passenger window obliterated inwards into sma
ll pieces, showering me with glass. Hands reached in grabbing the back of my hair and shoulder. The incessant pounding of dead hands continued on the windshield and roof. The only piece of good fortune was the dead woman plugging the back window. The car lurched from side to side as the dead continued to hunt us. I thought we weren’t going to make it out of there. My guess was a body lay under the front wheels stopping Smith from pulling away. All I saw were ghoulish, hissing faces with those milky white eyes and grasping hands banging at the windows in a desperate attempt to rip us to pieces.
Chapter Six
Smith hit the gas and the Pontiac reeled forward. Zombies tumbled off the car roof into our path. Smith swerved the vehicle from side to side to shake off the hordes of undead clinging to the car. A pair of grabbing hands clawed through the shattered passenger window and clasped onto my hair. My head was wrenched towards the broken glass. I fought with every ounce of strength in my body. I swung the golf club in small, desperate clubbing movements at the snatching hands. The zombie’s mouth came close with dribbles of saliva running down its chin. He was a male dressed in the hospital security uniform. Smith leaned over and blew the zombie’s head into splinters, showering us with more shit.
“I’ve had enough of these diseased motherfuckers,” Smith spat. “Look what they’ve done to my fucking car!” He pumped the gas and we bumped forward inching our way closer to the exit.
Rosenberg started to roll his car forward. He didn’t want to be caught in the same shit storm as us. We pulled away from the parking lot and into the exit lane, gathering speed. Several zombies fell by the wayside but still some clung to the roof and the side doors. I banged their diseased hands with the golf club but they registered no pain. The Pontiac drew alongside Rosenberg’s Honda and Smith made a twirling motion with his finger, telling him to get moving.
The Left Series (Book 1): Leftovers Page 3