by Tom Abrahams
“I guess,” said Dub. Barker’s argument wasn’t comforting. He was right. They’d all been exposed. It was impossible to avoid no matter what measures they’d taken to mitigate it.
There was fallout everywhere. Even when they stayed inside with the air-conditioning off, they were breathing ambient air that had circulated into the building from the outside. And on windy days, of which there were many, the fallout was as thick as fog.
Thinking about it made Dub’s throat seize, and he unconsciously held his breath as he considered how many times he’d inhaled irradiated particles capable of killing him. He tried to shake his mind free of the thought.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s keep going and try to find our way back to the sally port.”
“Without running into any more dead bodies,” said Barker.
Dub flashed the cone of light over the body one more time and then passed it across the unfinished food. The whole scene didn’t sit right with him. Regardless of how the woman had died, she couldn’t have been alone. She wouldn’t have ordered an entire pizza and a sub sandwich for herself, would she?
And that was assuming she’d ordered the food. It was more likely the meal was meant for others who’d had to abandon it when the attacks happened. This was a hospital. There was a good chance they’d had to triage people injured in the attack. Even if it was a children’s hospital, in a mass casualty emergency they’d have likely been called upon to help the wider medical center.
As much as Dub tried to imagine what had happened that led to the macabre scene in front of him, he was unable to picture it. He closed his eyes for a moment, moved the beam to the side, and followed Barker back toward the dim gray light seeping into the space from the emergency room doors.
The two moved cautiously, Dub sensing Barker’s trepidation as they walked away from the natural light and relied exclusively on the thin white beam from the LED flashlight.
The odor faded along with the light, and they pushed their way through one set of double doors after another. Dub had a vague sense of where they needed to be to find the entry to the sally port, but they had not seen any signs directing them there.
He aimed the light at one wall, searching for clues, swept the beam in front of them along the industrial tile floor, and aimed it at the other. There was no indication they were heading in the right direction. And then they hit a dead end.
A pair of doors, apparently locked electronically, were closed. It cut them off from what appeared to be a surgical area. They rattled the doors, tried prying them apart, and finally gave up.
Dub swung the light around, searching for some alternative when he spotted it. A sign on the wall behind them pointed to the elevators and a stairwell.
“Stairs,” said Barker. “More stairs. Everywhere we go, we have to climb stairs.”
“It’s good exercise,” said Dub, leading them in the direction of their path to the second floor.
“Yeah. But typically, I like to alternate leg day with back and shoulders.”
“Funny,” said Dub. “I didn’t know you worked out.”
“Not funny,” said Barker, despite a chuckle. The momentary levity, as brief as it was, eased the tension Dub felt building throughout his body and in the air around them.
They wound their way through the maze of hallways leading to the second floor, checking as they went for an alternative path to the ground level of the sally port, avoiding sections that contained banks of hospital rooms. Neither wanted to see another dead body if they could help it.
That desire almost stopped them from ascending the stairs once they’d reached the well. They were at the turn between the two flights of steps, their hands guiding them along the round metal railings, when Dub stopped cold in front of Barker.
“Do you hear that?” he whispered, his voice bouncing off the walls of the well. Dub’s pulse thumped in his neck. His hands were sweating inside his gloves.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Dub whispered, more softly than he had before.
“Should we turn around? Forget this mission? I mean, we can survive without weapons, right?”
Dub flicked off the light. He twisted his body and stepped down to even himself with Barker. He could hear his friend’s accelerated, heavy breathing. Barker was as scared as he was.
“Maybe,” said Dub, “but you agreed it’s going to get worse. We need to protect ourselves until we figure out a way off campus. It’s just that—”
The noise froze both of them in place. It was louder. It was closer. It was coming from the second floor only yards from them. Dub stared up at the spot where he’d last seen the door above them. He couldn’t place it, as disturbing as it was.
It sounded like a wounded animal; part moan, part screeching cry, and all agony. It certainly didn’t sound human.
Barker took a step back, descending a stair and putting Dub between himself and the door. Dub tightened his grip on the bannister and tugged himself another two steps higher. He felt Barker tug on the back of his jacket, but he ignored it and took another step as the wail grew louder and echoed in the space beyond the door.
Dub had his free hand wrapped around the flashlight. He considered turning it on but didn’t. A flash of light that snuck from underneath the stairwell door might alert whatever it was on the other side.
His chest was heaving as he struggled to control his breathing. It was the second time that day fear-fueled adrenaline had coursed through his body. Rather than search the darkness with his eyes, he closed them and focused on the sounds.
The wail, which induced goose bumps across his neck and arms, was as loud as it had been. It was laced with a scratchy, harsh undertone, like the crack and pop of an old vinyl record. Dub suddenly realized his body was trembling, but he took another step upward, blindly closing in on the door. Another wail, this one warning with phlegm, stopped him again. Barker slid up behind him.
“I don’t think we should go up there,” he whispered. “Could be an injured animal. Something with rabies or just wounded and angry.”
“How would an animal get up there?” asked Dub.
“I don’t know,” said Barker, his words barbed with exasperation.
Dub inhaled, his pulse still thumping in his chest. “We need to get to that police station.”
“Wait until whatever is making the noise gets farther away,” Barker whispered back.
Dub agreed and the two of them sat on the stairs. For the next hour, the noise was too close. Then it moved away, each successive wail somewhat more distant than the last.
When a good ten minutes had passed without the noise, Dub turned on the flashlight and led Barker through the heavy door and into a dark hallway. The air was thick with a variety of nauseating odors.
Barker gagged. “This is worse than downstairs,” he said. “I think we should—”
“Let’s go,” said Dub. “Hold your nose and let’s hurry.”
Dub, his eyes watering, searched the beige-colored walls for any signage that might lead them to the bridge. He started to the right and stopped about halfway along the hall. He turned back to Barker and aimed the flashlight past his shoulder. There was a thin dark line that ran along the center of the tile floor.
“It’s that way,” he said. “There’s an arrow pointing toward the bridge.”
Before Barker could answer, the wail echoed through the hall, bouncing off the walls and filling the space with an echoing cry that crescendoed before the warble and crack of it dissipated. Barker nervously adjusted the empty pack on his back.
An involuntary shudder rippled through Dub’s body, and he aimed the light farther along the hall and past Barker, who hadn’t moved. He appeared cemented in place.
Dub quickly moved to Barker and stopped beside him. Barker was trembling with fear. It was much warmer on the second floor than it had been on the ground level.
“It’s coming from that direction, isn’t it?” asked Dub, already knowing the answ
er.
Barker exhaled, his breath ragged. “Yeah.”
Dub craned his neck from one side to the other, releasing some of the tension with a crack. He put his hand on Barker’s shoulder and squeezed. “Let’s go.”
Dub slid the beam of light from one side of the hallway to the other and from in front of their feet to the end of the light’s reach. They were nearly at the end of the hall, at a T intersection, when Barker stopped again. He pointed at the floor, at the thin line that ran along its center. Dub aimed the beam at it and noticed it was wider than it had been and wasn’t as rod straight as it had appeared farther back along the hall.
Barker crouched onto his heels and, with the help of the light, dragged a finger across the line. It smeared, leaving a brighter red stain on the light tile. Barker, realizing what he’d touched, tried to wipe it off and lost his balance. He tumbled onto his back, his breathing labored. He scrambled onto his feet.
“That’s blood, dude,” he said. “It’s blood.”
Dub shone the light on the wall at the end of the T intersection directly in front of them and saw the bridge was to the left. He lowered the beam to the trail of what they now knew was blood. It went left.
Barker shook his head. “Mother—”
“We’ll be fine,” said Dub and turned left, keeping the beam ahead of them. They couldn’t have much farther to go.
The two stepped deliberately, though not confidently, forward. In the back of his mind, Dub knew this was stupid. There was no reason to risk their safety for the hope of finding anything worthy in an abandoned police station. But he was prone to acting without thinking. Barker, who he was surprised was still behind him, had been nice enough to point it out less than two hours earlier.
As scared as he was about what might be lurking between them and the bridge, he believed it couldn’t be something dangerous. More than evil, it sounded as if it were in agony.
That assumption proved right when the beam found the source of the wail. The moment the light struck its face, the piercing cry it emitted made Dub want to run in the opposite direction. But he didn’t. He stood there, the jittery beam fixed on the poor creature curled into a fetal ball at the point where the hall led to the bridge.
“What the…?” muttered Barker. “Is that…?”
“I think so,” said Dub. As much as he wanted to look away, he couldn’t. He was transfixed, trying to comprehend exactly what it was on the floor in front of them.
He took another step forward, and the creature, instead of recoiling, reached outward toward him with something akin to a claw. Dub tried to swallow. His throat was dry, and it took a couple of tries.
“What do we do?” asked Barker, sounding genuinely concerned. The fear in his voice was gone, but he didn’t yet sound himself.
“I don’t know,” said Dub. He ran his thumb along the inside of the strap of the empty pack on his back.
The creature wailed again, the phlegm crackling as the shriek exploded past them. It was remarkable that a person so badly damaged by radiation they were unrecognizable could emit a sound of such strength.
It was impossible to know if the person was a man or a woman. What little hair was left on its head was matted in clumps, like patches of weeds growing from sand. Its extremities were shriveled into weak appendages that curved from what Dub imagined were cramped muscles.
Its tongue lolled from an orifice that had to have been its mouth. Its eyes were swollen into two peepholes. It was emaciated, but even that word didn’t do justice to how bone thin it was.
Dub couldn’t tell from where the blood was coming, nor could he fully grasp how much of what he saw was from malnourishment, a pre-existing condition of some kind, or the attack itself. It almost looked like something from another dimension, something that had succumbed to the rigors of space and time. What he did know, however, was that this person didn’t have long to live and was spending what little time it had left aimlessly roaming the corridor on the second floor of a children’s hospital.
“Should we kill it?” asked Barker. “You know, like a mercy thing?”
Dub didn’t answer Barker. Not because he didn’t hear the question, but because he didn’t have an answer. The right thing to do would have been to end the poor thing’s life, to put it out of its misery. But they didn’t have the tool for that. Not yet.
“Dub,” said Barker, “what should we do?”
Dub sighed and looked over at his friend. “I think we go do what we came here to do.”
Barker glanced at the creature and then back at Dub. He swallowed hard and nodded, his eyes ebbed with tears. He clung to the wall and stepped ahead of Dub, carefully but quickly slipping past the dying remains of the person and onto the bridge. He kept moving past the beam of the light Dub still held out in front of them.
Dub followed and squeezed his eyes shut as he too passed the creature. It wailed at him, forcing another shiver along Dub’s spine. Without turning around, he crossed the bridge and guided Barker to its opposite end with the light.
Incredibly, the closed door at the opposite end of the walkway was unlocked. It led into the second floor of the police station. A level replete with cubicles, it looked like any other office building with a communal workspace.
The two of them searched desks and closets for anything resembling a weapon. They found nothing. They wound their way downstairs, through another stairwell, and found themselves outside an evidence room on the first floor.
Neither of them had said much since their encounter with the living corpse. For his part, Dub didn’t know what to say. There weren’t words. But as they worked to find a way into the evidence locker, Barker broke the relative silence.
“We can’t leave it up there,” he said. “It’s not right.”
Dub nodded. “I agree, but we need to finish here first. Then we can talk about it.”
Barker pointed toward the drop ceiling above them. Dub aimed the light overhead. “We could climb through the ceiling,” he said. “I bet there’s access that way. Up right here and then down in there.”
“How would you get back out?” Dub asked.
Barker shrugged. “I don’t know. Same way, I guess?”
“Worth a try.”
They found a chair behind the receptionist’s desk and rolled it over to the space outside the door to the evidence room. Dub flipped it over and pulled the wheels from the legs. Then he set it upright and helped Barker climb up to the ceiling. He pushed through a tile and reached down to take the flashlight from Dub.
“There’s a wide support beam,” he called down. “I can shimmy along that until I cross into the other room. Then I’ll punch through and hop down.”
“Okay,” said Dub. “Go for it.”
He steadied the chair and let Barker use his shoulders for a boost. The pressure released, and Dub looked up into the black open square directly above him. Barker was struggling along the beam, followed by a couple of strained grunts, and then came a crash.
Dub hopped off the chair and moved to the evidence room door. He pressed his hands and burlap-covered cheek against its cold metal.
“You okay?” he called.
“Yeah,” said Barker. “Wasn’t exactly how I planned it, but I’m okay.”
His voice got louder as he spoke. Dub backed away from the door. The handle turned; then it swung open, Barker leaning into the open doorway with his shoulder. He had the flashlight in one hand and a cut above his right eye.
“You’re bleeding,” said Dub.
Barker reached up and then rubbed the blood between his thumb and fingers. Then he wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “I’m fine. C’mon in. Let’s check this out.”
The room was smaller than Dub had imagined. It was lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves, the kind Dub had put together from a kit he’d bought at a home improvement store. It reminded him a little bit of the radio room in Boelter Hall, though instead of spare electronic parts and tech equipment, the shelves held various
sized plastic bags or worn cardboard boxes. There were manila envelopes and overstuffed file folders held together with overstretched rubber bands.
Barker aimed the light at the shelves at eye level. He moved the light from one side of the room to the other, casting the beam on the various containers. There didn’t appear to be an obvious catalog method.
“I say we start ripping into stuff,” said Barker. “Anything looks like it might be good, we take it. Cool?”
Dub agreed. He’d reconciled some of his issues with pre-attack morality versus what was acceptable afterward.
Barker rested the flashlight on a chest-high shelf closest to the door. It gave them some, if not great, visibility on the other shelves across from it.
Over the next thirty minutes, they rifled through every bag, box, and envelope they could open. They stuffed their findings into their packs until they couldn’t hold any more: two handguns, a box of 9mm ammunition, a .22 rifle, a full magazine of .22LR ammunition, a dozen knives of varying shapes and sizes, a flare gun with a half-dozen flares, lengths of bungee cord, a socket wrench set, three screwdrivers, and a full bottle of Southern Comfort.
They cracked open the whiskey and took healthy swigs from it before capping it and hauling their heavy packs out of the evidence room. They trudged back up the stairs.
“You ever wonder why somebody would have flares on campus?” asked Barker. “And why would they be evidence in a crime?”
“Or a socket wrench,” countered Dub. “People are crazy.”
“I’m glad they’re crazy, or we wouldn’t have the flares and the wrenches.”
“Agreed.” Dub was carrying the rifle in his hands, carefully ascending in the dark behind Barker, who’d kept the flashlight.
They reached the top of the stairwell and stopped. Barker had one hand on the door handle and the other aiming the light at Dub’s chest. He squinted, sucked in a breath through his mask, and sighed.
“What do we do about the…?”
He didn’t have to finish the thought for Dub to know what he meant. They hadn’t fully discussed their plan for euthanasia; they just understood one of them would have to do it. It wasn’t right to let that poor living corpse wander the halls like a spirit searching for its soul.