“Please, can you help me with a ride? My husband was killed and my car broke down about a mile east of here. Look, see? I can pay,” she said as she held out a handful of bills.” Her face looked nearly desperate. I looked her over. She looked like she had been well taken care of at one time, but it looked as if the last couple of days had been trying for her. She wore what appeared to be a designer dress, though it was a bit dirty from her ordeal, and her mannerisms seemed cultured as well. She was wearing expensive shoes, too. Tears filled her eyes as she pleaded again. “I’ve been trying to get someone to help me for over an hour, everyone’s too loaded up or too busy to listen. We missed the evacuations day before yesterday, and last night we were attacked while we slept in our apartment. Jack was killed trying to protect me.” At this she broke down and sobbed. “He died. It was aw ...awful!” her voice hiccupped. “I got into our car and started driving but I hit some rubble and the tires went flat. I dragged my suitcase over a mile to this place. Please help me! I promise not to burden you. All I want is a ride to safety!” she finished.
My god. We had plenty of room in our van, and she looked to be free from the disease. I wasn’t about to let her stay here. As I stepped forward, DeAndre had already moved past me and to the woman.
“Of course we’ll help you,” he said as he picked up her suitcase. “What’s your name?”
“Oh my God, thank you! My name is Holly White. Thank you so much!”
Jacob opened up the door as DeAndre lifted her suitcase into the van.
“Are you hungry or thirsty? Do you need to visit the bathroom? We’ll be heading out pretty soon.” I said.
Holly looked tearful but happy. “I guess I should go wash up and maybe get some water.”
DeAndre walked into the store with Holly. I turned to Jacob.
“She looks close to term. I wonder when she’s due?” I said.
“I’m not sure, I don’t know much about babies and women. I can’t believe nobody else would help her. Do you think she’ll be all right with us? You don’t think she’s dangerous, do you? We don’t know her or anything.” Jacob said.
I thought for a moment. “I guess we’ll find out. We’re taking a chance, but I’ll be damned if I leave a pregnant woman out in the cold. That baby she’s carrying didn’t ask for this, and I know I’d want someone to help my mom if she’d been in this situation,” I replied. Jacob nodded his head silently.
Just then, Caitlyn, Emily and Risa came out. Risa looked much better and was chowing down on a couple of Twinkies. I smiled. “Feeling a little better, kiddo?” I asked.
Risa smiled through her full mouth and nodded happily. Kids were so resilient. Except for a bruise on her forehead, she looked none the worse for wear. I gave her a hug and helped her back into the van while Jacob brought Emily and Caitlyn up to speed on the Holly situation. I decided to let the dogs out onto the side grass next to our van. They happily relieved themselves and drank thirstily out of the bucket of water put there for dogs. Ten minutes later we were all packed back into the van. Holly was settled in the middle and DeAndre was talking animatedly with her. Jacob was behind me again, and Emily and Caitlyn were with Risa and the two dogs toward the back. I turned on the engine and pulled back onto the southbound 99 freeway toward Bakersfield. After driving for ten minutes I tried the radio. Nothing but static on every channel. I was worried. Bakersfield stations should be coming in, unless they’ve evacuated that city too.
Chapter Eight
“Jacob, do you see any news for Bakersfield on Twitter or CNN or anything? I can’t pick up a single radio station,” I asked over my shoulder.
“Um, let’s see…” he scrolled through Twitter again, adding the #bakersfield hashtag. “Nothing so far. Let me try Google,” he said.
“Thanks. I would really love to know what kind of situation we’re driving into before we get there,” I said.
“Me too,” he said. After a pause, he continued, “I see nothing really recent on Bakersfield. Something from last night says the police were telling everyone to stay inside and not go out at all.” He sighed. “Man, that would drive me crazy. Just sitting there in a house waiting for something to happen. Who knows what could come into the neighborhood? You’d just be a sitting duck,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “let’s just hope the hospital is still running. We should get Risa’s head wound checked out. I’m worried that she was out for so long, although it was a blessing that she missed all the stuff that happened.”
Jacob nodded and returned to his search. As I drove, I looked around. The local roads alongside the freeway were deserted. There was no traffic going north, and just a few cars were headed south with us. When we got to Bakersfield, we headed straight for the Kern Medical Center. But as we pulled up into the big emergency room area, I saw the parking lot was mostly deserted: not a good sign at all, I thought. I parked and set the brake, turning to face the others.
“Guys, I don’t like the look of this. But maybe people were evacuated. Either way, I’d like to try and see if we can get Risa checked out. Maybe get some news on the evacuations. Who is coming with me and who is staying in the van?”
It turned out no one was willing to split up, so we all went in, leaving the dogs in the van alone. We took our weapons with us, just in case. As we got out, I looked quickly back and forth but saw nothing irregular. The seven of us made a scraggly group as we walked across the parking lot and through the double doors of the hospital. The inside of the hospital seemed deserted. I led us down the corridor calling out, “hello’s” every dozen feet or so. Finally, a haggard-looking nurse peeked out at us from behind a mostly closed door.
“Are they gone?” she asked, looking up and down the corridor. At this, I began to feel a prickly sensation as the hairs on the back of my neck rose.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “We just drove down from Fresno. We have an injured little girl with us. What’s been going on here?”
“Do you have any doctors available?” Jacob asked, looking around as he spoke.
Before she could respond, my thoughts were jolted by the sound of screaming. It was coming from the end of the corridor, where we had come in. Whipping around to look, we saw another nurse running. Behind her were three people. They were running after her, but staggering as they ran. One was a man in a business suit with what looked like half his face covered in blood. One was a woman in a torn blouse who was dragging her left leg, which was also bloody. The third I couldn’t make out clearly until I looked again. Then I gasped in horror. The man’s scalp was torn half off, and it hung down over the side of his face and flapped as he ran after the nurse. They all had the same dark grey skin color as the others had had, and they were coming toward us. Fast. The nurse they were chasing screamed as the man in the business suit caught up to her and grabbed at her. She fell heavily to the ground and skidded a few yards, then scrambled to her feet as the zombies reached for her. She was fast and although they grabbed for her, and got hold of her sweater, she ran on and peeled the sweater off as she ran. It came off of her and the zombies tore it apart with their teeth, but that gave the nurse the seconds she need to sprint away.
The nurse who had opened the door to talk to us cried out, “Stacy!” and screamed, “Run! They’re coming again!” as the three crazed zombies took up the chase once more. As the nurse called Stacy ran toward us, the other nurse who had called out to her gasped and disappeared behind the door again. We heard a growl very close to us, and as we watched as a zombie with yellow pus running down her face grabbed the nurse from behind. She had been in the room with her all along. Behind us, three more zombies came through the doors we had just entered. This all happened in less than a minute.
Jacob grabbed my arm and yelled, “Come on, guys!” then began to run down the length of the other corridor. DeAndre scooped up Risa, and we all ran together away from the chaos behind us. The corridor swerved to the right, and we soon came upon a bank of elevators. There was another corridor
off to the left that looked deserted.
“Which way?” I cried. As if in answer, we heard a growl coming from the left corridor and what sounded like someone slapping against a wall. Not waiting to see what had made that noise, I pulled us all into the alcove and punched the elevator buttons repeatedly. Nothing happened. Elevators always took so long. My heart raced, and adrenaline flooded my system. The nurse running from the three crazed zombies had nearly reached us, but the creature that had once been a businessman was right behind her. As she ran up to us, he grabbed her hair from behind and yanked her off her feet. Screaming, she flipped backward just as the elevator doors opened. We piled inside as she screamed, the man clawing at her face. Blood was everywhere. Making sure we were all inside, I frantically punched the floor buttons, but it seemed to take an eternity for the doors to close.
Meanwhile, the zombie had lowered his face to the nurse called Stacy and began to bite her. The other two zombies ran up right then; one fell beside the man and started biting the nurse’s arm. She screamed again and struggled all the more frantically. The businessman jumped on top of her knees first and held her down, and her screams began to sound liquidy. The third zombie ran up and tried to grab one of her flailing legs, but she kicked him. Dazed, he looked up at us just as the doors to the elevator began to close. He seemed to sense prey – to sense us – and lunged at the doors. His arm came through as the elevator doors finished closing, but the sensor detected an obstacle, and they began to open again. Risa screamed, and Jacob kicked at the intruder. My breath caught in my throat. DeAndre landed a kick at the zombie’s midsection which threw him off balance. He fell backward, landing across the threshold. Jacob grabbed his legs and flung them out as I pressed the floor button again. Suddenly the zombie, flailing on his back as he tried to right himself, let out a scream so piercing it seemed almost supersonic. I gasped. I had never heard such a sound issue forth from a human being before. The doors began to close again just as the thing rolled over and got to its feet. As he turned toward us again, the doors closed on the sight of him reaching out in our direction, grasping and flailing at the air. But this time, he was an inch too far away, and the doors closed before he managed to reach us. As we began to ascend, we heard him screaming in frustration and pounding on the metal doors that had just closed.
Breathing hard, we checked each other for wounds.
“My God!” cried Holly, clutching her round belly, “Oh my God!!”
Risa sobbed in the corner in Emily’s arms. Caitlyn’s face was ashen. Jacob and DeAndre were breathing hard. I looked at the buttons. There were five floors. I wanted to get us as far away from the madness as I could, so I pressed “5” for the top floor. As the elevator passed the second and third floors, we could hear more screaming. The sounds faded as we passed the third and fourth floors, and finally the elevator stopped at the fifth. It was silent as the doors quietly opened. I cautiously looked out, my senses on alert. Who knew what we would encounter?
“Be careful,” Caitlyn whispered as Jacob poked his head out the doors. I pressed and held the “open door” button so the elevator wouldn’t close on him. We didn’t hear anything except our own heavy breathing and Risa’s quiet hiccups, so I stepped out onto the floor. Looking up and down the corridor, I saw nothing. Everything was as still as death. Jacob stepped out beside me and looked around too. I motioned for the others to come, and we silently stepped into the middle of the corridor. The elevator doors began to close but I wanted to keep the thing there. Not only as an escape route, but I didn’t want zombies piling in and riding up to meet us.
“Hold it open for a minute, DeAndre,” I said. I walked a dozen feet down the corridor, grabbed a clipboard from the nurse’s station there and returned. DeAndre saw what I was doing and stepped out of the elevator, holding the doors open with his hand. Placing the big, boxy clipboard on the floor in the middle, I waited for the doors to begin closing, and made sure it held the doors a few inches open. I hoped it would work. It seemed to do the trick.
“Which way should we try?” Caitlyn asked, looking up and down the hall. My eyes followed hers, first in one direction, then the other. It looked utterly deserted, but as I looked closer, I could see that the chair at the nurse’s station had been overturned and supplies were scattered all over the floor. It looked as if there had been a struggle, but there was no way of telling where the combatants had gone.
I looked up as Jacob whispered, “I smell smoke.”
I sniffed the air. Sure enough, there was a faint scent of smoke. “Where is that smell coming from?”
“I think it’s coming from this way,” Emily said, pointing behind her and away from the elevator. I walked a few feet down the corridor she indicated. She was right: the smoke smelled just a bit stronger down this way. Still faint, but unmistakable.
“Let’s go this way, then,” I said as I started down the opposite way. As we passed the elevators, the air cleared completely. “The fire alarm system must be out,” I said quietly, looking up at the fire system sprinklers. “With smoke or fire, those things should be on and drenching us.”
A fire alarm system in a hospital failing? That didn’t seem right. Medical centers always doubled up on safety precautions. As we continued down the corridor, I added the mystery of the nonfunctional fire alarms to the list of questions in my head. Hopefully soon, we would have some answers.
The corridor dead ended at an intersection.
“Which way now?” asked Holly.
One way seemed as good a choice as the other, so I randomly picked the right hand side and began to lead the group cautiously down the hallway, pausing at each door and listening. After passing about six doors, I listened at the seventh. It was closed, but I could hear voices coming from the other side. At least two people were behind the door engaged in a conversation of some sort, speaking softly as though were trying to avoid detection. Their tone was deliberate, rather than agitated. I knocked hesitantly, and the voices stopped. I put my face at the crack between the door and the wall and said, “Hey. Anybody in there?” After a minute, the door cracked open an inch. A man’s face appeared, and he looked us up and down.
“Who are you? Is it safe out there?” he asked.
“It’s safe. We’re alone. We just drove down from Fresno. We have a little girl who has a head injury. We tried the Emergency Room but got chased and ended up in an elevator. We came up here. Can we come in there? Kinda feel like sitting ducks out here.”
He nodded and opened the door to what turned out to be an office, and we followed him inside. Two women were there in the room with him. One of them wore a hospital uniform, as did the man. The other woman was in street clothes.
There weren’t enough chairs for all seven of us, so we all settled down on the floor. “Is any of you a doctor? Risa hit her head so hard she was unconscious most of the day,” I said, bringing Risa forward.
The woman in street clothes stepped forward. “I’m a doctor,” she said, beginning to examine Risa. “When did she hit her head?”
“It was this morning around 8,” Emily said. “She fell and hit her head on the floor at Saint Agnes in Fresno.” She moved forward to hold Risa’s hand while the doctor examined her head.
Jacob turned his attention to the other two people. “Do you know what’s been going on?” he asked. “We just got in from across the country last night.”
The man nodded. “I know what happened. My wife has a sister who worked at Stanford in the Literature Department. My name’s Mike, by the way.” He reached out to shake our hands, one by one. “My wife passed away last year, and I am really glad I kept in touch with her family. I found out what happened only two weeks ago, when I talked to them on the phone.”
Worked. I knew Stanford had been under some sort of attack. Still, to hear him speak in the past tense like that was jarring.
“This all started roughly three years ago,” he said. “My sister-in-law was working at Stanford when they sent a team to Europe. They’d u
ncovered the mass graves where the victims of the Black Plague had been buried. When they opened the graves, they found out that the bodies had been just dumped there by the hundreds and thousands, without any caskets or preparation. It looked like it had all happened very quickly.”
“They also could tell that some of the victims had been buried alive. Some of them seem to have been trying to claw their way out.”
Our faces were masks of horror, mixed with incredulity.
He continued.
“They found that the survivors had dumped the bodies, most dead, but some still alive, and had covered them up with dirt and rocks as fast as they could. In light of what’s happening, this might have tipped them off about what to expect. But you know scientists. Anyway, when they exhumed these bodies, they found that the bone marrow in some of the victims was still intact. Now, keep in mind this all happened back in the mid-1300s. These bodies should have been dust, and some were. But the scientists found a healthy minority with intact bone marrow.”
“So they took this marrow back to the labs at Stanford and found that they could reawaken the illness that killed these people.”
We gasped at the implications.
“Now, today, we do have a strain of the Black Plague that we can cure. It’s a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis. With modern medicine, antibiotics and such, plus a clean, sterile hospital environment, this strain of the infection can be cured. But. …”
“Aha,” I mumbled, thinking, there’s always a ‘but’.
Mike smiled at me and continued. “So the scientists probably weren’t too worried when they began using the bone marrow to reawaken the 14th century version of the Black Plague. My sister-in-law explained it to me, about two weeks ago. The 14th century strain of the worst pandemic in history, because after all, it killed off over half the population. Well, it wasn’t the same as the modern day version. Turns out our 21st century strain is quite the watered down version of Yersinia Pestis. Seven centuries ago, what they were hit by was apparently a very virulent strain of the bacteria. A strain that, even today, we really cannot fight.” He sat back, looking into our faces.
Mad World (Book 1): Epidemic Page 6