The World's Last Breaths: Final Winter, Animal Kingdom, and The Peeling

by Iain Rob Wright

  Mike gave a small shrug. “If I were a philosopher, I might have answers for you. All I can say is tough luck. Tough luck for us all.”

  Devey needed air, so he hurried out of the ward and into the corridor. Sickness floated thickly in the air, a revolting wet smell that made every breath a feat of endurance. Human beings reduced to rotting meat. Never had he felt so insignificant, so worthless. His death had arrived from nowhere, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

  He’d woken this morning the same as always, groping around for his phone beneath his pillow before stumbling into a shower at a time when most people were still asleep. He wished he’d stayed in bed.

  But things might not be any better outside the hospital. Would a virus like this be contained to a single hospital? It may have started with a game of Bingo, but how many other people could the blue-rinse brigade have passed it on to? Mike said earlier that reported cases went as far south as Gloucester—and that had been several hours ago. What now? Had the virus reached London? Europe? Suddenly he had visions of the world ending.

  This is insane. I don’t know anything for sure.

  Devey hadn’t even tried to help himself yet. His sickness was in its early stages. He needed treatment. He had to at least try to beat this.

  The door to the next room was open like all the others. He stepped inside, hoping to find a doctor, but instead he found the male paramedic from this morning. He sat silently in a chair, a candle on the windowsill behind him. Even though they were in the sub-basement, the floor seemed to be only partially below ground, being sited along the rise of a hill. Whoever was outside, had not forgotten to barricade the windows of the hospital’s lower section, and the glass panes looked out onto featureless steel. In the resulting gloominess, it was hard to tell whether the paramedic was looking at Devey as he entered.

  “Hi. Sorry to disturb you. Do you know where any of the doctors are?”

  The paramedic shifted in his seat. “They’re about somewhere, but don’t expect them to help you.”

  “Why not?”

  The paramedic reached behind him and took the candle. He bought it onto his lap and rendered himself visible. No doubts remained about whether he was sick because both his eyelids had liquefied and slid away—it gave him the odd expression of a startled ghoul. “They can’t help you because all the doctors and nurses down are sick too. None of us are going to get better. Best we can do is ration the morphine.”

  Devey noticed then, the patient lying in a bed to his left. They lay so still he’d been unaware of their presence until the paramedic gave a subtle glance in their direction. Despite the power being off, there was equipment still running, taking measurements and slowly spitting out a never ending stream of paper. Devey sighed. “Is… is that your partner?”

  “She doesn’t have long left,” said the paramedic. “Suppose she must’ve been one of the first.”

  “You have it too,” Devey motioned to his eyelids. “How did you catch it?”

  The paramedic leant towards the bed and clutched his partner’s blistered hand. “I caught it the moment she did. I wasn’t going to leave her alone to rot. I’ve been holding her the whole time, and I’ll keep doing it until there’s nothing left.”

  If not for the printouts coming out of the machine, Devey would have assumed the woman was already gone. He couldn’t hear her breathing. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? If not for you, Claudia wouldn’t be here.”

  Devey wobbled, knocked off-balance by the accusation. “What?”

  The paramedic bolted to his feet, and Devey thought he was going to attack him, but instead he grabbed for something else. His fingers clamped on the corner of Claudia’s bedsheet and he yanked it like a magician uncovering his latest trick. Unleashed, the stench of human decay washed over Devey and made him gag. Claudia looked up at him, her eyes the only thing left of her face. She was a slick, gristle-covered skeleton. Her lungs pumped in her chest, lifting the soft veil of rotting skin with each breath. Her breasts had fallen away, given her the look of a mannequin. Her blood dyed the bedsheets red.

  “See what you did?” The paramedic shoved Devey in the chest, knocking him back three steps. “See what you did?”

  “Hey!” Devey put his hands up in front of himself. “Wait a minute.”

  But the paramedic kept on coming. “Get out of here! Leave us alone.” He shoved Devey again, knocking him into an unused drip stand. He had to struggle to keep from falling over it, and the delay allowed the paramedic to get in another shove.

  Devey retreated to the doorway. “Okay, I’m going. I’m… I’m sorry.”

  The door slammed behind him, and he stood in the hallway alone. A nurse walked down the corridor in his direction, only a slight blemish on her cheek, and enough strength left to smile at him. Maybe she could help—give him the drugs he needed to finally accept his fate—that he was dying.

  But before he could talk with the nurse, an almighty racket broke out in the corridor behind him. He turned to see a window rattling in its frame. The sound of power tools pierced the air.

  The people outside were coming in.

  6

  The nurse stopped, staring in confusion. Devey, on the other hand, knew he needed to move right now. The sound of heavy bolts being removed was a herald of an approaching threat. It wouldn’t be long before the people outside came in.

  He bolted into a side room, aware that people were watching him with confusion. He warned them to be ready, but most were too far gone to care. A few took the warning to heart, and got up out of their chairs, but they still didn’t look like they understood what was coming.

  The sound of power tools continued, roaring beasts, and Devey sprinted down the corridor back towards the stairwell. Before he got there, the glass panes of a window shattered ahead of him. He skidded on his heels as a monster appeared at the window. The soldier, donning a nightmarish gas mask over his entire head, climbed through the broken window and landed in the corridor in front of Devey. He lifted a stubbed-nose machine gun at him and bellowed. “Get down! Get down now or I’ll shoot.”

  Devey put his hands up and backed away. A side room lay off to his left, but he dared not look inside for fear of tipping off the gunmen, so he continued backing away slowly until the right moment presented itself.

  “I said get down!” “Screw you!” Devey bolted to his left, dodging through the doorway. Gunfire broke out. Rat tat tat. People screamed. Everybody screamed.

  Devey searched desperately a lifeline. There were no weapons in the room, or anybody to protect him—only frighten people who were looking at him like he might have an idea what to do. He was going to die amongst strangers.

  “Everybody down on the ground!” The gunman entered the doorway gas mask distorting his voice and giving it a ghostly quality. With no other choice, Devey put his hands up.

  “Please,” he said. “These people are sick. They’re afraid. Please.”

  “Shut up!” The gun shook, and the soldier’s finger twitched and tightened. “Just… shut up!”

  The gun went off, spraying bullets into the floor. The soldier slumped to the ground, and in the place where he’d stood, Mike snarled and brandished a steel bedpan. “I ain’t going to make this easy for you assholes!”

  Devey flinched. “Mike? What are you doing?”

  Mike tossed the heavy bedpan and picked up the gun. He examined it expertly before holding it against his chest. “I might be a dead man,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m about to lie down and let these sons of bitches kill me.”

  “Why are they coming in?” Devey asked. “They could just leave us trapped in here.”

  “Leave us in here too long and we’ll try to make an escape. They can’t risk someone getting loose.”

  The people in the room had remained silent until now, but the sound of more gunfire outside caused them to start sobbing. Devey wanted to turn and shout at them to be quiet, but he knew it was just the stress. He k
ept his attention on Mike. “You’re not helping by fighting back. Put the gun down.”

  Mike laughed. “Do you hear yourself?”

  More gunfire. Screams of people dying.

  “There might still be healthy people in this hospital,” said Mike. “People with a chance. You think it’s okay for these fascists to come in and gun them down?”

  Devey glanced around the room at the frightened faces. He spotted a nurse, herself infected, but not as badly as some. Until the gunfire had started, she would have been administering drugs and care to those worse off, giving comfort and dignity. Not shooting the sick like diseased dogs. “Okay…” Devey nodded. “Let’s go down fighting.”

  Mike smiled and clapped him on the back. “Into the fire then.”

  With the stubby machine gun against his shoulder, Mike raced out into the corridor, whooping like a cowboy.

  Ratatatat.

  He flipflopped in front of Devey, limbs thrashing in all directions. The gun dropped out of his hands and skittered across the tiles, hitting Devey’s trainer. He picked it up without thinking, surprised by how heavy it was. It was an alien thing in his hands, industrial. Dangerous. Mike crumpled in the corridor, dead and bullet-riddled.

  Another soldier in a gas mask appeared, moving in view of the doorway and staring down at Mike’s corpse. He raised a gun and put a bullet in his head. The ferocity of the act made Devey yelp, which tipped the man off that he was stood there watching him.

  The soldier pointed his gun at Devey.

  Devey’s entire body clenched, including his finger around the trigger of the gun he had picked up off the floor. The weapon bucked in his hands, and he had to fight to keep it from flying off. The soldier jerked backwards before falling down dead. The people in the room screamed. Screamed because they had just seen two men die.

  Something grabbed the back of Devey’s leg and he realised the people in the room had been screaming to warn him. The solider Mike had hit with the bedpan was climbing to his feet, trying to grab Devey and pull him down. This time, Devey acted with purpose. He bought the gun around and placed it against the soldier’s forehead.

  “No, please,” begged the soldier, but Devey had already pulled the trigger.

  Housed inside a balaclava and gas mask, the soldier’s head didn’t explode, it crumpled—his body flopped sideways onto the floor where he bled slowly onto the tiles. Devey looked back at the nurses and patients. “Hide.” Then he crept out into the hallway, avoiding Mike’s fatal mistake by checking the coast was clear first. At the end of the corridor, he saw shapes—soldiers stepping slowly through the shadows. It was dark outside, night having fallen without him realising. Moonlight leaked in through the windows. Gunfire continued, but was less sporadic now, more of a methodical pop-pop as patients were exterminated like rats. Devey pressed himself flat against the wall as a woman spilled out of a side room and went crashing into a trolley cart. She begged for her life, but one of the soldiers at the end of the corridor turned in her direction and gunned her down.

  No way Devey could take down every soldier on the floor—he wasn’t even sure how many bullets he had left in his gun—but he would try to avoid his death for as long as possible.

  “No! No! Leave my little girl! Plea-”

  Ratatata.

  Devey recognised the voice coming from the next room and winced when it was interrupted gunfire. He sprinted inside and opened fire as soon as he spotted the soldier’s black body armour. This time his shots were precise and measured—all three rounds struck the man in the centre of his back. A woman lay in the centre of the room, but she was still alive, clutching her bloody stomach and moaning. Her eyes went from confused to surprised. “D-Devey?”

  “Barbara? Shit, are you okay?”

  She shook her head. “He shot me. I… Please, help Jessica.”

  There was a bed behind her, and Devey moved towards it slowly. Jessica lay asleep, hooked up to a machine like the paramedic had been. Her pretty little face had peeled away, revealing a sticky, pink mask. She didn’t have long left. The sickness had moved fast.

  “Help her!” Barbara cried. “Just… please… help… her.”

  Devey heard the strength fade from the woman’s voice, and when he looked back from the bed, he saw she had passed on. She lay peacefully on her back, arms resting at her sides. Was she dead because of him? Would her fate have been different if he hadn’t shopped her in to the doctors?

  Jessica shifted in bed, her head rolling on the pillow. Her hair stuck to the fabric in clumps, and a bloody tear spilled from her left eye. Mercifully, she remained unconscious.

  Devey realised his cheeks were wet and wiped them with the back of his sleeve. His uniform was spattered with blood, but it didn’t matter. He turned to a vacant bed beside the one Jessica slept in and took its pillow. Then he placed it over the little girl’s face. He bore down, expecting a struggle, then stayed there for over a minute. Eventually, the machine next to her bed sent out a high-pitched alarm. The little girl was gone.

  Devey turned away, leaving the dead child and stepping over the dead mother. On his way out, he exchanged his gun for the one the soldier in the room had been carrying. He hoped it had more ammunition, but even if it did, he doubted he would get to use it all. He was already playing a losing hand, having survived an encounter with three trained soldiers, all of whom he had killed. Three men dead because of him. And now a little girl. He was about to head back out into the corridor, ready to face his own death, when he heard a voice in the room. He took a moment to realise it, but it was coming from the radio attached to the dead soldier’s shoulder. “Secure your areas and regroup at the main entrance.”

  “Roger that,” said another voice from somewhere in the building. “Requesting det charges on ground floor west,” said another. “Targets holding out inside Maternity Ward. Need to blow the doors.”

  Devey froze. The maternity ward was where he’d told Ken to go. It was where Sonja was, and maybe others too. Mothers and babies. The man on the radio called them targets.

  “Screw this!” Devey rushed into the corridor and headed for the stairs.

  “Hey! Stop!”

  Gunshots.

  Devey felt the air move, and the plasterboard exploded to his right. He zigzagged, picking up speed and keeping his head low. More bullets whizzed by, hitting the wall on both sides, floor, and ceiling, yet miraculously he was unharmed.

  “Stop!”

  Or what? You’ll shoot me?

  Devey made it to the stairs, and raced up the steps, praying he didn’t trip in the dark. The soldiers yelled after him and let off more shots. Evey second, he expected to feel a sting between his shoulder blades, followed by a suffocating death, but the bullets continued to chip at the masonry either side of him. When he eventually made it to the top of the stairs, he didn’t know what to do. He had been so sure he was about to die.

  The stairwell was closed off by a single door which he slammed shut, not daring to glance down the stairs at the soldiers pursuing him. Acting fast, he grabbed a trolley bed from a nearby alcove and wheeled it in front of the door. Then, more by luck than planning, he located a brake over the rear wheels and stamped on it, locking the trolley in place. The thing was heavy.

  “Open up!” Fists banged on the other side of the door. “Open up right now!”

  Devey shook his head in despair. “Did they really expect him to just give himself up to be shot? To put some doubt into his pursuers, he fired his gun at the door. He didn’t know if the bullets passed through the wood, but the banging stopped at least. He used the distraction to make a run for it, heading for the maternity ward. He just had to find it.

  Devey found the old man still sitting in the waiting area, except now he was dead. A line of bullet wounds crossed his brittle chest. He had refused to move as the soldiers came and shot him.

  A radio chirped and Devey ducked down behind the benches. He peered over the top and spotted two soldiers in the entranceway. The stee
l barricades were still in place, but a fire entrance hung open nearby. The soldiers spoke casually into a radio, guns hanging from their hips. Devey thought it best not to interrupt them, so he kept low to the ground and scurried away. According to the signs overhead, maternity services was housed with A&E, X-Ray, and Out-Patients. A busy section of the hospital, but would it be busy now? His gut churned with the worry that he would find nothing but a lot of corpses. The gun trembled in his hands, feeling heavier by the second.

  The ground floor was as dark as the sub-basement had been, and most of the windows were barricaded still. It made sense that the soldiers would want to keep most exits locked down, avoid people escaping. The only good thing was that Devey didn’t have to worry about someone grabbing him through an open fire exit or window. In fact, the corridor he walked down was deserted. Where were the soldiers? The staff?

  A sign overhead read Maternity Services and pointed to a set of double doors on the right. An intercom sat on the wall, but there was no reason to buzz for permission—the doors were chipped and splintered in the middle where they met, the locks snapped. Was he too late? Was everyone dead?

  He heard shouting.

  Instead of running the other way, he slipped in through the broken doors and hurried down the proceeding corridor towards movement he spotted at the far end.

  “Open up,” someone barked—a soldier. There were two of them. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Leave this hospital,” came a well spoken, yet defiant reply from Dr Zantoko.

  Devey slowed down to a creep. He held his gun ready, disgusted at how easily he contemplated killing. These soldiers had it coming though. They were the ones bringing guns into a hospital full of sick people. Innocent people.