With a clean body and a fresh outlook, I cautiously opened the door, looking for signs that more infected people had made it to our floor.
I threw my dirty uniform into the laundry bin and walked by to make sure that Hulk was resting quietly.
When Hannah saw me at the door, she got up to let me in.
“You didn't get bit, did you?” she questioned anxiously.
“No, but I did find another survivor. I put him in the other quarantine area. He was too distraught to answer my questions, and there was no way I could search him without making him more upset.”
“Who was it, and how did they get up here?” Brook began pacing in front of the window.
“It was Hulk, and he came up on the elevator. I put something in the doorway so that we wouldn't get any more unexpected visitors from that direction. Hopefully, he's not infected, and after he gets some sleep, he might be feeling more like his old self.”
“If he's been exposed to the virus, it could take minutes or up to a week to get sick and die.” Todd spoke up from the corner, finally joining the conversation.
“I'm willing to take a chance that he was simply in shock and not sick. If he is sick, then he's locked in a cage. I’ll be able to tell before we go in if he’s safe to be around.”
“We’ll need to take shifts and keep a lookout just in case someone makes it onto our floor. We don't want to be caught napping, but I know most of us are exhausted from the past few days.”
“Why don't you and Todd take the first shift while Brook and I get some sleep?” Hannah suggested. “It's been almost 24 hours, and I could use some downtime.”
“That makes sense as I just woke up, but we’ll have to figure out something to do for food tomorrow.”
“All I know is that I don't want to become food for those things while trying to feed my own stomach,” Todd announced dramatically.
“Thanks for your input, Todd. I'm sure we can work something out. In fact, why don't you try to get some sleep as well, and I'll go take stock of what's available on the floor.”
Todd looked relieved at not having to leave the room. “That sounds like a great plan, so I'll leave you to it.” He crawled up into the bed I had recently vacated and turned to face away from us, signifying he was done with the conversation.
The next morning, I woke up with the start. Brook was missing from her bed, but the other two were still asleep. I stood up quietly from where I had fallen asleep in one of the visitor’s chairs and walked over to the window, looking for Brook.
Not seeing her, I ventured out and found her standing in front of the glass window where Hulk was.
“Is he awake?” I whispered, approaching quietly.
Brook turned to face me with a growl, lunging with arms outstretched toward my face.
I ducked and backed up quickly, losing my footing as I tried to think of something that would work as a weapon. The only thing close by was the laundry basket, so I pushed it in front of Brook, delaying her long enough for me to crawl behind the desk. I searched frantically for something that would work to stop her from killing me.
There was nothing on the shelves but dust. I grasped at the drawers, managing to pull one open. The contents crashed to the floor, making more noise and drawing Brook toward me.
A growl urged me on, so I picked up the printer and smashed it into her already bleeding face. The broken chair I’d used yesterday was just on the other side of the counter, so I crawled around, hurrying to stand up before she got to me. The chair was harder to handle because it had been split down the middle, and when I picked it up, I was holding two chair legs bound together with cracked plastic to face the dead.
I swung the chair legs and missed, causing one of them to break free. I picked it up and went on the offensive, meeting Brook just as she came around the corner of the desk.
Stabbing the chair leg into her head, I let go as she fell to the floor. Retrieving it was much more difficult now that it was no longer attached to the whole chair. I placed a foot on her shoulder, and using both hands, I pulled hard, finally freeing it.
Now that Brook was no longer trying to kill me, I looked around to see if there were any other infected bodies that might have gotten to her. Not seeing anything unusual, I looked over her body, trying to see if there was a bite somewhere.
Her nails were broken off and her fingers were bleeding, but they looked like fresh wounds, and not something from the day before. I patted down her legs and was in the process of rolling her over when I realized her back calf was bleeding. A chunk was missing from her uniform, and there was a torn piece of flesh. That must have been the source of the infection.
Unwilling to move her body in case I needed to prove something to either Todd or Hannah, I left her where she was. I took the stainless-steel leg that had come apart from the chair and washed it in the sink. The metal would get slippery from blood and sweat, so I dried it with a paper towel before wrapping it in Duct Tape.
Hulk. I suddenly remembered where Brook had been standing before attacking me. I hoped that he was still safe inside the room and she hadn’t hurt him, but the door was closed, so maybe everything was okay.
Peering into the semi-dark room, he seemed to be resting. Holding onto my weapon, I opened the door and approached the bed.
He was snoring. While loud, it hadn’t turned into a growl, thank God.
Sinking to the floor, my body was exhausted from the rush of adrenaline. I took my phone out and sent a text to Stacy.
Me: The hospital has been overrun with infected people. I don’t think I can make it back to the house. It’s not safe. The world has gone crazy. Stay out of sight and don’t try to help other people. Tell Dillion I love him, and please, take care of him like he’s yours.
There didn’t seem to be a way out of this situation, and if all the sick people had become infected, that meant trying to leave would be impossible.
Trying to fight a couple of those dead things was bad enough. Groups of them would be certain death.
A tap at the window startled me out of my thoughts. Hannah was standing on the other side.
Getting up, I pushed the button, but didn’t let her into the room.
“I’m going to have to be really rude, Hannah. I need you to strip down to your under things.” I gripped the chair weapon, hiding it slightly behind my leg.
“What right do you have to ask that kind of question?” she sputtered indignantly.
Fed up, I grabbed her hand and pulled her behind the counter where I’d put Brook’s body out of sight.
“Because she’d been bitten and didn’t tell us. It’s a good thing she came out here for whatever reason. Otherwise, we both would have been killed.” I was past the point of being nice or compassionate.
“Oh God!” Hannah wailed. “You killed her!”
“Yes, I did, when she tried to attack me.” I pulled up the back of her pants leg and pointed. “She got bit. She was infected.”
Hannah was beyond reasoning and started screaming when I moved closer to shake some sense into her.
The door to the stairway started to bang, stopping her wailing. “What’s that?” she whispered, realizing that I wasn’t the scariest person in the area.
Inching closer to the door, I peered at the glass as it banged again. There were several infected trying to come through the door. Now that Hannah wasn’t wailing loudly, they weren’t hitting it as hard and seemed to be losing interest.
She was sitting next to Brook’s body, rocking back-and-forth with a quiet whimper.
“Shh. It’s going to be okay. We need to get you looked at, and then back in there with Todd. Can you do that quietly?” I bent down to the ground next to her. “When you scream it calls them. You have to be quiet so they don’t find us.”
I was explaining it like I would to Dillion. I had seriously hoped a nurse would be able to hold it together a little better, but wishes weren’t going to get us back to the safe room.
Catching sight
of the Duct Tape I’d used earlier, I pulled a section off and placed it across her mouth.
That snapped her out of her sorrow. “Sorry, I’m sure that wasn’t very gentle, but we need to go now. The farther we are from those things, the more likely they are to lose interest.”
She nodded and moved into a crouch so that she couldn’t see the door where the infected were fighting to get inside.
We made it back to the room with Todd. The door shutting woke him up.
“Todd, we have to be really quiet. Hannah, can you please do what I asked a few minutes ago?” This time she nodded and pulled the tape off with only a small groan and began to undress.
“Not that I mind the show, but why did she have tape over her mouth, and why is she stripping?” Todd rubbed his eyes.
“Brook had gotten bit and was infected. She left at some point, probably to use the restroom, and turned into one of those things. When Hannah saw her body, she started screaming and all the infected in the stairwell tried to get onto our floor,” I explained, but dreaded my next words.
“Can you please lose the scrubs as well so that we can make sure you don’t have a scratch or a bite?” Maybe playing nice would get me further than it had with Hannah.
“I don’t think I have any bites,” Hannah announced, turning around slowly in her bra and panties.
In a show of good faith, I did the same, which stopped any protests that Todd might have had about following suit.
“Hannah, do you see anything?” I questioned curtly.
“No, you’re clear. So is Todd.”
“Thank you.”
“We could all just leave our clothes off and, you know, have a nice time together,” Todd said suggestively.
“Oh my God. How did we get stuck with the one jerk left in the world?” Hannah moaned.
“Well, he’s not the only man around,” I answered, pulling my top back into place. “Hulk made it into the elevator, but he was in shock. I got him moved into the other quarantined area where he’s been sleeping. He was snoring, but didn’t appear to have any wounds when I put him on the bed. When he gets up, we can check more thoroughly. I don’t know that he ever got to sleep. I figure he’s been up for several days, and when all hell broke loose, he just couldn’t handle it.”
“Yay. Now I have to share the two hot nurses,” Todd mumbled under his breath.
“Look, the only way this is going to work between all of us is if we are civil to each other. We’re not here for your entertainment. If you so much as make that kind of suggestion or try to act on it, I’ll throw you into the elevator and send you down to the infected for their lunch.” I held up my weapon until it touched his stomach. “Are we clear on the subject?”
He nodded nervously. “Yes, but I have rank on you, so don’t think you’re in charge around here.”
“Really? Do you want to take over? Go ahead. How do you kill one of those things? What are your plans for food? How long do we stay here, or should we try to get out?” I might have been a few inches shorter than he was, but that didn’t stop me from getting in his face.
“Never mind, we’ll do what you suggest, nurse,” he gulped nervously.
“We need to stay in here for at least an hour before I can go check on Hulk. Evidently, they’re attracted to noise, so as long as we give them a chance to settle down and keep our voices low, we should be okay on this floor.” I gave Hannah a pointed look.
“She’s right. When I started screaming is when they realized something was on the other side of the door. When I quit, they stopped banging. What are we going to do with Brook’s body?” Hannah started crying again.
“If we can get her out into the stairwell, then her body won’t decompose in here with us. I think we can move around, but we’ll have to be careful getting to the other floors. The top floors should be mostly free of people because they were only for the really sick, and we didn’t have as many before this started.” I didn’t want to be callous, but we saw death every day in the ER, and moving her off our floor seemed like the best idea.
“I guess. There’s not much we can do for now. Do we even have any food here?” Todd rubbed his stomach, finally processing that we were up a creek.
“Most of the floors have a break room with some supplies, but not very much. The cafeteria is going to be our best bet, but I don’t know that we can make it down there. We can pull our resources and see what we come up with, but there are always the IVs if things get really crazy. Those are always stocked on each floor and could last us a while if we can’t find any actual food.”
“You’re freaking crazy,” Todd accused.
“Crazy? Maybe, but I’m a crazy lady who’s alive. I’ve already survived five of those things so far.” I was getting tired of his attitude.
“You killed Brook. She wasn’t just a thing, she was a person. Everyone calls you the ice princess and they’re right. You don’t even have a heart, do you?” Hannah’s words simply added to what everyone already believed about me.
“Honestly, if something or someone is trying to kill me, then yes, I will kill them. I plan to survive. Once those things turn, they’re not our friends anymore. I don’t know if some part of who we are is still inside, but if you turn, do you really want to wander around infecting others?” I fixed her with a glare, waiting for her answer.
“I guess not, but it just seems so heartless to put people down. I don’t think I can do it.” She cringed at the thought.
“Let’s put it this way, I’m not going to make you kill people or those infected things. If you’re attacked, you have two choices: put it down, or get bitten and die. The choice is yours. If you want to live, then you’ll have to defend yourself. If you don’t, well, I can put you out there with Brook’s body. It should give me long enough to get the doors closed behind you.”
“Ugh, you are a terrible person. I hate you.” Hannah rolled her eyes and threw herself on the cot with her back to me.
“I think you brought out the teenager in her,” Todd huffed. “I don’t have anything to say, and if you tell me to fight, I’ll try. That’s the best I can do, because I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“Ugh!” I groaned, sitting in the corner as far away from both of them as possible.
These two just might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back before the world ends.
Stacy
I looked out the window as a piece of paper blew across the campus grounds. It had been full of students only two short weeks ago, before most of the school had become deserted.
What sounded like the closing of a door in the hall of my dormitory had me motioning Dillion to be silent with a finger to my mouth.
Poor kid had already become so accustomed to playing quietly in the short time we had been in my room, he didn’t even move anymore. This wasn’t the life for kid to have to live.
The day we’d left campus with Jen was the last I’d seen or heard of anyone in the building. There hadn’t been a cleaning crew, or even a maintenance person checking to see if things were secure.
We had driven carefully on very empty streets. The five miles from the house to campus was eye opening. The world had really gone crazy. Stores had been broken into, trash lined the streets, accidents had been left unattended. It was chaos, which made the actions of my neighbor more understandable.
The back parking lot was a place that I could park and not be seen from the street in case people were driving by. We snuck in quietly, but the entire place was empty.
It was a four-story building and had security pads, plus keys were required to gain entry if the electricity went out, but sometimes the doors didn’t shut properly or were left open. Each holiday, if I came back before all the others, I’d always do a sweep to make sure there weren’t any others cohabiting with me. Having Darren do it with me had been a godsend after the attack at the house.
We unlocked all the rooms to make sure they were clear. This wa
s the end of the world and no one was coming back, so it wouldn’t matter anyway because we were going to gather anything usable when it was daylight. I was glad that I’d done it with Darren this time to make sure that Dillion and I would be safe while he was gone.
The only people who knew the codes to the dorm were the people who lived there. I gave Darren the code so that he could get in when he returned.
He had only stayed on campus that first night, and then had gone back to our neighborhood. It had already been several days, and I was getting really nervous that he wasn’t going to come back, leaving us alone again.
I’d gotten a cryptic text message from Angie a few days after we’d gotten settled in on campus.
Angie: The hospital has been overrun with infected people. I don’t think I can make it back to the house. It’s not safe. The world has gone crazy. Stay out of sight and don’t try to help other people. Tell Dillion I love him, and please, take care of him like he’s yours.
Text messages and phone calls were spotty since the circuits had overloaded the first few days of the infection. I’d tried to reach Darren a few times, but he hadn’t responded. He was only supposed to be gone a few days, but it had been over a week ago, and we were running out of food.
I knew the cafeteria that was closest to my dorm would be our best bet for food, but I didn’t want to leave Dillion alone, so I had to come up with a plan.
“Dillion, we have to be ninjas if we’re going to sneak into the kitchen and make us some food. We can’t be noisy or someone might notice us. Can you do that?” I asked as I kneeled down to his level.
His little head shook yes. He was so serious, but I was afraid that if I tried to make him laugh, we could be in trouble from the noise.
I’d taken his hand and ran to the cafeteria. We’d made it, but when we got inside, closer to the kitchen, I could see the door had been propped open, meaning that we weren’t the only ones there.
The person in the kitchen wasn’t trying to hide, so I got closer, only to find there were three people inside.
Against Zombies Box Set, Vol. 1 | Books 1-4 Page 34